Although the guardsdidcome in handy for the several times a week that Rene and the nurses wrestled the old man into a wheelchair to allow him several hours in the sun at—she paused dramatically—Mr. Harper’s request.
And it sure as shit sounded like Rene had a boatload of distaste forMisterHarper even though they were kindred spirits in their unrestrained judgy disapproval.
Jules, wise man that he was, was simply standing by and letting Rene word-vomit.
It was hard to know for sure (pause for silent drumroll) if Mr. Devonshire enjoyed his time outside in the garden—or if he truly liked having the TV on in his room all day, but Mr. Harper insisted on that, as well. And with the volume up high?—
Wait a minute... Sam roused himself from his day-of-disappointments stupor to clear his throat and ask...
“I’m sorry.” Jules was already efficiently on top of it. “But Mr. Devonshire wasn’t able to communicate with you?”
“Oh, bless your heart, no,” Rene said. “He’d had a massive stroke—it was a miracle he'd survived for three years after, with all the damage done. At his age? Especially with no familiar faces around him. He was estranged from his son, and even his longtime housekeeper abandoned him after the stroke—Helen Davis—not Johnson or even Emily, sorry. Apparently she didn’t want the responsibility of managing his care.” She tsked and sighed. “Which I thought was a little cold since she’d been here for at least twenty years prior, and even lived on site. I mean, whatever happened to loyalty? Ofcourse, maybe it was just time for her to retire. To be fair, I never met her. Or Cathy or Paula. They were the housekeepers employed before me.”
Jules had started walking, gently herding her back toward the locked library door, but now he stopped, stuck back on... “Massivestroke?” The moment he could get a word in edgewise, he repeated her words. “Unable to walk or communicate at all? For the whole nine months of your employment?”
“Bed bound,” she confirmed. “Completely. For well over three years, in fact. He had a bedsore that must’ve started during his initial hospital stay, right after the stroke. It was quite an ugly wound, even all those years later. It required the nursing team to shift his position every two hours, day and night. Which they most certainly did undermywatch.”
Jules flipped back a few pages in his notebook. “We spoke to Helen Davis—for the record, she absolutely wanted to stay. She’d lived here, for decades, and said she had to move out to make room for the new housekeeper. She was told—” he found the page he was looking for “—because of the stroke, Mr. Devonshire would be using a walker, and he’d need additional physical support that due to her age and some issues she’d been having with back pain, would make it impossible for her to continue in the position.”
Rene was shaking her head. “Maybe I got it wrong,” she said with the attitude of a person who never got anything wrong. “But I don’t think he was ever able to walk again, not even with a walker. I mean, we had all kinds of mobility assistance devices, but when I arrived, more than two years in, they were all still brand new. The wheels on those things wear down pretty quickly.” She shrugged. “One thing’s for sure, this job does not go well with back pain, so I do sympathize with her about that.”
“I can only imagine,” Jules said as they once again madetheir way toward the big wooden door to the library—the one room they hadn’t been able to access yesterday.
“As for Helen—and Cathy and Paula, for that matter—I really only know their names by chance. There were no notes, no phone calls, not so much as a single text to let me know things like Mr. Devonshire seems to enjoy butterscotch pudding or his favorite socks are the green ones, which seemed... inexcusable.” But she immediately flipped. “Still. In some ways, it was nice to be able to run the place with my own set of rules. Well, mostly. There were a few biggies that came with the job.” She laughed again, but there was no humor in it. “I think I ended up breaking all of them. Including by coming back here today. The severance package was contingent upon not returning. Ever. Which seemed so cold. But since I seem to not have gotten the severance package, and since you’re working with Mr. Harper,andI seem to have taken the only key to the library when I went home that last day, although how that could be is beyond me... I’ll let you return it to Mr. Harper. He's been... less than pleasant. Of course, he was close to Mr. D for decades, and he's surely grieving, so... I’m not taking it personally.”
She so obviouslywastaking it personally, but Jules accepted her statement without bursting into laughter.
“Since I’ve already misunderstood a lot of what I was told,” he said with his usual self-effacing charm. “I just want to verify—you don’t live on the premises. Or rather, you didn’t before Mr. Devonshire passed...?”
“That is correct,” Rene said as she unlocked the door. “There is a housekeeper’s apartment on the premises, but that was occupied by the head of security. Mr. Spencer. I don’t think he lived there full-time, but he certainly stayed there often enough. I had to stay in the nurse’s quarters in the event of doing an overnight, which wasn’t all that comfortable.”
Jules opened his mouth to speak but she wasn’t finished.
“My hours were supposed to be strictly eight to five-thirty. I usually left as soon as I cleaned up after dinner. Which we serve—served—punctually at four-thirty every day. I was on call, of course, in case any major problems arose in the night, but between the night nurse and the security team, Mr. Devonshire was in... Well, I was going to saygoodhands, but that wasn’t quite true. He was inhands.” She laughed again as she somewhat ceremoniously handed the key to Jules before pushing the heavy door open. “Assuming, of course, that the night nurse showed up. Since January, there’d been a lot of no-shows.”
The door she’d unlocked led into a large library, with gorgeous floor to ceiling wooden bookshelves and enormous windows that were blocked by cheap and ugly room-darkening shades.
“How did you handle that?” Jules asked as she crossed the room to pull them up.
Damn, this room was huge.
Light from the back garden flooded the large space. It was, without a doubt, the nicest room in the house. If Sam were bedbound, he’d want his bed put in here, too.
Thousands of books were on the shelves, and a small sitting area with a sofa and a matching pair of easy chairs—a little tired-looking against all that rich, gleaming wood—was set up near the door, in front of a rubble-rock fireplace. Over the mantle, on one of the very few wall-spaces not covered by shelves, was a large framed photo—a gorgeous aerial shot of the estate at sunset.
But the desk in which Helen had told them Milt the Senior had kept his calendar and address books—leather bound—was no longer in the center of the room as she’d described.
“I stayed and got overtime,” Rene said. “And argued a lot with Mr. Harper. About needing a bigger budget. I mean, you get what you pay for, and nobody pays nurses enough. That was probably the start of the... friction between Mr. Harper and myself. It escalated when I pushed to get full discretion over who got hired. I still don’t know why it was such a big deal to him—he insisted on personally meeting every single candidate, even the home health aides.”
The center of the big room held a stripped down and empty hospital bed—the kind that could be raised and lowered, with guard rails to keep the patient from falling out. An array of medical equipment—monitors and IV type devices, all shut down and quiet now—surrounded the head of the bed. At the foot was a low table that held a sixty-inch TV—not the biggest in the world, but certainly big enough considering its proximity to the bed.
“He wouldn’t let me use a nursing service,” the housekeeper continued her soliloquy about the trials and tribulations of working for Ernest Harper, “which would’ve made lifesomuch easier. If the night nurse cancelled,they’dbe responsible for sending a replacement out, but no. He wouldn’t budge on that. No one came in without his clearance. It was... unsustainable.”
In the far corner of the room were several different models of wheelchairs and what looked like a variety of walkers and other mobility aids, along with—yes! There was the desk. It had been pushed off to the side where its broad surface was being used to hold bed pans and other medical supplies.
Jules was already over there, opening first the top drawer and then the others, as Sam, too, looked over his shoulder to see...
Nothing.
