Chapter 8 - The Clean Title
The closing on 412 Elmwood Avenue took place on a Friday afternoon in late October, ninety days after the carafes had shattered on the flagstones.
The real estate market in the county was unseasonably tight. David had listed the property through a commercial brokerage in Columbus on September tenth, three days after the professional clean-up crew had finished stripping Lauren’s navy paint off the kitchen cabinets and repairing the structural joists in the basement that Evan had notched without an engineer's stamp.
We had four offers within seventy-two hours.
The buyers were a young couple from Cincinnati—a pediatric physical therapist and a high school history teacher—who had fallen in love with the heart-pine floors and the hundred-year-old maple in the front yard. They had offered fifteen thousand dollars over the asking price, all-cash, with a thirty-day inspection waiver.
I sat at the end of a long mahogany conference table in the law offices of Vance, Miller & Sterling on the fourth floor of the Huntington Bank building.
The left side of my face was completely healed now, though if you looked closely under the strong fluorescent lighting of the conference room, you could see a faint, white crescent-shaped line—barely an inch long—where the edge of the glass had parted the skin beneath the earlobe. The headache was gone; the ear had stopped whistling three weeks ago.
David Vance sat to my right, wearing his usual dark gray suit, a thick stack of blue-backed legal instruments arranged before him with the mathematical precision of a field artillery battery.
Across the table sat the title officer, an efficient woman in her forties with half-moon reading glasses suspended from a silver chain around her neck.
"Deed transfer from Claire Marie Vance, unmarried, to Marcus and Elena Higgins, as joint tenants with right of survivorship," the title officer recited, sliding the heavy legal vellum across the polished wood toward my pen. "Purchase price: five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. County conveyance fees and transfer taxes have been deducted. Municipal liens: zero. Water escrow: verified cleared."
I picked up the heavy black rollerball pen.
My hand didn't shake. The signature was three inches long, the C and the V executed with the same decisive, horizontal stroke that June had used on her checks for half a century.
Claire M. Vance.
The title officer inspected the ink, stamped the page with an embossed metal seal that gave a satisfying, mechanical ker-chunk, and slid a second document toward me.
It was the wire confirmation sheet from the escrow clearinghouse.
The net proceeds after broker commissions, attorney fees, and the three-thousand-dollar township repair assessment were printed in crisp, nine-point Courier font at the bottom of the ledger:
NET PAYOUT TO SELLER: $489,412.18
"The funds were released to your money-market account at one-fifteen this afternoon, Claire," David said, taking off his reading glasses and polishing them with a clean linen handkerchief. "The transaction is complete. The deed has been electronically filed with the county recorder. You no longer have any legal, financial, or residential nexus to Elmwood Avenue."
I leaned back in the high-backed leather chair, letting the air out of my lungs in a long, quiet sigh that felt as though it had been trapped beneath my collarbone since that afternoon in July.
"Where are they living, David?" I asked.
David paused, his glasses halfway back to his face. He looked at me with those ancient, cynical eyes that had seen forty years of local estates turn to ash.
"They took a six-month lease on a double-wide mobile home behind the bulk propane depot in West Lancaster," he said, his voice flat and unvarnished. "Evan’s union hearing concluded two weeks ago. Because of the domestic assault conviction—he took a negotiated plea to assault in the third degree, six months suspended, twelve months of formal probation—they demoted him back to junior maintenance grade two. His hourly rate dropped eight dollars and fifty cents."
He reached into his leather briefcase and pulled out a small, printed clipping from the local weekly paper.
"And Lauren?"
"Your sister is currently working the customer service desk at the big-box hardware store on Route 22," he said, sliding the clipping across the table. "Twenty-two hours a week. Just enough to avoid the federal reporting threshold for her food assistance application. Aunt Diane told Raymond at church last Sunday that Lauren has stopped speaking to anyone who attended the barbecue because nobody offered to lend them the ten thousand dollars they needed for a security deposit on an apartment in town."
I looked down at the clipping.
It was a small legal notice in the back of the paper: Notice of Personal Property Lien Sale. Re: Abandoned Commercial Storage Unit #114, Lancaster Mini-Storage. Lessee: Evan Mercer.
It was the contents of the garage.
The three thousand dollars' worth of industrial tools, the custom aluminum car ramps, the outdoor deep-fryer, and the six-foot neon brewery sign Evan had hung above the workbench. All of it being auctioned off to the highest bidder to satisfy a three-hundred-dollar rental delinquency.
I pushed the paper back across the mahogany.
"Did you charge them for the eviction filing fees, David?"
"Every dime," David replied, a thin, wintry smile touching the edges of his mouth. "Seven hundred and forty-two dollars. Deducted from the security deposit credit we allowed for their moving expenses under the agreed order. The law does not grant professional discounts to people who strike their landlords, Claire."
I stood up from the table.
I was wearing a tailored charcoal wool blazer, a cream silk shirt, and new leather boots that didn't have a drop of road salt on them. I felt light—not the hollow, frantic lightness of someone who has run away from an emergency, but the solid, balanced buoyancy of a ship that has finally dumped its contaminated ballast and found its proper waterline.
"Thank you, David," I said, offering him my hand.
He took it. His grip was dry, warm, and surprisingly firm for a man who spent his life behind a desk.
"You're a good girl, Claire," he said softly. "June was right about your engine. Just make sure the next house you buy doesn't have an extra bedroom for people who don't know how to carry their own trays."
"There won't be an extra bedroom, David," I said. "And the front gate is going to have a lock that requires a code."
May you like
I walked out of the conference room, through the quiet glass doors of the bank lobby, and down the granite steps into the October sunshine.
The air was clean, smelling of burning leaves, cold pine, and the vast, open road that stretched out toward the mountains three hundred miles to the west, where nobody knew my name, nobody needed forty dollars for prime ribeyes, and every square foot of the ground beneath my boots belonged entirely to me.
