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She goes to visit her father in prison once.
“Franziska,” he greets her, waving off the guards who brought him into the room. They leave as obediently as his servants. Her servants, soon, since Papa is behind glass and close to dead.
“Papa,” she greets politely. “I am here to discuss your disownment.”
Papa reacts to that with a slight twitch of his hands. “The cause being?”
She scoffs. “Surely you can figure that out yourself.”
“Grand-Uncle Alfred was a murderer.”
That he was. After his execution, his ashes were buried in the family plot, next to his father, whom he’d loved. Papa had told her the story when she was eight and had just failed to graduate secondary school. Great-Uncle Alfred is the reason Germany doesn’t have the death penalty anymore. Their family had ensured it.
“Great-Uncle Alfred was a perfect murderer,” she says. She leans forward, slightly. “Do you remember what you said to me, when I failed the state exam because I was caught cheating?”
She’d been furious, yelling up a storm, demanding her father let her redo the exam. Papa had shut her up with a wave of his hand.
From the twitch around his eye, he remembers. Still, better to explain, since he apparently has the same understanding of consequences as an eight-year-old.
“‘Breaking the rules is no object’,” she quotes, “‘as long as you do it perfectly’.”
He says nothing, so she continues.
“Since obviously your transgression is not comparable to a child slipping a cheat sheet up her arm, let us compare you to Great-Uncle Alfred.”
He nods tightly.
“Great-Uncle Alfred was a murderer. But, as becomes the Von Karma name, he was a perfect murderer. Let us see why.”
She raises a fist. “The perfect murder has three components.” She raises one finger. “One: the perfect motive.” Another. “Two: the perfect execution.” The last. “And three: the perfect aftermath.”
She grabs one finger. “First, the motive. Great-Uncle Alfred killed his mother. Why?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Because she murdered his father.”
Papa had told her this in front of his grave, right after coming home from the test center. His fingers had stroked her hair.
There is glass between her and her father, and he doesn’t have much hair left to stroke, anyway.
“You killed Gregory Edgeworth. Why? Because you foolishly forced a confession like some common fool and he caught you.”
Papa clenches his jaw. “He gave me a penalty.”
“‘When you are foolish enough to get caught, you cannot blame anyone else for the consequences’,” she quotes back at him, and he looks away.
“Second,” she says, pushing her second finger forward. “The perfect execution.”
Papa almost winces, neck muscles tensing. She continues.
“Great-Uncle Alfred discreetly acquired arsenic and slipped it into his mother’s evening tea. She was dead in minutes.”
She stares at her father, who still refuses to meet her eyes, like a coward.
“Look at me,” she snaps. He does. “You spent several hours in such a severe daze you missed an earthquake. You were shot before you even committed the crime. When the elevator opened, purely by chance, and your target and two potential witnesses appeared unconscious, also by chance, did you even check if your blood dripped onto the scene? Did you realize you were wearing gloves when you picked up the gun? Or was it pure luck, too, that you left no decisive evidence at the scene?”
He doesn’t answer. She doesn’t expect him to.
“Lastly,” she continues, “the perfect aftermath.”
She lowers her hand and starts drumming her fingers against the table.
“Quite frankly, I don’t even know where to start,” she starts. “Great-Uncle Alfred called the police himself. He confessed. He never cared to hide his misdeed. Murder was his one and only objective.”
She stops drumming and points at her father. “But you cared. You never wanted anyone to know what you what you had done.”
She sits back. Pinches the bridge of her nose. Takes a deep breath.
“So why on Earth would you bother with Miles Edgeworth?”
Papa doesn’t answer. She waits. It takes him far too long to realize that question wasn’t rhetorical.
“As I said during the trial: vengeance. Do keep up, Franziska.”
“You are a foolish fool who for the last fifteen years has made more foolish decisions than I foolishly thought possible,” she snaps. “Gregory Edgeworth was dead.”
He doesn’t seem to understand. Even now, he doesn’t seem to understand.
“You were unrelated to the case,” she says slowly, as if talking to a child. “Even with your sloppy execution, there was no one who could have reasonably connected you to Gregory Edgeworth’s murder. But by taking in Miles Edgeworth, you made that connection yourself.”
Papa looks at her. “There is nothing worse for a father than seeing his child fail.”
If they had allowed her to bring her whip, she would have snapped it.
“Gregory Edgeworth. Was. Dead,” she says, stressing every word. “You foolish fool, he was dead. He didn’t see Miles Edgeworth fail, because he was dead. Do I need to say it in English? Have these months in Los Angeles rotted your brain and made you unable to think common sense? He was dead, fool, and what you did or didn’t do with Miles Edgeworth didn’t matter to him in the slightest, because. He. Was. Dead.”
Papa glares at her. “I will not tolerate impertinence.”
“And I will not tolerate stupidity,” Franziska snaps back. “Do you not understand that your irrational obsession with punishing Miles Edgeworth for his father’s imagined crimes doomed you?”
“I should not have tried to frame him before the statute of limitations on the DL-6 ran out,” he admits, “but he was hardly the reason I was caught. I underestimated that damned defense attorney.”
She stares at him, unable to believe his idiocy.
“I did not come to America for you,” she finally says, and that makes his eyes narrow. “Miles Edgeworth is missing. The authorities, with their typical lack of intelligence, are presuming him dead.”
She wants to say more, but Papa’s face breaks into a wide, triumphant smile, and before she knows it, she stands up and slams her hand on the glass. The guard takes a step forward, but her father stops him with a wave of his hand.
“You fool,” she spits. “Do you truly not understand? Even if Miles Edgeworth jumped off a bridge and killed himself, which he did not, he still wouldn’t be this game’s loser! You are on death row! The game has already ended! You wave your hand to command the judge, the guards, clinging to the shreds of dignity you imagine you still have, as if you surrendered, but you didn’t! You lost!”
The smile has slipped off her father’s face. His jaw is set in stone. She takes a deep breath. Sits down. Folds her hands on her lap.
“As Miles Edgeworth is presumed dead, I was called as his next of kin to handle his belongings. And do you know what I discovered, hidden in his apartment?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer.
“Letters,” she says primly, staring her father dead in the eyes. “Letters from one Phoenix Wright.”
Papa starts forward, his hands violently gripping the armrests of his chair, knuckles white and bloodless. Franziska had sat on the floor of Miles Edgeworth’s apartment, drinking her third glass of his champagne, and read all five letters.
Miles, started the first.
Edgeworth, ended the last, if you don’t pick up a goddamn pen and talk to me, I won’t give you a choice.
“Most news of Phoenix Wright is about your trial against him,” she continues, leading the way to the execution chamber. “But there was a court transcript from four years ago. State v. Wright. Defending attorney, Mia Fey. Defendant Phoenix Wright, art student at Ivy University, was framed for murder by his girlfriend. They met in the courthouse reading room.”
She leans forward. “Now, why would an art student be in the courthouse?”
Papa’s hands are shaking.
“Because he was switching majors. In his third year. Why would an art student switch to law in his third year?”
She smiles.
“Because he was childhood friends with Miles Edgeworth, and apparently, Demon Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth had wanted to be a defense attorney when he was small.”
She sees it in his eyes. For the first time, it dawns on Papa just how badly he failed.
Her back aches from moving Miles Edgeworth’s belongings to a storage unit, and she can’t resist rubbing salt in the wound.
“You lost the moment you tried to murder Miles Edgeworth along with his father.”
It is as if her father’s strings are cut. In a manner of speaking, of course. He doesn’t fall over, as a puppet would. But his shoulders slump, his hands fall off the armrests. He leans back and closes his eyes.
“Matilde wasn’t buried on Von Karma land,” he mutters, not to her.
It is the first time Franziska has heard her name. She will make sure her nephew will forget her father’s.
Franziska was trained to go for the kill, and she has always been a prodigy.
“You used to scold me for being, as you claimed, ‘attached’ to Miles Edgeworth.”
Franziska’s memories start late. One of the first is of Miles Edgeworth, in the shadow of a tree, handing her an apple. One of the most recent is staring at his custom chess set and realizing someone other than her beat him first. Somewhere in the middle, her father intensifying her study regimen when Miles Edgeworth got a better grade.
“Has it ever occurred to you that this was your own fault?”
Her father’s eyes are hollow, but not dead.
“I would have been willing to bury you at home. I would have been willing to scrub away your sins.”
She swings down the axe.
“I would have been willing, had it been anyone but him.”
At eight, after he scolded her, Papa took her inside and dried her tears. He let her sit on the dinner table and fed her licorice.
She reaches into her purse and procures a small box of licorice. Dutifully, she pushes it through the opening in the glass. Papa stares at it, then reaches out. He holds it reverently, like a child.
As she stands to leave, he calls to her.
“Franziska,” he says, pride in his dead eyes. “You have grown into a perfect young woman.”
She curtsies, like she does in court.
She doesn’t say another word to Manfred.