Chapter 4 - The Discovery of the Arizona Paper
By six o'clock that evening, the heat had settled into the grass like grease.
David had taken Eliza down to the Dairy Queen on Highway 55 to get a vanilla cone with the chocolate dip that hardens into a shell—the kind where you have to eat the corners first before the ice cream leaks out through the bottom of the cake cone.
The driveway was empty.
The seafoam bicycle was still there. David had refused to touch it until the insurance adjuster came out on Monday morning. He had pulled two yellow plastic saw-horses from the tool shed and set them on either side of the wreckage, with a twelve-foot length of black-and-yellow hazard tape he had brought home from a substation job in Holly Springs tied between them.
The pink ribbons were still in the dirt.
I sat at the kitchen island with my laptop open and three banker's boxes of Arthur Bennett's papers stacked on the bar stools beside me.
These were the boxes my mother had told me to throw away during the estate sale. “Just old receipts, Catherine. Your father kept every electric bill from nineteen-seventy-two. It's just trash.”
I had not thrown them away.
I had put them in the dry crawlspace behind our water heater, beneath three rolls of fiberglass insulation, because my father had taught me that you never burn a surveyor's book until forty years after the pin is pulled.
In Box Two, beneath twenty-two years of property tax receipts from the Town of Garner and a bundle of canceled checks from the First Union National Bank, was a manila folder marked: OLD MILL RD — ENCUMBRANCES.
I opened it.
The paper inside was not North Carolina bond. It was an eight-page legal packet printed on that slick, heat-sensitive paper that comes out of high-volume commercial loan offices in the Southwest: DESERT SUN FINANCIAL SERVICES, LLC — SCOTTSDALE, AZ.
The date on the first page was November fourteenth, twenty-twenty-two.
Two years after my father's death.
The borrower of record was listed as: Diane Bennett (Life Tenant).
The co-borrower of record was listed as: Shayla Vance (Remainderman).
The principal balance was ninety-six thousand, four hundred and twenty dollars.
The interest rate was eleven point eight percent, variable, with an adjustable rate rider that kicked the floor up to fourteen percent after the twenty-fourth month.
And on page seven, in the signature block reserved for the remainder beneficiaries whose consent was required under North Carolina General Statutes Section 31A to encumber real property subject to a testamentary life estate, was my name.
Catherine Bennett.
The ink was black ballpoint—the cheap, smeary ink from a Bic medium-point pen that you buy in a ten-pack at the dollar store.
The C was too round.
My father had taught me to sign my name with a straight vertical stroke—a habit from forty years of drawing legal descriptions on vellum with an ink ruling pen. My C was a surveyor's mark; it had a flat top and a sharp forty-five-degree tail that dropped below the baseline like a plumb bob.
This C was a circle. It looked like an unbaked biscuit.
Beside it, stamped in purple indelible ink that had bled through the cheap wood-pulp paper into the notary jurat on the reverse side, was the official seal of:
KAYLA MARIE HIGGINS
NOTARY PUBLIC — STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA
MY COMMISSION EXPIRES: 04/12/2025
Kayla Higgins was Ryan Vance's twenty-two-year-old niece.
She had worked the drive-through window at the SECU branch for six months before being terminated for "irregularities in cash-drawer balancing," and currently worked the front desk at a tanning salon in the strip mall behind the Walmart in Garner.
I sat in the air-conditioned silence of our kitchen for seven minutes without breathing.
The refrigerator hummed its low, six-cycle vibration. Through the window over the sink, I could see the yellow hazard tape fluttering slightly in the evening draft that was finally coming off the Neuse River basin.
I picked up my phone and dialed the private cell number of Marcus Vance.
No relation to Ryan. Marcus was the senior partner at Vance, Miller & Calloway in downtown Raleigh—a man who had spent forty years defending title insurance underwriters against forged deeds and fraudulent home-equity liens from Currituck to Cherokee.
He answered on the third ring.
"Marcus," I said.
"Catherine. I'm looking at your brief on the Duke Power easement. It's clean. The prescriptive use argument has teeth."
"I'm not calling about Duke Power, Marcus," I said.
My voice had that flat, dead weight that comes over an actuary when the mortality table confirms the third heart attack.
"I need an emergency ex-parte notice of lis pendens filed in the Wake County Register of Deeds before nine-fifteen on Monday morning."
There was a five-second silence on the line. I could hear the rustle of heavy bond paper in his study in North Ridge.
"Against what parcel, Catherine?"
"Old Mill Road," I said. "The home place."
"That's your father's property. Your mother is the life tenant."
"My mother signed a ninety-six-thousand-dollar deed of trust with a predatory lender in Maricopa County two years ago," I said. "And my sister forged my signature on the remainder joinder with a notary stamp from a twenty-two-year-old girl who sells bronzing lotion at the strip mall."
Marcus let out a long, dry whistle through his teeth.
"How much of the draw is left?" he asked.
"None," I said, looking at the third page of the packet where the wire transfer routing was documented. "The proceeds were disbursed in two checks on November twenty-first. One for forty-four thousand to a marine dealership in Wilmington for a twenty-four-foot center-console fishing boat registered to Ryan Vance."
"And the rest?"
"A cashier's check to the Wake County Tax Collector for eighteen thousand dollars in back property taxes on Shayla's house," I said. "And thirty-four thousand dollars in cash, paid directly to an account at the SunTrust branch on Glenwood Avenue under the name Vance Media Solutions, LLC."
"What is Vance Media Solutions?"
"It's Shayla's Instagram business," I told him. "The one where she buys thirty-dollar sundresses from Shein, cuts the tags out with my mother's pinking shears, and sells them as 'curated coastal vintage' to sorority girls at NC State."
Marcus paused. I could hear the ice shifting in his scotch glass.
"Catherine," he said softly. "If you file that lis pendens with an affidavit of forgery against your own sister, the District Attorney in Wake County has no discretion under the nineteen-ninety-four statutes. Forgery of a deed of trust exceeding ten thousand dollars is a Class G felony. It carries a presumptive active sentence of eight to thirty-one months in the state women's facility in Raleigh."
"I know the sentencing grid, Marcus," I said.
"And your mother signed the initial application as the life tenant," he added. "She’s an accomplice to the procurement of a fraudulent instrument under Section fourteen-one-nineteen. She could be indicted as a co-conspirator."
I looked out the kitchen window.
David's truck was pulling back into the driveway.
Eliza was in the passenger seat, her small face pressed against the glass, her chin smeared with chocolate dip, holding a small paper cup containing the melted remains of her vanilla cone.
She saw the yellow hazard tape.
Her smile did not return. She pulled her head back from the glass, her small shoulders hitching upward as she reached for her father's hand on the gearshift.
"Marcus," I said into the phone.
May you like
"Yes, Catherine?"
"Have the runner at the courthouse door at eight-forty-five on Monday," I told him. "And tell the clerk to use the heavy purple stamp. The one they don't use unless the sheriff is standing in the hall."
