Chapter 40: Fourteen Ashcroft Lane
The county assessor puts everything online.
It is free and it is public and most people never look.
I look.
I looked at three hundred deeds a month for a living, at a desk, on Kesler Street.
The search takes a name and gives you every parcel that name is attached to.
I typed MERCER, DEAN R.
Two results.
The first was the house on Delham Street.
Instrument type: warranty deed.
Grantor: Mercer, Cassandra A., by Mercer, Dean R., attorney-in-fact.
Consideration: one hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars.
Recorded on a Tuesday in the second year of my sentence. I was working in the prison library that month, shelving.
I want to explain the words attorney-in-fact and then I want to move past them.
In my second month inside, a lawyer sent forms in.
Dean needed authority to deal with the house, the insurance, the tax filing.
I signed a durable power of attorney at a table in a visitation room with a correctional officer as the witness.
I read it.
That is the part people do not believe.
I read all six pages and I understood that it authorised the conveyance of real property, and I signed it, because the alternative was that the house sat there and the taxes ran.
I was twenty-four and I had been inside for eight weeks and I had a husband who was going to look after things.
Every word in that paragraph is accurate and I do not get to take any of it back.
The second result was 14 Ashcroft Lane.
Instrument type: warranty deed.
Grantees: Mercer, Dean R., and Mercer, Bree A., husband and wife, as tenants by the entirety.
Consideration: three hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
Recorded eleven months after the first one. Eleven months is long enough for a thing to look unrelated.
Attached instrument: mortgage, two hundred and eighty thousand eight hundred dollars, thirty years.
That is a ten per cent deposit, which is thirty-one thousand two hundred dollars. I did that in my head at the terminal.
I sat at terminal six and did not do the subtraction, and then I did it, because I always do it.
One hundred and eighty-nine minus what was owed on it.
I did not know what was owed on it. So the subtraction did not close.
I want to be exact here, because this is the point where a person in a story is supposed to have found something.
I had not found anything.
A man sold a house he had lawful authority to sell, and eleven months later he bought another one with a mortgage and a deposit.
There is nothing in a deed index that says where a deposit came from. Deeds do not carry that.
I know what people want that page to have said. It did not say it. It said what deeds say.
The parcel record has more.
Lot size, eight thousand two hundred square feet. Year built, 1994.
Bedrooms four.
Bathrooms two and a half. Attached garage, two cars.
Last assessed value, three hundred and forty-one thousand. Assessed values run under market in that county by about eight per cent.
There is a small photograph on the parcel page, taken by the assessor's office from the street, in flat light, in some month with no leaves.
A white house with a grey roof and a black post box on a post at the end of a short drive. There is a basketball hoop over the garage that somebody left up.
The drive is empty in the photograph.
Assessor photographs usually are. They come in the morning.
I looked at it for less time than I looked at photograph nineteen. That is true and I do not know what it means.
Then I opened the notebook to a clean page and wrote the address down.
Fourteen Ashcroft Lane, and the parcel number, and the recording date.
Then I looked at what I had written for about a minute.
Then I tore the page out of the notebook, folded it twice, and put it in the bin under the printer table, the one full of misprinted receipts.
I did that because I know myself, and because a written address in a coat pocket is a plan, and I did not have a plan and did not want to accidentally acquire one.
Condition eleven of my supervision is about the victim's family. There is no condition about a cousin. I checked the sheet that night to be certain.
There is no rule anywhere that says a woman may not drive past a white house with a black post box.
That is exactly why I threw the page away.
I can recite the address. I have never been able to stop being able to.
But I have never written it down again, and I did not go, and I want the sequence of what I did to stay honest.