Two Women, One Con Man

Eighteen years ago Lindy signed the lake house over to her husband. He never filed the paperwork.

Which is how a forty-nine-year-old vet tech ends up in a lawyer’s front parlor in Bedford on a Tuesday afternoon, with clinic hair and a coffee stain shaped like Florida on her scrub top, sitting across from a small blonde woman in a linen blazer who has been on the phone since before Lindy came through the door.

“You’re the technician.”
“I’m sorry?”
“He said you worked with animals.”
The woman closes her folio. “He also said you were fifty-five, which either means he can’t count or he wanted me to feel better about something.”

Her name is Aster Vance. She runs an ad agency in Roanoke, she’s fifty-three, and she was the next Mrs. Overton. He moved into her apartment in July. Lindy’s decree is dated the following spring.

He took nine years off one of them and a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars off the other. He built that house on Lindy’s grandmother’s money and then told his next fiancée it came from his own.

And somewhere in a refinance file there’s a deed with Lindy’s name on it in handwriting that isn’t hers. She knows it the second she sees it, because the R has a loop she has never once used in her life.

Two women who should have nothing to say to each other spend a season building a case at a kitchen table in Bedford, with a half-beagle named Warrant asleep under it.

Neither of them planned the rest of it.
“I’m fifty-three. I have built one very good business and one catastrophically bad marriage, and I did both of them by being the most reasonable person in the room. I am done being reasonable about you.”

His name is Jeffrey. He’ll correct you.