“Like a budget.”
I poured him a second coffee.
“Brendan, how long have you known?”
“Pieces of it for 2 years. The full picture, maybe 4 months. The HELOCs I learned about 3 weeks ago when your grandmother called me.”
“My grandmother called you?”
“She has been calling me once a month for almost 3 years. She told me three weeks ago that you and she had a plan. She told me to keep building my folder and to wait.”
He looked at me.
“Wallace, I am ready. Tell me what you need.”
What I needed was a lawyer.
The lawyer was a man named Patrick Howerin, downtown Cincinnati, a senior partner at Howerin and Vance.
He had been my grandfather’s poker friend in the ’60s.
He was 76 now, and he did not take new clients.
He took me because he had loved my grandmother since 1962 and never told her.
He met us in his conference room on a Thursday morning in early June.
My grandmother. Me. Brendan. A young associate named Diane who took the notes.
Patrick sat at the head of the table with a fountain pen and a yellow legal pad, and he listened for 2 hours without interrupting.
When I finished, he capped the pen.
“Mortgage fraud,” he said. “Six counts. Wire fraud. Bank fraud. We have a forensic affidavit. We have a forgery exemplar from 1995. We have witness testimony from the spouse. We have a falsified cashier’s check that was never deposited. That last one alone could be its own indictment.”
“Federal?” Brendan said.
“Federal. Hamilton County will defer. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio will take this. I know the assistant. I will call her on Monday.”
“How long?” I said.
“6 to 8 weeks for an indictment. Then arrest. Then arraignment. Then it depends.”
“And the house?”
“The house is yours, free and clear. Recorded April 14th in the name of Pendry Heritage Holdings LLC. No claim against it. If anyone, including a member of your family, enters that property without your express written invitation, they are trespassing under Ohio Revised Code 2911.21. Your Ring footage is admissible. Ohio is a one-party-consent state.”
He looked at me over the half-moons of his reading glasses.
“Wallace?”
“Yes?”
“You understand what is going to happen to your sister.”
“Yes.”
“You understand what is going to happen to your parents.”
I looked at my grandmother.
“They have already chosen,” I said. “Now I get to choose.”
Patrick set down the pen.
“Then let’s work.”
For the next 2 and 1/2 weeks, I stayed in the Tudor.
I worked remotely.
I let the deliveries arrive.
I unpacked the kitchen.
I put my grandmother’s stained-glass fixture back where it belonged.
I slept badly.
Patrick filed the federal complaint on a Thursday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office accepted it for review by Monday.
Chapter 9: Final confrontation
On the night before what I have been telling you about, the night before my father stood at my door and told me I had 48 hours to leave, my grandmother went home to her condo in Anderson Township to sleep in her own bed for the first time in 3 weeks.
The Tudor was quiet.
The Ring app on my phone was quiet.
I made tea.
I went upstairs at 10:30.
At 3:12 in the morning, the Ring chimed.
It was the chime I had set for the front porch.
I sat up in bed.
I opened the app.
My father was in the camera frame.
He was wearing a windbreaker over a flannel shirt.
He had a brass key on a ribbon in his right hand.
He tried the key.
I watched him try it.
I watched his face change when it did not turn.
I watched him try it three more times, harder.
The way an old man tries a thing he refuses to believe will not work.
Then I watched him step back.
He looked up at the porch ceiling, straight into the lens, and his face went small.
He walked back to his truck.
The cab light came on for a second when he opened the door.
I could see, in the passenger seat beside him, my mother looking at her hands in her lap.
The truck pulled away from the curb.
I sat in the dark with the brass key from the bread-clip drawer in my own hand and the brass key from the porch camera burning into my eyes.
There had been two keys cut.
Cassidy had given one to each parent.
At 4 in the morning, I drove out to my grandmother’s condo in Anderson Township.
I did not call.
I rang the bell.
She answered in her dressing gown.
I held up my phone with the Ring playback.
She watched it twice.
She made me coffee.
She did not say, “I told you so.”
She had earned the right, and she did not use it.
“They will come back,” she said.
“They will come back?”
“How?”
“There’s a French door in the conservatory. I never had it rekeyed. I forgot it existed until last week. And I told myself I would deal with it after the holiday. The original key from 2005 is probably still on Cassidy’s old chain in a drawer somewhere.”
“Then they will come back today.”
“They will come back today. What do you want to do, Wallace?”
I looked at her over the coffee.
“I want to let them in. I want to drive home, walk in, see what they brought, and walk out. I want the cameras to do my talking. And I want Patrick to be ready.”
She nodded once.
“Call him before you go.”
I called him from her kitchen.
He picked up on the third ring at 5:40 in the morning.
He had not been asleep.
He listened for 90 seconds and said, “Go home. Take nothing. Stay no more than four minutes. Walk out. Drive to my office. I will have everyone here by 9:00 a.m. tomorrow.”
I drove back to Mariamont.