The Stranger On My Credit File

Chapter 4 The Notary's Second Signature

Adele Chen worked faster than she promised, which is the only reason I am not still paying for Daniel Voss's truck.

Two days later she sent me a folder with four documents in it. The first was the withdrawn lien. The second was a notarization log from Gerald Voss's office, obtained through a public records request because notary logs are public in that county and Gerald Voss had been sloppy about it for years. The third was a copy of the power of attorney I had signed at twenty-four, which I had never seen since, and which did not include any authority to file marriage certificates.

The fourth document was the one that mattered.

It was a notarization certificate for the marriage of Eleanor Harrow and Daniel Voss, and in the box for the absent party's identification, Gerald Voss had written, in his own hand, the details of a driver's license.

The license number was my father's. Not mine.

My father had been dead six years when the certificate was signed.

"This is enough," Adele said on the phone. "This is a notary certifying an ID of a deceased person. He has no defense. It's not ambiguity. It's not procedure. It's a crime, and it's in his handwriting."

"Will it hold up?"

"In a hearing? Yes. In a courtroom? Yes, if it gets there." She paused. "Which is why we file first and let him react."

I sat with that for a while. There is no quiet in my apartment in the mornings, because the river traffic starts at five and the old building squeezes every sound through the fire escape. I sat in it anyway.

"Adele, if I file the death record without notifying him, I'm the fraud. If I file a correction petition, he gets thirty days to move the money."

"Correct."

"So the only way to do this defensibly is to do it in the window between them. File the death record, survive the audit, and let the notary's handwriting do the rest."

"That's what I would do."

"And if the audit fails?"

"Then you have committed fraud, you lose your job, and Daniel Voss gets a very sympathetic story about a woman who tried to erase her husband." She said it flatly, without cruelty. "I want you to hear the price before you choose it."

I heard the price. I chose it anyway.

The form was called a Request for Correction of Vital Records: Decedent Status. It exists so that families can close out the records of people who died without paperwork, usually the very old, the very isolated, the ones whose deaths nobody reported. It requires three things.

One: a statement of fact, sworn under penalty of perjury.

Two: supporting documentation.

Three: a fee of forty dollars.

I filled it out at my kitchen table on a Tuesday morning, and I wrote, in the space for the statement of fact, the truest sentence I have ever put on a government form.

Daniel Voss is not my spouse. He never was. The record causing this filing was created by fraud, and the man who created it will not exist to dispute it while it is under review.

That last clause was doing a lot of work. I knew that. Adele knew that. The clerk who received it would not read it that way, because clerks read for keywords, and the keywords were correct.

Daniel Voss. Not my spouse. Fraud. Under review.

I sent it in with a certified copy of the notarization certificate, the withdrawn lien, the birth and death dates of William Harrow, and a short cover letter that said nothing except that a fraud had been committed and I was seeking correction.

Then I waited.

It took eleven days. On the twelfth day, I got a notice in the mail that my request had been accepted for processing, and that pending completion of a records review, the associated records would be flagged.

Flagged is not erased. Flagged is a yellow light.

It became a green light four days later, on a Friday afternoon, while I was in the middle of a carrier audit at work and my phone buzzed on my desk with an email from the county.

Your request has been processed. Decedent status approved for the associated record. Spousal link terminated. Credit reporting agencies have been notified.

I read it three times. My hands were steady. My heart was not.

Then I opened the second email, the one that had arrived thirty seconds later.

Notice of audit: your filing has been selected for secondary review due to an objection received from an interested party.

Daniel Voss had objected. He had gotten the notice, the flagged one, the yellow light, and he had objected to it.

Thirty days. I had thirty days.

I called Adele.

"He objected," I said.

"Of course he objected. That was always going to happen."

"What happens now?"

"An investigator reviews the file. They look at your documentation and his. If your documentation is better--and it is--they decline to reverse." Her voice was calm and it was doing me good. "You did the right thing. You documented everything. You kept the notarization certificate, which is the only piece of paper in this entire mess that a court cannot argue with."

"And if he produces something?"

"Then we produce the notary log, and his father goes to jail, and he still loses."

I sat down in my car in the Calloway parking garage and looked at the ceiling, which was doing its job of being unimpressive.

"Thirty days," I said.

"Thirty days."

Daniel Voss found my number on the twenty-first day.

I was at the kitchen table, eating soup standing up, because it was nine at night and I had spent the whole day in a truck depot. The phone buzzed. Unknown number.

I let it ring. It rang again. On the third call I picked up, because I am not a person who lets things ring.

"Eleanor Harrow?"

The voice was male, young, and weirdly cheerful. Like someone selling something he didn't believe in.

"This is she."

"Hey. So. I think you and I have a problem."

"I know exactly who you are."

"Then you know why I'm calling. You filed something on me. The county knocked on my door, which is not a fun conversation. The bank froze my accounts. My fiancee left, which, honestly, whatever, she was already on the way out." He laughed, and it was the laugh of a man who has never once had to deal with consequences. "But you put my name on a death record. That's not a small thing. That's me being inconvenienced."

I set my spoon down.

"You're going to be more than inconvenienced," I said.

"See, that's what I wanted to talk about. Because I have paperwork too. And I know people. I know your boss. I know your brother. And I know you went to the county with a story about fraud that you can't prove to a judge without putting your own name on the line. You filed a death record on a living person. That's a felony, Eleanor. That's not nothing."

I looked at the table. My father's life insurance form was underneath the newspaper. His name was printed on it, and the ink was old.

"You're right," I said. "It is not nothing."

"So here's what I'm offering. You withdraw the filing. I withdraw my objection. We go back to being married on paper and forget all this happened. I mean, it works for both of us."

"It works for you."

A pause. "I think you're being emotional."

"I think you signed your name to a document with my dead father's ID on it, and I think you were sloppy, and I think you are about to find out that sloppiness has an address." I stood up. "Do you want me to read you the notarization certificate? I have it in front of me. It's in your father's handwriting."

Silence.

"You don't know what you're doing," he said at last, and for the first time, under the cheerfulness, there was something else. It sounded like fear.

"I do," I said. "That's the difference between us."

I hung up first.

The rest of the thirty days went the way I needed them to. The investigator at the county was thorough, humorless, and, critically, literate. She read the notarization certificate and asked me to produce the notary log. I produced it. She read the log and asked if the notary had been contacted. Adele sent a written statement.

And on the twenty-ninth day, I got a phone call from the investigator, a woman named Paula Dietz, who told me she had never seen a file like mine.

"The objection has been declined," she said. "The current decedent status stands."

I said thank you. I do not remember sitting down.

"One thing you should know," Paula said. "Your lawyer asked us to hold the file open until the objecting party is formally notified. That's just standard, but it means it's not quiet. He'll get the notice on Tuesday."

I knew. Adele and I had planned for that.

I spent the weekend doing the last thing I had left to do: I froze every account that had my name and his on it, notified the credit bureaus formally, and called the county twice to confirm that the spousal link was severed in the death record. It was. On paper, Daniel Voss no longer existed, and he no longer had a wife.

Which meant that starting Tuesday morning, every agency in the state that had ever waited on his paperwork would begin to notice that the name Daniel Voss belonged to a dead man.

I slept through the Monday night for the first time in a month.

I did not sleep through Tuesday.