What Rose Forgot

by Nevada Barr

  “Then Derek got hold of the drugs that make people demented, and administered them to Chuck,” Rose goes on. “When Chuck got bad, bingo, bango, bongo, he’s carted off to Memory Care where they can finish the job.”

  “Isn’t that kind of dramatic?” Royal says. “No offense meant, Mrs. Dennis.”

  “None taken.” Rose rolls through to Sphinx Pose, relishing the stretch in the small of her back. Release your buttocks. Her yoga teacher’s voice intrudes into her mind. Rose releases her buttocks. “Life is dramatic,” she says. “No matter how weird what you think up is, there are people out there actually doing it.”

  “I noticed Derek got antsy when you pushed him on exactly who recommended Longwood. He sure wanted Barbara to remember the brochure,” Mel says.

  “Didn’t you say your dad heard about Longwood through a brochure?” Rose asks.

  “Yup. Uncle Daniel showed it to him. Because you’re my grandmother, and Dad is all about including me in adult decisions now that I’m men-stru-ating—”

  Chanting, “TMI, TMI!” Royal drops his phone so he can put his fingers in his ears. Mel kicks him, and he laughs.

  “So I actually read the brochure, and went to their website. Very professional. Lots of five-star reviews. Doctors and cooks got awards for things,” Mel finishes.

  On her back, Rose hugs her knees tightly to her chest and rocks in tiny circles, massaging her sacrum. “The brochures are coincidental, ubiquitous, or certain recipients are targeted. If we were targeted, there has to be a person inside the target’s home, or in her circle of friends, who knows there is a demented person, and has enough clout to make a case for Longwood when the brochure arrives. In Chuck’s case, it appears Derek is that inside person.”

  “So if Chuck was demented, why not put him at Longwood?” Royal asks logically.

  “Maybe he wasn’t demented,” Rose says. She stretches out long and relaxed in savasana, Corpse’s Pose. “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes you were,” Mel says.

  “You were kind of out of it when I found you,” Royal adds.

  “That’s because they were drugging me!” Why doesn’t anyone seem to get that?

  “Barbara said Chuck was demented before. And I know for a fact you were demented before Dad found Longwood,” Mel says.

  Rose enjoys being a corpse for a minute or two. “Because we were drugged at home, in our houses, before Longwood. Drugged by the inside person,” she suddenly realizes. “Not just Chuck; me, too.”

  A long silence ticks by.

  “Who do you think the inside person was in your case?” Mel’s voice is very carefully bland.

  Rose quits breathing.

  Flynn, Mel’s dad. He’s the one who took her to the doctors who deemed her demented. The one who chose Longwood. Flynn drove her to the front door and walked her in.

  Mental fog, physical danger, and a general ignorance of which direction the next blow is coming from, and who is behind it, have kept suspicions of her stepson on a subconscious level, a level where Rose experienced an aversion to calling him, letting him know what she was up to. The aversion has not been fully or logically addressed. Until now. Now Rose knows part of her suspects Mel’s dad of getting her out of the way after his father died.

  Possibly Longwood did phone him about her attempted escape, had been phoning him all along, keeping him apprised of her movements. Maybe Flynn is conveniently out of town for nine days so the window of opportunity for the unfortunate demise of his father’s second wife will be wide open and Flynn will have an alibi. Flynn could have purchased a used truck and had it delivered to Goodman’s.

  Rose stays on her back, eyes closed.

  “You think it is Daddy, don’t you?” Mel asks in a small flat voice.

  Daddy. Mel hasn’t called Flynn Daddy in several years. Except when the child’s heart in her teenaged breast is wounded.

  Is Rose accusing Harley’s son, Izzy’s husband, Mel’s father, of conspiring to murder her? What possible reason could Flynn have for wanting her dead? Is Nancy, Harley’s ex, right? After Harley died, in her grief, did Rose lean too hard on Mel, become a burden on a family already touched by tragedy?

  That might be motive enough to get Flynn to tell her to go home, but not to kill her.

  Money.

  Rose hasn’t been able to follow the money. Now she realizes she is the money. She is worth twelve million, give or take a million. Her paintings bring in a lot of money, and Harley had a genius for investing. Between them, they’d done very well for themselves.

  Or for their heirs.

  Daniel? Daniel stands to gain as much as his brother, and Daniel is underemployed, making little more than minimum wage, where Flynn brings in between one hundred fifty and two hundred fifty thousand a year. Rose doesn’t know Daniel as well as she does Flynn, but he strikes her as the sort of guy whose idea of an evil deed is blowing dandelion fluff in the direction of his neighbor’s lawn.

  On Harley’s death all the money comes to Rose. When Rose dies, the bulk is to be divided between Harley’s sons, Daniel and Flynn.

  Why kill her? Why not just wait until she kicks the bucket naturally?

  Because, alive, she can change the will.

  She can’t see either Daniel or Flynn plotting and scheming to kill her for money. Of course, because she cannot see a thing doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  As a young woman, Rose had been a devotee of the god Science, embracing the concept that if a phenomenon could not be replicated in a lab with a couple of rats, it did not exist. Then she began noticing that the moment a scientist “discovered” a phenomenon—germs, black holes, the internet, cell phones, subatomic particles—it was instantly transmuted from magic to Science.

  It stood to reason that millions more phenomena that Science closed its collective eyes to existed as well.

  To be inclusive, Rose long ago decided to believe in all things she could not see.

  Can she believe that under the kind and civilized demeanor of Flynn or Daniel—or Flynn and Daniel—there lurk greed-frenzied monsters that will send their stepmother on to a better life before she can leave all those lovely millions to a shelter for homeless mother cats? Picturing it is rather like picturing the Hardy Boys mugging Anne of Green Gables.

  Who else? Lying on Royal’s floor, eyes closed, Rose thinks. Marion would never leave her home and cats, not even to kill someone for a small fortune. Rose is safe on that front.

  Camilla Reynolds and James Madding, the MCU’s early-rapid-onset dead, have to have been well-to-do to be lodged at Longwood. Had the sudden moves of their nearest and dearest after their timely expirations been because they were heirs by way of chicanery? Is that the deal? Invalidate, incarcerate, then dispose of? Marion might be able to find out if there were substantial inheritances involved.

  If not Daniel or Flynn, then who?

  Rose’s eyes pop open.

  Nancy Dennis. Harley’s ex was never a big fan of Rose’s, though Rose was not the other woman. She wasn’t even the next woman. There was that nasty email telling her to stay away from Flynn and Mel. Can that have been to isolate Rose, make her distrustful of those who might help her?

  Rose can remarry. There may be new stepchildren, new grandchildren. Foreseeably, Rose can change the will, leave the money to them. Does Nancy want to guarantee all the money goes to her sons?

  Again Rose hugs her knees into her chest, then rocks until she is upright and in a half lotus. She despises this line of thought. Nameless, faceless suspects are interesting. Suspicion of those close to her is torture.

  In the teepee, her whereabouts are known only to one family member, Mel; if Rose cannot trust her with her life, life isn’t worth having. She is safe enough for the moment. When she gets time, she will make an appointment with her estate lawyer and change the will, cut everyone out, then spread the word. That should keep family from killing her. They’d want her alive so she could change it back in their favor. Unless they decided to off her out of
revenge.

  For today, tonight, tomorrow, she needs to figure out how to get Chuck out of Longwood and stashed somewhere safe until the drugs wear off and he can fend for himself.

  And if he doesn’t, if he dies because of her interference?

  Kidnapping and murder have much longer jail sentences than assault and breaking and entering, even for a first offender.

  “I’m going to the teepee to meditate,” Rose announces.

  “Om,” Mel replies, not looking up from her cell phone.

  CHAPTER 25

  Sitting in a half lotus, on an acrylic zebra skin, Rose lets her gaze soften. Her mind itches to count the time since her awakening in the Memory Care Unit and her final escape. Days? A week? Breathing in, she relaxes, not into the numbers but into the need for numbers, the need to calculate the half-life of drugs, withdrawal, fear, and stress.

  There is the suffering of suffering.

  The suffering of change.

  The suffering of self.

  Letting concepts drift free, her mind opens beyond the battered, poisoned gray matter of her brain. Rose lets go, and lets go again, settling into still radiance, inherent energy, and the thoughts and emotions rising and dissolving.

  Then she is dissolving. Water pouring from her closed eyes as grief, deep and warm and eternal, fills her, stretching in every direction; grief she’s not had time nor mind for, the magnificent presence that was Harley Dennis, her husband of fifteen years, her boyfriend, her roommate, her partner in crime. The man who rescued her and loved her, who found her foolishness and eccentricity delightful. The hardworking, levelheaded, Presbyterian CEO who had always wanted to marry an artist and, when he was sixty-five, did so.

  What a grand whirl it had been.

  Rose cries for herself, and for all sentient beings who never know what true love feels like. She cries for the dogs they raised, the cats they served, the wealth of joy they created together.

  Heartbroken happiness emanates from her as she floats in a vast sparkling sea of grief.

  From a distant shore an irritating noise bores through to ears she’s forgotten she has. It stops. She breathes, settles. The noise augers in again.

  The iridescent sea vanishes. Tears stop. Rose opens her eyes to the walls of the teepee, eerily glowing gray from the light on the screen of her cell phone. The plastic rectangle buzzes like a grasshopper in a paper bag.

  A good and righteous Buddhist would not break meditation for worldly affairs, but then a good Buddhist wouldn’t be mired in karma up to her eyeballs. Knowing she postpones enlightenment for at least a lifetime, Rose picks it up. Black letters spell out UNAVAILABLE on the tiny screen.

  “Hello?” Rose answers warily.

  “You’ve been stirring up a hornet’s nest,” a man snarls into the phone as if trying to keep his anger at a respectable decibel level.

  “Who, may I ask, is calling?”

  “It’s me. Eddie. Who do you think? Other than me and my mother rotting in detention, how many people’s lives have you screwed up?”

  “Everybody’s who tried to murder me,” Rose replies acidly.

  “Yeah, well … I thought we were past all that. Since you cut my finger off, I’d call us even.”

  Rose does not think half a digit balances the scales when pitted against a life, but she forgoes comment.

  “You know where SouthPark Mall is?” Eddie asks.

  “I can find it.”

  “We gotta talk. There’s a Chick-fil-A. Meet me there in half an hour.”

  A fast food outlet in a mall; that seems safe enough. Besides, Rose is hungry. Concern over Chuck’s impending doom, if, in fact, his doom is impending, has kept her too distracted to bother with lunch.

  “I can do that,” she says.

  “Do it, then. Thirty minutes.” Eddie cuts contact.

  Stirred up a hornet’s nest.

  It had to be her and Mel’s visit to the Boster mansion. Derek must have called and reported it. Barbara could have done it as well, but Rose’s money is on Derek. A woman didn’t live for sixty-odd years without learning how to read the signs of dominance and abuse.

  Not everybody can sit around all day polishing their nails. Derek had said that. The subtext is you do nothing of value; your life is empty of worth. Rose suspects Barbara is either innocent of betraying her husband—other than in the biblical sense—or has been coerced into it. Derek, the not-brother, must have wormed his way into the Bosters’ life, then begun seducing Chuck’s much, much younger wife, possibly in the guise of taking care of her when Chuck started going round the bend.

  As she puts on her shoes, she tries to connect the dots: Drugged in her own home until demented. Put in a respected local facility for which Flynn conveniently got a flyer at the appropriate time. Dementia-inducing drugs continued inside the MCU.

  Unwittingly? The prescription sent along with Rose?

  Unlikely. The first thing responsible doctors do in elder care is review medications. But possible, the switched drugs smuggled in in the original prescription bottle. Still, that would only be good until the prescription needed to be refilled.

  Three connected dots: drugged at home by criminal #1; incarcerated, drugged at the MCU by criminal #2. Chuck’s dots might be the same. Both Rose and Chuck have money; an heir—or heirs—might be tempted to kill them before they squandered their fortunes or changed their wills.

  How did criminal #1 and criminal #2 get together? Not once, but judging by Marion’s findings, three or four times in so many years. Rose suspects a criminal #3 who serves as matchmaker for #s 1 and 2.

  She isn’t going to solve that equation tonight. She doubts she will solve it until Chuck is rescued, and his mind sufficiently restored that they can compare notes.

  Or he dies a horrible death because some crazy old bat decided to take him off his meds and out of reach of medical help.

  “Not thinking that,” Rose says to herself.

  * * *

  Rose locates SouthPark Mall on Google Maps. After a heated discussion, she elicits promises from Mel and Royal that they won’t follow her. Though Eddie has his softer side—as evidenced by Tania and Amy—she does not want him to see Mel, or even know Mel exists. Rose has not forgotten the Eddie who came down the ridgeline with a knife in his teeth.

  The mall is busy enough that Rose feels safe. Guards stand around the way mall guards do. She mentally takes note of their whereabouts. The one loitering between LensCrafters and the Disney Store is closest. He doesn’t look much younger than she, and not in as good shape.

  Ageism. Mel was right. Rose banishes the judgment.

  Hunched over, elbows on knees, Eddie is waiting on a park-style bench outside the Chick-fil-A. He is sporting the black ball cap, cargo shorts, T-shirt, and deck shoes. Rose wonders if he is on a job, and if that job is her. She waits until he notices her; then, while he watches, she goes over to the security guard by LensCrafters. Eddie flinches as if he is thinking of bolting. Rose pats the air reassuringly. He settles back down.

  “Excuse me, Officer.” His name tag reads WARREN VAN FLEET. “Warren, may I call you Warren?” Rose hopes her moment of television fame has not made her face a household name. “Could you help me?”

  “That’s what we’re here for. And Warren is fine,” he says. He has a nice voice, deep with a hint of a southern drawl. Up close he is bigger than Rose had thought. There is a bit of lard, but under it she can see muscle.

  “I don’t want to be a pest,” she says sweetly.

  “Never a pest. Truth is, I’d be glad for a purpose. It’ll take my mind off my feet.” He smiles a tired smile, but one with warmth and endurance. Rose guesses he is the kind of guy who will work until the day he dies regardless of financial need.

  “I’m meeting with that man on the bench, at least I think it’s him, the one in the black ball cap.” She points. Eddie squirms like a six-year-old who has to go to the toilet. “I’m thinking of hiring him to do my yard work. I wanted to meet him in a public
place. I’m sure he’s a wonderful young man and wouldn’t hurt a fly, but, you see, I lost my husband recently…”

  “That’s a shame,” Warren says sympathetically. “How did he die?”

  Rose suppresses a giggle. Fortunately it comes out sounding like a sob. “I don’t want to go into that.”

  “Of course you don’t, of course you don’t. Trust a Van Fleet to stick his foot in his mouth. What can I do for you?”

  “Dealing with all these new things … I’ve been having a lot of anxiety issues. Scared of my own shadow.” Rose smiles apologetically. “That’s why I’m interviewing a lawn man in a mall, for heaven’s sake. If you could just kind of keep an eye on things? I’d feel a lot more secure knowing you were watching out for me. Sorry to be such a silly old thing.”

  “No apology necessary. Glad to do it. You need me, just whistle.”

  “Just put my lips together and blow?” Rose can’t resist.

  His eyes widen, then crinkle into a grin. “You got it, lady.”

  “What was that about?” Eddie growls as Rose sits down primly on the end of the bench.

  Eddie is pale under the swarthy skin, leaving an unhealthy grayish tinge around his mouth and nose. In contrast, his cheeks are ruddy. Scared, Rose surmises, scared and angry. Not a good combination.

  A moment passes while Eddie glares from beneath the brim of his ball cap.

  When it becomes clear Rose is not going to be intimidated, he says, “You turn me in to that mall cop? You did, and you got a dead mall cop on your conscience.”

  “If I turn you in, it won’t be to a mall cop, or in a crowd of innocent bystanders, and I will be as far away from the incident as I can get. I was just saying hello. Warren is a friend of mine.”

  “I thought you were new here, didn’t have any friends.” His eyes travel from Rose’s face to a bowling bag between his feet.

  “I bond quickly,” Rose says. “What’s in the bag, Eddie?” Given its round shape and sturdy handles, Rose can’t help but picture a severed head. It is precisely the sort of vehicle severed heads would be delivered in.