The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Oh, yes.

  A work of art, elegant but masculine. The clear slides and the ruby bell gleamed like music. The trombone fit perfectly in his hand. Utility was crucial in a water pipe, and his beautiful trombone wasn’t bulky or awkward but transferred easily from hand to hand.

  The best glass of his life.

  He was shaking with excitement. He made a ten-second video, the trombone on its little feet and then in his hand, rotating it to show off all its glory.

  He set up an Instagram auction, tapped in his hashtag poetry, and braced himself for applause or contempt.

  But if he sat glued to Instagram waiting for results, he’d be mental. He had to wait a while. He clock-watched because if he checked the time on his cell phone, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from checking Instagram too. Grandma’s house had a lot of clocks. Some of them he had changed at daylight savings, and some of them he hadn’t.

  Freddy killed time playing Grandma’s piano. It hadn’t been tuned in forever, but Freddy liked it out of tune. It gave the notes a shuddery feel, like they were trying to get up and run. He sang along, making up hashtag lyrics for future auctions.

  #stacksofglassandverses

  #bongsandpipesandcurses

  Finally he turned away from the keyboard and tapped Instagram on his phone.

  You nailed it, Freddy.

  Strike up the band, Freddy! It’s gorgeous.

  Freddy yelled with delight. Snap tore up the stairs to be part of the excitement. Freddy tossed him a dog treat and read more posts.

  Holy herb!

  Look at your cool shit!

  These were just observations, though. Nice, but not bids. But then in came the first bid. It was for a thousand dollars.

  Freddy doubled-checked the decimal point.

  Yes. One thousand dollars.

  Thirty minutes and twelve bidders later, it reached three thousand.

  Most people never sold anything for hundreds of dollars. Most people never even got up to one hundred. Everybody reading these posts was doing miracle math: If Freddy could get three thousand for a few days’ work, what could he earn in a year?

  He’d just left every bro behind and there would be jealousy and resentment.

  On the other hand, it was just a bid. Somebody Freddy didn’t know had entered some numbers on a cell phone. They hadn’t paid for it, just said they would. If Freddy had learned anything this weekend, it was don’t trust people. Even trustworthy people.

  Whattabid! Way to go!

  Love your work, Freddy. So clean.

  Dude!

  Even his former girlfriend texted, which was nice, except that Cynthia was trouble. She wanted him to become middle class. Like his sisters, Cyn advocated a job with benefits, a commute, and a wife.

  Freddy! Awesome work! Awesome bids! Cuz u are an awesome guy! Eager to see you at BABE.

  How eager? Was she planning to flatten him if he showed up or hoping to save on expenses and share a hotel room? She probably figured he was rich now and could afford a nice hotel.

  Hey Cyn! Good to hear from you.

  Angie has a booth at BABE. I’m going to help.

  It was hard to run a booth alone, although Freddy usually did. Going to the bathroom and getting meals was tough because you couldn’t leave your booth unsupervised. And it took one person to admire the customer’s taste and photograph the necklace she was wearing and a second person to total the sales and wrap the purchase. A third was even better, to keep an eye out for shoplifters. He’d been stunned in the beginning to see nice bead ladies slide away without paying for the beads they were admiring, but now it was just part of the routine.

  If he did fly to BABE on the Leper’s plane tickets, he’d have a booth with practically nothing to sell. Airline lost my Samsonite, he’d have to say.

  They would be incredulous. You checked it?

  Well, I didn’t want to, did I? They made me.

  Lucky Angie, he texted.

  You coming?

  Indecision here.

  Where’s here?

  Freddy could pick a town. Nashua, New Hampshire. Butte, Montana. Asheville, North Carolina. But then he’d have to keep track of his lie.

  On the road, he wrote. You teaching this semester?

  Third grade. Love it.

  Happy for you. And Happy Birthday next month.

  Freddy! You remembered! See you at BABE!

  He went back to Instagram.

  The bids did not close at three thousand.

  The next bid was five thousand.

  Five thousand dollars. For one piece of glass.

  Freddy read and reread this staggering number.

  His glass was so brilliant, so beautiful, so awesome—

  Wait.

  The bid was from Blowupallmedschools.

  Had to be Doc. Except (a) Doc didn’t care about a glass trombone, and (b) Doc didn’t have five thousand dollars to drop on a piece of glass.

  The bid was fake. It was just another notice from Gary Leperov.

  Freddy sat down heavily.

  The Leper wouldn’t pay Freddy a thing. He was destroying Freddy’s auction instead.

  The very next post was the sentence he had yearned to read his whole glass life.

  I want a Freddy.

  It was meaningless.

  Like me, thought Freddy. Like my life.

  MONDAY

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Maude Yardley,” repeated the secretary at the third church Laura phoned Monday morning. “She was a pillar of the church. Before my time, but people still get teary telling me how she went downhill with Alzheimer’s.”

  “Downhill” was the favored adjective for Alzheimer’s patients. An easy euphemism, dismissive of the details that made the disease so grim.

  “And then I think her husband started to get it too.”

  Kenneth had early-stage Alzheimer’s? It made perfect sense. It explained the teetering in doorways. He really didn’t know whether he was coming or going.

  This awful news put Maude’s death in another light. It was entirely possible that if Kenneth suffocated his own wife, he only half knew he was doing it. Right now, he would only half know that he had done it. Or half not know. It was why Alzheimer’s patients could be so frantic and irritable. They only half knew anything, and they only knew that half the time.

  “Oh my goodness!” shrieked the secretary. “I’m Googling Maude! She was murdered!”

  Laura and the secretary had a ghastly conversation about how much Maude might have suffered. Laura thought that suffering, like living, was different for a person in profound dementia. It could be far worse, with fear and horror hideously magnified. Or the opposite: all sensors too slow and damaged to process anything.

  “I’ll put an announcement in our daily email,” said the secretary, “but I’ll just say died suddenly. Those go out to hundreds of people. I’ll add Kenneth Yardley to our email prayer list. Do you have his email address so people can send their sympathy?”

  Laura opened the screenshot of Maude’s admission page and recited it.

  If Kenneth is innocent, she thought, it will be so uplifting to hear from old friends, and if he’s guilty, he’ll feel worse, which is only fair.

  She hadn’t even fixed a second cup of coffee when her cell phone rang. “Mrs. Maple? My name is Betty Sherwood. Forty years ago, Maude Yardley and I lived in Old Greenwich on the same street. She was my dear friend. My granddaughter Tiffany gets the prayer list on her cell phone, and she just read it to me.”

  That was quick. The secretary must have sent out the news while she and Laura were still on the phone.

  “Tiff called the church for the details of Maude’s funeral, and she was told that my poor Maude was murdered. They gave Tiffany your phone number. Please tell me m
ore. I’m beside myself.”

  Laura gave her everything she knew, which was very little.

  “I’m heartsick,” said Betty. “She was a good, dear woman. That’s such a brutal ending for a fine life. Tiffany took the morning off from work to come over and comfort me. She pulled out my old photograph albums. I lost a foot and most of my sight from diabetes, so I can’t see the photos anymore, but Tiff is reading all the labels from when we lived on Highview Avenue. Maude and Kenneth were just two doors down, and we used to have barbecues. We still used charcoal. It was so hard to light. People would bring their own hamburgers or hot dogs and everybody would bring a salad or a dessert—we had just discovered cake mixes—and all summer, the neighbors would congregate. My husband would say the blessing, and we’d sit in the backyard. We had folding aluminum chairs, the kind with webbing. Now I’m in assisted living and I don’t even have an oven.”

  Laura still paused in the cake-mix aisle. The boxes were so pretty. But she hadn’t baked in a decade. Possibly two.

  “The church secretary told us that Kenneth is still alive,” said Betty. “Kenneth had Alzheimer’s first, of course, and I expected him to be long gone. Kenneth must be ninety or more.”

  Could Kenneth really and truly be in his nineties? Managing his Alzheimer’s so well that he was still driving, paying bills, renting out houses? Using an astounding skin cream and a wig? Or had Betty, along with being blind and one-footed, lost track over the years?

  “There was a cousin,” said Betty. “He put Kenneth in a home somewhere. Tiffany, read the barbeque photo captions to me. I can’t remember the cousins and I’ll need to call them.”

  The album pages are probably black, thought Laura, and Betty wrote in white ink, and pasted on four little photo corners to hold each picture.

  “Hank and Evelyn,” read Tiffany. “Kenneth and Maude. Jim and Janet. Stephen and Lucille. That’s the first page. Now over here, Hank and Evelyn are not around, but we’ve added Morris and Eunice. Nana, how come you always list the man’s name first?”

  “Tiffany, don’t start with me. Next you’ll be telling me not to call the women in my club ‘the girls.’ Pull yourself together and keep reading.”

  “Here’s some excitement,” she heard Tiffany say. “A new couple on the block. They’re way young, compared to you middle-aged guys. Bobby and Virginia.”

  “How fortuitous!” cried Betty. “Bobby and Virginia are the cousins. Well, Bobby was the cousin. Virginia was his wife. I even remember their last name now! Lansing.”

  The name Freddy had found in his searches.

  “Betty,” said Laura, “since your lovely granddaughter is staying for the morning, how about I bring lunch and stay for the afternoon? Because I am also upset about Maude’s death.”

  Tiffany said she would arrange for two meals to be sent up from the dining room.

  “Meals here are bland,” said Betty sadly. “No salt, no grease. Probably you should bring your own lunch from McDonald’s.”

  The sound of broken glass crashed through Grandma’s kitchen.

  The point of installing the special ringtone was to remind Freddy not to answer. But a guy who bid five thousand dollars for your rig, you had to answer, even if his master plan was to ruin you. “Hey, Lep. Is that your bid on the trombone? Thanks. I’m honored.”

  “The trombone is sick, Freddy. How did you even think of a winged trombone?”

  “A friend of mine is researching an American composer named Charles Ives, and Charles Ives said that when he was writing music, he kept in mind a brass band with wings. So I decided I’d make the band. But in glass.”

  “Dude. Isn’t Charles Ives the guy who writes music nobody can listen to but it’s trendy?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And are you making beads between brass band pieces?”

  “We already talked about this, Gary. I’m not doing more bead shows.”

  “Freddy, what’s the matter with you?” said Gary tiredly. “I’m not asking you to steal anything. You’re just scribbling your name on some sheets of paper and handing my cash over to a clerk for the sales tax.”

  “I guess I don’t want to go in that direction.”

  “I’m the one going that direction. Listen. I got expenses. I got a four-carat wife, she drives a Lexus, I wear Fair Trade pants, we got a kid in a pricey nursery school, I am stretched to the max, I’m sponsoring your career by bidding up that rig, and you are doing BABE for me.”

  “Gary, you’re a big deal. You’re not stretched.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m just an ordinary guy trying to make a living.”

  “Come on. You know what people say about you.”

  “They’re quoting me, Freddy. I make it all up. That Russian gangster stuff—that’s just advertising. People love that shit.”

  Freddy didn’t believe it. If Jason knew, everybody knew. Probably the police on both coasts knew. And you didn’t hire real, true muscle like Doc unless you needed real, true muscle.

  But what does it matter? he asked himself. What does it actually matter if I stand firm with Gary Leperov? Nobody on earth cares but me.

  It was the terrifying theme song of his existence. Nobody actually cared.

  Freddy felt a desperation so deep he could not imagine climbing out.

  “Freddy, I’ve invested in you for a year,” said the Leper. “I have expectations. And you’re not withdrawing. No one withdraws from me. Ask your little friend Cynthia.”

  Cynthia had texted because Gary Leperov told her to?

  Freddy felt even worse.

  Cynthia was mixed up with the Leper. A sweet, wholesome third-grade teacher who even made girlish little pastel beads. How could Cynthia even know that Gary Leperov existed?

  But Freddy would not have believed Shawn would make coke buys either.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Laura smuggled the McDonald’s bag past the front desk and gave it to Betty. They both giggled. “It was a guess,” said Laura. “My feeling is, at our age, it’s our choice what we eat.”

  “If only,” said Betty. She happily unwrapped her burger while Laura ate the dining room meal, sprinkling it with a tiny packet of McDonald’s salt. “Mmm! French fries!” said Betty. She dug in while Laura talked about MMC and her drive up there and her new best friend Freddy and her sad, ruined aunt Polly.

  “You visit Polly three times a week?” said Betty. “You are a saint.”

  People often told Laura this. Surely it was harder to qualify for sainthood than just driving up Route 9 now and then. “When I visit, Polly might mumble meaningless syllables or wants to go shoe shopping.”

  “The horror of dementia,” agreed Betty. “The sensation that your loved one is still there, but she can’t get out and you can’t get in. You know, Laura, I think Bobby and Virginia may have moved to Farmington. Next time Tiffany comes, I will ask her how I might reach them.”

  “We can find that out right now.” Laura opened her phone, located Robert Lansing in Farmington on Schoolhouse Road, pressed the number, and handed the cell phone to Betty.

  Betty held the phone nervously. “I lost most of my sight prior to the advent of cell phones, Laura. Tiffany lives on her phone, whatever that means, but I don’t own one. Oh dear. A voice is repeating the phone number.”

  “That’s good. Wait for a little beep. Then leave your message.”

  Betty gulped. “Hello, Virginia!” she shouted. “And Bobby! Good afternoon! It’s Betty Sherwood from Old Greenwich days. I just heard the tragic news of dear Maude’s death. Do, please do, phone me.” She recited her landline number and handed the cell back with visible relief.

  They visited another half hour and then Laura stood up to go.

  “Why don’t you take the album home to leaf through?” said Betty.

  Laura wasn’t interested in Betty’s
photo collection, but she well understood that the loan ensured a second visit. She thought of the huge world of desperate old ladies, gamely going on, supported by exhausted children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews. “How lovely,” she said.

  I-95 was busier than Laura had expected, which was always the case. This part had been constructed when they believed in entrances with crossover exits, so Laura kept to the middle lane, hoping not to sideswipe or be sideswiped. She was approaching New Haven. She could continue east on 95 and go home or turn north on 91 to Farmington, home of Virginia and Robert Lansing.

  Virginia Lansing still cares about Maude, thought Laura, because she visited MMC just last month. She must be torn to pieces about Maude’s death. I bet she’s as eager to talk as Betty. And I am in need of information.

  She went north on 91, exhilarated to be hot on the trail.

  But…trail of what, exactly? She wanted it to be Kenneth who killed Maude, not some insane staff member. But did she really want to creep around in people’s lives, lying and prying? A sort of murder voyeur? Yes, she did, so she mustn’t.

  Laura took the Route 66 exit and drove to Middletown instead.

  Mrs. Reilly was at the front desk.

  “Why, hello,” said Laura. “You don’t usually have desk duty.”

  “We’re short-staffed.”

  “You are?”

  “Not every employee is comfortable working where there has been a murder.”

  It had not occurred to Laura that the staff would be afraid. But of course they were. Whoever the murderer was, the staff probably knew or had met the person. Or worked with them.

  “Please excuse me,” said Mrs. Reilly, “but I am dealing”—she seemed to debate how to finish this sentence and then openly shrugged—“with a family removing their loved one because of what happened to Maude Yardley.”

  It’s starting, thought Laura. Staff and residents are leaving the ship. If too many leave, we sink.

  She crossed the pretty lobby to the locked door and entered the code.

  The door didn’t open.

  She entered the code again and still the door didn’t open.