Chapter 9 - The Locksmith at Dawn
At six o'clock on Saturday morning, an Ohio winter dawn broke over Elmridge Drive in cold shades of violet and ash.
A white commercial van from *Ravenna Lock & Key* pulled into the driveway, followed immediately by my Ford F-250 and Carys’s minivan. Behind us, Portage County Sheriff’s Deputy Harris pulled his cruiser up to the curb, his yellow roof lights flashing softly against the snowy oaks.
Arden had obtained an emergency temporary restraining order from the Portage County Common Pleas Court the previous afternoon, granting her exclusive possession of the marital residence pending the formal divorce and fraud proceedings. Grant had been served at a cheap motel near the interstate by Deputy Harris at midnight.
The house was dark, silent, and empty.
The locksmith, an old high school classmate of Carys’s named Dave, pulled out his power tools. Within fifteen minutes, the heavy brass cylinders of the front, back, and garage doors were drilled out and replaced with heavy-duty commercial deadbolts.
“New keys, Arden,” Dave said, handing her a silver ring with three fresh brass keys. “Nobody gets in here without a sledgehammer now.”
We walked inside. The house smelled stale—a combination of cold take-out pizza, sour beer, and damp carpeting. Grant had spent his last two nights here alone, tearing through drawers and closets looking for documents, leaving empty boxes and scattered clothing across the hardwood.
Arden stood in the dining room.
The dining table was still set with the dusty remnants of Thanksgiving dinner that had never been cleared. Dirty china plates with dried cranberry sauce, half-empty wine glasses with thick red rings at the bottom, and dried turkey bones sat beneath the chandelier.
At the head of the secondary table, my chair still sat on its side where Grant had kicked it, covered in a light dusting of fallen pine needles from a holiday wreath.
Arden walked over to the chair. She reached down, took the mahogany backrest in both hands, and slowly, deliberately set it upright on all four legs.
She looked at me, her eyes shining with quiet strength. “This chair belongs to you, Mom. It always did.”
“We’re clearing this out, Arden,” Carys said, rolling up her sleeves and carrying in three heavy black trash bags from the hallway. “Every stitch of his clothes, every cheap trophy from his golf tournaments, every bottle of his expensive cologne. It all goes into storage boxes. If he wants it, he can pay a constable to retrieve it.”
For four hours, we stripped Grant Voss out of that house.
We packed his tailored suits, his designer shoes, his leather golf bags, and his collection of luxury watch boxes into plastic totes and stacked them neatly in the garage. We scrubbed the kitchen, washed the linens, and threw open the windows to let the crisp, clean Ohio air blow out the stench of arrogance and lies.
By noon, the house was clean. It felt lighter, as if a dark, suffocating fog had finally lifted from the rooms.
As we were taping up the last box in the garage, a battered, ten-year-old Chevrolet Cavalier pulled up to the curb. Wallace Voss was behind the wheel. The Audi was gone—repossessed by the dealer that morning after his credit card bounced.
Wallace climbed out of the car. He looked ten years older than he had on Thanksgiving. His coat was wrinkled, his face was gaunt, and his hair was wild. He shuffled up the driveway, stopping at the edge of the open garage door where Deputy Harris was leaning against the doorframe, chewing on a toothpick.
“Where is my son’s property?” Wallace rasped, his voice hollow.
“Right there, Wallace,” I said, pointing to the neatly stacked plastic totes. “Everything that belongs to Grant is packed, inventoried, and signed for. You have thirty minutes to load it into that rust bucket before Deputy Harris escorts you off county roads.”
Wallace looked at the boxes, then looked at Arden, who stood beside me with her arms crossed, completely unmoved.
“You’re destroying your own husband, Arden,” Wallace croaked, trying one last time to summon his old authority. “Grant loved you. He gave you a life you could never have dreamed of in Ravenna.”
Arden looked Wallace dead in his watery eyes.
“Grant gave me sixty-five thousand dollars of debt, a forged deed, and a mother-in-law who laughed when an elderly woman hit the floor. Take your boxes, Wallace. And don’t ever come back to this county.”
May you like
Wallace stood there for a long moment, looking like an old, broken tire that had finally run out of air. Without another word, he picked up the first plastic tote and dragged it toward his car.
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