Chapter 5 - The Gathering of the Ashes
By five o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, the temperature inside 412 Whispering Pines Lane had dropped to forty-seven degrees.
The house was dark.
Because the Puget Sound Energy account had been held in my personal name and billed through my corporate account, my morning notification of tenant transition had resulted in an automated service suspension pending the establishment of a new residential account by the occupants.
To establish a new account, Puget Sound Energy required two things: a valid lease agreement and a cash security deposit of six hundred dollars.
Eric Thorne possessed neither.
The living room smelled of cold fireplace soot, stale potato chips, and the sharp, sulfurous odor of three boxes of wooden kitchen matches that Diane had used trying to light the emergency gas fireplace in the den.
The gas was off, too.
Diane sat on the modular sectional couch, wrapped in three separate acrylic blankets she had retrieved from the linen closet, wearing her lavender housecoat over a thick winter parka. Her pink foam curlers were gone, her gray hair hanging in greasy, uncombed strings around her gaunt, pale face.
She was holding a landline handset that had no dial tone, pressing the buttons repeatedly with a trembling, arthritic thumb.
"She’s a demon," Diane muttered, her voice rocking with a low, rhythmic, terrifying cadence. "That girl is an absolute demon from hell. To leave an old woman in the cold. To turn the heat off on her own mother-in-law. God will punish her, Eric. God is watching what she’s doing to this family."
Across the room, sitting on the reclaimed Douglas fir dining table with his boots resting on my leather task chair, sat Mark.
His face was bruised.
A two-inch cut ran along his left cheekbone—the result of a brief, violent scuffle with the repossession driver that had ended with two patrol officers from the Bellevue Police Department pinning him face-down on the wet asphalt of the driveway, threatening him with felony assault charges before the driver hitched his Dodge Ram and hauled it down the hill toward the impound lot in Renton.
"Shut up, Ma," Mark growled, his voice thick with rage and cheap bourbon he had been drinking from a coffee mug since three o'clock. "Just shut the hell up about God. Where are the keys to the Ford work van?"
"There are no keys to the van, Mark!" Eric screamed from the kitchen.
Eric was pacing the floorboards like an animal in a concrete pen.
He had not shaved. His eyes were bloodshot, circled with dark, purple shadows of exhaustion. He had spent seven hours on his cell phone—first with First Independent Bank, then with Barnes Lumber, then with four different criminal and civil defense attorneys whose numbers he had found on Google.
Every single attorney had told him the exact same thing:
Does your name appear on the deed? No.
Did you sign the pre-marital property agreement in 2019? Yes.
Do you have two hundred thousand dollars to post a commercial bond to stay the execution? No.
Then pack your clothes, Mr. Thorne. You have twenty-nine days.
"What do you mean there are no keys to the van?" Mark roared, slamming his bourbon mug onto the Douglas fir table so hard that the ceramic base cracked, spilling dark amber liquid across the debt schedules I had left behind.
"Cat Financial locked the electronic ignitions remotely at two o'clock!" Eric yelled back, standing in the kitchen doorway with his hands clutching his hair. "The trucks won't start! The mini-excavator on the job site is bricked! Barnes Lumber filed an emergency mechanics' lien against the homeowner in Issaquah an hour ago! The client just canceled the contract, Mark! He kicked our crew off the property! We don't have a job! We don't have a business! We don't have anything!"
Diane let out a high, ragged shriek from beneath her three blankets.
"Call her father!" she wailed, rocking back and forth on the couch. "Call that retired judge in Spokane! Tell him what his daughter is doing! Tell him she’s throwing his family into the snow!"
"Her father died four years ago, Ma!" Eric sobbed, his voice finally cracking, tears of pure, helpless terror spilling down his hollow cheeks. "Her father is dead! There is no one to call! Arthur Pendleton is her lawyer! Do you know who Arthur Pendleton is? He was the president of the Washington State Bar Association! He charges eight hundred dollars an hour! He doesn't even talk to people like us!"
"Then go find her!" Diane shrieked, rising from the sofa, the blankets falling around her feet like discarded molts. "Go to that fancy hotel downtown! Fall on your knees! Tell her you’re sorry about the damn computer! Tell her Mark will buy her five computers! You're her husband, Eric! A wife has to obey her husband! The Bible says—"
"She doesn't care about the Bible, Ma!" Eric screamed, stepping toward his mother with his fists raised, his face twisted in an expression that made Diane stagger back against the cushions in sudden, genuine fear. "She doesn't care about me! She doesn't care about you! She has two million dollars in liquid securities and a team of corporate litigators who are systematically stripping every piece of skin off my back!"
He pointed a shaking finger at the floor beneath his boots.
"Look at this house, Ma! Look at it! Claire paid for the roof! Claire paid for the furnace! Claire paid for the food you've been eating for seven years! You wanted her to wash the patio? You wanted Mark to stomp on her laptop?"
Eric let out a wild, breathless laugh that sounded like dry glass breaking in an empty well.
"He stomped on the machine that was paying for our lives, you stupid old woman! He stomped on the only thing between us and the street!"
Mark stood up from the table. His jaw jutted forward, his fist clenching around the cracked mug. "Who are you calling stupid, Eric? You're the one who couldn't keep your woman in line! You're the one who let her put everything in her name!"
"She had the money, Mark!" Eric lunged forward, grabbing his brother by the collar of his grease-stained sweatpants. "I didn't have twenty dollars to my name when I met her! Everything I ever owned was leased through her company!"
"You coward," Mark spat, shoving Eric back into the drywall with enough force to crack the plaster. "You weak, pathetic coward."
Eric stumbled, caught himself on the edge of the kitchen island, and looked at his brother, then at his mother.
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The silence that fell over 412 Whispering Pines Lane was not the quiet of peace.
It was the cold, rotting silence of an abandoned mine shaft where the air has turned to poison, and the miners have finally realized that there is no one left at the top of the rope.
