You will regret this. We are not leaving until we get what is ours.
It is Derek. He is too cowardly to use his own phone. But the cadence is his.
“What is ours,” not “what is yours.” To them, everything I achieve is community property available for harvest.
I do not reply.
I take a screenshot.
I forward it to Grant Halloway and to the email of the sheriff’s deputy who dismissed me yesterday.
I type a message to the deputy:
Received threat from suspect Derek Caldwell following the identity theft attempt this morning. Adding to the file. If anything happens to this property, you have the suspect on record.
I set the phone down.
It is ten o’clock.
I need to secure the perimeter.
The house is freezing, and the darkness is a liability.
I call an emergency electrician service two towns over. I tell them I have a total system failure and need a dispatch immediately. I tell them I will pay triple the holiday rate in cash.
The van arrives at noon.
The electrician is a burly man named Dave who looks at the massive house and then at me wrapped in blankets with confusion.
“Main breaker looks smashed,” Dave says after inspecting the box on the side of the house. “Someone took a hammer to the master switch. That’s not an accident, lady.”
“I know,” I say. “Can you bypass it?”
“I can replace it,” he says. “Have the parts in the truck. But it’ll cost you twelve hundred for the callout and the parts.”
“Do it,” I say. “And Dave, I have another job for you.”
I pull four boxes from the pile of supplies I bought days ago. They are high-definition security cameras, small and discreet.
“I want you to mount these,” I say. “But I don’t want them visible. I want one inside the vent in the foyer. I want one hidden in the corners of the porch. I want one facing the back terrace, tucked into the ivy. And I want them hardwired. No Wi-Fi that can be jammed.”
Dave looks at me. He looks at the smashed breaker box. He puts two and two together.
“Ex-husband?” he asks.
“Something like that,” I say.
He nods.
“I’ll hide ’em so deep a spider wouldn’t find ’em.”
While Dave works, I go back to the library.
I have stopped the financial bleeding. I have secured the evidence and I am fixing the defenses. But I still do not understand the desperation. Why now? Why this house? Why risk a felony for a basement?
Graham is greedy, but he is also risk-averse. He likes safe, easy money. This invasion is messy. It reeks of panic, and the panic is coming from Derek.
I log into a database that Hion subscribes to. It is a skip-tracing tool used for background checks on high-level corporate hires. It costs fifty dollars a search, and it pulls data from court records, lien filings and judgment dockets across all fifty states.
I type in DEREK CALDWELL.
The screen populates.
It is a sea of red flags.
Derek is not just broke. He is drowning.
There is a judgment against him in New York for forty thousand dollars in unpaid rent on a commercial loft. There is a lien on his car. There are three maxed-out credit cards currently in collections.
But then I find the smoking gun.
Six months ago, Derek registered a limited liability company called Caldwell Crypto Ventures. He took out a secured business loan from a private equity lender, a hard-money lender with a reputation for aggressive collections.
The loan amount is two hundred thousand dollars.
The collateral listed on the loan application is equipment and real estate assets.
I click on the details.
He hasn’t listed the manor. He couldn’t have. He doesn’t own it.
But the loan is due in full on January 1st. It is a balloon payment.
If he doesn’t pay, the interest rate triples and the penalties kick in.
Then I see the email correspondence attached to a lawsuit filed by one of his investors last month.
Derek promised them he was securing a state-of-the-art facility with “free hydroelectric power” to maximize mining efficiency.
He sold them a fantasy.
He took their money, bought the rigs and now he has nowhere to put them and no way to pay back the loan.
He needs the manor not just to save money on rent. He needs the address.
He needs to take photos of the servers running in a secure stone facility to send to his creditors to buy more time. He needs to show them he is operational.
If he can’t show them the facility by the New Year, they are going to come for him. And hard-money lenders don’t send letters. They send guys like the locksmith, but with baseball bats instead of drills.
Graham and Marilyn probably don’t know about the dangerous debt. Derek has likely told them he just needs a launchpad for his brilliant business.
They are protecting their genius son, unaware that he is dragging them into a criminal conspiracy.
I sit back in the chair. The heat is starting to return to the house. I can hear the radiators clanking and hissing as the boiler kicks back to life downstairs.
They are not just bullies. They are desperate. And desperate people make mistakes.
I look at the timeline I have written. Identity theft. Fraudulent lease. Utility sabotage. Harassment. And now loan fraud.
I could give all of this to the police. I could hand it to Grant and he could bury them in court for the next five years.
But that isn’t enough.
Marilyn wants to play the victim in the public square. She wants to tell the town of Glenn Haven that her daughter is a monster who left her family out in the cold. She wants to use the community’s pity as a weapon.
I look at the invitation list for the local historical society’s annual Christmas mixer. I found it on the desk when I moved in. The previous owner had been a member.
I’m not going to hide in the dark anymore.
I pick up my phone and call Grant.
“Is the power back on?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “And I know why they’re doing it. Derek owes two hundred grand to sharks. He needs the house to prove he’s solvent.”
Grant whistles.
“That explains the forgery. He’s cornered.”
“Grant,” I say. “I want to file the restraining order, but I don’t want it served by a process server in a cheap suit.”
“How do you want it done?” he asks.
“I want it served publicly,” I say. “Marilyn went on Facebook and told the world I was crazy. She invited the whole town to judge me. So I think the whole town deserves to know the truth.”
I pause, looking out the window at the snow-covered lawn.
“I’m going to host a party.”
“A party?” Grant asks, his voice skeptical. “You just bought the place. You have no furniture.”
“I have a house,” I say. “And I have a story. I’m going to invite the people who matter, the neighbors, the preservation board, the people Marilyn is trying to manipulate. And when they come back,” I say, because they will come back tonight, “I want an audience.”
I can hear Grant smiling through the phone.
“You’re not just fighting back, Clare. You’re setting a stage.”
“Exactly,” I say. “If they want a drama, I’ll give them a finale. But this time, I’m writing the script.”
The battlefield of small-town politics is often more vicious than a corporate boardroom, primarily because the stakes are not just money. They are history and aesthetics.
Glenn Haven is a town that values its appearance above its morality. It will tolerate a quiet scandal, but it will never tolerate an eyesore.
This is the leverage I need.
