The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Laura couldn’t stand it. She walked around the corner, thinking to have a chat with the nurse, but the nurse’s office with its top-open Dutch door was empty. Inside, on a deep shelf at eye level, stood a hundred-plus three-ring binders in alphabetical order. Yardley, Maude J., was last on the right.

  Movement was slow here in Memory Care.

  The nurse would mosey back from whatever she was doing. She was heavy and wore thick-soled neon-bright sneakers, which made squishy noises when she walked.

  Laura reached over the shelf of the half door, unlatched it, stepped in, and retrieved Maude’s binder. Why was it still here anyway? On the other hand, where would it go?

  The first page was the application.

  A severely physically ill person could not be accepted as a resident, because this was memory care, not a nursing home. A resident couldn’t be violent. Alzheimer’s and dementia could cause rage, which led to hitting and biting. MMC wasn’t set up for that. Poor Philip had moved to the far edge of acceptability. And third, of course, the family had to have enough money.

  This application began with Maude’s date of birth, place of birth, husband’s full name, residence at the time of application, and the last four digits of her social security number. Because residents could not always identify themselves, the facing page had Maude’s current photograph in a plastic sleeve, along with a smaller photo from when she had been a few decades younger. Laura took cell phone photographs of the photos and IDs and replaced the chart.

  Laura didn’t have a good reason to trespass on Maude Yardley. She didn’t have half a reason. She wanted Kenneth not to be a murderer. But if he had not killed Maude, it had been a staff member or an outsider, in which case, Polly was at risk.

  She had to know.

  She let herself out of the record room and latched the half door behind her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Driving up to Middletown, Freddy came to his senses. Nobody had killed Maude. Certainly not Kenneth. A guy who shows up three or four days a week to sit with a brain-dead wife? He’s going to snap? No. He feels homicidal, he skips MMC that week and goes to the casino.

  Still. Could Kenneth have killed his wife for money?

  But if there’s money, he thought, we’re all spending every cent of it on MMC. If we don’t want to shell out, we don’t have our person there. But we all have power of attorney, and if we want money, we just spend it. And he’s the husband; he has the money anyway. On the other hand, Maude just keeps on living, MMC is eating up the whole estate, and maybe Kenneth wants something left for himself.

  When he got to MMC, he sat in the car and people-searched Kenneth Yardley.

  There were two in Connecticut. The one married to Maude Jeanette Kaiser Yardley was in Old Greenwich. Kenneth, the people search informed him, was eighty-eight. Maude was eight-four.

  Wow. Mr. Yardley was some well-preserved dude.

  Do eighty-eight-year-olds commit murder? Does a person really care that much about anything once he’s that old? Isn’t it enough just to breathe again the next morning?

  Old Greenwich was nowhere near Middletown. Kenneth could not be driving daily from Old Greenwich.

  Well, maybe he could. It just seemed like a long way, because Greenwich residents face New York City and hardly know that the rest of Connecticut exists. The drive would be six lanes most of the way: I-95, I-91, and then Route 66, which petered out and became any old road. But even with traffic, it was probably only an hour and a half.

  Still, that was three hours of driving plus all that time hanging out at MMC. It made visiting Maude a full-time job.

  Real estate in Old Greenwich was seriously expensive. The only people who could afford to buy there were Wall Street types with bonuses. Freddy checked Zillow. The Yardley house looked pretty ordinary on its quarter acre, but its worth was estimated at $1.6 million.

  A guy with that kind of house didn’t need to murder his wife to get cash. Just sell the house.

  Why tuck Maude in an institution too far away for her girlfriends to visit? But Maude had probably outlived most of her friends, while dementia drove away the rest.

  Kenneth could have bought the house decades ago when he was a vacuum-cleaner salesman or whatever, and now he was living on social security and couldn’t afford memory care in Fairfield County. But then again—just sell the house.

  The other Kenneth Yardley lived in New Britain, a city with wild variations in prosperity and neighborhood, about fifteen minutes northwest of Middletown. The street view showed a rather sad two-family near the campus of Central Connecticut, probably a cheap student rental with lots of turnover and parties.

  The search listed the same relative—Maude—for both Kenneth Yardleys. So maybe there were not two Kenneths; maybe there was one Kenneth with two houses. Maybe Kenneth had gotten himself housing closer to Maude for these daily visits, which was kind of sweet.

  He checked the tax assessor’s online records. The New Britain house was owned by a Robert Lansing, so Kenneth was probably a renter. He must have kept the Old Greenwich house but be renting in New Britain so he’d be near Maude.

  It was a serious sacrifice. Freddy respected Kenneth for it. He did not want the police deciding that the husband did it.

  But if the husband didn’t do it, and Doc didn’t do it, then somebody on the staff had.

  Staff? As in Jade? Heidi? Vera? Constanza? Mary Lou? Grace?

  No way.

  Freddy went in the front door instead of the employee entrance. For the moment, there was no one at the desk.

  He leaned over the visitor book. It was a large spiral pad on which you were supposed to write your name, the date and time, the resident you were visiting, and your cell phone number. He took a picture of the day of Maude’s death. Kenneth had checked out at 3:00 p.m. Mapes had checked in but forgotten to check out. Freddy of course wasn’t there at all. He went backward, capturing several more pages. Kenneth signed in dutifully two or three days a week. Freddy had been thinking he visited a lot more than that. Was Kenneth also a sign-in skipper?

  Maude had had only one other visitor he could find. A Virginia Lansing had come once. Was she an owner of the duplex?

  You had to be some kind of loyal to visit a woman as deep in dementia as Maude. You can’t take a person like Maude to a restaurant or play cards or ask for the latest. You just sit there and then you leave.

  Constanza shuffled into the lobby at the pace of an Alzheimer’s patient instead of a twenty-year-old clerk.

  “Hey, Constanza,” said Freddy. “Looking great. Love the earrings.” Actually, she looked totally crummy. “Something else happened?” he asked. “What? Tell me.”

  “The police are checking up on everybody. They found out Mary Lou has a criminal record. She’s been fired.”

  Mary Lou hadn’t saved up enough for her dental work. And now she had no income. And she’d have a hard time getting another job. “MMC doesn’t run background checks?” he asked.

  “Mary Lou came through a temp agency, and the temp agency does the background checks. She was so good, they hired her outright, but it turned out that temp agency just says they do a check. And guess what else,” said Constanza. “I found a finger on a string. Sitting here on the desk.”

  Freddy’s eyes crossed.

  “I’m not joking,” said Constanza. “It was a finger, all creepy and dusty and dead, like a zombie finger, but it was a bead hanging from a string. They said it’s made of glass, although it looked like pottery to me.”

  Leper pendants were very collectible. The string would be hemp. And Doc would have been wearing one. “A string like a necklace or a Christmas tree decoration?”

  “Like a necklace, Freddy. You wouldn’t put a dead finger on your tree.”

  “And the string wasn’t broken? It didn’t, like, fall off? Somebody set it down on purpose?”

>   “How would I know? Are you turning into a detective? Everybody else is. It’s the new hobby around here.”

  “When did you find it?”

  “Yesterday.”

  There was no clutter on Constanza’s desktop. Along with her computer was the big sign-in book, a little jar filled with pens and pencils, a small digital clock, and a fake plant. A finger on a string could not lurk unnoticed for several days, so it couldn’t have been there since late Wednesday night.

  Was the finger a sign intended for Freddy? A sign of what? What if Constanza hadn’t mentioned it? What was the plan, leaving it on her desk? And whose plan was it?

  “The police told us to let them know about anything unusual,” said Constanza, “so I gave it to them, and you know what? They recognized it. There’s a clothing store down by that Himalayan gift shop, right on Main Street. They sell stuff like that. Like who would buy it?”

  The police were probably already in Auburn’s shop, questioning her. A woman who had cocaine in her back room would never tell a cop anything.

  Except that he now knew Auburn would fabricate anything.

  Freddy was suddenly really sorry that his pipes were in a cabinet in her shop.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mr. Griffin was trying to get out. “Hey, Mr. Griffin,” said Freddy. “This is good luck. Let’s head on over together.”

  “I think I’m late,” said Mr. Griffin.

  “Heck no. Your timing is perfect.” Freddy took Mr. Griffin’s arm, and together they walked back into the activity room.

  He sat on a metal chair with his grandmother in her wheelchair next to him while Mrs. Maple told a long, boring story about the composer Charles Ives being a summer person in Westbrook in the 1880s. Freddy listened because it was better than thinking about everything else converging on him. “You won’t believe this,” he said, “but I am familiar with Charlie. My mother and my grandmother were strictly classical. NPR was their best friend.”

  “I wish I had known them!” cried Mrs. Maple, forgetting that she was sitting next to that very grandmother. Of course, there was no way to get to know Cordelia Chase in this incarnation. “I’m reading Charlie’s biography,” she said.

  “Already? You just found out about him.”

  “If there is a book lying around unread,” said Mapes, “I attack. Want to hear a great line? Charlie Ives said that in thinking about composing, he kept in mind a brass band with wings.”

  A brass band with wings!

  He’d seen a trumpet bong on Instagram. He didn’t want to copy anything. What else was brass? Maybe he could do a trombone bong. With wings. Awesome.

  A trombone was a complex instrument.

  Where would the water go? In the bell, of course, which was cool but problematic, because a trombone’s bell was in the center of the slide, so the rig could not stand on its bell like a trumpet. His trombone had to be perfect or people would laugh. Could he put glass feet on the U-turn of the slide so it stood upright, a little trombone person? Tricky.

  He’d use clear ruby red for the bell, so you could watch the water bubble, and opaque ruby for the spit valve, braces, and mouthpiece. A water pipe could be any size, and this year, the style was seven or eight inches high.

  A real trombone was a metal project, made out of a sheet, and making it from glass was, like, insane. He’d have to build scaffolding to hold his pieces together for when he welded them, glass to glass.

  Dude. Seriously difficult. But cool.

  He came out of his daydream about the world’s most beautiful rig to find that Mrs. Maple was now interrogating Mrs. Reilly. “You sincerely feel the residents are safe?” said Mapes.

  “Of course.”

  “Obviously the police do not think the residents are safe,” said Mapes, “since they’ve posted an officer here.”

  Whoa, thought Freddy. What happened to my cop antenna?

  He hadn’t even spotted the guy propped up against a wall in the activity room, looking bitter. Probably wondering who he’d offended to get this duty.

  Mrs. Reilly went off to do whatever administrators did. Talking low, Freddy filled Mapes in on his Kenneth search: the two houses, the landlord, and the visit of the Lansing woman, who was probably related to the landlord. It was public information, sitting online, waiting to be read, but it felt like a trespass on Kenneth. Mrs. Maple countered with the details of Maude’s medical record.

  Stuffy old Mapes had gone into a locked (well, latched anyway) office to read private medical records? Now that was trespass.

  Mrs. Maple handed him her cell phone. “Look at the photo of Maude when she was middle-aged.”

  Maude Jeanette Kaiser Yardley had been nice looking. Not nice in the sense of pretty but nice in the sense that she looked like the grandmother everyone wanted. A woman who baked a lot and laughed a lot. Like Grandma, except chunky. The resemblance to MMC’s Maude was hard to spot, but then, dementia was destructive of personality, and with the personality gone, the face changed.

  “What is she standing in front of?” asked Mrs. Maple.

  “Definitely stained glass. She’s in a church.” Freddy had never done stained glass, which he considered basket-weaving, “Kumbaya”-singing 1960s arts-and-crafts crap. Well, not the stained-glass windows in churches, but certainly what hobby stores sold.

  “Kenneth told me they didn’t believe in anything,” said Mapes, “and she didn’t want a funeral, but here she is standing in a church.”

  “Living with dementia could sap anybody’s belief,” said Freddy. Although in his case, a minister’s wife was keeping him in casseroles and the minister was helping with Grandma, so Freddy had, as it were, secondhand faith. And if he had a team in his dementia world, it was not his distant sisters; it was the Burnworths. I should go to church or something, he thought. Show my gratitude.

  “We know she lived in Old Greenwich, because that’s on the application,” said Mrs. Maple, “and therefore I think the church in this photograph is in Old Greenwich. I’m going to call every church secretary in that town to see where Maude was a member.”

  “Will they tell you?”

  “Of course they will. They’ll want to put an announcement in the church bulletin so Maude’s Old Greenwich friends will know about her death.”

  Freddy didn’t get why Mapes would do that, although certainly he never needed a reason to do things. Is it fun? You’re on.

  “Also under consideration,” said Mrs. Maple, “is that your grandmother has called Kenneth a meany beany, and later she said there were other meany beanies. Anything a resident says is suspect, but still.”

  Freddy’s mind skittered to the awful possibility that his grandmother had witnessed the murder. Why leave her alive to tell the tale? If you were going to slaughter one old lady, would you stop at slaughtering another one? He took Grandma’s hand to reassure himself that she had not been suffocated. He glanced at the aides, the other residents, the fresh flowers on the tables and the snacks on the tray. He still could not believe that anybody had been murdered.

  He pulled out his cell and phoned his Dakota sister. He and Kara never used preliminaries. “Karrie Darrie, can you remember Grandma using the phrase ‘meany beany’?”

  “She used to call Jenny that. Remember what a bully Jenny was? Always pushing me and Emma around.”

  “Jenny? Jenny is a total soft touch.”

  “Well, now. She did grow up. But then. It was always Jenny’s toy, Jenny’s dessert, Jenny’s TV channel, Jenny’s shopping trip. Emma and I were just people to yell at.”

  This sounded fabricated to Freddy. On the other hand, his sisters were a lot older than he was. He hadn’t been born when they were battling seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds or whatever. He said, “Tell me about meany beany.”

  “Why?” said Kara, leaving out the “h” so the word sounded extra irked. />
  “Whhhy,” he corrected her. “Because Grandma’s been saying it.”

  “Grandma never uses a vulgarity, a swear word, or any syllable that could be construed as ugly or rude. So she never said, ‘Jenny, you rotten little shit, cut it out.’ She said, ‘Jenny! Do not be a meany beany.’”

  What could Kenneth have done to merit meany-beany status? He hadn’t pulled the chair out from under his wife or smacked her. In fact when Grandma called Kenneth a meany beany, Maude hadn’t been murdered yet, had she?

  Freddy never had a good time frame. His days slopped into each other, and nights vanished altogether.

  “I’m in the car-pool line,” said Kara. “Gotta go.”

  South Dakota vanished and Mrs. Maple leaned forward again. “I need more about Kenneth Yardley. I want to check on money. Money is the reason for most violence and crime.”

  “Mapes, if Kenneth killed Maude, it’s over. We don’t have to worry about Aunt Polly or Grandma. We can let go of this.”

  She gave him the identical disappointed expression of every woman in his family. “And what about Maude?” she asked, gently reproving. “Do we worry about how she died? Do we worry about her pain, suffering, and fear? Or just say, ‘Oh well. Whatever.’”

  It came to Freddy that he was the one who most needed Kenneth to be the murderer. Because otherwise, the murderer might actually be Doc, in which case it would be Freddy’s fault.

  Heidi burst onto the scene. “Sing-along time, Freddy! You have such a nice voice! And Mrs. Maple! Such a lovely soprano! ‘Row, row, row your boat’! ‘Here we go, looby loo’! Bring Grandma, Freddy!”

  His grandmother croaked, “Looby loo,” and Heidi cried, “See? Grandma remembers! Isn’t this wonderful?” and Freddy was doomed.

  When he was finally back at Grandma’s house, Freddy headed straight for the patio and the redwood lounge chair. He needed to get high to make his next phone call. He entertained himself by installing an appropriate ringtone for the Leper. He actually found a ringtone of breaking glass—like a picture window falling ten stories and smashing on concrete.