The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “Oh,” I said aloud. It had been recorded with the county last winter, just before I’d come home to visit for Christmas and then decided to make my move back to Michigan. A copy of the deed was attached and I stared at it, at the description of the property my dad had sold to Libet and Aaron Feeney. He had turned our land into an odd-shaped wedge, so that we still owned the driveway out to the street but the house was now narrowly hemmed in by the Feeneys’ property on one side. The new boundary line ran just a few feet from my back deck, and they’d received most of our shoreline, like at least eighty percent of it. “That’s almost all our beach access,” I said slowly. “That’s…” That was what gave my house any value at all. Without it, I had a falling-down cottage and a dirt driveway, and a few trees on the other side. “That’s…”

  “I’m sorry about this,” Gunnar said. “I really am. I had no idea that you didn’t know and I thought you were just being obnoxious and delusional when you yelled at me and at the surveyors. Really, you were being obnoxious, but you thought you were right.”

  I hadn’t been right, and now, I was stunned. I sat down, holding the title report in my hand, still staring at it. “He was already sick,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “My dad knew he was sick. He knew he was going to have a lot of medical expenses, and he did. He had done all these renovations on our bookshop, too, and owed a ton on a loan he’d taken out to do them. The cottage was—is—falling apart, and he probably wanted money to repair it. And he had already lost a fortune to a friend who had a no-fail idea…” I had told him not to give money to his friend for his dumb diamond mine. Who had a diamond mine? Not some idiot my dad had known in college and who wouldn’t know kimberlite if he ate some. “I don’t know how much he lost to that joker, but he had to take out all those mortgages. The guy didn’t even know what kimberlite was,” I said aloud.

  “Who? Who’s Kimberley?” Gunnar asked.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t know either, if your tutor didn’t tell you! I’m talking about the igneous rock that you mine diamonds from!” I said scornfully.

  At first Gunnar looked blank, and then he looked angry. “Are you back to calling me stupid?”

  “No!” Yes, but I hadn’t meant it. “No, but I—” Who, really, was the dumb one? Was it the guy holding the deed to my only asset, or was it me, who knew the name of some African rock? From my vantage point, it wasn’t Gunnar who was stupid.

  He sat down next to me and I bounced, realizing that I had placed myself on his gigantic, unmade bed in my shock at seeing the deed. “What did you mean that your dad was sick when he signed this?” he asked me. “Did he…”

  “Yes, he died,” I said shortly, but had a thought. “You know, I bet this isn’t even legal.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t sign contracts under duress or coercion. If you do, they aren’t valid,” I said, which I was sure had to be true. “And he was definitely under duress! He knew that he was going to die and he was making poor decisions!” I jumped off the bed and some of the papers scattered to the floor. The place was already such a mess, it couldn’t have bothered anyone. “I’m going to go talk to an attorney.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Gunnar told me. “It’s best to get legal advice for anything this important.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are you trying to trick me, somehow?”

  “No. I understand from what you just said that you’re broke. You had what you thought was the value of your property cut in half, at least. Maybe even more.”

  I put my hand over my stomach, which had just done a flip. The value cut in half, maybe even more.

  “If I were you, I’d talk to a lawyer, too,” Gunnar continued. “Do you want the name of mine?”

  “Of course not!” Was he not getting that he was the enemy? He had just taken half the value of the only thing I had, maybe more! Why was he speaking so nicely, like someone could be rational about her house being pulled out from under her? I started to sweep out of the room, but turned to tell him over my shoulder, “I’ll find my own counsel, and you’ll be hearing from us in court!”

  That parting shot would have been a lot more effective if I hadn’t slipped on some of the papers I’d just dropped. Gunnar caught me under the arms to stop the fall, but I heard him grunt.

  “Oh, no! Your back. Is it your back?” I asked anxiously, turning around. “Did I hurt it? I weigh a lot. You should have let me hit the ground, because I’m used to it.”

  He stood very still. “I’m all right,” he said, but he held his face tightly, like he was in pain.

  “Can you sit down?” I put my hands on his arms to help him. “Can I get you anything? Ice? Aspirin? Can I rub it?” I felt genuinely terrible, but then remembered that he had stolen my land. “You probably have some team doctor to call,” I said, and stepped away.

  “I’m all right,” he said again, but he still hadn’t moved.

  “Ok. Ok, good, well, I’m going to find that lawyer.”

  “Fine.”

  I walked a lot less sweepingly to the door, placing each foot carefully and watching for errant papers. I looked back at him before I left the room.

  “You know, this isn’t my fault,” Gunnar told me.

  Well, someone had to be to blame. I turned around quickly and took a set of stairs down that landed me in a powder room on the main floor. The workmen were very surprised when I stepped out of it and I was momentarily disoriented until I saw the hole that had once been the front door, and I went for daylight.

  Then I barreled straight to my car, and straight to the library, where I went straight to the reference section and then to one of the computers because my own had bitten it permanently the night before. I read and read and researched, taking tons of notes on the paper I’d brought and more I borrowed from the librarian.

  I needed to be prepared. This was a fight I couldn’t afford to lose.

  Chapter 5

  “What do you mean that I already lost?”

  “Hallie,” the lawyer said, glancing at his notes. “Can I call you Hallie? Let me put my cards on the table.” He put his hands on his desk instead. “There’s no case here. None.”

  “But, duress! Coercion! Illness!” I argued, and Mr. Avery shook his head.

  “For the reasons that you state yourself in this brief, you don’t have any basis to try to revoke this warranty deed. None.” He looked down at the typed page in front of him. “By the way, this is very impressive. You said you have no legal background at all?”

  “No,” I said sadly. I really wished I did, though. “None.”

  “I’m not sure why you prepared a brief that is so counter to your own interests.”

  “I was being a devil’s advocate?” I suggested. Really, it was because there hadn’t been any other conclusion to draw. Even I (with no legal background) could tell that I didn’t have any rationale to cancel out what my dad and the Feeneys had agreed upon and recorded. The more I’d researched the applicable state law and case law, the more I saw that it was hopeless. My visit to this attorney, who promised a free consultation on his website, was a last-ditch effort. But I had dragged my feet coming into his office, because I had already known what he was going to say. And he said it:

  “No way. Your only recourse is a lawsuit.” He rubbed his two fingers together against his thumb, and I got his meaning, but even so, he spelled it out. “Money. A lawsuit’s going to be extremely expensive.” He sat back, his cracked leather chair creaking loudly, and adjusted the orange Woodsmen hat he wore. “And even after spending all that money, I’d bet the house that you’ll lose. Could you to try to buy the land back?”

  There was no way. My dad had let go of it for peanuts, and even if I had that money, Gunnar would be sure to price it correctly, for much, much more. And that was if he’d even want to divide the property he had just purchased, and why would he? No matter what I’d said to him, I didn’t actually think he was dumb.

  Mr. Avery sh
ook his head. “Lots of billable hours on this one,” he said, and he looked almost regretful that he wasn’t going to soak me for them. “It’s a shame. Who did you say the new owner of the house is?”

  “I didn’t,” I answered shortly. I wasn’t going to bring Gunnar, a Woodsmen player, into this, because then it would probably become front-page news. I looked at the clock on the office wall, which had a picture of a liquor bottle, a large red arrow pointing to the number five, and a slogan in the middle that read, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!” It didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in Mr. Avery’s dedication to the serious pursuit of the law, but even so, I knew he was right. After all, I had written that legal brief, with a sinking feeling every time I typed another line of it on the library computer. I had been hoping for a miracle, but not really expecting one.

  I retrieved my papers from the lawyer’s desk and stood to go. “Thank you for your time,” I told him.

  “Sure, yeah.” He paused and tapped my name at the top of the legal brief. “Hallie Holliday,” Mr. Avery said suddenly. “Any relation to Harris?”

  “Oh, yes,” I answered. “Harris Holliday was my grandfather.”

  He broke into a smile. “We used to play cards together. I’m happy to help out his granddaughter.” He spread out his hands. “No charge for today!” he told me, which I already knew because I confirmed on the phone with his assistant that the consultation was free before I’d ever set foot in the office.

  “Thank you,” I told him anyway, and grabbed my bag. I had to hurry so I wouldn’t be late to the tutoring center, to give Marley her chance to learn nothing and to make me feel simultaneously pressured and useless.

  “Do you understand?” I asked her a while later, tapping the biology textbook. It was so beat up, it looked like it had gone a few rounds in the chaos of Gunnar’s house with the workmen there.

  “I totally get it.” She checked her phone. “I love algebra.”

  “That’s wonderful, but we’re doing bio. Put your phone away!” My voice was too loud, and she looked up quickly from whatever she was watching.

  “Wow, Heather. Are you feeling a little off today? That time of the cycle?”

  As a matter of fact, it was, and that was also none of her business. And I was suddenly very tired of her rude attitude and total lack of curiosity. “Don’t you want to learn this?” I asked her. “Not just so you can pass this class, which you’ll need to graduate, by the way—but don’t you want to know things, just because they’re interesting? Don’t you want to be an educated person?”

  Her face got stony, not with boredom this time, but with anger. “No, I don’t want to learn this. I don’t care if I graduate. And I don’t care if I’m an ‘educated person.’ Where the fuck is that going to get me?”

  Even though the binder had told me to stick to the ground rules I’d established at our first meeting, I ignored her breaking the one about the F word. “Education can get you anywhere,” I said earnestly. “To college, for example! You could get a scholarship and go live somewhere new and different.”

  “Who says I want something new and different? And who says I need a scholarship?” she asked coldly.

  “I needed one. And I went to college on it.”

  “And look where it got you,” Marley said. “Right back where you started, dressed in raggy shit, driving a crap car, and sitting in here every day with me. No way that you even have a man! Your life sucks, and I’m supposed to imitate you?” She laughed, loudly. The other kids in the room looked over at us but the tutors kept their eyes down now, out of sympathy or fear that they could be assigned to her next. “Yeah, right, like I’d listen to you. You’re not anyone I’d ever want to be,” she told me. She looked me in the eyes, daring.

  Her words lashed against me, because all of them were true, and after my meeting with the lawyer, I was pretty low. I stared at her across the table, willing myself not to cry—but then, as I looked into her triumphant face, I got mad, so angry that own my face turned red. I wasn’t in high school, and I wasn’t going to let another mean girl make me feel like crud.

  Even if she was right.

  “You know what?” I asked her. “I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t care if my life sucks, I don’t care if I have a man, I don’t care that I look like I crawled out from under a rock in these clothes! You’re going to understand goddamn tonicity if it kills me!”

  She stared at me and then smiled delightedly. “You swore at me. You broke your ground rules. You’re not supposed to do that.”

  “Screw the ground rules,” I snarled back. “Get your butt to work, now!”

  Which way was this going to go? We kept our eyes locked for what felt like an excruciating hour or so, but then, hers dropped to the book. “Fine!” she barked. “Fine, if you’re going to be a bitch!”

  “I am,” I informed her. And when the session was over, she had learned all about osmosis.

  I made my way into my boss Linda’s office after Marley had sprinted out when our time was up. “Hi, Hallie,” she greeted me. “I don’t see any teeth or tire marks on you, so I’m hoping things with Marley were all right today.”

  “Fine,” I answered, because in the end, they had been. “Can you tell me anything about her? Are you allowed? I’ve tried to talk to her about her life and she just shuts me down.”

  Linda frowned a little. “I don’t know everything, either,” she told me. “Her files from Children’s Protective Services are sealed, of course.”

  So, things were tough enough that Protective Services was involved with her and her family. “Maybe you could just tell me what you do know.”

  “I’ve met her mother once.” The look on Linda’s face said a lot. “That’s an unstable situation. And you’ve seen her reports from the school.”

  Yes, she either barely passed or flunked, every class except for gym. “You don’t know anything else? Boyfriend, friends, hobbies?” I hinted.

  Linda shrugged. “She doesn’t like to say very much, as you’ve probably noticed. And we haven’t done great with her here. She had two tutors before you, but the first moved for another job offer, and then Tristan went off to graduate school, so neither of them was with her for very long. Not long enough to really form a relationship. I think that’s what will make a difference for her.” She looked at me hopefully, but I was stuck on one fact.

  “Two tutors,” I repeated, and not six as Marley had told me when she’d implied that she’d driven them off. I was glad to hear that she hadn’t actually killed them and disposed of their bodies in acid, as I had been imagining; according to Linda, they were alive and well. They had survived Marley and I could, too.

  “I hope you’ll be here long enough to really help her, and not just with schoolwork,” Linda said baldly, giving up on the hopeful looks and just spitting it out. “She needs continuity and stability, and if she’s not getting that at home, I believe we can provide at least some of it here.”

  I tried to prevent myself from feeling guilty under Linda’s pointed stare. “That would be great,” I muttered, and got up quickly, and not mentioning my job search. After I left the learning center, I was heading directly to the library to send out more résumés, and I had broadened my search beyond Chicago. I was looking everywhere now, all across the country. I was bound to find something—anything—soon. I thought I’d be on my way out of Michigan before too much more time passed, but I was certain that Marley wouldn’t care. She hated me, and she could have continuity with the next tutor, the one who wouldn’t swear at her and tell her to get her butt to work to learn biology.

  On my way home from the library, I got a call from Gaby. “Hi, Hal, I’m sorry,” were the first words out of her mouth. I’d gotten a copy of the deed for myself and shown her, so she knew the extent of my real estate problems and had been looking into it a little for me. But her leading with “I’m sorry” made me steel myself.

  “Have you had any success figuring out the new value of my property
? Are there any comps?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s kind of a weird situation, to be so near the beach but not really have the access anymore—except that one little bit of it that’s left,” she said slowly. “And the shape of the lot now means that it would be almost impossible to put up a new house and have sufficient setbacks from the property lines. Your current one needs some work,” she said guardedly, which was real estate agent code for, “Your house is a POS.” I was aware of my cottage’s shortcomings. Gaby then gave me her valuation, a number so low that I moaned a little. “Let me work on it,” she told me, “but Hallie, what I said before about your house being real estate gold…”

  “I know,” I answered her. No more gold. But what was left was still mine, and I still wanted to keep it. And anyway, with the value that she had just given me, if I sold everything at this very moment, I’d be underwater on the mortgages and owe more than I got from the sale. I was, to put it mildly, screwed.

  But I had a plan to improve things somewhat. I would start at the roof, where I had discovered the unfortunate weak spots while trying to fix my broken TV antenna, and I would work my way down, slowly fixing the cottage so that it didn’t fall in around me and ratcheting up its value along the way. I had checked out a few books on home improvement from the library before I’d left there and now I sat on my back deck to read through them to learn about roofing. Since I’d never actually used a lot of tools before, I practiced a little by hammering some rusty nails that I found in the garage into the loose boards of the deck that I had tripped on a few times.

  That went ok, so my next stop was up. I stuck the hammer through the belt loop of my shorts, held the nails in my mouth, and skinned up the ladder with boards shoved into a backpack on my back.

  The view from up here was absolutely beautiful, making me wish that I could add on a second story. But given how my thumb was throbbing from where I had already hit it with the hammer, I would probably just have to stick to patching the roof. I put the nails in my back pocket and stood and admired the water for a while before I started to get very, very hot in the late-August sun. I looked down below at where I had left my straw hat lying on the deck, wishing it was on my head.