One thumbprint. Nora was sure of it. She remembered the ink, the way it wouldn't come off at the kitchen sink with dish soap, the faint gray whorl still on her thumb when she went to bed. She remembered looking at it in the dark and thinking it looked like a tiny map of a river.
One thumbprint. One journal entry. One stamp on the power of attorney. And then—a second stamp, on a second document, on a page Grant had flipped past while he talked about a check on a paper plate.
She opened a new browser tab. She read Government Code section 8206 again, slower, all of it. And there it was: a member of the public may request a copy of a line item in a notary's journal, in writing, and the notary must supply it.
Her mother kept a journal because the law required it. Her mother would have had to write something in that journal, for that night, for that thumbprint. And whatever her mother had written was one of only two things. Either it said "interspousal transfer grant deed," in which case her mother had known exactly what she was stamping. Or it said "power of attorney" and nothing else—in which case there was a deed sitting in the Sacramento County records bearing her mother's seal and no journal entry and no thumbprint at all. One was conspiracy. The other was a notary committing fraud on her own pregnant daughter. There was no third box.
Nora sat on the nursery floor at four in the morning and felt something she hadn't felt since she saw them behind the lemon tree, something cold and steady and clear. It wasn't anger anymore. It was the feeling of finding the edge of a puzzle.
She texted Priya at 4:06 a.m.: I know how we prove it. Come over when you're up.
Priya texted back at 4:07: I'm up. I'm always up. Coffee?
Nora looked at the word for a long moment, at the fact of a person who was awake for her at four in the morning, and she put her hand flat on her belly and typed: Decaf for me. Bring a printer.
* * *
They spent Monday building the case like a lesson plan.
Priya was a litigator, not a family lawyer, but she called a friend from law school named Marcus Okafor who did real estate litigation in Sacramento, and by noon Marcus was on speaker on the dining room table, the same table where her mother had set the black zippered case. Marcus had a deep, unhurried voice and asked short questions.
"Did you ever intend to transfer an interest in the property to your husband?"
"No."