Chapter 9 - Justice Served
In law school, they teach you that self-defense requires proportional force and a reasonable apprehension of imminent bodily harm.
As Evan swung the iron bar toward my skull, I didn't think about legal doctrine. I thought about the cold concrete floor of the cellar where I had lain with a broken bone while he made phone calls to his stockbroker.
I ducked beneath the arc of the tire iron.
The heavy metal whistled through the empty air, smashing into the plaster wall behind me with a sickening crunch.
Using all the momentum of my recovery, I planted my healed right foot firmly on the marble floor, spun, and brought the heavy brass fireplace poker down across Evan’s right forearm with everything I had.
A sharp, wet crack echoed through the foyer.
Evan shrieked in agony, dropping the tire iron. He staggered backward, clutching his fractured wrist against his chest, dropping to his knees on the shards of broken glass.
“My arm!” he wailed, sobbing on the floor. “You broke my arm!”
“Now we’re even,” I said, keeping the brass poker leveled at his chest.
The front door burst open.
Four sheriff’s deputies poured into the foyer, flashlights cutting through the darkness, handguns drawn.
“Sheriff’s office! Don't move!”
Sheriff Douglas rushed in behind them, kicking the tire iron away from Evan’s reach. Two deputies tackled Evan to the floor, pulling his arms behind his back and snapping heavy steel handcuffs around his wrists.
Evan screamed in pain as the metal cuffs clicked over his broken bone. “She attacked me! She hit me with an iron bar! Arrest her! Arrest her!”
Sheriff Douglas looked at the shattered banister, the tire iron on the floor, the smashed terrace door, and then at me standing calmly with the brass poker.
“You okay, Claire?” Douglas asked.
“I’m fine, Sheriff,” I said, handing him the poker. “He broke into the property, assaulted me with a deadly weapon, and threatened Mrs. Vale’s life.”
Marian appeared at the top of the stairs, wearing her silk dressing gown, her cane in hand. She looked down at her son writhing in handcuffs on the foyer floor.
There were no tears in her eyes tonight. Only the calm, absolute resolve of a matriarch who had finally excised the poison from her home.
“Take him away, Robert,” Marian said softly. “And please ensure the district attorney adds burglary, home invasion, and felony assault to the federal fraud charges.”
“With pleasure, Marian,” Douglas said.
As the deputies dragged Evan out into the driving rain, he kicked and screamed like a toddler having a tantrum in a grocery aisle. His neighbors—the affluent doctors, lawyers, and business owners of Blackwood Hill—stood at the edge of their manicured lawns in their raincoats, watching the disgraced son of the Vale family being shoved into the back of a police cruiser in cuffs.
The trial never happened.
Faced with forty-two counts of federal wire fraud, bank fraud, tax evasion, and felony aggravated assault, Evan accepted a plea agreement three months later.
He was sentenced to eleven years in federal prison at FMC Devens, with no possibility of parole, and ordered to pay 4.8 million dollars in criminal restitution.
Paige didn't escape unscathed. While she avoided prison time by cooperating with the federal prosecutors, she was stripped of every dividend distribution from the Vale family trust. Her luxury car was sold to pay off her credit card debts, and she was forced to take a job managing a retail boutique in suburban Rhode Island—the first honest forty-hour workweek of her life.
On a cold morning in March, Judge Harrison signed the final decree of absolute divorce.
I walked out of the county courthouse holding the official blue-backed document.
My cast was gone. My limp was gone. My married name was gone.
May you like
I was Claire Montgomery again.
***
