Part 9
The hearing on Lydia’s petition took place on September 30, as scheduled. That first session lasted twenty minutes.
Julia came with her cane, wearing the same white blouse. Claire sat beside her and laid out her pencils.
Lydia did not appear. She sent a request for a postponement, citing illness.
The judge, a woman with a very quiet voice, asked Julia ordinary questions. What was the date? What season was it? Who was the president? What was forty minus seven? Who was her son? Where did she live? How would she manage money if someone gave her some?
Julia answered.
Then the judge asked, “Do you understand what is being requested here?”
“Yes. They’re asking you to make me someone whose decisions are made by other people.”
The court arranged an outpatient evaluation and an independent assessment of her circumstances. Julia went to Missoula three weeks later. There were three hours of conversations, tests, charts, pictures. The finding was brief. No condition had been established that prevented her from understanding her decisions or managing her affairs.
The petition was denied.
Julia came out of the courthouse and sat on a step. Her legs would not hold her, and this time weakness had nothing to do with it. Everything had loosened at once.
Claire sat beside her.
“Now for the unpleasant part,” she said. “The bank.”
The bank had lent money and wanted it back. It was not concerned with who had been putting what in whose cup at home. Claire filed to have the loan and the deed of trust set aside because Julia had been unable to understand the transaction when she signed. Derek, Lydia, and Robert Whitman were drawn into the dispute as well.
The case turned on a note nobody had expected to survive. The bank’s security video was long gone, but the loan officer with the cactus in the teacup had written a memo. The customer signed in the presence of relatives, appeared unusually slowed, and answered questions with single words. The officer had raised the concern with her supervisor.
His response had been, “If she’s signing, she’s signing.”
The decision came late in February, on a day when blowing snow filled the valley and the bus out of Millbridge took four hours. The loan agreement and the deed of trust were rescinded.
“The bank can’t sell your house,” Claire told her in the kitchen, drawing little squares on the back of an old receipt. “No interest, no penalties. But the money that actually went into your business still has to be accounted for. Your share is much smaller than eighty-five thousand. And they owe too.”
Whitman got his deposit back and reimbursement for the preparation expenses the agreement covered. Together they came to twice the original deposit, and that obligation did not vanish with the loan.
He came to Cedar Fork once, in March. Julia saw the white car outside her grandmother’s property. A man in a good jacket walked along the fence, looking at the hillside.
Then he knocked.
“I didn’t know,” he said from the doorway. “You can believe me or not. They said you were sick and needed money for treatment, that your husband’s mother was handling the sale.”
“I believe you,” Julia said.
“Will you still sell? I’m not trying to rush you. But with what you owe now, you have to see—”
“No.”
He looked at her, at the cane in her hand, at the slope behind the garden.
“Shame. You’ve got a view of the Alder, and the ford’s less than a thousand feet away. That’s prime land.”
“It has my cellar on it,” Julia said.
The criminal case went to court in the summer.
Lydia faced charges arising from the deliberate, prolonged infliction of serious bodily injury, along with fraud involving money borrowed in the name of a person who could not understand what she was signing.
Derek faced charges for his part in it. Once he admitted what he had done, he kept cooperating. He disclosed things the investigators had not known and might never have found on their own.
Sentencing came in August, a year after Pearl had stood in the yard with bumblebees droning over the phlox.
Lydia admitted no wrongdoing. She stood very straight and said she had spent her life caring for animals and people. Her daughter-in-law had been gravely ill. Small amounts had been given to relieve anxiety. Nobody had meant harm. They had wanted a peaceful household.
“And it was peaceful,” she said. “For three years.”
Julia sat in the second row, looking at her back. She had expected triumph, or hatred, or at least satisfaction.
There was none of it. She felt empty, and a little sorry. Not for Lydia. For the young woman she had been, newly married, frightened of this woman and hoping to please her.
Lydia received six years in state prison. Derek received a three-year suspended sentence with probation. The court weighed his admissions, his cooperation, and the child still in his care.
As they left the courtroom, he turned to look at Julia.
She did not look away.
For ten years this man had put a hand on her shoulder. For three of those years he had brought her that cup. Not once had he asked, Mom, what’s in this?
It had been easier not to ask…
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