Flashback

by Gary Braver

  “Christ!” He hissed and he slammed his hand on the wheel.

  René felt her insides clutch. No, something else.

  He pulled over to the side to let traffic pass. He had driven by the turnoff. For several seconds he stared through the windshield as silence filled the car like toxic gas.

  “What’s wrong?” René could hear the fright in her voice. Ever since her arrival, she had detected a low-grade anxiety—her mother’s nervous distraction, her father’s forced cheer. A horrid thought slashed across her brain: Her mother’s cancer was back. During a regular check-up they had found a spot on her lung. And Dad was so distracted by worry that he got confused on a route he could navigate in his sleep.

  “Everything’s fine,” her mother snapped.

  “I’m just a little tired, Honey.” When the traffic cleared, he made a U-turn, approached the intersection again, then turned.

  “Dad, it’s the other way!”

  He slammed on the brakes and nearly collided with an oncoming car. Horns blared as they sat in the intersection, her father looking stunned. “Pull over. Pull over!” her mother shouted. He pulled over, the car facing the opposite way and on the wrong side of 6A. René’s chest was so tight she could barely breathe and her mother was crying. Her father sat staring straight ahead. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m getting senile. I forgot how to get there.”

  “You’re not getting senile. You’re not.” But she could sense the ugly snout push its way up. “You just got a little confused, people blowing their horns like that. We don’t have to go, if you don’t want to.”

  “We’re going,” her mother snarled. “You can turn now.”

  Her father checked the road. “What happens when you get old.”

  “You’re not old. Seventy-two is not old,” René insisted.

  “Straight,” Diane said under her breath. “Straight.”

  And her father pulled through the intersection up toward the restaurant.

  And in the backseat René uttered a silent prayer. Please, God, no.

  Seven years later they buried her father under that stone. By then he had forgotten he had once been a full human being.

  René finished cleaning the headstone. “I’m doing better, Dad,” she said. “Making an effort to stay active. Even Nick is after me. ‘You’re too holed-up with your computer.’ ‘You have to end this self-exile,’ he says. ‘Meet a nice guy.’ Well, I’m going to a party tomorrow. Should be some interesting people there besides Nick.”

  Birds fluttered overhead and changed direction with a flick. She watched them swirl around and return overhead, then blow away toward the west.

  “Remember the time we went fishing off the pier at Scusset Beach? Caught a striper the size of my leg. Missed being a keeper by two inches, but you let me bring it home and scale it. You said they looked like quarters flying off it. Always had a way with words.” She touched the stone.

  “I miss you, Dad.” I miss us.

  9

  RENÉ ARRIVED AT BROADVIEW AROUND NINE the next morning. The receptionist told her the old 3-2-1 security code had been replaced by 63082, which struck her as excessive given that the ward was for dementia patients, most of whom were bereft of short-term memory. She tapped the code on the keypad and the door to the AD unit clicked open. She passed through and the door closed and locked behind her as it was supposed to. Just as she started down the hall, her attention was arrested by something above her head—the ceiling security camera.

  Even though it was Sunday, Alice was in her office. “Her records aren’t back, if that’s what you’re wondering. The police still have them. Sorry.” She looked away and began shuffling papers.

  “Okay. Then maybe you can call me when they’re back,” she said, wondering why Alice was acting as if René were a giant botulism spore.

  “No problem,” Alice said without looking up.

  “Oh, one more thing,” René said, as Alice started away. “The patient census you gave me? There are forty-two names and forty-six patients on the ward.”

  Alice looked at her blankly.

  “Mary Curley, Louis Martinetti, Anthony Marsden, and Gloria Breed. According to my records, none of these people are residents.”

  Alice gathered her things. “Well, they’re under Dr. Carr’s care.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you should speak to him.” She began to move away from the desk.

  “But you’re head nurse on the unit.”

  “And Dr. Carr is head physician,” she snapped.

  She tried to get away, but René stopped her, “Alice, are you telling me there are patients here whose medical records I don’t have access to?”

  Alice took a deep breath, puffing up like a bird in defense. “Really, I have to go.”

  “Sure, but maybe you can tell me about the security cameras.”

  “What security cameras?” Alice’s voice skipped an octave.

  “Outside the unit doors. Has anybody checked them?”

  “Checked them?”

  “To see who might have let Clara out of the ward?”

  “Let her out? Nobody let her out.” Again she tried to get away.

  But René took her arm. “Alice, I don’t know what’s going on here, but let me just say that if word got out to the state and federal regulatory boards that there are irregularities in the medical records of a patient arrested for murder, that there are more patients on the ward than listed, that critical pharmaceutical documentation is missing or locked away—there are going to be questions about patient neglect and patient abuse, and we could see a SWAT team of regulators come down on us like banshees demanding to know what other irregularities Broadview is up to, raising questions about patient security and wondering all sorts of things about the nursing staff and criminal negligence or, worse—that somebody here let Clara Devine out of the home, intent on murder. And since I’m professionally responsible for reporting irregularities in patients’ status, my job is on the line. So maybe somebody should tell me what’s going on or I’m calling the state.”

  Alice stared at René for a long moment, her face rippling with expressions under the glare of René’s threat. Finally she sighed, and her body deflated like a balloon. She glanced down the hall to an aide. “Bonnie, I’ll be right back.” Then she nodded René inside a small back office and locked the door behind them. “They’ll probably have my head, but I’m sure you’ll find out anyway.”

  “Find out what?”

  “You know nothing about this,” she whispered, her eyes full of pleading.

  The axes of the room felt as if they had shifted a few degrees. René nodded. “Okay.”

  Alice unlocked a desk drawer and removed a videocassette. On a table behind them was a television monitor and VCR where they often viewed patient behavior or educational videos. Alice popped in the video, and after some flickering the screen filled with a grainy black-and-white ceiling shot of the unit’s security door from maybe ten feet back. For several seconds nothing moved, as if they were looking at a still. Then a figure appeared in the jerky time-lapsed motion of security cameras. Clara Devine.

  She was alone and carrying a shopping bag. She looked about her, then, unbelievably, she went to the wall and with a finger she tapped the keypad and pushed her way through the door, which closed behind her. It happened so fast that René just said, “What?”

  “Yeah, I know. She let herself out.”

  René felt a flash of gooseflesh across her back. What she was seeing could not be—like witnessing a dog suddenly speaking English or seeing someone levitate. Dogs don’t talk, and Alzheimer’s patients don’t recover their short-term memory. The disease, like gravity, was a downward, persistent force.

  “I don’t believe this.” René’s mind raced for a rational explanation: Clara had been misdiagnosed all along. She had faked her dementia. It was somebody else. None of the above.

 
; “There’s more,” Alice said, her voice grim. She hit a few buttons and the tape switched to another venue. The main entrance outside. Again a shadowy figure, but with Clara’s face and body, and this time she was dressed in a rain poncho pulled over her head.

  “We think she changed in the elevator and slipped by the front desk. It was raining out.”

  On rare occasions, a patient managed to elope from a nursing home, usually because of understaffing. Two winters ago a man wandered outside and froze to death. As a result, Broadview had installed an elaborate security system. But no Alzheimer’s patient was capable of figuring out a pass code or remembering it even if she had heard it from one of the staffers. Nor were any of them capable of long-range planning of a disguise on a rainy night.

  “My guess is she must have watched one of us use the keypad, and she memorized the combo.”

  “Alice, she has middle-stage Alzheimer’s. She’s not capable of memorizing anything longer than a second, and you know that.”

  Alice didn’t respond.

  “Do the police know about this?”

  “No. They never asked. Their job was to solve a murder. Broadview’s security is Broadview’s problem and not a police matter.”

  “If they ask?”

  “The system was down, the cameras weren’t working. Not my area.” Alice popped out the cassette and locked it in the drawer again. Then she got up and put her hand on the doorknob to leave.

  Not my area.

  “Alice, what the hell’s going on up here?”

  “I think you’d better ask Dr. Carr. He’ll be in tomorrow.” And she hustled away.

  10

  MORNINGSIDE MANOR WAS A RED BRICK, three-story nursing home nestled among birches and evergreens and adjoining conservation land in Smithfield, just below the New Hampshire border. It was an adult long-term-care facility with a hundred and ten beds and was a cut above most of the homes and rehab centers that René regularly visited. It was Monday afternoon and she could not believe the number of cars in the parking lot including several limousines, all here for the groundbreaking of a new Alzheimer’s unit.

  A large white tent had been pitched on the lawn, and waiters and waitresses were circulating through the crowd with champagne and fancy hors d’oeuvres. This was not the typical jug-wine-and-cheese-cube affair afforded by nursing home budgets.

  René parked and made her way toward the tent, seeing no faces she recognized until she spotted Nick Mavros. He was standing with a small knot of people and waved her over.

  “Now here’s a young woman for whom the expression ‘teacher’s pet’ was coined. Hello, beautiful,” he said, and gave her a hug and double-cheek air kisses, vestiges of a Peloponnesian birth some sixty years ago.

  Nick had a strong face, thick bold features, and large eyes that lit up his face. “And now I’ve embarrassed her.”

  “I’ll survive,” she said, and shook hands with another physician introduced as Peter Habib from Plymouth, a man about Nick’s age.

  Nicholas Konstantinos Mavros had been her professor in pharmacy grad school and her thesis advisor for two years, during which time they had become more than student and professor. During her father’s decline, Nick had taken René under his wing, consoling her, bringing her to his home, giving her solace when she needed it the most. Over the three years since her father’s death, Nick had helped fill the void with warmth balanced by keen intelligence—traits which accounted for his position of respect in the community of neurophysicians. He was one of the few men whose mind never abandoned his heart, and René was grateful that there were people like Nick Mavros in the world.

  Nick no longer had time to teach and was cutting back his private practice. He was senior neurologist at Mass General Hospital and chief collaborator at that institution’s MRI Imaging Center, where he and a team of physicists had pioneered new techniques for diagnostic imaging of the brain.

  “They’ve got a tent the size of Fenway Park and half the medical community of the Northeast. What’s the big deal about a new nursing home wing?”

  Nick made a happy grin and held up his glass. “Free champagne.” His eyes had that white-grape glow. He liked his wines and had a collection in his cellar.

  “You have no shame,” René said.

  “He’s a Greek. What do you expect?” Dr. Habib joked.

  “Then they’re all Greeks here,” Nick said.

  “Good stuff?” she asked, hinting that he’s probably had more than he should.

  “Excellent, and brain cells be damned.” Then his eyes widened. “Uh-oh! There go another ten thousand.”

  She laughed. “You can spare them.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Habib said, excusing himself. “Something about the powers that do reckoning with the powers that be.” And he walked off.

  “I love that guy,” Nick said through his champagne. “He knows how to live. He just bought himself a brand new Harley-Davidson for his semiretirement. Carpe diem.”

  Habib had moved to a small group of people clustered around a large bald-headed man near the podium. “So what’s the big deal?” René asked. It was a crowd of at least a hundred and fifty and clearly was no shoestring celebration.

  “It’s not Health Corp. who’s picking up the tab,” Nick said. Then he put his mouth to her ear. “The fella in the gray suit and bald head talking to Preston Van Dyke and Carter Lutz and now Peter. Gavin Moy.”

  “Who?”

  But just then Carter blew into the microphone. “May I have your attention, everybody?”

  When the crowd quieted down, he introduced Preston Van Dyke, CEO of Health Corp., the parent company of the nursing homes that included Morningside and twenty-six other homes and rehab centers. Van Dyke began by thanking Carter Lutz and other dignitaries gathered there. “I’d like to say that this is a great day for Morningside as we break ground for our new long-term-care unit, which, as you may know, is to be constructed with another generous gift from GEM Tech.” And he motioned his hand toward Gavin Moy. When the applause died down, Van Dyke continued: “With your wonderful support, we will expand our already fine facilities and increase the quality of health care for years to come.”

  Van Dyke continued briefly, and when he was finished, somebody handed him and Gavin Moy a chrome shovel with which they posed over a plot of dirt for a flurry of photographs and applause. The groundbreaking still didn’t explain the large crowd of suits, including someone she recognized from the FDA.

  “Exciting, huh?” Nick said.

  “Overwhelming,” René said, as they walked to a table of fancy snacks. Her mind was pulsing to tell him about the video of Clara Devine. “Do you know a neuro doc named Jordan Carr?”

  “Yes. In fact, he’s here somewhere. Why?”

  “I’ll catch him another time.” This was not the occasion for a confrontation.

  “Well, if you change your mind, I’d be happy to—” But Nick was cut off.

  “René Ballard?”

  She turned to see a tall, good-looking man with shiny black hair.

  “Speaking of the devil,” Nick said. “René Ballard, Jordan Carr.”

  He held his hand out to her. “I understand you were looking for me.”

  “Well, yes. I was.”

  “Then I saved you the trouble.” His smile spread over a perfect set of upper teeth.

  Nick grinned and took the invitation to depart. “If you’ll excuse me.”

  “No, you don’t have to leave,” she said to Nick.

  He held up his empty glass and nodded toward a waitress. “The champagne lady’s here and all’s right with the world,” he said with a wink. “Besides, there’s someone I have to say hello to.” And he headed off, grabbing another champagne from the waitress on the way to Gavin Moy.

  “So,” Dr. Carr said, smiling down on her.

  “We can do this at another time.”

  “This is as good as any.”

  He had a thin, boyish face with a high forehead and large, dark a
lmond-shaped eyes that made him look Polynesian. His hair was perfectly black and parted on the side with optical precision. René stood five-five, maybe five-six in heels, and he was nearly a head taller than she was. “Okay. Then perhaps where we can have more privacy,” she said, and led him to an opening away from the crowd.

  “My, my, this must be important,” he said, following her.

  She couldn’t tell if he was being serious or condescending. It didn’t help that he spoke in a crisp English accent, which blurred the distinction. When they were on their own, she said, “I have some questions about Clara Devine.”

  He kept his face in a neutral state of bemusement. “What about her?”

  René was conscious of the professional divide between them—he a nationally recognized neurophysician probably on the board of a dozen important institutions and she a twenty-nine-year-old consulting pharmacist. She also reminded herself that a misstatement could get Alice Gordon and the other nurses in trouble. “I’m wondering how she managed to escape Broadview and get herself to the CVS and kill a complete stranger.”

  “I’m familiar with the case, Ms. Ballard.” He smiled and sipped his wine, studying her with unblinking eyes.

  She was not going to let his porcelain smugness derail her. “As you may know, I’m responsible for monitoring patients’ meds each month. When I went to check her folder, I discovered that several months’ worth of her charts were missing. Also, the order sheets were signed off by you rather than her primary care physician.”

  “Because I’ve taken over for Dr. Colette.” His words had the honey-glaze patience of a teacher addressing a slow child.

  “I see, but that still doesn’t explain Clara’s missing medical charts and those of four other patients under your care.”

  If her discovery surprised him he did not let on. “They’re in Broadview’s computers.” His smile shaded into irritation, and he checked his watch.