“…Harold Voss, I want her to know that the deed of this house was never his to sign,” I read aloud, and my voice cracked on the last word.
Mr. Strauss, the retired attorney, waited while I held the letter of my father against my chest. The paper was thin as an onion skin and the handwriting slanted just the way I remembered, from every permission slip and birthday card of my childhood.
“Who was Harold Voss?” I asked.
“Your father partner,” said Mr. Strauss. “They owned a feed and seed store in Lacey County for twenty years. In 1991 Harold sold his half to your father and left town. Or so everyone was told.”
He opened a folder and showed me a stack of papers with a faded stamp. The sale of 1991 carried a signature of Harold, but the notary was a cousin of my ex husband, Randall Pruett, who was then a young clerk at the county office. My father had spotted something wrong years later and written it all down in the letter, then locked it away with his will.
“Randall forged that signature,” Mr. Strauss said quietly. “Harold never sold. He simply moved away after a quarrel, and Randall saw his chance. He took Harold half of a parcel of land behind your house. Today that parcel is worth more than the house itself, because a developer wants it for a road.”
That was what the contract was about. Randall and his new wife, Tiffany, did not want my house. They wanted the title of my house, which carried an old easement that crossed the parcel. Once I signed the so called correction papers, the easement would vanish, and the forged ownership of the parcel would become perfectly clean.
“And the three hundred and ten thousand?”
“A payment to you, disguised as a purchase,” he said. “A price low enough that you would feel lucky, and high enough that no one would ask questions.”
I thought of my mother in her kitchen, humming over a pot of beans, and of my father fixing the screen door on a Saturday. They had loved this house with their whole hearts. They would never have wanted it to be a prop in a lie.
I asked, “What happened to Harold?”
Mr. Strauss smiled for the first time. “That is the good news, Mrs. Whitaker. I made some calls this morning. Harold Voss is eighty one years old. He lives in Bend, Oregon, with a daughter and two cats. And he has been wondering for thirty four years why nobody answered his letters.”
I will never forget that phone call. A tired, kind voice said, “Hello?” and I said, “Mr. Voss, my name is Carol. My father was Walter Greer.” There was a long pause, and then he said, “Little Carol with the braids? I carried you on my shoulders at the county fair.”
Harold flew to our county two weeks later in a wool cap. He walked up the path of my childhood home and stood on the porch with his hand on the railing. “Your father painted this railing the year I left,” he said. “He promised me he would keep it nice.”
He gave a statement to the district attorney the next morning. The forged signature, the cousin notary and the old payments to Randall were all in the record. Randall was charged with forgery and conspiracy to defraud. Tiffany, who had known only what she was told, cooperated at once and left him.
The developer withdrew. The parcel went back where it belonged, split between Harold and me, which is exactly what my father had hoped for in his letter. I signed a new document that day, and this time I knew every word on it.
Harold sold his half to the county for a public garden. He asked only that it be named for the two of them, and the sign now reads Greer and Voss Park, with a little bench at the edge.
Randall tried once to call me from the county jail. I let it ring, and then I let it ring again, and then I turned the phone face down on the kitchen table and went out to water my mother roses. Some doors you do not need to slam. You simply stop opening them, and the quiet that follows is its own kind of answer.
Mr. Strauss refused every cent of payment. I sent him a pie anyway. He returned the dish with a note that said, “Your father would be proud, and so am I.”
I still live in the house. In the evenings I sit on the porch with a cup of tea and watch the children play in the park, and sometimes, when the wind is right, I could swear I hear two old men laughing over a feed sack.
