The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “We can handle it.” She produced a muzzle.

  It had not crossed Freddy’s mind to consider an appliance. Snap, you’re in jaw prison. But you have all four paws and that’s cool.

  “May I ask you to prepay for the week?” the woman said.

  Luckily, he was a cash kind of guy. He peeled bills off a fat roll.

  She looked startled. Probably going to call the police and say, “Only drug dealers carry wads of cash. Check him out.”

  But no, she beamed. “Love income I don’t have to report.”

  “Do I get a break for cash?”

  “Nice try.”

  They both laughed. It was easier for her.

  Freddy got back into the Avalon and tried to figure out his priorities.

  Two weeks ago, I didn’t have a single priority, he thought. I did a little lampwork and ate takeout.

  Freddy started the engine, and the GPS map materialized on the dashboard screen. He studied routes home and nearby fast-food places. He was starving. Having come north from Middletown, he now wasn’t far from Farmington. Maybe six, eight miles.

  Whether the man was Kenneth or Bobby, the guy was exonerated. Did he even know that? Cops loved mental torture, and Ames would enjoy leaving Kenneth terrified, especially if they were still looking at him for pill crushing. “Oh,” they might say a few days later, “did we forget to tell you? You’re in the clear, Maude-murder-wise.”

  Freddy decided to drive on to Farmington. Let Kenneth know that the cops were cool with his alibi. Maybe not let on that he knew Kenneth wasn’t Kenneth, but for sure collect that photo album Mrs. Maple was so tense about. That would give him a peace offering for Mapes, which was key, because visits to MMC would go on, and he needed an ally, even one who dumped on him. He bet Mapes was already feeling sorry about that. She was the reserved New England type who would be a lifelong holdout against Twitter, Facebook, and all the personal-detail rest of them. She’d never refer to her husband again, and they’d be back on their same old footing.

  Freddy turned onto Schoolhouse Road.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  With Kemmy huddled at her side, calling the junk-run guys had been a giggly adventure. But alone in her kitchen waiting for their return, Laura felt beyond stupid.

  The junk-run guys were probably laughing so hard they couldn’t steer. Five hundred dollars from some pathetic woman who left a piece of paper in her dead piano? They were probably calling a reality show to describe a seriously deranged hoarder for the next episode. On top of everything else, they would tell the producer, she has two other pianos, which she shrink-wraps so they can’t be played.

  A white car of indeterminate make drifted slowly up her driveway. It was the kind of sedan Laura had driven her entire adult life, and she couldn’t help the little bump of superiority she felt because her red Cadillac was so much more exciting. She did vaguely wonder why the men weren’t driving their pickup, but then, they weren’t loading a piano this time, so a truck wasn’t necessary. She stood in the open door and waved.

  She had paid cash before and now had Kemmy’s cash and her own check. The men got out of the car and came toward her.

  They were not carrying anything, let alone a large page of music manuscript.

  She didn’t remember one of the junk-run guys being so thin he could hardly keep his pants up. She didn’t remember the ponytail.

  She definitely didn’t remember the other man being the size of a closet.

  The anorexic guy grinned. His mouth was full of gold, as if he had substituted a bracelet for his teeth. His eyes were too wide or maybe too bright. His skin was leprous.

  The closet guy’s bare arms were covered with purple and green tattoos.

  They weren’t the junk-run guys.

  Laura tried to get back in the house, slam the door, lock herself in, and call 911, but she had left it too late. The massive one literally set her aside, his huge hands closing on her upper arms, moving her as easily as Laura would move a glass of water. His hands were tattooed all the way down the fingers, which were laden with rings so large they were weapons.

  Laura had never stood next to a human being as large as this. He was a wall of flesh.

  Once inside, the ponytail guy stopped short, staring through the wide hall arch blocked by shrink-wrapped pianos and long wooden crates.

  The closet guy bent his face toward hers. Even his lips and nose were huge. He spoke in a voice as heavy as his body. “Looking for Freddy,” he told her.

  These terrifying creatures she would expect to be out robbing a convenience store were Freddy’s friends? Or enemies? What were they doing at her house? Freddy had never been here.

  “Freddy you gave a ride to,” said the thin one, walking through the kitchen to examine the music room. “He had a ole woman in a wheelchair.”

  Freddy. Wheelchairs. Rides. She remembered now. What pleasure she had felt when Freddy flagged her down, loving the idea that she was helping this sweet boy and his dear grandmother.

  But Freddy was not a sweet boy. He was in drugs.

  Making pipes is a sport, Freddy had told her. Prison to avoid. Taxes to dodge. Gang members to be invisible to.

  Evidently, Freddy had ceased to be invisible because Laura Maple had two gang members in her house looking for him.

  They found me because I gave Freddy a ride, she thought, which means they found me through my license plate. So they are able to bribe or terrify somebody at the DMV or the police department. Or deal drugs to them. Because that’s why the skinny guy’s eyes are blaring like trumpets. He’s on something.

  It had taken these creatures a week to get here. Why the delay? Maybe they’d found out her address earlier but zoned out or forgot to follow up.

  Perhaps they were the reason Freddy had needed a ride to start with. He had lied that his grandmother was ill. He had been running from Closet and Ponytail and up she drove, so he threw his grandmother in the front seat and Laura under the bus.

  Freddy was probably home free. But Laura Maple was home trapped.

  The skinny ponytail guy was giggling, a high wheezy chortle coming out of his gold bracelet mouth.

  Many years ago, there had been a notorious Connecticut home invasion where the violence had been extreme: ropes and rape and the young victims burned alive. And now, thanks to Freddy Bell, it was happening to her, Laura Maple, of Bach fugues and overdue library books.

  She would tell these two how to find him. So there!

  Except Freddy was her friend. She who had betrayed her own mother… Was she also going to betray her friend?

  It was the worst thing you could say of a person: He’d sell his own mother if it got him somewhere. For anyone but Laura, that was hyperbole. Laura had, in fact, sold her mother to the lowest-bidding institution and walked off.

  Whereas Freddy had closed up his life in Chicago, left every friend behind, moved into his grandmother’s isolated house to care for her at home. Took her to church, figured out how to get her into Memory Care when he couldn’t manage the slimy details of home care, and now took her out for fresh air and sunshine, holding her in his arms when things were at their worst.

  No, she could not give Freddy to these creatures. “The woman in the wheelchair was my aunt,” she improvised, surprised to find that she was speaking with a British accent. Perhaps her inner self thought that Masterpiece Theatre diction would create an invisibility cloak. “I don’t know which aide was pushing her,” she explained, her English lilt ridiculously overdone. “Some man who works at the nursing home.”

  Closet Man was almost quaintly taken aback by her answer or perhaps her pathetic fake accent. “What’s your aunt’s name?”

  She named a different aunt from the one living at MMC. “Esther Johnstone,” she said. Aunt Esther had died years ago out in California.

  “What nursing home?” />
  “Three Pines.” The name of a long-ago summer place she and her husband had rented when the children were little. Three Pines, four people, two dogs, one lake. Oh, those sunny, perfect days. Her husband and the children swimming and fishing and canoeing and always, always hungry. She saw herself in the funny old kitchen, each appliance standing alone on its side of the room, and no counter at all, just the table in the center.

  The Closet looked at his smartphone. It was the size of a domino in his massive hand. He would soon find that she had made up the Three Pines nursing home in Middletown. Freddy didn’t work there because it didn’t exist. She did not want to think about what these two could do to her. She backed into the kitchen, thinking, I have knives, I have a landline.

  But Closet followed her. She had cornered herself, no way out except crawling under a piano.

  Ponytail Guy was working his way through the shrink-wrapped grand pianos, plastic-covered bookcases, and pieces of future organ. His hair was too thin to be called a ponytail; it was more of a greasy rat’s tail. He kicked the biggest crate, which was over ten feet long. The claw hammer still lay on its lid. “What’s in these?” he said belligerently, as if they’d been arguing.

  “Pipes,” she said, thinking, I’ll never play my practice organ. Its pipes will stay in their coffins, and I will end up in mine. Freddy, how could you? You’ve sicced an actual gang on me.

  “No way! You’re in pipes? These are serious containers! You ship ’em? How many does each crate hold anyway? You could put thousands of pipes in there! Where do you buy ’em? Where do you sell ’em? Freddy’s your partner?”

  Laura had not stopped to consider that she and Freddy sought the same thing, except that his pipes inhaled drugs and hers exhaled music. She wanted to share the joke with him, but she might not share a laugh with anybody again.

  “I need to find Freddy Bell,” said the huge man. “He’s making me crazy, he’s making my boss crazy, I gotta straighten the little shit out. All you gotta do is tell me where he is.”

  “I don’t talk to the aides,” Laura said, trying to insert a little British disdain into her voice. She could hardly form syllables. It was like at the dentist’s, when the Novocain set in, and half of your jaw was useless. “I don’t know if the aide’s name was Freddy.”

  Ponytail Guy picked up the hammer and tapped the claw head against his palm, grinning his gold bracelet grin.

  Some anorexic moron druggie is going to hit me in the face with a hammer, Laura thought, and I won’t be able to stop him.

  Where had these two come from? What did Freddy have in common with them? Sweet Freddy, who teased all the aides and kissed his grandmother hello? Freddy didn’t plan on being good, she thought. He isn’t in a good profession. But life required him to be good and so he is. Life required me to be good and I just shrugged.

  Closet Guy looked toward the front of the house and cocked his head in the posture of listening.

  Laura didn’t hear a thing. I really am going deaf, she thought, as horrified by that as by the home invaders.

  Ponytail Guy set the hammer down. Out of his pocket, where Laura would stuff a pack of tissues, he pulled a gun. He smiled at the gun as if it were an old friend and they were glad to see each other. He took a quick sneaky look at Closet, who was facing the other way. Giggling silently, he pointed the gun at Laura.

  Then she heard what Closet heard: a car engine. The junk-run guys had arrived.

  Because of the kitchen wall, she couldn’t see her back door, but it was literally open; she could feel the cold draft. The junk-run guys were young. Probably had wives and babies. She opened her mouth to scream a warning, but Closet slammed his hand over her mouth and swung her around. The hand was the size of her entire face. If he dug those huge fingernails into her flesh and yanked, she would relive yet another Connecticut nightmare, where somebody’s pet chimpanzee ripped a woman’s face off, blinding her and discarding her lips.

  There was a loud drumbeat-style knock and a cheery bright call. “Hello there! I’m looking for Mrs. Maple!”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Talk about autumn leaves. Kenneth’s street was like glass gone wild—orange, red, and gold shards thrown in the air, piled in the street. Up the block, landscaping crews were blowing leaves to the curb and sucking them up in trucks. One woman with a rake was attacking her own yard. She looked militant, a lone warrior against a million leafy invaders, her little metal tines spending hours on a chore those crews could do in ten minutes.

  She waved. Freddy saluted her.

  The white clapboard house was low-slung and rather pretty. Kenneth/Bobby’s car was in the drive, along with a car Freddy didn’t recognize. The name Virginia filtered into his mind—the only visitor Maude had had besides Kenneth. Betty had told Mrs. Maple that Virginia was married to Cousin Bobby. So maybe Virginia drove that second car, because maybe here, these two were a regular old couple named Lansing. Not that it was a regular old thing to have a fake wife and a fake name and fake hair.

  Freddy parked behind the two cars and walked up to the front of the house. A brass pineapple knocker on the wooden door was behind a flimsy aluminum storm door that didn’t close right, making it useless summer or winter.

  Every clapboard needed paint and every windowpane needed caulk. Every shrub needed to be removed. If Kenneth/Bobby had been spending Maude’s money, he sure wasn’t throwing it away on maintenance.

  Freddy leaned on the doorbell and waited.

  After a minute, the door opened a few inches, revealing the little piddly kind of chain Freddy could kick through if he felt like it. “Yes?” The hoarse voice wasn’t Kenneth’s.

  “Hi, I’m Freddy Bell. My grandmother is at Middletown Memory Care. I’m here to see Kenneth.”

  The door closed.

  The woman across the street leaned on her rake, watching.

  The chain was removed, the door opened, and there stood a frazzled-looking old woman. Heavy, with weird yellow hair—not blond, not honey, sort of lemon—and smeared lipstick. “Heyyyyy,” said Freddy, as if greeting a bead lady.

  “Come in,” she said, biting her lip in a flirty fashion and even batting her eyes. She was down to about four lashes, each caked with mascara. She was wearing garden gloves but had them on the wrong hands, so the empty thumbs stuck out at the sides, and she was clutching some statue thing to her chest, like a wooden doll.

  Could this possibly be Virginia? Whoa.

  This was what Kenneth came home to? The poor guy had one dementia relative tucked in an institution and lived with a second one at home?

  Freddy decided to make this a very short visit. He opened the storm door himself and stepped into a little hall painted a green so dark it verged on black. There was no furniture and very little light. “I just came for a photo album Kenneth borrowed,” he said. “I’m picking it up for Mrs. Maple.”

  “Kenneth’s in the other room,” said the woman.

  “Are you Virginia?” he asked. “Mrs. Lansing?”

  She gave him a sly smile, very Alzheimery. Freddy couldn’t imagine how awful this must be for Kenneth/Bobby. Had the poor guy taken up the real Kenneth’s name and money and houses, planning on some distant, dreamy good life, only to find himself walled in by dementia? Had Kenneth showed up at MMC in order to escape dementia at home? Why didn’t he just get in the car and ride off into the sunset?

  But Freddy knew all too well that riding off into the sunset was harder than it sounded.

  They passed through two very low, very narrow doorways, which proved that the house really was as old as it looked. The living room was painted dark mustard and had mustard-colored couches and brown plaid recliners. It made Grandma’s stuff look pretty sophisticated. Every window was covered by drapes, and only one small lamp cast a little circle of light.

  “Here,” said the possible Virginia. “Hold this for me.” She h
anded Freddy the statue thing. It was heavier than it looked and grubby, no surprise given the state of the house. “This way,” she said.

  Freddy shifted the statue. It might be two people embracing or it might be a deformed lamp base. Women always wanted you to do stuff for them. Next she’d probably ask him to fix her garbage disposal. Listen, as his grandmother would have said, this place was a vineyard in which you could labor forever.

  Kenneth was lying on the floor, watching TV from the rug, like a little kid.

  Freddy set the statue on the coffee table. “Kenneth?”

  The woman went back the way they had come. Trotted, actually. Sprinted, maybe.

  Freddy dropped to his knees.

  Kenneth’s head was turned sideways, and the back of his skull was covered with something like black cherry Jell-O. It took Freddy a moment to grasp that it must be clotted blood. Kenneth’s hair had detached and stood up in little bloody forests. It was either a wig or he had been scalped. His eyes were open. The eyes didn’t try to blink away the flecks of blood.

  Freddy had never actually seen a dead body. It was way more shocking than he would have expected. He panted for a moment and then looked back at the coffee table. The heavy statue thing was grubby because it had its own share of black cherry Jell-O.

  She handed me the murder weapon, thought Freddy. She wore gloves but I held it in my bare hands.

  That was what she wanted me to do for her.

  Take the rap.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The newcomer walked right into the kitchen, beaming.

  He was Laura’s height and rather pudgy. His tight button-down collar with heavy starch made his neck squash out. He wore a bright-blue bow tie, a spiffy jacket, and a scarf tossed artfully around his shoulders.

  Closet let go of Laura’s face and backed her into the wall of kitchen cabinets. In the music room, Ponytail scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. There might be a safety catch on the weapon, but Laura doubted that there was a safety catch in Ponytail’s thinking.