Chapter 1 - THE ROAD TO CANTON
My parents told Grandma Eleanor they were taking her to lunch.
Three hours later, a nursing facility in Ohio called me.
“Is this Ivan Sterling?” the woman asked. “Your grandmother listed you as her emergency contact. Her suitcase is still here in our lobby, but the family members who brought her left before the admission paperwork was finished.”
I was standing in the kitchen of my apartment, holding a cup of coffee I suddenly had no desire to drink.
“What do you mean, they left?”
The administrator hesitated. “They said they had to get some paperwork from their car. They never came back.”
I called my father, Arthur. It went straight to voicemail.
Then my mother, Wendy. Same thing.
I drove 190 miles with both hands locked around the steering wheel.
When I got there, Grandma was sitting beside a single brown suitcase and a grocery bag packed with medications. She was still wearing her church coat even though the lobby was warm. Her gray hair remained carefully pinned, and her face had that calm, stone-cold expression it always took on whenever she was furious.
I crouched beside her. “Grandma.”
She looked at me for several long seconds. Then she got to her feet. No tears. No questions.
She walked out toward my car, climbed into the passenger seat, and buckled her seatbelt.
“Don’t call them,” she said.
I looked at her.
“I’ll tell you where to drive.”
“Where?”
“First, the county courthouse.”
That got my attention immediately.
Once we were back on the highway, she opened her purse and handed me a folded bank statement. Three withdrawals had been circled in red. Twelve thousand dollars. Eighteen thousand. Twenty-five thousand.
All taken within six weeks.
“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.”
The two-hour drive to the Stark County Courthouse was swallowed by a deafening silence. Every few minutes, my console would illuminate with incoming calls from my mother, then my father, then my mother again. I ignored every single one.
When we pulled into the parking lot of the granite courthouse building in Canton, Grandma Eleanor didn't wait for me to open her door. She stepped out onto the pavement, smoothed her coat, and walked straight toward the broad stone steps with the posture of a woman half her age.
"Grandma, wait," I said, catching up to her at the double glass doors. "If Dad signed a temporary POA, he has legal authority over your accounts until it's revoked."
"Which is precisely why we are walking into the Probate Clerk's office right now, Ivan," she said, her blue eyes piercing into mine. "A temporary power of attorney granted for medical recovery requires a physician's attestation of mental incompetence to become absolute. Arthur told the bank I had dementia."
My jaw dropped. "He what?"
"He brought a forged affidavit to First National Bank three weeks ago," Eleanor said, pulling a folded clerk's notice from her handbag. "I received this notice in the mail two days before they took me to 'lunch.' He attempted to petition the court for full legal guardianship over my person and my estate."
May you like
She looked up at the towering ceiling of the courthouse foyer.
"Your father thought I was an old woman who would sit in a room, cry into a pillow, and accept whatever fate he arranged for me," Eleanor whispered, her jaw trembling with controlled rage. "He forgot who raised him."
