A power of attorney is not ownership.
It is the right to sign as somebody, in their interest.
Fourteen months ago she placed him at Halloway — under his own name, legally, correctly, which is the part everybody finds hardest to believe.
She did not hide him in an attic.
She put him in a licensed facility two counties away, paid by his own long-term care policy, and then she simply did not tell one person on earth where he was.
Me.
Because I was the only person who would come.
And using that same power of attorney, eleven months ago, she signed a deed transferring the house on Ridgemont from Clayton Kemp to Clayton Kemp and Vonetta Kemp as joint owners with right of survivorship.
Which means: the day he d*es, it’s hers, outright, with no probate, no will, no notice to anybody.
That’s it.
That’s the crime, and it happens about four hundred times a year in this state, and almost none of them are ever called anything.
“Is that legal?” I asked Ruth.
“An agent under a power of attorney cannot make a gift to herself unless the document expressly authorizes it,” she said.
“Your father’s document did not.
I know because I have the original of the replacement he signed six weeks before your trial, which revokes hers and names you, and which she has never seen because she never asked me for anything.”
