Chapter 9 — HALDEN ROW
Mercer Ridge Development had four projects in the ground that fall.
Three of them were fine.
The fourth was called Halden Row.
I learned about it the way you learn about anything in this state, which is that somebody at a county office puts it on the internet and nobody ever looks at it.
Fifty-one townhomes on eleven acres off Old Poole Road. Site plan approved eighteen months earlier. Grading permit pulled. Stormwater permit pulled.
And then nothing.
The county inspection log for Halden Row had entries every week from March through November of the previous year, and then a gap.
Eleven months of gap.
There is a very small number of reasons a fifty-one-unit project stops moving after the grading is done, and every one of them is money.
I called a guy.
Everybody in the trades has a guy. Mine is a man named Duke who has poured footings for half of eastern Wake County and who once sat in my truck for two hours in an ice storm.
"Halden Row," I said.
Duke laughed for a while.
"What do you want to know?"
"Why it stopped."
"Because they can't pay for the sewer."
"They pulled the permit."
"Pulling a permit's free. Sewer's not." He spat. "That whole site's got to pump. There's no gravity fall to the main. They planned for gravity, got it approved for gravity, and then the survey came back and there's about nine feet of grade in the wrong direction."
"So they need a lift station."
"They need a lift station and about a quarter mile of force main and the county's going to want a bond on the whole thing."
"How much?"
"Total? Four and change."
I asked him to say the number.
"Four hundred grand, give or take. Could be four twenty-five."
Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
I sat in my truck in a Lowe's parking lot with the phone against my ear.
"Duke, how does a guy like Mercer come up with four hundred grand when his project's already stalled?"
"He doesn't. Bank won't touch him with a stalled site. His own paper's already pledged." Duke thought about it. "He'd need something clean. Something outside the company that nobody's got a lien on yet."
"Like a house."
"Like a house."
I want to lay out what I understood at that point, because I got the shape of it right and the reason wrong, and being wrong about the reason cost me another four months.
What I understood was this.
Grant Mercer needed four hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
He had my wife.
He used her to manufacture a second mortgage on my house — with her mother's stamp making it look real — and the LLC his wife managed was on the lender side so the money could move without a bank ever asking a question.
The transfers to 4471, the hundred and eighteen thousand out of our checking, my daughter's savings: those were something else. Those were Corinne feeding cash into the same hole for six months before the big paper existed.
The whole thing hangs together.
It is logical.
It is what I told Alma, and it is what she put in the civil complaint, and it is what I believed all the way through Christmas.
It was wrong.
Not the facts. The facts were right.
What I had wrong was that I thought the house was the point.