The clerk told me the property records showed my name as the owner, not a tenant. I laughed because I thought she was looking at the wrong address, but she read the parcel number to me and it was the exact house I had lived in for eleven years. She said the transfer had been recorded months earlier and that someone had filed documents placing the property in my name.
I asked who had filed them, and she said the paperwork had been submitted with a copy of my husband’s death certificate attached. I hadn’t signed anything, and I certainly hadn’t been told that the house had changed ownership. The clerk said there was one more document in the file that I needed to see, so I went to the county office the next morning and asked for a copy.
The document was a deed, and the date on it was two days after my husband’s funeral. The strange part was that the signature wasn’t mine, but it looked close enough that I could understand how someone might have accepted it. At the bottom was the name of a person I didn’t recognize, listed as the person who had transferred the property to me.
I called my landlord and told him what I’d found. For the first time since I’d lived there, he sounded genuinely frightened. He asked me whether the county had shown me the previous deed. I said no, and he told me not to request it over the phone or mention his name to anyone at the office. Then he said something that made me sit down: “Your husband didn’t rent that house from me. He bought it eleven years ago — and someone has been collecting your rent ever since.”
