Chapter 14 #2
“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, and I 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 obviously was taking 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 say good hands, but that wasn’t quite true.
He was in hands.” 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 life so much easier.
If the night nurse cancelled, they’d be 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.
Well, not quite nothing, but nothing they were looking for.
The top, nearly flat center drawer held only a yellow post-it note with what appeared to be the wifi password, but the drawer on the top left held personal care items—a hairbrush and comb, an electric razor, an electric toothbrush, a tube of lip balm, nose-hair scissors, toenail clippers, and emery boards.
“Shit,” Sam breathed.
“Yeah,” Jules agreed.
“All hiring decisions had to cross his desk,” Rene ranted on as Jules was carefully thorough, pulling the drawers all the way out in case something slender—like an address book—had slipped down behind them, “so it really was his own blasted fault that I was there instead of the nurse on the night Mr. Devonshire passed. Frankly, I was exhausted, so yes, I broke one of Mr. Harper’s precious rules and called for an ambulance instead of following his ridiculous protocol of notifying Mr. Spencer, which didn’t make sense even when I wasn’t bone-tired.
Mr. D was gone—it was not a matter of getting in a team of paramedics as quickly as possible to revive him.
The man had breathed his last. And since Mr. Spencer wasn’t in his apartment.
.. I made the call. I thought it was disrespectful for Mr. D’s body to just..
. lie there unattended until God knows when Mr. Spencer returned. ”
There was definitely something Sam had missed—like what rule of Harper’s said what about the security head—Spencer—and calling an ambulance...?
But now Rene was tsking again as she took in the bed and the medical equipment.
“I was hoping this would be gone by now. Emily Johnson, bless her heart, doesn’t need to be reminded that a man died in this room.
Peacefully, for sure—I can vouch for that.
I’ve suggested—a number of times—that it all be donated.
There’s a world of people out there who could use it, but for some reason, Mr. Harper doesn’t want to let it go.
To be fair, I guess he’s got... other things to deal with. ”
She really was a master at passive aggression.
Sam did a slow 360, looking around the large room.
Other than the books, the room held no paper. No filing cabinets, no stack of boxes marked “personal,” no scripts or notes from long-ago projects, absolutely nothing of that kind.
That was still weird, as Jules had called it last night—and was maybe even weirder in here. But sure, okay. The wildfires that now regularly plagued SoCal could be intense—although the books on the shelves hadn’t been removed.
So... massive stroke three years ago, at which point the on-site housekeeper had either quit—the story that Rene still seemed to believe—or been fired—the story Helen had told them last night.
And after that, nurses and housekeepers had been coming and going through a very active revolving door, albeit tightly gate-kept by Harper.
“Did any of the staff stay on,” Jules asked Rene, clearly onboard Sam’s very train of thought, “after the stroke three years ago?”
“That’s a question for Paula or Cathy,” Rene said, “I forget which one was first, but I seriously doubt it because, what staff? I think Mr. D might’ve had a driver before the stroke, but aside from the housekeeper, I think that was it.
As long as I’ve been here landscaping’s been contracted out, but even that’s been minimal, which is a shame.
There was a new garden bed with flowers put in right about the time I started, which seemed odd because mulching’s more of a spring thing.
” She shrugged. “I mean, it was August, did they really think petunias would survive the heat? I thought either copious amounts of water or a complete conversion to xeriscaping would make the garden more pleasant for Mr. D to sit out there, but Mr. Harper informed me that that was not my purview. I was in charge of food, cleaning, and scheduling the nurses and caregivers that he hired. In other words, stay in my lane. Still, I brought it up repeatedly—it just became another thing that he and I argued about endlessly. That, and the need for hazard pay. I mean, if the estranged son was such a dire threat to require a team of around-the-clock armed guards...”
“His son was a threat?” Jules pushed, looking over at Sam as if making sure he was awake for this.
He absolutely was, but after a day spent knocking on random Emilys doors, with the additional pain of Dead Milt’s sole friend going toes up mere moments before they’d had a chance to talk to the man, there wasn’t much that would surprise him.
“Apparently his son threatened to kill him,” Rene said.