Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Read Online Free PDF Page B

that something was wrong. A white card about fifteen inches square was nailed to the front door, and she could read the title while still on the sidewalk: “notice of eviction.” Not until they climbed the steps to the front stoop and read the fine print did they learn the house had been sold at a sheriff’s auction two weeks earlier.
    Wells was thankful it was just her and John. Callie and her daughter had moved out some months ago, taking an apartment closer to downtown and to Rafaella’s elementary school. It would have been bad for the little girl to come home in the middle of the afternoon and find the house sold—or even find the sheriff’s deputies still there, nailing up the notice and denying her entry.
    “Nice of them to tell the owners,” Praxis grumbled. He tore the card down, folded it, put it under his arm, and unlocked the door.
    “I’m sure it must be some kind of mistake,” she said. But when they got inside, Wells reached over and took the card from him. It was still a public document.
    “What?” he asked. “I’m throwing it away. It’s all just bureaucratic nonsense.”
    “That’s still an official notice. It belongs on somebody’s door—just not ours.”
    “You’re right, it’s my house. Bought and paid for. I don’t even have a mortgage, so they can’t foreclose on it.”
    That reminded Wells of something. “But do you own it, John?” she asked. “Think back a bit.”
    Two years earlier, when money was tight and they needed to post a performance bond on the War Memorial Opera House—one of their first big projects—Praxis had put the house on Balboa Street up as collateral. As Wells remembered it, the appraised value had just about covered the ten percent in real money that the engineering firm needed to raise in order to get the five-million-dollar bond.
    “Right, the opera house,” he said. “But we’re fine on that job. Ahead of schedule, in fact.”
    “I’ll look into it in the morning,” she said. “Maybe it was the bank that made a mistake. Now that can happen.”
    “But then … are we even allowed to stay here tonight?”
    “No one around to stop us, is there?”
    In the morning, it took three calls to the bank for Antigone Wells to discover that the performance bond had been quietly cancelled. With the opera house project more than ninety percent complete their client, the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, had not questioned the cancellation when they received notice of it some weeks earlier. The person who authorized the action had elected to withdraw the value of the bond in cash, in the form of a readily negotiable cashier’s check, and release title to the property held as collateral.
    “Who signed the authorization?” Wells asked.
    “Praxis Engineering’s vice president of marketing,” the bank official said. “I can’t quite make out the signature.”
    “Mariene Kunstler?” she suggested.
    “That could be it,” he agreed.
    After she got off the phone, Wells went in to see Callie and explained what she had discovered. “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is where Kunstler got the authority to do all this.”
    “We gave her power of attorney,” Callie said.
    “Why, for heaven sakes?” Wells asked.
    “Mariene needed to be able to sign for the company—contracts, joint ventures … performance bonds. It simplified the bidding process and let her make deals on the spot.”
    “A powerful tool to give someone who’s not even bright enough to know when she’s signing away the chairman’s house,” Wells observed.
    “She might not have known about that. The bond was before her time.”
    “She could have checked the address. It might have rung a bell.”
    “I think the deed showed only city block and lot number.”
    “Anyway, now we know where she got that half million.”
    “Yeah, pretty clever. Sneaking it out from under our noses.”
    “Except she got caught. Let’s call her in here so we can nail