He Chose Mistress, I Chose Empire novel · Chapter 3 of 32
Chapter 3: Saturday Auction
Back behind the wheel, Haddie meets storage-auction buyer Jubal Quillen and his daughter, hires him to sell the mansion's contents, and learns Brantley tried to sell him paintings he swore under oath were already sold.
"Then he's lying," I said. "And he knows we can prove it."
"He knows something," Wilma said. "Men like that don't file a lie unless they think the paper's gone."
My lawyer called that afternoon.
She was a woman in her fifties who had handled my father's estate and still called him "your daddy" too.
She had read the whole petition, including his financial affidavit.
"He lists six oil paintings, bought during the marriage," she said. "He swears he sold them in 2025 and spent it on business costs."
I remembered them.
Six dark landscapes in gold frames that hung in his study for two years.
One morning they were gone. He said the market was good.
"Do we believe him?"
"Honey, I don't believe his watch tells time."
Saturday was the first Saturday of the month.
At Kitt, that means two things. Jobs go out at seven, and the lien auction starts at one.
At six forty-five, one of my drivers called in with the flu.
Wilma held out the keys to Truck Two without looking up from her clipboard.
"You remember how?"
"I remember how."
I hadn't sat behind that wheel in six years.
I pulled the seat forward and turned the key.
The engine caught, and something in my chest caught with it.
Talmadge wives don't drive trucks.
I took a three-bedroom from Green Hills to Franklin with two of my movers.
I backed the truck down a driveway so narrow the customer covered her eyes.
I didn't touch a mailbox.
The older of my two movers looked at me in the side mirror.
"Your daddy used to brag about that," he said. "Said you could back a twenty-six-footer into a coffee can."
"He said that about everybody."
"No, ma'am. Just you."
I had to look out my window for a mile.
By one o'clock, forty people were standing on the second floor of the warehouse.
Wilma ran the auction with a wooden gavel and a coffee can for deposits.
We never see inside a unit until the door goes up on sale day.
The first unit up was 207.
The door rolled up on a stained mattress, a broken treadmill, and about forty garbage bags.
A man in a quarter-zip and loafers bid fifty dollars right away.
"Sixty," said a voice behind me.
"Seventy-five," said the quarter-zip.
"Eighty."
I turned around.
He was tall and broad, in a flannel shirt with sawdust on the sleeves, a pencil behind one ear.
A little girl in pink rain boots stood on an overturned bucket next to him so she could see.
She was holding a clipboard of her own.
"Daddy," she whispered, loud enough for half the floor. "That's a bad unit."
"I know, bug."
"Then why are you bidding?"
"Because that fella's having so much fun."
The man in the quarter-zip went to two hundred.
The tall man bid two-ten.
The quarter-zip went to three hundred and fifty and looked around the room.
"Sold," Wilma said, and banged the gavel.
The tall man touched his hat to the winner.
"Congratulations. That treadmill's a classic."
The man in the quarter-zip stared into his new garbage bags and stopped smiling.
The little girl laughed so hard she nearly fell off her bucket.
I knew the tall man.
Not his name. His shape.
Ten years ago I was twenty-one, driving Truck Four, and he was the young guy in the back row at every auction.
We nodded across the lot once a month for four years. That was all.
"You used to drive the white Kenworth," he said. "Brake light out on the left side for about a year."
"It was on the right."
"It was on the left. I almost told you."
"Why didn't you?"
"You were scary."
"I'm still scary."
"Yeah," he said. "I see that."
His daughter looked up at me with great suspicion.
"Are you Miss Wilma's boss?"
"Technically."
"She said you emptied a whole mansion in forty minutes."
"Thirty-eight."
The girl turned to her father with her mouth open.
He held out a big hand with a fresh cut across one knuckle.
"Jubal Quillen. I buy units, fix up what's in them, and sell it out of a barn past Ashland City."
"Haddie Kitt."
His palm was rough and warm.
He let go of my hand a second too late. Or I did.
"I hear you've got a houseful of furniture on your first floor," he said.
"Fourteen paintings, a Steinway, and a dining table for twenty."
"Selling it?"
I hadn't decided until he asked.
"All of it," I said. "Except my father's desk."
"I'll run your sale. Ten percent, and I'll get you more than you think."
"Five."
"Eight, and I'll fix the gouge on your daddy's desk for free. I saw it coming in on the dolly."
"Seven, and you fix the desk."
He looked at his daughter.
She nodded solemnly and wrote something on her clipboard.
"Deal," he said.
Then his face changed.
He looked past me at the hallway where the old units ran toward 114.
"Can I tell you something? Since you're the boss."
"Go ahead."
"Your husband is Brantley Talmadge, right? The tower guy."
"For now."
He lowered his voice so his daughter couldn't hear.
"He called me last month. Offered me six oil paintings for cash. Landscapes, gold frames. No receipts."
The floor went very quiet under my boots.
"I asked where they were. He said out of storage, in a building he owned."
He tipped his head at the brick around us.
"I figured he meant this one."
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