In September of 1994, a young woman drove a dust-colored Ford wagon out to a farmhouse south of Madrid, Nebraska. She was twenty-six years old. Her notary commission was days old. Her job was small. Watch a widow sign a quitclaim deed. Stamp the page. Take the fee. Drive home. Ordinary work, in an ordinary county. The widow sat at her own kitchen table in her good gray coat, the one with the brooch. Her daughter wasn't in the room. The son-in-law did all the talking, in the county's reasonable voice, the kind that has an answer for everything. And when the widow went to sign, her hand was trembling, and the page moved a little with the trembling, and the son-in-law put his thumb on the page to hold it flat. His thumb never touched her hand.
