Chapter 5 - Unraveling the Grift
The explosion happened on a Thursday, five days before the thirty-day notice was set to expire.
Harrison had spent the afternoon at a local public library, using their free computers because I had changed the Wi-Fi password to a sixty-four-character string of random numbers. When he came through the side door, he wasn't slumping. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and burning with a wild, cornered fury.
He held a thick stack of printed records from the Secretary of State’s business registry and three years of joint tax filings.
"Sloan!"
His voice was a shout that bounced off the high beadboard ceilings of the entry hall. It was louder than any noise he had ever made in this house, even when he was an adolescent testing his boundaries.
Sloan stepped out of the guest bedroom on the second floor, wearing her sunglasses pushed up into her bleached hair, a pair of new white linen trousers trailing on the rug.
"Don't yell at me, Harry," she said, her voice dripping with dismissive contempt. "I have a headache from that mildew in the basement."
"You registered *Palmetto Creative* as a sole proprietorship under my name!" Harrison walked up the staircase two steps at a time, waving the papers in her face. "You listed me as the managing partner! You took out a twenty-thousand-dollar merchant line of credit against my credit score, and you defaulted on it six months ago!"
Sloan didn't back away. She leaned against the banister, crossed her arms, and tilted her chin up.
"And? You didn't have any income, Harry. We had to show cash flow if we were ever going to qualify for that loft in Durham. I was trying to build our profile."
"You bought clothes!" he roared, his voice cracking into a raw, ugly screech. "You bought designer shoes! You went to Miami with your college friends while I was sitting here applying for entry-level drafting jobs at sixty grand a year! You told me that trip was for an interior staging seminar!"
"Oh, please," Sloan sneered, stepping down one step to look down at him. "You were pathetic, Harry. You’ve been pathetic since the day your dad died. You sat on the floor of this house like a fat baby waiting for Evelyn to spoon-feed you soup. Somebody had to maintain our social standing. Somebody had to look like we weren't complete failures."
"You stole from my mother's account!"
"She wasn't using it!" Sloan’s voice rose, shrill and vicious, cutting through the stairwell. "She’s an old woman with three houses and a garden! What does she need thirty thousand dollars for? To buy more lemon trees? To bake more ugly cakes for her bridge club? She’s hoarding everything while we were starving!"
"We weren't starving!" Harrison yelled, tears finally breaking from his eyes, hot and ugly. "She was buying our groceries! She was paying for the gas in your car!"
"She was giving us scraps!" Sloan snarled. "And you let her! You’re thirty-five years old, Harrison, and you’re still hiding behind her apron strings. You burned my twenty-five-hundred-dollar bag because you didn't have the balls to stand up to your mother when she went crazy!"
I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my hand resting lightly on the newel post Arthur had carved from a single piece of heart pine.
"Harrison," I said.
Both of them stopped. They looked down at me from the landing—Sloan red-faced and venomous, Harrison shaking, his hands clutching the tax papers as if they were the pieces of his shattered life.
"The sheriff will be here on Monday morning at nine o'clock," I said, my voice steady, level, and utterly calm. "Whatever you two have to settle between your business and the state of North Carolina will not be settled under this roof. Sloan, your bags need to be on the porch by Sunday night. If they are not, they will be removed to the street by professional movers, and the cost will be added to the civil claim Bradley Vance is filing against your LLC on Tuesday."
Sloan looked at me, then down at Harrison, who was weeping openly now, his head hung low, his shoulders trembling.
"You're a pair of pathetic, dried-up ghouls," she spat.
May you like
She turned on her heel and slammed the guest room door so hard that the brass sconce on the hallway wall vibrated, hummed, and dropped an old glass prism to the floor, where it shattered into three clean pieces.
***
