Chapter 9 - Whispers at the Country Club
Greed has a way of making fools boastful before the victory is won.
On Saturday evening, Denise Mercer called me, her voice crackling with laughter over the phone.
“Evelyn, you will not believe what happened at the Oakridge Country Club mixer tonight.”
“Enlighten me, Denise,” I said, settling into my armchair with a cup of chamomile tea.
“Grant and Paige were at the bar, ordering Dom Pérignon on credit,” Denise recounted. “Grant was cornering his business associates, openly boasting that he was coming into a major seven-figure windfall before the new year. He told Bob Henderson that he was preparing to liquidate his mother’s estate and expand his equity partnership!”
“Did he, now?”
“And that’s not all,” Denise continued. “Paige was showing the women her phone, bragging about an architectural rendering for a thirty-thousand-dollar kitchen renovation featuring imported Italian marble! She told everyone that ‘poor Evelyn’ was finally succumbing to early-stage dementia and being transitioned into full-time memory care for her own safety.”
I took a slow, measured sip of my tea. “Let them celebrate, Denise. The higher they climb on their mountain of lies, the harder they will hit the ground when it crumbles.”
“The Carters signed their final escrow disclosures today, Evelyn,” Denise added, her tone turning professional. “The wire transfer of $780,000 cleared the title company’s holding escrow an hour ago. The house belongs to them at noon on Wednesday.”
“And the professional movers?” I asked.
“Scheduled for Tuesday morning at seven sharp,” Denise confirmed. “An unmarked commercial fleet. They’ll pack your selected furniture, your personal keepsakes, and Arthur’s books, and transport them directly to Cape Haven while Grant is stuck at his firm’s mandatory regional summit in Chicago.”
Grant had proudly announced to me two weeks earlier that he would be out of state from Monday through Wednesday for his company’s year-end conference.
He thought he was leaving behind a trapped, defenseless mother.
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In reality, he had given me the perfect seventy-two-hour window of absolute freedom.
***
