Chapter 12 - The Foreclosure on Mill Road
By Tuesday morning, the crash had arrived. I drove past the Mill Road property on my way to the lumberyard to pick up dowels for a personal woodworking project. Drury Hardscape and Snow LLC was usually a hive of roaring machinery by seven in the morning, diesel fumes curling into the crisp air while crews loaded pallets of bluestone into commercial dumps.
Today, the gravel lot was deathly still.
Parked right by the roadside fence, parked where every passing car on the bypass couldn't miss it, was Jarrett’s gleaming twenty-one-foot boat. A bright yellow piece of plywood had been tied to the trailer hitch with zip-ties, spray-painted with jagged black letters: SACRIFICE SALE – ALL OFFERS CONSIDERED. A few feet away, two county sheriff cruisers sat idling with their amber parking lights on, while a pair of plainclothes field agents from the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance stood by the warehouse doors, clipboard in hand.
Through the plate glass window of the front office where Shauna used to sip her iced lattes behind a mahogany desk, I saw furniture being hauled out. Two men in uniform moved filing cabinets, computer towers, and the very desk that had housed my forged signatures into an unmarked van.
Near the customer parking spaces, Shauna stood beside her white luxury SUV. She wasn't wearing her crisp emerald silk blouse or designer sunglasses today. She was clad in an oversized gray sweatshirt, her hair pulled back into a messy knot, clutching a cardboard box filled with desk organizers and family photos. Jarrett paced five paces behind her, shouting into his phone, his face the color of raw beef, kicking a pile of pea gravel across the blacktop with his work boot. When his contractor license was flagged for administrative review following Arthur’s filings, three major commercial winter contracts had pulled out overnight.
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As my Buick slowed near the stop sign, Shauna looked up. Our eyes locked through the dusty glass of my window. There was no defiance left in her posture, no trace of the entitled smirk she used to trade with Dorene over watermelon trays. She looked hollowed out, terrified, and utterly exposed. She took half a step toward the road, her lips parting as if to call my name, but I did not stop. I signaled left, turned onto the county bypass, and let the dust of Mill Road settle behind my tires.
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