The Honey Farm They Signed Away

The Deed That Was Never Signed

I told Grace about the eight-thousand-dollar offer and the talk of undue influence, and she filed our answer, and she filed to have the will admitted to probate with me as the sole devisee of the real estate, and she filed for a temporary order keeping everyone off the property until it was sorted out. And then she did the thing that broke the whole case open. She filed for discovery. She asked my mother, formally, under oath, to produce every document related to the farm and to my grandfather’s finances.

While we waited, something happened at my own office that I will remember until I die.

A quitclaim deed came across the counter to be recorded. It came in the mail with a recording fee and a cover letter from a title company two counties over, one nobody around here uses. My coworker Dana pulled it off the stack and started to index it and then she stopped and brought it over to my desk, because she knew whose family it was, and she had that look on her face.

The deed purported to transfer the eight acres and the house, my grandfather’s farm, from Walter Dyer to Kayla Dyer.

It was dated the previous November. Three months before he died.

It had my grandfather’s signature on it.

Except it did not. I had thirty years of my grandfather’s back-slanted printing in three boxes in my closet, and I had a hundred thousand entries of it on file in the very building I was standing in, and the name on that deed was a forward-leaning, looping, careful forgery by somebody who had studied his signature and gotten the shape right and the soul of it completely wrong. And the notary block was filled out by a notary whose commission, when I looked it up, which took me about four minutes because looking things up is my whole job, had expired the previous September.

Somebody had forged my dead grandfather’s signature on a deed, backdated it to before his death, had it notarized by a notary with a lapsed commission, and mailed it to my office to be recorded, because they assumed that whoever indexed it would just index it, the way a clerk indexes four hundred documents a week without reading the names.

They did not know the clerk would be me.

I did not record it. I took it to the Register, my boss, a careful old fellow named Halvorsen who had held the office for thirty years, and I laid it on his desk next to two of my grandfather’s real letters, and I did not say a word. He looked at the two signatures for a long time. Then he picked up the phone and called the county attorney.