Retirement Plan

by Martha Miller

  Jessica said, “Thank you for coming, Miss Long.”

  “Please. Call me Sophie.”

  “Sophie,” Jessica repeated.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” Jessica said. “In a way this was a relief. She’d lost so many of the things that pleased her. Most of her friends are dead.”

  Sophie nodded. “I should have come to visit her. But, you know, we lost track.”

  Jessica nodded, then looked toward the back of the room. Sophie turned, a little awkwardly because of the neck pain, and saw two old women slowly move toward them. The one in the wheelchair was stooped, so until she was closer, Sophie could see only the top of her head. The woman walking behind the wheelchair was heavyset and wore orthopedic shoes. Nuns, Sophie thought—either that or lesbians. These days they seemed to dress alike. Back when Sophie had taught at the Catholic school, nuns wore black robes and their hair was always covered.

  “Sophie Long.” The old woman in the chair had said it.

  Sophie looked closer and it took a moment. “Sister Anne.” Sophie turned to Jessica and said, “Sister Anne was the principal back when your mother and I taught at the same school.”

  Jessica graciously took the old woman’s claw-like hand and thanked her for coming. The three of them approached the casket together while Sophie stayed seated. Jessica stood silently, her head bowed while the nuns prayed. This is where it ends, Sophie thought, alone in a funeral parlor.

  By eight o’clock Sophie and Jessica were putting on their coats. Sophie said, “Would you like to come by our house for coffee?”

  Jessica shook her head. “I’m sorry, I’d really love to, but I have to get up very early to pick up my cousin who’s flying in tomorrow.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Down the street at the Ramada.”

  “There’s a little greasy spoon right across the street. How about it?”

  “Well, maybe a cup of tea,” Jessica said.

  A young woman, probably in her late forties, wearing a tight white uniform slightly yellowed around the collar and beneath the arms, slapped menus in front of them.

  “Just two cups of tea,” Sophie said.

  Jessica asked, “What kind of pie do you have?”

  The waitress looked over her shoulder at a pie case that sat next to the coffee pots. “Looks like apple and coconut.”

  Jessica made a face.

  “I got some fresh carrot cake,” the waitress offered.

  Jessica looked at Sophie. “Will you have a slice of cake with me?”

  “Carrot cake would be wonderful. At least I’ll be able to say I had my vegetables today.”

  The waitress smiled, shoved her pencil behind her ear, and left. She’d probably heard the vegetable line five thousand times, yet she had smiled. Sophie decided to like her.

  Teapots, cups and saucers, and two healthy slices of carrot cake in front of them, the waitress went to her place behind the counter and picked up a paperback novel, leaving them to talk.

  They sipped their tea in silence. Finally Sophie said, “Will you live in the house or will you be selling it?”

  Jessica shrugged. “The house is gone. We sold everything after Mom broke her hip a second time. I got her into a retirement home—the best one I could find.”

  Sophie watched her. Something was wrong.

  “It started out as assisted living, and then as she required more care she moved into a more skilled-care section. I thought that was good because she wouldn’t have to move all over again when her situation changed.”

  “Sounds nice,” Sophie said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “My mother was robbed. The place had a good reputation in the community and was less expensive than most others. Social Security and retirement checks were direct- deposited into a fund from which the resident’s bills were paid and needs were met. But when Mom died, I discovered that the owner and operator, Mr. Ingram, had Mom’s insurance signed over to him. Then I opened Mom’s lockbox. He’d emptied it.”

  Sophie let out her breath slowly. She laid her fork down and waited.

  “Her rings and everything else of value were gone. Then I found out that residents were, within the letter of the law, of course, often neglected. At the least, they were overmedicated and left in the care of untrained staff. I guess rooms were kept clean on visiting day because that was how most families measured the quality of care.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jessica stared out the window at the red lights on the Ramada Inn across the street. Then she said, “I’d give anything to hurt that bastard.”

  Sophie nodded. “Taking advantage of someone old and sick should be a capital crime. Instead, people like Ingram manage to avoid detection because, in this culture, no one wants to know what happens to senior citizens.”

  “Who knows how many old people he’s robbed.” Jessica sighed. “I’ve been wondering how far he goes with the people who don’t have close family.”

  “Someone needs to shoot him.”

  Jessica dabbed her eyes with a tissue and nodded.

  “If someone had a business of getting rid of bad people for pay, would you be interested?”

  Jessica shrugged again. “Those wedding rings were mine. He stole them.”

  So the only-working-for-strangers rule was the first one they broke.

  *

  The shadows were long when Morgan finally pulled into the narrow driveway and parked in the shade next to the house. The single garage off the alley was full of her parents’ things. Someday she’d sell what she could and burn the rest. Her father, a retired beat cop, had died of a heart attack in 2004. Morgan had lived in the family home for six years now—two years with her mother and the last four alone.

  Inside, she switched on the TV, kicked off her shoes, and crossed the living room to the kitchen. She opened a bottle of lite beer and took a long draw. As usual on Sunday evenings, her head was pounding. The first year had been the worst. Those days her mother had cried to go home with her when she left. Now, heavily medicated and further along in the disease, she usually fell asleep in her chair after two or three hours. But, before dozing off, she still beat Morgan at chess more often than not.

  Morgan gathered the Sunday paper from the kitchen table and carried it into the living room. She put the beer on the coffee table, then tossed the paper on the couch and sat down. She picked up the remote, turned on the TV, and muted it. A manila folder waited for her. She’d learned a few things about Zach Ingram since the day she’d been called to the scene of his shooting. He wasn’t a well-loved man. In fact, many people had reason to want him dead. But those weren’t the type of people who hired a killer or knew enough about assault rifles to do the deed.

  She and Henry had gone back to Ingram’s neighborhood in the evening after six when folks were home from work. They’d netted very little. Ingram wasn’t a touchy- feely type of guy. He kept to himself.

  The only useful information came from Joby Pratt, the teenage son of the neighbor Leona Pratt, the woman who’d reported hearing what might have been a gunshot. Morgan had returned to the neighborhood on her way home at seven thirty. The sun sat low in the west and the temperature was dropping. When she rang the Pratts’ doorbell, she didn’t get a response. She waited, then hit the bell again and followed by knocking. She had been about to give up when the locks inside clicked. Then the door opened about six inches and a boy peeked out.

  “Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want none.”

  Morgan held up her shield and said, “I’m a homicide detective. We’re canvassing the neighborhood, trying to find someone who may have seen or heard something last night.”

  The boy swung the door open. He was tall and thin with a blond buzz cut and a tattoo of some kind of lizard beneath his left ear. His loose-fitting jeans were cut off at the knees, and his T-shirt was the type that kids these days called “wifebe
aters.” Morgan guessed him at seventeen or so, but when she took down his birthday and subtracted, she realized he was a month short of fifteen.

  Joby indicated that she should follow him. They walked through a somewhat messy living room, then dining room, and into the kitchen. The layout of the house was similar to Ingram’s.

  “Is your mother here?” Morgan asked.

  “No, but she told me someone might come around. I was having dinner. You want some pizza or soda or something?” He motioned toward a chair opposite his half-empty box of take-out pizza. “I got coffee, if you want, or more Red Bull.” He picked up his can and drank from it.

  “I’m fine,” Morgan said, sitting. She would have preferred that the kid’s mother be present, but it was late, and she didn’t want to come back if the kid didn’t have anything.

  He met her eyes for the first and last time, and said, “Well, we sure had some excitement next door, huh?”

  Morgan nodded. His skin was pale and his eyes were bloodshot. She wondered how much caffeine he’d had. “Would you rather come downtown with your mom and talk to us tomorrow?”

  Joby shook his head.

  “Your mother told an officer she might have heard a shot. Did you hear anything?”

  He took a bite of pizza and started chewing. Then he nodded.

  “What happened?”

  He picked up his drink and washed the pizza down. “I heard the shot. And it sounded like a shot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Good and loud is what I mean. My room’s right up there.” He pointed straight up. “I can see the neighbor’s backyard from my window. So I shut off my own light and looked out. At first I couldn’t see anything. The place was dark. I thought it might have come from somewhere else. Then the security light came on and I saw a guy, carrying a rifle and heading toward the alley.”

  “You heard a shot and saw a stranger next door, and you didn’t call the police?” This was irrelevant, of course, and a mistake. But it slipped out.

  Joby Pratt squared his shoulders defensively. “I was supposed to be in bed. I have an early class. Besides, I didn’t really think someone had been shot. I just sort of, you know, figured all that stuff happened to other people. I thought a gun went off by accident or something. I didn’t know about Mr. Ingram until I got home this afternoon and Mom told me.”

  Morgan checked her notes. “Can you describe the man you saw?”

  Joby shrugged. “An old guy. Square-built. Kind of short, I think, but from this angle it’s hard to be sure.”

  “How old was he?”

  “How should I know? I didn’t card him.”

  Morgan reminded herself she was talking to a fourteen-year-old who had some important information—the only information. She softened her approach. “If you had to guess…”

  The kid seemed to consider this. Morgan expected him to say thirty-five or forty, which would seem old to a teenager, but he surprised her.

  “His hair was all white. Short, but, you know, not like kids wear today. He moved a little slow considering the light came on and all. My grandpa’s fifty-eight and he walks faster than this guy did.”

  “More than fifty-eight, then?”

  “Yes, a little more, I think.”

  “Could you describe him to a sketch artist?” Morgan asked hopefully.

  “Naw, I was looking at that rifle. Then he was gone. But the guy was short and old, with white hair. Glasses too.” Joby took another bite of pizza as if to say that was all.

  “What kind of glasses? Can you describe them?”

  “Big, with dark rims.”

  Morgan had closed her notebook, fished a card from her pocket, and left it with the boy with instructions to call if he remembered something else. She’d been excited at first, but the information had led nowhere. Everything she’d learned led nowhere.

  Morgan shook off the memory of the interview and leaned toward the coffee table, and her straight, dark, collar-length hair fell forward. Brushing it back with her fingers, she hooked it behind her ears, then placed the beer bottle on a coaster and opened the folder. She spread several papers across the table—the notes on all the people she’d interviewed and photos of the crime scene.

  “Come on, kid,” she said to the silent, flickering television and the empty room. “Come on. You can do this. You’re a smart girl.”

  Chapter Three

  The Ingram hit made the newspaper and the local TV news. Before that excitement died down, Sophie and Lois had their next job—a referral from Jessica. A friend from college, Ashley Schneider, was having trouble with her ex-husband, Josh. He was stalking her and had threatened her life as well as the lives of their three children. He broke into her house several times and, on the advice of her domestic-violence counselor, Ashley relocated.

  She hadn’t even unpacked all the boxes before he found her. He simply waited at her work (a job she couldn’t afford to leave) and followed her home. He lay beneath the bushes in her side yard and watched her through the French doors in the family room. Ashley called the police several times, and each time they took him in and talked to him. He’d leave and then come back, if not the same evening, the next. Ashley had an order of protection and a stack of arrest reports, yet things continued to escalate.

  One evening when a man Ashley was dating spent the night, the two woke to the sound of sirens. They got up and went downstairs. The living room was dark, but flickering shadows danced on the walls. Ashley then heard her boyfriend swearing. She rushed to the front door and saw his SUV, which had been parked in the street out front, engulfed in flames.

  The Schneider job was across the state line in Indiana. To learn his routine, Sophie and Lois had to board the cats, Buffy and Blade, and spend several days in a motel, so they added those expenses to the total cost. The majority of the money from this job would pay Sophie’s ticket for driving uninsured.

  In the end, they learned Schneider went only two places regularly: to work and to Ashley’s home. More than once, he hadn’t even gone home before he checked in at his job at the House of Health, an isolated warehouse that housed a vitamin- and dietary-supplement business, where he was one of twelve employees who handled phone sales and shipments.

  *

  A week following their return home, Lois drove back to Indiana alone. Shortly after sunup, she parked on a two-lane road that ran past the rear of the warehouse and led out into the country. Behind her a cornfield, with rows of green stalks less than a foot high, stretched toward the horizon. Though the days had been growing much warmer, the temperatures had been in the low forties the night before, and Lois pulled her faded denim jacket closed. As she waited, she remembered her first kill, the deer with the brown eye.

  Late in November of the first year Lois lived with her grandmother, her Uncle Harry decided to teach her how to hunt. Although Grandma objected, Uncle Harry won her over. The youngest brother of Lois’s mother had seemed quite grown up. When she looked back on it, she realized that he’d been around seventeen. Late in the afternoon, he grabbed a rifle and walked with her across the backyard, past the outhouse and the pheasant pens, to the stubble field. To her right was the long rutted lane she went down to catch the school bus. On her left stood an old outbuilding that housed a broken-down tractor, a lawnmower, and about twenty cats. Beneath the gray sky and ahead of them was a stack of hay bales.

  “This here is the rifle I used when I was about your age,” said Uncle Harry. “It’s a bit smaller.”

  “A BB gun?” she asked.

  “No, sir. This here is made for young shooters, but that don’t mean it won’t kill what it hits.”

  He showed her how to stand, then placed the rifle in her hands. “See that old tin can sitting on top of the bale? Line up the sight and squeeze the trigger.”

  She’d missed the first shot, but it taught her a lot. The flash of gunpowder surprised her, so she closed her eyes. By evening, she could hit her target about half the time.

  As
they walked back to the house, Lois was tired and hungry. The sun was setting and the geese were honking as they settled on the pond. Her mother once told her that the pond had been good for swimming years ago. But when the geese found it, the water got too dirty with goose poop. They didn’t even fish there anymore.

  Lois hadn’t slept much that night. She understood intellectually the difference between these deer and Bambi. Farmers considered deer pests. The population needed to be kept down because too many deer meant that a lot would starve. She’d eaten deer meat before and found it wonderful. Grandma had explained that deer roam free. Nothing she could buy in the grocery store tasted quite as good.

  Around three in the morning she heard Uncle Harry stumble into the house with a crash, followed by Grandma’s irritated voice. Uncle Harry spoke softly, and laughed. In the end, Grandma was laughing too. Just before the sun came up, he knocked at Lois’s bedroom door. When she entered the kitchen, Grandma was there.

  “I put some cornbread and coffee with milk in the bag with your blanket for your breakfast,” she said.

  Uncle Harry kissed her forehead. “Thanks, Ma.”

  The sky was just turning gray when they walked past the outbuildings. The pheasant pens were empty now that Grandpa was gone. These days they seldom used the outhouse, which had usually been full of spiderwebs and a smell that burned Lois’s nostrils. Though they’d never replaced the pump in the kitchen, with water from the same well, they’d turned a back porch into an indoor bathroom back when Grandpa was too sick to go outside. He’d complained a lot about that. To him it seemed unsanitary to go to the bathroom in the house.

  Lois followed Uncle Harry across the stubble field and into the woods. The air was cold enough that Lois could see her breath. They hadn’t put up a deer stand yet that year, so they decided to lay a blanket on a small hill overlooking the stream where the deer liked to cross. Harry fell asleep first. Lois hadn’t even realized she’d been sleeping until a sound woke her. She opened her eyes and not ten yards away stood a big buck. He snorted and Uncle Harry’s breathing changed. He was awake too. He took her hand and placed it over the rifle. The stock was cold.