I sat in my kitchen with the quitclaim deed spread on the table under the lamp, and I read it the way I had read ten thousand of them in thirty one years in the recorder office in Huntington County. The grantor line had my name. The signature was a very good copy, I will give it that, with the loop on the P that I have made since the third grade. But it was the notary block that stopped my breath. Loretta Spurlock, my best friend of fifty years. Her stamp, her signature, her commission number. And the commission number was wrong.
I knew it was wrong because I had typed it myself, in 2021, when Loretta renewed her commission at my kitchen table and I helped her fill in the form. The number she used on my deed was the number from her old commission, the one that expired in 2019. A deputy recorder checks it automatically. A clerk who knew what she was doing would have rejected the deed on sight. But my replacement, a nice girl named Kayla, had been out sick the week of December twentieth, and the deed had been recorded by a temp. Loretta had done it on purpose.
I put my hand on the telephone. Then I took it off again, because there was a knock at the back door, the soft double knock I had heard for fifty years. Loretta stood on the step in her good wool coat with a casserole dish, and she was crying before I opened the door. “Patsy, I could not tell you,” she said. “Diane has been at my house since October. She knew about Bobby. She said she would tell the board of my church what I did with the funds. I did not know what else to do.” She held out the dish like an apology.
A forged deed and a wrong commission number gave one former recorder the length of a single dinner to bring her daughter back to the truth in Huntington.
I gave my terms in my own kitchen, over the casserole, which was tuna. Loretta would tell me everything she knew. I would call my other children, Mike and Lori, and my daughter in law Karen, and I would tell them to come to Huntington by dinner time on the thirtieth. And Diane would be invited too, with Heritage Pointe paper in her hand, so that we might have a family conversation in the house she believed was already hers. Loretta wiped her face with a paper towel. “Patsy,” she said, “I am so sorry.” I said she had already written me a very long letter, in the notary block.
They came at six. Mike and Lori brought the grandchildren, and Karen came with a pie, and Diane arrived last, in her good coat, with a folder under her arm and the cool smile she had worn since she was fourteen. She sat at the head of the table, where her father used to sit. She said it was for my own good. She said I was seventy nine, and alone, and that the house had too many stairs. “Mom, you have been giving money away to everyone but me,” she said. “I am the one who is here.” Loretta spoke up in the corner. “Diane, you made her sign nothing. You forged it.”
I laid the quitclaim deed on the table, and I pointed to the number in the notary block. “Diane,” I said, “this deed is void. Loretta put the wrong commission number on it, on purpose, so that it would be thrown out. She did it because she could not tell me, and she could not refuse you, and she wanted me to find it.” Diane stared. Then she snatched the Heritage Pointe contract and the deed from the table, meaning to dash into the living room and put them in her car, and she bolted through the kitchen door in her high heeled boots.
She got as far as the front hall. Mike, my oldest, who is a large man and a gentle one, stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, and Lori came up behind him in her scrub top with the baby on her hip. Karen, my daughter in law, who lost her boy Jimmy in 2014 and never once complained, took her place at the other side of the door. Nobody said anything. Diane turned around in the hall and looked at us all. “It was only a house,” she said. Karen answered, softly, “Diane, it was your mother.”
The prosecutor was gentler than I would have been. The deed was voided and the recording was struck from the record. Diane agreed to a plan of restitution, and to counseling, and to a restraining order that I asked to be lifted in the spring. Loretta lost her notary commission, voluntarily, and she took a job at the library, where she reads to children on Thursdays. I forgave her over a cup of tea, and then I forgave her again at church, and a third time on the telephone, and by Easter we had stopped counting. A friendship of fifty years is a long road with some bad curves.
In the name of Dale, who passed in 2021, I started the Dale Holtz Fund. It pays for deed searches, title alerts and a year of property monitoring for older homeowners, in Huntington, Wells and Wabash counties. In the first year we signed up two hundred sixty one homeowners. One woman in Roanoke, eighty six, called to say that the alert on her telephone had gone off on a Tuesday, and that she had called the recorder office, and that someone on the other end had actually answered. It was Kayla. She had been trained, I like to think, by a very good teacher.
At Christmas, Diane came to the door with a Heritage Pointe brochure and a Christmas card. I thought for a moment I would not open it. Inside, in her cramped hand, she had written, I am sorry, Mom. Under it was a ten dollar Olive Garden card. I laughed until I had to sit down. I called her and said I would like to go to dinner, just the two of us, and that she could buy. We ordered the breadsticks. We did not say much. At the end she said, “Mom, the soup is on me.” I said, “Honey, it always was.”
