Francis suggested an approach.
I would contact my brother and tell him that my mortgage lender required an interior inspection in connection with a refinancing review. I would bring a licensed inspector. Since my brother had no legal standing as an occupant, he had no authority to refuse an inspection.
He tried.
He told me the timing was inconvenient. I told him that declining to cooperate with a lendermandated inspection could complicate his own credit situation in ways he probably didn’t want. I did not explain how or why. I let him fill in the blank himself.
The inspector, actually an investigator working with Francis, documented everything, the painted walls, the removed shelving, some of which turned out to have been thrown away entirely.
The original mid-century sofa, which my neighbor later confirmed she’d seen in a dumpster in the alley 2 weeks after my brother moved in. The crayon on the walls in the hallway, a water stain on the ceiling of the master bedroom that corresponded with an upstairs bathroom where the kids had apparently flooded the floor at some point. The brass fixtures gone.
When Francis and I sat down to review the documentation, she laid the inspection images next to the before photos from my first day album.
The before images looked like a magazine. The after images looked like a daycare after a long week.
“They will not expect you to have this level of evidence,” she said. “In my experience, people who feel entitled enough to do what was done to your house also believe the person they did it to will not fight. They calculate on compliance.”
The court issued the eviction order within a few weeks.
I was not there when the enforcement officer posted the notice on the door, but my neighbor Petra texted me about it. She said my brother came outside and stood on the porch reading the paper for a long time and then went back inside without saying anything. His wife, she said, started crying in the driveway.
My father called me that night. It was the first time he had called me since any of this began.
He sounded exhausted and somehow younger than he had in years, in the particular way that people sound young when they are frightened.
“Is there anything you can do?” he asked. “About the timeline for the kids.”
“Dad,” I said quietly. “Where were you when my furniture was in a dumpster?”
He didn’t answer.