Baby, It's Dead Outside

by E M Kaplan

  In comparison, Betty’s side was like the rest of this facility. Her bedding was dark green and looked like it would smell of moth balls.

  Do those exist still? Where would you buy a moth ball?

  Josie spied the edge of something caught in the cushion of Betty’s chair and wobbled over to investigate. “Look at that. It’s her Kindle. She’s not off in a corner somewhere reading. Not without this.”

  She flipped open the cover and turned it on, but it was just the most basic model e-reader with no fancy note-taking ability and nothing tucked inside the pocket of the cover.

  So much for Betty’s supposed spy tactics. Just more paranoia on poor Lynetta’s part.

  The seat cushion of the chair was slightly askew, and when Josie pushed it with her knee, it didn’t shift back into place, which annoyed her. She wasn’t OCD, but Betty seemed a bit finicky, so Josie shoved it again, being careful not to topple herself over since she was essentially standing on one foot. The cushion didn’t budge.

  With her free hand, she grasped the threadbare fabric piping that wound around the edge of the cushion and pulled it forward, thinking it was just wedged diagonally in one of its corners. The cushion came off the chair as she also dropped Betty’s Kindle to the floor with a cracking sound.

  “Crap.”

  Josie was about to ask Darren Ross for help. He stood in the doorway with an annoying and skeptical expression that brought the words “throat punch” to her mind. She wasn’t permanently handicapped, but wasn’t he ever going offer to lend her a hand?

  How unhelpful could a person in the healthcare industry be?

  She gritted her teeth but did a double-take when she noticed a small white shape tucked in the seat of Betty’s chair.

  “Well, no wonder the pillow wouldn’t fit,” she said, bending over to look.

  Her thoughts screeched to a halt and her fingers paused just millimeters away from picking up the vial of chalky white powder. Her instincts and the lessons ingrained from watching hours of crime shows on TV screamed at her not to touch potential evidence—but she did lean closer for a better look.

  Uh oh. Is this what arsenic looks like?

  Part 4: Major Meltdown

  There’s no greater inconvenience in the modern world—other than stomach cramps when you’re stuck in a traffic jam—than a busted refrigerator.

  First world problems, right? Wrong. When your fridge fails, your precious culinary gems are destroyed, crumb by crumb, all because of a technological failure. Goodbye, herbed pot roast, I hardly knew ye. Farewell, deliciously light frozen key lime pie. I thought I’d see you again one day, but alas, it’s not to be. So long, savory sauce cubes in the ice tray. Now you’re nothing but muddied memories.

  And what else do the melting ice caps reveal? Hidden atrocities. Forgotten crimes of foods gone by. That lump of spice cake with the unfortunate clumps of unmixed flour, pound cake loaves that could kill a man with their resemblance to patio pavers, and chalky Christmas cookies from a well-meaning coworker. Long-forgotten reminders of the past that lay buried and frozen, in stasis until the previously obscured frozen lumps slowly begin reveal themselves.

  —Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food

  Chapter 30

  Not long after Josie’s discovery of the tube of white powder, the police arrived at Pleasant Valley to collect and catalog the mysterious substance. Josie’s gut feeling was that it might be arsenic—poison, for sure. She was no expert, but she was willing to take Dr. Charles’s hunch as a point in the right direction.

  Where does a person even get arsenic? You can’t just go down to Wallyworld and pick up the Great Value version of it.

  As she stood in the hall outside Lynetta’s room—trying to stay out of the way—an investigator extracted the vial of powder and took a statement from a flustered Darren Ross. She didn’t blame the guy for being upset. Just a few hours ago he’d been having a normal day, just the average number of ambulance calls. Now he had two missing old women—one dead and one possibly on the lam.

  “We have several aide stations throughout our facility,” he said, his voice getting higher and higher as he grew more agitated. “I’ve already alerted them to check the rooms in their zones for Betty. We have protocols in place for this kind of situation.”

  Standard procedures for beating the bushes for a senior citizen homicide suspect?

  Darren Ross explained further. “If a resident falls or has a medical incident, we need to be able to locate them as quickly as possible. If Betty is still on the premises, we will find her within a matter of minutes.”

  His phone chirped in walkie-talkie mode as each member of his staff checked in. When roll call finished, not a single one of them had seen hide nor hair of Betty Edwards. The woman had vanished somehow in a facility full of rules and monitored doors.

  A sense of dread grew and then settled in Josie’s gut. Even if Betty had harmed Lynetta, she was still a fragile old woman, vulnerable and easy to injure. Whoever had put her up to harming her roommate had provided the powder and had then taken her away from the nursing home after the deed was done. Unless Betty had somehow been faking her medical and impaired cognitive state just to get closer to Lynetta for this very purpose.

  Cloak and dagger of the geriatric kind—never underestimate the older generation. They’ve had their mettle tested by gas shortages, poverty, and the Vietnam War.

  “What about exits?” the cop asked him.

  The police officer was a blocky, stout guy not much taller than Josie with a full head of gray hair and startling blue eyes. He was also a bit of a loud talker, and she had the urge to back away when he spoke. As it was, she couldn’t help a slight leaning back, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  Josie glanced at the small window in the room. The pane was glazed over with frost outside. The window sill, while clean, had a row of knickknacks on it. While the inside had a hand crank for opening the glass a few inches—at least for people without arthritis in their hands—the window and its surroundings had clearly not been disturbed. Even if a little old lady could open it, no one had.

  As the cop continued to ask questions, Lake Park Villa’s mayor, Dan Beardsley, showed up. He strode toward her through the hallway, earmuffs still on, puffy brown jacket making a whisking noise she could hear his entire approach. A wisp of his flyaway blond hair bounced with each step.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, pivoting on her good foot and shifting her crutch.

  “What happened to you?” he asked at the same time, their words overlapping.

  “Slipped on the ice.”

  “Oh, that sucks. Gotta be really careful. Some of it, you can’t even see. You just have to assume you’re at Disney on Ice and shuffle your feet.”

  She pictured herself doing the baby Bambi spin before she’d gone down with a cartoon-worthy flailing of her arms. Her spill had all happened so fast, anything was possible.

  “My landlady’s nephew was supposed to salt the sidewalk.”

  He grimaced and said apologetically, as if it were his fault, “At least the ice was pretty.”

  “Sure was, from what I could see lying on my back.” She didn’t want to sound like she was blaming him for his town’s weather. After all, it was northern Illinois in February, so she dropped it and repeated her initial question. “Why are you here?”

  He held up his phone as if that might answer her. “I heard a call on the police scanner. I’m not just a government official; I’m also a reporter for the Lake Park Villa Gazette.”

  Double duty mayor in this little town. Why am I not surprised?

  He lowered his voice. “I’m here because we’re doing a top secret exposé on the alleged code violations at Pleasant Valley. I mentioned them to you before, but this lady—” He pointed at Lynetta’s room, “was supposedly poisoned. She just died an extremely gruesome death. Poison is not a pleasant way to go. Acute nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea. It would have been as messy as Ebola without the bleeding from
the orifices. I can just imagine the panic she must have felt as her organs began to slowly shut down. She probably was dizzy, weak, and disoriented, and then kaput, she died. I mean, it just sounds like a terrible way to go.”

  He paused and then asked, “So what are you doing here? This historical building is hardly a destination vacation spot for out-of-towners.”

  She tipped her chin toward Lynetta’s door. “The dead lady was my aunt.”

  “What?—Oh, damn.” She could see him visibly trying to regroup and actually pitied him. He stuttered a bit more, offering his distressed condolences. She watched him in a clinical way, feeling a bit detached herself. Is this normal? she wondered. Then again, she’d barely known Lynetta, and also, she’d had a few hours to deal with the shock…or was she still in shock?

  Telling him that Lynetta had been her aunt had felt natural this time. Josie hadn’t even stumbled over the words. The leaden weight in her stomach was real grief. She still wanted to find a real heir and offload the money and responsibility, but she genuinely mourned the poor woman for as short a time as she’d been acquainted with her.

  No one deserved to die like that.

  He cleared his throat. “So I suppose it would be bad form if I took a few photos?”

  

  “Does anyone know where the roommate is?” Dan Beardsley asked her as they moved into the hallway to let the police look around inside the room. He slipped his phone back into his coat pocket after he finished snapping some pictures of the alleged crime scene.

  “Betty Edwards is gone. She disappeared—she’s nowhere on the property. They can’t find her,” Josie told him.

  He frowned. “What do you mean? She’s missing? This place isn’t that big. She has to be here somewhere. How far away can a little old lady with memory problems get?”

  At his words, everyone around them stopped speaking and stared at him.

  Josie knew firsthand about the tendency of some dementia-addled patients to wander. Years ago when her own mother had walked away from home and gotten lost twice before Josie had realized the extent of her memory problems. Her mother had come back from walks later and later before they realized she was trying to find her way “home”—not their little house in the suburbs, but her childhood hut in Thailand.

  In Lake Park Villa’s frigid weather, however, Betty Edwards had the added threat of freezing to death.

  The bustle started back up in a flurry of activity as one of the uniformed police officers spoke into his shoulder walkie-talkie, which chirped and crackled. Static cleared over the connection and he turned away, gesturing Darren Ross to follow him outside the room as he began to radio his dispatcher a description of the missing Betty. The woman dispatcher’s voice came back through, confirming that she was requesting additional searchers and that it would be posted shortly on Facebook as well.

  “Hold up a minute,” Josie said, more to herself than anyone else. “Betty is a memory care patient, too? That doesn’t make any sense. She seemed sharp as a tack.”

  More than sharp—cutting and sarcastic, in fact. I’m no doctor, but a woman as lucid and as snarky as that is not going to wander off into a cornfield in the middle of winter. Not unless someone took her out of here and left her there on purpose…

  Darren Ross interrupted his statement with the police to tell her, “These are all memory care patients in this wing. We don’t mix them all together, but every patient is different. It may not be obvious with some until you get to know them a bit better.” Then he turned back to his questioner.

  Josie frowned suddenly wondering if Lynetta had asked to move into the wing on her own or if someone had requested that she have a place here. She made a mental note to ask Greta the next time they spoke.

  Dan Beardsley got his phone back out and snapped a couple of photos of Lynetta’s side of the room with his phone. Then he thought better of it and included Betty’s side as well. “Well, if Betty poisoned Lynetta, maybe she tried to make a run for it,” he said, speculating as he captured the scene, zooming in on Betty’s reading chair.

  “On foot? In sub-zero windchills?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe someone came here and picked her up.”

  “First of all, she left her Kindle.” Which seemed highly out of character. Josie knew Betty wouldn’t have left her beloved e-reader behind, even if she was fleeing the scene of a crime. “And second of all…”

  Josie felt her eyes widened as she had a thought. Any accomplice, unwitting or not who had come to collect Betty Edwards would have to sign in at the front desk and be buzzed through the door by Marcy, the grouchy Gorgon guarding the front gates of this messed up place. If anyone had come or gone, with or without Betty Edwards, the clipboards at the front desk would be a clear record of who had come through and what time they’d been there.

  “I’m going up to the front desk,” Josie told Dan Beardsley.

  “Aha,” he said, catching her meaning. “Marcy.”

  Chapter 31

  “That woman is not going to tell you anything,” Josie warned him. “I’ve tried buttering her up. Nothing works. Not candy, not alcohol, and definitely not being nice.”

  He shot her a raised eyebrow. “She’s a tough nut to crack, but she’s no match for my style of persuasion. I’ve got insane skills in this department. Watch the master and learn.”

  She followed him back down the hallway—her crutch making it a pain in the neck trying to keep up with him…but seriously, couldn’t he slow down just a tad?—out the front doors to the reception area where Marcy had her head down, working on something behind the counter.

  Dan Beardsley went right up to the counter and laid his hands out flat, as if he were going to crawl across it like Spider-Man.

  Marcy lifted her gaze from her work and stared first with a pissed-off scowl at his fingers, which were making prints on her counter. “What do you want?” she asked, pushing back her desk chair and standing up, in full-on Gorgon mode.

  “The master, huh?” Josie asked, trying to keep the scoff out of her voice and failing.

  “Patience,” he muttered over his shoulder.

  “What are you doing hanging out with him?” Marcy asked her, suddenly on the offensive. “This guy,” she jabbed toward him with a blunt-tipped thumb, “dated my mother.”

  He shook his head. “That was ancient history and you know it. Water under the bridge.”

  “You coulda saved me from step-dad number two.”

  “Doubtful. Your mom never would let anyone save her.”

  “Too late now. We’ll never know.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?”

  “What do you want anyway?” Marcy didn’t look any closer to helping their cause than if Josie had come down here and received the cold shoulder on her own.

  Josie watched the exchange between the two with mounting frustration. Betty was either in danger or on the run. In either case, time was of the essence.

  “My Aunt Lynetta is dead. We found some kind of poison in Betty Edwards’s side of the room, and now she’s missing.” Josie blurted out, even though nothing had been proven.

  “Jesus,” Marcy said, her jaw going a bit slack. “I thought it was just a normal ‘oh, someone’s wandered off again.’ I guess that explains why Tommy is here.”

  When Josie looked confused, Dan Beardsley explained, “Police Officer Jablonski and his partner.”

  Does everyone know everyone else in this town?

  Josie nearly asked the question out loud, but the answer was obviously yes. She wondered how long it would take for her to get ingratiated with the residents if she actually moved here…and suspected the number might be in the double-digits for all their Midwestern friendliness. At least in Boston there was no pretense of politeness.

  She took a deep breath and shook herself out of her negativity.

  I’m just frustrated. Worried about a little old lady murderer. Mad at my ankle. And disgusted with myself for not believing Lynetta enough to insist she leave
the nursing home before she’d been harmed.

  Marcy admitted, “I could see them near Betty’s room on the cameras, but I didn’t think anything was wrong. It was just Harris after all. No big deal.”

  

  Two minutes later, Josie perched on her crutch next to Dan Beardsley, crowding Marcy behind her desk, looking at video footage. From this vantage point, Josie could see not only what was on the computer monitor, but also everything on Marcy’s desk that had been hidden from the other side.

  First of all, she really does like chocolate, the big liar-head.

  The woman had an open bag of fun-sized Kit Kat bars on the desk right below the counter, invisible to anyone standing opposite her. In addition to that, however, she also had a sizable collection of vintage Troll Dolls, the creepy plastic figurines with beady black eyes and a shock of neon fuzz on top of their heads. On each of these dolls, the hair had been carefully whittled to a perfect point, like maybe their owner played with them when she was bored at work.

  While Marcy accessed the facility’s server where video footage was stored, Josie pushed aside the top clipboard to the side of Marcy’s desk, looking for the list of this morning’s visitors.

  “Hey. Don’t touch that.”

  Josie didn’t recognize any names or signatures on the clipboard. She raised her hands in the universal gesture for Who me? “Not touching anything. Just leaning, getting the weight off my foot.” Her ankle actually was throbbing again, but she noticed Marcy—apparently not the most thoughtful healthcare worker either…was it an epidemic?—did not offer her a chair.

  But now Josie could clearly see the day’s sign-in sheet. Depressingly, not many visitors had been through the doors today. As she scanned down the sheet that she’d revealed, she didn’t see anything that jumped out at her, but she made a mental note to visit her mother’s nursing home as soon as she got back to Boston. Even if her mother mistook her for a nurse again.

  Marcy queued up the video from earlier in the day. “About what time are we looking at?”