CHAPTER 8: EPILOGUE: THE TERRACE OVER SIMI VALLEY
Fourteen months later.
The early autumn sun broke over the high, sandstone bluffs and the wide, cobalt-blue expanse of the Simi Valley at the Mercer ranch in the Santa Susana Mountains, burning off the sweet morning mountain mist that clung to the blooming orange groves and the sweeping white hydrangeas along our front terrace.
The air was sixty-eight degrees, smelling of sun-cured cedar shingles, citrus blossom, fresh-baked blueberry scones, and the clean, honest ozone of an un-broken American sky.
The historic forty-acre Mercer citrus homestead had been completely transformed.
On the cleared site where Bradley’s luxury sports car garage and the old packhouse had stood, the Department of the Navy and the State of California had installed a permanent geodetic monitoring monument; surrounding it now, occupying forty acres of protected hillside, stood The Arthur Mercer & Lily Eleanor Sovereign Child Trauma & Legal Sanctuary, its state-of-the-art esophageal reconstructive surgical wings, child trauma recovery pavilions, and vocational classrooms training four hundred young pediatric nurses, toxicologists, and family law advocates every year in child forensic advocacy, medical trauma ethics, and constitutional property law.
On the broad, covered cedar back deck of my restored home overlooking the deep-water irrigation canal where the mountain runoff ran clean, smooth, and free toward the Pacific…
Sitting at a long twelve-foot reclaimed chestnut trestle table with an open set of regional land surveys and a steaming ceramic mug of dark-roast chicory coffee…
Was Clara Mercer-Vance.
I was thirty now.
The paralyzing horror of that afternoon in Encino, the terrifying sound of my daughter choking on toxic lye, and the heavy burden of forty years of family secrecy had completely metabolized into an un-shakeable, eighty-year architectural peace; my strength had completely returned, rooted in the bedrock of an un-broken command.
I wore an unadorned cream-colored linen work shirt, comfortable dark denim trousers with copper rivets, and clean leather field boots. My face was radiant, free of the quiet terror and domestic isolation that had haunted my eyes when Bradley stood over our kitchen counter.
Around my left wrist, resting easily against the rolled linen cuff, was Arthur Mercer Senior’s restored 1956 Admiralty Gold Chronometer, its mechanical second hand sweeping with that clean, rhythmic, sixty-cycle tack… tack… tack that had governed fifty years of honest labor.
Beside my chair on the cedar decking, fast asleep on a braided wool rug with his heavy golden head resting across my boots, was Barnaby—the faithful eighty-pound Belgian Malinois who had watched over our family through every turn of the wheel.
Under the comprehensive military court-martial decrees, high treason convictions, and civil asset forfeiture settlements finalized in the United States District Court in Washington:
– Former Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance was convicted on sixty-four counts of High Treason under Article Three of the United States Constitution, Conspiracy to Sabotage Strategic Defense Infrastructure under Title 42, and Premeditated Attempted Murder under Title 18. Sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, without the possibility of parole, his sixty-billion-dollar shadow consortium completely dismantled into the sovereign custody of the United States Treasury, he spends twenty-three hours a day in an eight-by-ten subterranean concrete cell, having discovered that forty years of aristocratic calculation ends in an un-marked grave.
– Bradley Michael Vance and Victoria Sterling-Vance were convicted of Premeditated Attempted Murder in the First Degree, Aggravated Child Torture by Chemical Ingestion, Transnational Wire Fraud, and Seditious Conspiracy. Sentenced to thirty-five and thirty years respectively at the United States Penitentiary ADX Florence in Colorado and the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, their luxury properties, country club memberships, and personal accounts auctioned on the courthouse steps in Los Angeles to provide eight point four million dollars in permanent restitution to child poison recovery funds, they spend thirty hours a week cleaning facility laundry and hospital bedpans, having finally learned what caustic chemicals actually feel like when the power is stripped away.
– Mr. Carter, our heroic neighbor, was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal in a private ceremony; provided with a lifetime maintenance pension from the sanctuary fund, he tends his garden in peace, knowing that his courage saved an innocent life.
– The Sixty Billion Dollars in recovered strategic defense reserves and forfeited offshore assets were formally deeded in absolute, un-encumbered fee simple to The Mercer Sovereign Sanctuary Trust, administering free advanced surgical esophageal reconstruction, emergency legal defense for domestic violence survivors, and debt-free university scholarships for twenty-four thousand daughters of single mothers across North America every year.
The crushed-gravel path from the lower garden gate crunched softly.
Walking up the cedar steps of the terrace, wearing an unbuttoned flannel work shirt over a clean gray t-shirt, carrying a wooden tray holding six warm blueberry scones and two steaming ceramic mugs of fresh coffee, was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Bennett.
He had formally stepped down from military trial counsel six months ago.
He was now the Master Chief Executive Director for the Mercer Sanctuary, spending his Saturday mornings teaching young apprentices how to audit sovereign charters and defend constitutional property rights with uncompromising, twenty-five-dollar-an-hour honesty.
