TUESDAY NIGHT
After speaking with Doreen and growing more certain that it was Holly who stopped by the office last year to look at the property records, I’ve finally decided Gretchen Strickland deserves to know the truth about tax sale before it’s too late. Under Vermont law, she has exactly one year from the day of the transfer to contest the tax sale in court. That leaves roughly two months, plenty of time for someone comfortable with the system to hire a lawyer and get the ball rolling.
Not so much for a legal neophyte like Gretchen, who, I’m guessing, doesn’t have a savvy real estate attorney on retainer, unlike Robert Barron or his father. Those two probably have a stable of blue-blood chiselers. That’s why I’ve decided to bring the file to her myself and outline the steps she must take immediately, if not sooner.
It took some doing to hunt her down. Gretchen’s address isn’t listed anywhere on the internet. She has no Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account. Nothing to do with LinkedIn, and her numbers don’t automatically pop up on Google. It’s like she doesn’t exist.
There’s a reason for that. According to the statewide voter registration system, Gretchen’s address is available to me, as a town clerk, but secret to the public because she’s listed as “safe at home.” I take that to mean she’s a victim of domestic abuse seeking protection from her batterer, her husband. She and Zeke are still married, I believe, but they weren’t living together when the tax sale was happening. He’d gone off the deep end by then, and word around town was he was taking out his frustration on her so she fled with the twins.
Now I’m driving to Grandfield, a former railroad junction forty miles up 100B, to knock on the door of a former resident who probably despises me for putting her house up for tax auction. I’m dreading every minute.
Gretchen’s apartment is in a weathered gray two-story house with a crumbling porch that appears about to collapse and chipped paint that should be tested for lead. I find a space on the street to park discreetly just as my phone rings. Erika, at last. I’ve been on pins and needles all day waiting to hear what happened with the cops and her car.
“Hey, honey,” I answer casually, as if nothing’s going on.
“Hi, Mom.” Erika lets out a breath. “Sorry I didn’t call sooner. I know you left, like, a hundred messages.”
“Three texts,” I clarify, sinking low in my seat as a small blue Ford pulls into a space in front of Gretchen’s apartment. “And two voicemails.”
“Yeah, like I keep telling you, no one my age picks up voicemails. The only reason I even have an answering message on my phone is for work.”
“Duly noted.”
“Anyway, I just want to fill you in that I’m fine. I’m not in any trouble. I wasn’t kidnapped or murdered.”
“Nice to know.” The door to the blue car opens and a woman carrying a cloth grocery tote gets out slowly, the pink legs of her scrubs peeking out from under her zip-up coat. “So why did Andre want to talk to you?”
“About my car. Don’t make a bigger deal about this than it is, but Robert asked to borrow my Kia over the weekend. He wanted to take Holly on a surprise honeymoon to Montreal and felt there might not be enough charging stations for the Tesla.”
I do not ask about Holly’s Range Rover. Nor do I mention that I saw Robert dump a bag in our garbage that turned out to be woman’s PJs lightly spattered with blood, a bag currently stuffed in my freezer. The goal here is to regain my daughter’s trust while surveilling the woman I’m now certain is Gretchen slowly climb the uneven wooden front steps and push open the downstairs door without using her key.
“Anyway, it was found this morning abandoned and vandalized in the national forest down in Peru.”
“Peru!” All thoughts of Gretchen fly out the window. “What was your car doing in Peru?”
“That’s what the police are trying to find out. The going theory is maybe it was stolen from a park ’n’ ride? I dunno. They’re checking it out. They’re checking into whether Holly and Robert might have left it in Whitehall and taken the train to Canada. The bummer is, the Kia’s a total loss. My insurance is covering it but there’ll be a five-hundred-dollar deductible.”
I can’t believe this. If it weren’t for bad luck, my kid wouldn’t have any luck at all. “What do Holly and Robert have to say about this?”
There is a pause and then Erika says sheepishly, “That’s the other thing. We haven’t been able to locate them. I’m assuming they’ve totally unplugged, but if they don’t return as scheduled by tomorrow night, I’m gonna freak.”
I don’t blame her. The mystery of their whereabouts aside, Holly and Robert’s absence must be ratcheting up the tension on the set and, therefore, my daughter’s stress. From what Erika’s been telling me, the stakes are never higher than the week before the reveal, with daily live promotion and teasers online to lure crucial viewers. I don’t see how Team H&R has a chance of winning the TMB contest if they’re choosing these last days to “unplug.”
But I try to comfort her with my go-to line. “It’ll all work out in the end. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end!”
“That’s what I keep telling myself,” she says cheerfully, even if, as I suspect, the positive attitude is forced. “Anyway, what are you up to tonight?”
I’m grateful she’s willing to move past our tiff from the weekend without requiring a postmortem. Sometimes, all mothers and daughters need is a little space to cool off. “Running an errand.”
“At this hour? What kind of errand? Don’t tell me some idiot needs emergency notary services.”
No, but that would have been a good excuse. “I’m meeting up with Gretchen Strickland.” That’s about as honest as I’m going to get. I’m not sure if Erika grasps the complexities of tax sales, but she might understand enough to realize what I’m about to tell Gretchen will be bad for her employers.
“Gretchen Strickland!” Erika repeats, sounding alarmed. “You mean, Zeke Strickland’s wife? The people who used to own Robert and Holly’s place?”
She might be aware of more than I give her credit for. “Yup.”
“Are you meeting with him, too?”
“I’m not sure . . .”
“Oh, my god, Mom, you can’t. Zeke’s, like, messed up in the head. He’s super dangerous.”
This catches me off guard. “What makes you say that?”
“Just take my word for it. Zeke is a very, very, very bad dude. Tell them to meet you during office hours when there are other people around. You’re all alone down there. It’s not safe!”
A light goes off in the upstairs apartment I suspect is Gretchen’s. I haven’t the heart to break it to my excitable daughter that I’m nowhere near the office, that I’m on Gretchen’s territory, miles away. “Relax. We’re gonna have a brief chat and then I’ll be home. No big deal.”
“Okay. I hope you’re right. Though, hold on.” There’s a pause. “If Zeke doesn’t happen to show, ask his wife where he is, okay? But do it subtly. Don’t tell Gretchen I’m the one who wants to know.”
“Why?” Now I’m suspicious. If Zeke Strickland is the devil’s spawn, why is she trying to find him?
“Call it a hunch. Or, as you would say, no big deal.”
* * *
The entryway to the building reeks of musty carpet and stale cigarette smoke. I pass by two cinched white plastic bags of garbage deposited outside the grimy door of an apartment from which a TV blares and take the narrow stairs to the second floor. Not sure what the building codes are in Grandfield, but this chopped-up house would be a death trap in a fire.
The door to Gretchen’s apartment is decorated with orange pumpkins and black cats cut from construction paper and sprinkled with silver glitter. Halloween is right around the corner and someone’s making an effort. My guess is it’s Gretchen.
Gathering my strength, I rap softly.
There’s a muffled shuffling on the other side and then a woman’s cautious, “Who is it?”
“I’m here to see Gretchen. It’s Kim Turnbull, the Snowden town clerk.”
“Who?”
“I need to speak to Gretchen about a property she and Zeke own in town. I have . . . new information.” Hopefully, that will be enough of an enticement.
The door opens a crack, enough for me to make out a woman in sweats and dark hair tipped with purple. “What are you doing here? It’s late.”
No argument there. “I’m really sorry. I just want to give this to her.” I hold up the file. “Documents from the tax sale. If I could speak to—”
“Let her in, Nicole.”
Gretchen steps into view wearing a blue robe and thick glasses, her head wrapped in a towel, indicating she just got out of the shower. There’s something about her that’s vaguely familiar. Then I remember she came to the office once with a babe on each hip to bring me a gift of raw honey as a thank-you for helping Zeke fill out the building permit for his cabin. Though that couldn’t have been more than five or six years ago, with the dark circles under her eyes and her sallow skin, she seems to have aged decades. Or that could be the harsh effect of the overhead fluorescent.
“How’d you find her?” asks Nicole, closing and locking the door behind me. “She’s supposed to be on the safe-at-home list.”
I avert her excellent question with a “Just did.” I can’t risk being interrogated by a roommate. “Gretchen, I won’t be long. But it’d be a good idea if we could go over these documents together, so you understand what they’re about and what you have to do to get back your Snowden property.”
Gretchen blinks once or twice. “Are you serious?”
“That’s why I’m here. Is there someplace where we can sit?”
She pulls out one of the folding chairs around a plastic table, pushing aside a plate of congealing microwaved frozen pizza. To our left, the blue screen of a TV flickers in front of a threadbare couch. The floor is a minefield of plastic toys.
Nicole folds her arms, her belly button protruding through a thin T-shirt. She’s pregnant. “You good, Gretch?”
“It’s okay. Yeah.”
“Five a.m., you know. That’s when the little stinkers get up.” Nicole shuffles in slippers to a door at the far end of the room, shoots us a parting glance, and disappears.
“We’ve got three kids sleeping so we need to keep it down. Have a seat.” Gretchen gestures to the chair and goes to the refrigerator, her hand shaking slightly as she reaches for a green bottle of Mountain Dew. She sits across from me, the folder marked STRICKLAND TAX SALE lying between us like an unopened Pandora’s box, its one saving grace being that there’s still hope. “Did something change?”
I did, I want to tell her. “Nothing’s changed. Except you’re coming up on a really important deadline to reclaim the house and I wanted to give you copies of these records so you could start the process.”
Gretchen drops her gaze to the folder, but doesn’t touch it. “I thought it was a done deal. You signed over the deed to Robert Barron, right?”
“To be specific, the town actually deeded the property after you and Zeke failed to redeem.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” she says, taking a sip of her Mountain Dew. “Zeke and I were separated by then. I wasn’t getting the mail, he was. I didn’t know anything about the auction. Didn’t know it was coming up for sale or that the taxes hadn’t been paid, even. I couldn’t believe it when Zeke told me we’d lost the house. I was like, What? How? Shouldn’t I have been notified?”
This is where I close my eyes and summon all my courage. “Yes. You’re absolutely right. You should have been notified. I screwed up.”
There is a calm before the storm. She is rigid, forearms resting on the table, fists clenched. “What do you mean you screwed up?”
“I mean, I should have sent you and Zeke notification of the tax sale by registered mail with a returned receipt signed by at least one of you for our records. I didn’t. I didn’t even send you a notice by regular mail. There was no way you could have known the auction was coming up unless you read the legal ads in the local paper, which no one ever reads, or happened to see one of the three postings around town, which no one ever sees. In other words, as collector of delinquent taxes, I did not comply with the law.” I pause to inhale another breath. “On purpose.”
Her fury builds. Eyes bulging, cheeks a hot red, she pounds her fist so hard it rattles the dishes in the cabinet. “Goddamn it. I knew it. I knew it wasn’t our fault. I told Zeke you people were working with Barron. Did he slip you a bribe or what?”
“Guys!” Nicole hisses from the bedroom. “Shhh.”
“For the record,” I clarify in a whisper, doing my best not to take her insult personally, “working with Barron was the opposite of what I was trying to do by not notifying you. Actually, I was out to skewer the sale on your behalf. What they call planting a poison pill.”
Her jaw drops. “On our behalf? Well, you didn’t do a very good job. We lost the fucking house.”
“Look, you owed $8,462 in back taxes. I’d tried to work out a payment plan with Zeke—”
“Like he was even capable of working out a plan,” Gretchen snaps. “My husband suffered a TBI after falling off the ladder while shingling our roof and his prefrontal cortex was shot to shit. Do you know what that means?”
“No, not exactly.”
“It means he can be a pussycat one minute and one minute later he’ll be threatening to blow off my head. It means he’s lost the ability to control his rage, to tamp down his aggression. He’s constantly in anger mode. That’s his default setting now. He punched so many holes in the walls of his old apartment they looked like swiss cheese. He’s in living hell.”
I cringe thinking of the pain and fright she’s endured, not to mention what Zeke’s going through. “I’m so sorry. When I was dealing with him and the taxes, I had no idea.”
“That’s why you should have contacted me.” Crossing her arms, she raises her face to the peeling ceiling. “Whatever. That was two years ago. It’s too late now.”
I shake my head. “It’s not. That’s the point of the poison pill. It’s a baked-in fatal flaw, which is what these records show.” I tap the red file. “You can appeal the sale based simply on the fact I failed to notify you, the owners, that your property was about to go to auction. The Vermont Supreme Court’s made it clear in prior rulings that failure to notify is a sufficient basis in and of itself to reverse a tax sale.
“You’re practically guaranteed to get your property back. Best of all, the property you’ll get back won’t be your log cabin; it’ll be a million-dollar estate and the taxes will be paid. You won’t just have your land—you’ll be stinking rich.”
Gretchen regards me with a wary stare. “There has to be a hitch.”
“No hitch. I’m the only one putting my ass on the line by coming forward. You could sue me. Robert Barron will definitely sue me and the town and I’ll lose my job for failure to uphold my oath of office. It’s all bad for me and the Town of Snowden and certainly the Barrons, but not for you.”
Tears are pooling in the corners of her eyes. “I still don’t get why you would do something like this to us.”
“I didn’t do it to you. I did it to help you. I wanted to give you an option to get back your land if the tax sale went through, which it almost didn’t, since the locals who regularly bid at these auctions did their research and saw there wasn’t a return receipt with an owner’s signature. Why end up with a property only to lose it in court, was their attitude. So they sat this one out and it was almost yours again. Everything would have worked out as I planned—”
“You mean, no one would have bid on the house and we’d have had time to come up with the money?” Gretchen interrupted, beginning to get it.
“Exactly. You could have had extra weeks, months, maybe a whole year. I just never expected some out-of-state blogger would get wind of the auction and swoop into town with a bucket of cash.”
For the first time tonight, Gretchen allows her lips to drift into a slow smile. She seems to have calmed down a bit. Perhaps her change in fortune might even be sinking in. “Does Robert Barron know what you did?”
“He didn’t at the time. He thought he got a steal that the locals were too stupid to recognize.” I think of the visitor from Florida riffling through our records a year ago. “If he’s discovered the fatal flaw since, he’s kept his mouth shut. It’s in his best interests to keep this quiet until the deadline for appeal passes in January. That’s why I’m here tonight, because you have about ten weeks to get a lawyer and start the ball rolling.”
Gretchen opens and shuts the file without examining the contents. “I can’t get over this.” She rests her elbows on the table, massaging her forehead. “I can’t believe there was no reason for us to lose our house, that it could have been ours all along.”
“It can be yours again, even better than before. You’ll own it free and clear. No debt. No back taxes. That’s the good news.”
“Good news?” She sits up. “You think this is good news? Now I have to hire a lawyer. How much is that gonna cost? How am I supposed to pay for one? You don’t think Robert Barron with all his money and connections won’t fight me tooth and nail?” She flicks away the folder. “It’ll be a cakewalk for him. I don’t care what you say, no judge is gonna hand over this so-called million-dollar property because you forgot to send one certified letter.”
She might have a point, but I refuse to concede. “Have faith. I’m willing to testify in court that I intentionally failed to mail you the notice. It wasn’t accidental oversight. The Vermont judicial system tends to be biased against property confiscation.”
“Is it? Hmmm. I seem to recall a Vermont judge allowing a sheriff to show up unannounced and boot my husband from his own home in February during a snowstorm.”
That’s true. Also true is that Robert will hire platinum attorneys to run Gretchen Strickland into the ground. Yet, where there’s a chance, there’s hope. “Give yourself some time to think about what I said.” I get up, slinging my purse over my shoulder. “If you need the recommendation for a good real estate lawyer, give me a call. I know a few.”
“You’d recommend a lawyer to sue yourself?” Gretchen asks, with a laugh. “Why?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do. And I happen to get a lot of pleasure from a clear conscience.”
The other bedroom door opens and Nicole emerges again, annoyed. She’s had it. “Okay, guys, you’ve gotta wrap this up. I’m not getting any sleep.”
“She’s going,” Gretchen says, giving her roommate a thumbs-up.
Outside in the short hallway that smells of old cigarettes, I say, “I truly am sorry, Gretchen. It was never my intention for you to lose your house.”
She leans against the doorjamb and sighs. “If I’d only known about the taxes being in arrears, I could have scraped up the cash, asked my parents for a loan, anything. You shouldn’t have interfered. You should have followed the law. You’re an elected official. That’s what you swore to do, right?”
“Could not agree more, believe you me. But what’s done is done. All I can do is make amends by admitting my mistake and doing what I can to correct it.”
Gretchen nods quickly. “I appreciate that. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for you to come here.”
Not by a long shot. “By the way, I have a duplicate set of records for Zeke. You don’t happen to have an address where I can send them, do you?”
She snorts. “An address? Hardly. Zeke lives out of his pickup.”
“Any place in particular?”
“Nope. He’s always on the move. Though, if you were waiting for me, you likely were pretty close to him and had no idea.” Gretchen chucks her chin toward the street where my car is parked. “His truck was right under the Michaelsons’ oak tree when I got home tonight. He likes the spot because it’s shady. I ignored him like always. Got inside real quick.”
I vaguely remember a white beat-up Ford behind me. I thought for sure it was unoccupied and the idea that it wasn’t, that Zeke Strickland saw me but I didn’t see him, gives me the creeps.
“I’ve caught him passing by the day care when I fetch the kids or in the parking lot outside the grocery store. Too wily for the cops, though. As soon as I call to report him violating his restraining order, he’s outta there.” She pulls her robe tighter, protectively. “Zeke always was a survivor. Doesn’t need much to live on. Clean water. A tarp to keep off the elements. He’s a good hunter so he can catch his protein. He never was one for going on the internet. He’s got a cell, but it’s prepaid in cash. When it comes to not wanting to leave a digital imprint, Zeke was ahead of the curve.”
“Sounds like the Unabomber.”
“Not far off. Do you know that when we first got the Snowden property, we actually spent an entire winter in the old root cellar? I swore I wouldn’t live underground with only a trap door to the outside, but Zeke fixed it up really nice. We lay carpets to take the chill off the stone floor and put in a bed and a woodstove and a couple of pieces of furniture. We were snug as bugs in a rug. Being below the frost line, it was relatively toasty, too.”
No. Out of the question. “I can’t even think about living in a hole. Too similar to being buried alive, my ultimate fear.”
She raises and lowers a shoulder. “You get used to it. There are way worse fates.”
“Yeah?”
“You could be living in a house you have no business owning knowing somewhere out there is a family whose home you stole just because you could. My husband may have mental health issues and he might be so violent he’s impossible to live with, but at least when he’s on his own, he’s not hurting anyone.”
With that, she closes the door and turns the latch, ending the discussion before I can tell her more bad news that she definitely doesn’t want to hear.