The trust company called me back the next morning. The woman I’d spoken to had pulled the file and found two notarized documents with my name on them. One was the trust agreement, and the other was a spousal consent form. I asked when I had supposedly signed them. She gave me a date in August. I knew exactly where I’d been that day because I’d spent the entire afternoon at my daughter’s house helping with the grandchildren. Then she told me the notary’s name. It was a woman I’d never met, but her office address was three miles from my mother-in-law’s house.
I confronted my husband before he could leave for Doris’s next appointment. He looked at the paperwork and immediately stopped pretending he didn’t know what I was talking about. He admitted his mother wanted him to control the trust because she was afraid the other children would fight over the house. I asked why my signature was on the consent form. He said the trust company had told him I needed to sign, and he “handled it.” I asked what that meant. He finally said he had taken an old copy of my driver’s license and some paperwork with my signature to the notary. I asked him whether he understood that I had never been there. He just said, “Mom needed it done.”
I called the trust company again and asked them to freeze any changes involving my name. Then the supervisor told me something that changed the entire situation. Doris hadn’t just transferred the house into a trust. She had also signed a separate document naming my husband as the person who would inherit everything if she died before the trust was distributed. But there was another beneficiary listed beneath him — a name I recognized immediately. It belonged to the woman who had been calling my husband every morning, the one he claimed was only helping with his mother’s appointments. I asked the supervisor why her name was there. She went silent and said, “Ma’am, I think you need to come in and see the original file.”
