A Two Thousand Dollar Nebraska Land Purchase Leads to a Federal Fraud Case
The yellow envelope from the county was damp on one corner when the delivery driver handed it over.
He did not turn off his engine, which had a skipped beat in the third cylinder that I could hear even through the closed cab.
“Sign on the bottom line,” the driver said, holding out a plastic stylus.
I signed my name, Arthur Graham, with the careful, heavy stroke of a man who spent thirty years holding a wrench.
I bought two hundred acres of land for two thousand dollars and thought I had slipped through some invisible crack.
Inside the manila packet, beneath the modern white receipt, lay a yellowed land deed from nineteen sixty-seven.
The old paper was thin as onion skin, showing the original surveyor marks for the eastern boundary.
“You the one who bought the old Miller section?” the driver asked, looking past my shoulder toward the northern ridge.
“I am,” I said, wiping my palms on my trousers to clear away the phantom grease of my old life.
“Watch yourself with the people in the stone house down the road,” he said, shifting his truck into gear. “They do not like newcomers on their border.”
“It is just raw dirt,” I said.
He let the clutch out without answering, leaving me alone in the yard with the cold wind rattling against my metal barn.
By eleven, the temperature had dropped five degrees, and the air smelled of damp prairie earth.
I walked the eastern line, checking the weathered cedar posts to see which ones would survive the winter.
Mr. Duca, the neighboring cattle farmer, walked his side of the wire with a pair of rusty fencing pliers in his gloved hand.
“You get your papers?” Duca called out, his voice dry and slow.
“Just this morning,” I said, leaning against a solid corner post.
“I got a letter yesterday,” Duca said, squinting toward the ridge. “Some outfit called Meadowbrook says our property values are tied to their road maintenance.”
A cold gust of wind came over the hill, and I felt a slight chill that had nothing to do with the weather.
