“He asked me to help with the paperwork. That’s all it was.”
That’s what Wayne said. Word for word. And I remember standing in my kitchen holding the phone so hard my hand was cramping, just trying to figure out if I was misunderstanding something. Because Wayne has always been the type to have an explanation. A smooth one. The kind that almost makes sense if you don’t look too closely.
I should back up a little. The county recorder’s office sent a notice. A duplicate deed notice. Which, honestly, I didn’t even know was a thing they sent. I almost threw it away thinking it was junk mail because the envelope looked so plain. But something made me open it, and I stood at my kitchen counter reading it three times before anything actually registered. My dad’s farm. Eighty-six acres out on Route 9 that he has worked since before I was born. The land that still has the fence post he and my uncle put in together in 1987, the one that leans a little to the left and he always said he’d fix and never did. That land had been transferred. To Wayne. Last month.
Dad is 83. He was diagnosed with early-stage dementia about two years ago, but honestly it moved faster than the doctors expected. Some mornings he calls me by my mom’s name. She’s been gone for eleven years.
He forgets what season it is sometimes. He’ll ask me the same question four times in an hour and not realize he asked it at all. He’s not completely gone, I want to be clear about that. He has good days. But he is not a man who should be signing legal documents without someone sitting next to him explaining every single line. Everyone in the family knows that. Wayne knows that.
So when I called Wayne and he told me Dad had asked him to help with the property taxes, I asked him to explain that to me more. He said there was some kind of paperwork Dad wanted sorted out and that he had just driven out there and helped him get it done. He said it like he was describing helping someone carry groceries. Casual. A little bored even. I asked him what specific paperwork, and he said something about tax filings, transfer documents, the usual stuff. I said, “Wayne, I pulled the deed. It’s not a tax form.” He got quiet for a second and then said Dad had wanted to make sure things were “taken care of” before anything happened to him. That was the phrase he used. Taken care of.
I drove to the county recorder’s office the next morning. I don’t even fully remember the drive. I know I stopped for gas because I was on empty and I remember thinking that was such a stupid thing to be dealing with, stopping for gas, when my hands were shaking like that. When I got there I asked to see everything related to my father’s property, and the clerk, a woman probably around my age, pulled it up and then got a look on her face that I noticed immediately. Not pity exactly. More like she had been waiting for someone to come in and ask.
She said, “We actually flagged this one.”
I asked her what she meant by flagged it. She said that Wayne’s name had come up in property transfer filings three other times in recent months. Different properties, different elderly relatives, different counties nearby. She said the signatures on all of them matched a pattern that their office had started tracking. She was careful about how she said it, very measured, but I understood what she was telling me. This was not a one-time thing. This was not Wayne doing a favor for his confused old uncle. She told me the district attorney’s office had already been contacted. She said the combined value of the properties involved across all four transfers was something she started to read off to me, and I actually had to ask her to stop and repeat it because I genuinely did not process the number the first time she said it.
Wayne had already listed forty of those eighty-six acres for sale to a developer. There was a listing. Active. Forty acres for two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I looked at it on my phone in the parking lot of the recorder’s office and there it was. Dad’s back forty. The piece with the old pond on it, the one where we used to catch crawdads when we were kids, where Dad took me fishing probably a hundred times. Listed as a “development opportunity” with “excellent road access and flat terrain.”
I went to see Dad that afternoon. He was sitting at the kitchen table doing a word search, which he does every day, and he looked up and smiled at me and asked if I wanted coffee. I said sure. I sat down across from him and I just looked at him for a minute. I asked him if he remembered Wayne coming to visit recently, and he said oh yes, Wayne had come by, real nice of him. I asked if he remembered signing any papers and he thought about it and said he thought maybe there was something about taxes. He seemed relaxed about it. Unbothered. He trusts Wayne. We all did, more or less. Wayne has been at every Christmas, every birthday, every funeral. He held Dad’s hand at my mom’s burial.
That’s the part that keeps getting stuck in my head. Not even the money, though that’s obviously enormous. It’s that Wayne sat in that kitchen. Probably had coffee. Probably talked about the weather or the neighbor’s new tractor or whatever, and then slid a deed transfer in front of an 83-year-old man with dementia and told him it was a tax form. And Dad believed him. Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he?
I have an attorney now. We filed to have the transfer voided on the grounds of cognitive incapacity, and I have the medical records to back that up. Dad’s doctor was very clear in his notes about Dad’s state of mind and his inability to manage complex financial decisions without support. The attorney says the case is strong. That the fact that Wayne had already listed part of the property for sale actually helps us because it demonstrates intent. She said that word a couple of times. Intent. I keep turning it over.
The other three families, I don’t know them. I don’t know if they’ve figured out what happened yet. I don’t know if they got notices like I did or if they’re still in the dark. That bothers me more than I expected it to. I keep thinking about some other daughter somewhere opening a piece of mail and not knowing what she’s looking at, almost throwing it away.
Wayne hasn’t called me back since that first phone call. I’ve texted him twice.
The second time I told him I had spoken to an attorney and that the district attorney’s office was involved. He read it. That little read receipt showed up and then nothing. I don’t know what I expected him to say. I’m not sure I wanted him to say anything.
Dad asked me last week if Wayne was going to come by for the Fourth of July like he usually does. I said I wasn’t sure. Dad said he hoped so, that it was nice having the family together. I told him yeah, it was. I didn’t explain anything. I don’t know if I ever will, honestly. I’m not sure he’d be able to hold onto it, and I’m not sure making him understand what Wayne did would do anything except hurt him in a way he can’t do anything about.
The farm is still in legal limbo right now. The listing was taken down after my attorney sent a cease-and-desist. The forty acres is not sold. Not yet. We’re fighting to get the whole transfer voided. My attorney says we should know something in the next few weeks.
Some days I feel like we’re going to be okay. Like the evidence is clear and the system is going to work the way it’s supposed to and Dad is going to be able to stay on that land for whatever time he has left. Other days I read something about how slowly elder fraud cases move, or I look at the listing screenshot I saved on my phone, and I feel this thing I don’t have a clean word for. Not quite rage. More like a cold, tired kind of disbelief.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to Wayne. I genuinely don’t. Part of me doesn’t want to think about it because thinking about it means thinking about what he is, and he’s also the person who gave a toast at my wedding and taught my son to bait a hook. People are complicated, I know that. But some things aren’t that complicated. Some things are just what they are.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
End of story — Part 4 of 4
