Best Place to Die

by Charles Atkins

  ‘OK, fine,’ he said, and pulled back the barrier, as an ambulance laid on the horn wanting to get through.

  Without pause, she drove past. Knowing the starfish-shaped layout of Nillewaug, with its wide hedge-lined drive, sprawling central structure and outer buildings, which included an Alzheimer’s unit, rehab facility, adult day care, and others whose purpose she didn’t know, she steered toward the access road that ran around the periphery.

  ‘Lil, please just park,’ Ada said, her hand on the latch. ‘I’ve got to find her.’

  ‘OK.’ She edged off the road not fifty yards from the burning building.

  Before they’d made a full stop, Ada was out with Aaron jogging behind her. Lil stayed back at a distance, keeping them in view and remembering something Bradley often said: ‘The first thing to do at the sight of an accident is check a pulse . . . your own.’ Sound advice, as she surveyed the chaotic scene, more than a dozen fire trucks – Grenville only owned two – ambulances, cruisers, and more arriving. The smell of smoke, but not like a wood fire; this was acrid and laced with burning vinyl siding and something else, like gas or oil. She thought of the hundreds of residents, many of whom she knew. Please, God, let everyone be OK, let them make it through this night.

  And then she pulled her camera from out of the bag. She looked at it, a part of herself questioning her motives, so much chaos. Is this really what you should be doing now? She started snapping. Zooming in and watching through the LED screen. Looking up as Ada and Aaron disappeared down a walking path dangerously close to the burning structure. ‘Wait,’ she shouted, and ran after them. This was crazy, feeling a spike of terror – Ada wouldn’t try to go in . . . would she? The saga of the past several months of trying to pry Ada’s mother, Rose, out of her rent-controlled apartment in the Lower East Side, the bitter mother-daughter exchanges. And finally, after yet another fall where Rose had been left lying on the floor for more than an hour before emergency personnel were able to break down her door, she’d finally acquiesced to the move. Thank God she’d had her call button around her neck, but even with that . . .

  ‘Ada!’ Lil shouted, clearing the edge of the rehab building, and getting an unobstructed view of the fire. With camera in hand, she couldn’t help herself, the scene both horrifying and spectacular. She framed and captured vivid images as hoses, braced by pairs of firefighters, shot pressurized streams of water through shattered windows. She zoomed in close as a female firefighter, her face blackened, exited the building, with one arm around the waist of a confused-looking woman in a filthy pink robe, her other hand pressing a mask to the woman’s face. A pair of paramedics raced toward them with a stretcher, its green oxygen tank and bright-red metal kit strapped on top. As the firefighter released her charge to the medics, the elderly woman looked back. With a shock, Lil recognized her – Gladys Hendricks, her face was contorted in anguish, as the medics placed a new mask over her nose and mouth and strapped her to the gurney. Lil’s thoughts tumbled. Where’s Ada? Turning in place. ‘Ada!’

  ‘Up there!’ a male voice shouted, an arm pointed toward the roof.

  Lil looked up and saw a lump at the roof’s edge. Impossible to make out, and she pressed the telephoto button as far as it could go. In the screen the lump took on form . . . human form. As the resolution sharpened she saw it was a woman – oh God, no – with thin gray hair, her scalp visible through the fine strands. She wasn’t moving and, ignoring tears that spilled down her cheek, Lil sidled to the left, not wanting to impede the firefighters and medics ferrying Nillewaug residents to a string of ambulances that had coalesced into a kind of taxi line on the access road. Staring at the camera’s LED screen, she kept the focus grid on the woman’s head, all the while praying that some movement would show she was alive, that they’d get up to the roof, bring her down and all would be well. Nearly banging her knee on a small bench, she moved a few steps forward, and had a clear shot of the woman’s face, as she lay with her eyes closed, her head resting on the brick edging. ‘Betty . . .’ Lil’s breath caught as she recognized Mrs Grasso, a retired first-grade teacher at Pond Elementary. She stared at the screen – please be alive – willing her to breathe. Tears spilled as she tried to steady the camera. A ladder with a firefighter in a cherry picker telescoped up the side of the building, and while Lil knew that recording this was ghoulish, she shifted the camera to video mode and followed him.

  The rescuer anchored to the roof’s edge and ran toward Betty. Lil watched him check for a pulse at her throat. He shook his head, then he scooped her up as though she weighed little more than a child. Lil’s hands shook as she held the camera in both, trying to steady it. She’s dead, and what was she doing on the roof? The answer that came to mind too awful: she was trying to escape. As the firefighter ran Betty in his arms to the ambulance at the front of the queue, she shut off the video. Sobbing, she turned slowly, aware of dawn creeping up the eastern sky, the flames through the second-floor windows still visible but no longer so high, as focused jets of water bombarded their target. Smoke billowed thick and black; windows shattered, and, barely audible over the sirens, cries for help.

  Ada, where are you? Putting down the camera she started to jog around the building’s periphery, trying to gauge where Rose’s first-floor apartment was. Her closest exit was toward the back, and, shouldering her bag, Lil broke into a run. As she fled from the heart of the fire, she saw smoke billowing from broken upper-floor windows. Unbidden and unwanted thoughts hounded her, like having recently survived a fire she knew that death from smoke inhalation is not the worst way to go. The smoke was too thick, anyone still inside . . . It could take someone in their sleep. Not slowing her pace, she realized it probably had tonight. People are dying here . . . people are dead.

  Lil coughed as she rounded the back of the building. ‘Ada!’ Spotting her silhouette in the bright blue sweats standing by a bench with the much taller Aaron on the other side and two women seated between them.

  Now winded, but so relieved. ‘Thank God you’re OK.’ Lil took in Ada’s worried expression, and then that of her mother Rose, and a second woman with dyed red hair in a white nightdress with sprays of purple petunias, both of them drenched, the redhead with Aaron’s jacket draped on her shoulders. They were strangely silent and focused on something in front of them that Lil couldn’t yet see. And then she could.

  ‘It’s her,’ Ada said, as Lil caught her first glimpse of the blonde woman, in her late thirties – maybe early forties – on the ground not more than forty or fifty feet in front of them. ‘Delia Preston.’

  ‘She jumped,’ Rose spat out. ‘She jumped to her death!’

  The redhead looked across at Lil. ‘I want to go home. Can you take me home?’

  Not often at a loss, Lil again thought of Bradley’s truism: the first person’s pulse to check is your own. ‘Are any of you hurt?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Ada said.

  ‘How would you know?’ Rose shot back, her rage at the boiling point. ‘How could you possibly know what you’ve just put me through?’

  ‘Is anything hurting, Mother?’ Ada asked. ‘Have you broken anything?’

  ‘And if I had what would you care? Connecticut’s safe, you said. I can go on bus trips and visit all my friends back in the city. Safe? Safe? You call this safe?’

  Lil kept quiet and surmised that, based on the volume and pitch of Rose’s fury, she was probably OK. But it was Delia Preston she couldn’t take her eyes off. Her neck twisted unnaturally to the side, her skirt hiked up revealing well-toned legs and the tops of her stockings, held in place by a black-lace garter belt – people still wear those? She approached the fallen body, her feet crunching in tiny shards. She looked up at a shattered window on the fourth floor, the only broken pane in this portion of the building. There was no smoke coming out, at least nothing like on the other side. Aaron came up beside her. ‘I checked for a pulse,’ he offered. ‘I’m pretty sure she’s dead.’

  Lil knelt and placed two finger
s on Delia’s badly twisted neck where the carotid pulse should have been; she felt nothing. ‘What now?’ she said to herself, as she looked up at Aaron and then at Ada, her mother and the other woman on the bench. She needed to get everyone out of here, but you don’t exactly walk away from a dead body. Fishing through her bag she found her iPhone. She knew that Hank Morgan, Grenville’s Chief of Police, had to be here. His line was busy, but he picked up on the second try.

  ‘Lil?’ His deep voice was backed by sirens.

  ‘Hank, I know you’ve got more on your plate right now than you want, but I’m at the back of Nillewaug and there’s a dead body just next to the ambulance bays; it looks like she jumped.’

  ‘What are you doing back there? You shouldn’t be here, Lil.’ Something paternal and a touch patronizing in his voice.

  ‘Ada’s mother is a resident. We heard the fire and . . .’

  ‘How’d you get by the road block?’

  Not wanting to get that young trooper in trouble she lied, ‘We came through before the barricades went up. Something else, the body; I know who she is. It’s the administrative director for Nillewaug, her name’s Delia Preston.’

  ‘Delia? Shit! You said she jumped?’

  ‘Looks like.’

  ‘Lil, don’t touch a thing, I’m on my way.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, and as the phone went dead she dropped it in the bag and retrieved her camera. She took quick stills of Delia, of the window, and zoomed in on clusters of Nillewaug residents, some sobbing, but most eerily quiet around the periphery on benches placed as ornamental stopping points on a carefully measured and maintained walking path. Checking the battery – not much juice left – she shot a video, remembering long-ago lessons from college, when she’d harbored a fantasy of becoming a journalist with a major newspaper or magazine. This of course never happened, her life took a different turn – wife, mother and office manager for her physician spouse. As she panned the horrific scene she thought about the who, what, when, where and why of reporting. With the camera’s red light blinking she narrated, keeping her voice soft, ‘It’s five a.m. on Sunday, April third, two thousand and eleven. I’m on the scene of a multi-alarm fire at the assisted-living complex, Nillewaug Village in Grenville, Connecticut. There is at least one fatality, Delia Preston.’ She zoomed in on the dead woman’s face. She’d met her twice, last fall and then again this past winter. Both times in Delia’s light-filled office, the first time with Ada, who’d grilled the director about the workings of Nillewaug, and then with Ada and Rose. Delia, with her every hair in place, seamless make-up and pressed skirt suits, was one of those people who was always camera ready. Like a pitch woman on the Home Shopping Network, or a beauty queen twenty years after the pageant. Lil filmed her dead face, half pressed flat to the ground the other eye open as though staring off into space. Who was she? Lil knew little about her other than she was an outstanding salesperson who met a prospective resident’s every objection – and Rose Rimmelman had more than a few – with quick answers, humorous anecdotes and direct eye contact. Whether real or feigned, Delia deftly communicated caring and that hard-to-fake belief in the inherent goodness of what Nillewaug offered. ‘We take care of everything,’ she’d said, at the December meeting where over the course of two and a half hours she’d clinched the deal with Ada and Rose. ‘It’s called the Promise Plan. And we keep the promise. Once signed on, a resident is assured that their every need, whatever it might be, will be seen to for as long as they remain at Nillewaug.’

  Rose, and to a lesser extent Ada, had picked away at Delia’s assertions like a pair of crows on a tasty bit of roadkill. ‘And if I get sick? Or God forbid,’ Rose had said, ‘Alzheimer’s?’

  Delia had merely amped up the volume on her warm and pearly smile. ‘Excellent questions. Our goal is to keep our residents in their own apartments. Our twice-yearly resident surveys show this to be the strong preference. In rare occasions this is not possible.’

  ‘And you ship the poor sucker to some hell-hole nursing home,’ Rose had shot back.

  Delia had laughed as if Rose were a professional comic. ‘Brilliant! But no, we are licensed to run both intermediate and fully skilled nursing facilities. If a resident needs a rehab stay, or permanent placement the care and comforts in Nillewaug’s extended care units are unparalleled. And this isn’t just a sales pitch, but for the past five years we’ve ranked in the top fifth percentile of nursing homes – and those are national surveys. We have only private rooms and our Alzheimer’s and Dementia complex is state of the art. All of which gives us tremendous flexibility. The Promise is truly a promise. We will take care of you.’ And she’d artfully turned to Ada. ‘We will take care of your mother, regardless of what the future brings.’

  ‘What the hell?’ A man’s booming voice startled her. ‘Lil, what are you doing? You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Hi Hank,’ she said, and, with the camera on, she unobtrusively let it pan up the Chief of Police – mid sixties, full head of silver, square jaw and broad shoulders, belly a bit bigger since his wife Joanne died of breast cancer five years back, but all in all still robust and not bad on the eyes in his jeans and navy parka with the Grenville logo on the right breast.

  He walked to her side and looked at Delia. ‘Shit! I’m assuming you checked a pulse.’

  ‘Yes, she’s dead, Hank.’

  ‘You took pictures?’ He stared at the camera, which she was holding at her side, the lens trained on his face.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s still going, isn’t it?’ He sounded tired.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, knowing what was coming.

  ‘Lil, shut it off. You’re going to have to give it to me; it’s going to be evidence.’

  ‘Hank, we’ve been friends forever, but I work for the paper now. You want these images, which I am more than happy to share, but if you want the original you’ll need a court order.’

  ‘Jesus! Fine.’ He turned around, spotted Ada. ‘Mrs Strauss . . . what’s she doing here?’

  ‘Her mom’s a resident. I don’t know who that other woman is. Do you know what started the fire?’ Yes, Lil, good question – who, what, when, where, why.

  ‘Fire Marshall just got here, too soon to know.’

  Lil made a mental memo to put a call in to Sam King – Grenville’s Fire Marshall. While not exactly friends with Sam, her prior life as Dr Campbell’s wife, office manager and pseudo-nurse had given her an unobstructed view of the layered reality of her hometown and its residents. Sam would take her call, not that she’d ever blackmail a former patient of Bradley’s. No, that’s something she would never do, but would Sam – married with children and treated, on two occasions, for the clap – know that?

  Hank looked down at Delia, pulled out a digital camera from an inside pocket and, circling the body, started to snap photos. ‘Shit!’ He pressed the button on the camera. A red light blinked. ‘I really hate these things.’ His forefinger jammed on the button, but nothing.

  ‘Dead battery?’ Lil asked.

  He nodded and after trying a couple more times jammed the camera back into his pocket.

  ‘It looks like the fire was hottest on the second floor,’ she offered, switching from the what to the where.

  ‘Looks like,’ he said, being deliberately obtuse.

  ‘I saw them take Betty Grasso off the roof . . .’ She felt her throat close off. She didn’t want to cry. ‘She’s not OK, is she?’

  He shook his head in the negative. ‘No,’ he said, and he pulled out his cell. He turned his back to her and stepped away. With sirens in the background, some from miles away, it was near impossible for her to hear him. Her battery was nearly dead as she aimed the camera’s microphone toward Hank, figuring she could plug it into the computer and try to up the volume later. A pair of state troopers rounded the corner of the building.

  ‘Over here,’ he shouted. ‘Lil, you need to take your friends and get out of here.’

  ‘Of course.’ As the
red light blinked faster signaling the battery’s last few seconds she caught his instructions to the troopers. ‘Treat it as a crime scene. And for Christ’s sake be careful. The state’s going to be here in force and let’s not look like morons.’

  THREE

  Not long after, Hank Morgan was staring at another dead body. Dr Norman Trask – Dennis Trask’s dad – dead in bed. ‘Shit!’ He wondered how many hours had passed since he’d moved from being more tired than he’d ever been in his life, to this weird state. His thoughts zipped as he and Grenville’s Fire Marshall, Sam King, got their first look at the ground zero of what would become the most devastating fire in their town’s history. On the barely scratched surface things were shaping up as one God-awful accident. But Hank, who over thirty years ago had been Grenville’s first police chief – prior to him it had been all resident troopers – made no assumptions. With a borrowed camera in hand, and Sam doing the same with a state-of-the-art Nikon, they’d pushed their way into Trask’s overstuffed rooms.

  ‘What the hell!’ Sam had muttered. The balding Fire Marshall had to squeeze to make it through the narrow, ceiling-high paths of charred boxes and magazines bundled in twine. ‘Are you kidding me?’ A look of abject disgust on his face. ‘Why the hell wasn’t this reported? It’s one thing to have a hoarder in a private residence, but when we’re talking shared walls . . . Shit!’ And with dirty water swirling around their thick-soled boots they’d trudged through soaked plastic bags, bundled newspapers and stacks of God knows what that had been scorched and then drenched into unrecognizable mounds.

  Hank listened to Sam’s tirade while he collected first impressions. Including the strange feelings that seeing Lil Campbell had kicked up; she still looked good in that I’m-drawing-no-attention-to-myself sort of way. Of course she shouldn’t be here, but that hadn’t been it. They were close in age, had been friends for decades – always as one married couple doing stuff with another, or the rare golf foursome when the workaholic Bradley would join in. It was more, and not the kind of thing he’d share with anyone, not even her. What’s the harm? he’d thought. You’re alone, she’s alone . . . albeit always with that cute little friend of hers. And you’re thinking about asking her on a date in the midst of this? Get a grip. And he’d followed Sam in tracking down the fire’s point of origin. Little doubt that it had started in this unit where the flames had blazed the hottest. The smell hit them first as they’d made their way into the apartment, the door demolished by axes. Acrid fumes with notes of petrol and burned plastic and rubber. And everywhere he’d looked, clocks and jumbled rubbish in boxes and black plastic bags. Solid walls of pure crap that obscured everything from the floor up to the ceiling in places. The first door off the long narrow hall was a galley kitchen, the hoard reducing the small space to less than a square yard of cluttered floor where someone could stand. The bottom cabinets probably not opened in years because of the mounds in front of them, the top ones unable to close, their contents forming an avalanche that spilled on to the buried counter and from there to the floor. And the stove was dangerously obscured by stacks of forms – this was an accident waiting to happen – but not where the fire had started.