Hands dug into pockets, Emily and Jerome followed the winding road that split the forest in two. By the time the road had opened up to reveal acres of flat land with the Ever After Care Foundation rising like a monolith from its centre, Emily’s face was so cold she felt as if she had been slapped.
Beside her, Jerome tugged the hood of his coat over his forehead. He grumbled to himself, occasionally glancing in Emily’s direction.
As they came closer they saw topiary-lined gardens. Most of the plants had died back or fallen victim to frost. It was a very different picture to the vibrant images on the website. The manor house, however, was much more impressive. A series of turrets and chimneys adorned the sloping slate roofs of the c-shaped sandstone building. Nineteen windows watched the strangers draw near. Emily wondered what riches might have once been spied through them as lords and ladies met to discuss the dowries attached to their daughters’ impending, arranged marriages.
In stark contrast, the one storey modern extensions attached to either side of the building were ugly and out of place.
Apart from a handful of vehicles in the car park the place felt deserted.
“I just don’t see why you couldn’t have asked about her over the phone, instead of dragging me out here to freeze my ass off,” Jerome said in a hushed voice. “And there are dying people in there. It just feels wrong.”
Emily stepped up to the impressive oak front door and pressed the intercom button.
“No one’s going to tell us anything over the phone,” she said. “We’re going to take a tour, that’s all. Hopefully, we’ll glean something while we’re here.”
“Well, I don’t want any trouble. The only reason I came along is because this is a ridiculous idea and someone needs to watch your back.”
“I appreciate it.”
The door opened and a nurse in her mid-fifties, who was short but powerfully built and dressed in a blue and white uniform, greeted them.
“Goodness, it’s icy out there!” A blast of frosty air extinguished her smile. “Come in, come in! Before we let the heat out.”
They stepped into a grand hallway resplendent with wood-panelled walls and hanging chandeliers. A grand double staircase grew up from the centre. Nestled in between was the front desk, where a young woman sat at a computer. She looked up, noticing the visitors.
The interior of the building had undergone some major transformations in order to accommodate its patients. Beige carpet now insulated the stone floors. Ornate windows had been replaced with double-glazed replicas to eliminate draughts.
“Well now, who do we have here?” the nurse asked, neatening her bun of dark hair.
“Emily Swanson. I called yesterday. This is my partner, Jerome.”
Already overwhelmed by the near-tropical heat, Jerome pulled off his scarf and jacket.
“Oh yes, of course” the nurse nodded. “Well, Emily, I’m Nurse Bates. I’ll be showing you around today, but first I’ll need you both to sign in with Rosa over there.”
As the nurse led them toward the reception desk, Jerome whispered, “Your partner? Really? And well done for giving them our actual names!”
Once they were signed in and wearing visitor badges, Nurse Bates led them towards white double doors.
“It’s your mother you’re here for?”
Emily nodded. “She has bowel cancer, stage four. She doesn’t have long. A few weeks perhaps. I’d like them to be comfortable.”
Nurse Bates patted her on the hand. “Well my dear, she’ll be properly looked after here. We have all the home comforts and therapies you can think of to make her stay as pleasant as possible. You’ll see as we go around that all our visitors are treated with the utmost dignity and respect.”
It was a strange term, Emily thought. Visitors. As if those who came to stay here were passing through, when in fact they had reached the end of their journey.
They began the tour with the dayroom.
“We won’t go in.” Nurse Bates held up a hand as they came to a halt in the doorway. “We don’t want to disturb anyone unnecessarily.”
As the nurse ran through the list of facilities, activities and events linked to the dayroom, Emily and Jerome looked around. It was a curious mix of old and new. Original features, such as the unused fireplace that ran across the east wall, remained. More contemporary additions, such as wall to wall carpeting, lighting fixtures with dimmers, and an enormous flat-screen television, were a reminder that in spite of the archaic surroundings, this was very much the twenty-first century.
Furnishing the dayroom was a mismatch of couches and loungers, and a set of sturdy elm bookcases. Red and gold Christmas decorations concertinaed towards the central chandelier, while a plastic Christmas tree stood beside the television, its branches cradling bows and baubles. Emily couldn’t decide if she found its presence a comfort, a reminder of how vibrant and benevolent life could be, or if those colours served to taunt the dying, to remind them this Christmas would be their last.
A handful of patients dotted the room. Most of them were elderly and frail, their bodies half-devoured by cancer, heart disease and other life-ending illnesses. But there were a few who were much younger, including a woman in her thirties whose headscarf concealed the clumps of hair that had grown back now her chemotherapy was at an end.
A few patients had family with them. Some still wore coats despite the stifling room temperature. Talk was quiet, sporadic.
“Most of our patients receive home care,” Nurse Bates said, keeping her voice at a respectful volume. “Around eighty-five percent of them as a matter of fact. The majority of sufferers would rather spend their last days in the comfort of the familiar, but there are a few, like these, who choose to end their lives here. Have you considered home care as an option?”
Emily had stopped listening. She stared at the woman with the headscarf, who sat alone, lost inside her dressing gown. Her eyes were muddy and dull, their vivacity snuffed out by an abandonment of hope. Why hope, her expression said, when death was already extending a hand?
“Emily’s mother insists on a hospice,” Jerome told Nurse Bates, who beckoned them away from the dayroom and led them upstairs to the patients’ rooms. Showing them into a vacant bedroom, the nurse explained that each room was en suite, and was equipped with an adjustable hospital-style bed and a wall-mounted television. Emily stared at the empty bed. She was at her mother’s house again, that emaciated husk turning into dust beside her.
As Nurse Bates led them back toward the staircase, she pointed out the large lift doors. As if on cue, they slid open and two nurses wheeled out an elderly man asleep in a hospital bed.
“Sometimes I wonder what Doctor Williams was thinking, founding a hospice in a placed filled with stairs,” Nurse Bates continued. “But then as you walk around, all the wonder, all the majesty of the house takes your breath away. There’s so much history here it seems fitting somehow for our visitors to become part of it.”
“How long have you worked here?” Jerome asked as they took the stairs to the next floor. A wide corridor stretched out before them. There were rooms for massage, reflexology, Reiki, and Shiatsu, as well as designated spaces for art and drama therapy, and grief counselling for both patients and their families.
“What a question!” the nurse laughed. “Well, it must be coming up for almost twenty-nine years. I’d previously worked for Doctor Williams for a number of years before he’d gone on to bigger and better things. You can imagine my surprise when out of the blue I received a phone call from him asking if I wouldn’t mind heading a team of nurses here at Ever After. It had been running for about a year then. Doctor Williams was dissatisfied with the level of care his current team was able to provide. I’d always held Doctor Williams in high regard, so of course I was extremely flattered.”
“Twenty-nine years is a long time,” Jerome mused.
“It is indeed! A long time and a lot of lost lives.”
“How do you cope with it? The dying,
I mean.”
Nurse Bates sighed. “Counsel, prayer, and cabernet sauvignon. Of course, it would be a lie to say you get used to people passing away, in spite of it being a frequent, sometimes daily occurrence. But as I always say, the day you stop feeling anything is the day you need to find yourself a new calling.”
The final stop of the tour was the multi-faith prayer room, located downstairs in the west wing extension. It was a simple room, void of religious iconography. The silence in here was all encompassing, and Emily felt it around her like a death shroud.
“Doctor Williams has worked incredibly hard to make this place what it is today,” Nurse Bates said, walking her visitors back towards the reception area. “You won’t find better nurses or greater quality of care anywhere else—even if I do say so myself.”
Their visit was coming to an end. Jerome looked across at Emily, trying to catch her attention. If she was going to ask about Alina, now was the time. Emily, however, was lost in thought.
“Can we meet Doctor Williams?” he asked Nurse Bates. They were passing through the dining room now, the foyer just through the next door. “He sounds like a very interesting person, doesn’t he, Emily?”
Emily blinked. “Yes, he does.”
Nurse Bates led them out into the foyer, where two nurses conversed in low voices with the receptionist.
“I’m afraid Doctor Williams is offsite today,” she said. “I could ask him to call you if you have any further questions?”
The nurses at the front desk smiled at the visitors, then headed towards the dayroom. Jerome removed his badge and scrolled through the sign-in book, taking his time to locate his name. He shot Emily a sideways glance, and was about to give her a subtle nudge, when she said, “Thank you for your time, Nurse Bates. Obviously, there’s a lot to take in right now, although I realise there’s not a lot of time to make a decision. Perhaps I can call you later, once we’ve discussed it with my mother?”
“Of course,” Nurse Bates said. “These decisions aren’t made lightly. We’ll be here, so go ahead and call when you’re ready.”
“I’m just glad we met that nurse when we did,” Emily said, turning to Jerome. “In a situation like this, you have to think ahead. What was her name? I forget.”
For a second, Jerome was silent, searching her expression for clues. Then, he was reluctantly playing along. “I can’t remember. She was German, wasn’t she?”
“That’s right.”
Uncertainty creased Nurse Bates’ brow. “Alina?”
“Yes, I think that was her name,” Emily replied. “That was it, wasn’t it, Jerome? Alina. We met her at a mutual friend’s house warming a few months ago, and when I mentioned my mother, Alina told us all about this place and about all the good that was being done here. It was a stroke of luck really, meeting her when we did.”
The receptionist looked up, staring at Emily.
“I’m afraid Alina hasn’t been with us for quite some time now,” Nurse Bates said.
“Yes, it’s terrible what happened to her, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Emily felt her mouth drying up. “She disappeared, didn’t she? Our friend told us all about it. Do you know if they found her yet?”
The nurse’s gaze flitted between the two visitors. “I’m afraid your friend is very much mistaken. Alina isn’t missing. She’s gone home, back to Germany.”
“Really? Are you sure? Our friend told us her husband had reported her missing. That one evening, on her way home from here, she simply vanished. Isn’t that awful?”
“I’m very sorry, but I don’t know anything about that,” Nurse Bates said. Any trace of welcome was now gone. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have patients to attend to.”
She walked them away from the front desk and towards the front door, where a security guard now stood. He opened the door and the cold rushed in, tearing through the foyer like a pack of wolves.
“Good afternoon to you both,” Nurse Bates said.
Before either of them could respond, the guard closed the door behind them.
“Our friend? What the hell was that?” Jerome began marching down the gravel path, back towards the road.
Feeling eyes upon her, Emily turned and saw the security guard had moved into the dining room and now watched her through the window.
She took off after Jerome, quickening her pace, leaving the Ever After Care Foundation behind her.
***
Neither of them spoke on the bus back to the train station. As they waited on the platform for a city-bound train, Jerome was unable to hide his anger.
“You shouldn’t have lied like that,” he said. “I feel terrible.”
Emily dug her hands into her pockets and glanced down the length of the platform. “But you’re an actor. Isn’t it your job to lie?”
The train pulled into the station. The gathering crowd surged towards the open doors, barely giving passengers the opportunity to alight. Jerome entered the nearest carriage and slumped into a window seat. Emily joined him and they both were silent until the train pulled away a minute later.
“Those people were all dying,” Jerome said “They were just sitting there, all skin and bone, waiting for it to happen. We shouldn’t have invaded their space like that. It was disrespectful. And by the way, for the record, you’re a terrible actress! That nurse was onto you in a second.”
Emily shrugged. She was in no mood to be scolded. The Ever After Care Foundation had revealed nothing but a lingering black cloud of suffering and despair that had stalked them through the manor house and now followed them back to the city. Nurse Bates had been insistent—Alina Engel was alive and well, and back in Germany.
“Do hospices usually have security guards?” she asked.
Jerome became increasingly agitated. “Are you even listening? We made this whole story up about your mother dying, pulling on that nurse’s heart strings just to ask a couple of questions that you could have asked over the phone. Well, at least you got what you came for. At least you know Alina is alive and well.”
“My mother died of bowel cancer six months ago,” Emily said. “And I know nothing of the sort.”
She looked out of the window, avoiding Jerome’s shocked expression, his mouth swinging open and shut like a malfunctioning gate.
He tried to speak but Emily was no longer listening. She was gone, her mind travelling back in time, just as the journey they had made that morning reversed itself outside; the present disappearing scene by scene, as if the day’s events had never happened.
Jerome had exited the lift, muttering a goodbye before sloping off to his apartment. Now alone, Emily watched the headlights of the traffic blinking in the coming darkness like nocturnal animals waking from sleep.
Memories of her mother seized her mind. She had refused to stay at a hospice, insisting that her home would be the only place in which she would spend her final moments. Even the hospital was off-limits—not because the nearest was a thirty-mile drive, but because, like a hospice, she refused to surround herself with the sick and the dying. If she wanted that, she said, she need only pick up a mirror.
Even though Emily understood her mother’s needs, she’d resented her decision. Without any say in the matter, she watched her mother die at home in her bed, her body resembling a scattered pile of chicken bones, her last breaths ragged and sodden, each one more protracted than the last.
There was no family to call. No friends to inform of her passing. With that last breath expelled, Emily sat on the edge of the bed, an eerie calm washing over her. Then, in one fluid movement, she reached over to her mother’s bedside cabinet, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one up. Her mouth filled with the taste of ash, of graveyards. Turning her head, she blew the smoke out over her mother’s body, wondering if she might see her spirit swim through it.
The Ever After Care Foundation had proven to be a dead end. Now, as Emily watched charcoal clouds slide across the afternoon
, her mood grew darker and darker. Outside, clouds burst and rain fell in heavy sheets. In the street, pedestrians struggled with their umbrellas, bouncing off each other like pinballs.
Before the world fell apart, the views from Emily’s cottage had been wonderful. And like a play, the scenery changed with each season. Spring grew brilliant green buds and fragrant blossoms, while summer brought thick lawns and meadows. Then, with the arrival of autumn, colours became crisp and corroded. And yes, winter showered the land in plenty of rain, but it was a leafless, roguish wilderness born from stark beauty.
Here in the city, looking through the window was like looking at an enormous photograph. Nothing ever changed. And the nothingness was like an omen that had come into being.
Emily could feel herself falling; a weight of frustration, remorse and loss wearing her down. She thought about the Ever After Care Foundation. Why had she really gone there today? Jerome was right. It would have been easy to ascertain the same information over the phone. But she had felt compelled to go there. She had needed to see what it was like inside.
Suddenly, she felt dirty. Her skin itched.
After taking a long shower, Emily dressed into cotton pyjamas and sat on her bed, wondering if she should skip dinner and take an early sleeping pill instead. Shrill ringing pierced the silence. She tensed. It had been so long since anyone had called her phone that the ringtone sounded unfamiliar. Who was calling her? Only three people had her number—Lewis, Paulina Blanchard, and Jerome.
Hurrying back to the living room, Emily picked up her phone from the table. The caller ID read: UNKNOWN.
Emily caught her breath. If Paulina had followed through on her request, there was a fourth person who might now have Emily’s number. Karl Henry.
Fingers trembling, she hit the answer key and listened. Quick, anxious breaths filled her ear.
“Hello? Miss Swanson?”
It was not Karl Henry. The voice belonged to a woman and it was filled with worry.
Lost Lives (Emily Swanson Mystery Thriller Series Book 1) Page 7