The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  I can’t remember four numbers I’ve tapped a thousand times. I’m getting Alzheimer’s too.

  She would end up here, spoon-fed, wearing pull-ups and smiling at nothing. Beloved faces would fade away and music would just be noise. And her children. Oh, the children. Would they bother?

  Mrs. Reilly hastened over. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Maple. The police told us to change the code.”

  In times of joy, boredom, fear, or, for that matter, any emotion, Freddy’s solution was glass.

  He decided to start the band with one drum in his favorite dark green, streaky with garnet. Maybe a face in the drumhead, something distorted, with long ears and drooping nose like an Easter Island statue. Grotesque sold well in pipe circles.

  If he made the drum too drummy, it would look like a Christmas tree ornament. Twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers piping.

  This was distracting. A Christmas card with eleven glass-pipe guys piping? He might have to design a poster. What should the partridge in a pear tree be?

  Speaking of trees, he should make Tree Lady a rig. You didn’t see that many maple tree rigs. If any.

  Freddy recognized that he was seriously high. Now of course his cell phone had to go and ring, and the caller ID said Auburn. He had forgotten to think about her middle-of-the-night trespass. Her Cube. Her dealing. Her necrotic finger that turned up on the MMC desk. He totally didn’t want to talk to Auburn, but not talking to her could be just as crummy. “Hey, Aub,” he said, super casual.

  “You hear about Shawn?”

  Auburn knew Shawn? She knew Shawn and Freddy were friends?

  Freddy had never wondered where Shawn bought his herb. Now he thought: from Auburn.

  “I guess he had an issue with coke,” said Freddy carefully.

  “What happened was, the Leper needed a cop. The Leper is so smart, Freddy. How he made Shawn deal? His guys caught Shawn’s dog, some old mutt Shawn loves. I don’t see the point in dogs myself. Then he told Shawn to do what he was told or they’d slice off the dog’s paws, so Shawn said yes, but he’s so stupid he worked a parking lot with video cameras and he got caught.”

  Cut off Snap’s paws?

  Would anybody actually grab a dog and whap down on its little legs with a machete?

  Doc, who had planned to be a healer? Mutilate a dog? Or was that a job for the skinny sidekick? But would they really do that?

  Shawn must have believed they would.

  You heard about dogs that died to save their masters, but you didn’t hear that often about a master dying to save his dog. Because that could happen to Shawn. A cop might not survive prison.

  How could Shawn have run into the Leper to start with? He didn’t do glass shows. He didn’t even attend shows.

  Freddy had been having nightmares about hands around throats. Now he was going to have nightmares about machetes and paws.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  In the common room, Laura found most residents napping while a few played bingo with a volunteer. Bingo was quite a challenge when you were no longer numerate. Freddy’s grandmother dozed in an armchair. Evie, whom Laura rarely saw, sat blankly on a sofa. Evie was one of the silent ones who mainly slept.

  Kenneth was once again standing at Maude’s door.

  Maybe Kenneth did have Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember that his wife had died. Many patients didn’t remember that they had children and would argue with an adult child who kept insisting they were related.

  Poor Philip was panting and frantic over something or nothing. He tried to turn his table over, but the table was heavily braced. He began pounding it with his big fists.

  “Grace!” Kenneth yelled. “Jade! Give that monster a shot and calm him down!”

  Which did not sound like decades of Alzheimer’s but just a short-tempered man losing control.

  Grace poked her head out of a resident’s room. “Can’t without doctors’ orders. But plus, you give a trank, he can’t balance anymore, and he falls. Might break bones.” Grace coaxed Philip to his room while he called her names and tried to trip her.

  Philip had a lift chair, which launched him upright, but if the aides set the control on the floor, Philip could neither see nor reach it. He’d be stuck in his chair. It was one of many awful but necessary ways in which residents were controlled. Grace shut Philip’s door and returned to her tasks.

  “The guy’s a menace,” said Kenneth.

  Philip’s not a menace, thought Laura. He’s a sorrow.

  In her room, Aunt Polly was sipping her fortified chocolate drink. “Hi, Aunt Polly. Shall we read the next chapter?”

  “Laura,” said Polly affectionately. “I like your hair. You had it cut.”

  Laura had not, but she said “Thank you,” because anytime Polly knew her made up for all the times Polly didn’t.

  Through Polly’s open bedroom door, Laura could see Grace at the big center island, fixing somebody a banana and cracker snack. She couldn’t see the rest of the common room, but each ceiling corner had a large circular mirror, the sort people with dangerous driveways use to check oncoming traffic. In one, Jade was walking a resident Laura didn’t recognize to his room. In the other mirror, Kenneth remained in Maude’s door, looking left and right as if dealing with heavy traffic. Very Alzheimery. The poor man, sliding in and out of normalcy like that.

  Kenneth darted away and was no longer in the mirror. A minute later, he scuttled back. Neither Jade nor Grace was now in view.

  It was like watching a soap opera with only a fraction of the screen available. Laura forgot to read to Polly, and Polly continued to sip chocolate.

  Now Philip appeared, stumbling over to the sofas. How had he gotten his door open? He was a fall waiting to happen.

  Kenneth went to Philip’s aid before Laura could, which was unexpected and nice. The men had a sort of tussle as Kenneth tried and failed to keep Philip upright.

  Philip fell heavily on top of Evie.

  Evie was a toothpick under the freight truck that was Philip. Laura shouted for help and rushed forward. Jade and Grace came running.

  Philip’s muscles were flaccid and his coordination long gone. He was helpless. It took all four of them to hoist such a tall man to his feet.

  Philip’s weight could have cracked Evie’s ribs or damaged internal organs. Silent Evie couldn’t tell them if it hurt. They called the ambulance. She would have to have X-rays.

  “I bet that’s what’s happened to my Maude,” said Kenneth. “This monster came in and lay down on her.”

  Laura was horrified. Could Maude have been suffocated by Philip’s dingy, old terry-cloth bathrobe? What if Philip had reached out and the only thing he could grab hold of was a throat?

  And then she had a worse thought. Why had Kenneth suddenly darted away from Maude’s room? Had Kenneth opened Philip’s door? Given Philip the chair control? Or pushed the buttons himself? When Philip came back in the common room, had Kenneth tried to help? Or had he intentionally pushed Philip down onto Evie?

  Stop it! she told herself.

  Bad enough she had nearly driven to Farmington to interrogate a stranger named Virginia in some sneaky, we’re-all-in-this-together kind of way. Now she was pretending Kenneth shoved helpless people to the floor and Philip strangled old ladies without knowing.

  Laura said goodbye to her now dozing aunt and walked out of the common room. Kenneth caught up to her at the locked door. He blocked it, glaring at her. He was not a large man, but he was certainly a furious one. “You interfering bitch,” he whispered. “You called that church Maude used to belong to. You told people to send sympathy emails and crap. The goddamn minister called me to pray.”

  Laura was more shocked by his language than by the possibility that he had shoved Philip. However, Alzheimer’s made some victims deeply angry. If Kenneth had been floating in some grim low-level Alzheimer
’s for years, this might be how it manifested.

  Laura was afraid of him.

  On the other side of the reinforced glass panes, a middle-aged couple tapped the code and opened the door. Reluctant children trailed behind them, scuffing the floor and looking irritably at their silenced devices. Laura slid through, leaving Kenneth’s sick rage and her own sick curiosity behind.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  There was never a pause in glass. Stop for two seconds and gravity took over; the glass drooped like honey on the end of a spoon. Molten glass was orange, so when he was actually working on a piece, he couldn’t see its real color. He loved that: the mystery of chemistry. Well, it wasn’t mysterious really—he could explain it—and yet the truth of any glass was hidden during its creation.

  There was a sharp knock on the sliding glass door behind him. Freddy was startled but too experienced to flinch when holding glass whose temperature was over two thousand degrees. He glanced over his shoulder.

  The detective from MMC was standing with his nose actually in the crack of the sliding glass doors.

  To Freddy, a cop was a known predator, complete with gun, truncheon, and satellite radio. A cop in his studio was unthinkable. I have a seriously stupid studio design, he thought. My bench should face the door. But no, I arranged this place so somebody can sneak up on me.

  He did not turn off the torch. He did not remove his huge, dark safety glasses.

  He turned to face the cop, glass rod still in his right hand, still spinning it, keeping the glob aloft, like a softball on a stick.

  Freddy circled his bench.

  The cop unwisely slid the door open all the way.

  Freddy held the glass upright, not pointing it like a weapon, but it was a weapon, because nobody stands still with molten glass advancing toward his face.

  Freddy stepped forward. “Oh, hey, how ya doin’?” he asked, all friendly, as the cop backed away.

  The little poured-concrete patio had a partial ring of fieldstone, stacked about a foot high. Grandpa had built it from stones he turned up in the soil when they were putting in the perennial gardens. Freddy remembered towing a little sledge on which Grandpa set the fieldstones. Grandma always lined the ring with baskets of scarlet geraniums and orange marigolds. She never had any use for pastels.

  If the cop backed up another inch, he’d trip on the fieldstone. Freddy weighed the pleasure of seeing him fall and the punishment for damaging a cop.

  He stopped.

  The cop couldn’t take his eyes off the spinning glass knob, which was rapidly cooling but would be capable of delivering a hideous burn for quite a while. “How come you don’t burn your hand?”

  “Glass is an insulator, not a conductor.”

  “You like glassblowing?”

  No, thought Freddy. I’ve dedicated my life to something I despise. “I’m not a glassblower. This is called lampwork.”

  “Is it what Dale Chihuly does?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the gas?”

  “Propane.”

  “There’s a second tube.”

  “Oxygen.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Propane accepts a lot of oxygen. Controlling the mix is a torch art.” Control the mix, Freddy told himself. Stay calm.

  “Flammable gas,” said the cop. “Sounds tricky. If somebody wanted to wreck your studio, what would they do?”

  Huh? What was up with that? “Take my lucky tweezers, probably,” said Freddy lightly. They were sparring, but Freddy didn’t know why. He couldn’t pace himself because he couldn’t guess how long he had to last.

  “You know,” said the guy chattily, “somehow I didn’t expect a raised ranch tucked back here. I figured a cute old colonial.”

  Freddy’s loathing for the cop was eclipsed by despair for his grandmother, soldiering on, so brave and so lost. No doubt she, too, had expected a more gracious life and a more beautiful house. But she made the best of what she had.

  She’s still making the best of it, he thought.

  “The house belongs to you now?”

  “My grandmother isn’t dead yet.”

  “Sorry. So. Auburn, with the store on Main Street. One-name Auburn. She visited Middletown Memory Care.”

  Seriously? Then Freddy needed to check on Grandma right this second. He had left his cell phone on the bench and didn’t want to let the cop in and didn’t want to set down the glass and didn’t want the cop to know that he was suddenly, completely terrified for Grandma.

  Auburn might actually suffocate an old lady.

  Because the Leper told her to.

  Because she was showing off for Danielle.

  Because she wanted to know Freddy’s last name.

  Because it was fun, like trapping Br.

  Maybe Auburn was trapping Freddy. For sure, she’d had something to do with trapping Shawn. Or everything. She could even have thrown in the Leper’s name for fun while in fact she set Shawn up herself.

  “Auburn didn’t get past the front desk,” said the cop. “She didn’t give her name and she didn’t sign in.”

  She’d go in next time. His sisters were right. He had to get Grandma out of there. But how? And take her where?

  To Emma in Australia? Grandma couldn’t last one hour on a plane, never mind twenty-four or whatever it was to Sydney.

  Jenny in Alaska? It was possible to drive there but not possible for Grandma.

  South Dakota. Drivable. He and Grandma would have to share a hotel room. What would he do when she had to go potty? Bring her into the men’s room and change her pull-ups? How many bathroom stops between here and South Dakota?

  Freddy transferred the molten glass to his other hand. He was tiring.

  “One of the housekeeping staff happened to walk by when Auburn was at the desk and recognize her, because she’s a customer at Auburn’s shop.”

  Auburn did not currently stock a single accessory that a maid could afford. So either the maid had shopped in the store’s previous incarnation or she was there buying pot. Or coke.

  “We had a little chat with Auburn.”

  Middletown cops probably knew Auburn better than Freddy did. They probably wanted to question Auburn pretty much any time, and once they recognized that pendant, they would have trotted right over.

  He wondered if Ames was also the cop who had dealt with poor Br. No, because the guy who pulled Br over would not have been a detective.

  Wait.

  Why had Auburn told Danielle not to use names in Br’s story? Auburn wouldn’t protect Br. Her whole goal was to ruin Br.

  Maybe she didn’t want me to know the name, thought Freddy. Which means I know Br.

  Freddy had grown up on the shoreline. His high-school graduating class had had only seventy-eight kids. He knew most people who’d been one, two, and three grades ahead and behind. He knew his sisters’ friends and classmates, even though they were a lot older, like Shawn. He knew tons of people from the church he grew up in. Br, he thought. Brian? Brent? Brady? “Did Auburn tell you who bought that finger on a string?” Freddy asked.

  “How do you know about the finger?”

  “Come on. The whole staff is talking about it.”

  “It’s pretty clever, that finger,” said the cop. “It’s actually a cocaine jar.”

  Freddy had seen quite a few Leper pendants, and that was what they were: cool jewels. This had been a jar? So Gary had yet another line, and Doc wholesaled it to retailers like Auburn. Not good news. It meant that Freddy really was laundering coke money.

  And then he realized something else: Auburn didn’t know the Leper. She knew only his reputation, or she’d have been calling him Gary. It would have been crucial for her to call him Gary and prove they were on close terms. So it wasn’t the Leper Auburn knew.

  It was Doc
.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  By the time the cop finally left, it was getting dark.

  Snap seriously did not want to be tied up in the Way Back. He not only tried to bite but also growled. His barks and howls followed Freddy all the way to the house. Good thing there were no close neighbors.

  Freddy wished he could like Snap. He and his dog could go through life together: trade shows, angry landlords, repo men, girlfriends, glass burns, and blisters. But if he ever got his own dog, Freddy would want a dog whose eyes yearned for affection, not a dog whose teeth yearned to break skin.

  It was late when he drove into the visitor lot at MMC. An extremely heavy man was getting out of a Prius. Philip’s son, Martin. He and his entire family always came for Sunday dinner, and now and then Martin showed up during the week. Mrs. Maple liked them a lot because of the regularity of their visits. Sometimes Freddy thought Mrs. Maple was grading all these relatives: people who got an A, people who were C minus, people who failed and would have to repeat their dementia year.

  “Freddy!” cried Martin. “Have you heard? Kenneth Yardley called the police and accused my father of murdering Maude! They’re taking him seriously! They’re here right now! Kenneth says that my father falls on people and probably fell on Maude and crushed her to death. They believe him! I don’t know what we’re going to do! It’s insane.”

  A cop came out of MMC. He must have been waiting for Martin. What could be worse?

  “Wait,” said Freddy, who needed this syllable a lot while he worked on elusive thoughts and tried to reach intelligent conclusions. Or even any conclusion. “Nobody here can get up,” he told the cop. “Once they’re down, they’re down. Philip is a big guy, but he can’t get up from a chair by himself. He sure couldn’t get up off a bed or a floor. If Philip fell on top of Maude, he’d be there till the staff found him. He didn’t do it, and it didn’t happen.”

  “Why didn’t the aides just tell us that?” asked the cop.

  “Come on. They’re scared of you. They can’t think straight.”

  The three of them processed into the building. Martin gripped Freddy’s arm for support.