Chapter 5
That evening, after Callahan had gone and Margaret's house had gone dark behind its curtains, I sat at my kitchen table with the closing file for the house spread out in front of me, and I read it the way you read something you should have read more carefully the first time. I had bought the house seven months earlier, and I had signed the papers in March, in a title office with a notary who kept glancing at the clock. The price had been fifty-five cents on the dollar, a number so low that my friends back in the city had told me to walk away, because houses do not sell that cheaply unless something is wrong with them.
The closing had taken seventy-two hours from offer to signature, which is not how house sales normally work. There had been no inspection contingency, no survey contingency, and no time to ask the questions a careful buyer asks. The deed was clear, and the title insurance was in place, and the listing agent had called it an estate liquidation, a family eager to settle and move on. The contract contained a clause I had skimmed past at the time because the notary was in a hurry and I was in a hurry: the property was sold "as-is, with all undocumented easements intact." I had read those words as lawyer's boilerplate. Now they read like a warning I had signed without understanding.
I remembered the agent's manner during the walkthrough. She had hurried me through the back rooms, lingered in the kitchen where the light was good, and steered me away from the root cellar door with a comment about damp and old wiring. She had known the house would sell fast at that price, and she had known, I suspected, that the buyer who asked too many questions would not be the buyer who closed in seventy-two hours. I had been the buyer who did not ask, because I was not really buying a house. I was buying proximity to the place where my brother had disappeared, and I had let the bargain blind me to everything else.
I pulled out the plat drawing again and laid it beside the deed. The plat showed the boundary straight along the old fence line, and the deed carried the same description, clean and unremarkable. Nothing in the file mentioned a medical examiner, a case number, or an easement that ran anywhere unusual. And yet the pin in my yard sat four inches inside the line on that plat, and a laminated evidence card had been buried beside it in the mud. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make the paperwork look clean while the ground itself told a different story.
I thought about the clause again: "with all undocumented easements intact." An easement is a right to use someone else's land, and an undocumented easement is one that exists in practice but not on paper. What kind of easement would a seller need to preserve without documenting it? What runs under a yard that needs to keep running after the house changes hands?
There was one more detail in the file that I had dismissed at the time and that now refused to sit quietly. The seller had not been a family member clearing out an estate. The seller of record was a private trust, and the trust's paperwork had been handled by an office across town that I had never visited and whose name I did not recognize. At the closing, I had asked the notary who the trustees were, and she had said the trust documents were sealed, which is not unusual, but which meant I had bought a house without ever knowing who had actually sold it to me. A liquidation, I had assumed, meant a family eager to settle. A trust selling at fifty-five cents on the dollar in seventy-two hours meant something else entirely: it meant someone with a reason to move a property fast, to a buyer who would not ask questions, and to keep the title warm in the meantime.
I did not have answers that night, but I had a new way of looking at the file. The sale had not been a liquidation. A liquidation gets rid of a problem. This sale had preserved one, and it had put me on top of it, holding title, paying the taxes, and asking no questions for seven months. I closed the file, left it on the table where I could see it in the morning, and went to bed knowing that the house I had bought cheap was cheap for a reason I was only beginning to understand.