Chapter 2 - The Second Set of Keys
By Saturday morning, the locks on our house on Dellwood Drive had already been changed.
Patrice had advised me not to return there alone, but I needed clothes, and more importantly, I needed the old filing cabinet in the basement where Dale kept his physical ledger books. While Dale was presumably holed up at his downtown office trying to manage the impending fallout with his business partners and his bewildered girlfriend, I pulled my old Buick into the driveway.
The house looked entirely normal from the outside. The azalea bushes were trimmed, the lawn was neatly edged, and the morning sun glinted off the front windows. But the moment I turned my key in the front deadbolt and found it spinning loose, the illusion of our marriage completely dissolved.
He hadn't just changed the locks; he had erased me before the ink on the divorce petition was even dry.
Fortunately, Patrice had sent a locksmith with me. Within ten minutes, the front door clicked open, and I stepped into the foyer. The air inside smelled faintly of Dale’s cologne and stale coffee.
I walked straight past the living room—past the couch where we had watched countless Friday night movies—and headed down the basement stairs. The air grew cooler, smelling of damp concrete and cedar. I flicked on the overhead light, illuminating the metal desk where Dale managed his accounts.
The filing cabinet was unlocked. That was his first mistake; he had always been arrogant enough to assume no one would ever dare look through his private papers.
I opened the top drawer, pulling out tax returns, bank statements, and corporate filings. As I flipped through a stack of equipment leases from the past three years, something caught my eye—a handwritten sticky note attached to a statement from a local supply distributor.
Call Marcus regarding the warehouse lease on 4th Street.
I frowned. Dale didn't own a warehouse on 4th Street. His commercial roofing business operated out of a yard on industrial parkway.
I pulled out my phone and photographed the page, along with several other documents detailing transactions I had never heard of. But it wasn't until I reached the very back of the bottom drawer that I found something that made my breath catch.
It was a manila envelope labeled Personal - Confidential, sealed with red wax.
When I broke the seal and slid the contents out, I found a deed to a property I had never seen before—a residential home located in an upscale lakeside community two counties over. And the name on the secondary title wasn't Ashley.
It was registered under a woman named Diane Vance.
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And according to the acquisition date on the deed, Dale had purchased the lakeside house five years ago—right around the time he claimed his business was failing so badly that I needed to pick up a Saturday cleaning job to help pay for groceries.
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