by Vivian Barz
Hunched over now, the girl shrugged and began rooting through the bowels of her desk. She hauled out a compact mirror and went to work popping a sizable whitehead on her chin. After dabbing the pus away with a crumpled fast-food napkin, she smeared a glob of sparkly pink gloss across her lips and returned to the infomercial. Susan focused her attention on a painting of lilies over the sofa that screamed of mass production. If it comes down to dying alone or winding up in a place like this, I’ll take death.
“Hello? You with me?” A woman standing not three feet in front of Susan waved.
Susan started. “Oh, hi. You must be . . .” All Susan could conjure was whitehead. Nurse Whitehead .
“Thought I’d lost you there.” The woman smiled warmly. She was middle aged, with dark, puffy hair that had gone gray at the temples. She was motherly, her body shape the type tactful individuals sometimes described as “pleasantly plump.” She held out a hand for Susan to shake. “I’m Nurse Hoguin. Some of the residents here call me Nurse Gracie. Whichever you prefer.”
“Sorry, I must’ve zoned out for a second there,” Susan said and then thought: If she’d had a weapon, I’d have been dead before I realized I’d been murdered . She swallowed, her mouth starchy . . . And my last meal would’ve been that shit-awful scone.
“This place tends to have that effect on people,” the woman chirped with forced merriment, eyebrows raised. I know this place is awful, and you know this place is awful, but let’s keep this between the two of us, mkay ?
“Must be the lighting.”
“What can I help you with?”
Susan flashed her badge once again and explained that she was there to speak with Mary Nichol.
The nurse folded her arms over her chest protectively. “Mary? What’s this about?”
“I’m afraid I really can’t say,” Susan apologized, hoping the woman wasn’t going to force her to get nasty. She hated it when they did that.
“No, I imagine you can’t.”
“How long have you worked here?” Susan asked as they made their way down the hall.
“Oh, nearly twenty years. ’Bout as long as Mary’s been here. She’s a nice lady.”
They paused at an activity room off to their left so that the nurse could whisper a terse directive to a lazing subordinate. A few residents shambled about, but most were seated in ratty lounge chairs, saggy flesh pooled around them like halos, lumpy oatmeal incarnate. Like the check-in area, a television held center stage, an imposing Sony-god looming over its faithful disciples. On the screen, a cooking show played at a volume rivaling that of a jet engine. The men licked their lips greedily, while the women, most in housecoats, cooed half-heartedly over a shrimp scampi recipe they had absolutely no intention of ever preparing. In the corner of the room sat two pruned characters sharing a cheap plastic chessboard, the sort of thing one would pick up at a five-and-dime for about ninety-nine cents. Neither man seemed particularly interested in the game, as their eyes were trained on the rather large-breasted chef who was leaning over the sink to shake cooked angel-hair pasta dry. The men turned their attention back to the board as the show cut to commercial, and Susan noted that they were using an incomplete chess set, substituting pennies for the missing pieces. She found the grimy pennies the most harrowing detail of all, that two old men with a collective age easily north of 160 should be denied the dignity of a complete game, albeit a cheap one.
A bubble of ache popped sharply in the center of her chest, coating her insides with a foul residue of repulsion. How can you stand it? she nearly blurted to the nurse. Day after day?
She asked instead, “Do you know Mary well?”
“Sure, she’s one of our few long-term residents. Only person been here longer is Jack, and he’s a hundred one. Dementia,” Nurse Gracie said as they continued their journey down the hall. “And you get used to it,” she added primly, as if addressing Susan’s silent disdain. “There are homes far worse’n this—believe me. Things happen in those places that’d curl your hair—neglect, theft . . . abuse. But I keep an eye on my staff here, make sure everything’s aboveboard. I like to think that I make the residents’ lives better by staying. Some of them are just dumped off like dogs at the pound, and I’m talking about by their own family .”
“How about Mary—she get many visitors?” Susan made a move to pull out her notepad and then reconsidered. Better to keep things friendly, off the cuff. People tended to clam up once they saw that every word they said was being documented. Or worse, they felt the need to go Oscar Wilde with their stories and embellished.
The nurse shook her head. “She doesn’t have much family. That good-for-nothing son of hers never bothered to visit—that’s for sure. Before he went to prison, I’m talking about.” Gracie flushed. “Please don’t mention to anyone that I said that. I don’t like to encourage scandal.”
Susan flashed her palms and shook her head. “So how about after?”
The nurse looked at Susan blankly. “After what?”
“Has Gerald come by since he’s been out of prison?”
Nurse Gracie frowned. “I didn’t even know he’d gotten out. I don’t think Mary knows either.”
Susan believed her. Shock was one of the harder emotions to fake, and besides, the nurse would have no reason to lie. “He was just released on parole. A little over a week ago.”
“They must’ve released him early, then. Mary said he wasn’t due to get out for another seven, eight years.” Nurse Gracie’s color had faded some, her lips curled down at the edges in marked revulsion; the dropping of Gerald Nichol’s name tended to have that effect on people, Susan had found. Like letting out a silent, stinky fart in a packed elevator.
“Is she, uh, coherent?” Susan asked delicately, eschewing Ed’s harsher syntax, gone soft .
“Mary?” Nurse Gracie said with a low ha sound. “She’s sharper than a tack. Her body is what’s in bad shape. The poor thing can hardly move. But she’s tough, never complains.” The admiration in her voice was unmistakable.
They turned down another long hallway. This one was entirely vacant, with a series of nondescript doors running its entire length. “Resident housing,” the nurse said. It made Susan think of that classic horror-film scene where a hapless victim runs from a monster but gets nowhere, the corridor stretching out before him or her like taffy.
“Here we are,” Nurse Gracie said. She surprised Susan by rapping a knuckle on Mary’s closed door and then immediately entering. They could have walked in on the poor woman half-naked and scrambling to get dressed, for all the warning she was given. Like a complete chess set, personal privacy was apparently something Emerald Meadows did not provide. Guess they figured that the seventy-plus crowd wasn’t a part of the nudist set.
They found Mary sitting on the sofa, though she was thankfully clothed, a skeletal figure wrapped in a fleece blanket. She wasn’t doing much of anything other than staring off into space, a basket of yarn and knitting needles cast off to her left. As Nurse Gracie explained that Officer Marlan had a few questions, a calm smile spread across Mary’s well-worn face, as if she’d been expecting them.
As soon as the nurse left, Mary turned to Susan. “Is he dead?”
CHAPTER 6
Susan was confused by the question. Maybe Nurse Gracie was wrong, and Mary actually wasn’t all there. “I’m not following, Mrs. Nichol.”
“Call me Mary.” Her voice warbled with age, but yes, she seemed to still be very sharp. She motioned for Susan to take a seat, and her expression grew shrewd. “There’s only two reasons you could be here: Gerald’s escaped, or he’s dead.”
Straight down to business with this one. Susan quickly clarified, “No, no. He’s not dead.”
“He’s escaped, then.”
“So you haven’t heard from your son?”
“Wouldn’t have asked you if he was dead if I had, now would I?” Mary cracked.
Susan felt the color rise to her cheeks. Good point, though Mary could be faking
her obliviousness. She didn’t think so, though. “Fair enough. Gerald was released from prison about a week ago. You obviously didn’t know.”
Mary pursed her lips. “I didn’t.”
“I take it you two aren’t close?”
“And I take it you know what he was locked up for.”
“I do.”
Mary sighed deeply, her body so frail that it seemed as if she’d lost a few pounds along with the air spent from her lungs. “But I suppose he’ll always be my son, no matter what he did.”
Mary’s comment was one that Susan had heard copiously, and it never ceased to get her hackles up. Perhaps if more mothers held their sons accountable instead of blindly standing by their sides the way Mary did, there’d be a hell of a lot fewer wife beaters and rapists out in the world. “You mean violating innocent children.”
Mary, of course, had nothing to say about that. “Why are you here, Officer?”
Susan checked herself silently. It wasn’t her job to place judgment, at least not vocally. And if she got too snarky, Mary would be of no help. “I’m here about Gerald’s charges.”
Mary leaned forward, her expression cautious. “Go on.”
“First, I’d like to confirm with you: your son owns your farm now—is that correct?”
Mary nodded. “I signed it over to him when my body started going to pot. With the way the system works, the government would’ve taken everything I owned to pay for my medical bills.”
“I understand. Is there a possibility that Gerald could have been . . . operating longer than we’ve known?” Susan typically wouldn’t have been so cryptic, but it felt dirty and wrong, speaking to this ancient woman about a child predator. Despite her standoffishness, Mary Nichol seemed far too sweet to have any affiliation with the monster that was Gerald Nichol. Of course, they always did. People were great at pretending.
“Honey, this’ll go a lot faster if you just tell me what this is about,” Mary said. “Me, I have all the time in the world—don’t get too many visitors these days—but I bet you’ve got better things to do than sit here yarning with me all day.”
True, Susan was eager to get the hell out of the creepy place, but she was only working a half day. Her plan after Emerald Meadows was to head home, where she’d remain in her pajamas for the next three and a half days. Maybe, maybe catch up on some paperwork. She rarely had so many consecutive days off, so she was going to enjoy them in all her slothful glory.
“We found a body on the edge of your son’s property,” Susan began. “It’s a small boy.”
Mary raised her eyebrows. “Oh?” Susan expected her to say more, but she didn’t.
“It appears that he died”—was murdered by your good-for-nothing son— “many years ago, perhaps around the 1960s. Gerald would’ve been just a teenager then, but given the nature of the crimes we already know he committed . . .”
Mary’s chin quivered. Still, she remained mute.
But what was there for her to say, exactly? Certainly, there was no section in any parenting handbook in existence that instructed mothers on how to cope with police inquiries regarding their pedophile offspring. Susan wondered if Mary would still be so determined to stand by her son’s side now that she knew that he, in addition to having a predilection for child pornography, was the murderer of a little boy.
“You’re lucky, you know,” Mary said at last.
She’d spoken so softly that Susan wondered if she’d actually heard her at all. “Sorry?”
“These days, women have choices. They’re independent .” Mary closed her eyes, thoughtful. “It wasn’t always this way.”
Susan opened her mouth and then closed it. There was more Mary had to say, and she knew better than to deter her by filling the silence with banalities.
“I married Wayne—Gerald’s father—young. I was just shy of seventeen, but that’s what we did back then. My family was poor, and Wayne’s family had money. You wouldn’t believe it now, but I was a very beautiful girl, and . . .” She raised her scrawny shoulders. “It was a way out.”
Susan nodded, though her insides were itching with impatience. She couldn’t imagine the relevance of Mary’s story, but something in her gut told her that it was going somewhere, that she should just shut it for once and listen.
“I was never in love with Wayne—he was an awful, awful man, truth be told. But he did give me a child, so I guess some part of me loved him for that.”
“Your only child,” Susan said.
Mary went on as if Susan had never spoken. “I knew what Wayne was doing to Gerald. God help me, I knew , but I turned a blind eye to it for so many years. And for that I’ll never forgive myself.” Mary’s words were coming out more quickly now, had taken on a feverish quality, as if she’d been stabbed in the chest by an invisible sword and was bloodletting personal demons. “Wayne, he went . . . funny when kids were around. But we didn’t talk about that sort of thing back in the sixties; we didn’t say things like child molester —I doubt the phrase had even been invented yet. Nobody in town ever said anything to me outright, but I think most everyone suspected. They sure never left Wayne alone with their own children.”
Susan, a product of a small town herself, could picture it all too well: Hushed conversations in the market that abruptly ceased whenever Mary neared. Stealthy glances that were both pitying and judgmental. Mary hemmed in by the same people who probably called themselves her friends, all of them aware of her dirty secret, yet not one of them willing to help, maybe because they didn’t care enough to, maybe because they had problems of their own, maybe simply because they couldn’t .
Mary lowered her eyes to her lap and dropped her head forward, as if the sheer weight of the words that followed were too heavy for her mouth to carry. “Of course, I didn’t always know what Wayne was doing to Gerald. I had my suspicions at first, but over time there was just no denying it. I . . .”
Mary slid a hand up her blouse, rooted around in her bra, and pulled out a crumpled tissue. She blew her nose into it, stuffed it back where she’d gotten it, and continued. “But like I said, things were different back then. I was uneducated and had no money other than the paltry allowance that Wayne gave me to buy groceries. I tried to skim from it, but it was never enough. I couldn’t just leave . Where would I go? The one time I tried reaching out to my parents for help, they told me to go home to my husband. So I . . .”
Mary rubbed her chest as she began to cough. Susan quickly crossed the room to the kitchenette and filled a glass of water for the old woman. She accepted it gratefully and took a few sips. Moments later, she cleared her throat and raised her head, determined to get her story out.
“As silly—stupid —as it sounds, I thought that if Gerald could only wait a little longer, if he could just manage to hold it together until he turned eighteen, then he could move out on his own and forget the horrible business of his childhood.”
Forget, as if it’d be that easy to put from his mind , Susan scoffed in silence. Forget years of abuse, as if it were just some dumb, mortifying experience of his youth, like wetting his pants in the schoolyard. Susan focused hard to keep her head straight. If she hadn’t, she would have wildly shaken it, maybe even shouted a little.
“I killed him, you know,” Mary said, and Susan went very still.
The two women sat so silently now that the only noise was the dripping faucet on the other side of the room.
“You heard me right,” Mary said, sounding utterly drained. “But what are you really going to do? If you arrest me, I’ll be dead by the time I’m brought to trial. And any jail you take me to in the meantime will be an upgrade from this place.”
There was more to the story that Susan wanted to hear. “Mary, I’m not sure what any of this has to do with why I’m here.”
Mary ignored her. “Don’t you want to know how I did it?” She answered before Susan did. “Mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?”
“I ground them up and put them in h
is meatloaf. I picked them in the field just behind our house. They were poisonous, of course,” Mary said with a coy half smile.
Susan was at a loss about what to do. Never had she heard such a brazen admission of guilt, not even when the perps had been caught red-handed. Should she call in to the station? Get Mary’s confession down on paper? She’d dealt with plenty of violent offenders, but this was her first murder. She decided to play it cool for the time being, keep Mary talking.
Mary didn’t need any encouragement to continue. “One night at dinner—Gerald was away at football practice, so it was just the two of us—I told Wayne I had cramps, so I wasn’t much in the mood to eat. I said that he should go on without me. He did, and I’m sure it was to keep me from discussing my ‘lady issues,’ as he called them. Wayne was always squeamish when it came to female anatomy.”
No surprise there , Susan thought.
“He died that night in the hospital.”
“Of accidental poisoning,” Susan murmured.
“That’s right. I was uneducated and unworldly, as everyone knew, so how was I to know that some mushrooms are lethal? People had been treating me like I was dumb my whole life. I figured, Why correct them now?”
“You were never brought up on charges.”
“That’s right, but I’m guessing you already knew that.”
Mary adjusted her blanket, a small task that seemed to take her a great deal of effort. Hell, if I put her in handcuffs, it’d probably break her wrists , Susan thought. Mary coughed a little—the struggle with the blanket had disrupted her breath—and then asked Susan a surprising question. “You know how I did it, but don’t you want to know why ?”
“I assume it was because of what he was doing to Gerald.”
“Yes,” Mary said. “And no.”
Susan sat even stiller now, her pulse racing.
“I was washing up after breakfast when I decided to murder my husband,” Mary said and then swallowed. Speaking was a great effort for her, the pauses between her words increasing in length. Susan hoped she’d get to her conclusion before she passed out completely. “I was at the sink, watching Gerald play out front with the little boy from next door, Lenny Lincoln.”
