Chapter 8: The Appraisal
The Meridian's folder had lived in the fire safe since 2011, the year we finished the restoration, and it had a heft to it that night like a family Bible. I made coffee I didn't drink and I spread the contents across the kitchen table in the order my father had taught me paperwork deserved: provenance first, then proof, then price.
Provenance. The build sheet from Vantage Motors, Coventry, stamped March 1968. The Meridian GT had been the marque's last hand-built car, a straight-six grand tourer made by men who signed the inside of the door panels in grease pencil, and the factory had completed two hundred and fourteen of them before the money ran out. My car's panel was signed by a fitter named E. Ashworth. I had written to his granddaughter once. She had sent back a photograph of him in his overalls, squinting, holding a spanner like a scepter.
Proof. Matching numbers, engine and chassis and gearbox, verified by the marque registry in 2009 and re-verified at the Amelia Island concours in 2016, where the car took second in class and my father โ seventy-nine, in a blazer he'd owned since the Carter administration โ had stood beside it accepting compliments with the stunned courtesy of a man being praised for his own face. Show records. Photographs in chronological order, which means photographs of a wreck becoming a car becoming, at the end, the thing it had always intended to be. My father bought it as a wreck in 1978 for eleven hundred dollars, off a man in Indiana who'd kept it under a tarp and a grudge, and he had driven it home on three cylinders with the other three, as he liked to say, in the trunk.
Price. The appraisal, eighteen months old, performed by a marque specialist who had flown in from Chicago and spent two days with a boroscope and a white glove. And behind it, the insurance policy โ collector coverage, agreed value, the kind where the number is not an argument after the fact but a contract before it. Two point three million dollars. My father had insisted on that appraisal, over my objections, because sentiment, he said, is not a figure, and someday somebody would need a figure. I read the number the way I had read it when I signed, as a formality, an absurdity, a tribute to appraisers' optimism. Now I read it as the exact size of the hole in my driveway.
I called the insurer's claims line and was handed, after two transfers, to Derek Lindt, who was the adjuster on the policy. Forty-five, Chicago, a voice trained flat by ten thousand other people's worst weeks. I gave him the policy number and the case number from Rapid Recovery, and I said, "The vehicle has been destroyed. Crushed, on Friday, at a salvage yard, under an HOA tow authorization I never received."
There is a silence professionals make when a claim changes species in their hands. It has a texture. I listened to Derek Lindt make it.
"Mr. Mercer," he said at last, "I need you to be very sure about the word destroyed."
"I stood in the yard this morning. The driver confirmed the crush and signed the intake. I've requested the processing certificate."
"Then this is no longer a theft-and-recovery file." I heard keys, and the particular speed of a man opening systems I couldn't see. "It's a total loss at agreed value, with subrogation. Derek Lindt, senior adjuster โ this call is being noted. I'll need the authorization chain: the HOA's tow order, their notice records, your correspondence file, the appraisal, the registry verification. Everything you have."
"I have everything," I said. "My father kept files the way other men keep grudges. Thoroughly, and forever."
"Then understand what I'm telling you, because it matters: with agreed value and this documentation, the company pays the two point three. And then the company becomes you, for purposes of recovery, with a legal department that does this for a living. Whoever signed that tow authorizationโ" he paused, a professional savoring the one sentence his job allows him โ "has had a very expensive week, whether they know it yet or not."
After we hung up I sat with the folder a long time. Two point three million dollars. Lorraine Vance had fined me forty dollars in May for a visible garden hose. She had stood on my sidewalk with her clipboard and watched a flatbed take a car worth more than every house on our street combined โ mine, hers, the Kaminskis', all of them standing in a row like teeth โ and she had processed it, for the crime of being under a cover in my own driveway while my roof was open to the sky.