Part 3 — The Paper She Signed
The woman at the strip-mall branch read it to us slowly. Last Tuesday my mother had signed a durable power of attorney, naming Corbin as her agent. It was a form letter, bought online, with a notary stamp that did not match any commission in Tennessee.
Teddy put his hand flat on his kitchen table and let out a long breath. The branch manager had refused to file it. The notary number was fake, and the woman who ran the desk had caught it. She had slid the form into a drawer and phoned Teddy, who was the first person she thought of in a bank bulletin chain.
Nothing had been recorded, and not a cent had left the new account beyond the deposits my mother made. Every dollar was still sitting there, in a joint account that had never been used. The bank froze it that same morning, with a note on the file for the fraud unit.
We took the video and the paperwork to the Clarksville police. Detective Marlow sat with Mom at her kitchen table that evening and explained everything gently. She cried at first, and then she was angry, the clear, useful anger of a woman who had been lied to by someone she trusted. She said, What do you need me to do?
What the detective needed was an ordinary Tuesday. At ten oclock, the silver sedan with the fish sticker pulled up in front of her house. My mother walked out in her good coat, with her purse over her arm and a wire the size of a button pinned under her collar. She got in the car and smiled.
I sat in my wifes car down the street, with Detective Marlow beside me in the passenger seat. We followed them at a distance to the strip mall, past the interstate, to the same little branch. This time the manager had two officers in the back office.
Corbin held the door for Mom, as he always did. At the desk, the teller asked him for identification. He gave a name, and the manager said, Sir, that does not match the name you used last week. By the time he turned around, the officers were standing behind him.
His real name was Dennis Lakes, forty-six, wanted for similar schemes in Kentucky and Alabama. In the sedan were three prepaid phones, a stack of church bulletins from different towns, and a list of names, all women over seventy-five. He was not a blessing, he was a rehearsed performance, and my mothers own good sense was what finally ended the show.
He was charged with attempted fraud, forgery, identity theft, and exploitation of an elderly person, along with warrants from the other states. A judge refused bail. The bank returned all of the deposits, every $9,400, and the prosecutors added the money from the earlier victims to the file.
Mom took it hard for a week. Then she stood up in her Wednesday night Bible study and told the entire story. Four women came up to her afterward, whispering about their own new friend. By Friday the deputies had taken statements from all of them.
I had her landline reconnected on Saturday. She had me teach her how to read the new cell phone, and she wrote the passcode on a card and kept it in her Bible. We ate supper together every Tuesday after that, at her kitchen table, with the porch light on, and the bulb was one I had fixed myself.