My sister grabbed my wrist in the last pew and said, Linda, that is not a realtor with the clipboard. That is Franks daughter. The one he had with his secretary in 1985.
It fit together fast after that. Franks daughter had handled the sale of my old Grand Rapids house in June, to a family I never met, and somewhere in that process she took my fireproof box, the one with my divorce decree in it. They thought that if the decree was gone, I could not prove Frank and I split in 1997, and his fake caregiver letter and our 1972 marriage certificate would be enough to move him into my condo as my husband.
They forgot something a second-grade teacher of forty years knows cold. A divorce decree is not just a paper in a box. It is a public record, filed with the court in Kent County, Michigan, in 1997, and anyone can request a certified copy.
They stole the only copy they thought existed. They never learned that the state of Michigan kept one too, and had for twenty-seven years.
I called the Kent County clerk Monday morning. A certified copy of my divorce decree was in my hands within days, and faxed to the Sarasota police before Frank finished unloading his recliner. A doctors letter claiming a seventy-four year old woman who walks four miles a day and does her own taxes is incapacitated does not survive five minutes once the real divorce decree is on the table.
Forging a caregiver letter and using a stolen box to pretend a divorced woman is still your wife is fraud, and Frank and his daughter are answering for it. The family I sold the Grand Rapids house to got their part sorted out too, once the stolen box turned up.
I paid three hundred thirty-eight thousand for my condo, cash, from half of everything I earned teaching. My name. My home. I have not spoken to Frank in twenty-seven years, and after this, I never will again. I keep my new certified decree in a new fireproof box, in my own closet, where only I have the key.