Dying Wishes

No. 5 in The Kate Lawrence Mysteries: Kate’s turning 50, and as if that weren’t depressing enough, she’s about to become a grandmother—twice. Her investigation of a mysterious death at the Vista View retirement complex opens her eyes to the new realities of aging, some of which send her reeling. What really happened to the wealthy, tennis-playing cougar in Building One? Are residents covering up a sex-for-hire scandal? Will Kate’s longtime friend lose her job as Vista View’s business manager? Kate makes it her business to discover the truth—or die trying. Proceeds from all online sales benefit Our Companions Domestic Animal Sanctuary.

Dying Wishes

by

Judith K.
Ivie

Mainly Murder Press, LLC

Wethersfield, CT 06129-0586

www.mainlymurderpress.com

One

 
“There comes a morning in every woman’s life,”
I said to
Strutter
on the telephone, “when she looks
into the mirror and knows precisely what she’ll look like if she makes it to
the age of eighty. Lines, pouches, droopy bits—they’re all there, lurking just
below the surface, waiting to erupt at the slightest provocation. I won’t need
to wear a mask this Halloween. A pointy hat and a broom, and I’ll be the
perfect old hag.”

I squinted at my
reflection in the hand mirror and stuck out my tongue.

“The approach of
the big five-o has got you down, huh? Well, I’m afraid I can’t relate. Not only
am I a full seven years younger than you are, but we women of color age
undetectably, or hadn’t you heard? It’s you pigmentation-challenged Caucasians
who dry up in your fifties, Katie girl.” The twinkle in her Jamaican lilt
softened her unsympathetic words. “Not that you could prove that by Margo,” she
added as a final dig.

Margo
Harkness
was our third partner and a few years into her
fifties, an apparently ageless blonde beauty.

“That’s a Southern
thing.
Comes in the gene pool right along with the drawl and
the debutante’s guidebook.
So what’s on your agenda today?” I turned the
mirror face down on my bed and reached for my cooling coffee.

“Nothing
very exciting, although grocery shopping with a two-year-old does have its
heart-stopping moments.
She chuckled. “Thank goodness Charlie has a game after
school. I can plop myself in a lawn chair and hand Olivia over to that gaggle
of fourteen-year-old girls who think she’s just the cutest thing ever.”

“She is the cutest
thing ever, and it doesn’t hurt a bit that her big brother is the emerging star
of Wethersfield High’s soccer team.”

“Oh, Lord, don’t
remind me. It’s only October, and I already wish the school year were over.
Those girls are absolutely stalking him. If he’s not on
Facebook
,
he’s got that damned cell phone clamped to his ear, or he’s hammering away at a
text message. I swear
,
none of them will have
functional thumb joints by the time they’re thirty. What’s your plan for
today?”

I sighed.
“Vista View.
I told Margo I’d take her days this month as
well as mine. She has a ton of new listings to show, and I told her I’d
finalize the sale on Mrs.
Roncaro’s
unit. Her death
was quite a surprise. She seemed just fine the last time I saw her.
Such a nice lady.”

Vista View is a
retirement community
repped
by our firm, Mack Realty.

“Tomorrow, I’m
going to stop by to see the
Henstock
sisters.
Ada
telephoned me, and I haven’t seen them in a while. I
think they may want to check out the retirement complex. Even that little Cape
we sold them behind the Silas Robbins House is getting to be too much for them,
I think, so I want to tell them about Vista View, if they’re looking at
options.”
Ada
and
Lavinia
are sisters, former clients and now good friends who live near the Wethersfield
Green on Broad Street, right around the corner from our office.

 
“Seeing them will probably do your silly age
funk good. Those old gals are what, eighty-something?
And
still interested in the opposite sex, if
Lavinia’s
reaction to Margo’s husband is any indication.”
Lieutenant John
Harkness
, AKA Margo’s husband, had taken charge of an
investigation involving the sisters some two years previously.

I emptied my mug
and eased out from under my ancient cat Jasmine, who considered me her personal
heat source.
Her housemate Gracie, a young ginger cat,
slitted
her eyes at me from the foot of the bed.
I
had lingered under the covers long enough that they had assumed it was a
weekend morning and settled in.

“Let’s face it.
Women of any age respond to a man as good looking as Margo’s husband,” I said,
reflecting upon our previous experiences with
Ada
and
Lavinia
, “but
Lavinia
did
have a habit of blushing whenever John was around, as I recall. Anyway,
gotta
go.
Pinch Olivia’s fat cheeks for
me.”

“Will do,”
Strutter
promised and rang off.

Despite my later
than usual start, I could hear Armando’s shower running upstairs. His work
schedule at
TeleCom
International required a good
deal of international travel and lots of overtime, so he could pretty well
start and end his days in the office when he chose. That suited my Colombian
husband’s casual relationship with time very well, although it made me
a little nuts
. I headed for my own downstairs bathroom and
hoped there was still enough hot water for my shower.

It isn’t so much
the age, I mused as I rinsed shampoo out of my hair under a stinging spray.
It’s the unavoidable significance that gets attached to birthdays ending in
zeros. The beginning of yet another decade of life, they seem to shout, and a
lot more water has gone under the bridge. For women, these announcements have a
lot to do with physical appearance. Even an attractive
woman,
and I’m happy to say I do have my good points, gets labeled differently as the
years roll by. She’s “a pretty young thing” in her twenties and “still very
youthful” in her forties but only “well preserved, considering her age” by the
time she hits fifty. After that, “still takes care of herself, bless her” is
about all she can hope for.

I toweled off and
blew dry and moisturized, then spent my customary two minutes with the mirror,
applying the workday amenities of mascara, lipstick and a little blusher.
“Still very youthful,” I muttered defiantly, struggling into pantyhose and the
pencil skirt and tunic that would get me through the day in comfort, if not the
height of elegance. Small gold hoops in my ears, and I was done. At the last
second, I dabbed a few more drops of firming serum onto my chin and neck.
Couldn’t hurt, might help.

“Good morning,
Cara
, did you sleep well?” said Armando
from the hall as I hastily made my bed. He stood in the bedroom doorway,
impeccably turned out for his work day, as always. Not especially tall, but
undeniably dark and handsome, he was fastidious about his personal appearance
and always a sight worth seeing. Unfortunately, that orderliness didn’t extend
to his bedroom and bathroom which were, to put it kindly, a perpetual mess.

I yanked the
comforter smooth and turned to give him a smile. The sight of him caused all
the usual stirrings, so evidently there was some life in the old girl yet. Both
cats dropped all pretense of feline aloofness and churned around his ankles,
purring and nudging, as they vied for his attention.

“Apparently, your Latino
appeal extends to females of all species,” I noted, and he obliged the hairy
ones with a
scritch
apiece. I inhaled his clean,
soapy scent as I leaned in for a kiss.

“I am very glad to
hear that.” His hand wandered from my waist, and I slapped it away lightly.

“Off to work with
you. I’m running late for Vista View, and I still have to feed the beasts.” I
wiped a smudge of my lipstick from the corner of his mouth and patted his butt.
“Go.” He went.

A few minutes later
I got on the road as well. Instead of following my usual route to Old
Wethersfield, where Mack Realty had its offices on Old Main Street, I turned
right out of The Birches’ entrance road and made my way down Prospect Street to
Collier, where the Vista View complex was located.
 
The signs of autumn were everywhere, in the
gardens that were lush with fall blooms, in the property repairs being made in
preparation for a New England winter, and the pumpkins and pots of colorful
mums on every front stoop. Within half a mile I passed a painter on a ladder,
tending to the window trim on an already tidy looking Colonial; roofers
repairing shingles atop a sprawling ranch; a young man in earphones operating a
roaring leaf blower; and an elderly woman on her knees, energetically tidying
her perennial border.

I parked my car in
a visitor slot and hefted my briefcase over the gearshift console. Never
without a full complement of file folders and papers, it weighed about twice as
much as usual today, stuffed as it was with rental agreement forms, sales brochures
and price sheets. By the time I reached the entrance of Building One, which
housed the administrative offices and dining facilities for the complex, I was
puffing. Yet another sign of advancing age, I reflected sourly.

As I paused to
catch my breath, I looked around at the other buildings. Several surrounded a
tasteful green, and carefully meandering roads led to similar groupings set
farther from Collier Road.
 
From the
outside they all looked similar, like expensively constructed and maintained
residential housing, but I knew that each one served a specific purpose in the
hierarchy of caring for the elderly. The clusters farther removed were indeed
elegant housing units of all configurations—garden apartments, townhouses, and
even freestanding units—and were rented or owned by the not-yet-retired or
newly retired who still enjoyed good health and mobility. Phase One-
ers
, the developers labeled them.
 

Phase Two
facilities were located closer to the main road and consisted of one-bedroom
units discreetly equipped with bells, buzzers and other devices that allowed
their residents to call for help, should they require it. Housekeeping services
were available to Phase Two-
ers
, as well as communal
dining in Building One if they wished to avail themselves of regularly provided
group meals that were both nourishing and appealing.

Phase Three
residents were essentially nursing home patients and enjoyed the best
round-the-clock personal care services that money could buy. It wasn’t anything
to look forward to, exactly, but it was the reason that most residents signed
up for a Vista View unit to begin with. While enjoying the amenities of Phase
One and Phase Two, they knew Phase Three was waiting. It was comforting, I
supposed, to know that one need do nothing but slip quietly into an adjoining
building to accomplish the transition. I imagined myself, the advancing years
robbing me of my mobility and independence, and felt inexpressibly sad. Vista
View was my job today. Was it also my future?

A blue Audi slid
smoothly into a parking space, and an exuberant foursome in tennis whites burst
from its interior. They still glistened genteelly from what must have been an
early morning session on the courts.
 
They headed for the front door of Building One and, presumably, the
snack bar. “Your game is really improving,” one of the men, sleek with good
health, threw over his shoulder at his companions. “You two almost got us
today. We’ll have to put in some extra practice time with the pro, right, Jan?”
He poked the trim lady at his side, and she giggled.

“I’ll be glad to
spend extra time with Anthony anytime for any reason,” she agreed.
 
She yanked open the heavy glass door and
swept through, winking at her friends. The general banter continued as they
made their way through the immaculate lobby, and I found myself smiling as I
trailed after them, lugging my paperwork. Apparently, this aging business had
some positive aspects.

It was an exquisite
fall day, and prospects were few and far between. By mid-morning I was drumming
my fingers on the desk in front of me and waiting to have lunch with Ginny
Preston, Vista View’s business manager. The small conference area to one side
of the lobby, where Mack Realty customarily set up shop, allowed me to see who
was coming and going “without being intrusive to our guests,” as Ginny had
phrased it.
 
Over the years Ginny had
become a good friend. We often swapped stories over coffee or lunch on my days
here. Ginny worked mostly by herself, poring over her computer and ledgers, so
she welcomed the break, and I enjoyed a little conversation with someone my own
age. Margo,
Strutter
and I alternated our Vista View
duty, so Ginny and
I
 
always
had lots to talk about.

Drop-ins dwindled
to nonexistent, and I still had an hour to kill. Ginny had left a couple of
telephone messages from the weekend on the desk. After I dealt with them I
occupied myself by putting together packets of sales literature, which
consisted of small pamphlets fitted into staggered pockets of a presentation
folder. Each one featured a different couple, smiling toothily at their good
fortune in living “the Vista View lifestyle.” If you believed these photos, no
one here was over the age of fifty-five, lonely, overweight or incapacitated in
any way. I guess that’s because they have lifestyles instead of plain, ordinary
lives like the rest of us.

After that time
hung heavily. I still had twenty minutes before my lunch date with Ginny. I
gave Vista View full marks for their food service. Menu offerings were light,
tasty and attractively presented, and the chef put together a killer Cobb
salad. A steady stream of residents already trickled through the lobby, heading
for the dining hall. My stomach rumbled in anticipation, and I glanced at my
watch yet again.