Chapter 3 - The Deed and the Recording
Martin Cole had been a property and military law attorney for twenty-two years.
He had taken Jacob's call at eleven-thirty at night because Jacob's commanding officer had called him first, which was the kind of call attorneys in military law took regardless of the hour, and he had listened to the summary of events with the focused attention of someone mentally sorting information into categories as it arrived.
Forgery. Wire fraud. Fraudulent impersonation of a legal representative to a federal military installation. Unlawful property transfer. Potential elder financial abuse in reverse — Jacob being the protected party rather than the parent.
"I need the property deed," Martin said. "The original purchase documents, any estate documentation from the grandmother's bequest, and anything with your father's signature that postdates your deployment."
"The deed is in the house," Jacob said. "Which I no longer legally own."
"You own it," Martin said. "The fraudulent transfer doesn't hold. A forged signature on a property deed is not a legal instrument. The deed reverts to you the moment we can demonstrate the forgery, which given that you were deployed overseas at the time of signing should take approximately forty-eight hours.
"Can I get back into the house?"
"You can," Martin said. "It's your house. Your parents are trespassing."
Jacob looked at the wall.
"They won't move," he said. "My father is—"
"I'm aware of what your father is," Martin said. "I've dealt with men like your father before. They rely on the assumption that the other party lacks the resources or the information to fight them. We are going to remove both assumptions."
"How long?"
"If the Army releases the recording of your father's call," Martin said, "I can have a fraud referral to the federal prosecutor's office by Friday. The property deed runs parallel — that's civil, not criminal, but the timeline is similar." A pause. "Jacob. Your father committed federal crimes against a deployed military officer. The Army takes that seriously. This is not going to be a long fight. It is going to be a thorough one."
Jacob returned to Emily's room.
She was asleep in the chair beside Sophie's unit.
Sophie was breathing steadily.
The color had come back to her face.
Jacob sat down across from them and looked at his daughter for the first time without the emergency crowding everything else out. Four months old. He had missed the first four months. He had missed Emily coming home from the hospital, had missed Sophie's first bath, had missed every morning and every evening and every unremarkable Tuesday of a life he had been trying to get back to.
His parents had made the four months he missed worse than they had to be.
They had taken the money that would have made those months easier.
They had taken the house his grandmother had left him.
They had left his wife and four-month-old daughter on a porch in a blizzard.
And they had done all of it while he was too far away to know it was happening, which was the specific cruelty of it — the timing, the distance, the calculation that a man overseas could be managed if you controlled the information reaching him.
He picked up his phone.
He called his father.
Richard Hayes answered on the third ring with the unhurried confidence of a man who had decided he was not going to be in trouble.
"Jacob. I assume Emily has been filling your head with—"
"I spoke with Martin Cole tonight," Jacob said. "I also spoke with my commanding officer. The call you made to my unit in April was recorded."
Silence.
"Whatever Cole has told you—"
"The property deed has a forged signature," Jacob said. "You know that and I know that and Martin Cole knows that and by Friday the federal prosecutor's office will know that."
A longer silence.
"Jacob, if you would simply sit down and—"
"I want you and mother out of the house by eight o'clock tomorrow morning," Jacob said. "I want every document with my name on it left on the kitchen table. I want every account statement from the past eighteen months printed and left beside it."
"That house—"
"Is mine," Jacob said. "It was my grandmother's. She left it to me. You forged my name on a transfer document while I was overseas serving this country and you left my wife and my infant daughter in a blizzard."
He paused.
"Eight o'clock," he said. "Or Martin Cole files the fraud referral tonight instead of Friday."
He ended the call.
Emily was awake.
She had been awake for the last two minutes, watching him from the chair.
"Is it going to work?" she said.
"Yes," Jacob said.
"How do you know?"
"Because my father just stopped talking," Jacob said. "My father always has something to say. When he stops talking, he's calculating whether he can win."
"And?"
"He can't," Jacob said. "He knows he can't. He's been trying to decide that since April."
Emily looked at Sophie sleeping in the warming unit.
"What do we do tonight?"
Jacob looked at his daughter.
"Tonight," he said, "we stay here. Sophie needs the monitoring."
May you like
"And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," Jacob said, "we go home."
