Murder, Money, and Moving On Read online

  “What is this?” I asked, staring up at my arm.

  “It’s just a fracture, George,” the man explained. I recognized him finally as he came into focus. Ryan. “But they’re going to have to keep you in for a day or two because you hit your head pretty hard.”

  That explained the throbbing. I groaned. “I need to get out of here.” I couldn’t even recall why. I just knew that I had been in the middle of doing something very important. I couldn’t be stuck in this place, with my arm in a cast.

  Ryan completely ignored what I had said. “Do you remember what you were doing before you hit your head?” He looked down at me in a worried manner, like a parent looking down on a child. Which was strange, because he was younger than me.

  What was this, an interrogation? I looked at the uniform and badge and wondered if I was in trouble. Was I just in hospital, or was I also under arrest?

  And then I realized—no, I didn’t remember what I was doing before I ended up in the hospital. My heart started to race and I started to panic. “I—I don’t know…” No matter how fast my mind raced, I kept coming up against a black, brick wall. Thud.

  “You still remember your name though, right?” Ryan asked. He was looking over his shoulder for someone. Perhaps the nurse.

  “Yes. George,” I said, calming down. That was one fact that came to me quickly. “And I know who you are. Ryan.”

  He nodded, looking a little relieved. “That’s right,” he said with a smile, but it seemed to be covering up worry underneath. “And do you remember what town you’re in? What you do?”

  I frowned a little. “Yes.” I blinked a few times. I almost said ‘Paris,’ but that was where I had been before this. “Pottsville,” I said slowly. “And I own a craft store.”

  Color retuned to Ryan’s face and I knew I had said the right things.

  “You were up on the roof of your shop,” Ryan said gently. “And you took a fall off the side. You are lucky you escaped with only a fractured arm and a bump to the head.”

  I didn’t feel lucky.

  I frowned, but the very action hurt. “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “I know,” Ryan said, and he seemed to sigh. “It’s okay. You just shouldn’t have been doing that.” I got the feeling that I was in trouble for some reason. It was my roof, wasn’t it? Why couldn’t I be up there whenever I liked?

  “Why not?” I asked. The events—whatever had taken place before my being on the roof—were all a blank as well.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now,” Ryan said, patting my hand quickly before he pulled his away. “We need to decide what you are going to eat for the next few days.”

  He had the two paper menus in front of him. He told me that I needed to decide what I wanted for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for the next two days. “How about oatmeal for breakfast,” he suggested. “And then casserole for lunch. Those are good hearty meals to start off your day.” Everything sound unappetizing.

  I screwed up my nose. “No, none of it.”

  “You have to choose something,” Ryan said. “Either the casserole or the meatloaf.”

  Wasn’t this a hospital? Wasn’t it full of sick people? How did they expect people to stomach meatloaf for lunch? “The casserole,” I finally decided on. “And Jell-o for dessert. But I’m not going to eat it.”

  “You might have your appetite back by then. Hopefully.” Ryan made all the relevant ticks on the menu forms and placed them to the side where they would be collected by one of the staff members later.

  Once the menu business was all sorted, Ryan placed his hat on his head and leaned over to give me a kiss on the cheek. It was more of a platonic kiss than a romantic one. I tried to remember… Weren’t we more than just friends? That all seemed fuzzy as well. And I wasn’t sure it was just the bump on the head that made it seem that way.

  “You’re…you’re leaving?” I asked. I suddenly wished I had stretched out my decisions about the food a little longer. I didn’t want him to go.

  I could tell he was mad at me, but just pretending not to be because I was hurt. He was being nice, but he couldn’t entirely hide the fact that he was angry at me, no matter how nice he was acting. I just wish I could remember why he would be upset. Wasn’t I allowed to be on the roof of my own shop? What had I done that was so wrong?

  Oh, gosh.

  An image of a man’s body crashing through a roof came flooding back to me. That had something to do with it, I just knew it.

  “I have a busy shift ahead of me…” Ryan said apologetically. “I have to go.”

  “Please, Ryan, stay… I…I’m sorry for whatever it was that I did.”

  But he said he really had to leave. He promised he would be back to visit me in the morning when visiting hours started up again. He looked at his watch. “I am about to be kicked out here anyway,” he said. “Cathy is pretty strict about these things.” I assumed he must have been referring to the nurse with too much lipstick.

  “He was cute,” the nurse said, fluffing my pillow. I noticed that her name tag did indeed say Cathy.

  I smiled up at her. She was nice, despite her fluorescent lips and the fact that she was a little too strict about visiting hours. “Yes. He’s cute even when he’s mad.” That was very frustrating indeed.

  “Why would he be mad at you?” she asked, and she seemed genuinely interested. She stood up straight and grinned down at me. It was hard to judge her age through all her thick makeup. She was probably late thirties, even though she was only a trainee nurse. I supposed she was hoping for a late career change. I could understand. I had changed careers almost a dozen times in my 41 years. That was something else I could remember. My past, I could cling to. The present and the future? Well, that all looked pretty fuzzy.

  I frowned a little, only enough so that it didn’t hurt. Things were starting to come back to me. Not everything. I still couldn’t remember anything about my fall or why I had been on the roof. But just thinking about the roof triggered a slightly earlier memory. “Someone died…” I said quietly. “They fell through the roof! And I was trying to figure out who did it… Only I wasn’t supposed to.” Slivers of memories came rushing back to me so quickly it made my head hurt. Oh. That must have been why I was up there. Ryan was a cop. I was probably stepping on toes. His toes.

  “Someone died?” The nurse looked pale. Which I thought was a little strange, considering she must have come face to face with the dying every day.

  “Yes,” I said, staring up at her gravely. “And, Cathy, he didn’t just fall through the roof.” More and more was starting to come back to me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been sharing it with Cathy. I was just excited that my memory hadn’t been totally wiped by the bump to my head. “They were murdered.”

  She went even whiter.

  “Well, why on earth would anyone be mad with you for trying to solve who did it!”

  I shook my head. It didn’t make sense, looking on it from the outside. You would think that the cops would just be happy to know who the murderer was. But it didn’t work like that. They were only happy when they were the ones who figured it out.

  I couldn’t remember what had happened on that roof, but I knew I had been on the verge of discovering something. And this stupid fall had interrupted it.

  “I need to get out of here,” I said, pleading with Cathy. “Come on, you understand, don’t you?”

  I heard a buzzing noise and Cathy told me she had to go. “Another patient needs me…”

  “Please, before you go. Tell me how I get out of here?”

  “Well, you’re stuck here for a few days,” Cathy said, giving me a sympathetic look as she rushed off to attend to the buzzing. And so I was left there, on my own.

  I opened my eyes the next morning and was frustrated to see it hadn’t all been a bad dream.

  There was a phone next to my bed where I could take calls. They weren’t exactly pouring in, but I did get one. I hadn’t seen Brenda for days, but sh
e was doing me a huge favor. And I was forever grateful to her.

  “Jasper is doing just fine,” Brenda said. “And Casper as well. You don’t have to worry about them.”

  I sighed. She’d put my mind at ease—a little. Yes, I was sure they were alive and breathing, but were they happy? I wasn’t worried that Brenda would do anything to them or be negligent—she was a good pet owner with three cats of her own—just that Jasper and Casper would be confused about the stranger’s house they were in, and wanting to come home. So I was worried. Casper, my other dog, would be okay. I had been separated from Casper a few times, she was the more independent of the two, but Jasper and I did everything together and had never been separated for more than a day. He would be worried I had abandoned him, like his previous owner had done at the shelter. He probably thought he was stuck at Brenda’s house, with her rules about not going on the carpet, and the plastic over the furniture, and her small yard for the rest of his days. I mean, I know that dogs don’t really have a concept of time. But Jasper was a smart dog. Once he was there for a day or two, he would start to worry.

  “George?” Cathy said, sticking her head in. “How are you this morning?”

  “Bored,” I said. But I managed a lazy smile. It wasn’t her fault I was being held hostage.

  She was wearing even more lipstick than the day before. It was almost blinding, even in the relatively dark room. She came in and fluffed my pillows again and helped me to sit up. I hated the fact that I needed help.

  “Well, I have something that might change that,” she said as she cleared my tray away and took note of how much of my breakfast I had eaten. I felt a little sheepish as she looked at the completely empty bowl. It turned out I’d had a far more healthy appetite than I had predicted. And after all my whining about it, it also turned out that the hospital food wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected. The casserole the previous evening had actually been really delicious. Cathy told me that they did have fully qualified cooks in the kitchen.

  “Oh?” I asked. “And what might that be?”

  “A visitor,” Cathy said cheerily, and I felt relieved that Ryan had made good on his promise to return as soon as visiting hours were back. I even started to get a little excited. The morning wouldn’t seem so long if Ryan was here.

  “Oh, do you have any lipstick I can borrow?” I asked, sitting up as I caught sight of my pale face on the tray in front of me. From the looks of her lips, she may very well have used it all up already.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have any on me, but I don’t think this particular visitor will mind too much what you look like. She knows you’re in the hospital after all.” Cathy let out a little laugh. “She’s not going to expect you to be made-up.”

  My heart sunk a little. “She?” I asked, feeling disappointed. Looked like Ryan wasn’t back after all. Then my disappointment turned to confusion. Who was this mystery visitor then? It couldn’t have been Brenda because I’d just gotten off the phone with her and she was on her landline. I didn’t know many people in town and I only had a handful of female friends. And which of them knew that I was in the hospital?

  Cathy must have seen my confusion.

  “She says she’s an old friend of yours from out of town,” Cathy said brightly, pulling back the curtain. A shock of sunlight hit my eyes. “She’s very eager to speak with you.” Cathy winked at me and said she would leave me to it so that we had some privacy. “You can always hit the emergency button if you need me.”

  “Thank you.” I sat there nervously twiddling my thumbs. I could hear footsteps finally enter the room, but there was still a curtain around my bed that I couldn’t see through.

  Around walked a woman with pale skin and long, auburn hair that was slightly frizzy at the ends, like she’d had the hairdryer on too high. She was wearing a long, plum coat and a calm expression.

  I didn’t recognize her in the slightest. Was she really an old friend of mine? I reached up and touched where there was a bump on my head. This was a worry. Just which parts of my memory had been affected? I’d believed it was only the short-term I was meant to have lost.

  “Georgina?” she said. She didn’t sound entirely sure.

  I blinked a few times. Did she not recognize me either? Maybe we had both suffered knocks to the head.

  Or maybe I just didn’t look like myself.

  “Yes?” I said leaning back into my pillow as she walked further into the room. Getting slightly too close for comfort. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the button I was supposed to press if there was an emergency. Cathy had told me to use it any time.

  “That looks nasty,” she said, nodding toward my arm, which was still hooked up to a sling. Making me pretty much immobile. I wouldn’t be able to get up and run. Or fight back if I needed to. I kept glancing at the emergency button.

  I still hadn’t confirmed my name with her. But it was written on large letters on a sign on the side of my bed, along with my date of birth, and what medications I was on. The woman nodded. “It is you,” she said. She had a strange look on her face, as though she had been waiting a long time for this moment.

  “Who are you?” I asked quietly.

  “My name is Alice,” she said quietly. “And I think, Georgina, that we have one very important thing in common. That is what I am here to tell you about.” She stopped and took a deep breath, her hands in front of her like she was praying for a moment. “I just don’t think that you are going to like it.”

  5

  “Nurse, nurse!” I called out, frantically pushing the button. The emergency tone went off and I could hear footsteps racing down the hall toward my room.

  “What is it, George?” Cathy arrived breathless and with her pony tail scrunchy in her hand as she tried to tie her hair up. “Is it your head?” She looked frantically at my monitor to try and figure out what the emergency was. But no. It wasn’t that I had a bleeding skull. It was something far more serious. Cathy couldn’t see anything wrong from my monitor. That was because the problem was an external one.

  I shook my head and pointed to the intruder with my one good hand. “It is this woman,” I called out. “I want her removed from my room immediately! I want her removed from the entire hospital!”

  Alice shot Cathy an apologetic look. “I’m not sure what all this is about, nurse,” she said, her hands still clasped together. I wasn’t sure how she had the nerve to stand there, all good and proper like that, after what she had just told me.

  “Remove her!” I yelled. Why wasn’t Cathy listening to me?

  “George, let me get you a cup of ice chips.” Cathy tried to calm me down, but it did no good. I asked her to fetch security. I wanted Alice out and gone for good.

  “I am serious. I want security. Now.”

  Poor Cathy didn’t seem to know what to do. She looked at me then looked at Alice, and then froze. She wasn’t equipped to deal with this particular type of emergency.

  “It’s fine. I’ll go,” Alice said, her hands held up in mercy as she backed away from my bed. “But that doesn’t change what I just told you, Georgina. You are going to have to come face to face with this eventually!”

  “Do you need me to get the oxygen?” Cathy looked down at me, worried.

  She had a point, I did seem to be having problems breathing, but I didn’t need the oxygen mask.

  “What I need is to get out of this place,” I said, trying to pull my arm free of the sling where it was still both tied up and attached to a drip. I managed to unhook it, and to pull the needle out. I tried to stand up, ignoring the headache that I’d had for two days.

  “George, I can’t let you do that,” Cathy said, trying to restrain me. “Now, I don’t have to go and get the doctor, do I?” She stood back. “Or this security that you have been asking for?”

  I shook my head and sat back, but in my mind, I was already trying to figure out other ways to escape. I would have to wait until Cathy was gone. Or maybe wait until Ryan cam
e back—he would help me. Of course, I could always phone my ex-husband. But with the event that was drawing near, I really, really didn’t want to do that.

  “What did that woman say to you?” Cathy asked as she inspected my arm and made sure that it was okay before she put it back through the sling. She reattached the drip, this time finding the vein with relative ease. “She didn’t threaten you, did she?”

  Oh, she had more than threatened me. I could feel my whole face burning as I looked at Cathy and told her what Alice’s visit had all been about.

  “She is trying to take my dog from me!”

  I pushed the tray away. Suddenly, the hospital food wasn’t just unappetizing, it was downright disgusting. “Come on. You’re acting like a child.”

  Ryan had turned up, but an hour after visiting time had officially started. I supposed I should have been grateful he even turned up at all. But I knew that by arriving late, he was trying to make a point. And I was in no mood for it. I had just received the worst news of my life. Jasper’s old owner. Back to claim him as her own.

  The stew in front of me was growing cold and it had far too many herbs and spices in it. Wasn’t hospital food supposed to be bland? Too salty as well. The sauce around it was starting to congeal. I put the lid back on it and shook my head while Ryan sighed at my insolence.

  “You need to try and get some protein into you,” Ryan said. “At least try the ice cream.” He dug the spoon into the ice cream and snaked it toward my mouth like I was a child.

  I crossed my arms and kept my mouth in a firm hard line just like I was one.

  “Just one spoonful and then I will put it away,” Ryan promised. I took one mouthful of ice cream, but it didn’t taste sweet at all. It was sour. Ryan shook his head. “I think your taste buds are just messed up. Might have something to do with your head injury.”

  “She can’t take Jasper from me,” I said. “I can’t let her.”