Chapter 1 - The Paper at the Table
The grandfather clock in the dining room clicked its heavy brass tongue against midnight. In the quiet of the kitchen, the sound had the density of a gavel dropping on wood.
Beside my left elbow sat the remainder of Mabel’s birthday cake. It was a round, two-tiered sponge with buttercream frosting that had begun to stiffen around the edges into a sugary crust. Five pink candle-holes punctured the top layer, each cratered where the warm wax had run down before being blown out.
Across the yellow pine table lay the six-stapled document the process server had pushed into my hands while six five-year-olds sang off-key.
STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA
IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE
SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION — COUNTY OF CABARRUS
CIVIL ACTION NO. 26-CVS-04118
BAKER LANDWORKS, LLC,
Plaintiff,
v.
ROSALIE HOLLIS BAKER,
Defendant.
VERIFIED COMPLAINT FOR SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE
I reached into the gray metal footlocker resting on the chair opposite me. The box bore the stencil CAPT R. HOLLIS, JA, USAR in faded black industrial enamel. The smell that rose from the open lid was distinct: canvas treated with water-repellent, mimeograph carbon from pre-mobilization packets at Fort Jackson, dry dust from Camp Arifjan, and the faint, sweet cedar shavings my mother had dropped into the corners before I left Fort Bragg for the desert.
I lifted out Folder 2: LEGAL / DOMESTIC / PRE-DEPLOYMENT 2024.
My fingers found the original document by touch. It was printed on twenty-four-pound linen bond—the paper I had bought myself at the commercial stationer in Concord because the legal assistance office at the reserve center only stocked cheap twenty-pound multi-use that yellowed within eighteen months.
I laid the two instruments side-by-side beneath the overhead pendant light.
To my right lay Warren Baker’s Exhibit A: a four-page Option to Purchase Real Property, dated March 14, 2024. The signature on the final page was bold, black, and unmistakable. Daniel had used the pilot pen with the extra-fine rolling ball that I had given him for his thirtieth birthday. The initial stroke of the D rose high, looped backward with a flourish he had copied from his grandfather’s architectural drawings, and finished with a sharp downstroke that clipped the printed line.
Daniel C. Baker, as Attorney-in-Fact for Rosalie Hollis Baker, pursuant to Power of Attorney recorded in Book 1142, Page 88, Cabarrus County Registry.
To my left lay the original, executed instrument from Book 1142, Page 88.
I did not need to search for the operative language. I had spent sixteen hours at the pine table in February 2024 drafting it, three weeks before my mobilization orders took me to the 335th Signal Command’s forward headquarters outside Kuwait City.
I had known Warren Baker for six years by then. I had watched him at three Thanksgiving tables, two corporate Christmas parties at the country club, and a dozen family dinners where he sat at the head of the mahogany table like a municipal magistrate hearing small-claims pleas. I knew that he viewed all family assets as water flowing naturally toward the lowest point in a drainage basin—which was always his personal checking account.
On page two of my instrument, Section 4 (Express Limitations and Exclusions), Paragraph (c) sat centered between two horizontal lines:
"NOTWITHSTANDING ANY GENERAL PROVISION HEREIN TO THE CONTRARY, THIS POWER OF ATTORNEY DOES NOT CONFER, AND SHALL NOT BE CONSTRUED TO CONFER, UPON THE ATTORNEY-IN-FACT ANY POWER, AUTHORITY, OR DISCRETION TO SELL, TRANSFER, CONVEY, LEASE FOR A TERM EXCEEDING THIRTY (30) DAYS, MORTGAGE, PLEDGE, ENCUMBER, GRANT ANY OPTION UPON, OR IN ANY MANNER DISPOSE OF OR CREATE AN INTEREST IN REAL PROPERTY HELD IN THE INDIVIDUAL NAME OF THE PRINCIPAL, SPECIFICALLY INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THAT PARCEL IDENTIFIED AS PARCEL ID 5621-09-1142 (THE HOLLIS FARM, RIDGE ROAD)."
I leaned closer to Warren’s Exhibit A.
Page one of the Option recited the consideration: $1,000.00, non-refundable, paid in hand.
The option period: Twenty-four months from the date hereof.
The purchase price: $150,000.00.
Then I looked at the acknowledgment on page four of Warren’s Exhibit A.
The notary seal had been struck in purple ink. The stamp belonged to one Marjorie L. Pruitt, Notary Public for the State of North Carolina, Commission Expires November 12, 2027.
Marjorie Pruitt had been Warren Baker’s executive secretary since the year the Carter administration deregulated the trucking lines. She had a desk outside his corner office on Church Street that smelled of menthol cigarettes and damp carpet, and she kept his personal checkbook in a locked fire-drawer beneath her typewriter table.
The jurat on the acknowledgment read:
"Personally appeared before me this day Daniel C. Baker, Attorney-in-Fact for Rosalie Hollis Baker, and acknowledged that by the authority duly given and as the act of the principal, he executed the foregoing instrument for the purposes therein expressed."
The date on the notary stamp was March 14, 2024.
I pulled out my military green logbook from Folder 3.
March 14, 2024, had been a Thursday. At 1400 hours Arabia Standard Time—which was 0600 hours on Church Street in Concord—I had been standing on the crushed-gravel apron behind Building 102 at Camp Arifjan, reviewing a line-of-duty investigation for a specialist who had dropped an eighty-pound transmission case onto his foot during an engine swap.
At 2200 hours AST that same day, I had logged an unclassified call home through the commercial line in the morale tent.
I opened the deployment notebook where I kept the date, time, and topic of every satellite call to my children.
14 MAR 2024 — 1410 EST.
Daniel at office. Mabel has ear infection; Dr. Vance prescribed amoxicillin ($18 co-pay). Theo took three steps toward the pantry door. D. says work is 'hectic,' Warren in Raleigh for DOT hearing on the bypass expansion. Connection broke at 1418.
Warren had been in Raleigh on March 14.
He had not been in the Church Street office holding a closing with his son.
I turned back to the complaint.
The verification on the final page of the lawsuit was signed not by an attorney, but by Warren Baker himself, as Managing Member of Baker Landworks, LLC. The law firm on the summons was Pritchard, Howell & Vance, P.A.—old, comfortable estate and real-estate lawyers who occupied a Greek Revival brick house two doors down from the courthouse.
The signature belonged to Robert Pritchard. He was seventy-four, played eighteen holes with Warren every Tuesday morning at the Cabarrus Country Club, and had handled every land acquisition Warren had completed since the mid-eighties.
I stood up, walked to the refrigerator, and poured a glass of cold water.
From the bedroom above the kitchen, the floorboards gave a familiar, three-stage creak. It was Daniel’s weight—the long, shifting step he took when he got out of bed to check his phone or take two antacids from the bottle on the dresser.
The steps moved toward the hall linen closet, paused, and then retreated toward the bed. He was not coming down. He had seen the papers on the table. He knew what lay in the second folder of the footlocker, even if he had convinced himself over two years that the paper had simply dissolved under the weight of his father’s voice.
I walked to the kitchen window and looked through the double panes into the darkness of the backyard.
Beyond our grass line, where the gravel driveway of the Lynen Street house met the alley, the silhouette of Warren’s black Lincoln Navigator was gone. He had driven away at four-thirty, his tires crunching over the dried pine needles, leaving behind two empty paper plates, a crumpled red napkin, and the paper that proposed to strip thirty years of my mother’s sixteen-hour kitchen shifts off the county register for thirty cents on the dollar.
"Just a housewife," I whispered against the glass.
May you like
The pane showed the reflection of my kitchen: the blue dish towels hanging from the stove handle, the stack of plastic cups drying on the counter, and the yellow pine table covered in thirty-pound bond paper.
I didn't turn out the overhead light. I sat back down, pulled my legal pad from the gray footlocker, uncapped a fresh black pen, and began writing the caption for a motion under North Carolina Rule of Civil Procedure 11 for sanctions against Robert Pritchard, Esq., and Baker Landworks, LLC.
