Chapter 7 - The Depositions
The state of Oregon permits videotaped depositions upon oral examination under Rule 39 of the Oregon Rules of Civil Procedure.
Most lawyers conduct them in beige conference rooms with lukewarm carafes of water and a box of generic pastries.
Monica Hail conducted hers in the grand arbitration suite on the twenty-ninth floor of the Wells Fargo Center, where the floor-to-ceiling glass looked straight out across the Willamette River toward Mount Hood, and the room was cooled to sixty-two degrees.
Arthur Skelton sat across the table.
He was seventy, with that ruddy, windburned complexion that men of his class acquired from thirty years of weekend sailing at the Columbia River Yacht Club. He wore a three-piece tweed suit that cost more than my first car, and an expression of infinite, weary patience—the look of a man who had spent four decades cleaning up after the sons and wives of Portland’s merchant aristocracy.
Diane sat beside him.
She had chosen her wardrobe with exquisite care: a cream cashmere twinset, no jewelry except her platinum wedding band and the small pearl studs, and her hair pulled back into a simple, unadorned knot. She looked like a woman who spent her weekends reading to the blind and her weekdays weeping into her tea over her broken family.
My father sat on her right, staring down at his yellow legal pad, drawing small, neat geometric cubes in the margin with his gold Montblanc.
Evan had not come. He had sent a medical certificate from an urgent care clinic claiming an acute flare-up of lumbar radiculopathy.
“Let the record show,” the court reporter intoned, “we are taking the deposition of Diane Pierce in the matter of *Rachel Pierce v. Richard Pierce, Diane Pierce, and Evan Pierce*, Multnomah County Circuit Court, Case Number 24-CV-10892.”
Monica Hail didn't look up from her notes.
“State your name for the record.”
“Diane Vance Pierce.”
Her voice was soft, melodic, and carried that faint tremor of wounded dignity that had worked so well on the Lake Oswego school board.
“Mrs. Pierce,” Monica began, “on the evening of November twenty-fourth of this year, you hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at your residence on Iron Mountain Boulevard?”
“I did.”
“And the plaintiff, Rachel Pierce, was present?”
“She was.” Diane sighed—a tiny, delicate breath that fluttered the cashmere at her throat. “We were so glad she came. We’ve been trying to bring Rachel into the fold for so long.”
“Did an incident occur between you and Rachel in the kitchen at approximately eight-fifteen that evening?”
Diane looked at Skelton. Skelton gave her a slow, imperceptible nod.
“There was... an episode,” Diane said, her eyes dropping to her hands. “Rachel was very agitated. She had brought a pie—a lovely gesture, truly—but she seemed to believe we were being critical of it. She became quite aggressive in the dining room, using profanity in front of the younger children. She stormed into the kitchen. I followed her because I was concerned. I wanted to tell her that we loved her.”
“And what happened when you followed her?”
“She was hysterical,” Diane said, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. “She was throwing things into her bag. I reached out to touch her shoulder—just to comfort her—and she spun around and threw the pie against the floor. She screamed that we were all parasites. And then she fell. She simply lost her balance on the tile and fell into the mess she had made.”
“Did you strike her?”
“Never.” Diane looked up, her blue eyes wide, clear, and brimming with sudden, perfect tears. “I have never struck anyone in my life. I loved her mother. I have tried for fifteen years to be a mother to that girl. It has been the great heartbreak of my marriage that she has carried so much hatred for me.”
Across the table, my father’s hand stopped moving. His gold pen hovered over a cube.
Monica turned a page on her legal pad.
“Mrs. Pierce, you are under oath.”
“I am well aware of that,” Diane said, dabbing at the corner of her eye with a tissue she had kept tucked into her sleeve.
“You did not touch her?”
“I did not.”
“You did not call her an ungrateful bitch?”
“Good heavens, no. I don't use that kind of language.”
“You did not push the ceramic pie dish off the island?”
“The dish fell because Rachel knocked it off in her rage.”
Monica looked at Arthur Skelton.
“Counselor,” Monica said, her voice flat, “are you prepared to stipulate that the witness’s answers represent her final, unamended testimony on this point?”
Skelton smiled—that easy, patrician smile of a man who believed he was holding all four aces. “Miss Hail, my client has answered your question four times. She was attempting to console an emotionally disturbed young woman. If you have any questions that don't involve harassing a woman who spent her Thanksgiving cleaning up after your client, I suggest you ask them.”
Monica turned to Kevin.
“Plaintiff’s Exhibit Four for identification,” she said.
Kevin stood up, walked to the sideboard, and placed a portable flat-screen monitor on the mahogany table, directly in front of Diane and Skelton.
He plugged in an HDMI cable connected to his laptop.
Diane’s smile didn't vanish, but it stiffened—just around the edges of the mouth, the way plaster looks when the lath behind it begins to shift.
“What is this?” Skelton asked, leaning forward, his glasses sliding down his nose.
“This,” Monica said, “is the optical telemetry from the *Sub-Zero* refrigerator located in the kitchen of the Iron Mountain residence. Captured November twenty-fourth, eight-fourteen p.m.”
My father’s head came up.
His face was the color of a wet sidewalk.
“Monica,” he said, his voice cracking on the first syllable. “Wait.”
“Richard,” Skelton barked, turning to his client. “Be quiet.”
Kevin pressed the spacebar.
The conference room was filled with the sound of Diane’s voice—not the soft, wounded whisper she had used two minutes ago, but that razor-sharp, percussive hiss:
*“You think you’re so clever... You come into my home with your pathetic, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude...”*
On the screen, Diane’s arm reached out.
The shove.
The ceramic plate shattering.
The sound of the impact seemed three times louder in the high-ceilinged conference room than it had in the kitchen.
Then Diane leaned down, her face filling the screen.
*“Look at you. Always on your knees. Always making a mess.”*
The slap.
The crack of the hand against my bone.
Skelton didn't move. His hand remained resting on his legal pad, his fountain pen leaking a small, dark circle of blue ink into the yellow paper.
Diane sat like a woman who had been struck by lightning while looking into a mirror. Her mouth was slightly open, her chin raised, her hands frozen in the act of folding the tissue.
The video continued.
It showed her standing over me while I bled into the squash.
And then, in the background, it showed the pantry door opening.
It showed Eleanor.
And behind Eleanor, it showed my father.
The camera caught Richard Pierce’s face as he reached for his mother’s arm, pulled her back, and closed the door.
Kevin paused the video.
The conference room was so quiet that I could hear the faint, electrical hum of the fluorescent fixtures thirty floors above the street.
Monica Hail didn't look at Diane. She looked at Arthur Skelton.
“Counselor,” Monica said, her voice dropping into a register that was almost polite. “In Oregon, perjury in a proceeding of record is a Class C felony. Furthermore, under Rule 3.3 of our Rules of Professional Conduct, you have an affirmative duty of candor to the tribunal. You have five minutes to confer with your clients in the hall before I call the presiding judge to request an immediate evidentiary hearing on our motion for terminating sanctions.”
Skelton didn't look at Diane. He didn't look at my father.
He closed his leather portfolio with a dull, heavy slap.
“We will take a recess,” he said, his voice sounding as if he had swallowed gravel.
Diane didn't move.
She was staring at the monitor, where her own face was frozen in the middle of the strike—her nostrils flared, her mouth twisted into an ugly, triumphant snarl that fifty thousand dollars’ worth of cosmetic dentistry could not disguise.
“Richard,” she whispered.
My father didn't answer her.
He had stood up from his chair. He didn't look at Diane. He didn't look at Skelton.
He looked at me.
His eyes were wide, wet, and completely empty—the eyes of a man who had looked into the cellar and realized that the foundations of the house he had spent thirty years building had rotted down to water and black mold.
“Rachel,” he said.
I didn't answer him.
May you like
I picked up my tea mug, took a sip of the lukewarm peppermint, and looked out the window at the white peak of Mount Hood rising above the clouds, clean and cold and entirely out of his reach.
***
