Chapter 4 - The Locks and the Landlord
The locksmith arrived at eleven-thirty in a battered white van with Kane County Security & Hardware stenciled on the side.
His name was Frank Kowalski. He had gone to high school with my late husband, David, back when Elm Ridge Road was still surrounded by cornfields instead of subdivisions with retention ponds and faux-stone entry pillars. He took one look at the bandage on my jaw, didn't ask a single nosey question, and went straight to work with an electric drill and three heavy-duty Schlage commercial deadbolts.
“Double-cylinder on the back door, Meredith,” Frank said, blowing brass shavings off the strike plate. “Keyed from both sides. If someone kicks the glass out of the mudroom pane, they can’t reach their arm through and turn the thumb-latch. You want the garage keypad reprogrammed too?”
“Wipe the memory, Frank,” I told him, sitting on the porch steps with a mug of black coffee held in my right hand, keeping the steam away from the left side of my face. “New code. Six digits. Don't write it on the frame.”
“Understood,” he said. He paused, wiping his grease-stained thumbs on his canvas pants. “Heard Brandon was in a spot of trouble down at the county building this morning. My boy works in the clerk’s office.”
“Brandon is thirty-two years old, Frank,” I said evenly. “He’s old enough to handle his own paperwork.”
Frank nodded slowly, respecting the boundary with the old-fashioned tact of men who grew up in the valley. “Aye. More than old enough. David always said the boy needed a cold winter to figure out how thick his coat was. Looks like winter’s here.”
By twelve-fifteen, the house was sealed. Every exterior lock was fresh, hardened steel that hadn't seen Brandon’s fingers.
At one o'clock, the black Lincoln Continental belonging to Douglas Sterling pulled into my driveway.
Douglas had been David’s closest friend since their days at the University of Illinois. He was seventy-one now, with a full head of silver hair, gold-rimmed bifocals, and the kind of quiet, understated wealth that didn't need to drive a leased sports car to prove it existed. He stepped out of his car carrying a thin leather briefcase, walked up the front steps, and took off his wool flat-cap as he reached the porch.
He looked at my face, and for three seconds, his jaw worked silently behind his lips.
“Meredith,” he said, his voice dropping into that deep, courtroom baritone. “My God. Sarah Miller called me from the department before noon, but I thought she was exaggerating.”
“Sarah doesn't exaggerate, Doug,” I said, opening the newly deadbolted door and gesturing him inside. “Come in. I made a pot of drip coffee. Normal coffee. Out of a paper filter.”
We sat at the dining room table—the formal cherry table we only used for Thanksgiving back when there were people worth setting the good china for. Douglas laid his briefcase flat on the polished wood and clicked the brass latches open.
“I got your notice at six-fifteen, Meredith,” Douglas began, pulling out the commercial lease agreement for 414 Elm Street. “I called the building manager at seven. By eight-thirty, I had my chief financial officer pull Brandon’s internal billing ledger for the last eighteen months.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The weariness on his face wasn't business stress; it was the specific, heavy exhaustion of an older man realizing he had spent years shielding an incompetent protégé out of loyalty to a dead friend.
“How bad is it, Doug?” I asked.
“He hasn't paid his share of the utility escrow since November,” Douglas said bluntly. “He told my office manager that you were handling the quarterly disbursements directly through your personal trust account. He ran up nine thousand dollars in shared administrative overhead—printing, courier services, legal library access—that was supposed to be settled on the first of every month. The firm carried it because his name was Miller, and because your signature was on the master guarantee.”
I felt a cold prickle of nausea in my stomach. “He told you I was paying it?”
“He did,” Douglas said. “And that’s not the worst of it, Meredith. Three weeks ago, he approached my junior partner about taking over three of our long-term agricultural estate clients. He told them he was establishing an independent wealth-management boutique in Geneva. He offered them discounted fee structures if they transferred their retainers to an LLC he registered in January.”
“Oakridge Tax Associates,” I said, remembering the name from the bank statements.
“Precisely,” Douglas nodded grimly. “He was using my office space, my secretarial pool, and my professional insurance umbrella to poach my own clients behind my back while telling me his widowed mother was guaranteeing his rent. When your email arrived this morning revoking the guarantor agreement, I sent our security officer to lock his suite. As of ten-fifteen this morning, his keycard has been deactivated. His computer terminals are quarantined for forensic audit.”
I leaned back against the high wooden chair, the dressing on my jaw pulling tight as I exhaled. “Is he facing criminal charges from your firm, Doug?”
Douglas looked at me with deep, sorrowful eyes. “If he had just been late on rent? No. We would have settled it with a payment plan out of respect for David. But poaching clients using firm resources while falsifying billing affidavits is a direct violation of the state accountancy board’s ethical standards. I filed an administrative suspension notice with the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation twenty minutes before I drove out here.”
“He’ll lose his license,” I whispered.
“He’ll be suspended for at least two years,” Douglas corrected. “And without your guarantor letter, the building management company is exercising their right of immediate eviction under Section 14 of the commercial lease. He has until five o'clock on Friday to clear his personal effects from Suite 2B under the supervision of a building security guard. If he isn't out, his desks and filing cabinets go to a municipal storage auction.”
I looked out the window at the gray sky over the garden. The hydrangeas David had planted along the fence line were dry and brown from the early autumn frosts, their dead flower heads rattling in the northwest wind.
“He told me this morning that I was dead to him,” I said softly.
Douglas reached across the cherry table and laid his broad, dry hand over mine. “David used to say that a weed doesn't stop choking the corn just because you water it, Meredith. You spent seven years watering a boy who thought the rain came from his own pocket. You didn't do this to him. He built the scaffold himself. You just stopped paying for the lumber.”
The phone in my pocket buzzed.
I pulled it out. The screen showed a notification from an unknown number with a 630 area code.
I clicked open the text message.
Mrs. Miller, this is Arthur Vance, Victoria’s father. We posted her bail fifteen minutes ago. We need to speak immediately regarding an affidavit of non-prosecution. If you think my family is going to let a sixty-two-year-old nurse ruin my daughter’s life over an accidental kitchen mishap, you are gravely mistaken. Have your attorney call my office before five p.m. or we will be filing a cross-complaint for elder domestic provocation and property damage.
I stared at the screen for ten seconds, the cold disgust rising in my throat until it tasted like copper.
I turned the phone around and slid it across the cherry wood toward Douglas Sterling.
Douglas put his reading glasses back on, read the message once, and his mouth tightened into a thin, predatory line that had won forty years of corporate litigation in the Cook County courts.
“Provocation?” Douglas murmured, his voice dropping into an icy chuckle. “Arthur Vance was a third-tier collections attorney when David and I were in law school, and he hasn't gotten any smarter with age. Give me your phone, Meredith.”
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“What are you going to do, Doug?”
“I’m going to call the state’s attorney’s office in Geneva,” Douglas said, pulling his own cell phone from his breast pocket. “And then I’m going to call the chief of the county bar association’s ethics committee. Because if Arthur Vance thinks he can intimidate a complaining witness thirty minutes after a domestic battery bond hearing, he’s about to find out what a real lawyer looks like.”
