The county clerk called me back two days later and said there was another agricultural lease attached to the same parcel. It had been filed in 2011, renewed twice, and covered the exact acreage my uncle had been reporting to us as his own operation. I asked who the tenant was. She gave me a company name I’d never heard of, then said, “That’s odd. The registered agent is your uncle.” I pulled the original deed and the numbers finally started making sense. For years he’d been telling us the land barely produced anything, but the county records showed commercial leases, equipment payments, and annual production filings that were several times larger than the checks he’d been sending the three of us.
I called my brother first because he was the other person on the deed, and he thought I was joking. He said Uncle Ray had always told us the farm was barely breaking even and that the yearly checks were whatever was left after expenses. I sent him the county documents. Ten minutes later he called back and said, “There’s something else you need to see.” He had found an old tax return in our mother’s papers showing rental income from the property that was almost eight times what we’d been told. Then I noticed the date on the second lease. It had been signed three months after our father died, when my uncle had become the only person handling the land. The signature on the lease wasn’t his name. It was my mother’s.
Except my mother had been in the hospital that entire month and had suffered a stroke two weeks before the date on the document. I took everything to the attorney handling the estate. He looked at the lease, then at the signature, and said, “Don’t confront him yet. We need the original.” The county had it. And when they pulled the archived copy, there was one detail my uncle had apparently forgotten to remove: the witness signature belonged to a man who had died in 2014. The attorney is requesting every lease, payment record, and tax filing going back to 2011. My uncle called last night and asked why I was suddenly “making things complicated.” I told him I wasn’t. “I’m just finally reading the paperwork you were hoping nobody under seventy would ever read.” He didn’t answer. Then he asked whether I had found the third lease. I hadn’t. So now I’m wondering what else is sitting in that county office.
