Fish, Chips, and Murder

by Patti Benning

“Let’s do it,” Alicia said.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Autumn said.

  Emily activated the application, and the three of them stared at the screen eagerly as the program located Alicia’s phone.

  “Well, it’s definitely in the building. This little blue dot is where it is,” Alicia said as the phone pinged to signify that it had located the other device. “Let’s go. I think it’s this way.”

  They followed the Bluetooth tracking until they came to a door which the app indicated the phone was on the other side of. Autumn checked the name, then frowned. It was Natasha’s room. Was it really as simple as that? It made sense, she supposed. Natasha didn’t like her aunt much, and if anyone was going to try to frame Lucinda, it was probably her.

  She must have faked her wedding ring going missing to throw us off her trail, she thought.

  “Should we go in, or just tell Nick that this is where the phone is?” Emily asked.

  “We’ll stick to our plan,” Autumn said. “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to ask Natasha if she has seen your phone. Depending on what she says, then we’ll know whether to go to Nick or not.”

  “All right,” Emily said reluctantly. Autumn could tell that she wasn’t looking forward to waiting all night for a resolution.

  “We’ll be here bright and early in the morning,” Autumn said. “It won’t take as long to uncover the truth.”

  The three of them turned and were about to head back down the hall when they heard a loud thump come from within the room. Autumn hesitated, frowning, and Emily turned toward the door with a worried look on her face.

  “Should we see if she’s okay?”

  “I think we should,” Autumn said. “That was loud, and it didn’t sound good. She might have fallen.”

  Emily nodded. Out of the three of them, she was the only one with a key to the residents’ rooms, so she was the one to unlock the door and push it open. As soon as she had glanced inside the room, she let out a sharp scream and stumbled backwards her heart pounding, Autumn pushed past her and gasped. Inside the room, Natasha was lying on her back on the floor, blood pooling around her. For a heart stopping moment, she thought that the older woman was dead, but then she saw the rise and fall of Natasha’s chest.

  “Help,” the elderly woman whispered.

  Knowing that she would never forgive herself if Natasha ended up the same way that Archie had, Autumn ran into the room and knelt by her side. Confronted with all of the blood, she froze. This was her chance to save a life, and she didn’t have the faintest idea of what to do. All of her first aid training seemed to have vanished from her mind, and she stared down at her hands feeling helpless. A life hung in the balance, and she was completely useless.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Natasha?” Autumn looked around desperately, trying to tell where the blood was coming from. “What happened?”

  She saw the older woman’s lips try to form words, but she couldn’t make out what she was trying to say.

  “I’m calling an ambulance,” Emily said behind her. Autumn didn’t bother responding as she leaned closer toward Natasha. The older woman tried to whisper again, and this time Autumn heard it.

  “Behind you.”

  It took a moment for Autumn to register the words, and by then, it was too late. She felt the cold steel of a knife being pressed to her throat and felt warm breath against her hair. She didn’t hear any reaction from Emily and Alicia and realized that the two of them were probably out of sight. Emily must have stepped back into the hallway to make the call. The young woman wasn’t used to the sight of this much blood.

  “Don’t move,” a low voice said. She could hear Emily chattering on the phone in the hall. She wished that either she or Alicia would look into the room again, but she didn’t dare turn her head or make a sound.

  “Don’t say anything,” the person behind her added. “I want you to back away slowly and get out of sight of the door.”

  “But Natasha… I have to save her.” The words came out automatically, before she could stop them. From the door, she heard a gasp. One of the two woman in the hall must have looked in.

  “If either of you take a single step into this room, I will kill your friend,” the voice behind her said more loudly. It was a woman’s voice, and Autumn thought that she recognized it. “You, drop that phone.”

  She heard the thunk of the phone landing on the carpet and winced. With any luck, the paramedics would already be on their way, and they would bring the police with them.

  “I – I don’t understand,” Emily said from the door. “You?”

  Autumn was dying to turn her head to see who it was, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she kept her eyes glued to Natasha. She had finally found the source of the blood; a stab wound in the older woman’s side. She knew that she needed to stop the bleeding quickly, but how? It was impossible to think with a knife pressed to her throat.

  “I need to get my father into this place. I can’t keep taking care of him, it’s going to drive me crazy. I love him, but it’s too much for me to handle. This is the best nursing home in the state. Don’t you understand? We were fourth or fifth on the list. That could mean waiting for years. I can’t take even another month of this.”

  The woman’s words were frantic as they spilled out. Autumn realized finally who she was. It was Bella, the woman who had visited only a couple of days before with her father.

  “You killed Archie, too, didn’t you?” Autumn said, realizing that this was the missing piece of the puzzle.

  “I had to,” the other woman hissed. “My father’s going to get himself killed, or end up burning down the house, or decide to take my car out on a joy ride and run over some little kid. I can’t take that risk, and I can’t keep trying to take care of him by myself. I need to make room for him here.”

  “Were you planning on killing four or five residents? You were pretty low down on the list before all of this happened.”

  The pressure of the knife lessened slightly as the woman behind her shifted. “I was hoping that after a death that looked like a blatant negligence, no one else would want their relatives to come here. It was easy enough to lure Archie out by telling him someone wanted to see him. It was harder to actually hit him over the head with a rock, but I managed it. And it would have worked, too. Almost everyone dropped off of the list. I have to admit, I didn’t expect the police to do so much digging around.”

  “We take safety very seriously here,” Autumn said. “What sort of facility would we be if we ignored something like Archie’s death?”

  “Old people die,” Bella said coldly. “I didn’t think that he would be missed.”

  Autumn winced. She had never heard someone so heartless before in her life.

  “What are you going to do now?” Emily asked, a challenge in her voice. Autumn admired the younger woman’s bravery.

  “I’m going to have to get rid of all of the witnesses,” Bella said. She didn’t sound quite as certain anymore, though. More quietly, she muttered, “This isn’t going how I planned it at all.”

  “Well, sorry to wreck your day,” Emily snapped from the door. “There is no way that you’ll be able to kill all of us. You’d be better off letting Autumn go.”

  Autumn felt the knife pressed into her neck harder. “I don’t want to hear anything else from you,” Bella said. “If you say something else, your friend here is going to be the first to go. Now, I want the two of you to come into this room and shut the door behind you.”

  Autumn was disappointed when, after only a brief hesitation, her friends walked into the room and closed the door quietly. Were they really going to give up that easily?

  “Good. Now, walk along the wall and sit on the bed. Keep your hands on your heads, where I can see them.”

  Alicia and Emily complied. Autumn glanced at them before turning her attention back to Natasha. She was glad to see that the older woman was still breathing, even though she was continuing to lose blood. They we
re all running out of time.

  Bella hesitated then, shifting again and withdrawing the knife slightly. “I guess… I guess I should get this over with,” she said doubtfully. With a spark of hope, Autumn realized that this woman wasn’t quite prepared to murder three extra people tonight. This might be their way out.

  “You don’t have to kill us,” she said quickly. “If you promise to let us go, none of us will go to the police.”

  That was a lie, of course, but she figured that she didn’t owe Bella the truth. She wasn’t surprised when the other woman just laughed.

  “I may not be very experienced at this sort of thing, but I’m not an idiot. I just have to figure out the best way to do this.”

  She fell silent again, and Autumn considered her options. She knew that she didn’t have long before Bella built up the courage to end her life. She tried to catch either Emily or Alicia’s gaze, but they were both staring above her head at the killer. She wondered if either of them had any sort of a plan, but she doubted it, considering that her own mind was completely blank.

  An unexpected knock at the door made Autumn and Bella both jump. She felt the knife nick her skin and winced. That had been close. She felt a sudden, mad hope that it was the police, but quickly realized that there was no way they could have gotten there that quickly.

  “Natasha, we know you’re still awake. Let us in.”

  Autumn felt the blood rush out of her face as she recognized the voice. It was her uncle.

  “Lucy told me that she saw you take the phone. I remember seeing you by her purse the day before we found the cash and the wallet inside it. We connected the dots. We know you’re the thief. We just want you to give the phone back to us, so we can give it to Alicia tomorrow. After that, you have to promise that you’re done stealing. If you’re upset with Lucy for something, just talk to us.”

  “None of you say anything,” Bella hissed from behind Autumn. For the first time that evening, Autumn was happy to comply. The last thing that she wanted was for her uncle and aunt to get dragged into this.

  “I mean it, Natasha. If you don’t give up the phone and promise to stop stealing, we’re going to go to Nick in the morning. None of us want to involve the police, but we will if we have to.”

  To Autumn’s horror, she heard the door knob turn. It was still unlocked, and the door swung open slowly.

  “Natasha?”

  She heard her uncle gasp. She couldn’t blame him; the site of her kneeling on the floor beside Natasha in a puddle of the other woman’s blood must have been shocking, to say the least. Not to mention the madwoman holding a knife to her throat, of course.

  “You really shouldn’t snoop,” Bella said. “I want the two of you to go and join them on the bed, and if you don’t, I will slit her throat. Don’t move, don’t say a word, and don’t try anything.”

  Autumn saw her uncle open his mouth as if he was about to say something, but one look at her and he shut it again, obviously deciding that it wasn’t worth the risk. He nodded once, then made his way over to the bed.

  “You too,” Bella said, gesturing at her aunt.

  Autumn watched as her aunt fumbled with the wheelchair, seeming to struggle with moving it. She felt her stomach twist as Bella sighed. Aunt Lucy was blocking the door, and if Bella wanted the door shut, she was going to have to move.

  “None of you move, or the old lady will get hurt,” she warned as she removed the knife from Autumn’s throat and strode over toward Lucy’s wheelchair. She was reaching for the handles when all of a sudden Aunt Lucy yanked the wheels backward, running the chair into Bella legs. Taken by surprise, Bella stumbled backward, dropping the knife.

  Autumn realized that this was her chance. Her aunt was causing a distraction, and Autumn wasn’t going to waste it.

  She lunged at Bella, tackling her legs and knocking the other woman over. There was a moment of struggle as Bella scrambled for the knife, but Autumn held on tightly and after a moment, Alicia appeared, wrestling the woman’s arms to the ground. With Autumn on her legs and Alicia kneeling on her wrist, Bella was restrained. Autumn heard the beeping as somebody dialed 911 and told herself that the nightmare was over at last.

  EPILOGUE

  “The construction crew has been at it all day,” Emily said, coming into the kitchen to dump a pile of clean napkins on the counter. “I guess that’s a good sign, but I’m not looking forward to another couple of months of this.”

  “No matter how many headaches I get, I’m still glad to hear them again,” Autumn said. “Anything that hints that the nursing home isn’t getting shut down is a good sign.”

  The two women began folding napkins together in a comfortable silence, which was broken when Alicia ran into the kitchen, breathless. “I finally got Natasha to tell me why she kept trying to pin the thefts on your aunt,” she said.

  Autumn looked up, intrigued. Natasha had only come back from the hospital that morning, and Alicia had volunteered to spend the day helping her get around. Surprisingly, the two women got along quite well.

  “Well, are you going to tell us why?”

  “She’s in love with your uncle! She confessed to me that she’s been after him for months now. She’s been trying to figure out how to get him to leave your aunt, and she thought that if he thought your aunt was a criminal, he might be convinced to leave. She’s been lonely ever since her husband died, I think, and she said that your uncle is the first person that she liked in a long time.”

  “Wow,” Autumn said. “I have to admit, I didn’t expect that.”

  “I know, right? But she told me that she didn’t realize just how much he loved your aunt. She promised me not to try anything else and will settle for being his friend. Not that she has a chance now anyway, now that we all know she’s the one who was stealing stuff.”

  “She got lucky when you think about it,” Autumn said. “If we hadn’t been tracking the missing phone and found her, who knows what would have happened. She might have ended up like Archie.”

  The three of them shivered. Just that morning, Nick had told them that Bella had confessed to everything in front of the police. She had taped over the door latch when she had visited earlier that day and had propped the doors open when she came back that evening to lure him outside.

  After learning that they were still going to have to wait around for another room to open up, she had turned her attention to Natasha. Autumn figured that she probably had chosen the older woman because of her outburst at Lucinda earlier that day. It had drawn attention to her, and not in a good way.

  Even though Natasha had caused a lot of problems for her aunt, Autumn was extremely thankful that they had managed to get the bleeding stopped in time. She was starting to know how Nick felt and knew that she would have blamed herself forever if Natasha had passed away.

  “So, how much longer do you think you’ll help out here?” Autumn asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “I promised Nick I would stay here until he hires at least two replacements, as long as it doesn’t take longer than a couple of months,” Alicia said. “I like it here. It’s nice spending the mornings helping people. Maybe I’ll start volunteering and come back during the holidays to help.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Autumn said, smiling. “We can always use the extra help.”

  Alicia grinned, then said a quick goodbye before leaving the room, off to see if anyone else needed help now that her news had been delivered. Autumn and Emily resumed folding the napkins. Things were slowly getting back to normal, and that included things between her and Nick. Even though she knew that Nick still felt terrible about Archie’s death, even he had to admit that it hadn’t been his fault.

  They were both looking forward to the future. Autumn couldn’t wait to see what the new wing of the building brought to Asheville Meadows. She might only have been working there for half a year, but she had the feeling that she was there to stay. Other jobs might pay more, but she knew that she would never fi
nd somewhere else where everyone felt as if they were family, and she knew that feeling was something that she couldn’t put a price on.