My Wife Let a Stranger In Three Times; I Locked Her Out with One Fingerprint

Chapter 3 The Seabright Card

The Seabright Motor Lodge is a low building off the coastal highway, twelve rooms and a parking lot with a broken light. I have passed it a hundred times on my way up the coast for cases. I never thought I would walk into it on my own business.

I went the next afternoon. I did not tell Elena. I told the front desk clerk I was looking for a contractor named Dean who had done work for me and left a card in my truck, and I described the truck and the beard. The clerk was a young guy with a silver chain and no interest in anything, and he told me there was a Dean who stayed there sometimes, room four, but he was not checked in that week.

"Does he stay often?" I asked.

"Depends. Weekends mostly. Sometimes weekdays. He pays cash."

"Does he stay with anyone?"

The clerk looked at me then, and I saw him decide not to care. "Sometimes."

I thanked him and left. I sat in the truck and looked at room four. It had a window facing the lot, and the curtains were open, and inside I could see a bed and a lamp and nothing else. I did not go in. I did not need to be a man who breaks into a motel room. I needed to be a man who knew what he was dealing with.

So Dean was a man who paid cash and stayed in a motel twenty minutes from my house, and my wife had his key card in our guest room. That told me two things. One, this was not a one-time mistake. Two, he had a place of his own somewhere, and the motel was a convenience, which meant he did not want to take her to his home.

I called my friend Marcus, who runs a small security firm in the next county. Marcus and I worked a case together six years ago, and he owes me a favor. I did not tell him everything. I told him I needed a background on a contractor named Dean with a beard and a truck, and I gave him the description and the receipt.

"Family thing?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

He did not push. That is why I called him.

Two days later he sent me a file. Dean Mercer, forty-two, licensed contractor, address in a town forty minutes inland. One prior for assault, dropped. One for a bad check, paid. Divorced five years ago. No children.

And on the last page, a photograph from a job site. A tall man with a dark beard, standing next to a truck, holding a coffee cup. He was not handsome in the way men are handsome in movies. He was the kind of man who looks like he could put a roof on your house and then drink with you about it.

I looked at that photograph for a long time. Then I looked at the address, and I made a decision.

That night Elena was out. She said she was going to her sister's, and I said fine. I waited an hour, then I drove inland to Dean Mercer's town. I did not go to his address. I went to the bar on the main street, the one with the enamel lighters on the counter, and I sat down and ordered a beer and asked the bartender if Dean was in.

"Not tonight," the bartender said. "He's usually here Thursdays."

"I'll come back," I said.

I stayed for one beer. I watched the door. I learned the room. Then I drove home, and when I got there, Elena was already back, and she was on the couch with her laptop, and she did not look up when I came in.

"Good night with your sister?" I asked.

"Fine," she said.

I sat down across from her. "I spoke to a lawyer today," I lied.

That got her attention. She closed the laptop. "What?"

"About a separation."

She looked at me, and I watched her run it through her head. I do not think she expected me to move this fast. I think she expected the fight, the tears, the week of silence, the part where I slept in the guest room and she told her mother I was impossible. That is how it goes with men like me. We are easy to steer when we are hurt.

I was hurt. But I was not steerable.

"You can't just decide that," she said.

"I can decide anything I want," I said. "I am asking you for one thing. Tell me the truth about Dean, all of it, and I will handle this quietly. No lawyers, no scene, no one in town has to know. We can split the house and the accounts and I will be gone by the end of the month."

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she said, "You are bluffing."

I stood up. "I don't bluff," I said. "I document."

I went upstairs and closed the study door, and I sat at my desk with the file open on the screen in front of me, and I thought about what I had just done. It was a small move, and an honest one, and it had told me what I needed to know. She had not asked me to stay. She had not said she loved me. She had not even asked what lawyer.

She had asked if I was bluffing, because if I was not, she had a problem, and the problem was not me leaving. The problem was what I might leave with.

I opened the scanner log again and looked at the print. Then I opened the county property records and started to work.

Because if a man is going to take a marriage apart, he should know exactly what is holding it together, and why someone would want it to stay standing.