I stood in the lobby of the Shoji Tabuchi theater in Branson, eighty years old with funnel cake still on my breath, and listened to Melissa the banker tell me the man beside my impostor had shown a notarized letter saying I had been declared incapacitated, signed by a doctor.
And the doctor was my late son Marks best friend from high school. The same man who held my hand at Marks funeral and said, anything you need, Mrs H. Anything.
What he needed, it turned out, was my house. He and my daughter-in-law Robin had cooked it up together. Robin wore the gold cross necklace I gave her and carried my old expired drivers license, the one I thought I threw away in 2019, to pretend to be me. The doctor forged a letter declaring me senile so a man claiming to be my power of attorney could take a home equity line of credit against the little house I bought in May.
The trouble with declaring a sharp eighty-year-old incapacitated is that she tends to be standing in a theater lobby, entirely capable, when you try it.
Melissa, bless that young woman, stalled them. Her manager stalled them. I stayed on the line with the Topeka police the whole time. When officers arrived, Robin was holding a license that expired in 2019 and a necklace that proved nothing, and the man had a POA I never signed and a medical letter from a doctor who never examined me.
They needed me to be helpless. I have buried a husband and a son and I have never once been helpless a day in my life.
The forged incapacity letter sank the doctor. A physician who signs a false declaration to help steal an old womans house loses his license and answers to the law, and he is doing both. Robin and her power-of-attorney friend are answering too.
My house is mine, no loan against it, no lien, nothing. I finished the Branson trip my church paid for. I saw both shows and rode through Silver Dollar City, and I bought a brand-new wallet, and the only license in it is the current one, with a very alert-looking photograph.