14 Reading Harper Lee moved to a nursing home, different from Nelle Harper’s assisted living facility. She was no longer able to fully manage Nelle Harper’s financial and legal affairs. This weighty job went to a former member of Alice’s office staff who had gotten her law degree from the University of Alabama. The “Discovery” of Go Set a Watchman In this same year a copy of a novel written before Mockingbird and rejected by Lippincott was discovered in a bank vault by two of Nelle Harper’s literary consultants, her agent Sam Pinkus and a Sotheby’s rare books expert, both of whom remembered her lawyer also being present on the occasion, contrary to the lawyer’s own memory. Lawsuits and Possible Dementia On May 3, 2013, Nelle Harper’s lawyer, on her behalf, sued her then literary agent, Pinkus, over theft of Nelle Harper’s royalties, which he had been able to do by taking advantage of her declining health to sign papers in 2007. Claire Suddath, in an interview with Nelle Harper’s lawyer, asked how a woman who could be manipulated by her agent into signing away her rights could, four years later, be competent enough to agree to a publication she had in her pre-stroke days vowed never, ever to agree to. Suddath writes that she got no answer. In October of 2013, Nelle Harper’s lawyer also sued the Monroeville museum—a settlement that forced the town to make concessions regarding its murals, the museum, and the city’s production of the stage play of To Kill a Mockingbird. Alice Lee’s Conclusions about Her Sister’s Health On November 17, 2014, Nelle Harper’s sister died but not before she made clear, in writing, that Nelle Harper’s dementia would lead her to sign anything put before her, including an objection to the publication of a book, The Mockingbird Next Door, by Marja Mills with whom both Alice and Nelle Harper had willingly cooperated. Yet Nelle Harper’s lawyer pro- duced a signed letter in which Nelle Harper expressed her objection. Alice, however, discounted the letter that her sister had signed. Marja Mills reported in the Washington Post on July 20 of 2015 that Alice had written her that “poor Nelle Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence.” Alice’s letter ends, “I am humiliated, embarrassed, and upset about the suggestion of lack of integrity in my office. I am waiting for the other shoe to fall.”
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