Chapter 229 The Estate

Chapter 229 The Estate
Anderson called on a Sunday evening in early March.

Not a Thursday, which was during our usual rhythm. Sunday at eight, while I was in the study reading, the cedar smell reaching me the way it did on good nights.

"The estate is going on the market," he said. "My attorney finalized the listing agreement last week."

I set my book down. "The Broadmoor estate."

"Yes."

The house where Eugenia had held court for forty years. Where she'd welcomed me into the family with a hug that smelled of expensive perfume. Where she'd sat by the windows sipping tea and told me she'd orchestrated nothing while orchestrating everything.

The house where Anderson had lived as a boy, before his father sent him to Switzerland. He'd been gone for years. When he came back to Seattle, he'd chosen the penthouse. The estate became the place he went for Sunday dinners because Eugenia expected it, not because it felt like his.

"I need to clear it before the listing goes active," Anderson said. 

"When?"

"Next two weekends. Movers handle the furniture. I handle what's personal." A pause. "I can't do it alone, Elaine. I've been telling myself for three years that I'd get to it. That I'd drive out there one Saturday and start packing boxes. I've driven past the gate four times and kept going every time."

"You want me to come with you."

"I'm asking. Yes."

I looked at the study walls. 

"Saturday," I replied.

The drive to Broadmoor took twenty-five minutes. March in Seattle. The rain had paused for the morning, leaving the city washed and gray with the kind of cold that got into your joints and stayed.

I hadn't been to the Ellsworth estate since the confrontation with Eugenia. Nearly five years ago. I'd driven through those gates in a rage, walked past those oil paintings, sat across from a woman sipping tea who smiled and denied everything while knowing she'd planned all of it.

Anderson was already there when I arrived. His car was parked in the circular drive. He stood on the front steps in jeans and a dark shirt, hands in his pockets, looking at the house the way people look at things they've been avoiding.

The Georgian columns were the same. The manicured grounds were less manicured now. Three years of reduced maintenance had softened the edges. The hedges were overgrown. Leaves had collected in the corners of the stone steps. A window on the second floor had a crack I didn't remember.

The house looked like what it was. A place someone had left and no one had come back to.

I parked behind Anderson's car and got out carrying two coffees. He took one without speaking. We stood on the steps and drank in silence.

"How long has it been since you were inside?" I asked.

"The funeral. My aunt arranged it from here. I came that morning and left before anyone else arrived."

"Three years."

"Almost."

He looked at the front door. The massive oak doors I'd walked through three times in my life. Once, as an eighteen-year-old at a charity event, watching Eugenia study me from across the room. Once, as a new daughter-in-law being welcomed into the family. Once, as the woman who'd come to confront the matriarch.

"Are you ready?" I asked.

"No."

He opened the door anyway.

The foyer smelled like closed air and dust. The marble floors were dull without the weekly polishing they'd received for years. The chandelier overhead was dark. The hallway stretched ahead, lined with oil paintings of Ellsworth ancestors whose painted eyes had once seemed to follow me.

They still did, but the judgment felt different now. Less intimidating and more tired. Portraits of people whose legacy had been corrupted by the last woman to carry their name.

Anderson stood in the foyer for a long time. I let him.

"She'd have hated this," he said finally. "The dust. The dull floors. She had staff clean this place daily. Every surface polished, every vase filled, every room maintained like a museum."

"It was a museum."

"It was a stage. She performed her life in this house.”

He walked forward. I followed.

We started with the library. Anderson's choice. Not the most personal room. Not the study where Eugenia had made phone calls about eliminating obstacles. Not the sunroom where she'd taught him chess. The library was neutral ground. Books and shelves and the kind of sorting that kept your hands busy while your mind adjusted to being in a place that carried this much weight.

The room was massive. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls. Leather chairs. A fireplace that hadn't been lit in years. Thousands of books. First editions, art monographs, and leather-bound collections that had been chosen for appearance as much as content.

I found boxes in the hallway where the movers had left them. We started on opposite sides of the room. Working in silence. Pulling books from shelves, checking for inscriptions or personal items tucked between pages, packing them in boxes labeled for donation.

The rhythm came naturally. The way it had been during the investigation when we'd worked side by side reviewing documents. The way it had during the trial when we'd sat in the gallery processing six weeks of testimony in shared silence. Anderson and I had always been able to occupy the same space without needing to fill it with words.

An hour passed. Two. The shelves emptied in sections. The boxes were filled and stacked near the door.

"Elaine."

I looked up from a shelf of art books.

Anderson stood near the fireplace, holding something that wasn't a book. A wooden box, the size of a shoebox, pulled from behind a row of encyclopedias on the top shelf. It had a dark wood and a brass clasp.

"What is that?" I asked.

He opened it.

Inside, letters. A stack of envelopes, cream colored, sealed, each one addressed in handwriting I recognized from the recordings exhibit during the trial. Eugenia's handwriting. Each envelope had a date written in the corner.

Anderson's face went gray.

"They're addressed to me," he said.

I crossed the room and looked. The envelopes were dated. One per week. Starting from the date of Eugenia's arrest and ending the week before the trial opened.

"She wrote these from federal detention," I said. "While she was awaiting trial."

"I never received them." His voice was flat. "My attorney screened everything from her legal team. Passed along what was legally necessary. Personal correspondence was held."

"Your attorney kept them."

"Stored at the estate. I told him I didn't want them. He must have put them here."

Anderson held the box the way you hold something that might be fragile or might be dangerous, and you can't tell which until it's too late.

"There are at least thirty here," he said. "One a week. Eight months of letters I never read."

"What do you want to do with them?"

He looked at me. The question I'd answered about my own ghosts, about Timothy's files, about the records and documents that had defined my life for years. What do you do with the evidence of someone who destroyed you? The words they left behind. The paper trail of a relationship that ended in a courtroom.

"I don't want to read them," he muttered.