“What will you do?”
“Let her.”
I drank the rest of my coffee.
I want to ask you something, you who are listening to me right now.
What do you think Cassidy is going to do the moment she walks past 4127 Lynen Ridge and realizes her sister is the new owner?
Drop your prediction in the comments. I want to read what you write.
I’ll tell you what she actually did in a minute.
Chapter 8: Brendan’s testimony
What she actually did?
I have to back up to tell you.
It was a Saturday in mid-May.
The Tudor smelled new. Fresh polyurethane on the floors. Paint barely cured on the dining-room trim.
I was on the stepladder in the foyer, adjusting the stained-glass tulip fixture my grandmother had given my parents in 1995.
Somebody had taken it down during the foreclosure and packed it carelessly.
I was straightening one petal when the doorbell rang.
I came down the ladder.
I opened the front door.
A man in his mid-30s stood on my porch with his hands in his pockets. Tall. Khaki jacket. Salt at the temples already, which surprised me.
He looked uncertain.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “I drove by twice this week and finally just decided to knock. Are you—is this house for rent or for sale by owner?”
“Neither.”
“Oh. I—okay. I was told it might be.”
He took a half step back like he was going to leave.
Then he stopped.
He looked at my face.
He looked at the stained-glass fixture behind me.
He looked at my face again.
“You’re Wallace.”
I did not answer.
“I’m Brendan Renfruit. I’m—”
“I know who you are.”
He took his hands out of his pockets.
He looked at the porch boards for a second.
When he looked up, his face was different.
“Wallace, can I come in just for 10 minutes, please?”
I should have said no.
I am not somebody who lets people into my house on the day I am still nailing baseboards.
But there was something in his face that I had only ever seen on my grandmother’s.
A quiet, sustained alarm.
I opened the door wider.
I put on the coffee.
He sat at my kitchen island.
He kept both hands flat on the marble like he was waiting for permission to lift them.
He looked at the bookshelf in the next room.
He looked at the photograph propped against it, the one my grandmother had brought me from Mariamont in January.
The one of me and her on the porch of this house in 1999, when I was barely a year old and she was already old.
He looked at me.
“My wife has been telling me since Tuesday that she bought this place back from the bank to return it to the family. And for $200,000.”
I poured the coffee.
I slid the cup across to him.
I sat down.
“Brendan, I want to ask you something, and I want a yes-or-no answer. Did Cassidy buy this house?”
“No.”
He closed his eyes.
He kept them closed for a long second.
Then he opened them.
“Okay. Did you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“At auction in March, through an LLC.”
“Through Pendry Heritage Holdings?”
I looked at him.
“Yes.”
He laughed once, very dryly, like a man who had just had a small bone confirmed broken.
“I drove past the courthouse that morning. I had a job in the next building. I saw your grandmother walking out. I knew. I knew. I told myself I was being paranoid.”
“Why were you driving past the courthouse, Brendan?”
He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket.
He pulled out a folded white envelope.
He set it on the marble between us.
He smoothed the crease.
He looked at me steadily.
“For the last 6 months,” he said, “I have been quietly building a folder, and nobody on Lynen Ridge, including my wife, knows it exists.”
He opened the envelope.
He laid the contents on the marble, one item at a time.
Item one: a photograph of a cashier’s check dated April 2nd, drawn on Fifth Third Bank, made out to First Mariamont Holdings for $200,000, signed Cassidy R. Renfruit.
He had photographed it from her purse on a Sunday morning when she was in the shower.
“This check was never deposited,” he said. “I checked. The bank shows no record of First Mariamont Holdings ever existing.”
Item two: a printout of a BetMGM account statement.
Third quarter 2024.
$41,000 in slot losses.
The account name was Cassidy Renfruit.
Item three: a screenshot of a private Venmo from Cassidy to a contact saved as Max.
$2,800.
No description.
“Max,” Brendan said, “is a man in Newport, Kentucky, who runs a small after-hours card room. My wife thinks I don’t know.”
Item four: a photograph of a notebook page.
Cassidy’s handwriting.
Columns of names—David, Mom, G—and dollar figures next to each, totaling in her tiny, precise script at the bottom:
$412,000.
“That’s a tally,” he said. “She has been tallying what she has taken from each of them.”
I stared at it.
“She tallies it?”