Pinned to my collar was an identical unpolished bronze surveyor’s transit pin:
`MASTER CHANCERY AUDITOR: COLONEL HELEN ELEANOR MERCER`
`COMMISSION: DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL INFRASTRUCTURE INTERDICTION`
`UNITED STATES ARMY SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND`
Richard Mitchell’s knees liquefied.
He slid down against the oak sideboard until his dinner jacket caught on the brass cabinet pulls, his mouth opening and closing like a stranded carp:
“Helen…?”
Richard whimpered, his voice cracking into that thin, pathetic squeak:
“Colonel Mercer…?!
But… you were an archivist!
You cataloged old land surveys for the county library!
You lived on three thousand dollars a month!”
“I audited your defense contracts under Title Fifty National Security Secrecy, Richard,” Colonel Helen Mercer answered softly.
My voice had no microphone.
Yet it filled that sixty-foot dining room with forty decibels of compressed, unyielding polar diamond:
“You told your mother eighteen years ago that my family brought nothing to the table.”
“You told your board members that I was lucky you didn’t divorce me after Julian was hurt.”
I walked down the length of the table.
My hand-welted leather field boots made a clean, concussive *tack… tack… tack* against the Persian rug.
I stopped two inches from where my husband sat shivering on the floorboards:
“You didn’t stay married to me out of pity, Richard.”
“You stayed married to me because on the morning of our wedding, your corporate legal counsel discovered that this five-million-dollar estate does not sit on private land.”
“It sits on Parcel Nine of the **1944 Mercer Sovereign Lineal Charter**!”
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the charter:”
“The underlying fee-simple title to forty miles of defense bedrock belongs exclusively to Arthur Mercer’s direct biological descendants who hold active master chancery commissions.”
“Unto me.”
