My Sister Sold Our Dying Mother’s House in 2019, Last Week, I Bought It Back at Her Foreclosure Auction.

I want to explain something about waiting.

When you have a case, a real case, with documents and witnesses and a clear violation, the temptation is to move immediately. To swing. To make them feel it now.

That is what Julie would have done.

I am not Julie.

I filed everything. The deed, the medical records, the hospice notes, Peggy’s check stub (which arrived in a padded envelope with a handwritten note that just said, “Do what you have to do, honey”), the Zillow history, three independent comps from March 2019 showing the true market value, the LLC formation paperwork showing Greg as sole member.

I put it all in a banker’s box under my bed.

Then I lived my life.

I went to Julie and Greg’s for Thanksgiving in 2019. I brought a pie. I asked about the kids. I complimented Julie’s new kitchen backsplash, which had been installed, I noticed, in the same month they sold my mother’s house.

I did not mention Linden Street.

I went to Christmas at their lake cabin in 2020. I gave the kids Amazon gift cards. I let Greg pour me a bourbon and lecture me about the stock market. I smiled.

I did not mention Linden Street.

Julie relaxed. I could see it happening in real time, month by month. At first she watched me carefully, the way you watch a dog that once snapped at you. But time went on, and I brought pies, and I asked about the kids, and eventually she stopped watching.

By 2021, she was back to calling me boring at Christmas.

Meanwhile, I was doing two things.

The first was tracking Halcyon Holdings LLC. Every quarter I pulled the property records. The house sat empty for six months, then Greg listed it for rent at $2,800 a month, absurdly high for the neighborhood. It sat empty another four months. He finally rented it to a young family for $2,100. He was, I could tell from the tax filings, over-leveraged. He had refinanced the house in late 2019, pulling out $180,000 in cash against it, which he’d used, I later confirmed by way of Peggy, to buy a boat and put a down payment on a second lake property in Wisconsin.

The second was watching Greg’s other business. He ran a small commercial construction firm. In 2020, the pandemic hit his supply chain. In 2021, interest rates began to climb. In 2022, one of his major clients, a mid-sized restaurant group, went under and left him holding $340,000 in unpaid invoices.

By early 2023, I was seeing the pattern I had been waiting for.

The Wisconsin property went into foreclosure in April.

The boat was repossessed in June.

In August, I got a Google alert I had set up years earlier: 1428 Linden Street, notice of default filed with Ramsey County.

Greg had stopped paying the mortgage on my mother’s house.

The auction was scheduled for the first week of November.

I called my lawyer.

I had, in fact, had a lawyer for two years by then. A quiet woman named Denise Park who specialized in estate litigation and who had reviewed my banker’s box in her office over three separate meetings and had said, at the end of the third one, “Kate. When you’re ready to move on this, we have a case. We have a very good case. But you need to be sure of your timing.”

I was sure of my timing now.

Denise and I did two things.

The first was to send a certified letter to Julie and Greg, from Denise’s office, on Denise’s letterhead. It laid out, in twelve careful pages, the case: the fiduciary breach, the self-dealing, the below-market sale, Peggy’s testimony, the medical records showing our mother was non-responsive at the time of the transaction. It requested a settlement discussion. It noted that criminal referral to the county attorney was an available option but not the preferred one.

I signed the letter as co-executor of my mother’s estate.

I dropped it in the mail on a Tuesday.

The second thing we did was register me as a qualified bidder at the foreclosure auction.

I had been saving, quietly, for four years. I had also sold my condo in St. Paul the previous spring and moved into a rental, telling everyone, including Julie, that I was “trying to figure out what I want next.”

I had $340,000 in cash sitting in an account.

The certified letter arrived at Julie’s house on a Thursday. My phone started ringing at 7:04 p.m. that same evening.

I did not answer.

She called eleven times.

She left three voicemails. The first was crying. The second was screaming. The third was quiet, and it was the one that almost got me.

“Katie,” she said. “Please. Please just talk to me. I know what I did. I know. Greg said it would be fine, he said Mom wouldn’t know, he said we’d pay it back into the estate later. I was so stupid. I was so scared about the bills, and he made it sound so reasonable, and I. Katie. Please. I’m your sister. Please just call me back.”

I sat on my couch and listened to that voicemail three times.

Then I called Denise.

“She’s ready to talk,” I said. “Set the meeting.”

“Kate,” Denise said. “Are you sure you don’t want to just go to the auction?”

I thought about it.

“I want both,” I said.