The name underneath was a woman I’d never heard of. I asked the title agent who she was, and she said the woman had been authorized by the seller to access the property. I told her I was the seller and had never authorized anybody. She pulled the file again and found a copy of my driver’s license attached to the release. It was the same copy I had given them at closing. I asked when the key had been picked up. Eleven days before the sale. I was out of town that entire week, and my mother’s house had already been emptied. The agent said the woman had told them she needed access because she was “checking something before the closing.”
I drove to the house and knocked because I still had the buyer’s number from the closing paperwork. The new owner let me walk through, and everything looked exactly as it had when I handed over the keys. Then he said the water-heater claim was the first strange thing he’d noticed. The repair company had come out three weeks after closing and said someone had already replaced a valve and left a receipt inside the utility closet. I asked to see it. The receipt was dated nine days before closing, and the customer name was mine. The work order also listed an emergency contact — the same woman whose name was on the early key release. I called the number, and she answered on the second ring.
She knew my mother’s name. She knew the house had a crawlspace. And before I could ask who she was, she said, “You finally found the fourth key.” I told her there had only ever been five, and all five were accounted for. She laughed and said that wasn’t what she meant. Then she told me my mother had given her a key in 1996 and had made her promise never to use it while she was alive. My mother died in 2020. I asked why she’d entered the house before I sold it. There was a long silence, and then she said, “Because your mother told me if you ever sold that house, I was supposed to take the box from the attic.”
