Mask of Flies (10 page)

“Our residents are
afraid of her.” Jill stared at the floor as she talked. “I don’t
blame them either . . . When she is taken for her daily walk the
residents and staff clear the hall.”

“I’m going to check
up on Mr. McKinney and find out where these bites are coming from.”
Tony walked Jill to the door, he always felt compelled to make
conversation brief in the cramped office. He doubled back and grabbed
a notepad and pen, remembering that Tom McKinney had advanced
Barrett’s Esophagus. Years of drinking and untreated acid reflux
rendered Tom McKinney mute; he would have to communicate through
writing.

Papers were scattered across his
desk. Tony attempted a quick search for the master schedule, but came
up empty handed. Spring Hall’s usual caretaker, Lydia, was on a
cruise celebrating her 15th anniversary. And he needed to find out
who was taking up in her absence.

Down Spring Hall, the
overwhelming smell of urine choked out the air. It gradually
increased towards Mr. McKinney’s room. Tony knocked two hard raps
on his door and walked in immediately after. Inside, the intensity of
noxious ammonia seized his respiration. Tom McKinney lay in his bed
shivering, every pore of the bed saturated in his urine. Tom must’ve
sat all morning, judging from the staleness of smell. “I’m sorry
Tom.” Tony turned around and hurried for the head nurse’s office.

Kaja Borkowski, the
head nurse of Oak Leaf retirement home, was not in her office, likely
checking up on one of her nurses or scolding a caregiver. Tony
glanced at an old picture of her on the wall, the portrait of a once
young vibrant woman. Her once honey blonde hair was now almost
completely grey, and her delicate features now weighted down with the
rust of age and years of scorn.

Tony had a contentious
history with Kaja. Their most current argument she questioned the
competency of Rick Soblinski as a caregiver for the terminally ill
residents of Summer Hall. Kaja thought her nurses should be the only
authorized personnel to administer care to the residents, and that
Rick should be moved to another hall. The supposition of having a
nurse only hall would require two more new hires, and it wasn’t in
the facility’s budget. Kaja had some heated words in response to
the rejection of her request, words that got under Tony’s skin, and
he almost retaliated by asking her who spurned her into being a
man-hater, but he refrained; the perpetual nice guy pervaded.

Down the hall, Tony
heard the sound of file cabinets being slammed came from the
direction of the nurse’s station. It was Kaja, disheveled, riffling
through patient charts.
She has
plenty of gophers to work charts. What’s she doing?

“Kaja—is everything
okay?” asked Tony.

“No, everything not
okay. Half the staff called in sick. I run around doing everybody’s
job! I threaten to fire three nurses if they didn’t come in hour,
they never show,” Kaja said with a very Polish accent. Reaching
below the desk, she emerged with a set of scrubs and tossed them at
Tony. “Help me with rounds, before we get sued.”

“I’ll start in Tom
McKinney’s room, before he drowns in his own piss.” Tony decided
that it was about time to drop the nice guy routine.

Allie sat up,
dangling her feet off the edge of the bed. The doorway to the
bathroom swayed, and her t-shirt was drenched in sweat. Her insides
rolled as she got to her feet and ran for the bathroom—but her
stomach contents erupted halfway there, spewing forth onto the new
Berber.

After a poor attempt to
clean the mess, she staggered into the living room and dropped
herself onto the couch.
The deal
is done in Rochester; they can do without me today. I’m taking some
vacation time.

On the couch, Allie paged through a
few novels borrowed from a friend; the smutty prose wrenched on the
emptiness inside. Her appetite returned around noon. She reheated
some leftover Chinese food—which could have contributed to her
earlier upheaval—and ate it without really tasting it. Daytime TV
was laughable, although not so much to distract her from Rick’s
absence. The house felt foreign and cold without him. She had to
remind herself that he was the bastard who cheated and left.
Disgusted with her thoughts and being penned up in the drafty house,
Allie grabbed her coat off the rack and headed out for some fresh
air.

The Main Street in
Williamsville was packed with shops: bakeries, jewelry, antiques,
neighborhood pubs, and pizzerias, were all lit up beautifully for
Christmas. The walk wasn’t far, but the wind made the journey
unexpectedly cold. Nevertheless it refreshed her to get out of the
house—away from all the little reminders, away from his scent.

Allie had considered
Rick her second chance at love and life, and never thought it
would’ve ended in such an abrupt fashion, so detached.
Was
it drugs, that other woman?
These ruminations would not
leave her mind. The only certainties were she missed him and it hurt
like hell. Walking down the strip of shops, she glanced in windows,
anything to take her mind off of Rick.

Through the storefront
window of McGuire’s Antiques, customers congregated around a record
player with a large horn speaker. Allie heard the classic jazz in the
doorway. Antique mahogany and oak dressers stood on display in the
showroom—the works of an era when craftsmanship mattered. Old man
McGuire refused to acknowledge any item manufactured post 1962 as a
true antique.

A full functioning
antique soda fountain, located in the rear side of the store, served
shakes, root beer floats, and soft serve on the cone. She always
admired Dick McGuire’s business prowess; not only had he one of the
best antique shops in Western New York, but he also brought in quite
a bit of family business with the soda fountain. The people of
Williamsville loved their slice of Americana—and swarmed his
storefront.

Quite the antiquarian
herself, Allie had enjoyed McGuire’s, but today she just wasn’t
in the mood. She kept walking, passed the bakery, passed the pawn
shop, and stopped in front of the Creekside Tavern. A bartender
placed a fold out chalkboard by the entryway that listed the day’s
happy hour special.
A drink
could be good
, but she remembered how one drink turned
into many in these situations, and what a drunken, emotional mess she
became when her first marriage went south. Allie’s two older
daughters were away at school, but the youngest, Lulu, was living at
home and saw the train wreck unfold. She vowed never to sink so low
again and moved onward, towards the old apple cider mill, located in
Glen Falls Park.

The park was nestled in
a quiet neighborhood off of Main Street; Allie frequented it
regularly to walk the trails that elevated up to a small set of
waterfalls. Today, the much needed movement got her blood flowing and
the worry driven exhaustion dissipated. The fog in her head—
attributed to inactivity and MSG laden Chinese food—lifted. With
newfound clarity, Allie realized that she had left her Blackberry at
the house, and that she’d miss Lulu’s call. Her baby called late
afternoon, every-other-day, to check up on her Ma.

Allie’s two older
girls, Lana and Lynette, called less frequently in the recent years.
They were grown woman, starting families of their own; mom had become
a useless appendage. Plus she knew that her two older girls held a
certain distaste for Rick, no doubt Kevin helped this. But Lulu
understood; she lived through the divorce, witnessed the destruction
it caused, and saw how Rick pulled her Ma from the depths. Allie
loved her youngest for this.

But she was so far
away. Lulu, recently turned 21 and lived in Orlando, attending her
last year at Rollins College, majoring in marketing—like her Ma. Lu
bartended at some pretentious nightclub on weekends. Allie didn’t
like her baby girl staying up so late, being around drunken men, but
being the independent girl she is, Lulu needed to make her own money.
Even after Lulu’s father, Kevin, offered to cover the cost of
college completely, she insisted on paying her rent and groceries.
Now Allie needed to hear her baby’s voice—to know that all that
she loved hadn’t vanished into the night.

When Allie approached
the precipice of the falls, she almost turned around to head home,
but suddenly the lights behind the waterfalls switched on. The
illuminated rushing water against the sunset sky was therapeutic. She
decided to soak it up a few more minutes. Out the corner of her eye,
Allie saw a young couple utilizing the romantic vista, and it tinged
the moment with sour remembrance. Her daze broke when she heard a
familiar voice from behind.

“Hey Allie, how are
you?” an overenthusiastic female’s voice asked.

Allie did not want to
be disturbed in this moment, or baited into an awkward conversation
about Rick. Turning, she saw Tiffany, and Marco hanging to the back.

“What brings you guys
out on this cold night?”

“Just stretching our
legs, it’s so easy to go stir crazy in the winter . . . Is Rick
okay?” Tiffany asked, wincing. She knew she struck a sensitive
subject.

Of
course you just had to as
k. “I wouldn’t know, haven’t
heard from him in two days,”

Marco stepped from
behind. “Allie . . . at work Rick didn’t seem like himself. He
walked out Tuesday, and we haven’t heard from him since. I tried to
contact him, but his cell phone is off.”

“I got a voicemail
from him Tuesday night; said he was with some auditor from upstate,
and he was showing him around Buffalo—Rick didn’t sound like
himself,” Allie said.

“Strange—really
strange—management made a huge stink over Rick leaving before he
briefed the auditor on a new patient. I ended up covering for him.”
Marco shivered underneath a heavy winter jacket. “He was taking
care of this horribly disfigured patient who had been abandoned at
our sister facility, in Silver Creek. It got the attention of Adult
Protective Services. They sent a real ball-breaker to check up on
us.”

“Yeah, Rick mentioned
the patient when he came home Monday.”

“This’ll sound
kinda weird, but this patient has the whole facility freaked out. So
much that I think people have been calling in sick to avoid her. I
wouldn’t be surprised if he up and quit. Maybe he feels ashamed?”
Marco said.

“Rick is not a
coward. He would not leave me just because he quit his job.” Allie
could feel the blood rushing to her face, and her eyes watering up.
The sting of the frozen wind didn’t help.

Marco looked away.
“Maybe not, but I know he looks up to you, being a successful woman
and all. I see how it might be tough for him to face you . . . I’m
sure he is fine and that you’ll hear from him soon,”

Tiffany hugged Allie.
“If you need anything, give me a call.”

“Okay guys, it was
good seeing you.” Allie wiped the moisture from her eyes. “I’m
sorry. It’s been hard.” The wound was too fresh to talk about,
and the conversation had been painfully awkward. Sure, Marco and
Tiffany were nice enough people, but Allie had been around long
enough to know about how couples talk about other couples. She was
willing to wager that they would spend all night speculating what
happened to Rick. She didn’t like the feeling of being relegated to
a feeble little girl searching for her lost puppy.

“No need to
apologize.” Tiff’s eyes were now glazed over.

Allie hugged Marco and headed home

Inside the empty
home, Allie saw that her Blackberry had vibrated onto the floor.
Picking it up, the display read: 17 missed calls. One from Lulu, the
rest an unknown number. She called her voicemail to check the
messages.

“Hey Mom it’s Lu,
just checking in—” Allie hit four to skip the message before it
finished.

The next message:
“Allie, it’s Rick. Listen, this must sound crazy, but I was
kidnapped. I got away and wrecked my car—now I’m stuck in Niagara
Falls, the American side. I sure could use a ride. It’s cold. Call
me at this number when you get this.”

Allie immediately
dialed the number.

Elias put the last of
the venison steaks into the freezer. With deep winter near, in the
Allegheny wilderness, stockpiling provisions became a necessity. Cody
sat next to him wagging his tail looking for a handout. From the
cupboard, Elias pulled out a Ziploc bag full of deer jerky and threw
a healthy hunk down. The beagle barely chewed, swallowed, and sat
begging for more.

“Did you even get a
taste of that Cody?” He threw down another small piece.

Looking out the rear
window, he wondered how the cold came so quickly. The garden
withered; its harvest jarred or dried, packed away in the cellar
pantry. Elias had cultivated his green thumb young, planting the
thinking herb in the hidden corners of the Kingbird land. Until
Father caught him, and beat him bloody. Now he planted for winter
survival.

It
has been a long time since anybody visited.
The
caseworker’s inquires didn’t leave Elias’s thoughts the past
few nights. He thought that he shouldn’t have claimed to have known
Angeni. But during the talk Elias’s emotions rushed, and he told
the caseworker an earful. Perhaps the man meant well, although their
conversation went nowhere. The attempt to convince Tony that his
great grandmother was cursed proved to be a lost cause.

Through the window,
dead timber lay stacked on the side of the barn. Elias intended to
chop it into firewood over a month ago, but drinking and lack of
sleep had cast him thin, low priority chores went undone. He went
outside, through the wind and snow, through the barn door and pulled
his wood axe off the shadow board. It had seen better days; the blade
was coming loose and the old-wooden handle had several hairline
cracks. He remembered buying a replacement after moving back to the
land.
It’s in the attic.