Chapter 217 Sentencing 4

Chapter 217 Sentencing 4
I sat forward on the couch.

"What?"

"Guards found her in her cell at ten PM. She's dead. Preliminary assessment is suicide."

The word didn't register. I heard it. Processed the letters. Failed to connect them to the woman I'd watched walk out of a courtroom six hours ago with her back straight and her chin level and her expression saying she regretted nothing.

"H-how," I stuttered.

"Hoarded medication. Accumulated over weeks, possibly months. She was found during a routine check. The medical team was called immediately. She was already gone."

Silence.

"Elaine? Are you there?"

"Yes."

"I wanted you to hear it from me before the media breaks it. That will happen within the hour."

"Does Anderson know?"

"I'm calling him next."

"Don't."

Lancaster paused. "Excuse me?"

"Let me tell him."

Another pause. Longer.

"Alright. But the media embargo won't hold past one AM. He needs to know before it breaks."

"I'll call him now."

I hung up. Sat in the dark for thirty seconds. My hands were steady. My breathing was even. My mind was doing the thing it did when reality arrived too fast for emotion to keep up, the same shutdown that had carried me through the verdict, through the parking garage, through the sentencing. Processing information without feeling it.

Eugenia was dead.

She'd killed herself.

Hours after a judge told her she would die in federal custody, she'd made sure of it. On her terms. Her timeline. Her method.

Even in death, she controlled the exit.

I picked up my phone and called Anderson.

He answered on the second ring. He hadn't been sleeping either.

"Elaine?"

"I need you to listen to me."

Silence. He knew. The way people know when a call comes after midnight. The voice tells them before the words do.

"Your mother is dead. Lancaster called. They found her in her cell tonight. Suicide."

Nothing on the other end. No sound. No breathing. No response.

"Anderson."

"When." His voice was flat without inflection.

"Around ten PM. Guards found her during a routine check."

More silence.

"Pills," I said, because he would ask eventually, and hearing it now was better than hearing it from the news.

"Pills." He repeated it without tone. Like he was translating it into a language he didn't speak.

"The media will break it within the hour. Lancaster wanted you to know first."

"You told Lancaster to let you call me."

"Yes."

Silence. Long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call was still connected.

"She chose this," Anderson said finally. His voice cracked on the last word. It wasn’t a sob. "She heard the sentence, and she chose this."

"Yes."

"Of course she did." A sound that wasn't a laugh. "Of course she did. She spent her whole life controlling everything. Why would death be any different?"

I pressed the phone against my ear and said nothing.

"I testified against her. I helped put her in that cell. And she..." He stopped and started again. "She didn't leave a note."

"No."

"No explanation. No apology. No goodbye to her son. She took pills in a federal cell and left nothing."

"No."

"That's her. That's exactly her. The final statement. Silence. No one gets closure. No one gets a reason. She walks out on her own terms and leaves everyone else to figure out what it means."

His voice was shaking now, but not because he was crying. It was shaking with something that lived between rage and grief and the hollow space where a mother used to be.

"I should feel something," he said. "My mother is dead. I should feel something."

"You will."

"Right now, I feel nothing. Is that normal?"

"It's what I felt at the verdict."

"Is that supposed to be comforting?"

"No."

More silence. The clock ticked in my hallway. I heard Anderson breathing on the other end. Uneven. The breathing of a man holding himself together by force.

"Do you want me to come over?" I asked tentatively.

"No." He said quickly without a thought. Then he paused as though he were contemplating, "Yes. I don't know." It was quiet.

"I'm coming."

"You don't have to."

"I'm coming, Anderson."

I hung up before he could argue. Changed from my pajamas into some sweats and grabbed my keys. The clock in the hallway read twelve thirty-two AM.

I drove to the penthouse in the dark. Seattle's streets were empty. The city didn't know yet. In an hour, every phone in the Pacific Northwest would light up with the alert. Eugenia Ellsworth was dead. Suicide. Hours after sentencing.

But right now, the city was quiet. And Anderson was alone in a penthouse, sitting with the knowledge that the woman who raised him had chosen pills over a life sentence.

I parked in the garage and took the elevator up. The doors opened into the foyer.

Anderson was standing at the windows. He didn't turn when the elevator opened.

He was holding his phone in one hand. The screen was dark. He'd been standing there since I called, waiting for me to arrive, not moving, not sitting, not pouring whiskey. Standing in the dark, looking at a city his mother had spent forty years trying to own.

He looked at me when I crossed the room. His eyes were dry. His face was gray.

I crossed the room and stood beside him at the windows. Close enough that my shoulder touched his. We stood looking out at the city lights and the ferry crossing Elliott Bay.

Neither of us said a word.

"She sent flowers to Elijah Shaw's funeral," Anderson muttered, his voice distant as if he was reciting facts from someone else's life. "She ordered his death and sent flowers."

"I know."

"She welcomed you into the family, planned our wedding, chose the chapel, kissed your cheek." He paused. "And she'd already arranged to steal your inheritance."

I said nothing.

"How do you grieve someone like that?"

"I don't know."

"She's my mother. She's dead. And I feel cheated." His voice cracked again. "Not sad. Cheated. She escaped. "She took the sentence the judge gave her and swallowed a handful of pills she'd been saving for months. She decided she'd rather die than spend one night in a cell."

He pressed his palms against his eyes.

"And I feel relieved. Which makes me a monster."

"It makes you human."

"She can't hurt anyone else. That thought keeps surfacing. She's gone. It's over. No appeals. No escape. No more victims. She's dead, and the world is safer." He dropped his hands. "What kind of son thinks that about his mother?"

"The kind of son who watched her ruin twelve families and still hoped she'd look at him during the verdict."

Anderson turned to me. His eyes were wet now. He was holding it in the way he'd held it in the courtroom. The way he'd held it all week. Building pressure behind a wall that was starting to fracture.

"She still didn't leave a note," he said.

"No."

"Not even a line. Not even my name."

I took his hand and held it.

"She lived her whole life without giving anyone what they needed from her," I said. "Why would death be different?"

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the glass.

We stood at the penthouse windows while the city slept and the news prepared to break. Eugenia Ellsworth was dead at seventy-four. Overdose. No note. No explanation. No final words for the son who'd testified against her or the families she'd destroyed.

The last act of control from a woman who'd spent her life controlling everything.

Sometime around one thirty, Anderson's phone started buzzing. Then mine. The news had broken. Text after text. Alert after alert.

We didn’t look.

We stood in the dark and let the world find out without us.