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“Damn, that’s cold.” The others looked at their wives, but they pretended to be interested in something else.
“So no one is going to do anything?” I asked since, at this point, they know their sister better than anyone else.
“What can we do, Dad? If her husband is backing her plays, the only thing we can do is keep our heads down until she gets it out of her system.” Brian answered.
“Damn, and here we were, worried about Denny being a simp and not being able to take care of her the way we do. Now she’s brought in the big guns.”
“It’s not going to be that bad Trey.”
“Are you serious, Penny? Her twisted mind and his money are not a combination we want to fight. That’s all I’m saying.” They started bickering amongst each other while I was trying my best to convince myself that my kid was not capable of such things.
I still went ahead and complained about my missing car, which started a whole investigation.
It was only when they claimed that their cameras had malfunctioned for a period of time that I started to think that maybe the others were right and my daughter had used her husband’s money to somehow sabotage the rest of us.
I tried calling her, but my calls kept going to voicemail, and my texts weren’t being delivered. You’d think I was calling her to yell at her, but I know that that never worked in the past, and it wouldn’t now. I just wanted to know what else we had to look forward to.
At this point, I wasn’t mad; I figured the car would show up somewhere because who in their right mind would destroy an eighty-five-thousand-dollar car? It was not until we pulled up to my place and saw that it had been cordoned off that I started to change my mind about that. We all got out to see what the hell was going on, and my first thought was that someone had died.
There were people in hard hats milling around the house when we got there, and I started yelling at the guy who looked to be the one in charge when he asked who we were. “This is my house; what the hell are you people doing?”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but you can’t enter.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Your home has been condemned. Didn’t your wife tell you? You have a flea infestation that our exterminators claim there’s no help for.”
“A flea infestation? What the hell are you talking about? I only left here a few days ago, and there was nothing wrong with my place.”
“Apparently, your wife, a Mrs. Helen Archer, brought them into the house.”
“Why the hell would she do that?”
“I’m not sure, sir; you’d have to ask her that.”
“Where is she?”
“I have no idea. She was told not to vacate the premises until we returned to decontaminate her a few hours ago, but she wasn’t here when we returned. We have to accelerate demolition because the situation is only going to get worse the longer we leave it, and that could put the other homes in danger.”
My head was spinning in all different directions at once. “When did this happen?” He looked at some notes on his clipboard.
“It says here it was called in on Saturday.” Okay, so that has nothing to do with Alyssa. We didn’t tell her the truth until Sunday and on Saturday she was busy with the wedding.
But what the hell was Helen thinking? I pulled out my phone to call her to see what the hell was going on. I guess my phone got screwed up inflight or something because when I turned it on, there was nothing. No calls, no texts, nothing.
Which, now that I think about it isn’t normal. After she didn’t show up in Cabo, I was so relieved that I didn’t even think about calling her, and since she wasn’t harassing me, I figured she was sulking because I’d gone to the wedding ahead of her.
I didn’t want her there in the first place, which she knew, and I wasn’t too worried about her retaliating because I had already made up my mind to file for divorce as soon as we got back anyway, so nothing she did was going to make much difference to me at this point.
Had she somehow found out about my plans? That can’t be. I’d been very careful not to give myself away in any way. She doesn’t go into my room, so she wouldn’t have noticed that I’d been removing my stuff over the last year or so.
There were just a few suits and toiletries left in there anyway, and only my tools and my old classic Aston Martin in the garage, along with my golf clubs; that’s all that was left for me to take.
I’d planned on taking care of our finances sometime this week because that was the last thing needing doing before I filed. I didn’t want it to look like I was trying to scalp her in the divorce; I know that judges don’t look kindly on things like that, and though I hated the thought of giving her half my shit, it was well worth it to get away from her.
She would probably have won the house in the divorce, though, so why the hell would she do this? I looked for her number, which I didn’t know by heart and it wasn’t even in my contacts and didn’t show up anywhere.
I started to ask the boys if they knew it, but I knew that was a lost cause because why would they? I don’t think any of them ever had a conversation with her and I know for a fact that they never even said Hi to her after Alyssa went off to college.
