The summons came addressed to my husband. He’d been dead eleven years. It wasn’t a mistake—jury pools get purged, and we filed everything, and I know because I filed it. The date of birth on it was his, and the address was the house we sold in 2016. I took it to the courthouse in person because I wanted to hand it to somebody and watch them look at it. The woman at the desk typed for a while and then suddenly stopped.
She said his name had been reactivated in the system in January, and reactivations required a source document. I asked what kind of document could possibly reactivate a dead man’s jury record. She wouldn’t answer at first, but then she said it had been submitted electronically by a county office. I asked which county, and she gave me the name of the county where our old house was located. That made no sense because we had moved years before my husband died. Then she printed the source record and slid it toward me without saying another word.
It was a voter registration form dated two months earlier. The name, date of birth, and old address all belonged to my husband, but the signature did not. I knew that signature better than anyone, and whoever had written it had copied it almost perfectly. I asked the woman whether anyone had used his name to vote, and she told me she couldn’t discuss election records with me. Then she pointed to one line near the bottom of the form. There was a phone number listed as the contact number, and I recognized the last four digits immediately.
It was the number of the landline we had disconnected when we sold the house. I left the courthouse and drove straight to the old neighborhood. The house looked completely different, but the mailbox was still the same one my husband had installed years ago. A man answered when I knocked, and when I told him why I was there, he became visibly uncomfortable. He said he’d only rented the house for three months and had found something strange in the basement when he moved in. Then he went inside and returned with a cardboard box. On top was a photograph of my husband, taken years after his death, standing in the basement of the house we sold.:::
