Chapter 16 — ROY VANCE, 1999

I had assumed Judith Vance had been a notary since 2003, because that is what the current commission said.

The Secretary of State's notary division keeps records going back further than that, and a public records request costs twelve dollars and takes nine days.

Judith A. Vance, first commissioned 1994.

Commission revoked, February 2000.

Recommissioned 2003 after a five-year bar and a reinstatement petition.

The revocation file was four pages.

In November 1999, Judith Vance notarized a quitclaim deed transferring a house on Rock Quarry Road from Roy A. Vance and Judith A. Vance, husband and wife, to Judith A. Vance, sole owner.

She notarized her own husband's signature.

Which a notary cannot do — you cannot notarize a document you are a party to, and you certainly cannot notarize the signature of a person who was not present.

Roy Vance was not present.

Roy Vance had, according to the complaint filed by his brother in January 2000, left North Carolina in September 1999 and had not been heard from since.

The house went to Judith.

The complaint said the signature was forged.

The investigation found that the notarization was improper on its face — self-interested party — and revoked her commission on that basis without ever reaching the question of the signature.

Nobody ever proved the forgery.

Roy Vance never came back to contest it.

I read those four pages in my truck outside the post office and then I read them again.

Corinne was nine years old in November 1999.

I called my mother-in-law's brother-in-law, a man named Curtis Vance who lives in Sanford and who I had met twice at weddings.

He was seventy-nine and he answered the phone himself and when I said my name he said, "Corinne's husband."

"Yes sir."

"I heard some things."

"Most of them are probably true."

He laughed, a dry little laugh.

"What do you want?"

"I want to know about your brother."

There was a long pause on that line, long enough that I checked the screen.

"You know," Curtis said, "I have waited twenty-six years for somebody in that family to ask me that."

Roy Vance was a heating and air man.

He drank, some, and by the account of a brother who loved him, not as much as the story later required him to have drunk.

In the summer of 1999 he told Curtis he thought Judith was moving money.

"Moving it where?"

"He didn't know. He knew the house payment was going out twice."

"Twice?"

"Once to the bank and once somewhere else." Curtis coughed. "Roy wasn't a smart man about paper. He knew engines. He was going to get a lawyer."

"Did he?"

"He made an appointment. Never went."

"Why not?"

"Because in September he called me from a motel in Kingsport, Tennessee, and told me Judith had told him if he pulled that thread, she'd tell the police he'd put his hands on Corinne."

I sat up straight.

"Had he?"

"No." Curtis said it fast and flat and completely without heat, the way a man says a thing he has said many times to people who did not believe him. "No. And I'll tell you how I know, which is that Corinne herself told me he hadn't, at her own wedding, when she was drunk, and she cried about it."

"She told you at my wedding."

"She did."

"What exactly did she say?"

Curtis took his time.

"She said, 'Mama made me say something about Daddy that wasn't true.' And then she said, 'I was nine.' And then her mother came over and put a hand on her shoulder and she stopped talking."

I remember that hand on that shoulder.

I have a photograph from that reception with Judith's hand on Corinne's shoulder and I had always thought it was a nice picture.

"Did Roy ever come back?"

"He died in 2006. Chattanooga. Heart." Curtis was quiet a moment. "He sent Corinne a birthday card every year and every one of them came back. I have four of them in a drawer. Return to sender, in Judith's hand."

I asked him if I could have them.

He mailed them the next day.