by Wendy Webb
She squinted at me and gave me a mock scowl. “So was Ted Bundy.”
I choked on a bite of salad. “What?”
Kate laughed. “I’m kidding.”
“Seriously. What did he do? Or what might he be involved in?”
She winced. “I’ve said too much already.”
“Kate, I need to know.”
Kate took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s just . . . there was a report of a guy who matched the description of your man—”
“He’s not my man!” I broke in.
“The man,” she said, “who was spotted with a woman who later turned up dead.”
I put down my fork again. “Tell me you’re not serious.”
The one man I had even preliminary feelings for in years, and he was a murder suspect? This could not be happening.
“Well,” she said, “yes and no. The thing is, the woman died of natural causes, so there’s really nothing to it. But her children reported seeing a man who looked like Dominic—and you’ve got to admit, not too many men match his description—visiting her in the hospital a couple of times. They had no idea who he was. And her death was unexpected.”
“Hospital. So, she was sick?”
“No, that’s the thing. She was in the hospital for minor surgery, but there was a complication, so she had to stay a couple of nights while they monitored her.”
“That’s when the man visited?”
Kate nodded. “And then she died. Just died.”
My stomach knotted. I didn’t know what to think about what she was telling me. She probably saw, from the look on my face, that I wasn’t sure how to process this information. Did it matter? Was it anything? She reached over and took my hand.
“If Nick were concerned about it, believe me, he’d be all over it. And he’s not. I just wanted to tell you because you’re living in close quarters with him. I figured you had a right to know.”
“But,” I began, not sure where I was going. “So, her kids reported a visitor who looked like Dominic. How did that alone lead police to him? There’s a piece missing. I mean, police don’t just get a random description and then magically have the person to question. Right?”
Kate nodded her head. “Nick had read the description and the report and then saw Dominic around town here in Wharton,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s that random.”
“Speaking of Nick,” I said. “Does he have any leads on the woman who died over the winter at LuAnn’s?”
Now it was Kate’s turn to be surprised. “Oh! You know about that?”
“Everyone’s talking about it,” I said. “LuAnn’s got the room shut up for the season out of respect for the woman, until we find out who she was.”
“I probably shouldn’t be talking about this, either, but there’s no leads whatsoever,” Kate said. “Nick is getting pretty sick of women dying in Wharton and having no idea who they are or what happened to them.”
“It’s not the first time?”
Kate shook her head. “It’s how we met, actually. I’ll tell you that story some other time. The weird thing about this is, we live here. We were here all winter. We’d drive by LuAnn’s regularly when she had the place closed for the season. And not just us. Everyone in town who stays for the winter looks after each other. Nobody noticed anything going on at LuAnn’s. No lights. Nothing.”
I let that sink in and took a sip of wine. All these mysteries swirling around me, and I had only been here a couple of days. What would the rest of the summer hold?
After lunch, we strolled around the island for a while, popping into this shop and that shop, talking about different things. But my thoughts kept drifting back to Dominic and the lady in room five.
CHAPTER TEN
Early the next morning, I found Alice wandering in the hallway. She was peering out the windows on the door to the deck, one hand above her eyes, blocking the morning sun.
“Hi, Alice,” I said, a little too brightly. The images of Alice in my dreams swirled around me, and I felt a chill, wondering what that was about.
She whipped her head around, an alarmed look on her face.
“Oh! It’s you! You’re the one in the Yellow Lady room.” She smiled then, the fear that had been on her face melting into happiness. “Don’t tell me your name. Let me remember.” She paused for a moment, squinting at me. “Rebecca?”
My heart broke hearing Alice call me her daughter’s name.
“It’s Brynn,” I said, managing a smile.
“Brynn. Of course.”
“Would you like to join me outside?”
Alice nodded, a little confused. I led her out to the deck, where we settled into the Adirondack chairs.
“It’s a beautiful morning,” Alice said, looking out over the water. “Look how it shimmers.”
“Yes,” I said, exhaling and taking it all in.
We sat in silence for a while.
“Where’s Jason?” she asked me.
I smiled at her. “I’m not sure. But, don’t worry. He’ll turn up.”
She smiled back. “He’ll turn up,” she echoed as she locked eyes with me. But then her smile slowly faded, and her expression turned dark. “I’m afraid of a lot of things now. I don’t know why. It feels like bad things are lurking, waiting for me when Jason isn’t around.”
I leaned in toward her. “You know what, Alice?”
She tried to smile, her lips trembling. “What?”
“Don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me. I promise you that nothing bad is going to happen to you when I’m around. Even if bad things are lurking. They can’t get past me.”
Her eyes were wet with tears. She grabbed my hand. “I believe you. You are a warrior. You’ve had to be. You kept your mother safe. So I know you’ll keep me safe, too.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. She was right. I had indeed felt like a warrior during the last year of my mother’s life—even said as much to friends—fighting to get her the care she needed and deserved. But how did Alice know that?
“Heads on stakes outside of the care center,” she said, absently, staring out onto the water.
I took a quick breath in. “Alice, what did you say?” I asked her. “Would you mind repeating it? I don’t think I heard you correctly.”
She smiled broadly. “You put the heads of four nurses on stakes!”
I stared at her for a long minute. How could she possibly know that? She was referencing a joke (albeit a tasteless one) between my friend Mary and me about how I dealt with a situation at the rehab center where my mom had gone after being in the hospital.
A year before she passed, my mother had spent two months in the hospital fighting organ failure, and, when she had finally stabilized—which was a miracle—she was transferred to a rehab facility. The goal was to rebuild her muscle tone, which had all but evaporated, to allow her to be mobile again so she could resume her life at home. But it didn’t work out that way. Every day, my dad and I would arrive at the rehab facility to find her sleeping. There was no rehab. They had her on a morphine drip all day, every day, and so she slept, floating in another world instead of getting back on her feet in this one.
I didn’t question it at first, thinking maybe all of this sleep was a part of rehab somehow, getting her strength back before she began her therapy. No. That wasn’t it. After two weeks, her care team called me in for a care conference. Only, it was anything but. Four nurses—all of whom I’d seen at one time or another when I visited my mom every day—and me, sitting around a table, my mom’s chart in a file at the center of it.
The head nurse, Carla, cleared her throat. “There’s no easy way to say this,” she began, “but we need to talk about transferring your mother into our long-term-care wing.”
I furrowed my brow. “I don’t understand,” I said. “She’s supposed to be here for physical therapy to regain her muscle tone so she can walk again. Get around. Dress herself. So she can go home. That’s the goal, right?”
The four nurses gave me the same pitying look. “I’m afraid we need to adjust our goals for her,” Carla said. “She’s not responding to therapy.” She leaned in and said in a conspiratorial tone, “She’s not even trying.”
I recoiled, as though she had burned me. “What do you mean, not trying?” I asked, a little louder than I had intended, looking from one to the other.
“It’s our policy,” Carla went on. “It’s actually dictated by insurance. Patients in the rehab wing need to actively participate in therapy. We need to be able to document progress, consistent upward progress, for insurance purposes. If there’s no progress, we need to move them to the long-term-care wing, or insurance will stop paying the bills.”
“Why? I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“It’s a matter of insurance, as I said, but it’s also a matter of beds,” Carla said. “If your mother isn’t participating in therapy, we need to move her out of that bed to make room for someone who will.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, considering what they were telling me. “So, she’s moving upstairs into the long-term-care wing. Will she receive the same therapy there? Will she get what she needs to regain her muscle tone so she can go home?”
Carla shuffled the papers in front of her. The others looked down or away from me.
“Well?” I prompted.
“They don’t get the same kind of therapy in long-term care,” she finally said. “Those adjusted goals I mentioned? The goal is not to get them home. It’s to make them as comfortable as possible. It’s just a matter of some paperwork, and we can get her transferred today.”
Like hell they would. I thought of my constantly sleeping mother and the morphine drip they had her on, and rage bubbled up from deep within me, the kind of rage I’d never experienced.
“You have her on a morphine drip,” I growled. “She is sedated! Get her off that morphine drip, and then we’ll see about ‘trying’ and ‘progress.’”
They were blinking at me, as if they had no idea what I was saying. “It’s doctor’s orders,” one of them said. “We’re just carrying them out. We can’t just—”
I broke in. “When’s the last time the doctor was here? I haven’t seen him since the day my mom was transferred from the hospital.”
Crickets. The four of them looked from one to the other, shaking their heads.
“My mom has been here, what, two weeks now? When is the last time the doctor saw her?”
“He makes his rounds once a week,” Carla said. “It’s his view—”
“You don’t have eyes?” I pressed. “You’re nurses! She’s lying there sedated all day and night and you have the nerve to tell me she’s not participating in therapy?”
They stared at me, eyes wide.
“I want her off that morphine drip immediately.”
“We can’t just change doctor’s orders on the whim of a family member,” Carla said, squaring her shoulders.
Oh, this is going to be a battle, then? I was prepared. I leaned forward, resting my arms on the table.
“Here’s the way I see it.” I smiled at them. “I understand that your facility makes a lot more money shifting people into long-term care and keeping them there for the rest of their lives rather than giving them rehab therapy for a few weeks to get them back on their feet and get out of here,” I said, my teeth bared.
“You have no—”
I lifted my hand to shut down her words. My rage had settled into a quiet, simmering vengeance.
“Here’s what’s going to happen now.”
They shifted in their chairs.
“Tomorrow morning, I am going to come back here at nine o’clock. I fully expect my mother to be off the morphine, up and around, sitting in her chair, and eating breakfast. When she’s finished with her breakfast, I will accompany her to the therapy we’re paying you to give her.”
“We can’t just take her off her medication.”
“Yes, you can. She is not going to be sedated into a stupor for one more day. She is going to get the therapy we’re paying you for. And if I walk into this facility tomorrow and find her in bed, unresponsive, as she is now, I’m calling my friend John Stanich. Do you know John? He’s the district attorney.”
They fidgeted some more and exchanged glances.
“What you’re doing sounds like patient abuse to me. If I have to get John involved, he will start an investigation. And I will make sure the whole matter ends up on the front page of the newspaper, with photos of the four of you to go along with it.”
My phone had been sitting on the table in front of me. I picked it up and hit the photo app.
“Smile, ladies.” Click.
None of them said anything. I pushed my chair back and stood up. “I’ll see you at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” I said over my shoulder as I walked away, tears of rage and fury stinging at my eyes.
I got in the car and headed for home but pulled over a few blocks before I got there. I shut off the car and let the flood of tears wash over me, crying until there weren’t any tears left. My dad was back at the house, and I didn’t want him to see me break down. He had asked me to handle all of the particulars of my mother’s care—he was completely overwhelmed and not up to it—and I needed to come back from this meeting cheerful and upbeat. I blew my nose and put my glasses on, hoping he wouldn’t notice my puffy red eyes.
That night, I sat outside on my back patio with my friend Mary. I told her what had gone down.
“Oh,” she said, grinning. “That explains why I saw four heads on stakes outside of the rehab facility when I drove by this afternoon. I was wondering.”
The devilish look on her face and the absurdity of what she had just said flipped some sort of switch in me, and I started laughing and then couldn’t stop. It was one of those “inappropriate laughter during a solemn moment in church” moments where something—the intense need to release stress, maybe—overtakes you and won’t let you go. Both Mary and I laughed until we cried.
A tasteless joke, yes, but sometimes you have to descend into the ridiculous during extremely stressful situations to prevent insanity from setting in. We talked about how tragic it was that not everyone in my mom’s situation had an advocate willing to go into battle to make sure they got the care they deserved. How people just ended up alone and at the mercy of the system at the end of their lives.
But all of my threatening worked. The next day, lo and behold, I arrived to find my mother up and around, sitting in a chair and eating breakfast. I accompanied her to therapy that day and every day for weeks until she was strong enough to go home.
She lived another year after that. A good year, taking fun overnight trips with my dad, entertaining family, basking in the love we all had for her, never once complaining. And then it all became too much.
I hadn’t thought about that day in a long time. I looked at Alice, who was staring at the lake, the morning sun shimmering on its surface, making the water dance with life. Her face was the picture of innocence. She turned to me and smiled.
How could she possibly have known?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jason poked his head out through the doorway. “Hey, honey! There you are! I told you I had a phone call. I didn’t know where you got off to. You okay?” He stepped out onto the deck.
“I’m here with Brynn,” Alice said to him. She looked at me for a long moment. “Brynn. I’ll always be safe with Brynn.” And then, in a stage whisper to me: “Repeating names helps me remember them.”
“That’s great!” Jason said, catching my eye. “But now it’s time to go. Gil already left for the dock.”
Just then, Dominic came through the door carrying his French press full of coffee and a mug.
“Morning, y’all,” he said, setting the pot on the table. He turned his eyes to me. “I made a full pot. I thought you might like to join me again this morning.”
“Oh!” I said, pushing myself out of my chair. “Great. I’ll
grab my mug. I was going to make my way downstairs, but Gary’s coffee . . .” I made a face.
Jason snorted. “Tell me about it. Swill!” He raised his eyebrows at me and grinned before patting Dominic’s shoulder. “Good morning, sir.”
Dominic smiled at him. “And to you.” He turned to Alice. “Lady Alice, I hope you slept well.” He took her hand then and brought it to his lips.
She giggled.
“Brynn is my warrior, you know,” she said.
“You’re lucky.” Dominic grinned. “I’d love to have a warrior like her in my corner.”
“Come on, honey,” Jason said as he helped her up from her chair. “The lake awaits!”
After they had gone and I had retrieved my mug and half-and-half, Dominic and I sat on the deck, drinking our coffee and staring out over the water.
“What was that about, do you think?” I asked him. “Alice, I mean. It’s like she’s afraid.”
He took a deep breath in and let it out in a long sigh. “She feels herself slipping away. I’ve seen it before in people with Alzheimer’s or dementia, in the early to middle stages. Whatever evil has ahold of them, they feel it. They know it before it overtakes them.”
“I’ve never heard anyone call Alzheimer’s evil,” I said to him.
“Then you’ve never watched someone you love slip away because of it.” He gave me a sad smile then. The pain behind it was tangible.
He went on, staring out over the water as he spoke. “In some cases, it’s like they submerge into . . . I don’t know what. The collective. The otherworld. The beyond. They’re so close to death, they dip into it. And they’re gone from us for a while. Still here, but in another world, too, at the same time. They don’t know us. Don’t remember our names or anything about the life we lived together. But then, without warning, they can pop up. Put their heads above the surface. They slip back into our world and know us. They can call us by name. They become themselves again for a brief moment. Just a brief moment. Then it’s back down into the abyss.”
He took a deep breath. “You wonder where they go, when they’re in that abyss.”