The other two names were both from the same town, and the notary said the woman had brought each of them in with a different title but the same identification. I asked if she remembered what she looked like, and she said she did because the woman had been nervous every time. She always came in alone, put the paperwork down, and waited while the notary copied the license. Then the woman would leave with the new title and someone else would come later to pick up the vehicle. I asked where the cars had gone, and she gave me two addresses.
I drove to the first one and found a small repair shop. The owner remembered the Impala immediately because he’d worked on it before it was towed. He said the woman who brought it in had told him it belonged to her mother. I showed him the title with my name on it, and he stared at it for a long time. Then he went into his office and came back with an old work order. The customer name was different, but the emergency contact was my husband’s old phone number. I hadn’t seen that number on a document since he died.
I called the sheriff and gave him everything I’d found. He asked me to come in and look through the records they’d collected from the towing company. There were seven abandoned vehicles connected to the same phone number. Five had titles signed with names that didn’t belong to the people who actually bought them. Then he placed one more document in front of me. It was a 2019 title transfer, and the seller’s name was mine. But the buyer’s name was the same woman who had signed the nursing-home paperwork three years later.
