I called the notary because I wanted to hear her explain it before I accused her of anything, and when I gave her the recording information from the deed she went quiet. Then she said she remembered me, remembered my brother, and remembered the afternoon at his kitchen table exactly as I did. I told her I had signed one page believing I was helping him with a truck loan, and she said that was true as far as she knew, but the document had been presented to her as a trust transfer and I had signed as the person establishing it. I asked why she never told me what I was signing, and she said she assumed my brother had explained everything because he was the one who brought the paperwork and paid her fee. Then she said something that made me pull the deed back out: the trust had been created six days before I signed anything.
I asked her who the beneficiary was, and she said the document named my brother only as the person allowed to live in the house. The actual beneficiary was another name, one I recognized from somewhere but couldn’t place. She said the trust had instructions that if the property was ever sold or destroyed, the insurance proceeds were to go to that beneficiary. I told her the house had burned down in January and the claim was now worth one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. She said she knew, because the insurance investigator had contacted her too. Then she asked me whether I had ever received a copy of the trust. I said no. She told me there had been two copies: one went to the county, and the other had been given to my brother. I called him immediately, but he didn’t answer. When I went to his house, I found the kitchen table exactly as I remembered it, except there was a fresh envelope sitting where we’d signed the papers in 2015.
Inside was the copy of the trust. My signature was on the last page, but underneath it was a second signature that wasn’t mine. The name was the same beneficiary the notary had just described, and beside it was an address in Pulaski County. I called the insurance company and asked whether that name appeared anywhere on the claim. The investigator said yes — as the person who had reported the fire and claimed to have been the property’s trustee. I told him that was impossible because the trustee was the notary. He paused and said, “That’s what we thought too.” Then he told me they’d pulled the original trust from the county, and there was something different in their copy: a handwritten amendment dated three weeks after I signed, transferring the trustee’s authority to someone else. The handwriting was my brother’s. But the signature underneath it was the notary’s.
