The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “This place is full of meany beanies,” said Freddy’s grandmother darkly.

  “What is a meany beany, Grandma?”

  But she was already gone, having drifted back to her own world with the ease and speed Freddy found so unnerving.

  Laura considered the sheet event in Aunt Polly’s room. She could report Jade, deliver a lecture to Jade, or change the sheets herself.

  Or ignore it. She had exactly the right amount of energy to ignore it.

  Poor newly widowed Kenneth paused in front of Maude’s door exactly as he had the other day. Not in, not out, just swaying.

  How dreadful he must feel, thought Laura.

  Kenneth would have named a funeral home prior to Maude moving in, because they didn’t give a new resident a bed until the death plans were made. Now, with her body gone, Kenneth stood at the edge of a grim task: clearing up the dregs of an institutionalized existence. He could not dillydally. There was a waiting list: families who needed the death of somebody else’s loved one so their own loved one could move in.

  That was all Maude was now. A vacancy.

  Laura thought of the vacancy in her own heart. Many vacancies. Her heart was a motel of empty rooms. She walked over. Maude’s door was taped shut, a peculiarity Laura hadn’t seen before. “I’m sorry, Kenneth,” she said softly. “You loved Maude so. You never let her down. You always came.” It was her supreme compliment: he always came.

  Kenneth tried and failed to smile.

  “Would you like help planning the service?” she asked. “I’m a church organist. Very familiar with funerals. I could email or phone friends and family for you.”

  He stared at her, backed away, and circled the nurses’ station rather than have a conversation.

  Laura hoped that she would be as rattled when Polly died. The end of a life should provoke a deep reaction. She said a prayer for Maude, for Kenneth, for Aunt Polly, for Cordelia Chase, for Freddy. And for me, Lord, she thought. Please help me.

  Two cops came into the common room, one in uniform, one not. Patients shuffled in slippers or orthopedic shoes and staff squeaked in colorful sneakers, but the hard-soled shoes of the cops smacked the tile like storm troopers. Freddy had a hard time being rational around cops. He loathed them on principle. He took Grandma’s hand and drew enough comfort from her presence to glance at the uniformed guy.

  Shawn, thrilled when shoreline constables got body cameras, had demonstrated for Freddy. The battery pack, added to the row of waistline stuff, had been both obvious and invisible in all the clutter. The camera, about the size of a lighter, was attached to Shawn’s collar, sitting on his shoulder. Shawn could watch his own video of his own actions on his own cell phone, and the video was also sent to headquarters. It wasn’t a selfie. It was more of a life-ie, recording every act and word.

  The uniformed cop wore a camera.

  The guy not in uniform could be a detective, not that Freddy had ever met one, so he was going by TV, but he wore a suit and did not appear to have any equipment.

  They’ve come for me, he thought. He couldn’t swallow.

  Jade was still frozen in place, still staring out the window instead of at the cops in her very own ward.

  They’ve come for her, maybe? Cops love a perp walk. They’re going to terrify Jade and humiliate her. Or me. But I don’t think Social Security sends cops.

  He remembered Br. What if I got set up? Like Br?

  But who would set him up? Not the Lep and Doc; they needed him for the paper pushing. Auburn? Was this her new hobby?

  He didn’t think Auburn would bother to destroy somebody unless she could watch. And how could Auburn know about MMC?

  Grandma heard the loud slam of shoes and looked around nervously. “Arthur?” she said, her voice high and trembling. “Arthur, let’s go home now.”

  This was a favorite line, and several residents picked it up.

  “I want to go home too,” said Betty. “Is there a train?”

  “Thirty-seven,” called Irene. “Thirty-eight.”

  “Get away from my desk!” yelled Philip.

  Staff converged to comfort patients and get them back to their chairs or their rooms and especially to offer snacks, because there was nothing like a short cylinder of Ritz crackers, half a banana, or a paper cup of Froot Loops to distract a person.

  Mrs. Reilly, the chief administrator, was right behind the cops.

  He had met Mrs. Reilly when they were signing Grandma up, but mostly George and Lily Burnworth had pushed through the paperwork. Freddy’s job had been the literal physical transfer of his grandmother. Sometimes when he thought of the lies he told Grandma so she would go easily, he wanted to smash himself with a tire iron.

  Kenneth, having just escaped Mrs. Maple, now eased out of the room behind Mrs. Reilly and the cops. He kept his head down. He was either grieving for Maude or just as unhappy about cops as Freddy.

  Wait. Had he changed his bloody T-shirt?

  He looked down, and yes, he had, but the sweatshirt he’d chosen featured a Salt design, with a single insane eye and dragon’s teeth below bright-pink gums. But seriously, if that meant anything to the cops, then they were into pot too, and they’d just wish they had a cool sweatshirt like this.

  Mrs. Reilly waved at them. “These are two of our most frequent visitors, Mr. Bell and Mrs. Maple. Mr. Bell’s grandmother has the room next door to Maude Yardley. Mrs. Maple’s aunt lives directly across the common room from Maude.”

  The cop in uniform went on to Maude’s room. Mrs. Maple, looking elegant and competent, held out her hand to the cop in the suit. Cops don’t shake hands, because they don’t want you getting a grip on them first. But public-courtesy-wise, Mrs. Maple gave him no choice.

  “Wayne Ames,” said the suit. “I’m a detective with the Middletown police.”

  “I’m Laura Maple,” she said, “and this is my aunt, Miss Lambert.”

  “Good morning,” said Polly in the loud monotone that dementia had given her. It was actually afternoon, but it had been years since Polly had the slightest idea of time.

  “Good morning,” Wayne Ames said to Polly, and Freddy reluctantly gave him points for not correcting her.

  “How are you today?” Polly asked. She was wearing a food-stained bib, holding a rag doll in one hand and a hearing aid in the other.

  “Very well, thank you,” said the detective uncertainly.

  Freddy understood. It took a while to get comfortable with dementia. Like never.

  “You look quite dashing,” said Aunt Polly, and a stranger had no way of knowing that Polly said this to any man, even fellow residents in food-stained sweatpants, and that she had now reached the end of her patter.

  “Thank you,” said Wayne Ames, pleased and surprised.

  So he was susceptible to flattery even from a dementia patient. This seemed a useful piece of knowledge.

  The cop turned his attention to Freddy.

  What if he was required to identify himself? He’d left his wallet in the car, and no way was he going to that car when there were cops here and he was high and there was another nub in the cup holder. Okay, they didn’t usually prosecute grass anymore, but still. “Freddy Bell,” he said. “My grandmother, Mrs. Chase.”

  Out the window, he saw Kenneth emerge from the building. Three cops converged on him. Which meant a total of five cops at MMC. Kenneth Yardley’s stocky body was engulfed in dark uniforms and bulging accessories.

  A pipe guy needed only one accessory, made of glass. Well, two, if you counted the lighter. But cops, they needed a gun and a stun gun and a flashlight and a radio and something to bludgeon you with, and even through the iron fence and the landscaping, Freddy could see Kenneth wilt.

  The guy had just lost his wife. Whatever their issue was, it didn’t take three cops to ask a question or two. But that was cops. Their a
ctual weapon was to loom over you and threaten you.

  “Where is my machine?” asked his grandmother.

  The detective looked around for a machine.

  “Her walker,” explained Freddy. “We don’t need it right now, Grandma,” he said softly.

  The detective pulled up a chair. “Did either of you know Maude Yardley? The patient who just died?” he asked.

  In the beginning, Freddy couldn’t tell anybody apart: the men looked alike and the women looked alike. They were old and gray, in body and in personality. Most of the men were thin and bent and tended to frown or else stare vacantly. They knew this wasn’t the life they were supposed to lead, but they didn’t know how to get back. Most of the women had been given the same haircut: short porcupine hair. Maude’s hair had been white and sort of vertical, as if gravity no long applied, while Grandma’s was a white puffball. Maude and Grandma even had similar bodies: thin and shapeless, as if they had caved in and just their clothes existed.

  Sometimes, on the bedroom door, a family would tape a photograph of the resident as she had been in better years. It made Freddy pretty gloomy to see a color portrait of some stylish woman with a twinkle in her eyes and know that it matched the dull-eyed carcass pushing a cheap aluminum walker with tennis balls fitted over the legs.

  “Kind of,” said Freddy. “Maude and my grandmother sat at the same table for meals.”

  “We’ve got some questions about her death.”

  Freddy had already forgotten that Yale was doing an autopsy. He was suddenly terrified of how easily he forgot stuff. I’m barely twenty-six and I’m a candidate for memory care, he thought. Too much weed? Too much mental burden from Grandma and the house and the Leper and all?

  He knew what his sisters would say. Pull yourself together, Freddy. You don’t have any burdens compared to everybody else. Behave like a grown-up for once.

  The autopsy had to be about drugs in Maude’s system.

  What if MMC gets into trouble for some medication doled out by mistake? he thought. What if they shut the place down? What if I have to move Grandma? What if we can’t afford anyplace else? What if I have to bring her home again? How am I going to do that? Nothing in the house is safe. Stairs, gas stove, lots of doors, railroad tracks at the back of the yard. I’d have to hire aides, 24-7. They might have to live in. And a cleaning lady, because nobody’s going to stay half an hour the way the house is right now.

  “The forensic examiner thinks Mrs. Yardley was suffocated,” said the cop.

  Freddy had meant to be silent and uninvolved, but he moaned. “Suffocated! Just when you think you know the worst of this dementia crap, it gets even more worse. It can take away your ability to steer a pencil and recognize your own family, but I wouldn’t have said it took away your ability to turn over and keep breathing. I mean, that comes from some cortex or something, doesn’t it? Even if your thinking brain is full of holes, doesn’t your breathing brain still work? Now I have to worry about my grandmother squashing her nose against her own pillow?” He was babbling, a sure sign of being high. The cop’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

  “Maude Yardley didn’t suffocate from not turning over,” said the detective. “Cloth was held over her face. Her mouth is full of lint. Her jaw and neck are bruised where she was held down.”

  Chapter Nine

  Oh, Kenneth! thought Laura. Did you suffocate your wife? Because who else would? You should just have stopped visiting if you were that upset.

  Her entire body shivered, inside and out. She imagined Kenneth in a flurry of desperation or frustration or rage just lunging at poor Maude. Perhaps his only thought at the time was that he would no longer have a wife who breathed, ate, and defecated but did not, in fact, live.

  Laura was one of the lucky ones, because Aunt Polly was somewhat savvy on her good days. They could still sit with old family albums, and Polly could identify many of the photographs and tell the old stories. They could still play checkers, although Polly could never remember whether she was black or red, and sometimes couldn’t even recognize black and red, and the game was apt to peter out from sheer confusion.

  Whereas Philip cursed and whacked people with his cane.

  Edna had not smiled in a year and generally stared at her lap all day long.

  Although Polly would not be able to follow the detective’s conversation, another resident might, so Laura said, “Let us not discuss this in the presence of my aunt and Mr. Bell’s grandmother.”

  “Oh,” said the detective. “I was sort of thinking they don’t know what’s going on.”

  Laura stood up. “It’s unpredictable. We’ll chat in the parlor off the lobby.”

  The detective was startled and annoyed. Probably liked to be in charge, but so did Laura. “I’m headed home now, Aunt Polly,” she said, patting Polly’s shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”

  “It was nice of you to come,” said her aunt. But that was just a remaining memorized phrase. Polly did not look into Laura’s eyes nor register that Laura was leaving.

  “What is your aunt even doing here?” the detective asked. “She seems fine to me.”

  Suffocated meaning murdered?

  Freddy did swat mosquitos, but other than that, he was pretty much a no-kill kind of guy. And yet he loved violent movies, violent video games, and television series. The more gunshots, explosions, chases, knives, and broken jaws, the better. What did that say about his psyche?

  Anyway, murder? Here in Memory Care? Where there wasn’t even function, let alone violence? Who could possibly have done that to Maude? And why?

  The utter helplessness of a person like Maude made it immensely more awful. Freddy had a nightmare vision of fingers closing on a thin, wrinkled sagging throat, gripping a towel and jamming it into the mouth, flattening the tongue, cutting off the oxygen. And what could Maude do? Nothing except die.

  He’d never seen anybody but Kenneth visit Maude. Not that that meant anything. Freddy was here only three or four times a week and rarely stayed over an hour.

  It would be easy enough for anybody to get into MMC, he thought. You just say you’re visiting your great-aunt or whatever. It’s not like they ask for proof. You sign in, the front desk clerk opens the inner door for you or gives you the door code, you find your way to the right area, you visit.

  The aides were often so busy that there was no staff in the common room. They were in bathrooms lowering people onto the toilet and cleaning them up; they had taken a patient to the shower/tub room; they were walking somebody in the back garden or doing a resident’s laundry.

  You wouldn’t choose mealtime, when the staff gathered all residents and were busy mopping up spilled milk or spooning in mashed potatoes. No, you needed your victim alone in her room.

  Freddy figured the best time was after lunch and before the shift change. Patients were exhausted, napping in their wheelchairs or their rooms, while the staff grabbed a bite to eat in the TV area. People with Alzheimer’s and dementia did not watch television, because the speed of the action was too much to process, so the corner with the big TV, the two vinyl sofas (easier to mop up), and the little card table (as if anybody here still knew hearts from diamonds) were unused.

  The aides kept an eye out, but they wouldn’t know every visitor. Freddy didn’t recognize half the visitors, and he’d been coming for months. Adult children of residents generally worked by day and visited evenings or weekends, which Freddy never did. And old friends—golf partners, bridge partners, neighbors—could have visited fifty times and never crossed paths with a particular aide.

  Freddy didn’t even recognize half the residents. There was high turnover. Elderly people going downhill always found death at the bottom. Or if the person needed medical nursing care, he had to go to some other facility. Or families ran out of money and found a less expensive place. Or felt too guilty and brought their loved one back home.
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  A stranger could fit in pretty easily if he had any idea what the routine was or was good at party crashing. Freddy had always thought that crashing parties would be a fun hobby, but he didn’t have the clothes for it or the time.

  Mrs. Maple marched out of the common room.

  “Mr. Bell?” said the detective. “Mind coming along?”

  Freddy minded a lot, but coming along would result in less attention than refusing. Mapes guided them into the little yellow sitting room on the public side of the locked doors, where the staff interviewed job applicants and families discussed fees. The sofas were very soft, presumably to cushion the blow of finding out how much memory care cost.

  Freddy told himself that nobody in diapers ever sat here, but he kept standing. Mrs. Maple sat, adjusting pillows and sweater edges. The detective took the only hard chair and said to Freddy, “So you like this place? You’re comfortable with the staff?”

  “Sure.”

  “You feel your grandmother is safe here?”

  “Of course. What are you saying? You think somebody on the staff hurt Maude?”

  The detective was expressionless and silent.

  “I totally promise you that the staff is… They… No! Never. They would never hurt a resident.”

  “Why are you so sure?” asked the detective, as if the only reason Freddy could be sure the staff hadn’t murdered Maude was because he, Freddy, had done it.

  Murder is a million miles from not changing a sheet, thought Freddy. If a staff member killed Maude, that person is insane. I know these people. They’re poster women for sanity.

  “The staff,” said Mrs. Maple icily, “is above reproach,” she added, enunciating so carefully the words all but spattered on the guy’s jacket.

  “How many employees do you actually know? Have you met the night staff?” asked the detective.

  Freddy had never once been here after dinner or before breakfast. He did not know a single person on the night shift, except Vera because now and then, she worked days. “Listen, you’re going in the wrong direction,” he told Ames. “The residents sleep all the time. Half of them are always dozing in their wheelchairs or at the dining table. They sleep so hard you can’t even wake them. Maybe Maude just fell asleep against her pillow. Like the way with newborn babies it can happen? I forget what they call it, but it’s why babies have to sleep on their backs and their heads get all flat.”