“Your father has power of attorney,” she explained. “Temporary. I signed it after my knee surgery because I trusted him.”
My stomach tightened.
“He told me I was starting to become forgetful. He said I needed help handling the bills.” She stared out the window. “Then yesterday, I found this.”
“Did you confront him?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“He said the money was being used to pay for my care.”
I glanced toward the lone suitcase sitting in the back seat.
Grandma let out a humorless laugh. “At lunch today, your mother told me we were stopping somewhere that had a lovely garden. They walked me into that facility, finished none of the paperwork, and vanished.”
My phone buzzed. Dad.
Grandma reached over and turned it face down on the console.
“Courthouse first,” she repeated. “Then the bank. Then there’s one more place.”
“What place?”
She looked directly into my eyes. “My house.”
I swallowed hard. “Why?”
“Because if they’ve done what I think they’ve done, your parents didn’t just leave me there today.”
She reached inside her coat and pulled out a small envelope.
Across the front, written in my grandfather’s handwriting, were two words: HOUSE DEED.
“I hid this before they came to pick me up,” she said. “I wanted to know whether they would go looking for it.”
Her voice dropped. “They wanted me out of the way.”
PART 2
I need to tell you something about my grandmother, because my parents forgot it, and it cost them everything.
Grandma Eleanor was not a confused old woman.
Before she retired, she spent thirty-one years as the office manager for a law firm — the person who actually ran the place, who knew where every document lived and what every signature meant.
She had raised my father alone after my grandfather died. She had buried a husband, run a household, and managed a legal office simultaneously, and she did not miss things.
Which is why, when my father started telling her she was “getting forgetful,” she got suspicious instead of scared.
“A woman who ran a law office for thirty-one years knows what a durable power of attorney can do,” she told me, as we drove toward the courthouse. “I signed a temporary one after my knee surgery, for the six weeks I couldn’t drive. Temporary, Ivan. It expired two months ago.”
“So he’s been using an expired POA?”
“That’s what I need the courthouse to confirm.”
