Thea felt sick. “What happened?”
Aunt Dorothy sighed, fiddled with her hair some more, and then explained, “Annie and I were both in the kitchen talking to Rudy. We thought Daphne was watching television, but she must have slipped out of the room and gone up the front stairs.”
“Go on.”
“She made it to the attic—”
“What’s up there?”
Aunt Dorothy gave up on her hair. “Oh, you know,” she said, waving a hand vaguely toward the ceiling, “the usual detritus. Boxes of old clothing, trunks, unused furniture, all the things that families accumulate over time.”
“She got into that stuff?”
A reluctant nod. “She was going through one of the trunks, tossing the stuff in it every which way. Annie found her and she couldn’t get her to stop. So I tried. But she wouldn’t let go of the trunk. She climbed inside—”
“Oh, no.”
Aunt Dorothy’s hand wandered toward her hair again, then dropped. “The lid fell down and somehow locked. She started screaming, but we couldn’t get it open. Finally, that good man,” she gestured toward Rudy in the kitchen, “came upstairs and broke the lock and then just picked her up and carried her down to her room. That’s when we called her doctor.”
“Is she okay now?” Thea started to turn toward the front stairs, intending to go up and check on her mother.
“She’s fine,” Aunt Dorothy said, putting out a hand to restrain her niece. “I looked in on her five minutes ago. She was sleeping.” She hesitated and then added, “Dorothea, she kept repeating that she was looking for the coins.”
A good forty-five minutes later, after Rudy had given a demonstration of the alarm system and then departed, Annie had come down out of the attic where she had been trying to restore some semblance of order, and the three of them sat down around the breakfast nook. Thea had cleared the table and brewed them a pot of Earl Grey tea (longing to spike hers with something stronger) and began recounting the events of the day.
Annie and Aunt Dorothy kept apologizing because they had let Mother out of their sight and her misadventure had resulted in the hysteria in the attic. Thea told them that they had nothing to feel guilty about, the same thing could have happened to her. She wasn’t sure this was enough to assuage their guilt, but it would have to do.
Once they got past that particular episode, she brought her aunt and her erstwhile best friend up to date on her two unpleasant encounters with Cousin Bud and Detective Anderson, not to mention the very odd encounter with Bob Rutledge. Then she sat back, waiting for the reviews to come in.
Annie chuckled. “Bob Rutledge, huh? Well, are you gonna see him?” Before Thea could answer, she added, “That Jerry Anderson is a creep. I could have told you that.”
“Well, why didn’t you?” Thea asked, not disguising her testiness and also managing to avoid responding to her friend’s question about Bob Rutledge.
Annie shrugged. “I thought Jerry would listen to the tape and do some kind of John Wayne thing to scare off George’s crazy Cousin Bud.”
“Jerry was a student of mine,” Aunt Dorothy offered. “Maybe I should have a talk with him.”
Thea shook her head forcefully. “No, Auntie D. I don’t want you getting any more involved in this than you are already.”
Aunt Dorothy jutted out her chin. “I’ll get just as involved in this thing as I damn well please, thank you, my dear Dorothea.”
Thea glanced at Annie, who was not bothering to hide a smirk. “Whatever you want, Auntie D.,” Thea muttered.
Her aunt seemed mollified. “Well, at least you found out something important today,” she said.
Thea stared at her. “I did?”
“Oh, yes,” Aunt Dorothy said. “Bud Prentice is a very unstable and unpredictable man. And that makes him even more dangerous than we realized.”
CHAPTER 23
After Aunt Dorothy and Annie had gone home, Thea sat in the den pondering this latest bit of drama in the attic. It pained her to think of how frightened her mother must have been, locked in that trunk—even though it was for a short period of time, as both Aunt Dorothy and Annie had assured her. She wondered how she would have reacted if she’d been on the scene. Perhaps it was just as well she hadn’t been.
Around dinnertime she heard Mother stirring in her room upstairs. She hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on as day had faded away, so she got up to close the curtains before turning on a lamp. Out of habit, she peered out the window, checking to see if the dark car was there. Damn! It was back. More annoyed than fearful, she stared at the car for several long seconds. Then, using more force than was necessary, she shoved the curtains together. She thought about calling the police to report the car but, after her recent run-in with Jerry Anderson, she guessed he would shrug it off as nothing more than her paranoia. Instead, she turned to go upstairs.
When Thea entered her room, Mother lay cowering on the bed. Then, as her brain seemed to process who the woman in the doorway was, she visibly relaxed. But she clutched onto Thea’s arm as they descended the stairs to the kitchen. She wouldn’t let go until Thea grabbed a bag of potato chips and led her over to the breakfast nook. “Here,” she said, “munch on these until dinner’s ready.”
All through the meal Mother was quite subdued, but then, as she was having her second helping of ice cream, she looked at Thea and narrowed her eyes. “Where’s George?” she said. “I wanna ask him something.” The tone in her voice implied that Thea was keeping her from seeing her husband.
Hoping her mother couldn’t see how much the question rattled her, Thea said, “Oh, he’s not here, Mother. He’s gone away.”
“Where?” Again that suspicious tone.
“He’s gone on a long trip. He won’t be back for quite a while.”
Mother considered this. “Well, I wanna talk to him. Give him a call, will ya?”
Thea shook her head. “I can’t—I don’t know how to reach him.”
Puzzlement clouded Mother’s face, but all she said was, “Oh.”
Thea turned away from her and began to clear the table, grateful for something else to do other than gaze into those sad, confused eyes.
The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. When Mother went back into the den and turned on the TV, Thea slipped over to the window and peered out again. The dark car was gone, and she let out a deep sigh of relief.
Mother watched TV for a couple of hours, the sound rising and falling as she flipped through the channels until she found something that held her interest for more than thirty seconds. When she finally fell asleep in the recliner, Thea let her doze for a few minutes, then gently roused her and helped her up the stairs to bed.
Thea went to bed herself after she had armed the alarm system, but it took her a long time to fall asleep. Every time she heard the old house creak or the wind shake the windows, she’d sit up and listen, fearful that Mother had gotten out of bed and was traipsing around the house. But for once, Mother seemed to be enjoying a peaceful night. Unlike her daughter.
The next day, Thea remembered she had promised to attend a meeting of the Alzheimer’s Support Group, so she called Aunt Dorothy to come over and watch Mother for a few hours.
The meeting was held in the basement of a downtown church—a glorious old, yellow quarry-stone building erected in 1905. As Thea pulled into the parking lot and glanced up at the stained-glass windows, she remembered attending a wedding there for one of her cousins when she was in her teens. The church still looked much the same as it had that day, but the surrounding area had changed a great deal, and not for the better.
A strong smell of coffee and Luanne Varner accosted Thea at the bottom of the basement stairs. “Oh, Thea, dear, I’m so glad you came,” she gushed, helping her out of her coat and hanging it up on a nearby rack. Guiding Thea to a folding chair set up in a circle, she said, “You probably don’t know anyone here except Mattie, do you?”
Thea glanced to the left of the empty c
hair she was being steered to and encountered the blurry gaze of Mattie, whose glasses were possibly even more smeared than when Thea had last seen her at George’s funeral. “Hello, Mattie,” she said and received an unintelligible grunt in response.
Thea sat, realizing she was the center of attention of the dozen or so others. They were her age, early fifties or older, more women than men, and there were only a few welcoming smiles. Luanne proceeded to go around the circle, ticking off everyone’s name in a rapid-fire recitation that guaranteed Thea would have no chance of remembering a single one.
Mattie nudged Thea in the side and leaned toward her, an odor of clothes gone-too-long-without-washing preceding her. “Now that George is gone, Luanne thinks she’s our leader,” Mattie whispered in Thea’s ear.
As Mattie pulled away from her, Thea turned her head and gave her a tiny, conspiratorial smile. Better to let this strange woman think I’m on her side than to rankle her, Thea thought.
Luanne opened the meeting with a few words about George and how much he was going to be missed. At the mention of his name, Mattie let out a great chest-heaving sigh and then dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, already so besmirched with god-knows-what that Thea had to avert her eyes.
She expected Luanne might ask for other members of the group to say something about George, but the woman instead called for a moment of silence (broken up by Mattie’s loud snuffling into her handkerchief). After what seemed like only seconds, Luanne made some brisk announcements about the next meeting and then looked sharply at Mattie. “Do you want to start?” she asked. “Or would you rather wait until later?”
The folding chair creaked as Mattie shifted her considerable bulk. She stuffed the dingy handkerchief up her sleeve and cleared her throat. “My mother is about the same,” she said, but then she launched into a rambling account of her mother’s getting her hand caught in a soup can and her own struggles with that—until she finally resorted to calling the fire department to cut it off.
Thea tried to be sympathetic to this dilemma, but there was something so cartoonish in Mattie’s telling of it, that she expected to hear Porky Pig stuttering “Th-th-that’s all, folks!” when Mattie finally wound it up.
She turned to Thea, who realized that the group was probably acutely aware of her mother’s situation vis-à-vis the police, thus there was no necessity for going into that, so she simply told them about the previous afternoon when Mother had wandered up to the attic and been hysterical when she’d gotten herself locked in a trunk.
As she described what had happened, she could sense, and smell, Mattie moving in closer again. It took great self-control for Thea not to instinctively pull away as she felt the woman’s warm breath on her neck.
And then, just as she reached the part about Mother screaming because she couldn’t get out of the trunk, she heard Mattie emit a sort of low gurgle that sent a chill down her spine. Damn! The woman just gave her the creeps.
Next, as they went around the circle, Thea heard a litany of despair, stress, anger, frustration, and exhaustion as she realized she was listening to her future. The various members recited tales of dealing with irritability, crying jags, changing adult diapers, biting (thank goodness Mother had never done that, Thea thought), wandering away, hoarding, misplacing items (one woman’s father insisted on putting his shoes in the refrigerator). Thea studied all these people as they spoke and wondered if she’d ever be able to live up to the courage they displayed.
And then it came to the turn of a sweet-faced, tiny woman. “My daddy’s gettin’ worse,” she said, in a voice with more than a trace of a Southern accent. But what followed was not the usual roll-call of complaints and grievances. “I’m losin’ him,” she said, her voice wistful with longing. “And I jus’ love him more an’ more all the time.”
Thea sucked in a guilty breath. George had said much the same to her. She had listened to his words, but she had never understood them. A Christmas or two ago, she and George had stayed up late and, over their usual single malts, he had poured out his heart to her. “Your mother is getting worse,” he had admitted, “but that makes me love her all the more.”
At the time Thea just thought he was parroting some romantic claptrap from some movie or book he had read. But now, sitting here listening to this woman, Thea realized that George had been such a magnificent caregiver because he really cared. He hadn’t helped Mother out of a sense of duty, but because he loved her.
Thea glanced around the circle and thought that everyone else had seemed to be carrying out the role of caregiver more out of a sense of duty than out of love. Only this little woman had shared with George that depth of devotion and feeling.
It made Thea miss George all the more. He had been her mother’s champion and nobody, not Thea, not Aunt Dorothy, and certainly not Beryl would ever take care of Mother the way he did. He was the only one who ever loved her enough—and what a terrible loss for her now that he was gone.
A few minutes later when the meeting broke up, Luanne pressed Thea’s hand and told her how happy she was that she’d come. “Remember,” she said, “we’re here for you anytime you need our help.”
Mattie was standing right next to them and she grabbed Thea’s hand away from Luanne. “That’s right,” she said, her head bouncing up and down like a bobblehead doll. “Anytime.” And then she giggled and gave Thea a sly, bleary-eyed wink. In a furtive voice, she added, “Don’t tell anyone we’re in cahoots with each other, huh?”
Thea’s blood turned icy. She had no idea what Mattie was talking about.
CHAPTER 24
Thea came away from the Alzheimer’s support group meeting wondering if she was truly up to the burden of caring for her mother. Never mind investigating the circumstances of George’s death. Was she deluding herself into thinking that she could do both?
Her cell phone chirped as she drove back toward the house. It was Annie. “Just wanted to tell you that I’m bringing over my famous-on-five-continents Kitchen Garden salad for your dinner tonight,” she announced. “I saw your refrigerator and all those casseroles—we’ve got to get some veggies into you.”
“Fine,” Thea said. There was no arguing with Annie when she was on one of these missions, so she simply assented, wondering all the while what Annie had tucked away on her hidden agenda.
Of course, there was that other hidden agenda: the one concerning her daughter Heather.
Would Annie ever open up and talk to Thea and tell her why she had suspicions about Heather being involved in George’s death? Thea’s patience—and possibly their friendship—was wearing thin.
Things were quiet on the home front, but as Thea was taking off her coat, Aunt Dorothy handed her a slip of paper with a name and a phone number on it. Thea had to look twice to make sure she had read the name correctly: Whit Collins. Why on earth was he calling her?
She went into George’s office to make the return call to Whit, feeling slightly awkward about making this call in front of her aunt. Forty years ago, her aunt had been one of the few adults she’d confided in when she had her big crush on Whit. Not that Auntie D. would ever remind her of it, thank God.
She was surprised to hear Whit answer the phone himself. Evidently, he had given her his cell number or his private line. What did that mean?
When the typical pleasantries were over, it turned out that Whit had called to invite her to lunch. “We could go to the country club,” he said, rushing on before Thea even had a chance to respond, “you could see a lot of your old friends from school there but, no, you know, you probably aren’t interested in that.” He took a quick breath, then plunged ahead, “No, you wouldn’t be, would you? Anyway, I’m tired of eating there, I go there practically every day. Why don’t we go to this fun little place on the river? I haven’t been there myself for a long time, but everyone tells me the food is still good...whaddya say?”
Thea smiled to herself, realizing that good ol’ Whit was actually nervous about speaking to her. Would wo
nders never cease? “That sounds nice,” she said, deliberately keeping her tone noncommittal, “but I can’t go anywhere for a couple of days. I’ve been taking too much advantage of my aunt lately and I need to give her a break.”
That seemed to placate him and he promised he’d call back in a day or two. It was clear to her that, just like Annie, Whit had some sort of hidden agenda for wanting to see her. Was today some sort of national holiday—Hidden Agenda Day—and nobody had bothered to tell her?
Annie’s agenda became clear immediately. In typical bigger-than-life Annie-style she breezed in the door followed by her son Joe, who was carrying a large, plastic-wrapped, wooden salad bowl. Thea smiled at Joe and greeted him, and started to reach out for the bowl when she realized the back door had opened again. Stepping inside with a patently fake smile on his face was Annie’s husband Dan.
“Hello, Dan,” Thea mumbled, doing her best to hide her surprise. “Nice to see you,” she added, shooting a look at Annie, who was wearing her own cat-that-ate-the-canary kind of smile. Was that a feather Thea spied, floating out of her friend’s mouth?
Once the greetings were out of the way, Annie hustled Joe off to the den to go and see Mother, and then she came close to doing an imitation of a Border Collie, shepherding Dan and Thea over to the breakfast nook. “I need a few minutes in the kitchen,” she explained. “And Dan has something to tell you, Thea,” she said, arching her eyebrows at her husband.
Dan directed a resentful look at Annie, but by the time he had settled himself in the breakfast nook, his face had once again taken on that politician’s mask he wore so well.
Thea took the seat opposite him and folded her hands on the table, waiting. She’d known Dan since junior high school; he had been in her home room in high school and was never one of her favorite people. As a teenager, he’d seemed oafish to her, given to playing stupid practical jokes on anyone he considered a nerd. Somewhere along the line he’d picked up a bit of polish and the kind of bonhomie that was useful in politics.
What Has Mother Done? Page 14