Chapter 13 - The Deposition
The following Tuesday morning, the civil lawsuit Marcus Vance had filed on behalf of my son and me for Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress and Child Endangerment convened for its initial sworn deposition.
Because the criminal investigations against Richard’s company had drained their liquid cash, Evelyn and Richard could no longer afford the high-priced, aggressive civil litigation teams they usually employed to bully opponents. They were represented by a stressed, overworked general practice attorney who looked like he had barely slept in three days.
We met in the formal deposition room of Marcus’s State Street law offices. I sat next to Marcus at the long mahogany table, wearing a dark gray business suit, my posture composed and unwavering. Across from us sat Evelyn and Richard. They looked unrecognizable from the arrogant couple who had lounged in my resort suite in Maine two weeks prior. Richard was pale and unshaven, staring fixedly at his legal pad, while Evelyn looked haggard, her designer makeup unable to hide the deep, dark circles beneath her eyes.
Marcus did not open with preliminary negotiations. He turned on the digital video recorder, administered the oath to my sister, and immediately projected a video file onto the large wall monitor behind us.
"Mrs. Montgomery," Marcus began, his voice cold and analytical. "For the record, we are viewing Exhibit A: closed-circuit security footage recovered from the fourth-floor corridor of the Lakeside Grand Resort, dated July 14th. Please direct your attention to the timestamp at the bottom right of the screen: 1:24 PM."
On the screen, we watched the door to Suite 412 close firmly, leaving five-year-old Toby standing alone on the carpet. We watched the digital timer accelerate, showing two hours and forty-eight minutes of Toby knocking on the wood, calling out for his mother, and eventually curling into a ball by the emergency stairwell, crying silently into his stuffed action figure.
Across the table, Evelyn turned her head away from the screen, closing her eyes as tears began to leak down her cheeks.
"Mrs. Montgomery, please look at the screen," Marcus instructed firmly. "Do you recognize the child sitting on the floor by the stairwell?"
"Yes," Evelyn whispered into the microphone, her voice barely audible. "It’s... it’s Toby."
"Speak clearly for the court reporter, please," Marcus commanded. "At 3:15 PM on the video, the door to Suite 412 opens approximately four inches. You appear in the doorway. Did you observe your five-year-old nephew sitting barefoot in the hallway, exhibiting visible distress and crying?"
Evelyn swallowed hard, looking at her defense attorney, who simply gave her a grim, helpless nod to answer truthfully under oath. "Yes. I saw him."
"And did you invite the child into the air-conditioned suite, offer him water, or attempt to contact resort security or his mother to inform them of his location?"
"No," Evelyn sobbed, her hands shaking violently on the table. "I... I told him to go wait by the elevators. I thought Nora was coming right back! I didn't know she was stuck at the front desk!"
Marcus leaned forward across the mahogany table, fixing my sister with a stare of absolute judicial contempt. "You are under oath, Mrs. Montgomery. Let us play the enhanced audio file recovered from the corridor security microphone at 3:15 PM."
Marcus tapped his keyboard. Through the conference room speakers, Evelyn’s voice rang out with chilling, crystal-clear clarity: “Stop banging on the door, Toby! This suite is reserved for actual family. Go sit somewhere else!”
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The silence in the deposition room was absolute. Richard closed his eyes, burying his face in his hands as his wife’s cruelty was permanently etched into the legal record.
"You told a five-year-old child whose father had died that he was not actual family," Marcus stated, his voice dropping into a lethal, quiet register. "You left him barefoot in a public hotel corridor for three hours while you ordered room service and charged movies to his mother's credit card. And now, Mrs. Montgomery, you are going to pay for every single minute he sat on that floor."
