Never forget that.
No matter what she says, you hold your heads high.
You have royal blood in your veins, boys.
Honest bedrock blood.”*
We had thought he was simply telling bedtime fairy tales to soothe two frightened foster kids.
Then, when we were ten years old, Kenneth collapsed in his workshop from an acute coronary occlusion.
I remembered the rain on the cemetery tent, the smell of turned red clay, and Beatrice standing over the open grave with dry, glittering eyes, refusing to let Simon or me touch his brass casket handle.
The day after Kenneth’s funeral, Beatrice had moved all of his clothes, his tools, and his surveying notebooks out to the curb for the municipal trash incinerator.
She had taken our bedroom door off its hinges so we couldn’t lock it.
She had canceled the summer camp registrations Kenneth had paid for, telling us that free rides were over and that every meal from then on had to be earned with yard chores.
When we turned eighteen, she had set two cardboard boxes on the porch on graduation morning, handed us each a twenty-dollar bill, and told us that her legal duty had terminated at midnight.
And now, standing ten feet from her kitchen door, holding eighty dollars worth of white lilies for her diamond jubilee, I listened to her toast her mother over our stolen lives.
“Did you bring the file from the safe deposit box?”
Rose asked from inside the kitchen.
“It’s on the island,” Beatrice replied, the rustle of stiff document vellum audible through the louvers.
“The seventy-year spendthrift restriction on the underlying patent expires at midnight tonight, Mom.
Arthur Mercer’s nineteen-forty-four charter has an automatic sunset clause.
If the direct lineal heirs don’t file an active military or chancery claim on the docket before the anniversary passes, the adverse title defaults irrevocably to the registered legal guardians.”
*Arthur Mercer.*
The name hit my ears like the concussive thump of a heavy artillery shell detonating in an enclosed valley.
My heart hammered against my ribs so violently that my vision blurred around the edges.
Arthur Mercer had not been a stranger.
His name was stamped in faded black ink across the flyleaf of the antique, brass-cornered surveying manual that Kenneth had kept locked inside his cedar chest—the one book Kenneth had hidden beneath the floorboards of our attic bedroom before he died, telling me: *“If anything ever happens to me, Mason, don’t let Beatrice find this book.
You read the dedication on page three when you’re a grown man.”*
Simon and I had read that dedication when we were fifteen, huddled beneath the attic eaves with a flashlight:
*“To my beloved son Kenneth, and to his children who shall hold the line plumb when the wolves gather at the fall line.
Arthur Mercer, CWO, USN, 1944.”*
For eleven years, Simon and I had believed that Kenneth was an adopted son, or perhaps a distant nephew who had revered an old naval officer.
We had never dreamed—we had never dared to imagine—the truth that was now unraveling on the other side of that kitchen door.
“Kenneth wasn’t an only child, Beatrice,” Rose said, her voice dropping into a harsh, conspiratorial rasp:
“Arthur Mercer had three children.
Kenneth, David, and Eleanor.
When Arthur’s eldest daughter Eleanor died in that private clinic in Richmond twenty-three years ago, she left those twin boys in Kenneth’s care.
Kenneth was their uncle, Beatrice!
Not their foster father!
Those boys weren’t orphans from a ditch—they were Eleanor’s legitimate biological sons!”
A terrible, suffocating ringing began in my ears.
*Eleanor’s legitimate biological sons.*
*Kenneth was our uncle.*
*Our mother hadn’t abandoned us in a motel room during a blizzard.*
“And Eleanor owned fifty-one percent of the underlying fee-simple title to **Conduit Ten**,” Beatrice laughed, the sound cold, cruel, and completely devoid of human warmth:
“Her father Arthur Mercer bored forty miles of subterranean pre-Cambrian crystalline schist beneath North America under Title Fifty War Powers during World War Two!
He built the classified continuity command artery connecting the naval redoubts at Norfolk straight into the nuclear crypts beneath Washington!
Inside that conduit are forty-eight solid-titanium transit cylinders containing the physical, analog targeting release matrices for our nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent!”
Beatrice struck the kitchen island with her ringed hand:
“Sixty billion dollars in sovereign defense equity, Mom!
Kenneth was supposed to register Eleanor’s twin boys as the lineal custodians when they turned eighteen.
But I intercepted the birth registries from Richmond!
I paid the county probate clerk five thousand dollars to record them as anonymous abandoned wards, and Kenneth was too terrified of a public scandal to defy me!”
