by Renee George
I looped Smooshie’s leash over one of the fence’s concrete posts and approached her. Her lower jaw almost looked unhinged and dry spittle had created what looked like a white powder in the corner of her mouth.
“Mrs. Davidson?” I said. When she didn’t wake up, I placed my hand on her shoulder and gave it a mild shake. “Ma’am?”
Her skin had a waxy, almost yellow appearance. I touched her wrist. Cold, clammy, and she had a weak pulse.
The woman sitting on the bench said, “She’s been asleep since I got out here. She’s really tired.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve been out here since just a bit after lunch, and I finish eating around one.”
It was one thirty-five now. I rubbed my knuckles against her chest to see if I could rouse a response. Mrs. Davidson barely stirred. Her body carried a strange odor, one that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I tapped into my werecougar, allowing her to take over my senses. There was a sharp odor that smelled vaguely of medicine, but more like mouthwash without the mint added.
I knew Mrs. Davidson was diabetic. From everything I’d read, if she were experiencing a high blood sugar, she would smell fruity, as if she’d been drinking alcohol. But this was more stringent without any sweetness. “I think her blood sugar is low,” I said.
The woman next to her gave me a what do you want me to do about it? look.
“Hang in there, Jane. I’ll be right back.” I set the waste bag next to the bench then glanced over at Smooshie, who was happily eating a tuft of grass that I was sure I’d be cleaning out of the carpet at home later. “You’re not a cow,” I said to her. “Stop grazing.”
I walked quickly to the door, opened it, and stuck my head in. The short hall was empty, along with the two nurses’ stations on either side.
I could hear the beep of call lights. “Hello,” I yelled. “We need some help. Hello? Help!”
“Help!” I heard an elderly gentleman shout. Then a woman several rooms down joined in.
Great. I was starting a riot.
I glanced back at Mrs. Davidson. I didn’t want to have to leave her or Smooshie, so I tried again, even louder. “I need some help in the courtyard!”
Lacy Evans, her face flushed and her expression concerned, came up the hallway pushing her cart at a fast walk. “What’s happening, Lily?”
“Mrs. Davidson. She’s unconscious. I think she might be having a hypoglycemic attack.”
Now Lacy looked irritated. “She’s probably just sleeping. A lot of these people are hard sleepers.” As she said this, she was pulling out a small machine from her cart and some kind of pen that she loaded with a tiny needle.
“I hope that’s all it is,” I said. “But she’s super unresponsive, her pulse is weak, and her skin feels cold and damp.”
She poked a small tab into one end of the machine. “A glucose monitor,” she explained. “Lead the way.”
“She’s just outside here.” I opened the door wide, and Lacy brushed past me.
She knelt down next to Mrs. Davidson and took her hand. She clicked the pen against a finger, and that’s when I observed that most of her fingertips were purple and bruised from daily monitoring. She tapped the tiny droplet of blood against the tab sticking out of the machine, then set it down on the bench. She pressed her index and middle finger to the inner part of Mrs. Davidson’s wrist.
“Her pulse is faint.” She pulled a stethoscope from her pocket, put it in her ears and pressed the drum to Mrs. Davidson’s chest. “Damn it. Her heartbeat is going a mile a minute.” The machine beeped. “Her blood sugar is at nineteen! How in the world could that happen? It was two hundred and eighty before lunch. I told the nurse, and he gave her some regular insulin like it was ordered, but it shouldn’t have dropped it this low.”
She jumped up and ran inside, a few seconds later reemerging with a red box. She opened it and took out a prefilled syringe, removed the safety cap off the large-bore needle, then grabbed a vial that was inside the box. She popped off the red cap, stuck the needle in, depressed all the liquid into the vial. Keeping the needle in place, she shook the vial until whatever was in there was mixed with the contents of the syringe, then turned it up and pulled it all back into the barrel of the syringe.
“Glucagon,” Lacy explained as she withdrew the needle and put the whole thing back into its box. “It will raise her blood sugar.” To Mrs. Davidson, she said, “Stay with me, Jane.” She gestured to me. “Help me lean her to the left.”
I did, holding Mrs. Davidson off to one side, while Lacy lowered her pants down to expose her hip. She pinched up the skin and stuck Mrs. Davidson with a quickness that would make a shifter proud, then she pushed the plunger all the way down in a slow, steady measure.
I helped Mrs. Davidson up. “Now what?”
“It takes about ten minutes for this stuff to work,” Lacy said. “I'm going to get a nurse and call an ambulance. Can you stay with her until I get back?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her. “And hey, you were pretty incredible just now. You’re going to make a great nurse.”
Lacy nodded, her eyes starting to tear up. “Thanks.”
“Your dog is going nuts over there,” the old woman said.
I looked at Smooshie, who was now on her back and wiggling side to side, a recent habit she’d picked up. Parker theorized that it was ancient pack instinct kicking in since she ran with a cougar every week, but I’d given her enough baths to know she just liked to roll around in wild animal poop.
“Yep,” I said, as I waited for Lacy’s return. “That’s my girl. Nuts.”
Mrs. Davidson muttered something. Good. The injection Lacy gave her was working. When the nurse, a guy named Rick, showed up with Lacy and began checking out Mrs. Davidson, I took the opportunity to check on Smooshie, who was now pacing back and forth again.
I took her outside the gate and let her lead me several yards away from the courtyard. She circled, sniffed, then circled again, then sniffed. Then sniffed some more. Her tail wagged as whatever scent she’d caught distracted her from the fact that she needed to poop again.
“Come on, girl.” I wanted to get back and see how Mrs. Davidson was doing.
Lacy had been so calm in her quick assessment and treatment of the elderly woman. She certainly wasn’t the young girl who’d crashed her car my first week in Moonrise. She’d left her infant at home by himself while she’d run out to the convenience store for a fountain drink, and nearly ran a pedestrian over in the process. She’d been wearing pajamas and house slippers, and she had asked me to call her mom to pick up her son. I had debated on whether calling child services wouldn’t have been a better solution, but her mom worked for my uncle, and I’d decided to let family take care of family. After all, I’d had my share of tough times as a teenager trying to take care of a kid.
The way she’d handled this crisis, and the fact that she was going to school and getting her life in order, made me glad I hadn’t put more roadblocks in her way.
I focused my hearing toward the courtyard and heard the nurse tell Lacy that the blood sugar was fifty now, so on its way up. “Good job,” he’d told her. “How in the world did her blood sugar drop like that?”
Lacy replied, “I don’t know. She’s had lunch since her insulin injection. I double checked the dose. She shouldn’t have crashed like that.”
Paula the social worker and Annie the activity director hustled out into the courtyard. “The ambulance is here. How did this happen?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Rick said. “She got her normal injection before lunch. Maybe she didn’t eat? Even so, it’s a pretty extreme drop.”
Paula tugged at the hem on her shirt. “This is not good.”
“I’ll ask the aides if she ate her lunch,” Annie said.
“And how did she get outside?” Paula asked. “Who brought her out here?”
“I’ll find out,” Rick said. Then the paramedi
cs came through and, within a short time, they had Jane up on a stretcher. After they hooked her up to a few things, they strapped her down and the group of them went back inside the facility.
Smoosh pulled on the leash and pawed at whatever wonderful treasure she’d found. “What in the world has you so fascinated?”
I bent over for a closer look. Something red was sticking to a grass clump. I picked it up. It was a crumpled square of cellophane. It had a citrus scent. “You find the weirdest things,” I told Smooshie as I placed the trash into an empty poop bag. “Are you going to go or what?”
She eyeballed me, staring at the bag where I’d hidden her treasure, and twitched her ears back and forth expectedly.
I laughed. “You want a treat for your find?”
She barked excitedly at the word “treat.” I took a small pouch of training treats from my purse. “Sit then.”
Smooshie sat, but her helicopter tail was swishing so hard I doubted her butt touched the ground. She laid her ears back, her chin up, making her look very much like a seal. “Who could resist that face?” I asked when I presented her with the dime-sized delicacy. “Easy now.”
She took the treat gently, like the good girl she is, then inhaled it as if it were a dying man’s last meal.
“Lily,” I heard Nadine call.
Reggie, Pearl, Opal, and Nadine were in the courtyard. Opal was sitting on the bench, a walker pushed out in front of her. I hoped I hadn’t missed the chance to talk with Abby’s mom.
“I’ll be right there,” I said, loud enough for them to hear. Smooshie, who’d apparently lost the urge to poop, led me in their direction.
Chapter 8
The elderly woman who had been out there with Mrs. Davidson was still on her bench, enjoying the afternoon as if her neighbor hadn’t almost died. I’d seen that kind of ambivalence in certain sects of the shifter populations who barely batted an eyelash at extreme violence.
“How’d you end up back here?” Nadine asked me. Smooshie rubbed her shoulder against Nadine’s leg and got a scritch behind the ears as a reward.
“I was looking for—”
“No, no, no,” Reggie said, cutting me off. “What the ever-loving…” She was lifting her patent-leather, kitten-heeled pump from the ground, Smooshie’s poop bag clinging to the one-inch spike. “Why? Why would someone put this here?”
Nadine raised a brow at me.
“As I was saying, I was trying to find a trash can,” I said in my defense. “But there isn’t a single one outside this entire building.”
“Which answers my question,” Nadine said. “About how you got back here.”
Reggie scowled as she delicately extracted the biodegradable bag from her shoe. “This is so gross.”
“It’ll wash,” I told her. Nadine snickered.
Reggie stuck her tongue out at the both of us. “I don’t think I like either of you very much.”
“I’ll buy you lunch this week,” I told her. I dug around in my purse for a tissue and found a fast food napkin. “Here.”
She wiped the poop off the end of her heel and held the soiled napkin away from her as she looked around. “Trash?”
“My point exactly,” I said.
Opal, who’d been silently watching us, let out a big belly guffaw that ended in a wheeze of chuckles. “Oh, God,” she said. “I needed you all today.”
“Where’s Abby’s mom?” I asked, reining in Smooshie when she made a nosedive for Pearl’s crotch.
“Dang it, Lily!” Pearl swatted at the air where Smooshie’s nose had been and stumbled back. I was grateful she remained upright.
I grimaced. “Sorry.”
Opal laughed harder. Pearl, at hearing her sister’s reprieve from her grief, shook her head and smiled. “I’ll survive.”
Nadine answered my question about Abby’s mom. “Melinda is up in the office talking to Ruby Davis, the administrator, and Dawn Welch, the director of nursing. She said she’d meet us out here.”
“How’d you all know I was in the courtyard?”
“This place isn’t that big,” Nadine said. “We would have had to have been deaf not to hear. We would have been down here quicker but…”
“I’m slow these days,” Opal supplied. “Besides, at first we thought it might be old Gerald Greenspan. He hollers for help all the time then gets a few others going as well.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t even think about what I’d do with Smooshie once we got here.”
A middle-aged woman, maybe in her early fifties, walked into the courtyard. Her hair was professionally colored a honey blonde with delicate strands of high and low lights. She glanced around at all of us, her tired gaze finally landing on Opal.
“What will we do now?” the woman asked, her eyes filling with tears.
The rawness of her words made me recoil. Maybe talking to Abby’s mother two days after her daughter’s death had been a really bad idea.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told her, because there was nothing else to say, nothing that could help, anyhow.
“Melinda, this is Lily Mason,” Opal said. She held out her hand, and the woman sat down on the bench next to her.
“Did you know my Abby?” Melinda asked.
“I met her recently. She was easy to like.”
Melinda smiled. “She always had a way of drawing people to her.”
Smooshie, thankfully, showed little interest in Abby’s mom and had flopped down by my feet with a loud huff, giving up on any more exploration. “I could see that about her.” She had been funny and charming, and the fact that Opal had loved her was enough for me.
“Melinda, Lily has promised to find out what happened to Abby. She’s going to get justice for our girl,” Opal said.
Oh, Goddess me. “Now, Opal, I can’t promise all that.”
Melinda looked up at me with wet, pleading eyes. “I’ve read the newspaper article where you were instrumental in capturing the dentist and his wife who killed that poor preacher’s wife.”
Reverend, I mentally corrected. Katherine Kapersky had been the wife of Reverend Kapersky. The reverend had been a decent man. He left the church after Tom Jones’ conviction and moved away from Moonrise. Presumably for a fresh start. I hoped he’d found some peace. His wife had not been a saint, but she hadn’t deserved death.
“I agreed to look into it, Opal. I can’t make any assurances about what I’ll find.”
“But you’re already convinced she didn’t kill herself,” she said. “The cat. Audrey. Pearl told me about her not having any food and what you said about it.”
I glared at Pearl. She patted her blue hair and avoided eye contact. “I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“It isn’t a secret, but it also isn’t concrete evidence of foul play.”
Nadine nodded. “Lily’s right.”
“What about you, Doctor Crawford?” Melinda asked. “Have you found anything to explain my Abby’s death?”
Reggie frowned. “I don’t have any real answers, yet. I can tell you that I haven’t found any evidence of trauma.” Her voice softened; her gaze full of compassion. “I think she died peacefully, if that’s any comfort.”
“I wish it was,” Melinda said. “I just can’t stand the idea of people thinking my daughter would do this. And why? Abby had so much to live for. She had no reason to take her own life.”
I could feel a tingle of a lie. Melinda was holding back about her daughter. If anyone understood secrets and the need for them, it was me. However, now was not the time. Not if we were going to get to the truth of the matter.
I put my hand on Melinda’s shoulder and pushed my will, not hard, just a nudge to see if she would open up. My power couldn’t compel someone to spill their guts if they really didn’t want anyone to know. I had a feeling Melinda wanted to tell us, but she was afraid. Of what? Probably that we might judge her daughter, or maybe her.
“It’s hard losing someone we love, but death can’t undo
their life. There’s always good with the bad and bad with the good.” My brother Danny had been funny and charming and likeable, but he’d also been troubled, ran with a rough crowd, and had gotten into hard drugs. It didn’t mean I loved him less, but the truth of his life had tainted the police investigation into his death. “Whatever you tell us, I promise, it won’t stop me from finding out the truth of Abby’s death. Can you think of anything that might have pushed Abby too far? To a breaking point?”
A sob forced its way from Melinda’s throat. She took several deep breaths, then said, “Abby was taking antidepressants. It’s my fault.” She covered her face with her hands. “It’s all my fault.”
“How?” Nadine asked.
“She struggled after her divorce. Dale, her ex, he pretty much had blackmailed Abby into giving him the house and not going after him for alimony. She’d lost so much of her spark and I worried…” Her voice trailed off.
“You worried she might do something terrible to herself.” I lifted my hand from her shoulder. I shook my head. I didn’t believe Abby had been depressed, not anymore. Depressed people didn’t care about things like laundry and kitty litter. And the Abby I had met had been full of energy and happiness. “Please don’t blame yourself. I think you did what a mother is supposed to do. You helped your daughter through a terrible time and got her to the other side.”
The tension lines around Melinda’s eyes eased as she met my gaze. “Thank you.”
“Do you know if Abby was seeing someone?” I hated asking this next question, but as her mom, she might know. “A married someone?”
Melinda’s mouth pursed and her eyes narrowed. “She hadn’t been seeing him. Not for a while now.” She shook her head. “And before you ask, I don’t know who he was. She wouldn’t tell me. But she did promise me it was over. She’d had a few dates with other men the last three months. So, I believed her when she said it.”