The Woman With The Fountain Pen Examined My Name

I found Simone Avery through the lawyer who had handled my mother's estate. He had retired, but his answer came fast.

“Keep the papers flat. Don't write on them. Call Simone.”

Her office was in a plain building outside Rogers. I drove there Wednesday with my forms inside a clean folder and a shoebox on the passenger seat.

Simone Avery was forty-six, a Black woman with close-cut hair, steady brown eyes, and a quiet voice. Three old fountain pens stood in a chipped cup on her desk.

“My daughter calls those museum mistakes,” she said when she saw me looking. “I like a pen I can repair.”

I liked her before she touched my papers.

She asked me to tell the story once. Then she asked which pages were copies, which were originals, and who had handled each.

“Can you prove I didn't sign?” I asked.

“I can examine evidence. I won't promise a result before I do.”

Her fee for an initial review and written findings was $1,250. Further work or testimony would cost more. I wrote a check from my own studio account.

It left $7,912 there.

“I brought other signatures,” I said.

I opened the shoebox.

Inside were signed work orders from the weeks around the pension payment. Each had a small paper fold clipped to it.

She opened one. A piece of amber glass, smaller than a fingernail, shone against the paper.

“You date these?”

“Every finished window.”

“And the customers get matching invoices?”

“Yes.”

She laid the glass aside with care.

“Then we may be able to confirm when these signatures were made. That's useful.”

I had spent years being told the little folds wasted drawer space. Simone asked permission to photograph how I had stored them.

She used no grand speech. She put two pages under a camera and moved a light.

“Look at the F,” she said.

On an old beneficiary form, the top stroke leaned right. On the consent copy, it leaned the same way.

“Mine usually does,” I said.

“Yes. But these marks may match more closely than two natural signatures should. I need the original consent to assess that properly.”

There was a tiny break in the line after the n in Finch. I could see it in both images.

“Someone copied the old one?”

“That's a possibility. It isn't a conclusion yet.”

I felt cold despite the warm office.

Malcolm had known exactly where I kept the forms. He had complained about that drawer for years.

While Simone made her notes, my phone rang.

“You called the plan,” Malcolm said.

“Yes.”

“They called me. Do you know how small that made me feel?”

“Where are the cabins?”

“You're still doing it.”

“Where?”

“Past Beaver Lake. Two places. They needed work.”

“What did they cost?”

He breathed hard into the phone.

“Della has the figures.”

Simone waited while I wrote those words down, along with the time.

Then she gave me the name of a lawyer in Carroll County, Ruth Bell, who handled property disputes and family cases.

“Take her the whole story,” Simone said. “Money often leaves another paper trail.”

I stopped at the courthouse in Berryville on my way home. The clerk showed me how to search recorded property records at a public screen.

I found the two cabin deeds. Lantern Hollow had bought both on February 3. Della was listed as its manager.

Then I searched my own name.

I expected my studio deed. My mother had left me the building before Malcolm and I married. I had kept the title in my name through every roof patch and lean winter.

The deed was there.

So was a mortgage recorded in March.

The stated debt was $96,000.

I read the street address twice. Then I checked the lot description against the deed copy in my folder.

It was my studio.

The borrower was Lantern Hollow. My property had been pledged as extra security, and my name appeared on the mortgage as its owner.

The clerk printed the pages for $6.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I need the case search too.”

There was a foreclosure case. There had been a judgment by default. According to a proof of service, Malcolm had accepted papers for me at our house in August.

He had never handed them over.

My fingers left a damp mark on the counter.

“When is the sale?” I asked.

The clerk turned the final sheet toward me.

At ten the following Thursday, the court's commissioner was scheduled to sell the place where I had spent thirty-two years putting broken things back together.