Doing It To Death

by Angela Henry

  “I’m sorry, Miss Clayton. But Mr. Buford isn’t feeling well today and isn’t seeing visitors. He’s on bed rest. But he should better tomorrow,” said Lucy, the same woman who was staffing the front desk from last night.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Can you tell him I stopped by and will be back again tomorrow to check on him?”

  “I sure will. He’ll be so excited.”

  “Does he really not get many visitors?” I asked, not fathoming how a man with Pinky Buford’s charm and charisma could have been forgotten in a nursing home. What happened to his family?

  “He’s got a niece who stops by a few times a year, and on holidays, but aside from her, no one. And it’s really a shame. He’s such a darling.”

  “He certainly is. Do you know his niece’s name?”

  “She visits so rarely I don’t think any of us have gotten to know her enough to remember her name. I do remember her being a tall, pretty lady. I think she’s a doctor.”

  “Tall, pretty, and a doctor, huh?” Gee, that sounded just like Dr. Joyce Kirkland. Could she be Pinky’s niece? The same Joyce Kirkland that had done something back in the day that Dibb Bentley was holding over her head, and the same Joyce Kirkland who’d lied to me about knowing Brenda Howard? Joyce sure had some explaining to do.

  A loud crash and cry of pain came from the direction of the recreation room. I followed Lucy as she hurried from behind the counter and around the corner. A small crowd had formed around an elderly woman who had fallen. I hung back in the door as one of the nurses pushed past me into the room to attend to the fallen woman who lay moaning and unmoving.

  “Don’t worry, Ruthie. You’re going to be okay.” Lucy stroked the woman’s hair while the nurse examined her.

  Figuring they had it all under control, I turned to leave, and that’s when I saw the door marked Staff Room. I shouldn’t have. I should have just gone home. But I didn’t. Looking around to make sure no one was looking; I pushed the door open and peeked inside. As far as I could tell the room was empty. I quickly slipped inside.

  It was a large break room with a big, round table in the middle. On one side of the room was a sink, stove and refrigerator. On the other side was a small lounge area with a well-worn blue couch that was slightly sunken in the middle. The couch sat in front of a large console TV. To the right of the lounge was a hallway. At the end of the short hallway was another exit and on either side of it was a bank of green lockers, four on each side. All the lockers were labeled with a name, except for the one closest to me, which had no label on it. I guessed that this had probably been Brenda’s locker. Thankfully, the key that unlocked the padlock was sticking out of the bottom of the lock.

  The TV in the lounge suddenly clicked on and the voices of two women drifted down the hallway. Ever so quietly, I turned the key eliciting a soft click. As quietly as I could, I removed the padlock and slid it into my pocket. That had been simple enough. Opening the locker without making a sound was another matter entirely. It made a grating sound when I pulled on the handle and I froze. The talking from down the hall continued and I pulled again. The locker door opened. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but it was empty save some traces of tape on the inside of the door that must have been used to tape photos to it. Feeling foolish, I was just about to close the locker when I spied the edge of something peeking out from a seam at the bottom. I bent down and had to use my fingernails to pull it up ever so slowly. Once it was up about half an inch, I was able to grab it and pull it out. It turned out to be a photo, grainy and faded. I tucked it into my pocket and quickly turned to slip out the exit before I was discovered. But the TV had been either clicked off or turned down, and I heard a name that made my ears perk up.

  “Poor Ruthie. She hasn’t been right since Brenda died,” said one female voice.

  “Did she break her hip?” asked another woman.

  “No, thank the good Lord. She’s just bruised. She should be okay. Lucy rode to the hospital with her so they could check her out.”

  “They ever figure out what to do with all Brenda’s stuff since she didn’t have any family?” asked yet a third woman.

  “They gave that brown cardigan she always wore to Ruthie. There was some nail polish one of the aides on the night shift took. A couple of paperback romances got put out in the rec room. The rest got tossed in the dumpster.”

  “That’s damned shame.” It sure was. I crept a little closer.

  “What about her boyfriend? Did anyone call him about her stuff?”

  “Isn’t he in jail for killing her?” exclaimed one woman indignantly.

  “No! Not that pimp-looking guy they arrested!” said another woman. “He was her rebound guy. I’m talking about the one she was with for years before he finally dumped her last month.”

  “I remember her talking about him every once in a while. I didn’t know they weren’t together anymore. What was his name?”

  “You know I don’t think she ever told me his name. And he certainly never picked her up from work like the guy they arrested. Brenda was pretty tight-lipped about her personal life.”

  “Bet he was married.”

  “You think so?”

  “Why else would it be such a secret? Either married or super ugly.”

  All three women laughed. I took that as my cue to head out the exit. But nothing in my life is that easy.

  “Hey,” came a voice behind me. My hand had been reaching for the bar on the exit door. Instead, I turned, pasting a stiff, nervous smile on my face. An older woman in a nurse’s uniform with her white hair pulled back into a ponytail with a pink scrunchie, and a name badge that read Florence was looking at me with her head slightly cocked to the side quizzically.

  “Who, me?”

  “Do you see anybody else?” I just stared at her, wondering what would happen if I just bolted out the exit. But what if she called the police, who were actually sitting out in the parking lot? What would Mason do to me then? Lock me up and throw away the key, that’s what.

  “Sorry. I got lost.”

  “Oh, dang it. I was hoping you were the new file room temp.”

  Temp? Again, I shouldn’t have. But when was I going to get another prime opportunity to snoop? And in the file room of all places. And what kind of files were we talking about? Personnel? Patient? Could I look up Brenda’s address? Could I find out if Joyce Kirkland was really Pinky’s niece? And have I mentioned that I’m nosy? She started to turn away and it was now or never.

  “Actually,” I said, stepping forward. “I am the new temp. There was no one at the front desk and I wandered back here by mistake.”

  “Oh, no problem. One of our residents had an accident and our head nurse had to leave. I’m Florence Hubbard and you are…?”

  “Uh…Shelly Jones. Nice meeting you.” I picked the first name that came to mind. The only people at the nursing home that knew my real name were the absent Lucy and Pinky Buford. I figured as long as none of the residents who’d confronted me over Brenda’s memorial book saw me, I’d be fine.

  “Lucy is the one you’ll be reporting to. But I can at least get you started until she gets back, though that might not be until tomorrow. Last time I took a resident to the hospital it took over four hours.”

  “Just show me what you need me to do, and I’ll get right on it.” My perky voice sounded forced and phony and I cringed.

  “Right.” Florence gave me a nod and a smile and headed out of the staff room.

  She unlocked an office two doors down the hall and flipped on the light. It was a room about the size of the staff lounge. Three of the four walls were lined with tall beige metal file cabinets. Three rows of cabinets also filled the center of the room with two narrow aisles to navigate around them. A desk and a coat rack were against the wall by the door. Florence told me I could hang my coat on the rack, then gave me a quick tour of the room.

  “These files in the center are our resident files. Every nursing home resident for the past 2
0 years has a file in here.” She pulled a drawer open and gestured to the files inside. “If the file has a black tab on it, it means the resident is deceased. Blue means they’re housed in an assisted living unit. Orange means temporary residents, usually for post-surgical rehab, and green are the residents whose accounts are past due.

  “What about red?” I asked. I’d noticed a few of the black tabbed files of deceased residents had a red tab as well.

  “Oh, those,” she said, looking flustered, her face turning as red as the tabs she hadn’t planned on telling me about. “We used to provide hospice care here about fifteen years ago. There’s a red tab on those files.”

  “Really?” I was suddenly intrigued by her reaction. “Why’d you stop?”

  “Well,” she began reluctantly. “This was all before I started here, but from what I’ve heard, one of the terminal cancer patients in hospice here had AIDS. Every precaution was taken with her care. She wasn’t a danger to the staff or the other residents. But the family of one of the more affluent residents found out and raised Cain about it, threatening to sue and go to the papers. This poor woman had no place else to go, and the administrator here was frantically trying to place her in a hospice facility in another county, but she died. So that was the end of it. But, shortly afterwards, a decision was made to stop offering hospice care here.”

  “That’s awful.” And it was. I couldn’t even imagine not being able to die in peace because of someone’s ignorant family members.

  Florence showed me a large stack of file folders to be filed into the resident file cabinets. “What’s about these files?” Another smaller stack of files sat on the far corner of the desk.

  “Those are personnel files and they go in that row of cabinets in the back. But Lucy’s the only with a key to those files, so just leave them for her.”

  When she finally left me, I immediately tossed the folders I’d been in the process of putting into alphabetical order back onto the desk. I quickly located the B’s in the resident’s file cabinet and found the file for Leroy “Pinky” Buford. I skimmed the contents noting that he was eighty-three and had been a resident of the nursing home for three years. He suffered from diabetes, was allergic to penicillin, and had had a hip replacement the year before. His next of kin was listed as Dr. Joyce Kirkland. I was confused as to why he didn’t mention they were related when I’d last been here or why he’d told me about Lewis being willing to do anything for her. I remembered him saying she was a different kind of thief. What had he been talking about? A yellow note stapled to the top of one of the pages in his file caught my eye. The handwritten note read: Mr. Buford is noticeably agitated and upset after visits with his niece. At the suggestion of his doctor, we are limiting the frequency and duration of her visits effective immediately. Impulsively, I pulled the note off and put it in my pants pocket.

  Next, I eyed the pile of personnel files on the desk. There were only five; after quickly flipping through them, I was disappointed to see that Brenda’s was not amongst them. I headed to the row of cabinets at the back of the room. There were four cabinets, each one with a push lock at the top that had to be unlocked to access any of the drawers below. Could I pick the lock? They sure made it look easy on TV. All I needed was a hairpin, which I never used. My hair had grown out quite a bit. But I was still wearing it natural and had no need for hairpins. A paperclip might work.

  I rummaged through all the drawers on the desk with no luck when I remembered my coat hanging on the coat rack and rushed over to it. I’d slipped the padlock and key from Brenda’s old locker into my pocket and had forgotten to put it back. Would the padlock key unlock the file cabinet? It looked like a generic key that would open a variety of locks. I inserted the key in the lock of the cabinet labeled A through H. I said a silent prayer and turned it. Click. The lock popped out and I was in.

  It didn’t take long to find Brenda’s personnel file. A quick scan revealed that Brenda Ruby Howard started working as a nurse’s aide in 1985. She’d worked with the rehab residents for six years before requesting to work in hospice. That took me aback. Somehow I couldn’t reconcile the image of surly Brenda on Lewis’s couch puffing away on a joint to someone who’d willing volunteer to work with terminally ill residents. Then Pinky’s words popped into my head, “…after her sister died the way she did, Brenda was just a burned out shell. Hard and brittle and not caring about much of anything.” And suddenly, I knew what had happened to Brenda’s sister.

  Thirteen

  Elizabeth Pearl Howard had been forty years old when she’d succumbed to AIDS on May 19, 1991. According to her file, which was decorated with both a red and black tab, there had been only one person present when she died, her sister Brenda. Poor Brenda. I had a sister, too. And even though she worked my last nerve most of the time when we were together, I loved her fiercely and would be devastated if anything happened to her.

  A quick check of my watch showed I’d been at the nursing home for half an hour already. I needed to be long gone by the time Lucy came back. Usually emergency room visits took forever. But I wasn’t going to risk it. I hadn’t been able to talk to Pinky, but I’d found out more than I thought I would. I re-filed Brenda and her sister’s files and slipped out of the file room. The plan had been to exit the building through the staff room. But when I got to the staff room door, it was locked. Crap! The only other I exit I knew of was the front entrance. But who was staffing the front desk? Could I make it out the door without anyone seeing me?

  “Sherry?” Florence had come up behind me and I jumped. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Did you have a question?”

  “Uh…yeah, I did,” I said, while my mind raced. “Where’s the restroom?”

  “Just down the hall to your right.”

  “Thanks!” I practically ran down the hall and hoped she thought I really had to pee. The restroom was a small—one toilet and one sink affair with no window I could climb out of. Hopefully, when I left Florence would be gone. After five minutes I left the restroom to find Florence still in the hallway. But her back was to me and she was talking to one of the elderly residents. And that’s when the sound of music floated towards me from somewhere beyond the restroom. It was “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye. It didn’t take a genius to figure out whose room it was most likely coming from.

  I headed the opposite way and was around the corner in a flash, finding myself in another hallway. I could tell by the way the doors were decorated that these were resident’s rooms. Marvin’s mellow voice beckoned me down the hallway to the very last room on the left. The door was decorated with a small dry erase type message board, just like the kind I’d had on my dorm room door in college, with a marker dangling from it by a string. The door was slightly ajar, and I knocked softly.

  “Mr. Buford?” Getting no response, I pushed the door open and stuck my head in. Pinky Buford was sitting in a recliner by a large window, fast asleep and snoring softly. A newspaper of which half the pages had fallen onto the floor was draped across his lap. A pair of reading glasses had slipped halfway down the bridge of his nose, perilously close to falling off. I stepped into the room, gently pulling the door shut behind me.

  His room was spacious with a neatly made queen-size bed in the corner on the other side of the window. Brown carpet covered the floor, and a stereo system with two big speakers sat under the window. The music was coming from a record spinning on the turntable. The record’s dust jacket sat on top of the stereo’s lid, showing the late great singer looking handsome in a tux against a pink and purple background, the words Marvin Gaye Anthology in bold black letters above his head. The space below the record player was crammed to the gills with albums. Not CD’s, either. Vinyl, and lots of it. This was clearly a man who loved his music. There was even a large record case with a thick black handle wedged between the stereo and the bed. As for the bed, it was made up with military precision—not so much as a wrinkle in the blue, green and brown plaid bedspread. So mu
ch for him being on bed rest. I wonder why Lucy lied? I lifted the record case, surprised it was so heavy. How many records did he have in that thing?

  “Put that down, honey. I got a whole lot of priceless vinyl in that case.” Pinky had awakened and had set his reading glasses on the table next to his chair.

  “Sorry,” I said, setting the case back down. “I knocked but you were asleep. I can come back later.” But I couldn’t go back out into the hallway or I’d run right into Florence.

  “No need for that. I’m wide awake now. Besides, not too many men would rather sleep than talk to a pretty young lady. Have a seat. The only other place to sit in the room was his bed. I perched on the edge, keeping an eye on the door.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m right as rain. How ’bout you?”

  “They told me you were sick.” I gave him a skeptical look. The old man let out a snort of laughter.

  “That’s what they call it ’round here when we stir up trouble and they make us go to our rooms like children. They ain’t about to tell you they put an eighty-three year-old man in time out.” He winked at me and started laughing.