Sorrow to the Grave

Book 514: Murder Room

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune In the quiet suburb of Santa Monica, eighty-eight-year-old Mabel Foster loses her husband to a stroke. Rather than move Mabel into a retirement home, the neighbours hire Josephine Slaney to take care of her. The immense nurse is a godsend, the cost of her help is a bargain. Soon it becomes clear, however, that all is not right with Josephine. Mrs Foster, once bright and alert, falls quickly into a torpor and retreats into seclusion at Josephine's command. It is up to detective Dan Valentine to uncover a strange, lethal pattern among Josephine's former patients, and the race is on to stop her before she can strike again.

Release date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“Dan,” said Mary Fernald.

Sergeant Daniel Valentine made no response. He lay somnolent on the warm sand beside her, eyes shut. Mary inspected him; she didn’t think he was asleep. She sighed and sat up, thinking it
was about time somebody checked on Garm. It was illegal to let a dog loose on the beach, but this lonely little cove up the coast past Malibu was their own discovery and still remained theirs
during this summer of ’63.

Garm was toiling toward them through the sand. He’d been rolled by an unexpected breaker and his thick shaggy coat was water-logged. At the best of times an odd-looking dog, very large,
with a round, shaggy, flop-eared head and plume of a tail, a dirty-tan coat with an Airedaleish black saddle, but soaking wet he was even odder-looking than usual, his wasp waist and bulging
shoulders undisguised. He came up, laid a very ancient tennis ball at Mary’s feet, and beamed at her.

“Well, where’d you find that, boy? All right,” and she threw it down the beach for him. Garm panted after it. “Dan.”

Valentine lay still. “You’re not asleep,” said Mary severely, looking at him. And wondering (not for the first time) if he’d ever ask her to marry him—and
what she’d say if he did.

There was quite a lot of him to look at, stretched out like that. A long, long man, with good brown shoulders and chest, good mat of black hair on the chest, thick waving dark hair above thin
regular features, long upper lip and straight mouth; he looked tranquil and unaware. Was he asleep? He didn’t, she reflected, look much like a policeman. Not really.

Garm came back with the ball and she threw it again. “Dan!”

No response. “You’re shamming,” said Mary, and scattered a handful of sand over his chest.

Valentine grunted and opened his eyes. “ ‘I began to understand,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘why it is sometimes necessary to kill women.’ Damn it, I was
asleep. I didn’t get in until three A.M.”

Mary said automatically, “ ‘The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat.’ ” She had grown a good deal more familiar with Rudyard Kipling since she’d met Valentine,
and could usually identify his quotations. “Look, I’ve got a question for you. I just remembered Brenda asking about it.”

“Who’s Brenda?” Valentine sat up with a groan and fished in the pocket of his jacket beside him for cigarettes.

“A girl I went to school with, Brenda Sheldon. She’s somebody’s secretary—a nice girl, I always liked Brenda.”

“What about her?”

“Well,” said Mary, “we both belong to the alumni association—UCLA, you know—and know some of the same people, so we see each other now and then. And she knows I
know you, that is, a police officer. And—”

“Whom you just keep around to pick his brains for your plots,” said Valentine. Mary was a middling-successful writer of crime novels.

“You do come in handy. And remind me to tell you about the latest utter absurdity that idiotic editor—But about Brenda. I ran into her at the Cheyneys’ last night and she asked
me to ask you about this, if you could tell her what to do, who to see. It’s this old lady she knows, a pensioner, who is—maybe—being defrauded or robbed.”

“How?”

“By her nurse—a practical nurse.”

“Old woman any relation to the Sheldon girl?”

“Oh, no—she just lives near her, I gathered. From what Brenda said, it all seemed rather up in the air, I thought. Apparently the nurse is a little too officious, and nobody likes
her much. She’s keeping people out, Brenda says, not letting the old woman’s friends in to see her, on flimsy excuses.”

“Well, there’s not much in that,” said Valentine. Garm came panting back with the ball and Mary threw it for him again.

“No. The old woman’s on pension, as I say, and Brenda wondered whether maybe the Welfare Board would investigate.”

Valentine inhaled, coughed, and shook his head. “No authority has the power to investigate a private citizen like that, unless there’s an official complaint laid. In this case, which
doesn’t sound like much, by the old lady. If she isn’t complaining—”

“Yes, I see. I rather thought it’d be like that. I’ll tell Brenda.”

“In any case,” said Valentine dryly, “I shouldn’t think it’d be very profitable to set up a pensioner as a mark. Even if California does pay the highest old-age
pension.”

Mary laughed. “There is that.”

He got up, yawning, kicking sand over his cigarette stub. “Now you’ve waked me up. I think I’ll have another little swim. Coming?”

“Too lazy.”

Mary duly passed her information on to Brenda Sheldon the next day; being downtown shopping in Santa Monica and knowing where Brenda usually lunched, she found her
there—and an empty stool beside her at the counter.

Brenda looked incredulous and angry. “You mean nobody could lift a finger? I tell you, that nurse is up to some funny business.”

“Well, you can see how it is legally,” Mary pointed out. “By what you’ve told me there’s no real evidence of anything wrong, legal evidence, I mean.”

“Oh, forget legal evidence!” said Brenda impatiently. She was, Mary thought, a very pretty girl, and even more so when she was angry. Like most people, Mary didn’t think much
of her own looks—she was so used to facing her dark hair, fair skin, and green eyes in the mirror. Very ordinary, really; but Brenda made Mary, at five five, feel as tall as Valentine. She
was a trim, very small girl of Mary’s own twenty-seven years, who always looked very neat. She had dark copper hair in a fluffy short cut, and eyes almost exactly the same color under winging
brows.

“Well, before the police can start to investigate, they have to have something besides a vague suspicion that something’s wrong.”

“I see that,” said Brenda reluctantly, “but I’ll bet if they did look, they’d find plenty of evidence that something is wrong. Thanks anyway, Mary.”
She looked broodingly at the remains of her tuna sandwich. “What can I do? I suppose you could say it’s none of my business, but—”

Brenda Sheldon rented a little three-room frame cottage that sat in the backyard of Mr. and Mrs. George Hawkins’s house on Royce Street in Ocean Park. It was a street of
older modest frame houses, and there were few young people. Most of the householders were middle-aged to elderly. Some of the houses were poorly kept up because their owners were too old for the
work and couldn’t afford gardeners or painters. It was the first block down from Lincoln Boulevard, and the little shopping section around on Lincoln was a great convenience to many of those
elderly people. There was a dairy store, a small market, Mrs. Cass’s real-estate office, the dress shop kept by Jacqueline Devereaux, a variety store, a hardware store, a drugstore, and a
bakery.

The Hawkinses were typical of the neighborhood, in a way. In their late fifties, with three married children and five grandchildren. George Hawkins was a skilled mechanic, with his own gas
station. He kept their place up pretty well. Across the street lived John and Elsa Wilanowski; he was a carpenter, and all their children were grown and away too. There was Mrs. House, a widow who
lived alone; and another widow, Mrs. Johnson, whose schoolteacher daughter lived with her.

Brenda had rented the little house two years ago, when her grandmother died and she moved from the over-large house they’d rented. She hated apartments; they gave her claustrophobia. The
little house didn’t look very fancy, but it was more private than an apartment, and she had her own little strip of yard. The bus was only a block away, she could be in downtown Santa Monica,
where she worked in the office of a large jewelry-manufacturing firm, in twenty minutes.

Of course, in the two years she’d lived there, she’d got acquainted with several of the neighbors. The Hawkinses were friendly; Mrs. Hawkins persisted in the delusion that young
working girls didn’t know how to feed themselves properly, and often came in with a cake or a plate of cookies. Brenda also did a good deal of her shopping in the little shops around on
Lincoln there, and met other habitual customers.

That was how she’d first met old Mr. Foster, in the little dairy store. The old man had been friendly, in a stiff shy kind of way, and she’d asked Mrs. Hawkins about him. He was so
old.

“Oh, the Fosters, everyone knows them. They’ve lived here so long. Such brave old things.”

She’d got to know them too; and about them. As half a dozen people in the neighborhood did, she occasionally stopped in for a little chat with the Fosters, offering to do any shopping.
Generally, people could be counted on to be kind, and everyone rather admired the Fosters.

The Fosters owned the little two-bedroom frame house next to the Websters, on the same side of the street as the Hawkins house. It was hard now for the old man to keep the lawn cut, the shrubs
trimmed, but he did the best he could. A couple of years ago, he’d saved enough to hire some high-school boys to paint the house, and it looked better than some of the other places on the
block.

The Fosters had come here from somewhere in the Midwest—Iowa, Kansas?—nearly twenty-five years ago when the old man retired. He’d run a machine of some kind in a factory.
Talking with him, you knew he’d run it the very best he knew how, never been a minute late for work, and been pointed out as an example to wayward youths. He’d said once to Brenda that
he’d been on his own since he was fourteen, working. He might have had six or seven years of education. He was a tall, very thin old man, bent with arthritis and getting a little deaf, and
his false teeth fit badly so that he slurred his words for hanging on to them; but he had a dry, rusty sense of humor. He liked people to call him Clyde instead of Mr. Foster.

“One thing about gettin’ old,” he’d said to Brenda, “and outlivin’ everybody your own age—nobody left to call you by your own name. Y’know? A lot
o’ folks younger, they figure it don’t sound exactly right, call an old codger eighty-seven by his given name. But it’s one o’ the things you notice, know what I
mean?—bein’ just Mister to everybody.”

It was a thing she’d never thought about, but she understood how he felt. It must seem odd. To most of the people she knew, she was Brenda; it would seem strange, nobody left to use her
name—to be just Miss Sheldon.

Mabel Foster was eighty-eight, and she shared her husband’s sly little humor. “Never caught up t’ me yet, all these years,” she’d say, her little dark eyes
twinkling. “Comes December, he gets to be as old as me, but right off next April I get ahead of him again. He was right put out when he found I had nearly a year on him—didn’t let
him know till we was married, I didn’t!”

Mabel was a little, round, cheerful woman, probably very pretty once. You could guess that before she’d had arthritis, she’d been quick at everything, and neat, and particular.
She’d graduated from sixth grade, she confided to Brenda, back in 1887. She was twelve, and worked as a maid before she married Clyde Foster.

She’d started to have the arthritis six or seven years ago, and it had, as she put it, slowed her down some. But she could still get about the house, get the meals and keep the place
dusted. Mr. MacFarlane, who owned the hardware store, had fixed a ramp down from the back steps of their house so she could get out in the yard to hang up her laundry. The new automatic washer had
been a real godsend.

Mr. MacFarlane had told Brenda about that. He shook his head over it—a very remarkable thing that they’d managed to save up so much money, just on the state pension. But they were
thrifty, careful people. “If you’ll believe me, they live on the one pension check and put the other one in the bank every month. It must take some damn close figuring, you
know—taxes up too, the last couple of years—but they make do on that. Kind of a lesson to us all.”

Brenda agreed. California paid the highest old-age pension of any state, but even so, eighty-nine dollars a month wasn’t much for two people to live on in the sixties.

“He asked me to go with him when he got the washer; he doesn’t know much about business of any kind.” MacFarlane chuckled. “Said he’d count on me to see he
didn’t get cheated. They’re funny old souls, but you kind of have to admire ’em. Independent, you know.”

That they were, and there was all too little of that around these days. They could have gone to one of the county medical clinics, but old Mr. Foster said sturdily he didn’t hold with
taking charity while he could still pay his just debts. Besides, he’d rather pick his own doctor. So as little things came up, Mrs. Foster’s arthritis worse, or one of them coming down
with flu, they’d gone (Mrs. Hawkins said) to young Dr. Clarke over on Dewey Street. But he’d recently moved away, and Dr. Robertson had taken his office. They didn’t like Dr.
Robertson much; he wasn’t much interested in old people.

The Fosters had been young, they had known all the young things in life, when every feeling was new and exciting—they had loved, and made love, and had fine plans and hopes; and things had
changed, life had changed, for them together. Once they had hoped for children, sons and daughters to raise and see married and having children of their own—and to look after them in turn as
they grew older. It hadn’t happened that way. They had gone along, humdrum, happy enough, pleased with small joys, expecting little, for long years; and in the end it had come to this, a
little house bought with savings and a small legacy from a bachelor uncle—and the old-age-pension checks.

They were simple people; you could call them ignorant people. But did it make all that much difference (when you came to think of it), the good or bad grammar, the book-knowledge, the
job—at that end of life? Simple people, through no fault or intention, alone.

Brenda thought wryly that it would be easy for a psychiatrist to explain her feeling of sympathy for old Mr. and Mrs. Foster. All association—selfish association. An only child, her
parents killed in an accident, she’d been brought up by her grandmother, dear Gran Kilpatrick.

It had been five weeks ago that Mr. Foster had the stroke. . . . Everybody who knew them had been saying for some time that if one should go, the other couldn’t possibly carry on alone.
They had to help each other in almost every way. They had the county nurse in once a week—you didn’t have to pay for that unless you could: They did. She would give Mrs. Foster a bath
and straighten up the house a bit. They managed as best they could. Their own little house, a painfully accumulated bank account. The privately paid doctor. The penurious grocery bills—never
more than seven or eight dollars a week, said Mrs. Cass, who drove Mr. Foster to the nearest supermarket on Saturdays. Whatever Mrs. Foster couldn’t do, Mr. Foster managing somehow. One of
the pension checks put away safe in the bank each month, toward the taxes and the medical bills and any little luxuries . . . “It’s all I can do to keep myself from it,” Mrs. Cass
had said to Brenda. Mrs. Cass was a transplanted English countrywoman, and in moments of emotion her accent thickened into the lush North Country dialect of her childhood, “All I can
do. They do like their liddle fresh oranges that much, you know—and times, they’ll be up a penny or two a pound, and the old man shaking his head and saying, Too dear.
I’d dearly love to say, Oh, do have them, I’ll pay the difference! But they’re that proud, you know.” Her three chins had quivered and her vast bosom heaved. “What can
you do?”

What indeed. But they had saved enough, just this year, to buy a small portable television. They so enjoyed the old movies, and that awful western thing. . . .

Inevitably, she thought—when she heard about Mr. Foster’s stroke—inevitably, in the minds of everyone who has anything to do with the Fosters now, there will be a faintly
impatient overtone. They had gone on living too long.

You seemed to be here for an appointed time, reason or no reason. Those who survived incredible dangers, in war and so on, and then slipped on a wet pavement or something . . . Not that she was
so terribly religious, but there seemed to be a kind of rule about it.

And were you to blame, did you suffer any less, if you went on tediously living to be ninety? Even alone and poor?

Mr. Foster had his stroke on a Wednesday. In the next few days, most of the neighbors had called, as well as Mr. MacFarlane, Mrs. Cass, Jacqueline
Devereaux, Mr. Purdy from the dairy store, and Mr. Da Silva from the little grocery.

Brenda went to see Mrs. Foster on Thursday evening; and by then the old lady was realizing that they couldn’t go on like this, with just the county nursing service.

She looked older, and sad, but also reconciled. Perhaps at eighty-eight you lived so close to death that it didn’t seem so frightening or shocking. Yes, of course the Fosters had known
that this day was inevitable too.

She rocked a little in the shabby old platform rocker opposite the love seat, and her small mouth drooped. “I know it’s best it should be Clyde first. He’d be just awful
helpless, alone.”

Brenda said nothing.

“Well,” said the old woman, gaving a sharp little sigh. “O’ course he’s still hanging on. Doctor came this morning. But— I’m not afraid to say, tell the
truth an’ shame the devil—better for him if he wouldn’t, if he’d just slip away like. You know. He’d be mostly helpless, and need a nurse by him all the time. And
that’d mean the General Hospital, I guess, or a county home. Neither Clyde or me ever fancied a home like that.” And because that was true, and there was nothing to say about it, Brenda
was silent. “But whichever way,” said Mrs. Foster, “it’ll mean a change. I come to see that.” She looked around the little living room and sighed again.

The only new things in the room were the ugly little blond-finished television and the carpet, a blinding-bright cheap American Oriental pattern. There was the late-Victorian “set”
they had probably got when they were married—love seat and two chairs, the gentleman’s and the lady’s; originally horsehair-upholstered, now in a faded tapestry. There was the
platform rocker, and a couple of straight cane-seated chairs, remnants of a dining set, and a marred marble-topped table with a cheap ceramic lamp on it. There was an old-fashioned floor lamp. A
too-colorful lithograph of a farm scene, framed ornately in gilt, hung over the love seat, and a charming old banjo wall clock over the table. The walls were papered in a bright blue-and-pink
flower pattern. It was an ugly room, and Brenda could guess how bare and ugly the bedrooms would be: very likely brass bedsteads, sagging mattresses, cheap painted chests. But these were the old
woman’s things, making up her home, and she was seeing them taken away from her. Seeing herself taken away, for some unknown new place. For, as she said, whet. . .