The other two names were people I’d never heard of, and both titles had been signed within the same month as mine. The notary showed me the entries and said all three women had come in with the same person, but they’d used different addresses and different vehicles. I asked what the woman looked like. She said she couldn’t remember much except that she was older, had a southern accent, and she always carried a folder with photocopies of other people’s identification. I asked why she had notarized the documents if something seemed wrong. She said nothing seemed wrong at the time because the licenses were real.
I went back to the tag agency and asked them to pull the other two titles. Both vehicles were still registered to the names in the notary’s book, but both had been sold within a year. The clerk checked the transfer records and found something that made her stop. The same person had signed as the buyer on both. I asked for the name, and she read it to me. I recognized it immediately — it was the woman who had handled my paperwork at the nursing home in 2023. I told her that couldn’t be right because the woman had never met me there. The clerk looked at the original title again and said, “Ma’am, according to this, she didn’t buy your car. She bought it from you.”
I drove home and pulled every document I’d kept from 2019. There was one envelope I hadn’t opened in years. Inside was a photocopy of my driver’s license, the same version that appeared on the title, and a handwritten note in my husband’s handwriting. He’d been dead for months by then. The note had only one sentence: “If you ever find a car you don’t own, check who was driving the one you do.”
