Part 2
“I knew,” Dad said.
He didn’t try to inspect the page or ask me what I meant. He looked over my shoulder toward the driveway while he told us how Curtis had scanned his copy of my power of attorney and sent it to Wade Fenwick.
Fenwick had once worked as a real-estate paralegal. Now he prepared seller paperwork for private property transactions, operating alone and promising to keep deals out of the usual delays. He had returned the amendment and described it as a correction to authority Dad already held.
“He said the closing office could accept it if I confirmed you’d agreed,” Dad said.
“You confirmed something you knew hadn’t happened.”
“I thought we’d have the money back to you before you needed to come home.”
Bethany stood, bracing the folder against the cabinet so the pages wouldn’t slide. “Where was that money supposed to come from?”
Curtis spread his hands. “You bought through an attorney. You have an owner’s policy. They’ll sort out whatever’s wrong with the paperwork.”
“Go,” she said.
Dad turned toward her. “Let’s not make this worse before—”
“All three of you. I need to talk to my lender and the lawyer who took my money.” She opened the door wider, not to let us in, but to make the way out unmistakable. “You told me your daughter wanted this handled quietly. You let me move here.”
I slid my original document back into its sleeve. The false amendment remained with her.
“Make copies of everything,” I said. “Keep your packet. Don’t hand it over to either of them.”
Bethany looked directly at me. “How long have you had that deed?”
“Since Saturday. The alert came three days before that.”
“Did it identify the closing attorney?”
I felt Dad waiting behind me. Curtis had gone still.
“Yes.”
“And did you notify the office?”
I began with the file I hadn’t had, the information I was trying to assemble. Bethany waited through the first few words without moving, and I stopped.
“No. The legal assistance officer told me to contact them once I had the recording number. I wanted to get home and see Dad before he knew I was coming.”
She glanced at the cartons behind her. “Yesterday I gave back the keys to my apartment. My savings are in this house.”
“I should have called.”
“If you’d called, somebody might have stopped me from moving.”
“I know.”
Curtis kicked lightly at a loose piece of packing tape. “She didn’t put the house on the market, Bethany. We’re the ones who sold it.”
Bethany turned to him. “Then start by doing the one thing I’ve asked.”
Dad took his jacket off the rail. When he came alongside me, he reached down for my bag as automatically as he had when I came back from recruit training. I caught the strap first.
“You have somewhere to sleep?” he asked.
“I’ll find somewhere.”
“You don’t need to prove you can carry everything yourself.”
I pulled the bag against my leg. “Not today, Dad.”
Curtis called from his truck. Dad waited another moment, then followed him. They backed out with my toolbox still in the bed, the quilted pad lifting at one corner in the wind.
Bethany watched them leave. “I don’t know which part of any of this I can believe.”
“Get advice from someone none of us chose. Your policy has a claims number. Call that, and your lender. Hire your own attorney.”
“What about you?”
“I’m getting one too.”
We exchanged phone numbers. On the back of a baggage receipt I wrote the name and office number of the captain who had reviewed my document on Guam.
Then I looked at the bowl.
“That was my mother’s. Could I take it?”
Bethany reached past it and closed the folder. With her other hand she moved the bowl away from the edge of the cabinet.
“No. Not now.” Her voice caught once. “I need something to stay where I’ve put it.”
I picked up my bag. The driver was still at the curb, studying the navigation screen as if it had given him a difficult assignment.
By evening I had a motel room facing a service road and a phone charging on the bathroom counter. Captain Simone Burke called when her office on Guam opened for the morning. During our appointment there, she had pulled a legal pad out from under a stack of deployment forms and asked me for the original before she let me describe what I believed had happened.
She had also been plain about her limits. She could explain the document and help preserve my service records. She couldn’t litigate a Tennessee property case from a military legal office.
I told her about Bethany and the added page.
“Does she have both a mortgage and an owner’s title policy?” Burke asked.
“Yes.”
“Then she has people who need to be notified. Have you tried to put her out?”
“No. I left when she asked.”
“Keep it that way until civilian counsel has the file. Permission before entering. No retrieving belongings on your own. No taking her documents. And don’t promise an outcome you can’t control.”
I sat on the closed toilet lid and wrote those things on the motel stationery. There was relief in having tasks small enough to finish.
The attorney I reached from Burke’s referral list was Valerie Haines. She sounded as though she had already worked a full day and expected another one before sleep. I started with the forged page, but she interrupted.
“Dates, Ms. Bellamy. Let me build the calendar before we argue the case.”
She wanted the alert, the recorded deed, both versions of the authority document, and proof of where I’d been on the acknowledgment date. She didn’t tell me my house would be back by Monday.
“Recording doesn’t cure a false instrument,” she said. “But having the genuine original doesn’t make everything recorded after it disappear. We have a purchaser, a lender, an insurer, and possibly more than one person who committed fraud.”
She would put the closing attorney and title insurer on notice, seek to prevent another transfer, and make sure records were preserved. Any criminal referral would follow the evidence, not replace the work of clearing title.
“What should I ask Bethany for?”
“Nothing more until she has counsel. She’s protecting herself, and she should be.”
I spread a towel over the motel desk because the surface was sticky. Before midnight, it held printed pages, my laptop, and three charging cords. Bethany sent clear photographs of her buyer’s packet. Separately, after the closing lawyer verified my identity, Valerie obtained the seller’s disbursement instructions and forwarded them to me.
The purchase price came first. Two houses nearby had sold that spring for substantially more. Then I found Fenwick’s name, listed as the seller’s transaction coordinator, on the emails that had delivered the amendment and Dad’s certification.
He had urged the office to close quickly. His stated reason was that my unit’s return travel would soon make me unavailable. The lawyer handling the closing had relied on the notarized amendment and Dad’s assurance that I approved.
I opened the instructions governing the money. Dad had signed those too.
Most of the net proceeds had gone into Curtis’s marine-engine repair business and payments to two people I didn’t recognize. There were fees for Fenwick. Another transfer went to a credit union, with a loan number I had seen on envelopes at my father’s house.
I clicked the attached payoff demand. It described a loan secured by that house and a foreclosure deadline fewer than three weeks away…
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