Chapter 14 - The Civil Standby at the Gate
The legal aid office smelled like old paper and coffee that had sat too long. Diane, the attorney who'd taken my case on a Tuesday afternoon, laid the purge receipt flat on her desk and tapped it once with her pen.
"You don't need his permission to get your own clothes back," she said. "You need a witness."
She drafted the demand that morning. Personal property inventory. Three black trash bags, contents to include dresses, patterned silk scarf with blue border, printed photographs. She listed them the way I'd described them, plain and exact. She faxed it and emailed it and sent a certified copy. By three o'clock we had a date. Civil standby. Thursday at ten. Mansion gate.
I didn't sleep much the night before. I kept thinking about the stone pavers, how cold they'd felt through my shoes. I packed a duffel with nothing in it, just to have something to put my things into if the bags were ruined. I didn't open the folder. The last page stayed shut in the motel drawer.
Diane picked me up at nine-fifteen. She drove a gray Honda with a car seat in the back and a stack of files on the passenger seat she moved for me.
"You let me talk," she said. "You check your property. If something's missing, you tell me, not him."
The gate looked different with a sheriff's cruiser parked in front of it. The deputy was already there, a tall man in his forties with sunglasses pushed up on his head. He shook both our hands.
"Deputy Rollins," he said. "We'll keep this simple. I go to the door, I explain we're here for a property retrieval. No arguments on the property. Anything disputed goes on the list."
At ten-oh-two, the gate buzzed and rolled back. My husband drove down in a golf cart. Dark shirt. Short brown hair cut neat. He didn't look at me at first. He looked at the deputy.
"We've got the bags ready," he said.
No blonde woman on the steps. I noticed that before anything else. The front steps were empty. The driveway was empty too, except for one black SUV parked off to the side. No pink sports car. No line of security men in caps and gloves. Just the white mansion and the landscaping, trimmed and quiet under a thin overcast sky.
Rollins followed the golf cart up. Diane and I followed in her Honda. My hands were shaking on the duffel strap and I pressed them flat against my thighs to stop it.
He'd set them by the white pillar. Three large black trash bags, tied at the top with new white ties. Not the same ties. Someone had retied them.
"These are the bags from the fourth?" Diane asked.
"These are her bags," he said.
Rollins nodded toward me. "Ma'am, take your time."
I knelt on the stone pavers. The stone was damp from the sprinklers. I untied the first bag. The smell of trash plastic and perfume came up. My black dress from the charity dinner. My gray work dress. A shoe without its pair. I pulled each piece out slow and laid it on a clean sheet Diane spread down.
Second bag. More dresses. A sweater with a pulled thread. At the bottom, folded like someone had tried to be careful after the fact, was my scarf. The patterned silk with the blue border. It had a smudge on one corner, dirt from the pavers. I ran my thumb over it and didn't wipe it clean yet. I wanted Diane to see it as it was.
"Scarf recovered," Diane said, writing. "Soiled."
"It's just dirt," he said quickly.
Diane didn't look up. "I'm noting condition."
The third bag was the heaviest. Photos. Printed photographs, a stack of them with a rubber band gone sticky. Me and my mom at the lake. Me and him in front of the old apartment. A Christmas with his parents. The edges were bent. One had a footprint on the back, a pale tread mark on white paper. I held it up so Rollins could see without me having to say anything.
"Photos recovered," Diane said. "Damage noted."
He breathed out through his nose. "They were outside. I didn't — they were put outside, okay? I didn't step on them."
I finally looked at him. "Where's the other shoe?"
"What?"
"There's one shoe in here. Black heel. Where's the other one?"
He glanced at the bags. "That's everything that was in them. I had somebody gather it."
Diane wrote that down word for word. Had somebody gather it. She underlined it.
Rollins stepped forward. "Sir, is there any other personal property of Ms. — of Emma's still inside the residence? Jewelry, documents, additional clothing?"
"No," he said. "This is what was outside. This is what she asked for."
"And the vehicle?" Diane asked. "The pink sports car observed on the property on day one?"
"Not hers. Not relevant to this inventory."
"Noted as absent on return day," Diane said. She looked at me. "Emma, is anything else missing that was in the original bags?"
I went back through the first bag. My breathing sounded loud to me. I counted. The folder wasn't supposed to be in there — the folder had come from a gloved hand, not from my closet. I wasn't asking for that today. I was asking for what he'd thrown.
"The blue dress with the buttons," I said. "It was in the photo spilling out. I don't see it."
He frowned. "Everything's here. Maybe it's folded inside something."
I shook the dresses out one by one. It wasn't there. Diane wrote: blue button-front dress described but not located.
"I'll look inside," he said, annoyed now. "If it's inside I'll mail it."
"You'll produce it through my office by Monday," Diane said. "Not by mail to her directly."
He stared at her, then at me kneeling there with my clothes on a sheet on the driveway where I'd lived for six years. For a second his face shifted, something close to what I'd seen in that shocked moment behind the folder. Then it closed.
"Fine," he said. "Are we done?"
Rollins looked at me. I nodded and started folding the dresses into my duffel. The scarf I folded last and set on top. The photos I held against my chest until Diane handed me a large envelope.
We didn't talk about us. We didn't talk about betrayal or the folder or who gave the order. That wasn't what today was for. Today was for getting my bags back without him deciding what I got to keep.
May you like
At the gate, Rollins handed Diane a card with an incident number. "Call if there's trouble with that last item."
I sat in Diane's Honda with the duffel at my feet and watched the gate close behind us. The mansion got smaller in the mirror. The steps stayed empty.
