He asked whether the impression was raised or flat. I said flat — printed, purple, slightly crooked at the bottom edge. There was a pause on that line and then he said, in the voice of a man who has just found the thing he’s been looking for, that her seal had been an embosser, that she’d never in twenty-six years used an ink stamp, and that he knew that because he’d been the one to collect her equipment from her office in 2019.
He was an investigator with the Secretary of State. He’d handled the estate of every notary in that county for nine years and he still had her journal in an evidence room — the actual book, every entry she’d ever witnessed, ending in March 2019. He said the thing people never understand is that a forger has to invent a notary who can’t be checked, and there is no such notary, because the state keeps the books when they die.
I never called my brother. I have not spoken to him since February and I did not warn him and I’ve thought about that a great deal since. He was charged in October. His attorney withdrew the week before, which I gather is its own kind of statement. The 2022 will left him the house and the land and the accounts, and the 2011 will — the real one, filed, stamped with an embosser, sitting in a drawer at the courthouse the entire time — split everything three ways between him and me and our sister.
My sister wants to drop it. She calls every couple of weeks and asks whether there’s a version where he pays it back and we let it go, and I tell her the same thing every time, which is that it isn’t mine to drop anymore, it’s the state’s. The house is under seal. Nobody’s living in it. And I keep thinking about a woman on Route 9 in 2019 who has been dead six years and was still, somehow, the only witness in the room.
