I Was Paid to Pretend to Be His Granddaughter — Then His Final Wish Shocked His Family
PART 4
The VA fr*ud investigator was a tired woman named Lorna Pike who had, she said, “seen this exact thing forty times and never once with a tape.”
She listened to Sunday thirty-one in Mr. Abernathy’s office with her hands folded and her face doing nothing, and at the end she said, “Marcus. Who’s Marcus?”
Marcus was Patrice’s boyfriend, a man who “handled her finances,” and who had, it turned out, handled them straight into a joint account with Patrice’s name and Mr. Booker’s power of attorney and forty-one thousand dollars of a blind veteran’s savings over three years.
“He signed for the house,” Lorna Pike said. “She told him it was for the house. He couldn’t read it.”
“He couldn’t read it,” Mr. Abernathy agreed, “which is why he came to me in April and had me pull every document filed under his name in the county, and had me read every one of them to him, out loud, twice.
He knew about the power of attorney before I did.
He asked me not to act on it.”
“Why?”
“He said, ‘Because if I stop it now, Patrice will stop the girl from coming, and I’m not done knowing her yet.’”
I had to leave the room.
The confrontation, when it came, happened at the house.
