My Family Tried to Evict Me from the Craftsman House My Grandparents Left Me
“Of course,” she said, turning the flat screen forty-five degrees so I could view the display. “It looks like the transfer went from you to a corporation called Oak Valley Holdings.”
The document on the screen was a standard two-page quitclaim deed, the text crisp and black against the digital background. My eyes skipped past the legal description of the Elm Street lot, landing directly on the signature lines at the bottom of the second page.
There was my name, Emily Carter, written in dark blue ink.
The letters were slanted, the loops of the ‘y’ and the ‘C’ drawn with a deliberate, slow precision that looked like my own writing from a distance, but the spacing was wrong. The signature was too large, occupying nearly the entire width of the line, and the crossing of the ‘t’ was too low.
“Is there a notary acknowledgment attached?” I asked, my voice sounding thin and unfamiliar to my own ears.
Martha scrolled to the second page, showing a circular blue notary stamp. “Yes, notarized by a person named Brenda Vance in Los Angeles County.”
