Chapter 5 - The War of the Statements
By Thursday morning, the weather had turned into a steady, freezing drizzle that turned the pavement into glass.
In the small room at Mrs. Gable’s, Laura sat at a wooden card table she had borrowed from the landlady. Her laptop was open, its fan whirring softly as she reviewed the final galleys for a three-volume history of Midwestern rail routes—a job that would pay her twenty-two hundred dollars upon completion on Friday.
Sophia was sitting on a small braided rug near the radiator, carefully stacking wooden blocks into a tall, crooked tower.
"Mama," Sophia said, pointing a block at the window. "Is the rain coming inside?"
"No, sweetie," Laura said, her eyes not leaving the screen. "The window is shut tight. The rain stays outside."
A phone buzzed on the corner of the card table. It wasn't her cell phone—that line was still turned off, resting in her bag like a dead weight. It was the landline phone that Mrs. Gable had installed in the hallway, which had just chimed twice.
Mrs. Gable’s light slippers swished outside the door.
"Laura, dear," the old woman called through the wood. "There’s a gentleman on the downstairs phone who says he's your family's financial manager. He sounds very red in the face."
Laura walked out to the landing, took the black receiver from the wall hook, and brought it to her ear.
"This is Laura."
"Laura! Thank God!"
It wasn't a manager. It was her uncle Richard—her father's younger brother, who ran a small real estate tax preparation service out of a basement office on 12th Street.
"Laura, what in the name of God are you doing?" Richard gasped. He sounded as if he had just run up three flights of stairs with two bags of coal. "Your mother has been at my house since eight this morning! She’s hyperventilating on my sofa! She says you're trying to take their home away from them!"
"I'm not trying to take it, Uncle Richard," Laura said softly, her hand resting on the smooth oak banister. "It’s already mine."
"You know that deed was a temporary shield!" Richard shouted. "Your father was being sued! He was trying to protect his life savings! You can't just take an asset that was given to you in trust because you had an argument over dinner!"
"Did my mother tell you what the argument was about?" Laura asked.
"She said you were being ungrateful!" Richard snapped. "She said you've been living there rent-free for six months, eating their food, using their heat, and then you threw a fit because she asked you to clean up after your child!"
Laura let out a small, quiet sound—not quite a laugh, but the breath a person takes before stepping onto thin ice.
"Uncle Richard," she said, "I'm going to send a fax to your office in five minutes. It contains four documents."
"I don't want your faxes, Laura—"
"Document one," Laura continued, her voice clear and completely unhurried, "is the utility breakdown for Four-Oh-Four Elm for the past twenty-four months, showing that every dollar of electricity, gas, and water was paid from my checking account. Document two is the tax receipt for the special assessment in twenty-twenty-two, which I paid out of my divorce settlement. Document three is the bank ledger showing forty-two thousand dollars in payments I made toward Karla's condo so she wouldn't lose it to foreclosure while she was buying four-hundred-dollar boots."
She paused, listening to the sudden, heavy silence on the other end of the line.
"And document four?" Richard asked, his tone shifting from outrage to something cautious and thin.
"Document four," Laura said, "is a letter from the County District Attorney's Fraud Unit, which I will file on Monday morning if my mother doesn't have her personal belongings cleared from my property by three PM on the thirty-first."
"Fraud?" Richard whispered. "What fraud?"
"The deed was executed in twenty-twenty-one to hide the asset from a lawful judgment creditor in the Miller case," Laura said. "If my mother insists in court that the deed was a 'sham transfer' designed to defraud his creditors while keeping beneficial ownership with my father, then my father committed felony fraudulent conveyance. And as the transferee, I am required by law to report the transaction to the bankruptcy trustee."
The phone line was so quiet Laura could hear the ticking of the clock in Uncle Richard’s basement office two miles away.
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"They'll lose everything, Laura," Richard said, his voice barely audible now. "Not just the apartment. The pensions, the Buick, Arthur’s small equity account... the trustee will go back seven years."
"Then I suggest," Laura said, "that you tell my mother to start packing her china."
