Best Place to Die

by Charles Atkins

  ‘Vicky. But she’s no use,’ the redhead offered, shaking her head. ‘I want to go home. Please take me home?’

  ‘Where do you live?’ Aaron asked.

  His question worried her. ‘I don’t know.’

  He switched tactics. ‘Do you know where your daughter Vicky lives?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your daughter.’

  ‘She’s no good. Can you take me home?’

  Lil glanced in the rear-view mirror at the two older women under the blanket, with Aaron on the far side in a smudged white tee shirt, having given his leather jacket to Alice. She cranked the heat, and the car filled with the mixed smells of wet wool and char. She tried to figure what made the most sense. A pair of medics had tried to talk Rose into getting into an ambulance so she could get checked out at Brattlebury Hospital. Not only had Rose adamantly refused, but had insisted that Alice didn’t need it either. All of Lil’s years with Bradley, and a decent amount of common sense, told her that neither of the women was in medical peril. They had the occasional cough, but Rose was right. Hospitals were places of last resort, and best avoided. Which meant they were headed back to Pilgrim’s Progress. Lil threw Ada a glance, and, with her voice low, said, ‘You doing OK?’

  She shook her head, and cracked the tiniest smile. She leaned toward Lil and whispered, ‘She thinks I set the fire.’

  ‘And this is what I get,’ Rose declared, ostensibly to Alice, but clearly meant for Ada. ‘I wish I were dead!’

  ‘Mom,’ Ada said, ‘you don’t mean that.’

  ‘I most certainly do! What do I have? Everything is gone. Everything! I didn’t want to come to this place. But no, I’m not safe in my own home where I’ve been living for fifty years. I’ve got to move to Connecticut, and that pushy Delia woman.’

  ‘She’s dead.’ Ada was struggling to keep her temper in check. ‘And you’re safe. That’s what matters.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Rose spat. ‘This is your fault.’

  Ada’s hands balled into tight fists as Lil turned into the gates of Pilgrim’s Progress. She longed to reach across the seat and comfort her, but didn’t. Instead, she kept silent as they passed one of the two eighteen-hole golf courses, the man-made three-acre lake and finally came to their cul-de-sac.

  Ada unbuckled and leaned toward Lil. ‘I’ll put them in my place.’

  Lil nodded, and waited as Aaron helped his great-grandmother and Alice out of the back seat. Unseen by the older women, Lil took Ada’s hand and squeezed. ‘We’ll get through this.’

  Ada shook her head, her beautiful sapphire-blue eyes sought out Lil’s. ‘She hates me.’

  ‘No, she’s just scared and angry. She doesn’t hate you.’

  ‘Maybe . . . you know I haven’t told her about us.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She’s smart. She’ll find out.’

  ‘We’ll deal.’

  ‘I love you, Lil.’

  ‘Love you too. And it just amazes me.’ And with that she let go her hand, and got out.

  Ada jogged up the walk passing Aaron and the two women. Her first impulse was to unlock Lil’s condo on the right, but instead opened the door to hers on the left. One thing at a time, she told herself, as she waited for the trio to make it up the path. The phone started to ring. Leaving the door ajar, she went in and saw the answering machine on the granite kitchen pass-through blinking with recent calls.

  She picked up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mom, where were you?’ Her daughter, Susan – Aaron’s mother – sounded frantic. ‘I’ve been trying to get you all morning . . . Where’s Aaron?’

  ‘He’s with me . . . I’m assuming you’ve seen the news.’

  ‘Is Grandma OK, what’s going on?’

  ‘Everyone’s fine,’ Ada said, looking down the hall as Aaron held the screen door for Alice and Rose.

  ‘Did you see Jack?’

  The question stopped Ada. ‘Jack?’ The mere mention of her son-in-law blackening her mood further. ‘Why the hell would he be here?’

  ‘The fire,’ Susan said. ‘He got paged a little after five. I’ve been trying to reach you ever since.’

  ‘Susan, it’s been one hell of a morning, and maybe I’m losing it, but what would Jack be doing here?’

  ‘The Clarion underwrites that place. He got paged and was out of here like his job depended on it. You know him, he thinks he’s always one paycheck from getting his pink slip.’

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ she said, ‘and your grandmother is fine. Just furious with me, but that’s nothing new. Aaron’s with her now; she’ll be staying for a while. Maybe later you’d come down for a visit.’

  Ada felt her daughter’s hesitation. ‘I’ll have to check with Jack.’

  ‘For the love of God, Susan, your son and your grandmother are both down here, and would love to see you. Not to mention your mother could use a little help right now.’

  ‘I know, Mom, it’s just . . .’

  ‘Forget it!’ Ada snapped, wondering what had happened that had so entirely robbed her daughter of every ounce of courage and self esteem. The answer flew back with a single syllable – Jack. A man she’d disliked from the very first, who over the years had bullied and belittled her once brilliant and enthusiastic daughter into a scared mouse. ‘If you can make it great. But don’t worry, everyone’s fine. I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Mom, it’s just . . .’

  ‘Goodbye, Susan.’ She ended the call, as Aaron thoughtfully spread an old quilt over her sofa and settled Rose and Alice in their drenched and filthy nightdresses.

  She overheard him talking to the women, his voice calm.

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll hunt down some warm clothes, Nana Rose. It’s going to be OK, you’ll see.’

  Ada watched from the kitchen, her chest filled with pride and wonder.

  ‘You’re a good boy,’ Rose said, and she looked toward the kitchen pass-through and Ada. ‘Unlike some others who boss people into things they don’t want to do.’

  Ada’s cheeks flushed – this is not my fault – and was about to remind her mother of all the falls, the middle-of-the-night distress calls and how she’d been going back and forth to New York for years trying to keep her mother in that damn Rivington Street apartment, when the phone rang again.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mrs Strauss?’ A man’s anxious voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hi, my name is Kyle Sullivan, I’m a nurse at Nillewaug. You’re listed as the emergency contact for Rose Rimmelman. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘With me.’

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ he said. ‘Has she been checked out at a hospital?’

  ‘No, she refused to go, and at this point I’m not going to argue. She seems fine though, and we have another of your residents with us.’

  ‘Alice?’ His voice caught. ‘Please tell me you have Alice Sullivan.’

  ‘I didn’t know that was her last name, but yes, I think so. Red hair, probably in her seventies, has some kind of Alzheimer’s.’

  A pause on the line. ‘Thank God. Thank God.’

  Ada could swear the man was crying. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Not really,’ he offered, ‘but a little better now. Alice is my grandmother. Her apartment is next to Rose’s. I got her out of her apartment and asked your mother to stay with her and get her outside, but I haven’t seen her since, and she gets so confused; she wanders, too. I didn’t know where she was, or if . . . thank God. Things are so crazy here. I know we don’t know each other, but I can’t leave here right now, is there any way you could keep an eye on her for the next few hours? I’ll try to get there as soon as I can.’

  ‘Stop right there,’ Ada said. ‘She’s safe, we can keep an eye on her for as long as you need. Let me have your numbers, and I’ll give you mine. Do what you need to do. Your grandmother is fine. Does she have any special needs? Medications? Foods she can’t eat?’

  ‘Not really, just some pills f
or the dementia that don’t really work. If she misses a dose or two it doesn’t matter. I’ll call you as soon as I can. And, Mrs Strauss—’

  ‘Ada,’ she interrupted firmly.

  ‘Ada . . . thank you so much. I can’t tell you what a load you’ve just taken off my mind.’

  As Ada hung up, she spotted Lil coming up the walk, and glancing behind at Aaron in the living room tending to her mother and Alice, she went out. Across the walk she spotted Clayton Spratt in the window of the unit directly across from hers, holding back the curtain and staring. Bastard, she thought, glaring back, and wondering when the other shoe would drop on his threats about reporting Aaron living with her to the homeowner’s board. She kept her voice low. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘At least she’s OK, and that Alice woman . . .’

  ‘Her last name’s Sullivan. A nurse at Nillewaug called checking on Rose. Apparently he’s her grandson. I told him not to worry. It seems like he’s trying to track down all the residents.’ Ada’s gaze met Lil’s. ‘What am I going to do? I feel sick, all my mother’s things; she could have died in that place . . . What have I done?’

  Standing there, feeling exposed as their across-the-walk neighbors stared. ‘We’ll figure this out,’ Lil said, desperately wanting to hold Ada, to tell her that everything would be OK, but she didn’t. And something about that felt dead wrong. If Ada had been Bradley, he’d be holding her, and no one would have blinked an eye. Lil turned her head and spotted Clayton in the window with his pinched lemon-sucking expression, and then in the kitchen window of Bernice Framm’s directly across from her unit, movement in the corner of her cutesy cat curtains. ‘Life in a fishbowl,’ she whispered.

  ‘She’s going to have to stay with me.’ Ada stated the obvious.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Lil, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but . . . I don’t know how long I’ll be able to take it. You heard her. As far as she’s concerned I lit that place on fire.’

  ‘She’s scared, and you’re the only safe person around. And she’s still angry about leaving New York. But what were you supposed to do? Her visiting nurse had said they couldn’t keep her on as a patient because of the liability of her living alone, and she absolutely refused a live in. She left you with no choice.’

  Ada stared down the walk, which was lined with daffodil shoots, about a week from blooming. In the distance they heard a lone siren as it made its way from Nillewaug to Brattlebury Hospital. ‘You know what she wanted . . .’

  ‘But that wasn’t going to happen,’ Lil said, mentally tracing Ada’s profile, her firm jaw and high cheekbones. ‘Yes, she’s your mother, but you were supposed to just give up your life here, and be at her beck and call? I wouldn’t have let you.’

  ‘And now . . .’

  They turned at the sound of a phone. ‘It’s coming from mine,’ Lil said. She paused, not wanting to leave Ada when she was so clearly distraught.

  ‘Get it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine. Just need a few minutes to collect myself.’

  And Lil left her alone in the crisp spring air. Although, as she sniffed, and maybe it was on her, she still smelled smoke and burn. By the time she reached the phone the machine had picked up. It was barely eight. Who would call this early on a Sunday morning? She stood and waited as the outgoing message played and then a woman’s voice. It took her a couple of seconds to realize who it was; she picked up. ‘Mattie?’

  ‘Lil, glad you’re home. I’ve been trying to get you for the last hour and was starting to worry.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, trying to figure out why Detective Mattie Perez would call her at the crack of dawn.

  ‘Hank Morgan said you were at Nillewaug this morning. He said you were taking pictures.’

  ‘Yes . . . are you there?’

  ‘I am. He said you got shots of the fire and of Delia Preston.’

  ‘I did,’ Lil said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to look at any of it yet. We just got back. He practically confiscated my camera.’

  ‘It’s all digital, right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, I think I got both stills and some video.’

  ‘Do me a favor, Lil, and I’m dead serious.’

  ‘Of course.’ She could feel Mattie carefully choosing her words, this woman who’d only months earlier had saved her life. ‘Mattie, whatever it is you need, just ask.’

  ‘Lil, and please don’t repeat this. Or at least not to anyone other than Ada. Things are shaping up in a bad way. I’m treating this as a crime scene.’

  ‘Arson?’

  ‘Too soon to know for sure, but here’s a piece of the nightmare. You’re the only one to get shots of Preston’s body before it was moved.’

  ‘I heard Hank tell his officers to treat it like a crime scene,’ Lil said, feeling the need to defend the local Police Chief.

  ‘Yeah, well . . . apparently a pair of paramedics scooped her up and brought her to the ED. Hank said you got bent out of shape when he asked for the film . . . something about needing a court order. Really, Lil?’

  For the first time that morning she laughed. ‘He didn’t say please.’

  ‘And if I say please?’ Her tone shifted. ‘This is serious, Lil, even if this all turns out to be just some tragic accident, that film – depending on what you got – could wind up in dozens of civil suits, with everyone and their son and daughter suing Nillewaug and anyone else who might have contributed. I need you to not touch that camera, or connect it to anything until I get someone from the crime unit to do it. I swear you’ll get copies of everything. But with digital recording the whole chain of custody thing gets dicey. It’s already bad, where you’ve left the scene.’

  ‘Mattie,’ she said, trying to figure what a real reporter would do in this situation. Then again – just do the right thing, Lil. ‘If it’s that important, just come by and get it.’

  ‘Lil, much as I’d love to see you and Ada, I’ve got too much to do here. I’ll send another detective to pick it up.’

  Lil’s heart sank. Not only was she about to give up those pictures and video, but her shot at an exclusive with the lead detective on the biggest story in Grenville was flying out the window. It’s strange how snippets from journalism classes she’d taken over thirty years ago came back – being a reporter has everything to do with being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. ‘I’d love to have seen you too,’ she added, figuring at least that wasn’t disingenuous. ‘But more importantly I’d have thought you’d want to get a statement from Ada’s mother, Rose Rimmelman.’

  ‘Her and seven hundred other residents of Nillewaug, not to mention the staff.’

  ‘Yes, but Rose saw Delia jump,’ she added, dropping the carrot in front of the detective.

  Mattie paused. Lil could hear someone ask her a question, and the funny echo of a siren over the phone and then over the crow-fly path from Nillewaug to where she stood. ‘Huh,’ she practically grunted. ‘I don’t remember you being quite this devious, Lil.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t and I’ll be there in twenty.’

  The call ended and Lil was moving fast – twenty minutes is not much time. She clicked the computer on her dining room table out of sleep mode. The hook-up cable for the camera was already plugged in and, without pause, she attached it to the nifty little Canon. The screen flickered with images and a message screen appeared asking her if she wanted to delete the files once they’d been uploaded to the hard drive. Figuring that might be tantamount to obstruction of justice, or some other term that tumbled to mind from watching crime shows, she pressed no. The first shots were from yesterday’s opening of the Saturday flea market in Brantsville. It now being Sunday, she somehow needed to find the time to whip up seven hundred and fifty words, with two to four pictures, for her Cash or Trash column about antiques and collectibles in the Grenville Sentinel. She’d figured on the large open-air market as a likely subject. She and Ada went mos
t Saturdays from spring through fall. Fire or not, she’d need a solid two hours to hammer this out. A few dozen pictures of the market, interesting dealer stalls, and colorful vendors flickered on the monitor. There were a couple of disquieting moments as she stared at those seemingly benign images. It had to do with one stall, a not especially likeable dealer whom she and Ada mostly avoided – they called him Grumpy. Ada had spotted the stuff first, stacks of pictures and knick-knacks that had once belonged to Gwen Carrington, a friend of theirs, who had died in her sleep of a massive coronary last winter. The creep factor, in an otherwise fun early spring morning at the flea market, had been fast and big. Gwen had a thing for dachshunds, and Grumpy’s forty-by-twenty double-sized booth had hundreds of her little figurines, pictures cut from calendars that she’d framed, tops of cardboard boxes filled with little dog-shaped brooches and earrings, mugs with dachshunds. With a pit in her gut, she’d asked the dealer how he’d come by them. He’d told her that he’d done the clean out on Gwen’s condo. ‘Not the good stuff,’ he’d said with regret, ‘the leftovers. In exchange for getting the place emptied out, I keep and sell whatever I find.’ Clearly, this was the story she was supposed to write, how all this stuff people collect is just on loan. But how to do that without turning into Dolly Downer, something her young and ambitious editor, Corey Bingham, did not want. She stared transfixed at close ups of Gwen’s ceramic dachshunds piled in mounds being pawed over by prospective buyers, who, continuing with her ebb-and-flow theory of tchotchkes, would one day have their finds returned to a different stall in the future. The first images of the fire flew past, and she thought about Mattie’s instruction not to download or copy them. This was followed by a surge of pride; these were good, really good, in focus, clearly framed. Firefighters in motion, a pair of medics wheeling a resident toward the queue of waiting ambulances, flames shooting from the second-floor windows. As they sped past, she’d realized that they’d arrived not much after the first responders. She had clear images of the first ladder being raised, and of firefighters hooking up hoses and running in heavy boots and yellow coats into the burning building. If they’d gotten there even a couple minutes later they’d never have been allowed through.