Cursed to Death

by Bill Crider

  “We’ll have to send her out there later,” Hack said. “She’s busy right now, just answered a disturbance call over to the Sunny Dale Nursing Home.”

  “A disturbance call?” Rhodes wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What kind of disturbance?”

  “Don’t know,” Hack told him. “They didn’t say. Just said it was an emergency.”

  “I’ll go over there myself,” Rhodes said. “Then I’ll send her out to print the Suburban. After that I’m going by to see Mrs. Martin, and then I might go over to Ivy’s. If you don’t have any more emergencies.”

  Hack looked at him. “When you and that Miz Daniel goin’ to tie the knot? Seems like to me you’re puttin’ her off. How long’s it been since you started courtin’ her heavy?”

  Rhodes didn’t think it was any of Hack’s business, but the old man didn’t mean any harm. He always had to find out everything. “It hasn’t been that long. When you get to be my age, you’re not in any hurry to get married again.”

  Hack snorted. “Your age? You ain’t nothin’ but a spring chicken. You wanta look at somebody old, you take a look at me. And if that Miz Daniel liked me the way she likes you, it wouldn’t take me no more than a New York minute to get her to the church.”

  “Well, I . . .” Rhodes trailed off. He didn’t know exactly what he’d intended to say.

  Hack looked away. “Yeah, my wife died too. It ain’t easy to start over, I know. Don’t mind me. I just like to stick my nose in where it don’t belong.”

  “That’s O.K. When we set the date, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “You gonna let me stand up with you?” Hack paused. Then he said, “Me and Lawton?”

  “Absolutely,” Rhodes said.

  “Good. Now you better get over to Sunny Dale before they tear the place down, or whatever it is they’re doin’. Boy, I hope I don’t ever wind up in a place like that.”

  “I don’t blame you much,” Rhodes said.

  It wasn’t that the Sunny Dale was such a bad place, Rhodes thought as he parked in the asphalt parking area. It was just that as far as he was concerned, no nursing home was a good place to be. There was no doubt that the ones in Blacklin County provided good care, sometimes even sensitive care. It was just that . . . well, hell. It wasn’t the place at all. It was the thought of being old, old and pretty much helpless, that bothered him. Probably that was what bothered Hack, too. If Hack weren’t allowed to work at the jail, he might wind up in Sunny Dale or a place a lot like it, feeling useless and helpless. And one day he would find that he had become exactly what he’d feared.

  Rhodes looked over the lot and saw the other county car, the one Ruth Grady had driven. Like the one Rhodes was in, it was a white Plymouth with the gold shield and black lettering on the front doors. There were not many other cars in the lot. Not many visitors came at nap time.

  Sunny Dale was not a large building, but it was long. All the rooms were off two halls running straight to the left and right off the large room that formed the entrance. There was a cement porch the size of the entrance room, and it was lined with chairs. No one was in the chairs now, but in the mornings, when the sun hit the porch, nearly every chair would be taken.

  Rhodes opened one of the glass doors and went in. There didn’t seem to be any sign of a disturbance. A family in Sunday best, mother, father, daughter, were talking to an old white-haired woman in a tattered robe. They were all seated on a couch in the entrance room, a light, airy area with lots of glass and green plants. The couch and the other furniture were shabby from repeated use, but clean.

  Rhodes walked on in to the reception desk. Two women, one black, one white, both wearing white uniforms, stood behind it.

  “I understand you’re having a little trouble here,” Rhodes said.

  “That’s the truth, Sheriff,” the white woman said. She was wearing a black plastic name tag pinned to her uniform. The name EARLENE was embossed on it in white letters. The other woman’s tag said LINDA. “We’re going to have to do something about those two.”

  “Which two?” Rhodes asked.

  “Mr. Stuart and Miz White,” Linda said. “They been nothin’ but trouble since she got here, practically.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Rhodes asked.

  “Screamin’, yellin’, carryin’ on. That kind of trouble,” Earlene said. “Keeps everybody on edge. People can’t sleep, can’t get their work done. We may have to put ‘em out.”

  “Where would you put them?” Rhodes asked.

  “Humph. That wouldn’t be my lookout. But we can’t run this place with them carryin’ on all the time, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Where’s Mr. Patterson?” Rhodes asked. Patterson was the owner of Sunny Dale.

  “Down the hall in the men’s wing with Mr. Stuart. Room one-ten,” Linda said.

  “What about my deputy?”

  “She’s down the other hall,” Earlene said. “Women’s wing. With that Miz White. They’ve got ‘em pretty well calmed down now, but I don’t know how long it’ll last. This was the worst they’ve been, this today. That’s why we had to call. I thought we’d have a riot on our hands, I’ll tell you. It was somethin’ else.”

  “Well, I’d better check with my deputy,” Rhodes said. “Thanks for the information.”

  “Don’t mention it, Sheriff, I hope you all can get this mess straightened out, put the fear of God in those folks. Or at least the fear of the law.”

  Rhodes started down the hall to his left. Almost as soon as his back was turned, he heard Earlene say to Linda, “Honey, I just got to sneak back to the storeroom for a smoke. You don’t mind watchin’ the desk for a minute, do you?”

  “Not a bit,” Linda said.

  Rhodes hadn’t asked for Miz White’s room number, but he figured he could find it. Most of the rooms he passed had their doors open. In the first room a woman who looked almost as if she were mummified lay on her back like a doll in the big double bed. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open. A football game was on her TV set.

  In the next room a woman sat in a wheelchair, her head lolling to one side, her white hair hanging loose.

  The peculiar odor of nursing homes, completely unlike that of a hospital, a combination of musty age and urine, grew stronger as Rhodes walked farther down the hall.

  Near the end of the hallway he came to the room where Ruth Grady was sitting by a bed, holding an old woman’s hand. Ruth looked up as Rhodes walked in the door. “Good afternoon, Sheriff,” she said. “Did Hack send you to help me out?”‘

  Hack had not had an easy time of adjusting to the fact that the deputy Rhodes had hired to replace Johnny Sherman was a woman. In fact, he had not quite been able to address her by her name for several weeks. She had eventually won him over, however, and now they were fast friends. She was short, stout, and a thoroughly professional law officer. Rhodes felt lucky to have her on his staff.

  “He didn’t send me to help,” Rhodes said.”He just wasn’t sure what was going on out here.”

  “Unrequited love,” Ruth said.

  The woman in the bed turned to look at them. Her yellowish skin was a patchwork of fine wrinkles, and she had thin, short white hair. Her scalp showed through in places. “You needn’t make fun, young woman,” she said in a quavery voice.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Ruth said.

  “They won’t let us be together, you see,” Miz White said to Rhodes. “All we want is to be together.”

  “I see,” Rhodes said, even though he didn’t see.

  “Why don’t we go down and talk to Mr. Patterson?” Ruth said to Rhodes. “I think he can explain, and I’m sure Miz White will be fine now. Won’t you?” She gently disengaged her hand from the old woman’s.

  “Of course I’ll be fine,” Miz White said. “Mr. Stuart and I’d both be fine if they’d just let us be together.”

  “Well,” Ruth said, “we’ll just have to see what we can do.”

  “I know you just want to go ou
t in the hall and talk about me,” Miz White told them as they went out the door. “But I don’t mind. Not if you can get something done.”

  “I don’t quite get it,” Rhodes said once they were safely out of sight of Miz White’s door.

  “Get it? Got it! Put it in your pocket!” Someone yelled from the room they were passing. Rhodes looked in and saw a woman sitting in front of a TV set. She didn’t even look back at him.

  Ruth took the interruption in stride. “It’s the old story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Except in this case, the boy and girl are both around ninety years old.”

  “I’m still not sure . . .”

  “Mr. Patterson can explain it,” Ruth said.

  They walked past the desk. Linda was there, writing in a book of some kind. Earlene was still gone. Probably on her second cigarette by now, Rhodes thought.

  They passed rooms where old men sat mumbling to themselves, where others sat staring blankly at the walls, others where they slept restlessly. Rhodes felt a chill at the base of his spine. He wondered if he was having a midlife crisis. Or maybe he was just afraid of getting old.

  Mr. Stuart was sitting in a ladderback chair by his bed. Mr. Patterson was standing beside him.

  Like his nurses, Mr. Patterson was all in white—white jacket, white pants, white shoes. His name tag, however, had no first name on it. It said MR. PATTERSON. He was a short man, not much taller than Ruth Grady, but he was wide and solid. He was about Rhodes’s age, but his brownish-blond hair had no hint of gray in it, and it had been carefully styled, almost like the hair of a TV evangelist.

  Mr. Stuart looked small and shrunken in the sport coat and pants he was wearing. His wrinkled neck was at least a size too small for the collar of his shirt.

  Patterson looked up when the two law officers came in. “Hello, Sheriff. Sorry to have to call you about this disturbance, but things were beginning to get out of hand. Your deputy did a good job.”

  Rhodes looked at Ruth. She hadn’t mentioned how she had managed to quell the disturbance.

  “What seems to have caused all the trouble, Mr. Patterson?” Rhodes asked.

  “I’ll tell you that, Sheriff,” Mr. Stuart said. His voice was surprisingly strong. “They won’t let me and Miz White be together.”

  “Now see here,” Patterson said. “Don’t start that up again. I just won’t have it.” He turned to Rhodes. “You should have been here earlier, Sheriff. All the yelling, why I’ve never seen the likes of it.”

  Ruth Grady was smiling. “Me neither, not since the sixties. Biggest protest demonstration Blacklin County’s ever seen, I’d bet.”

  “I wish somebody would let me in on this,” Rhodes said.

  “They were in the halls, in their wheelchairs, in their walkers, just every which way,” Patterson said. He touched his hair as if to reassure himself that all the hurly-burly hadn’t disarranged it. “You see, at nap time, we have to separate them. Men to the men’s wing, women to the women’s wing. It just wouldn’t be . . . right any other way, if you get my meaning. We try to run a proper place here, and Mr. Stuart and Miz White are not in agreement with our policies.”

  “Damn right we’re not,” Mr. Stuart said.

  “We’re not set up for couples, you see,” Patterson said. “We don’t have . . . uh, coeducational facilities. We’re for singles only, and the people who come here know that. They’re apprised of the fact well in advance. So we take only those who have never married or those whose loved ones have . . . passed on.”

  Rhodes had caught on. “But you didn’t count on having a couple fall in love.”

  Patterson touched his hair again. “Uh . . . yes. I mean, no. We hadn’t counted on it. Not at all.”

  “But it happened.”

  “Yes. It happened. Of course, one would expect that persons of a certain age—”

  “Eighty-seven!” Mr. Stuart shouted.

  “—to be more mature about these matters,” Mr. Patterson said. “But Mr. Stuart and Miz White have become increasingly belligerent. And today, well, things just reached a head.”

  “Yelling and carrying on,” Rhodes said.

  “Yes, and mass confusion in the halls. You can just imagine. And someone was beating on the walls with a bedpan—”

  Rhodes looked at Mr. Stuart, who was smiling.

  “—and Mr. Radford tried to run me down with his wheelchair,” Patterson said.

  “It was pretty loud when I got here, all right,” Ruth Grady said, “but I didn’t see the wheelchair incident. I managed to get them calmed down with Mr. Patterson’s help. And Linda and Earlene pitched in. I think maybe Mr. Radford, or somebody, ran over Earlene’s foot.”

  Rhodes turned to Mr. Stuart. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said. “You and Miz White want to share a room?”

  “You got it, Sheriff,” Mr. Stuart said.

  “And when it came time for you to go to your rooms . . .”

  “We wouldn’t go. They had to take us. And we started yelling when they got us separated.” Mr. Stuart looked smug.

  Mr. Patterson looked unhappy. “We don’t run a place for couples, we just don’t,” he said. “It’s not . . . right, without the benefit of marriage or anything, and if they’re married, they’ll have to go elsewhere, because we don’t have married couples either.”

  “I take it this wasn’t as easy to sort out as you made it sound,” Rhodes said to Ruth.

  “Well, no,” she said, “but at least I didn’t have to use my sidearm.”

  “Never mind,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think I want to hear about it.” He looked at Patterson. “So where does that leave us?”

  “I’m going to call their children,” Patterson said. He looked completely exasperated. “I’m going to have them put out! I can’t stand any more of this. Why, we were planning to have a Christmas party next week, but there is no way we could have it with all this distraction!”

  “Now wait just a minute,” Mr. Stuart said.

  “Or maybe I could just have you arrested,” Patterson said. “How about that, Sheriff. Disturbing the peace? Inciting a riot? Would any of that apply in this case?”

  “Let’s step out in the hall,” Rhodes said.”Ruth, you keep Mr. Stuart company.”

  “All right,” she said. “We get along fine.”

  Patterson’s face was red and his eyes were narrowed. “You don’t want to try to talk me out of this, do you, Sheriff?” he asked when they got outside the room and shut the door.

  “Sure I do,” Rhodes said. “It seems to me—”

  “I will not run a bawdy house for the elderly!” Patterson said, his voice rising alarmingly. “I will not provide bedmates like some big-city procurer!”

  “I think you’re looking at this all wrong,” Rhodes said. “‘Can you imagine what’s going to happen if the newspapers get hold of this thing? What if one of their children calls some consumer advocate? What if one of them calls that guy in Houston, the one who closed the Chicken Ranch?”

  “Marvin Zindler?” Patterson said. “My God.” He put both hands to his hair.

  “See? Things could be worse. Whereas now, all you have to do is let two old people who aren’t going to do any harm to one another sleep in the same room.”

  “But what if some of the others . . . ?”

  “Oh,” Rhodes said. “That could be a problem, all right. But how likely do you think that possibility could really be?”

  “Well . . . not very likely, I guess.”

  “That’s what I’d say. Could you just give it a try? They don’t really have to share a room. Maybe we could compromise. Would you give it a try?”

  “I . . . I suppose so,” Patterson said. “We could work something out for a week, and then go on from there.”

  “Sure,” Rhodes said. “That ought to do it.”

  Mr. Stuart agreed, and Rhodes left them to iron out the details. He and Ruth left Sunny Dale, and Rhodes explained to her what he wanted her to do about Dr. Samuel Martin’
s Suburban.

  Chapter 6

  “It’s that curse, I just know it’s that curse!” Mrs. Martin was pacing in front of her Paul Bunyan Christmas tree, her arms crossed under her breasts, in the same robe she had worn the night before. She looked as if she hadn’t slept at all, and maybe it was the lack of sleep that had caused her to change her opinion of the reason for her husband’s disappearance.

  Rhodes tried to change her mind back. “The way I remember the things that were said—” he was trying to avoid the word curse “—he was supposed to get sick and have all his teeth fall out, not vanish.”

  “It’s all the same. Black magic!” Mrs. Martin’s hair hadn’t been attended to lately, and a few strands were popping loose like stray springs from an old couch cushion. “We’ll never find him. He’ll be like that ship, whatever it is. The Flying Chinaman.”

  “Dutchman,” Rhodes said without thinking.

  “It doesn’t matter! He’s gone, and we’ll never find him. What am I going to do?”

  Rhodes wanted to suggest a little sleep. Instead he said, “Why don’t you call your doctor, have him come over. He might be able to—”

  “I don’t want drugs! I want my husband!”

  “Why don’t we sit down,” Rhodes said.

  “I don’t want to sit down! I want—”

  “I know you want your husband,” Rhodes said. “And I want to find him. But we can’t talk until we both sit down and try to relax.”

  Mrs. Martin looked at him wild-eyed for a moment. Then she sat down on one of the couches. Rhodes sat in an overstuffed rocking chair where he could see her.

  “First,” Rhodes said, “I want you to know that we’ve found your husband’s Suburban.”

  Mrs. Martin’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t seem to speak.

  Rhodes went on. “Now, on that list you gave me, there was no property listed that was even near Milsby, but that’s where the Suburban was, parked behind the old schoolhouse. Did your husband own any rental property around there?”

  Mrs. Martin closed her mouth and thought about it. “No,” she said.