Chapter 6 — THE NOTARY STAMP

The Thursday in July was July 18.

Two twenty-two in the afternoon.

Corinne is at the kitchen island with paper spread out in front of her, and Judith is beside her, and there is a third person standing on the far side of the island whose head is above the top of frame the whole time, because the camera is mounted high and pointed down and he is very tall.

Charcoal jacket.

They are there for thirty-one minutes.

The audio is mostly paper and the refrigerator compressor and a fragment of conversation every couple of minutes.

At 2:31:

"—and this one's the one that has to have both."

Judith's voice.

At 2:38, Corinne: "It doesn't look like his."

Judith: "It doesn't have to look like it. It has to be his."

At 2:44 there is a sound I had to play eleven times before I identified it.

It is a rubber stamp.

A notary stamp has a very particular sound. There is the click of the die, and then a small squeak as the barrel comes back up.

Judith Vance has been a commissioned notary public in Wake County since 2003. She notarizes things at her church, at the insurance office she works two days a week, and, apparently, at my kitchen island on a Thursday in July while I was in a crawlspace in Durham.

At 2:51, the tall man says the only thing the microphone gets cleanly from him all afternoon.

"Nobody's going to pull this unless somebody asks them to pull it."

They finish at 2:53.

Corinne walks the papers to the hall and comes back without them.

I watched that clip until eleven that night.

The next morning I drove to the Wake County Register of Deeds.

It is a beige room with a counter and four public terminals and a woman named Terri who has clearly explained the search interface nine thousand times and does it a ninth-thousand-and-first with real patience.

I typed in our address.

Our deed came up.

And under it, recorded July 24, six days after that Thursday: a Deed of Trust.

A second mortgage.

Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars.

Lender: a name I did not recognize, an LLC out of a suite number in Cary.

Borrowers: Daniel R. Whitaker and Corinne A. Whitaker.

I printed it.

It cost me three dollars and fifty cents.

I stood at that counter and looked at my own signature on a document I had never seen.

Here is what people who have not been through this do not understand.

It did not look wrong.

It looked like my signature the way a cover band sounds like the band. All the parts in the right order. The D that runs into the a. The way I never close the l. Somebody had practiced.

At the bottom of the page was the notary block.

Sworn and subscribed before me this 18th day of July.

Judith A. Vance, Notary Public, Wake County, North Carolina. Commission expires 04/2028.

She had certified that I appeared before her.

That I was personally known to her — which is true, I have been married to her daughter for nine years — and that I signed that document in her presence on July 18.

On July 18 I was in a crawlspace under a dental office on Hillandale Road in Durham with two other technicians and a work order that has my name on it and a timestamp for every photo I uploaded.

That is the thing about a forged notarization.

The forgery on the signature line is a fight. Handwriting experts, opinions, maybe a jury believes it and maybe it doesn't.

The notarization is not a fight.

The notarization is a sworn statement by a commissioned officer that a specific human being stood in front of her on a specific date.

It is either true or it is not.

And it takes about four minutes with a work order to prove which.

I went out to the truck and sat in the parking deck and did not start the engine for a while.

$412,000.

Our house is worth about $530,000 on a good day. We had roughly $180,000 of equity in it.

You cannot borrow four hundred and twelve thousand against a hundred and eighty.

Which meant either the appraisal was garbage, or the lender did not care, or the lender was not really a lender.

I looked up the LLC on the Secretary of State's site on my phone.

Registered agent: a registered-agent service, the kind you buy for ninety-nine dollars.

Manager: Priscilla A. Mercer.

I sat with that.

Grant Mercer's wife had loaned four hundred and twelve thousand dollars against my house.

Against a house whose owner had never signed anything.

That is not a loan.

Nobody makes a real loan against a forged deed of trust, because a forged deed of trust is worth nothing the second the actual owner shows up with a work order.

You do that for one reason.

You do it to create a piece of paper that has to be argued about.

You do it to put a cloud on a title so that whoever owns the house cannot sell it, cannot refinance it, and cannot move — until somebody agrees to something.

I drove home and sat in the driveway and looked at my own front door for a long time.

Then I went inside and called a lawyer.