Fostering Death (12 page)

“Be my guest,” he said, his eyes still closed.

I fixed two mugs of tea and put one in front of Mr. Coleman.

Even with the door shut, it seemed cold in the kitchen. I went to the living room to check the thermostat. It was set at a reasonable seventy-two, but the temperature registered fifty-nine. No wonder it felt cold.

“Something wrong with your heat, Mr. Coleman?” I asked.

He raised his clouded eyes. “It’s not working.”

That much I’d figured out. “Do you know why it’s not working?” I asked.

“No.” He took another sip of his tea.

“You still heat with gas?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you still have that service contract with the gas company?”

“I think so.”

The phone still hung on the wall next to the back door. I opened the drawer that used to hold the phone book. There it was. I found the gas company’s number and punched in the numbers.

Phones weren’t something I’d had a great deal of experience with. The Colemans hadn’t allowed their foster children to use the phone. My dad never had one. Prison inmates without anyone to call have no use for them. Now everybody seemed to have these cell phones glued to their ears all the time.

The gas company answered with recorded instructions. I delved through a confusing array of automated messages, but finally got through to a live person. I asked about having a repairman out as soon as possible.

“Dennis Coleman? At 539 Whispering Pines?” a disembodied voice said.

“Yes, that’s right,” I agreed.

“Service discontinued due to lack of payment,” the voice said.

Lack of payment? The Colemans weren’t rich, but I couldn’t believe they couldn’t afford their gas bill. I said, “I thought you didn’t do disconnections in the winter time.”

“We don’t if the customer contacts us and works something out. In this case, no one responded to the shutoff notices. A representative visited the residence, but no one answered the door. His note says that it appeared to be unoccupied. No foreclosure notice posted, though.”

“Well, it’s very much occupied. And it’s pretty cold in here. How do I go about getting service restored?”

“You can talk to a service representative about setting up a payment plan or applying for assistance. But you’d have to wait until Monday to do that.”

“How about if the bill got paid? Could I do that today? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“Well, of course the easiest way would be to pay the bill. The office is open until five this afternoon on a limited basis. They can take the payment.”

I winced. “How much to get it reconnected?”

“One thousand five hundred and twenty-nine dollars.”

No way could I come up with that kind of money. I wondered if Mr. Coleman had that much. Probably. “How long does it take to get it turned back on after you get the money?” I asked.

“We’ve got an emergency crew on duty. If we get the payment by three this afternoon, we can have it turned on by five. Assuming the crew isn’t out on another emergency.”

Great. Now I just needed $1,529.

I hung up and turned to Mr. Coleman. Mr. Coleman ought to have money somewhere, although maybe not much in cash. Montgomery had indicated that the money Mrs. Coleman kept in the thesaurus had been taken.

“What happens to your social security checks?” I asked him.

“I don’t get checks.” He drew the afghan closer around his spare waist and took a sip of his tea.

“You have to get social security,” I said. “You worked all those years.”

“Yes. We…I have direct deposit.”

“Into a bank account?”

“Into the checking account. To pay the bills.” He tipped the mug so he could see the bottom, then lifted it to his lips again.

“When was the last time you ate?” I asked him.

“This morning.”

“Breakfast?”

“I guess.”

“What did you have?”

“Maybe it was yesterday.”

I had to get him something to eat. I opened the freezer. It was stocked with freezer-burned roasts and several boxes of frozen pizza. Seemed like an odd choice for an elderly couple. But it would be easy to fix, and maybe he really liked pizza.

“You want me to fix a frozen pizza for you?”

His face wrinkled. “I hate those things. They stink up the whole kitchen.”

No frozen pizza, then. I wondered why they were in the freezer. In a cabinet, I found a can of soup. This time I didn’t ask him. I just dumped it into a big bowl and stuck it in the microwave.

When it was warm, I put the soup and a spoon in front of Mr. Coleman on the table.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“Try to eat some anyhow,” I said, rummaging around until I found a package of saltines.

Obediently, he picked up the spoon and scooped up some of the soup. His hand trembled, but he got most of the spoonful to his mouth. His face cleared, and he continued to eat until the bowl was empty. He took the saltines I’d laid out and gobbled them down. Then he looked up hopefully.

I thought of all the stories I’d heard about released prison inmates who got deathly sick to their stomachs after they had their first non-prison meal. Hadn’t been a problem for me—most of my meals for the first few weeks had been ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches—but I thought it was probably because they weren’t used to eating regular food, especially in unlimited amounts. If Mr. Coleman hadn’t been eating much, I didn’t want to make him sick.

“Let that settle before you have anything else,” I said. “Now, where’s your checkbook?”

“In the office.”

I went to the tiny room off the living room Mrs. Coleman had called the office. When I’d lived there, it had always been locked. My memory of it was of a starkly neat space with a large desk and file cabinets lining the wall.

The door to the office wasn’t closed, and the space was no longer starkly neat. The file cabinet drawers hung open. The files sat in untidy piles on all available surfaces and the floor.

Did Mr. Coleman still have the big book-type checkbook I remembered? Or did he use one of those little ones that are about the size of a wallet?

The piles on the desk seemed like a good place to start.

Sifting through a pile of unopened mail, I found a few envelopes from the gas company. Two of them had large notes on the outside in red. The cutoff notices.

I found a bank statement that hadn’t been opened. I hesitated for a minute, wondering if it was my place to look at it, but how else was I going to find out if there was enough in the checking account to pay the gas bill?

The statement said Mr. Coleman had over ten thousand dollars.

Now I just had to locate the checkbook. And get Mr. Coleman to write a check that I could take to the gas company office.

As I shifted a stack of files and envelopes, several large manila envelopes fell off the pile. One spewed its contents across the floor. Old papers and photographs.

I stooped down to pick them up and tried to sort them out. Some of them were pictures of a young woman, very thin but unmistakably Mrs. Coleman. She’d never been thin while I knew her.

In a few, she posed with a man who didn’t look like Mr. Coleman.

The thought of Mrs. Coleman with another man was strange. Well, why not? The Colemans had been married for a long time, but lots of people had relationships before they married. What would make me think she should have been any different?

In one picture, Mrs. Coleman was thick-waisted, more the way I remembered her. But her arms were stick-thin.

Then came a few baby pictures. The Colemans didn’t have any children. I’d once overheard Mrs. Coleman saying that she couldn’t have any. Maybe some relative’s kid, although by the time I lived there, they didn’t seem to have any relatives, either.

A birth certificate. A boy, born more than fifty years ago to a Mildred Mayford. No father was listed.

Mrs. Coleman’s first name had been Mildred.

My heart froze. Had Mrs. Coleman had a child out of wedlock?

These days, that wasn’t a big deal, but back then, it would have been devastating.

I rifled quickly through the remaining papers. A copy of a release for adoption, dated the same day as the birth certificate. Signed by Mildred Mayford, in a strong hand using the proper Palmer penmanship I remembered Mrs. Coleman having.

A crash came from the kitchen. I hurriedly shoved everything back into one of the manila envelopes and put it under a stack of old papers. I opened a file drawer—everything had been removed from it—and dropped the stack into it.

“What was that crash, Mr. Coleman?” I asked as I went back to the kitchen.

He stood precariously, leaning on his cane and the table. The chair lay on its back on the floor and the afghan was bunched next to it. “What crash?” he asked.

I picked up the chair and draped the afghan over its back. “I’m still looking for the checkbook. Do you have any idea where in the office it is?”

Mr. Coleman scratched his ear. “In the center desk drawer, probably. That’s where it belongs.”

I gave him a few more saltines and made sure he was seated again before I went back into the office. Opening the center drawer, I shoved a few things aside. There it was. So simple. Why hadn’t I asked him more directly before?

I carried it out to the kitchen. Mr. Coleman was standing up again, holding onto the chair back and teetering. Taking a pen from near the phone, I said, “Sit down again for a minute, Mr. Coleman. We need to write a check to the gas company.”

He sat down again. Taking the latest bill I could find, I filled in the information, and put $1,529 in the amount lines.

I gave him the pen. “Sign this,” I told him.

He gripped the pen tightly and leaned hard on the check as he wrote something that I suppose was his signature.

He pressed down so hard the pen tore the check. And the one under it.

I tore those two out of the book and ripped them up. Then I made out the next one for the gas company again. “Try not to press so hard,” I said.

This time he signed it without ripping the paper.

I took it out of the book, folded it up and put it in my pocket. If I left pretty soon, I could get it to the gas company office in time to have the gas turned on today.

But Mr. Coleman wasn’t in any shape to leave alone.

“Does anybody come in to help you, Mr. Coleman?” I asked.

He frowned. “Help me?”

“Yeah. You know, like fixing you dinner or cleaning the house or helping you take your meds?”

His eyes teared up. “Rosa is supposed to come in for a few hours every afternoon. But I haven’t seen her here since the day Mildred died. She said she came in and found Mildred at the bottom of the cellar stairs. She called for the ambulance. But she didn’t wait for it to get here.”

That seemed kind of strange. And then she hadn’t shown up for work since? Could she have had something to do with the fall down the stairs? Should I call Detective Montgomery and make sure he knew about Rosa?

Rosa and the Rose Aaron mentioned were probably the same person. If Aaron were a police informant, Montgomery would be privy to everything Aaron knew. Montgomery would likely ask me how I found out that she’d been in the house. I wouldn’t have a good way to answer that.

If I couldn’t find somebody to come over, I’d have to call 9-1-1 or something and take whatever grief that came with it. And they’d probably take Mr. Coleman to the hospital. “Is there anyone else?”

“Mrs. Williams,” he said. “She was Mildred’s friend. And she’s a nurse. She stops in sometimes.”

“Has she been here lately?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Last time I remember her coming, I was just heading out for my walk. So she walked with me. But that was a while ago.”

“Like today?”

“I don’t think it was today.”

“Or maybe yesterday?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does she work for an agency or something?”

“She used to work in the hospital. Now she’s retired. But she belongs to the same church as us.”

“What church do you go to?” I asked. When I was a kid, they’d gone to the Church of The Savior, a fundamentalist Christian church.

“Church of The Savior,” he said.

I remembered all the ladies standing around him at Mrs. Coleman’s viewing. They’d looked like church ladies. At least at that church, the church ladies could be depended upon in an emergency for one of their congregation.

Taking the phone book, I looked up the church number and dialed. I got an answering machine. I wasn’t sure it would do any good before tomorrow morning, but I left a brief message anyhow.

“Any other way to get in touch with Mrs. Williams? Or anybody else from the church?”

He gestured across the room. “Her phone number’s on the refrigerator.”

“Where does she live?”

“The next street over.”