Set This House in Order deleted scenes

 

Andrew tells the police what really happened to Warren Lodge

I wanted to include a short bit in the epilogue about Andrew going to the Seattle police to report what had really happened to Warren Lodge. Given Andrew’s obsession with following rules, it seemed like something he would insist on doing, as a way of further demonstrating his responsibility and his fitness for running the house.

The problem here wasn’t the length of the passage, but rather that I couldn’t find a good place to put it. I tried shoehorning it into the description of Chief Bradley’s fate, but it didn’t really fit there (deleted lines highlighted in red):

The second letter that came this week was from Gordon Bradley, the now ex-police chief of Seven Lakes, Michigan. In case you are wondering, the letter was not forwarded to me by the Michigan State Department of Corrections. Despite his confession, Chief Bradley never served a day in jail for the murder of Horace Rollins. I can’t say I was totally surprised by that. A couple weeks after Penny and I first got back from Seven Lakes, I went to the Seattle Police—against the advice of Adam, my father, and Julie Sivik—and told them the truth about what had happened to Warren Lodge. The officers I spoke to seemed reluctant to even take a statement. It could be they thought I was a nut, but the impression I got was that, since Warren Lodge was an evil man, the exact details of his death were not all that important. I mean I assume if I’d told the police I’d pushed him in front of the van, they’d have taken more of an interest, but as soon as I made it clear that I’d never actually laid a hand on him—just startled him—they thanked me for coming in and told me not to worry about it.

Chief Bradley had laid a hand on the stepfather, of course, but I could see a similar logic being applied to his case: Horace Rollins was a bad man; Chief Bradley was a (mostly) good man who’d removed a serious threat to the community; therefore, he shouldn’t be punished too harshly. According to Jimmy Cahill, Chief Bradley had been allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault; he’d lost his job and had to do community service, but that was it. As for the threats he’d made against me and Penny, that was written off as temporary insanity and/or a huge misunderstanding, and he was never even charged for it.

Ultimately I decided that, as with the passage about the size of the geography, this simply wasn’t important enough to justify disrupting the narrative flow.

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