Chapter 7 - The Dominoes in St. Helena
At 6:30 AM on Saturday, the quiet of the Wisconsin morning was shattered by an alert from my work email.
It wasn't Nolan.
It was an email from *G. Finch Construction & Development*, sent from Gregory Finch’s corporate account. Attached was a forward of a venomous email he had just dispatched to Sabine’s personal address, copying his corporate general counsel.
*Ms. Kellan,* Finch had written, *my family spent last night in two rooms at a highway motel after two armed sheriff’s deputies informed us that your lease was a criminal forgery. If our five thousand dollars is not returned via cashier's check by noon on Monday, my firm will be filing a formal complaint with the Illinois Attorney General’s Consumer Fraud Bureau and filing a civil suit for treble damages in Walworth County.*
I closed Finch’s email. The man was abrasive, but he was entirely within his legal rights.
At 7:15 AM, the platform’s Trust and Safety team responded to my midnight submission. The listing had been summarily deleted. The host account—registered under Sabine Kellan with a secondary contact listed as Nolan Price—had been frozen.
Better still, the support specialist provided an expedited disclosure of upcoming transactions under their emergency legal protocol: three separate parties had paid a total of $16,800 into a business account ending in 4109 at Chase Bank.
Kellan-Price Media LLC.
At 7:45 AM, fifteen minutes before my deadline, my cell phone began to ring.
It wasn't from any of the numbers I had blocked. The area code was 707—Napa County, California.
I answered, placing the call on speaker while setting my coffee mug on the kitchen island.
"Meredith?"
The voice was older, clipped, and tightly wound. It did not belong to my mother or Sabine.
"This is Meredith Kellan. Who is speaking?"
A sharp exhale hissed across the line. "Meredith, this is Martin Price. Nolan’s father."
I tilted my head, studying the steam rising from my cup. "Good morning, Mr. Price. I assume you are calling from St. Helena."
"We are calling from the lobby of a roadside Best Western forty miles outside the valley," Martin Price said, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and profound humiliation. "My wife, Eleanor, spent the night on a chair in an emergency room because her blood pressure spiked to two hundred after your mother caused a physical altercation at the gates of that vineyard estate."
"I am sorry for Mrs. Price’s health," I said evenly. "However, the Wrencrest Estate was private property rented exclusively under my name. When my mother uninvited me from my own booking to accommodate your family, she forfeited the legal right to cross that threshold."
"We had no idea!" Martin’s voice rose, cracking at the edges. "Nolan told us this was a family celebration hosted by his business partner and your parents! He told us the travel, the cottage, the entire week was arranged as an executive retreat! We spent four thousand dollars on nonrefundable first-class tickets from Philadelphia. Willa took unpaid leave from her firm!"
"Then your son lied to you," I replied without hesitation. "Just as he assisted my sister in running an illegal vacation rental out of my Wisconsin lake house."
"He... what?"
"Your son and my sister created an LLC to collect stolen rent from strangers by forging my name on real estate agreements," I said, keeping my cadence measured and flat. "Last night, Nolan sent an email to my corporate firm address demanding eleven thousand four hundred dollars to reimburse you, threatening to file a false ethics complaint against my law license if I didn't surrender my home to their tenants."
Total silence fell over the California line. I could hear the faint, muffled sound of a highway in the background, followed by a woman’s sharp, distressed gasp—Eleanor Price.
"He... Nolan put that in writing?" Martin whispered.
"I forwarded the complete evidentiary packet, including Nolan’s extortion email and the sheriff’s incident report, to Nolan and Sabine forty-five minutes ago," I said. "If you ask your son to open his inbox, you can read it yourself."
"Meredith, please," Martin said, his voice suddenly stripped of all its executive authority. "Martin Price & Associates is a boutique consulting firm in Pennsylvania. If my son is indicted for felony identity theft and commercial fraud... if our name is dragged into Cook County courts or a sheriff's blotter in Wisconsin..."
"Then you should have raised a son who respects the penal code," I said. "Nolan has until 8:00 AM to deliver the records of the remaining victims. If he doesn't, Walworth County will issue a warrant, and Cook County will follow."
"Wait—wait! Don't call the police again. Nolan! Get in here right now!"
The phone muffled abruptly as Martin lowered the receiver. Even through the hand over the microphone, I could hear the sudden, violent detonation of family decorum.
*“Did you forge her name? Did you send a legal threat from your company email, you idiot? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”*
*“Dad, listen to me, Sabine said her family owned the cottage—!”*
*“Shut up! Shut your mouth!”*
I tapped the screen and disconnected the call.
It was 7:52 AM.
May you like
The dominoes had fallen in Napa Valley. The Price family, who had been perfectly content to take my bedroom, drink my vintage reserves, and enjoy a fifty-thousand-dollar vacation at my expense, had just realized that their golden boy was hitched to an arsonist—and holding the matches himself.
***
