Brokerage Assists in a Surprise Christmas Homecoming

A woman who had been wandering the streets for eight years was headed home for a Christmas reunion with her family because she remembered she once had invested in the stock market.

When a bedraggled Alice Perley wandered into the brokerage firm of A.G. Edwards & Sons in Nashville last week, the first person she met by the elevator was Michael Guess.

“I could tell she was homeless,” Guess, a financial analyst with the firm, said Friday. “It was obvious she needed help.”

When the woman told him she thought she had some money invested with the firm, Guess was skeptical, but “we need to help people regardless, and I wasn’t going to walk away from her.” So the 44-year-old Guess invited the woman into his office and listened to her story.

“She was vague about everything except that she remembered the name of our firm and felt that somehow she had money with us,” Guess said.

Guess said he and another broker took some cash from their pockets to give her but she refused, insisting she had money in an account.

“I knew something was going on then,” Guess said. “So I put through a call to our company’s office in Atlanta and asked them to check on it.”

A few minutes later he had confirmation that Perley was a client -- and that she had been missing for eight years despite exhaustive search efforts by her family.

Guess said it appeared that Perley, a college graduate with a chemistry degree, property and other investments, had disappeared from her home in Kentucky after a painful divorce. She left a commercial flight during a stopover at Nashville’s airport and lived in the woods, on the streets and in shelters in the intervening years.

The firm refused to discuss her investment, citing customer confidentiality.

While Guess was still on the phone with the Edwards office in Atlanta, the woman’s brother, Fred Perley of Charlotte, N.C., called and talked to her.

“She was happy -- really very happy when she heard her brother’s voice,” Guess said. “It was obvious she was ready to come home. At that point, I left the office to give them privacy, but I don’t mind saying I felt a real glow myself.”

The brother came to Nashville on Friday to take the woman home.

Said Guess: “Well, that’s what Christmas is really all about, isn’t it? We’re not supposed to judge others. We’re supposed to remember to help one another and not just walk on by -- aren’t we?”