I stood in the mud by a Humvee at Camp Shelby in full gear while First Sergeant Washington looked at his phone and then looked at me and said, Sergeant, my wife knows your sisters boyfriend. He is not who he says he is.
Washingtons wife worked at the title company in Hattiesburg, the same one where my sister Danas boyfriend claimed to work. Except the name he used with Dana was not his real name. He had a record, a history of real-estate scams under different names, and he had talked his way into handling closings long enough to do damage.
At my July closing, that man had slipped an extra document into the stack a nice young woman slid across the table one after another. Buried in my paperwork was a lease, with my signature forged onto it, naming Dana as my tenant. That was the lease the locksmith saw. That was how my sister changed my locks in daylight and moved in with three kids and a boyfriend who was running a con on all of us, Dana included.
The Hattiesburg police had told me a forged lease could turn it into a civil eviction. But a forged lease produced by a con man using a false identity is not civil. It is fraud, and once Washingtons wife named him, the title company and the police moved fast.
I signed a stack of honest papers in July. I never signed that one, and the hand that forged it belonged to a man with three other names.
The forged lease was voided. My name was the only one on the deed, clean. The boyfriend was arrested on charges that had been waiting for whoever he really was. Dana, who thought she had found a man who could get her a place to live, found out she had been used as cover.
I did not let Dana move into my home, because fourteen months and a three-thousand-dollar electric bill taught me that lesson in 2017. But I did help her and those three kids find a real apartment and a caseworker, because they were conned too, and the children did nothing wrong.
Mr Delacroix still calls me Sergeant. The new locks are mine alone. And First Sergeant Washington got a case of good bourbon from me, because the Army takes care of its own, even in the mud.