by Nevada Barr
“I got a nasty email from you,” Rose says. For a few seconds, they digest this. Then Nancy nods. They realize who sent them. The woman cutting Rose from the herd for slaughter, the one who had keys to both their houses, the woman who exchanged Rose’s drugs and put the prescription bottle through the dishwasher.
“Aunt Stella is the queen of nasty emails,” Mel says.
“Stella’s been arrested,” Elizabeth, Royal’s grandma, says. “She will be held at County until the arraignment. She is cooperating.”
“Ratting out everybody she can possibly think of,” Royal says. His grandmother lays a repressive hand on his shoulder.
“Alma Greene has been detained; charges are pending,” Elizabeth says.
“Stella got to know Alma when her father made a new will after he remarried,” Flynn says. Rose remembers that. He left everything to his new wife. Stella went ballistic. When he died in an automobile accident a couple of years later, Stella’s fury was reignited. “It looks like, after Dad died, Stella and Alma Greene got together and hatched this plot.”
Rose is afraid to ask any of the questions she needs to know the answers to. Mel helps her out. “Gigi, you’re going to be charged with some things, but Royal’s grandma thinks it won’t be too bad.”
“Longwood doesn’t want this kind of publicity,” Royal explains. “You know, patients poisoned, murdered, people breaking in, snatching old guys.” Elizabeth’s fingers tighten slightly on his shoulder and he stops, but the grin doesn’t leave his face. “No offense meant.”
“None taken,” Rose assures him.
“You have to produce this Chuck of yours, the one you made away with so flamboyantly,” Flynn says. He looks a lot like his dad did when dealing with a difficult situation. Rose knows that she is that difficult situation, and will be dealt with. With Mel’s intervention, she might be spared banishment. “Without a living, healthy Chuck, Ms. Pryor says all bets are off,” Flynn finishes. It’s possible her stepson hopes she will be safely locked away for a while—at least until Melanie is thirty and can take care of herself.
“This is better discussed in private,” the lawyer says. Elizabeth speaks in such a way that they all feel the threat. Rose doesn’t know what it is exactly, but she believes lawyer-client privilege, and plausible deniability for possible deposition questions, might be involved.
“Where is my phone?” Rose asks.
Mel pushes it toward her from where it lay behind a box of tissues on the table between their beds. “The police found it on Alma Greene’s desk and gave it to Dad. The nurse put it on airplane mode so you wouldn’t be disturbed.”
Rose takes it off airplane mode. Immediately it begins to buzz and chirp as messages download. Three are from Marion. Half a dozen or more are from Eddie’s phone. Rose starts to call, then stops. She looks at Elizabeth Pryor. “Can you handle another client?”
“Are you referring to Edward Martinez?” the lawyer asks. By the look on Royal’s and Mel’s faces, Grandma has been filled in on Eddie’s involvement so far as they know.
“Yes,” Rose says.
Ms. Pryor looks at her Apple Watch. She tucks a stray strand of blond hair behind her ear. She will have guessed Eddie was the masked man in the kidnapping. “I will speak with him if you both do exactly as I say,” she concedes.
Rose is fine with that. She pushes REPLY without bothering to listen to messages or read texts.
After a single ring Eddie answers. “Hey!” There is the sound of a mild scuffle; then a deep baritone says, “Yes?”
“Eddie?” Rose asks. It doesn’t sound like Eddie. Rose wonders if he’s gotten himself arrested for something in Brevard.
“May I ask who is calling?”
“Speaker, please,” Ms. Pryor says flatly. Rose puts the call on speaker.
She doesn’t know what to say, whether to answer. “May I ask who’s answering?” she asks cautiously.
“Charles—Chuck—Boster.” In the background Rose can hear a voice raised in protest. Slightly muffled, the baritone says, “Take it easy, son. Have another Fig Newton.” Mouth back to the speaker: “Now. Who is calling?”
“Chuck, it’s me, Rose.” There is a muffled discussion on the other end of the line. Then Chuck is back.
“The woman who took me out of . . . what? Longwood. The woman who took me out of Longwood?”
Chuck doesn’t remember her. Though Rose understands—he was drugged nearly to obliviousness when they were together—still she is a little hurt. “Yes. We knew each other in the MCU, the Memory Care Unit.”
“Eddie here has told me a little about that. I am not a man who enjoys only being told a little about why he is in the woods in the middle of nowhere without so much as a change of clothes.”
“Charles Boster?” Elizabeth Pryor says.
“Speaking,” says the voice.
“The Honorable Charles Boster, Court of Appeals?”
“Retired.”
“This is Elizabeth Pryor. I have been in your court many times.”
“Counselor Pryor, I remember you.”
Rose hands the phone to Elizabeth, who immediately leaves the room in search of privacy. A policeman is stationed outside the hospital room’s door. Rose doesn’t think he is there to ensure her safety.
No one speaks for a while. “I guess it’s all about lawyers now,” Flynn says. “I’ll see if I can’t arrange to reduce my travel.”
“I’ve got to . . . go . . . somewhere,” Daniel says vaguely. “Find an apartment. Like that.” He drifts out of the room.
“Let me know where to deliver your dratted cats,” Nancy says. “The big one has ruined my sofa. I’ll send you the bill.”
“Thank you,” Rose says to the ramrod-straight retreating back.
A nurse appears to shoo Flynn and Royal from the room. In the doorway, Flynn halts like a freeze-frame in a movie. Mel and Rose wait.
Without turning to face them, Flynn says, “Rose, I’m sorry I let this happen to you. Dad . . .” he clears his throat. “Dad was the guy who could fix anything, make things work, make them whole. When he died . . . I guess that guy is me now.”
“Us,” Rose says. “That guy is us.”
Flynn looks at her. “Us,” he agrees. “I’ll be home a lot more,” he says to Mel.
“Promise or threat?” she teases.
“Both,” he answers with a crooked smile. “I’ll be back later. You two get some rest.”
“Wow,” Mel breathes when her dad is gone.
“Yeah. I thought I was in big trouble,” Rose says.
“Me, too.”
Rose and Mel sit quietly, both on their cell phones. Too tired to talk, Rose texts Marion a brief update. Got to love a happy ending, Marion texts back. It is a happy ending. Rose knows that; she just doesn’t feel that. What she feels is emptiness. Emptiness is good. She breathes it in for a while, balancing in that lovely space between thought and death where the knowledge that one is made of stardust becomes visceral.
After a time, she says to no one in particular, “Chuck doesn’t remember me.”
“He will,” Mel says comfortingly.
“It’ll be good to have my cats back. Do you think Honey Cat really shredded Nancy’s sofa?”
“It’s pretty shredded.”
“The cats must not like Nancy.”
Mel doesn’t comment.
“I’ll bet you are really going to miss Granddad now,” Mel says.
Mel is astute, and not just for her age. When the emptiness fills with the detritus of life on earth, Rose will long for her husband, her friend, her sweetheart.
“Death should be called graduation. Life leaves this form and goes into the next,” Mel says. Mel has learned the dharma by osmosis. Rose doesn’t know if she knows the dharma that can be known, or if Mel is secretly enlightened. She suspects the latter.
“That is true,” Rose says. “But it’s hard to hold hands with the truth when you go to the movies.”
Mel sighs. “The
truth doesn’t teach you to build things.”
“The truth won’t pretend it’s his fault when you screw up.”
“The truth won’t toss you the remote when you’re too lazy to get off the sofa,” Mel says.
“The opposite of one profound truth is an equal and opposing profound truth,” Rose says.
Silence settles along with the dust motes in the afternoon light that slants through the window.
“Do you think Granddad will come back?” Mel asks softly.
“I do,” Rose says.
“You’ll have to become a vegetarian,” Mel says, “so you won’t accidentally eat him.”
“It’s not like he’ll come back as a pig or a chicken.” Rose spreads her arms out. “He’ll be, you know . . . one with everything.”
“Granddad is coming back as a hot dog?”
Rose turns her arm so Mel can see the IV tube. “Pretend my pillow has just been thrown firmly at your head.”
“Oof!” Mel whuffs, and falls back laughing. Rose hears Harley in his granddaughter’s laugh.
Orange light turns to blue, then gray. Rose watches the incremental miracle as Mel dozes in the bed beside hers.
“You are very wise, Grasshopper,” Rose whispers.
“This is so, Gigi Rinpoche” trickles back on an exhalation.
Epilogue
Hoping to avoid bad publicity, Longwood did not press charges against either Rose Dennis or Edward “Eddie” Martinez. Despite management’s efforts, the story was leaked. Following the exposé, the waiting list for families wanting to place their elders in the MCU increased exponentially. Nurse Karen Black and Anthony Brevard were fired.
Ms. Elizabeth Pryor, citing the lack of charges from the facility, along with the circumstances of Rose Dennis’s illegal incarceration, and diminished mental capacity stemming therefrom, got the State to drop all charges against Rose.
At Eddie’s trial, Rose testified that she had met Mr. Martinez when he was working on her roof and convinced him Chuck’s life was in danger. Judge Charles Boster appeared as a character witness on Eddie Martinez’s behalf. Charges of kidnapping were reduced to reckless endangerment. Eddie was sentenced to six months community service. Ms. Elizabeth Pryor got his mother released from detention and is representing her pro bono.
Wanda Lopez was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, the murder of Phillip Marsden Miller, Camilla Reynolds, and James Madding. She received two life sentences and is currently appealing the verdict.
Stella Dennis was convicted of assault and battery, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, and kidnapping. She is currently the captain of the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women’s volleyball team. She will be up for parole in eight years.
Alma Greene was disbarred and found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and of fraud. She turned state’s evidence in consideration of a lighter sentence, testifying that Wanda Lopez had broken Camilla Reynolds’s femur by shoving her against a sink, then used the morphine drip prescribed for pain to induce heart failure via overdose. James Madding was choked by a hot dog Wanda pushed down his throat when he was too feeble from drugs to defend himself. Phillip Marsden Miller was smothered with a pillow. Alma was sentenced to eleven years in the state penitentiary.
Marion Bliss, Rose’s sister, is presently obsessed with 5G.
Carter Goodman sold the painting of the truck in the desert for twelve hundred dollars. The business is now Goodman’s Used Cars and Fine Art.
Anthony “Tony” Brevard was indicted as an accessory. He jumped bail. Whereabouts are unknown.
Nurse Karen Black sued Rose Dennis for assault, deprivation of civil liberties, and psychological trauma. The suit was settled out of court for an amount rumored to be in the low seven figures. Ms. Black is on her sixth luxury cruise, this one to Antarctica.
Nancy Dennis received a new couch and adopted a rescue Chihuahua.
Daniel Dennis was promoted to manager of the Starbucks. Finding it too stressful, he quit and got rehired as a barista.
Chuck Boster went back to his wife, remarking that both he and Barbara needed someone to look after them.
Derek Pound, the not-brother, disappeared before he could be arrested. Derek worked as a personal trainer for both Alma Greene and Charles “Chuck” Boster.
Melanie Dennis, though starting her first year of high school, still hangs out with Gigi occasionally. She and Royal remain best friends. In a short, and less than solemn, ceremony, Mel, Royal, and Rose interred Eddie Martinez’s finger in the backyard of the Applegarth house. The grave is marked with a cracked garden gnome.
Acknowledgments
Don, Carter, Kendall, Marsden Jr., Brooks, London, , Helen, Lee, Charles, Liz, Jason, Marsden Sr., Logan, and Jacques for letting me join the wild and delightful world of extended family.
[ii]
ALSO BY NEVADA BARR
FICTION
Anna Pigeon Books
Boar Island
Destroyer Angel
The Rope
Burn
Borderline
Winter Study
Hard Truth
High Country
Flashback
Hunting Season
Blood Lure
Deep South
Liberty Falling
Blind Descent
Endangered Species
Firestorm
Ill Wind (a.k.a. Mountain of Bones)
A Superior Death
Track of the Cat
Nevada Barr Collection
OTHER NOVELS
Bittersweet
13 1⁄2
NONFICTION
Seeking Enlightenment—Hat by Hat
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Section
Section
Section
Section
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
[ii]
Copyright Page
[iv]
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
WHAT ROSE FORGOT. Copyright © 2019 by Nevada Barr. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover)
ISBN (ebook)
First Edition: September 2019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
9781250207135
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, ext. 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
-moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share