She was Dying Anyway

by P. D. Workman

  “If she were going to end her own life, then that last date with Lawrence made sense, right?”

  She nodded.

  “But Lawrence never said that’s why she did it. He said she had the day all planned out, but he didn’t say she had planned her death. He was surprised she died when she did, just like everyone else.”

  “So…?”

  “So, if she hadn’t planned her death, why have one last date? Why not… a number of special little events that would be easier for her to tolerate? Lawrence said how tired she was. She couldn’t manage to get through the day on her own and was wiped out the day after. If she hadn’t planned to die, she could have sprinkled each of those date ideas over the next two or three months, or however long she had.”

  Bridget considered. “I don’t know.”

  “She never told you she’d planned her death. Her doctor didn’t say he’d helped her. Her family didn’t say she did, and Lawrence didn’t say she did. So it wasn’t suicide, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then it doesn’t fit.”

  “Okay…” Bridget’s voice was cautious. “Then it doesn’t fit. So… what, then?”

  “Then is Lawrence lying?”

  “Why would he?”

  “Nobody else was with them. He took her out for the day… brought her back exhausted… she slept all the next day, and then she died.”

  “You think he did something to make her sick?” Bridget shook her head adamantly. “No. I don’t believe it.”

  “Something didn’t feel right. When he was telling me all of this, I knew something was off. His eyes, his body language, he was trying to hide something.”

  Bridget watched the carousel. It was a cooler day, so there weren’t a lot of families out in the park or a lot of children on the carousel. The cheerful music played and the horses circled endlessly. Zachary pictured Robin and Lawrence there.

  “Zachary, Lawrence didn’t kill her. He didn’t do anything to make her sick. He didn’t help her commit suicide. I saw him with her. He worshiped her.”

  “Maybe he wanted to put her out of her misery. The nurse said that her pain was getting worse, more difficult to manage. Lawrence said the pain was deep down in her bones. He was afraid the cancer had gotten into them. Bone cancer is one of the most painful things a person can go through. Maybe he didn’t want her to have to deal with it.”

  “I don’t believe it. No. I was there when he found out that Robin had passed. I was at the hospital. He was devastated by the news.”

  “Someone can still be devastated when they are the cause of a tragedy.” This Zachary knew without a doubt. He had plenty of personal experience in that area.

  “No. He was shocked. He couldn’t believe it. No one is that good of an actor.”

  Zachary scowled to himself. Bridget had a knack for reading a situation so that she could respond in just the right way; the perfect hostess, friend, and lover. Could she be that wrong?

  “Something is off,” Zachary repeated. “It doesn’t fit.”

  Chapter Eight

  Z

  achary went back to the treatment center the next day, hoping to find Nurse Betty on duty again on the same shift. She was, but she was busy away from the reception desk taking care of patient needs and minor emergencies, so it was some time before he could talk to her again.

  “You’re back again,” Betty observed. “Didn’t you get everything you needed from Dr. West?”

  “Dr. West was very helpful.” Zachary searched Betty’s face for any sign that Dr. West had told her not to talk to Zachary or informed her that he didn’t have the permission of the family to conduct his investigation. Apparently, he had either not gotten around to it, or hadn’t thought it necessary to let his staff know. “I just had a few more questions. I’m sorry, I know I’m being a pain.”

  “You’ve been very patient. We like patience around here.” She laughed at her word play.

  Zachary smiled along with her. “You know Robin’s fiancé, Lawrence,” he said, deciding to promote Lawrence from boyfriend to fiancé for increased sympathy.

  Betty nodded immediately. “Yes, of course. Poor fellow. We were the ones who had to inform him that Robin had passed.”

  “That must have been hard on you too. He took it pretty hard?”

  “Of course. Anyone would. It was a shock; we hadn’t anticipated her dying that soon.”

  “But at least he’d had a chance to say goodbye.”

  Betty’s penciled brows drew down. “What?”

  “Their last date. On Wednesday. Wasn’t that their goodbye date?”

  Betty pursed her lips. She started to shake her head, but then stopped, uncertain.

  “I just thought…” Zachary let his voice trail off, giving her time to think about it before going on. “They went out and did everything Robin was never going to be able to do again, and then on Friday, she…”

  “She didn’t commit suicide,” Betty said, providing Zachary with the nugget of information he was fishing for. “There was no end of life prescription. We would know. Everyone on the nursing staff knows if there is an end of life prescription.”

  “Oh.” Zachary let his puzzlement show. “Then what happened on Wednesday?”

  “She went out on a day pass. They went out together, she and Lawrence. I don’t know if it was a date. I thought… maybe they had people to see or arrangements to make…” Betty shifted uncomfortably. She let her gaze wander to her computer while she reviewed the past week’s events. “She was very tired when they came back. It was obvious she had done too much. She was in a lot of pain. She said, ‘I’m just glad I got that out of the way.’”

  “Not exactly something you would say about a big romantic date.”

  Betty rubbed the space between her eyebrows as if trying to remove the frown lines there. “No.”

  “They didn’t show you pictures of everything they had done? The carriage ride, the picnic, the carousel…?”

  “No.”

  “How did Lawrence seem? He must have been happy after such a big day with her…”

  “No. He was very subdued. Concerned about Robin being so weak, but… distant. And he didn’t stay with her. He often stayed late, watched her go to sleep.”

  “But he didn’t on Wednesday.”

  “No.”

  “And did he come on Thursday?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “He said he dropped in briefly, but she was sleeping.”

  Betty shrugged. “He might have. She did spend most of Thursday sleeping.”

  “Did that surprise you? Were you concerned in any way?”

  “She’d obviously had a busy day and been exhausted Wednesday, so… we were concerned that she get enough rest and not catch anything… we were happy she was sleeping. Patients need sleep.”

  “You didn’t think maybe he’d given her something?”

  Betty’s eyes were wide. “Given her something? What would he give her? He’s not a doctor.”

  “I don’t know. Alcohol. Valium. Ambien. Percocet or Oycotin. Or maybe something that conflicted with one of her meds. You must have patients that think they can just take whatever they want without talking to the doctor. Or they know they’re not supposed to and sneak something.”

  “Well… yes. That’s true. But I never thought Robin had taken anything. Just that she was worn out.”

  “You said she’d been in more pain the final few days.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t think she took anything extra for it? On top of what you were giving her? Lawrence said he was worried the cancer was into her bones.”

  “We weren’t sure why she was in so much pain. But we were managing it, she wouldn’t have needed to take anything else.”

  “And Lawrence couldn’t have decided she needed something more and slipped it to her? Even into her IV without anyone noticing?”

  “Anything is possible,” Betty said, frustration edging into her voice. “I c
an’t prove she didn’t take anything and nobody injected anything into her port. But did I think anything had? No. Do I think anyone did anything to cause her death? No. Ask it as many ways as you like, Mr. Goldman, it was just Robin’s time. Nothing will convince me otherwise.”

  “Did Lawrence get along with Robin’s mother and sister?”

  Betty’s eyes widened. She didn’t answer immediately, weighing her answer. “They seemed… civil. Not warm. I think there was a little competition as to who was going to sit with her. Not like some patients where when someone new arrives, the previous visitor leaves to make room.”

  Zachary tried to envision what the dynamic between Lawrence and Gloria would have been like. Gloria, a strong and outgoing woman and Lawrence, hesitant and uncertain. Would he have stood up to her? Or was the contest between Robin, wanting Lawrence to stay, and Gloria, wanting him out of the way?

  “Did you get the feeling there was animosity there? Maybe the family didn’t approve of him.”

  “Well, he was very different than her. But I don’t know what they thought of him, they never said anything in front of me.”

  Zachary decided to do some research on Lawrence before approaching him again. He needed to know for sure who he was facing. Even someone who seemed quiet and self-effacing could be explosive when confronted. Zachary was investigating someone he thought might have committed homicide, even if it was just classified as a mercy killing or an unauthorized assisted suicide.

  Lawrence Long had a number of social media accounts. He was, it would appear, an artist. He created sculptures and paintings, the kind that ended up getting installed as public art, drawing the ire of a public who wanted to know what the heck it was supposed to be. Big shapes, bold colors, and cobbled-together junk. Too sophisticated for Zachary’s artistic sense. He was a photography man to the bone, dedicated to capturing the real world, raw and unflinching. Lawrence’s kind of work gave artists a bad name.

  But maybe art was a shared interest he could approach Lawrence with. Rather than just showing up and demanding more answers, essentially calling Lawrence a liar, he could come up with a ruse that would put Lawrence more at ease.

  So, with a little thought and another phone call, Zachary soon found himself in Lawrence’s studio. In other words, his garage.

  Zachary was prepared for another studio like Isabella’s. She was one of the messiest people he had met, with towering piles of materials that threatened to topple over and bury them both. Zachary had always emulated Mr. Peterson, the foster father he had learned photography from, whose tiny darkrooms were always meticulously organized, with everything assigned a place. It was the one place Mr. Peterson had kept clean and ordered. It had soothed Zachary’s anxiety and had kept him from getting distracted. He was able to focus on developing pictures, achieving a sort of a zen state that he didn’t get from anything else in his life. So he kept his own darkroom and filing system the same way and tried to apply the same principles in the rest of his life, finding it easier to put things away and clean up after himself immediately than to let himself get overwhelmed by disorder.

  Lawrence’s studio was something in between. Messy, but with a semblance of order and not filled to the gills with junk he would never use. He had several large sculptures in the center of the room, with paintings on easels and other supplies on benches and shelves around the edges of the garage. Scraps of metal, what looked like car parts, and other items that Zachary wouldn’t have expected to be used in art.

  “Come on in. Make yourself comfortable,” Lawrence invited without inflection.

  Zachary didn’t offer to shake his hand this time. He looked around and selected a stool that had originally been red, but was speckled with various colors of paint. Zachary looked at it carefully and ran his hand over the surface to make sure that none of the paint was wet, before sitting down.

  “So, what was it you wanted?” Lawrence asked. “You were looking for pictures of Robin?”

  “I thought it might help Bridget,” Zachary explained. “I think that Robin’s death was just such a surprise to her, she’s really obsessing over it in a way that isn’t healthy. I thought that if I could pull together some pictures, maybe put them together in a slide show or a collage, it would give her something to hold on to. Something to remember Robin by. And then maybe she wouldn’t be so… at such loose ends about Robin’s death.

  Lawrence considered this, his expression veiled. He wasn’t so sure about meeting with Zachary a second time, even under the new pretense. Did he have a guilty conscience?

  “Doesn’t Bridget have any pictures of her? Couldn’t you get them off her Facebook memorial page?”

  “But I want something special for her. Something from those last few days of Robin’s life. I was thinking, when you were telling me about the lovely date you had with Robin the Wednesday before she died… that maybe if Bridget could see those pictures, could see both how frail she was, but also how happy she was, right up until the end… maybe that would calm her down.”

  “It’s quite personal,” Lawrence protested. “I mean, Robin and I… that was our last time together. I didn’t really anticipate anyone… sharing those moments with anyone.”

  “I don’t need anything that’s too private. Just maybe… a picture of her on the carousel… smiling. Enjoying that last day.”

  Lawrence didn’t respond right away. Maybe Zachary was giving off some signal that he wasn’t sincere.

  “Surely you took some pictures,” Zachary cajoled. “And you two were out in public, so they couldn’t be that racy!”

  It didn’t bring even the ghost of a smile to Lawrence’s face. He sighed, and finally motioned Zachary over to a computer in the corner of the garage. Not a great place for a piece of equipment that could be sensitive to dust or other contaminants in the air from Lawrence’s work. But maybe it was just a cheap one that he kept to be able to pull up pictures of models while he painted.

  With a few taps and clicks, Lawrence opened up his photo folder and hunted down the pictures from the previous Wednesday. He started to page through them quickly, not giving Zachary a chance to get a good look at any one of them. Robin’s thin, wan face. A few smiles, but mostly she was looking away from the camera, pensive or detached. She didn’t look like a girl on a bucket-list date. No big smiles. No romance. There were very few pictures that included Lawrence as well. Zachary made a motion for Lawrence to stop.

  “Wait, go back. I want to see that one with the two of you together in the carriage.”

  Lawrence looked unhappy about the request, but backed up until he stopped on it.

  “Oh, that’s very nice,” Zachary said. And on the surface, it was. The happy couple in the fairy-tale carriage, all sweet and happy. But neither of their smiles looked sincere. Though Lawrence had his arm around Robin’s shoulders, she sat stiffly, as if he were a stranger instead of her beloved. They held themselves apart, posed for the camera, but exuding no real warmth.

  “Could I get a copy of that one?”

  Lawrence grudgingly agreed and marked the photo to be copied. He continued to go through the photos that had been taken that day, with Zachary stopping him occasionally to request one of them.

  It was all as Lawrence had said. The carriage ride, the picnic, lying in the sun, the carousel, the cotton candy. It was obvious that Robin was exhausted by the end of the batch of photos. She had done way too much. Lawrence had taken one last picture of her at the end of the day, being tucked into her bed at the cancer treatment center, looking directly at the camera with a hard, unfeeling smile.

  “Can I—”

  “Not that one,” Lawrence said. “That’s the last picture I have of her. I don’t want… I don’t want anyone else to have that one.”

  Zachary wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to have that one either. It said too much. Something was wrong. Robin and Lawrence were not happy lovers, back from a tiring day, having done everything Robin had set out to do to make her last day with Lawrence
special. Something else was going on.

  He waited for Lawrence to copy the pictures to a thumb drive. He didn’t want to do or say anything that might antagonize the man until Zachary had the pictures safely in his pocket. He tucked them away and looked at the computer screen, still thinking about that last picture.

  “When are you going to tell me the truth, Lawrence?”

  “What?” Lawrence was obviously startled by the question.

  “It’s obvious you’re trying to hide what happened that day. It’s as clear as the nose on your face. So tell me. Quit trying to string me along.”

  Lawrence looked back at him, eyes wide and shifting back and forth. He walked over to one of the sculptures in the middle of the garage and looked it over, comparing it to the final product in his mind’s eye, touching the cool surface and pretending that Zachary wasn’t there to ruin everything for him. Zachary said nothing, letting the silence build. Lawrence knew something and he needed to confess it to Zachary. If he didn’t, he would just go on feeling guilty and worrying that one day someone was going to find out his secret.

  “It was supposed to be our last date,” he said finally. “Robin didn’t know she was going to die so soon, but she intended it to be our last date. She wanted to end on a high note, to have a perfect last date, and remember everything that way…”

  Zachary frowned, his forehead getting tight as he thought about it. “Are you saying…”

  “She broke up with me.” Lawrence’s voice was rough. “This whole thing was… I don’t know whether it was supposed to make me feel good or to make her feel better about dumping me.”

  Zachary could feel his pain. It cut a little too close to his own heart, being dumped by Bridget when she was going through treatment. There was something terrible about being dumped by someone when they should have needed you more. Something so damaging about being told ‘I have to eliminate everything that isn’t positive or necessary from my life in order to fight this thing. So you’ve got to go.’ No matter how Bridget or Robin tried to soften that message by surrounding it with special experiences or long-winded explanations, the message was still the same.