Chapter 4 - The Cost of Staying
At eight the next morning, I called my supervisor and asked for emergency leave from a corruption case I had been preparing for six months.
“Take the time,” he said. “But you need to recuse from anything touching your family.”
That was the cost of staying. I was good at my job because I did not lose control. This was my mother. Control was gone.
I hired an elder-law attorney named Naomi Carter before I showered or changed clothes. By noon, she had filed for temporary conservatorship and a restraining order keeping Julian and Chloe away from my mother pending the APS investigation.
“If the original POA was valid,” Naomi warned, “they’ll argue she trusted them and you’re overreacting because you feel guilty.”
“I do feel guilty,” I said.
“Then let me handle court.”
While Mom slept in a hospital room upstairs, Naomi and I went to First Tennessee Community Bank with the withdrawal slip. The manager, Mr. Haskins, couldn’t tell us everything without a court order, but he confirmed enough.
Two investment accounts had been closed in person three months earlier. The proceeds from the sale of Mom’s Norris Lake cabin had been routed through a newly opened checking account under my mother’s name, with Julian listed as attorney-in-fact.
“Was my mother alone when she signed?” I asked.
Mr. Haskins hesitated. “There was another person. A woman.”
Chloe.
On our way out, Naomi stopped at the bulletin board by the teller line and pulled down a flyer advertising notarization services. The business name at the bottom made her eyebrows lift.
“Cedar Ridge Title,” she said.
That same name appeared on the cabin sale documents Mr. Haskins had briefly shown us.
Back at the hospital, my mother woke long enough to hear me say Chloe’s old employer’s name.
She closed her eyes. “That’s where they made me sign the second papers.”
May you like
Second papers.
Whatever had happened in my mother’s bathroom had not started in that bathroom.
