Authors: Kevin O'Brien
Rubbing her chin, Jessie squinted out the window. “You know, I’m not sure. These old peepers aren’t what they used to be. I—”
Karen heard the chair legs scrape against the tiled floor. She swiveled around to see her father with his mouth open and eyes bulging. He pounded at his chest. “Oh, my God, he’s choking!” she cried.
“I got him!” Jessie pushed her aside and rushed behind the chair where Karen’s father sat, writhing. Within a moment, the big woman scooped him up out of the chair and locked her chubby arms around his stomach. Jessie jerked her forearms under his ribs—lifting him off his feet with every squeeze. Once, twice, three times, four times. Then a piece of food shot out of his mouth.
Karen’s father let out a cry, and then he gasped for air. He seemed to sag in Jessie’s arms. She lowered him back into the chair, and patted his shoulder. Karen hovered over him. “Just sit there and get your breath back, Poppy,” she said. He seemed okay, just a bit shaken.
But Jessie wasn’t so well off. Karen gazed at her. She staggered toward the bed and plopped down on the edge. Wincing, she put a hand over her heart. The color had drained from her face, and she started wheezing.
Karen hurried to her side. “Jessie, are you okay?
She didn’t respond. She just sat there, struggling for her breath.
Karen snatched up the phone and called for the doctor on staff. “There’s a woman here with breathing problems. Could you come to room 204, quickly please?”
As she hung up the phone, she heard Jessie say, “Aren’t you—aren’t you supposed to say ‘stat’?”
Karen sat down on the bed, and gently patted her back. “I’d feel like an idiot saying ‘stat;’ that’s for the nurses and doctors. How are you?”
Jessie nodded. “I just overdid it a bit. I’ll be peachy in another minute or two.” She glanced over at Karen’s father and started to chuckle. “Well, I’m glad he didn’t let my having a coronary slow him down.”
Frank was sitting up and gorging on his fried chicken once again.
Karen managed to laugh, but she noticed Jessie wincing again. She stayed at her side until the doctor arrived with a nurse. Dr. Chang felt Jessie’s throat, then put a stethoscope to her chest. He asked if she could walk with him to his office down the hall. Jessie nodded. But she seemed a bit unsteady on her feet as Dr. Chang and the nurse led her out of the room.
Karen hated to see her looking so feeble. Jessie was her rock. She couldn’t have managed without her these last four years.
Now that she’d moved her dad into Sandpoint View, Karen was getting pressured by her older brother and sister to sell the house. But she didn’t want to sell it yet. She kept Jessie on three days a week. They often took these trips to the convalescent home together.
Her father’s face and hands were a greasy mess. Karen got him cleaned up. Then she washed off the plate and utensils in his bathroom sink, along with Jessie’s Tupperware containers. All the while, she thought about Jessie, down the hall, being examined by Dr. Chang. The reality of it was, Jessie wasn’t much younger than Dr. Chang’s regular patients here.
One good thing, at least she hadn’t heard an ambulance yet. Whenever there was a severe medical emergency, they sent for an ambulance and rushed the patient to University Hospital. Many of the ones from this place died on the way.
Karen finished drying off Jessie’s Tupperware, and then checked on her father again. He’d moved into the cushioned easy chair, and was dozing peacefully. She decided to give Dr. Chang another five minutes with Jessie before going to his office and finding out how she was doing.
She glanced outside her father’s window, and once again focused on that beat-up, old black Cadillac. Was someone really following her? Maybe one of her patients? Most of her clients weren’t a threat to anyone, except maybe themselves. Every once in a while she got a truly disturbed new patient. But Karen sent those to a more qualified specialist.
Some of them didn’t like being sent away.
Karen looked at her dad again. He was snoring now. He wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.
Grabbing her purse, she retreated down the hallway to the side door, and then out to the parking lot. The cold wind hit her, and Karen shivered as she headed toward the old, black Cadillac. She wanted to get the license plate number. She still had a few connections with the police department from when she’d worked at Group Health Hospital, counseling the occasional crime victim or criminal. She could pull a few strings and maybe get a trace on the plates through the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Approaching the car, she didn’t see anyone inside. She wasn’t close enough to read the license plate, but started to reach into her purse for a pen and paper. Then she heard a faint, distant wail, and Karen stopped in her tracks. The siren’s high-pitched cry grew louder and louder.
The ambulance sped up the street, its red flashers swirling on the roof. It turned into Sandpoint View’s parking lot. “Oh, my God, Jessie,” she murmured to herself.
Running back to the side door, she ducked inside and raced down the hallway toward B wing, where Dr. Chang had his office. But as she turned the corner, Karen came upon about a dozen elderly residents hovering outside the TV room. Roseann was trying to get them to disperse. “C’mon now, clear the door, folks,” she was saying. “The paramedics need to get to Peggy, and you’re blocking the way.”
Karen approached her. “What happened?”
“Peggy Henderson fell and hit her head,” Roseann whispered. “There’s blood everywhere. I think she might have had a minor stroke, too, poor thing. Dr. Pollard is in there with her now. Help me get these people out of here.”
Karen glanced in the TV room, and saw the frail old woman lying on the sofa, with the other doctor on staff and a nurse hovering over her. Two bloodstained hand towels were wadded up in a ball by their feet. Pollard was checking her vital signs. Karen didn’t have much time for more than a glance. Two paramedics were barreling down the hallway with a collapsible gurney.
Karen turned to Dwight, a tall, spry 85-year-old who was a bit of a know-it-all. Except for his slippers, he dressed as if ready for a round of golf, in a green cardigan sweater and plaid pants. Among those gawking at poor Peggy, he was the least likely to budge. “Dwight, we need you,” she said urgently. “Could you help me get these people to clear the way?”
The old man relished being an authority figure. “All right, let’s give them some room here!” He kept clapping his hands and poking at his fellow residents’ shoulders and backs until they shuffled aside. Of the dozen or so spectators, two had walkers and one was in a wheelchair. Karen helped corral them down the hallway while the paramedics rushed into the TV room.
In the middle of all the commotion, she saw a young brunette in a windbreaker emerging from a nurse’s station alcove down the corridor. Karen froze. “Amelia?” she called.
The young woman glanced at her for a second, then hurried farther down the hallway. Karen started after her. “Amelia? Wait a minute!” She wondered why she was running away. Up ahead, the young woman ducked into a stairwell. The door was on a hydraulic spring, and still hadn’t closed all the way by the time Karen swung it open again. She heard footsteps echoing in the dim gray stairwell. The walls were cinder block, and the unpainted concrete steps went down to a lower level and then to the basement. Karen paused at the top of the stairs and peered over the banister. She could see a shadow moving on the steps below. “Amelia? Is that you?” she called.
Karen rushed down the stairs, pausing only for a moment when she heard a door squeak open on the basement level. A mechanical, grinding noise suddenly resounded through the stairwell, probably from the boiler. She continued down the steps to the landing and pushed open the door. Karen found herself in a long, dim corridor. Two tall metal oxygen cylinders stood against the wall, along with a broken-down metal tray table on wheels. Someone had left an old rusty crowbar on top of it. Straight ahead, Karen saw the open door to the boiler room. She poked her head in. The room was huge, with a grated floor, a big old-fashioned boiler, a furnace, and a labyrinth of pipes and ducts. She didn’t see anyone. Most of the maintenance people went home at 2:00
P.M
. on Saturdays.
“Amelia?” she called, over the din from the boiler.
Turning, she glanced back at the corridor. A set of double doors farther down the hall was gently swinging in and out. She would have noticed if they’d been moving before. Had someone just ducked into that room?
Karen hadn’t been down here since Roseann had given her an employee tour of the place months ago. If memory served her right, there was a storage room beyond those swinging doors. Approaching them, she cautiously glanced over her shoulder at the passageway to another part of the basement. She didn’t see anyone, just two large bins full of dirty laundry.
Karen pushed open the swinging doors, and stepped into the dark, cavernous room. The spotlights overhead seemed spaced too far apart, leaving several large, shadowy pockets amid the clutter. To Karen’s right was a graveyard of broken gurneys, metal tray tables and other hospital equipment. There were also about a dozen more tall oxygen cylinders.
“Is someone in here?” she called. “Amelia? Can you hear me? It’s Karen.”
She studied the rows of boxes to her left, some neatly stacked as high as five feet. But others had been torn open, revealing their contents: toilet paper rolls, lightbulbs, paper towels, soap bars, and cleaning supplies. One huge, open carton held bedpans that gleamed in the dim light. Still more boxes were opened and emptied, lying discarded on the floor.
As Karen ventured deeper into the room, she wondered what the hell Amelia would be doing down here. And if it had indeed been Amelia she’d seen upstairs, why had she run away?
Something crunched under her shoe. Karen stopped and gazed down at the thin shards of glass on the floor. Then she looked up toward the ceiling. The hanging spotlight above her was broken. She studied the line of spotlights; most of them had been shattered. No wonder there were so many dark areas in this cellar room. Someone had made it that way.
“Who’s down here?” she called.
Karen didn’t move for a moment. Her eyes scanned the rows upon rows of boxes, some sections engulfed in the shadows. About twenty feet away, she detected some movement amid the maze of cartons. Suddenly, a dark figure darted between the stacks.
Karen gasped. It looked like a man in black clothes, with a stocking cap on his head. She hadn’t seen his face; he’d moved too quickly.
Her heart was racing, and she started to back up toward the double doors. She thought she heard something—a faint murmuring.
“Do it now!” a woman whispered urgently. “Get her!”
Karen turned around and ran for the exit as fast as she could. Flinging open the double doors, she retreated down the basement hallway. As she reached the metal table by the stairwell, she paused and glanced over her shoulder. The storage room doors were still swinging in and out. But no one had come out after her.
She noticed once again the rusty crowbar on top of the table and snatched it up. She took a minute to catch her breath. With her gaze riveted on the swinging doors, Karen reached into her purse for her cell phone.
She had Roseann’s number on speed dial. Her friend answered after two rings: “Sandpoint View, this is Roseann.”
“Ro, it’s Karen,” she said, still trying to get her breath.
“Where did you disappear to? One minute, you’re with me working crowd control, and the next—”
“I’m in the basement,” Karen cut in. “I followed someone down here. I can’t explain right now. But could you send Lamar down?” Lamar was an orderly around thirty years old, one of the sweetest guys Karen knew. But he also had a linebacker’s build, a shaved head, and an ugly scar on his handsome face. With his formidable looks, Lamar would have made a good bodyguard. And that was what Karen needed right now, because she’d made up her mind to go back into that storage room.
“Tell Lamar I’m by the door to stairwell C, right across from the boiler room. And could you tell him to hurry, please?”
Karen clicked off the line, and stashed the phone back in her purse. She kept her eyes on the double doors, now motionless. She clutched the crowbar tightly in her fist, and waited.
“Are you going to call the police?” Lamar asked.
He’d given Karen his white orderly jacket to keep her warm, and she felt so small wrapped in it. They stood by a set of concrete steps leading down to a fire door to the convalescent home’s basement. The old door, with chicken wire crisscrossed in the fogged window, had had a fire alarm attached to the inside lever. But someone had managed to dislodge the mechanism. Karen and Lamar had found the door half open during their search of the storage room. Five overhead lights had been broken—and recently, too. Using Karen’s cell, Lamar had phoned Marco, the head of maintenance. Marco had been in the storage area shortly before going home at 2:00
P.M
. According to him, all the lights down there had been working fine three hours ago.
The outside stairwell to the basement was nearly hidden behind a row of bushes on the side of the long, two-story, beige brick building. But from where Karen stood, she had a clear view of the parking lot. The black Cadillac wasn’t there anymore.
Lamar nudged her. “So, are you going to call the police, Karen?” He spoke with a very crisp Jamaican accent.
Frowning, she shook her head. Even with her old connections on the force, she’d sound pretty stupid trying to explain what had happened. She’d followed someone down to the basement, to the storage room. She’d seen a man, but couldn’t really describe him. She’d heard a woman whispering to him. It had sounded like they’d planned to attack her or kill her—she couldn’t be sure. And oh, yes, one more thing: the young woman she’d followed down to the basement was a client, and a friend of hers.
“So, do you think you might have a stalker?” Lamar asked.
“I—I’m not sure,” she said, shrugging. She was thinking about last Saturday, when she’d spotted someone who looked like Amelia in the corridor outside her dad’s room.