Page 19 of Road Trip
“It’s okay, Shirley. Dad shifted his schedule, and he’ll see them.”
“She still hates me,” Maeve said, following the lawyer down the hallway. “It’s been almost twenty years, and I still don’t know why.”
“Shirley’s an equal opportunity hater,” Scott said, gesturing toward his office. “She doesn’t need a reason.” He seated himself at one of a pair of wing chairs and Maeve took the one opposite.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Scott,” she said. “And thanks for coming to Mom’s service. It meant a lot to our family.”
“And you, I hope,” he said.
Scott Childress was what Mary Helen had called a “ginger,” with strawberry-blond hair, dark blue eyes, and an earnest, freckled face. He’d been in his last year of undergrad the summer Maeve had worked in the law office, and although she could tell he was interested, they’d both been too shy to do anything more than smile and nod at each other over the coffee machine in the break room.
“It did,” she said, hating herself for blushing.
He leaned forward, propping his elbows on the knees of his gray suit pants. “On the phone you mentioned something about your mom’s finances? Tell me what’s going on.”
Maeve took a deep breath and summed up what she’d learned about Mary Helen’s late-life dedication to a televangelist named Brother Jerome.
Scott jotted notes on a legal pad. When Maeve felt tears welling up, he handed her a box of tissues without comment.
She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, crumpled the tissue in her right hand, and waited.
“That’s some story.” He shook his head. “Your mom always struck me as such a levelheaded person. Did she, in the past few months when you were her caregiver, show signs of dementia?”
“Now that I look back on it, yes. But I guess I was in denial. She was Mom, you know? She held our family together after Daddy died. She was widowed in her forties, went to work at my uncle’s drugstore, and even though she never went to college, she managed that store, and managed our lives. She was, I thought, indestructible.”
Maeve blew her nose on the tissue. “But in the last year, after she got sick, she was easily confused, forgetful. My aunts worried about her driving, and last Easter, she actually went missing for a few hours. She’d driven to Mass, like she always did, but afterward she didn’t show up at Aunt Bernie’s for lunch. Turns out she got lost. A cop saw her driving the wrong way down Lincoln Street and pulled her over. Lucky for us, the cop was a St. Mary’s girl. She knew Mom from the drugstore. So she called Uncle Keith and he came and picked her up. Mom made him swear not to tell me, but it happened again a couple months later. And I guess, in the meantime, she somehow started watching this guy’s church services on cable television. Not long after that we found out about the cancer, and she went downhill fast after that.”
“Any idea how much money she invested with Brother Jerome?”
“I’ll have to ask Keith. I know she wiped out her savings account. And then took out a new mortgage on the house for three hundred-twenty-five thousand. Totally unlike Mary Helen Dunagin.”
“Unfortunately, we see this kind of stuff too often with some of our older clients.”
He glanced down at his notes. “I’ll look into this Brother Jerome character and see if there are any pending civil or criminal complaints against him or his church.”
“Do you think we’ll have any way to go after him? Make him give back all that money she invested?” Maeve’s voice was wobbly.
“Honestly? I’m not sure. Do you happen to have any records, especially correspondence with Brother Jerome?”
“I guess Uncle Keith can get the bank records. He’s executor of her estate. As for correspondence, I don’t know. The good news is, Mom was a total pack rat. If she did have mail from Brother Jerome, she probably has it saved. Somewhere.”
“See what you can find,” Scott said. “At the very least, preying on a vulnerable senior citizen suffering from dementia is elder abuse. If he directly solicited investments by mail, that’s potential mail fraud, and it’s a federal offense.”
“What about the bank?” Maeve asked. “Didn’t they have some responsibility to protect Mom’s account too? Especially since one of the tellers specifically asked Mom what she was doing with all that money she was withdrawing?”
“Good question,” Scott said. “We’ll take a look at the bank’s culpability.” He tapped his pen on the yellow legal pad. “Seems like this is about more than just your mom’s estate, Maeve. If you want to tell me what else is going on, I’ve been told I’m a good listener. I know Therese’s work as an actress can be unpredictable, but you’re still a professor at Georgia Southern, right?”
She hesitated for a moment. The humiliation of her firing was still fresh. But Scotty Childress’s face was so earnest, so understanding, she decided to spill the beans.
“Iwas,” Maeve said, not bothering to hide her bitterness. “I was an associate professor. Up for tenure this year. But I got an email from my department head this morning, telling me that ‘due to budget reductions’ my contract isn’t being renewed.”
“They can do that? Without a hearing or some kind of review?”
“They can and they did. My class sections, even my office space, apparently, have already been reassigned to one of my colleagues, a male, who has lesser credentials but a closer friendship to my boss.”
“That’s appalling,” Scott said. “Labor law isn’t my area of practice, but it seems to me you might have a legit sex discrimination case.”
“Maybe. But in my world, the world of academia, you file a case like that, and your name is poison. No other college would touch me with a ten-foot pole.”
