Gilded Revenge: The Ex-Wife's Billion-Dollar Empire novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Gate
Two men try to put Lucinda in the SUV until the Ferrars driver blocks it with his car. At her father's lawyer's office she learns her uncle has a probate hearing tomorrow to declare her legally dead.
Two men got out of the SUV.
Both wore dark raincoats, and neither carried an umbrella.
"Miss Throckmorton?" the taller one said. "Your uncle sent us to bring you home."
Lucinda stood up with the phone still at her ear.
"Miss Throckmorton?" the lawyer said in her ear. "Are you there?"
"They're here," she said quietly.
"Don't get in that car."
"I wasn't going to."
The shorter man took a step toward her.
"Come on, now. Don't make this hard. He's been so worried."
"I've been in a house with a locked gate for three years," Lucinda said. "I'm not worried about much."
He reached out and closed his hand around her upper arm.
Three years of lifting a grown man out of bed had taught her more than he knew.
She turned her wrist inside his grip, found the soft place under his thumb, and pressed hard.
His fingers opened.
He swore and stumbled back against the bench.
The tall one came at her from the other side, and she swung the duffel into his knees.
He caught her by the hair.
Headlights swept across them both, wide and fast.
A black sedan jumped the curb and stopped crosswise in front of the SUV, so close the bumpers touched.
The driver's door opened.
The man who got out was the Ferrars family driver.
He was sixty, broad in the chest, and he had not run in a long time.
He didn't run now.
He walked around the hood and stopped beside Lucinda with his hands at his sides.
"Let go of the lady," he said.
"This is a family matter," the tall man said. "Stay out of it, old man."
"Then say it to the camera."
He pointed up at the dashboard of his car.
A small red light was blinking behind the windshield.
"It's recording your plates, your faces and your hand on her hair. Everything goes to a lawyer in ten minutes, whether she wants it to or not."
The tall man's grip slackened.
He looked at the red light, then at the shorter man holding his wrist.
"We're not done," he said to Lucinda.
Then both of them got back into the SUV and drove away.
The rain came down harder.
Lucinda stood with the duffel against her chest and her hair stuck to her cheek.
"You followed me," she said.
"Mrs. Ferrars's rule," the driver said. "If the marriage ever ended, I drive you wherever you ask. Any hour."
"Did she tell you why?"
"She tells me where."
He opened the back door of the sedan and held it.
"Where, ma'am?"
She almost said, "Nowhere. I don't know anyone."
But there was one person left who knew her real name, and he was waiting.
She gave the driver an address downtown.
The law office was on the eleventh floor of a building with a dark lobby and one lit window.
Her father's lawyer opened the door himself.
He was seventy and thin, and his eyes were wet.
"You look like him," he said. "Come in. Please. You're dripping on the carpet and I don't care."
He gave her a towel and a chair and a cup of coffee she didn't drink.
Then he laid a folder on the desk between them.
"Read the top page."
It was a court petition.
IN RE THE ESTATE OF LUCINDA ANNE THROCKMORTON, PETITION FOR DECLARATION OF DEATH.
She read the first paragraph twice.
Her uncle was asking a judge to say that she had died three years ago on Hollis Hill Road.
"He can't," she said. "There was never a body."
"The car burned. He says a person doesn't walk away from that."
"I walked away from it."
"He doesn't know that." The lawyer took off his glasses. "Or he didn't, until this morning."
She remembered the wreck.
The brake pedal going soft under her foot, the guardrail, the dark slope of the hill.
She remembered crawling out through the passenger door with her wrist broken.
She remembered deciding, at the bottom of the ravine, that she would let them think it had worked.
"Why file this now?" she asked.
"Three years is the earliest his lawyers could argue it, and he waited for the anniversary. Then your divorce hit the courthouse."
"So he'll know I'm alive."
"He'll know you were alive this morning." The lawyer rubbed his eyes. "Which means he has until nine tomorrow to make you dead on paper."
"What happens at nine?"
"The hearing. The judge is his golf partner and signs whatever he brings."
He tapped the folder.
"If the judge signs, your father's fifty-one percent of Throckmorton Group goes to a trust."
"Whose trust?"
"The trustee is your uncle."
The room was very quiet.
Outside the window, the rain slid down the glass in long gray lines.
Lucinda put down the coffee she had never touched.
"What time is it?" she asked.
"Ten past midnight."
"Then I have nine hours."
"For what?"
"To walk into that courtroom and make him look at me."
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