Baby, It's Dead Outside

by E M Kaplan

  Lynetta gave a little yawn and nestled back into her pillow.

  “Mrs. Downes,” he shouted. “It’s not your nap time yet. Chat with us a bit more before you go to sleep.”

  “Oh my,” she said. “I must be really tired. Or else it’s so comfortable here.”

  Josie looked at the paper-thin pillow doubtfully.

  The nurse bustled closer and helped Lynetta sit up more by cranking her bed up further and stuffing another anemic pillow behind her. “Just keep your eyes open a bit longer while the doctor asks you his questions,” she admonished.

  Josie could see why Lynetta might prefer the personalized attention of a hospital room over her room at Pleasant Valley. People brought her pillows and asked her a million questions. All eyes were focused on her.

  “Brittany, my dear, may I have a cup of water? My mouth is a bit parched.” Lynetta smacked her dry and cracked lips together a couple of times.

  “Now, Mrs. Downes, you know my name is Ashley. How many times have you been here before? I’ll get you something to drink in a bit. Just hold on and let Dr. Patel finish assessing you.”

  Lynetta frowned. “That’s what I said. Ashley. Of course I know your name.” She tried to lie back in her bed again and turned to pluck at the pillows behind her. “Why are there so many of these? This is the weirdest bed I’ve ever been in.”

  Dr. Patel was observing her with keen interest. “She seems a bit agitated to me. Do you think so, too?” He directed this last question at Josie, whose first instinct was to shrug because she hardly knew the woman. “Mrs. Downes, do you know where you are?”

  Lynetta rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Ronald. Of course I know where I am. I’m in the Emergency Room in Lake Park Villa, Illinois. It’s about three o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, February the eighteenth.”

  “Okay, all of that is correct, except who is Ronald?” He shouted most of his confirmation, but turned and asked Josie at normal volume. “Was Ronald her husband?” She knew she probably had a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face.

  Lynetta frowned at him in confusion. “I wasn’t the one married to Ronald. What are you talking about?”

  He checked his charts again and addressed Josie, “Has your aunt’s memory been assessed lately?”

  “I do not have dementia,” Lynetta shouted, as if Dr. Patel were hard of hearing himself. “I just sometimes seem to remember the wrong things. That’s why I moved myself into Pleasant Valley in the first place. Not for dementia, just for…you know, in case it gets worse.” Her voice faded to a slurred whisper and a look of fear crossed her lined face that was so intense, Josie’s stomach squeezed in sympathy. She wanted to reach out and grab the woman’s hand, but she wasn’t sure if Lynetta would become more alarmed. Being comforted by a fake niece might have an opposite effect than desired.

  Lynetta’s eyelids had begun to droop down.

  “Don’t go to sleep yet,” Dr. Patel said, again broadcasting in a voice that would have carried across a football stadium. “Are you listening to me, Mrs. Downes?”

  Lynetta didn’t respond, but her blood pressure monitor was still beeping, so Josie didn’t freak out. Plus, no one was shouting for crash carts or whatever. Most of her knowledge of ER critical care was from TV and not real life, thankfully.

  “Should I wake her up?” Ashley asked, ready to put a hand on Lynetta’s shoulder, presumably to shake her.

  “No, let’s allow her to rest. Her vitals are okay. We’re waiting on those labs for blood and urine. Continue to monitor BP. She’s a memory care patient, so the confusion might be an extension of that.”

  “She’s never called me by the wrong name before,” the nurse said. “That was weird.”

  Dr. Patel shrugged. “I’m not sure if that’s anything majorly significant, but we need to run some more tests to see what’s going on—but yes, I think we are going to admit her overnight this time just so we can watch her more closely. For now, she can have her nap.”

  Chapter 12

  After the doctor left the room, the young nurse—Ashley—dimmed the lights. Lynetta, apparently not asleep after all, opened her eyes. “Is he gone yet? Such a shouter, that one.”

  Josie’s eyebrows shot up. How much of Lynetta’s behavior is just an act? She, of course, had been waiting, antsy and squirming in her chair as if she were wearing horsehair underwear. She wanted to speak to the woman alone so she could ask her about the money and why her name was listed as beneficiary.

  Ashley rolled her eyes and said, “We’re going to prepare a room for you upstairs so you can stay overnight. You just hang out here and get comfortable. Dr. Charles, your primary doc, is still doing her regular appointments for the day, but we’ll let her know you’re here for the night. She may stop by if she gets a chance, depending on how her schedule goes.”

  Before Ashley left the room, she made sure she had Josie’s cell phone number in her notes in case she needed to be contacted during the night—which Josie was sure she wouldn’t have the answers for, but kept that to herself.

  Seriously, what the heck could I do about anything?

  Lynetta rolled onto her side and looked at Josie through the rails of her bed. “You’re a good girl, but you don’t have to stay with me. This may be a small hospital in a tiny town, but it could be hours before my room is ready. This ain’t my first rodeo. I know how it works.”

  “Lynetta, I need to ask you a question. Why did you put my name on your money accounts as your sole beneficiary?”

  Josie half-expected the woman to deny it or to pretend ignorance. Instead, she got a steely look worthy of Greta.

  “My sister trusts you.”

  “But surely you have family? There have to be other descendants of the Downes family?”

  Who are going to come out of the woodwork and throw lawsuits at me…

  She shrugged her shoulders suddenly looking like a tiny, unfeathered bird in her hospital gown. “None of them are here, are they? And you are.”

  “That’s not reason enough. That money should stay in the family. You need to take my name off the accounts. At least put Greta’s name on for now until you find some other family members.”

  “No.”

  Josie stared at her. “What do you mean ‘no?’” She was flummoxed. Suddenly she was dealing with a geriatric toddler.

  “I wanted to do it, so that’s all there is to it,” Lynetta said and settled herself back into her blankets.

  “But—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She sat up abruptly and gripped the bedrail. A strangle look crossed her face. Her expressed seemed part fear, part something Josie couldn’t identify. Determination? “Will you stay for a while?”

  “Yes, I can stay, but we’re not done discussing this. I’m going to find someone else whose name you can put on your accounts,” Josie said with a sigh. This was all wrong, but the least she could do was sit with the woman and keep her company until she fell asleep.

  Lynetta lay back on her bed and shut her eyes. Under the thin blankets, her narrow chest rose and fell unevenly.

  Josie experienced a sudden pang thinking about her having gone through this before, possibly multiple times in the past, all by herself. So, she’d stay for a while—plus she wanted to have a chat with Lynetta’s main doctor to see if she could shed any light on the state of her memory loss and flashes of confusion.

  The older woman rustled around on the bed for a few minutes. Then she said, apropos of nothing, “You know, Greta was the sweetest child when she was small.”

  Josie blinked in the darkened room, bewildered. The very idea of old, battle-axe Greta as anything other than her current state was mind-boggling.

  Lynetta’s voice was drowsy and slurred even though she still shifted anxiously on the bed. “We had different mothers, you know. I was nearly seven years old when my father took a second wife. I didn’t like my new mother at all until Greta came along. She was the most precious little baby.
I thought she was my doll. Mine to keep.”

  As Lynetta drifted off to an uneasy sleep, Josie sat still, her mind boggled by the thought of Greta as an innocent newborn. Somehow,she could only picture a miniature, steely eyed Greta in a newborn-sized Chanel suit, one that would fit a Chihuahua.

  Ashley, the teeny-bopper nurse, returned a little while later with a cup of water, but Lynetta was fast asleep. “She doesn’t usually have someone waiting with her,” she told Josie, which made her dead, shriveled heart crack open just a tiny bit. The organ inside her chest was more like a saladito, a face-puckering dried salted plum served in the middle of half a lemon or orange. She used to buy them at the swap market in Tucson and only later learned they were originally from China, not Mexico.

  She didn’t want to think about Lynetta lying alone in a hospital bed, spending her fortune in slow dribbles just to get some attention, no matter if her emergency visits were caused by her hypochondria. When Josie had to return home to Boston in a couple weeks, Lynetta would be left alone again. The situation was not ideal, and Josie was irritated by the fact that a person with so many financial resources did not have descendants or trusted friends who could take care of her in her old age, the time of her life when she most needed the support of those around her. Not some fake niece who showed up out of the blue and would disappear as quickly.

  Instead of a cold, impersonal hospital room with a bed on which tens of people had lain before her, Lynetta should have been in her own home or a swanky private facility, living out the rest of her days surrounded by luxury, eating gold foil covered bonbons and baby-talking to a Yorkie with a diamond-studded collar. Or whatever it was crazy old rich people did.

  To distract herself from what threatened to be a tidal wave of dark thoughts, Josie got out her phone to see if she could find out more about the Downes Drops cough suppressant lozenge family. Maybe they were like the Kennedys with cousins peppering the wealthy pockets of the U.S. in the style of a rare species of tree on a topographical map. A Nantucket hermit or an upstate New York orthodontist. Even an illegitimate third cousin would do.

  While Josie was searching the internet, Lynetta stirred on the hospital bed and murmured in her sleep. The monitor on her finger hooked up to the machine above her head beeped softly, and the cuff on her arm hummed and inflated automatically. The older woman didn’t even wake up as the Velcro’ed band puffed up and froze, grabbing her vitals before deflating with a hiss.

  The first website Josie found was splashed with an elaborate crest from the original branch of the family in England. Major pockets of people named Downes had resided in Shropshire and in the London area. Josie kept skimming and learned that Downes came from the name Dun, which meant “hill,” and was much more information than she needed to know. She’d thought she’d begin as far back as she could go, but she changed her mind and restarted with Lynetta and worked her way backward.

  The next website Josie found was about old-fashioned American candies and their makers. It grouped the Downes Drops licorice lozenges with some other medicinal candies, as well as a chloroform-based cough syrup, which Josie assumed was also a sleep aid. If she had a migraine or a kidney stone back then, she probably would have been up for some pretty serious and dangerous remedies. From what she’d heard, passing a kidney stone could be worse than birthing a baby.

  Hey, whatever worked for them back then. Modern-day opiates are scary, too.

  As amateurish as the website looked with chunky font, everything centered down the page, and old-school blue underlined links, it had a ton of biographical information about each candy maker. The site said Lynetta’s deceased husband’s name was Francis Fortune Downes, or “Frank.” Josie thought the middle name Fortune was super cool. She mentally set it aside for any future kids she and Drew might have. Frank had been the sole heir of his generation to the cough drop fortune. He and Lynetta had had no children, so the cash stopped with her. Francis Fortune’s father had been Elmer Edward Downes.

  How cute. The generations of men were named in alphabetical order. Maybe that was why Frank and Lynetta didn’t have any offspring. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted little Grover Guilford or Gerry Garbanzo to be bullied at school. Plus, no one likes to be trapped by a tradition not of their own choosing.

  Josie had been thinking more and more about this idea since she’d started looking at wedding preparations, even though she and Drew hadn’t set an official date yet in the four months since he’d popped the question. The delay was Josie’s fault, of course. Yes, she absolutely wanted to get married to him, but no, she had no idea what kind of wedding they should have. She’d put off the decisions until tomorrow and had been doing it steadily for four months. Call it procrastination. Call it a mental block. She’d never been the type of girl who’d dreamed about her wedding when she was little, and she didn’t know where to begin now that she was looking down the barrel at planning an actual wedding.

  The founder of Downes Drops was Daniel David Downes—or D.D. Downes, as he was known—who’d arrived in America from England in 1879. He’d spent a year in New York City trying, by a number of means, to get his financial feet under him, including selling insurance and men’s hats before he’d moved to Chicago the following year where he’d eventually found success as a candy manufacturer.

  Interesting. He was less of a candy lover than an entrepreneur, a businessman who had stumbled into sweets.

  Just as Josie wondered if she could visit the factory and if it was still standing, she came across a small black-and-white photo of an industrial scene in Chicago that mentioned the factory had eventually been torn down after a fire in the early 1960s. By then, the famous licorice drops had long fallen out of favor thanks to the rise in popularity of menthol in the cough drops created by the competing Ludens family.

  Josie had been hoping in her browsing to see if any other heirs to the Downes fortune existed, but it didn’t look as if Frank had had any other cousins. He’d been an only child. Before him, his father E.E. Downes had had two older brothers, both with the initials E. E.—maybe even of the same name as him—who’d died in childbirth.

  Otherwise, D.D. Downes hadn’t kept in touch with his family from England because he’d been effectively exiled by the rest of the family, who’d considered him a black sheep of sorts. Josie could find only the slightest hint of what he might have done to fall out of favor with them—that it was money related. Maybe Susan could dig up more details or even some juicy gossip while she was looking for heirs.

  Whatever had happened, the Downes descendants had to forgive him and his past errors—or at least take his money because Josie certainly didn’t want it.

  Chapter 13

  While Lynetta was sleeping in the sharply shadowed room with machines beeping, Josie decided to leave the hospital for a while to see if she could scare up more leads about Lynetta’s family. Josie could do only so much online from her tiny phone screen. On the best of days, she was lucky to remember to check her email and messages, but she was begrudgingly coming to accept technology as a necessary evil in her day-to-day life. Since Pleasant Valley was only a few minutes away, she figured she would head back there. Maybe Lynetta had some photos or keepsakes in her room that would help her memory or ease her agitation.

  Josie made a quick stop at the hospital gift shop, then headed back to the nursing home where she shoved a gold-covered box across the scarred counter at grouchy Marcy, the gorgon at the front desk.

  “What’s this?” Marcy asked with her hand on the box.

  “Fannie May chocolates. An assortment of buttercream, nougat, toffee. Dark and milk chocolate. A delicious Chicago tradition, from what I’ve heard.”

  Marcy scowled. “I hate chocolate. It’s disgusting.”

  Josie felt her jaw go slack.

  What kind of person hates chocolate? I mean, obviously there are allergies to take into consideration, but loving chocolate is a basic test of your humanity, isn’t it?

  However, Josie noticed the wom
an didn’t shove the box away. Instead, she put it on the desk beside her computer keyboard before buzzing Josie through the door.

  Progress. Baby steps. I’ll win her over yet…if I move here and invest the next few decades establishing myself as a semi-native of Lake Park Villa, maybe she’ll give me a head nod in twenty years or so.

  Josie’s feet squeaked down the hall in her low-rise Chucks. The passageway didn’t seem as creepy as the first time she’d walked this way. Maybe it was because of the glow in her heart that she might have chipped away the outer layer of Marcy’s crusty exterior. Josie rolled her eyes at herself. Or something.

  When she reached Lynetta’s room, the door was shut but not locked. She knocked, expecting the roommate—Betty the snarky bookworm—to answer. However there was nothing but silence, so she turned the handle and let herself in.

  “Hello?” she said just in case Betty was in the bathroom as she’d been before. “I’m just here to get a sweater for my aunt.” A nice, improvised lie that Josie was somewhat proud to think of off the cuff which, like math, and emotional confrontations, wasn’t her strong suit.

  This place doesn’t have video cameras, does it? she suddenly wondered and decided to keep up her fake errand ruse.

  “Now, where would you be if you were a sweater?” she asked aloud in what she hoped was a convincing stage whisper although she was racked with misgiving.

  I’m not good at subtle. I’m literally known for my inability to be subtle. Better move fast and get the heck out of here.

  She quickly stepped to Lynetta’s side of the room and opened the middle drawer of the dresser, looking for anything that might point to other family who’d be interested in inheriting Lynetta’s cough drop fortune. She was looking for old letters, a scrapbook, pictures, photo album, newspaper clippings, birth announcements—anything that might lead to a legitimate descendent.