Judge Hartleys daughter was quiet for a moment on the phone, and then she said, Mrs, I am an elder-law attorney, and I have been waiting three years for someone to hand me that agency on a plate. You just did.
The paper under Glenns loose brick, the one with the Muskingum County seal, was a deed notation Glenn had recorded years before he passed, placing our home in a small protective trust and naming the court as a backstop. Glenn never trusted smooth talkers with cake. He grew up poor and he read every line of everything, and he had set a trap for exactly this.
What the agency was doing was not a Legacy Program. It was a scheme. There is no law that lets a home-care company demand your house in exchange for care, and the threat that the county would take it otherwise was a lie told to frightened widows who did not know better. The attorney had heard whispers of it for years and never had a client brave enough, or prepared enough, to fight.
She called me sweetie eleven times in twenty minutes. She did not know my Glenn had left me a map in his own front walk.
The attorney took it to the state attorney generals office and to adult protective services. Those signed papers the owner left on my kitchen table, in her own hand, with her own pressure written all over them, became the evidence against her. Other widows came forward once there was someone to come forward to. The agencys license was pulled.
I kept the aide, the nice girl, because none of it was her doing. I just pay the honest company that took over.
Glenns herringbone walk is still out front, every brick he laid by hand in a pattern I saw in a magazine in 1971. I had a mason check that one loose brick at the end. He wanted to cement it down proper. I told him to leave it exactly as Glenn left it. You never know when a house is going to need its secrets again.