Chapter 3 - The Scouring of Dover Ridge
The sun did not warm Dover Ridge that afternoon; it merely turned the snow on the hemlock boughs into heavy, wet clumps that fell with dull thuds onto the frozen lawn.
At 1:15 p.m., a yellow municipal school bus, its engine rattling like an iron pail full of gravel, dropped Daniel Bennett at the crossroads where Dover Road met Farm Street. He had walked the remaining mile and a half with his wet overcoat over his arm, his burgundy silk tie stuffed into his trouser pocket, and his leather oxfords split down the welt where the road salt had eaten through the stitching.
When he reached the iron gates of 424 Dover Ridge Road, he found them open.
Not welcomingly open; they had been pinned back against the granite pillars with heavy steel transport chains, their fleur-de-lis finials wrapped in red vinyl caution tape that fluttered in the north wind like torn ribbons.
In the driveway sat four moving vans—not the discreet, padded vehicles of the white-glove suburban carriers he had used when moving his collection of architectural monographs from Boston, but thirty-foot commercial freight trucks with the logo of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department / Civil Process Division stenciled on the aluminum panels.
A dozen men in gray canvas coveralls were moving through the front double doors, carrying pieces of furniture Daniel had spent five years claiming as his private collection.
The mahogany sideboard from the dining room—the one he had told his college roommates had been purchased at an estate sale in Newport—was being lowered down the marble steps on four nylon straps. A young deputy with a clipboard was checking the serial number stamped into the back of the carcass against a blue inventory sheet.
“Careful with the feet,” Daniel shouted, his voice hoarse from two hours of breathing the sulfurous exhaust of the commuter bus. “That is eighteenth-century Chippendale! The veneer will check if you drop it on the salt!”
The deputy did not look up from his clipboard.
“Item 402,” the deputy read aloud to the two men holding the straps. “Reproduction Federal sideboard, manufactured in Grand Rapids, 1998. Appraised value: eight hundred dollars. Consigned to the regional liquidation warehouse in Chelsea.”
“Reproduction?” Daniel choked out, lunging toward the steps. “That was four thousand dollars at an auction on Charles Street! I have the certificate in the study!”
“The certificate,” a voice said from the shadow of the stone portico, “was printed on twenty-pound bond paper by your late father-in-law’s corporate secretary in nineteen-ninety-nine to satisfy the insurance underwriters.”
Arthur Vance stepped from the front hall.
He was seventy-two years old, with the long, horsy face of a North Shore Puritan and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles that sat so low on his nose he appeared to be looking at the gravel through his eyebrows. He wore an old tweed ulster with leather buttons and carried a green canvas briefcase that was bulging with certified copies of the Norfolk County registry books.
Arthur had been the Sinclair family’s primary litigation counsel since the year Daniel was born. He had personally drafted the covenants that prevented the Commonwealth from running a four-lane highway through the salt marshes at Essex, and he looked at Daniel Bennett with the precise amount of interest he would have accorded a damp leaf stuck to the sole of his boot.
“Mr. Bennett,” Arthur said, pulling a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket with a flick of his thumb. “You have fifty-two minutes remaining under the terms of the administrative exclusion order. The deputies have already cleared your personal wardrobe from the master suite. It is currently situated in the three cardboard cartons beside the garage.”
Daniel looked at the cartons.
They were cheap, corrugated boxes from a self-storage facility, sitting in six inches of slush beside the empty bays where his Mercedes had parked that morning. A pair of his running shoes—the neon-green ones he used for the five-kilometer charity runs on the Esplanade—poked through a torn flap in the top box.
“Where is my mother?” Daniel asked. His knees were shaking violently now, the wet cold having climbed past his knees into his groins.
“Mrs. Margaret Bennett,” Arthur said, checking a second column on his manifest, “is currently at the police station in Needham. She attempted to re-enter the carriage house in Manchester using an emergency window latch and was detained by the local constabulary for breaking and entering. Your brother, Tyler, has been contacted to provide her with bail. He declined.”
“Tyler declined?”
“He stated,” Arthur read from a handwritten notation on the margin, “that his logistics firm had just received an immediate demand for the principal balance on a four-hundred-thousand-dollar equipment note from Sinclair Marine Credit, and that he was currently attempting to locate his passport before the federal marshals arrived at his warehouse in Dedham.”
Daniel took two staggering steps up the limestone risers.
The front hall was stripped bare.
The nineteen-light crystal chandelier still hung from the vaulted ceiling, but its globes were dark; the power to the secondary circuits had been disconnected at the pole by the municipal light plant at eleven o'clock, leaving only the cold, grey daylight that slanted through the beveled glass. The hand-knotted runner was gone, revealing the pale, unsealed marble beneath—the floor that Claire had mopped on her knees thirty-six hours after coming home from the maternity ward.
“Arthur,” Daniel whispered, his hands coming together in an unconscious, desperate clasp before his chest. “You’ve known my family for thirty years. My grandfather was on the board of the Athenæum with your father. You cannot allow her to do this. This is an outrage against every principle of equity in this state. A wife cannot simply... she cannot seize her husband’s property without a hearing!”
Arthur Vance looked over his glasses.
A faint, wintry smile touched his thin lips—the smile of a man who had spent four decades watching men who married for money discover that the money had teeth.
“You do not have any property, Daniel,” Arthur said gently. “You have never had any property. When your father died, his estate owed twelve million dollars to the federal government and seven million to the construction consortium that built the harbor tunnel. Claire’s father paid those debts. He did not pay them out of charity; he paid them because your father held two thousand shares of voting stock in the dry docks that Arthur Sinclair required to complete his merger with the Dutch.”
He reached into his pocket and produced a small, flat brass key.
“Your father was an employee of the Sinclair Trust from 1982 until his demise,” Arthur said. “He received a salary of eighty thousand dollars a year and the use of the Manchester carriage house. He had no equity. When you married Claire, you were not bringing the Bennett line into union with an heiress; you were being permitted to occupy an asset that had been purchased from your father’s bankruptcy receiver for eighteen cents on the dollar.”
He dropped the brass key onto the bare marble between them.
It chimed—a single, bright, metallic note that died in the empty hallway.
“Your fifty minutes have expired, Mr. Bennett,” Arthur said. “The sheriff’s department has a cruiser idling at the gate. If you are still within the curtilage of this property when the town clock strikes two, you will be processed through the district court in Dedham on a charge of criminal trespass.”
Daniel looked down at the key.
May you like
He did not pick it up. He could not bend his back; the muscles along his lumbar spine had locked into a solid, trembling knot of cramp and cold.
He turned slowly, his split leather shoes dragging through the wet sawdust the movers had scattered across the portico, and walked down the steps into the white, silent lane where his cardboard boxes were already turning gray under the winter rain.
