The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  We’re all on the verge of collapse, thought Freddy. Our person is fragile, our lives are shaky, and the police are crawling all over us.

  The cop stopped in the foyer to make calls while Freddy and Martin went on in.

  He didn’t know a single aide on the evening shift, but a pleasant, very chubby woman named Monica was expecting him. She rolled out a folding cot from a closet filled with them. “For emergencies,” she explained. “Like if the town loses power, staff have to sleep over or maybe we get extra patients from other places or whatever. And when a family member wants to spend the night, like sometimes visitors stay for a week if they live far away.”

  You really had to love your person to live on a dementia ward for a week.

  Grandma did not notice that she was getting a roommate.

  The sheets were for single beds, too big for a cot, so the fitted bottom came right back off. He couldn’t imagine sleeping well, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to sleep well. He wanted to sleep lightly, so he could intercept Auburn if she showed up.

  But why would she show up? What was any of this nightmare for? He couldn’t get a grip on Maude’s death. He couldn’t figure out Auburn or Br or Shawn or Jade.

  Monica said gently, “You don’t have to do this, Mr. Bell. I know you’re afraid. Everybody is afraid. But your grandmother is fine. I’m not going to sleep through my shift. Plus we have an officer here for the night,” she added, pointing at a guy in rumpled old clothes. Freddy had figured him for a patient. He spotted the distinctive shape of a cigarette pack in the cop’s shirt pocket. No cigarettes, lighters, matches, birthday-cake candles, or any kind of fire at all were allowed in a place like this.

  “At night,” Monica reminded him, “the regular front doors are locked. Nobody can get into the lobby. A visitor talks into the intercom. One of us answers. If we’re satisfied the person is legit, we go to the door and let them in. Then I take them through the coded door to the resident wings. If I felt nervous, I wouldn’t open that door. I’d call the officer here to come out.”

  “And I’ll come quick,” said the cop. “I’m in and out a lot anyway because I have to go outside for a smoke.”

  Freddy lay down on a mattress so thin he could feel the cross-wire supports under his back. Around midnight, he got up, bored and restless. The common room was fully lit. An aide he didn’t know was sorting laundry. A patient he didn’t know was asking when they would serve lunch. In his room, Philip was swearing.

  Freddy lay back down. He couldn’t close his eyes, never mind sleep.

  At one in the morning, he heard sharp footsteps, crisper than slippers or sneakers. He got up, cracked the door, and peered out. It was the cop, returning from a cigarette break. The delicious scent wafted past Freddy, and immediately he was desperate for a smoke himself. He almost went out to bum a cigarette off the cop. Instead, he took a selfie and sent it to his sisters, so they’d know he was being responsible.

  He didn’t feel responsible. He felt like a man in prison. Like Br. Like Shawn.

  His grandmother slept silently. He couldn’t hear her breathing and got up twice to lean close and make sure she was still alive.

  He said to his mother, I’m trying, okay? I’m trying to do something right. But you know what, Mom? Right is kind of elusive in my world.

  He actually heard her from heaven. Or memory. Then change worlds, Freddy.

  TUESDAY

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Morning finally came to MMC. The day shift took over. Grandma slept on and on, motionless, as if she had crossed the threshold into death. Freddy wanted to see her up and going before he left. If he could stand it. It would be a test.

  At eight thirty a deeply anxious family of five began moving their grandfather into Maude’s old room. Good news that people still wanted to move in. The new people must think MMC was nice and safe. Or they were desperate. Freddy felt acquainted with desperate.

  “James!” the grandfather kept calling.

  “I’m here, Dad,” the adult son said.

  “The children! Did you leave the children in the car?”

  “We’re here, PopPop,” said the teenage boys.

  “Let’s go home now,” said the grandfather nervously.

  The grandsons muscled a recliner through the bedroom door. “That isn’t mine!” cried the grandfather. “Where’s mine?”

  The boys tried to comfort him. “Yours was too big for this room, PopPop. So we stole Dad’s. Cool, huh? You have a stolen recliner. Let’s try it out. Let’s sit in it.” They patted the seat. The grandfather backed away.

  Freddy so understood. The grandfather was thinking—I sit in that thing, and they’ll leave, and I won’t be able to get up and run after them.

  Freddy found an unoccupied corner of the common room and called his minister.

  “Hello, Freddy,” said George Burnworth in a voice that tried and failed to be enthusiastic. Probably he’d been up all night with some dying member of the church or maybe writing a sermon, which would certainly sap Freddy’s strength. “How are you? I meant to call. I’ve been swept up in other situations. What a nightmare at MMC. How are you faring?”

  “I’m fine, thanks, and so is Grandma.”

  “Lily and I haven’t been able to visit Cordelia for a few weeks,” said the minister, “but we’ll drive up shortly.”

  “My sisters want to move Grandma.”

  “That might be a good idea. Nobody seems to know why that poor patient was killed or by whom. There could be some maniac on the staff, although everybody I’ve encountered is kind and good. What are your thoughts?”

  “Mixed,” said Freddy. “But that’s not why I called, Dr. Burnworth.”

  “When are you going to call me George?”

  “Probably never. Listen, do you happen to know any criminal lawyers in Middletown? I mean, you probably don’t ever run into that kind of thing, but I thought I’d ask.”

  The minister said wearily, “Is this your crime, Freddy?”

  “I’m researching for a friend.”

  “Right,” said the pastor skeptically. “I’ll text a Middletown attorney I like and ask him to fit you into his schedule ASAP. I’ll text you his phone number and you set it up. Meanwhile, how can I help, Freddy?”

  “This helps. I really appreciate it.”

  “Call and let me know how it goes,” said the minister, but Freddy could tell the last thing George Burnworth wanted was to know how it went. He wanted a nice world, a smooth world, a Mrs. Maple world.

  Me too, thought Freddy, checking on Grandma again.

  She was waking up and trying to get her bearings. She thrashed around, clearly needing the bathroom. There were no aides in sight. Freddy helped her out of bed, walked her into her bathroom, guided her into position, and closed her right hand on the pull bar attached to the wall.

  She didn’t know what to do next. Freddy did know; he just didn’t want to. He stilled himself, helped her with her pajama bottoms, pulled her pull-up down, and she sat, having finally remembered how to go potty.

  Freddy shut the door, not so Grandma could have privacy, because she didn’t know what that was anymore, but so he had privacy. He washed up at a sink in the common room kitchen and went back to wait.

  Grandma was taking a long time. Finally, Freddy knocked. “You okay, Grandma?” he yelled.

  No answer.

  He opened the bathroom door.

  Grandma had had a poop event on the floor and tried to clean it up with her bare hands. When that hadn’t worked, she’d slipped her feet out of her slippers and was using them as scoops.

  “Jade!” Freddy yelled and added in a normal voice, “Sorry, shouldn’t yell. Please help Grandma.” He pointed to the bathroom.

  Glaring at him, Jade marched in. But the glare didn’t apply to her patient. In a sweet, cheerful voice, she s
aid, “Uh-oh, Miss Cordelia. Oopsy. Now you just sit back down on the toilet and let me glove up, and we’re going to get sparkly clean.”

  Freddy felt as if he were sinking into some sort of delirium. Complete with tremens.

  Jade finally brought Grandma out, freshly dressed and wearing moccasins. “I couldn’t save the slippers,” said Jade. “You gotta buy new ones.”

  “You’re a peach,” he told her, wondering where you bought bedroom slippers.

  “True story.”

  Okay, so she photographs patients at their worst, thought Freddy. But she cleans up stuff like this and she’s nice about it.

  To hustle in Freddy’s world, you needed to be a good judge of character, because you were always on thin ice in heavy drug traffic. But Freddy wasn’t a good judge of character, and he didn’t believe anybody else was either, because people shifted and wavered and changed. There were good bad people and bad good people, and Freddy least of all knew who was who.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When Laura went into the kitchen to fix breakfast, the stink of the dead piano choked her. It was an almost visible miasma. She opened every window, the front, back, and side doors, and lugged out the fans. Then she started phone calls to find somebody to take the piano to the dump. She got two “Leave a message” responses and one live answer. “We can’t make it today,” the junk guy said rather proudly. “We’re way too booked.”

  “I’ll pay you double.”

  “We still can’t make it today. Maybe tomorrow.”

  They agreed that he would come as soon as he could.

  With nothing else to do, Laura opened Betty Sherwood’s album. How pretty Maude had been in those lovely midcalf swishing skirts they wore in the fifties, ironed so primly, with the big square pocket. Her hair hung to her shoulders, a tortoiseshell barrette holding it back.

  But the Highview Avenue photographs contained a major surprise: It wasn’t Kenneth who visited Maude at MMC. It was the cousin, Bobby.

  Mr. Griffin had told Freddy he didn’t think that man was married to that woman, and Mr. Griffin was right. The man who called himself Maude’s husband was in fact her cousin.

  Laura was dumbfounded. A cousin had a perfectly good right to visit. Why would sixty-ish Bobby represent himself as ninety-ish Kenneth?

  Maybe Cousin Bobby had taken over Kenneth’s bank accounts?

  But Laura had taken over Aunt Polly’s money, and Freddy and his sisters had taken over their grandmother’s. Everybody had to. And if Bobby was spending some of the real Kenneth’s money on himself instead of on Maude, he’d inherit it anyway, and meanwhile, he certainly wasn’t stinting Maude.

  Why go to all the trouble of calling himself by his cousin’s name?

  Was that why he wore a white wig? To look more like a very old woman’s very old husband?

  The masquerade was creepy, but she was not ready to consign Bobby Lansing/Kenneth Yardley to some circle of hell. Anybody who visited Memory Care several times a week deserved praise, not censure. No one knew that better than Laura Maple.

  What had happened to the real Kenneth?

  Was he still alive, tucked in some upstairs bedroom in one of those houses? He’d be in his nineties. If his Alzheimer’s had indeed begun years ago when they were in Old Greenwich, he’d be beyond muddled now. He’d be a stone.

  If Bobby was comfortable having Maude in an institution, though, wouldn’t he also put the real Kenneth in one? Perhaps he couldn’t afford two, which would be ruinous for almost anybody.

  But then why not just sell the Old Greenwich house?

  More likely, the real Kenneth was dead.

  Laura Googled the Hartford Courant, Greenwich Time, Stamford Advocate, and Middletown Press and checked obituaries for Kenneth Yardley. There were none. Of course, Kenneth—well, Bobby—had said he didn’t believe in obituaries, and obituaries weren’t mandatory. No law proclaimed that people had to publish them.

  Could Bobby have hidden the real Kenneth’s death? How could he accomplish that? Bury the body in his backyard? She couldn’t picture Kenneth/Bobby with a shovel or a backhoe.

  Maybe the poor old man was buried under another name. What other name? Well, Bobby wasn’t using his own name right now, which freed up the name Robert Lansing.

  Laura Googled again. Robert Lansing Senior had died five years ago. That was no detailed obituary, just a two-line announcement.

  Wind was now actively blowing through her house, which was good. Dead piano stench was dwindling. Laura was shivering, but if she closed the house, the smell would build up again. She put on a heavy coat. Added a scarf.

  It occurred to her that if Kenneth wasn’t Kenneth, maybe Maude wasn’t Maude. Maybe she was Bobby’s mother or Virginia’s mother. Maybe the Lansings were getting free Memory Care by substituting their loved one for Maude and using her long-term insurance and social security and pensions.

  Laura studied photographs of Maude in the album and the one on her phone from the nursing record. Maude was Maude. But Kenneth was Bobby.

  Was he the meany beany to whom Freddy’s grandmother had referred? What could he have been doing that Cordelia Chase would decide he was a meany beany? Or even notice? Noticing was not a dementia characteristic.

  And why did Kenneth/Bobby visit MMC so often? Why come several times a week to visit a woman to whom you were not married, and she didn’t recognize you anyway?

  Fingers tapped her shoulder.

  Kenneth Yardley stood next to her.

  How could she not have heard him walk in? Was she going deaf? What a horrible fate.

  And now she was alone in her house with a man not using his real name who might be the killer of his own cousin and who hated her guts for phoning a church. She picked up the coffeepot. Thank goodness she still used a percolator. Boiling water was a weapon. “Mr. Yardley. What a surprise.”

  “No more surprising than you digging up Betty Sherwood and making her call us.”

  I’m an old fool, thought Laura. I gave Betty my phone to call Bobby and Virginia, so my caller ID—of course—ID’d me.

  “Why are you butting into my life?” he yelled. “What kind of sick person are you? I have suffered a terrible loss! The death by violence of my dear wife. And you’re poking at it, as if you’re toasting marshmallows or something. It’s not a game.”

  But it is a game, thought Laura. She’s not your wife. You are using a false name at MMC. You even have a false head of hair.

  He took a step forward. She took two back. She was now cornered. She really would have to exit by crawling under one of the grand pianos. She could probably scootch down and creep out, find something to hang on to, and haul herself to her feet on the other side, but Kenneth would long since have walked around to kick her.

  She could not meet his glare and dropped her eyes. Lying on the counter was Betty Sherwood’s faux leather album, her name embossed in gold on the cover. She looked quickly away. “How did you get this address?”

  “I stopped at MMC first thing this morning,” said Kenneth, “and told the desk you wanted to help me write the obituary but, oh dear me, I lost your address and phone number. So they gave it to me. I drive down here, your front door’s literally open, and I walk in.” He pointed to her music room. “You are some sick hoarder. Normal people don’t live like this. You’ve got broken stuff on your shelves? And what are you collecting in those boxes? They’re big enough to hold cannon.” He frowned at the shrink wrap on the nearest piano. Then he looked her up and down, in her heavy coat and long scarf, clutching her coffeepot. His voice turned gentle, a man dealing with a psycho. “Mrs. Maple, we’re all shaken by how my poor Maude died. I don’t believe the police are right. I don’t believe she died by violence. It was natural causes or an accident. I know families are removing their loved ones from MMC as fast as they can. I know you poked into my life in some misguided a
ttempt to find out what happened, maybe hoping to pin the blame on me, but I wasn’t there. You know that. The police told you.”

  He sounded so nice. He probably was nice. Only nice people visited MMC anyway. And if you had to have a fake husband, you might as well have a nice fake husband.

  With Kenneth over by the pianos, she slipped into the hall. “It’s pleasant on the front porch,” she said, heading out.

  Kenneth’s courtesy evaporated. “What is this?” he shouted. He snatched up Betty Sherwood’s album. “Where did you get this?” His face began to twitch. His cheek and one side of his lip leaped.

  Please don’t have a stroke. “Kenneth, that album is precious to Betty. I need to return it.”

  Kenneth stomped out of the house and over the grass, threw the album onto his passenger seat, and drove off so violently he left a patch.

  She didn’t want to face Betty over a lost album. She didn’t want to think about Bobby Lansing and Kenneth Yardley and the suffocation of poor Maude. She wanted the dead piano gone and the practice pipe organ built, and above all, she wanted to hear from her children.

  Why was she always the one to call them?

  Why didn’t they ever say to themselves, Gosh, I haven’t talked to Mom in ages, I can’t wait to hear her voice.

  She was close to tears. If she started crying, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Wayne Ames pulled into the driveway.

  It wasn’t fair! She couldn’t deal with him too.

  The detective trotted right up to the front door where she stood.

  Should she tell him that Kenneth Yardley was actually Robert Lansing? No. Whether or not he was Bobby, Kenneth had not been at MMC the night Maude was murdered. No matter how weird, illegal, or wrong it was to call himself somebody else, he wasn’t the murderer.

  She walked back to the kitchen. The detective took this as an invitation and came in, closing the front door after himself. The rest of the downstairs was still open, cold, and literally windy. “You like it chilly, huh?” he said.