Murder Never Forgets Read Online Free Page B

top of his egg and worries about the eye: “It represents eternal renewal, did you remember? An image of hope, of course.” Snap, off comes the top of the egg. “You know, I think I am in danger.”
    “Surely not, Daddy.” This has to be more of Mrs. Dexter’s paranoia. “The Manor,” I enthuse, “such a safe place.” I gesture at his small-paned, mullioned window, elegantly old-fashioned.
    “Hmmm,” says my father. “They may send me somewhere to keep me safe.”
    I don’t like this talk one bit, but I decide the way to handle it is to ignore it. I kiss him and position him in his easy chair in front of the TV, and by the time I leave for my appointment with Manor administration he seems perfectly all right, clucking over the timber construction of the prairie mansion in This Old House .
     
The appointment with Manor administration is the one where I’m supposed to discuss what to do with my father.
    They want to send him off to Hope House, and I want them not to. It seems to me that he has paid for the luxury of residence in the good parts of the Manor, and he should have that for a long while more.
    Manor administration is a lady named Mrs. Sisal, who has an asymmetrical haircut and is wearing a long-waisted black suit. She focuses on me in her lozenge-shaped glasses and lets me know that I am famous. “Excellent thinking last night,” she says. “Admirable.” She sounds as if it hurts to say these things. “We are going to have to give Mrs. Dexter medication lessons,” she adds right away, being the kind of administrator who needs to balance any nice thing she accidentally does with a mean one.
    I ask, “Medication lessons?” and she agrees, “Yes, of course,” and goes on to explain: “We have had many clients—the people we work with here are not patients , Miss Day, but clients —we’ve had many clients who did that. Forgot. Tried to swallow a pill inside its aluminum casing.”
    I’m lost here. “A pill in an aluminum casing?”
    Mrs. Sisal moves her head irritatedly. “Some of the medications are arranged on an aluminum-covered card. You have to separate the sections, which are sharp. And after that, you must pry the pill out.”
    “And you think she tried to swallow it, piece of card and all?”
    “Certainly she did. There’s no other explanation for those throat abrasions. And this client has had medication problems before; when she had pneumonia, she could not keep straight the rules about when to take calcium and when to take Cipro.”
    So Mrs. Dexter is being blamed for cutting her own throat with a pill casing; that certainly will take care of any ideas she might get about lawsuits. I feel a flood of anger that I can’t let show because Mrs. Sisal is moving on to the business of the day, hassling me about my father.
    “Embarrassing for him, too,” she says, and “He wanders, he calls out, he is distressed, he is upset, Miss Day, more upset than we find useful. Perhaps he would be happier in Hope House? Hope House,” she gets a fashionable pointytoed foot over the edge of her file drawer, “is our comfortable, controlled facility.”
    I work hard at looking unfazed; I smile gently. It doesn’t do to go weak with these bullying types. The question of who moves to Hope House and who gets to stay here in overstuffed luxury will probably be settled by Mrs. Sisal. “My father has been a very famous man,” I remind her.
    Both she and I know that famous once-upon-a-time has nothing to do with Alzheimer’s now but the reminder works just the same. She relaxes a bit, the glasses turn to their admit light mode; she likes the idea of fame and agrees, “We have many famous people at the Manor.”
    It’s at this point that it happens. The Devil makes me do it. I open my mouth and out it comes. I accomplish something that is totally outrageous and apparently unplanned, although later when I stop and review, I realize that I have indeed been planning toward it.
    I ask Mrs. Sisal