Chapter 7 - The Auction of the Shards
In March of the following year, the legal notices in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin ran to sixty-four pages of small, nonpareil type.
Page forty-eight contained the inventory for the judicial liquidation of the personal effects of the Mercer Estate, conducted by order of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois:
Lot 114: English silver-plate hollowware, eighteen pieces, minor denting to the coffee pot base.
Lot 115: Mahogany roll-top desk, nineteenth century, locking mechanism disabled by court-appointed receiver.
Lot 116: Portrait in oils of Arthur Mercer, Esq., unsigned, frame damaged during transit from storage.
I did not attend.
Maria, my junior partner who had taken over the firm's commercial ethics division, called me from her car on the bypass around noon.
"It took forty-five minutes, Claire," she said, her voice crackling through the Bluetooth speaker as I drove the boys back from their nursery school in Harbor Springs. "The whole estate cleared eighty-six thousand dollars. Daniel was there with his sister’s husband. He had a rented van with a trailer hitch."
"Did he buy anything?"
"He bought the desk," Maria said. "Two hundred and forty dollars. The auctioneer had to help him carry it down the ramp because his back went out on the second step."
"And Evelyn?"
"Evelyn didn't come," Maria said. "The nursing home in Northbrook doesn't allow residents to leave the premises without a conservator’s signature. Daniel’s sister signed the papers as limited guardian last week."
I looked out the window of the station wagon.
Along the shoulders of the road, the deep winter snow was finally receding, leaving behind the dark, wet loam of the Michigan spring. The willow branches in the hollows were turning that brilliant, yellow-green color that means the sap has begun to run from the root to the bud, indifferent to the frost that still visited the gravel at night.
"Thank you, Maria," I said. "Close the file. Archive the digital scans to the off-site server and shred the working carbons."
"Already done, Claire," she replied. "Enjoy the sun."
I hung up the phone.
In the back seat, Leo and Julian were arguing with great passion about whether an excavator could dig a hole deep enough to reach the water at the bottom of the world.
"It can, Leo!" Julian insisted, waving a plastic shovel with a broken handle. "If the diesel tank is big enough, it can go all the way to the rocks where the fish live!"
"It can't," Leo said, his chin set with that quiet, unmovable Montgomery gravity that I had seen in three generations of lake captains. "Because the dirt gets too hot. My teacher said the middle of the earth is red."
I smiled into the rearview mirror.
May you like
Their faces were clear, bright, and completely free of the cold, dead architecture of Highland Park. They didn't know the name Mercer. They didn't know that fifty people had once stood beneath thirty feet of gold balloons and cheered for their non-existence.
They only knew that the road led home, that the soup was on the stove, and that when they called out in the dark, someone whose hands were honest would always come through the door.
