The House That Never Accepted Him

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Chapter 13 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The knock on the front door of the mansion was at five-forty seven A.M

Victor was awake. He had not slept but he had been sitting in his study making calls until they all went out, and the number on the screen started to be darker and darker, and the favors that he had banked for the last thirty years were quietly being cashed out. At dawn he realized that no one was coming to help, that he had no choice but to move forward alone.

Another knock, this time harder. Then a voice, its words amplified, official. “Federal agents. This property is under warrant, open the door.”

Victor straightened his jacket, smoothed his silver hair with one hand and walked down the grand stairs. He heard Catherine's bedroom door open behind him, and heard her sharp intake of breath as she made her way to the landing, and saw the lights through the windows red and blue, flickering across the curtains, painting the entrance hall in flashes of colour.

"Victor." Catherine's voice was fragile, holding the banister with both of her hands. “What's this, Victor?”

Victor spoke without looking Catherine in the eye, "Go to your room, Catherine.”

“They can't just," Catherine began.

“They can,” said Victor firmly. "Go to your room.”

He opened the door, by himself.

Dozen agents in the driveway, others lined up in front of the house, vehicles with their headlights piercing the gray morning. A woman in the front holding a document up.

She said, "Victor Whitmore? We have a federal search warrant for the property, basement included, any storage areas and rooms that may be hidden.”

Victor's face remained expressionless. His hands were loosely clenched in front of him. “Well, of course,” he said and backed away to let them in.

As the agents came into the house, they were quiet except for the loud clomp of their boots on the marble floor, and he walked out onto the front steps. He watched the line of people as they headed into the kitchen and the door in the basement, flashlights cutting through the low light in the basement as the people disappeared into the early morning chill.

It took eleven minutes before the first box came out.

Victor saw a cardboard case labeled evidence carried by an agent in gloves. Then a second box. Then a third. Files. Photographs. While news vans started to roll up at the end of the driveway, in the daylight of forty years of his father's careful, guilty record-keeping, Victor was whisked away.

His jaw tightened. His hands were pressed together behind his back, his knuckles ached, and the skin on his hands whitened.

He had buried that room. He had placed charity boards, business plans, dinner parties and decades of painstaking construction on top of it, and he was confident that no one would ever look under the surface he had created.

He had been wrong.

He heard Richard's voice behind him, in the open doorway, rising in a harsh, demanding tone, followed by a voice of an agent, a calm, businesslike voice, instructing him to stay in the room. Richard yelled out something Victor couldn't hear. A door slammed.

Victor did not turn around.

As boxes continued to pass on the steps, for the first time in thirty years. Some strange, unknown, sensation settled in his chest. Not fear, exactly. Something colder and older and less manageable. Uncertainty.

For thirty years he had been able to manage all the variables. He had silenced the witnesses and had bought and sold judges, he had buried bodies, both literally and figuratively, and he walked away from them, knowing that he was just better at this than anybody else who’d be opposed to him.

Now, for the first time since he was a young man, standing by his father in the wreckage of a burned apartment building, Victor Whitmore wasn't sure what would happen next.

Theo phone rang at six-fifteen all over the city.

He was awake already, he had been sitting on David's couch with the blanket over his legs, gazing upwards at the ceiling, and hearing the muted noises in the apartment around him. He picked up the phone on the first ring.

“Mr. Callahan,” said Sarah Morrison. “I wanted it to be heard direct from me that the warrant was executed twenty-eight minutes ago and that the room, the documents and the contents have been fully secured and that nothing has been tampered with.”

Theo closed his eyes and took a deep breath out. "Everything's secured?"

"Everything," Sarah confirmed. “I want to be absolutely clear with you, Mr. Callahan this is, without hyperbole, one of the most important evidence recoveries in this office in thirteen and a half years.”

Theo exhaled a slow breath. His shoulders relaxed for the first time since the night he had left the mansion. He pressed his palm to his face, covering his eyes with it.

“Thank you,” he said in a hushed tone.

"Don't thank me yet. This is the beginning, not the end, Mr. Callahan. I'm counting on the Whitmores to fight, and they'll fight hard, and I'm hoping you'll be ready for that.” Sarah said, not unkindly.

"I understand.” Theo said.

“Once the cataloguing is done I'll call back," Sarah said and hung up.

Theo sat there holding the phone in his lap for quite a while. Two mugs of coffee were in hand, and David watched him carefully, as he came out of the kitchen doorway.

"They got it. Everything and no one could touch it.” Theo said.

David ambled across the room and placed a mug down in front of him. "That's good, right?"

Theo's hands wrapped the warm mug, his head nodding slowly. He felt relief, so it wasn't relief, but something next to it. A loose, deep and strange. He had been carrying the burden of being unseen, unheard, rejected even at home for three years. It had been one morning, and the world had at last turned where he told it to go, and done what he bid it do.

He indulged in a little bit of satisfaction, though small and quiet. Leaning his shoulders against the back of the couch,

That didn't last long.

In the moment, a cooler thought was already fidgeting, building the thought that Victor Whitmore had just lost everything, in front of cameras, in front of his own family, somewhere under it. Men who lost everything in public didn't just stand on their front steps and take it.

Theo put the mug down, clenching his jaw as he did so.

This was not over. It was just the beginning.

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