Wicked as They Come

I tucked her into bed and wrapped my arms around her. My heart tugged, as it always did, when I felt how frail she was getting, how narrow her shoulders seemed. She had always been solid, a rock of comfort and warmth who had eclipsed my distant mother and overly busy father in my heart. But I couldn’t escape the fact that she was losing her battle, and nothing in the world could help her.

After I walked out her door, I was all business. I drove to the library and waited my turn for a free computer. I typed “helping hands homecare” into the search engine, and on the second page, I found it. The same logo from the van in my glance of Jonah Goodwill, two hands forming a heart. Luckily, they weren’t far enough away to get me on a plane, but the two-hundred-mile drive to Greenville was going to take much longer than I would have liked. I scribbled down the number.

Alone in my car, I made the call. The night nurse said, “Helping Hands Homecare, we bring the care to you. This is Terry Ann.” She sounded bored. I could almost hear her doing a crossword with her TV on low volume in the background.

“Hi there, Terry Ann,” I said with the kind of smile that travels through phone lines. “I’m so sorry to bother you tonight, but I’m a nurse at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, and I’ve got a patient named Louise Shepherd who’s on her last legs, and she’s trying to find a Mr. Grove somewhere near Greenville. She said that he’s on home care after a head injury, and he’s one of your clients. Is there any way you could help me find him?”

“Ma’am, we don’t release the personal information of our patients,” she droned.

“I understand that, and I’m so sorry to ask, but I promised her I’d try. I’ve been taking care of her for a few weeks, and her mind comes and goes, and Mr. Grove is all she ever talks about. She can’t even remember his first name, and she doesn’t seem to understand that he’s unresponsive. But she wanted to give him a keepsake, her husband’s Purple Heart from the war. Maybe I could mail it to you, and you could give it to him?”

There was a pause, and I could hear her reserve crumbling. That sounded like a lot of work, and she’d like to get rid of me, but as a nurse, I understood how these things worked. Nurses work in nursing because they like helping people, after all.

“Honey, I ain’t supposed to do this,” she said, her voice low. “But my grandfather had a Purple Heart, too, and I know what a big deal that is to old folks. I believe you’re talking about Mr. Jonathan Grove of 1655 Sycamore Lane in Anderson. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Oh, thank you so much!” I gushed. “You have just made my night and her year. She’ll be able to go to her eternal rest now.”

“Good luck, ma’am, and God bless,” she said before hanging up.

I felt a little bad for heartlessly killing the fictitious Louise Shepherd, but it was for a good cause. And I was pretty sure she didn’t feel a thing.

I programmed the address into my GPS and started driving. I listened to my favorite CDs and enjoyed the safety and silence of my world, my car a little fortress of solitude. I thought through the plan over and over again in my head, trying to work out every detail. For all of his own planning, Jonah Goodwill had missed a lot of details himself, and I wondered if his mind was slipping. He was a man of power and influence, but doctors didn’t seem to exist in Sang. Maybe he was suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s, something they would have caught in my world. Or maybe he’d just started out plumb crazy.

It was pitch dark as I zoomed over the state line. I navigated past fields and strip malls and trailer parks until I turned onto Sycamore Lane. The country road was long and barely lit and lonely, but I eventually saw the brick wall from my glance, lit up by fancy yard lights. The matching brick house was needlessly huge, and I imagined that the lawn-care staff was even more extensive than the one at Eden House in Sang.

All that trouble for a vegetable who’d never wake up. What a waste.

I stopped in a dark spot a hundred yards away and straightened my scrubs. I put my ID badge into the glove compartment and tucked the locket under my shirt. I didn’t know who would be in the house, whether a nurse stayed around the clock or Mr. Goodwill had a housekeeper or a housesitter or an entire extended family. I just had to hope that whoever it was wasn’t very bright. Or nosy.

For the tenth time, I checked to make sure that I had all the supplies I needed in my tote bag before I rolled the car into the driveway. No Helping Hands van, which was good. A layperson would be much easier to deal with. Before knocking on the door, I put on my brightest smile.

Time to channel the talented and charismatic Lady Letitia Paisley.

The first knock didn’t raise anybody, so I rang the doorbell. There was movement within, and the porch lights came on, nearly blinding me. And then I heard a click I’d heard only in movies, and the door opened, and I was staring into the barrel of a shotgun. After all, it was the middle of the night on a lonely road in the country.

“Can I help you?” said a teenage boy in an open bathrobe and boxer shorts. His glasses were smudged, and there were Cheetos crumbs clinging sadly to a couple of hairs above his lip.

I looked over the gun and smiled nervously.

“Hi. Did Terry Ann at Helping Hands tell you I would be coming? I’m Carrie, and I have Mr. Grove’s medicine.”

The shotgun dropped, and the boy sniffed. “Nobody called. Sorry ’bout the gun. It’s late.”

“I know it is,” I said apologetically. I held my tote bag open and said, “I’m just filling in. His usual nurse forgot to switch out the IV bag, and they also wanted to start him on IV Zosyn. It’s an antibiotic. It’ll just take me a minute.”

The sullen boy opened the door, and I stepped into a beautiful marble foyer with the sort of curving staircase that must come equipped with at least one debutante in a white dress.

“Thanks,” I said. “Are you Mr. Grove’s grandson?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m Toby. We all take turns staying over here, because Grampa’s lawyer’s too cheap to hire somebody. At least he’s got good cable.”

“You’re a good boy to take care of your grandfather,” I said.

“I never even met him,” the boy said. He shuffled over to loaf on a long corner sofa in the next room and turned on the TV. “He’s been out for, like, twenty years.”

He sat down with his back to me and started switching channels, adding, “He’s upstairs in the big room.”

I walked up the curving staircase and padded down the deep carpet to the only door with a light shining inside. On the way, I didn’t pass a single family photograph or heirloom. The house reminded me of something set up for a magazine. Some obsessively neat aunt probably hired a decorator every five years or so to redo the whole place around the softly breathing man in the bedroom, who never even knew what the walls looked like.

The door was ajar, and I slipped in. There he was, lying in the bed I’d seen in my glance. He was propped up with pillows, and his mustache and hair were carefully trimmed. Even his pajamas were crisp, although I thought it ironic that the top button was unbuttoned, which could never happen in Sang. The room was warm and stuffy, and there was nothing personal, not a single memento. In the background, the radio hummed old-fashioned hymns.

No wonder the old man in Sang was crazy.

I walked to the window, which was covered by thick, light-blocking draperies. Peeking out, I had déjà vu, even though it was nighttime. That glorious magnolia reigned over the walled-in garden, sister to the greenspace behind Eden House. The man simply could not let go of his old life. I opened the drapes all the way. The waxy white blooms glowed in the moonlight, and I wondered if Mr. Goodwill shivered in Sang, thinking that a goose had walked over his grave as he kept vigil over my body and Criminy’s fury.

Back to my patient. He had a port in his chest for the IV, and I had to unbutton his pajama top to get to it. Luckily, the IV bag was nice and full, so I had plenty of time; his real nurse must have left recently. I leaned out through the doorway and heard Toby open a soft-drink can and collapse on the couch. Then I heard soft moans. Excellent—careless, hormonal grandson plugged into Cinemax. I closed the door gently and locked it, then turned on the overhead light.

With loving precision, I laid out my supplies on the bed.

36

The timing had to be just right.

Step One: Prepare the syringe, draw up 250 units of Mrs. Henderson’s pilfered insulin, and inject it into Mr. Grove’s IV line.

Step Two: Use the baby butterfly needle to draw a tube of my own blood.

Mr. Goodwill didn’t know that nothing translated from world to world except my body and the locket. I couldn’t bring over a syringe or a cup or a finger in a baggie, per his instructions.

Step Three: Stuff everything back into the bag, lie down on my back on the floor, and pour the syringe of my own blood into my mouth.

I really didn’t like Step Three.

Step Four: Let my complete exhaustion overtake me in sleep.

I’d considered taking meds to induce my rest, but I didn’t want to lie around on the floor, drugged up at his bedside, when I came back. Getting out of that house without real-world consequences was going to take my best acting performance yet.

Excited as I was, I knew that sleep would claim me as quickly as ever.

Step Five: Hope that my mouth stayed shut when I went unconscious.

Step Six: Pray that my cockamamie plan worked.

37

My eyes flickered open, and I fought the urge to spew blood all over the place. Somehow I managed to keep my lips together and my cheeks puffed. I sat up and found Criminy across the dark room. The curtains were drawn closed, and brilliant sunlight burned around the edges. Jonah Goodwill slumped at my bedside, snoring through his mustache.

Criminy’s eyes were wide and panicky, his mouth still stuffed with a handkerchief. When he saw that I was conscious, I gave him an exaggerated wink and tried to ease myself silently off the bed. It creaked, and Goodwill startled awake. I sank back down and tried to look pained.