The Sweet Dead Life (21 page)

All of which set me somewhere between happy and queasy. On top of everything else, I was now feeling comfortable (or close enough) with Amber Velasco. Maybe it would pass--like those ultra-skinny jeans everyone used to like until it occurred to most folks that unless you were anorexic or a 184

heroin addict you pretty much looked like a sausage stuffed into a too-small casing.

I used Casey's phone to leave a message on Maggie's cell. She texted back immediately.
What the f is going on with you?

I am not abbreviating. Maggie just typed 'f.' Unlike me and Amber and my brother, Maggie does not have a colorful vocabulary.

Mom's sick
, I texted back, for lack of a better excuse.

Casey's phone buzzed almost as soon as I pressed send.

"Jenna?" Maggie made sure it was me and not Casey before she went on.

"No offense, but your Mom is always sick. You need to get your butt to school. Do you need a ride or something?"

"Maybe by this afternoon," I said. "I'm gonna see how she feels."

We hung up. I knew she knew I was lying. It would have to wait.

I headed to Casey's room to find Amber eyeballing the two (yes, two) glass bongs sitting on the floor next to his laptop, the second being the rarely-used multi-colored one that Dave swore was imported from Germany. Instead of her perpetual EMT outfit (which she'd even worn bartending), she had on regular jeans and a long-sleeved black button-up shirt that showed a little cleavage and a hint of black lace bra. She was also wearing cowboy boots: a slick, pointy-toed pair that looked worn-in like she'd had them a while.

Casey was sitting on his bed, looking sheepish.

"What the hell am I doing here?" Amber said, mostly to herself.

"Please tell us!" I snapped. "We're dying to know!" I cringed, immediately regretting the lame pun and remembering the fact that Renfroe himself had used it.

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Without an answer, she grabbed Casey's laptop, then sat at his desk and powered it on. I shuddered. If she wanted to touch his laptop, that was her business.

"Let's get to work," she said, adjusting her blouse around that lacy bra. There was no denying it. Outside her EMT gear and dorky utility belt, Amber Velasco was a hottie. Funny, if Casey weren't dead and practically back together with Lanie, he'd be in heaven right now. (Or not so funny.) Amber's plan was to research every obituary we could find that connected to Oak View Convalescent Home.

"Let's start the day Dad disappeared," Casey suggested.

"I think we should start before that," Amber replied, her fingers flying over the keyboard. "Whatever this is, it has to be big. We have to find a pattern."

She had a point. If people were dying like my Mom had hinted, and the whole thing was bad enough to make my father disappear and cause Dr.

Renfroe to mess with my mother's brain, we needed to cast a wide net. Not everyone who passed away got mentioned in the paper, of course. We got going and hoped for the best.

By nine in the morning, we'd found three people.

By ten, we'd found three more.

By noon, I'd snuck off for a quick shower and changed into jeans and my Ima Razorback shirt. Also my Converse, since unlike some people, I had no boots. I stopped to make tea and toast for Mom and lied to her about why I was home, claiming that it was a teacher work day. Oh, and I also ignored several texts on Casey's phone from Maggie.

By the time I returned to Casey's room at 12:30, he and Amber had uncovered four more deaths of elderly patients living at Oak View Convalescent. Most, but not all, seemed to have suffered from Alzheimer's.

One guy had possibly died

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of a stroke. This was not an exact science; we had only the obituary wording and sometimes a request for contributions to go on. So if the family asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Alzheimer research, we assumed that's what the person died of.

"Ten dead people," Casey said. "That's a lot, right?"

"It's a freaking old person's home!" I yelled.

He and Amber frowned at me.

"Old people die," I said. "It happens. Come on. I mean that's why they're there, right?" I wanted us to be wrong--about all of it. Was Dr. Renfroe really doing something to make all these old folks die before their time? Why?

What sick reason could he possibly have?

Amber turned back to the screen. "Ten is ten too many. Even for a facility like that. None of the ten had cancer or any other immediately life-threatening illness or condition."

Casey began to pace back and forth. "So let's say Mom was on to something. What the hell is Dr. Renfroe doing over there? Knocking 'em off for sport? Feeding them poisoned tapioca pudding or something?"

"Not funny," I told him. "Remember me? Your poisoned sister?" I shifted my gaze to Amber's boots. If I still had boots, I would have shivered in them.

We tossed around possibilities. Dr. Renfroe was a crazed maniac. Dr.

Renfroe had poisoned himself by accident and lost his mind. Dr. Renfroe owed the Mafia mil ions of dol ars in gambling debts and was cashing in on phony insurance claims for his victims. (Amber's theory.) Dr. Renfroe was in fact a nice guy, but Oak View was built on Indian burial grounds and the ghosts were killing the residents. (Casey's theory. As far as I know, he hadn't touched either bong.) The patients were dying naturally, and this was all a crazy coincidence. (My theory.)

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Somewhere in the middle of the theorizing, my stomach growled that it was finally ready to make up for lost time. "I'm
starving
," I announced. "Can you call over to Beijing Bistro?" Casey had baked the last frozen pizza for breakfast. Plus there was the definite possibility that Amber would pay for the food.

Amber's phone rang in her pocket. She glanced at the caller ID. "Terry," she mouthed to us: her friend at the lab.

Terry was a loud talker. Casey and I could hear most of it through the tinny phone speaker. We huddled around Amber. The herbal concoction in Mom's system--which we now knew was probably getting into her from the stash of vitamins helpfully supplied by Dr. Renfroe--was in fact what Terry had suspected. It had some of the properties of gingko biloba. But there was one big difference. It seemed to have the
opposite
effect. Terry wasn't sure why, but he aimed to find out.

Amber hung up and smiled at us. "Terry's a crazy man. He lives for this shit."

"What shit?" I demanded.

With that, Amber started jabbering like a girl with a crush. In the last 24

hours, Terry had also conducted a little experiment with mice. There were lots of lab mice at Texicon where he worked. Specifically, he'd given them the same chemical compound he'd discovered in Mom's blood. Then he sent them on a "memory course" to find cheese. Just a simple little maze that rodents could master easily. But instead of sharpening the mice memories--

find the cheese, find the cheese--the compound made them forget the cheese. Stranger still, they didn't even seem to
care
about the cheese anymore. Maybe they knew it was there; maybe they didn't. But they walked right by it. If they bumped into it, maybe they would eat it. Maybe not.

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All the talk about cheese made my stomach rumble.

"Meaning?" my brother asked.

Amber arched a perfect brow at us. "Meaning we have proof that Dr. Renfroe was giving your mother something to make her forget. On purpose. Now we need to find out why. And what it is he wanted her to forget. It had to do with the deaths at Oak View, I'm sure. But it's probably even bigger. When we know, I'm betting we'll know what happened to your father. Or at least we'll be closer to figuring it out. Terry's emailing over a PDF with the blood work specifics."

Then what?
I wondered.

Would we just grab Renfroe and interrogate him? It wasn't like we were cops. This was not an episode of
Law & Order
. Besides, if it were, we'd be done by now and watching something else. Which would mean that we had dug up the truth, something I both wanted and didn't want all at once. A tiny piece of me still wanted to be wrong. I liked Renfroe. Up until three days ago, he seemed a decent guy. Plus, I was my father's daughter. I was pissed that I hadn't caught the tells.

Amber's phone beeped. The three of us huddled over the tiny screen again.

According to lab guru Terry, Mom's blood showed deficiencies in a bunch of the stuff that helps memory: B-12, folic acid, and E. Her good cholesterol

was also crazy low; and Terry believed we needed to pump her up with omega-3 fatty acids (the phrase "fish oil" was repeated three times) and possibly a couple glasses of wine every day. He also suggested checking her teeth and making sure she didn't have a bladder infection.

In short: it was probable that Renfroe's so-called "vitamins" had been leeching everything good from my mother's system.

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"Holy shit," Casey and I said together. We all agreed that: 1) Any colorful language was justified. 2) It was time for a road trip to visit Dr. Renfroe in his home turf of Oak View Convalescent Home. 3) We would pick up Chinese food on the way.

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There was just one problem.

Now that the vitamins were working their way out of her system, Mom was starting to feel better.

There is only one good part (in my humble opinion) about having a mother who is totally unfocused and often slightly unhinged: Once you figure out how to ignore the fear and the anger and the not-knowing, you can basically do whatever you want. Your mother won't notice. But in the time between her tea and toast and our decision to head into Houston, Mom had started noticing.

"I know you must have told me," she said, "but why are you two home today?" She had moved to the couch in the family room and was drinking a mug of something (Tea? Hot water? We had no more coffee.) that she'd prepared all on her own. She was wearing jeans and a clean gray and white striped T-shirt and an old pair of topsiders. She'd arranged her hair into a half ponytail. There was pinkish lip gloss on her lips.

I stared at her. Casey stared at her. Amber stared at us.

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Mom tilted her head. Her eyes looked sharper. Alert. This was amazing. This was fantastic. This was a nightmare.

"Teacher work day," I said. "Remember?"

The look that Mom gave me was the kind of look she should have been giving us for a long time now. The one that said she knew we were up to some youthful shenanigans. That she was on to us. That she would not ignore the sweet smell of pot wafting from her son's door night after night.

That she would not just cry and go back to bed when her daughter passed out in front of her.
This
was the mom I had wanted so badly the past year.

But now she had to go away. Now we needed to drive to the Medical Center and inform Dr. Renfroe that he was a slimy bastard who had made my father disappear, plied my mother with destructive vitamins, and most likely poisoned my boots for reasons unknown. Not to mention how he had probably killed off a bunch of innocent old folks.

"Amber?" Mom set her mug on the coffee table. "That's your name, right?"

Amber nodded anxiously.

"Why are you in my house in the middle of the day? Don't you have somewhere to be? Aren't you a paramedic? Is that your Mercury Marquis on our driveway?"

"Mom," Casey began. "Mom--"

"Jenna," my mother interrupted, turning to me.

"Yeah?"

Her forehead wrinkled, her eyes even more intense as she studied my face.

"You've been sick, haven't you? And there was an accident. I ..." She shifted back to Amber again.

"Mrs. Samuels." Amber's voice was soft but firm, her Texas twang more noticeable for some reason. "We think that Jenna may have been--"

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The door bell rang.

All of us jumped. Even Mom. Amber opened up. For a horrified second, I thought it might be Renfroe, making an unannounced vitamin visit.

"I made Christmas fudge," announced Mrs. Gilroy. She held out a covered tin.

"Yum," Amber told her. "Smells delicious."

"Marshmallow Fluff," Mrs. Gilroy said. She poked her head in, peeking here and there like she was looking for something. "That's the secret ingredient.

Are y'all doing an indoor decorating project?" she asked in a voice that let me know that's not what she thought. "Cause we think it might be draining your electric system or something and maybe leeching over to ours. Our manger scene just lit up all by itself. Weirdest thing."

None of us said a word. Mrs. Gilroy wasn't big on taking hints.

Amber snatched the tray from her. "Is that all, ma'am? Thanks so much."

She narrowed her eyes, but nodded. "You're looking better, Holly," she said to Mom on her way out.

Amber slammed the door. I realized for the millionth time how much we'd tried to hide what had been going on, and how it had sort of slipped out there anyway. How could I hide it? Especially from nosy asshat neighbors. Maybe I'd been looking for people to know. Looking for help even when I was telling myself that I didn't need any.