The Sweet Dead Life

  “Mrs. Samuels.” Amber’s voice was soft but firm, her Texas twang more noticeable for some reason. “We think that Jenna may have been—”

  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.

  “Mom?” Casey asked.

  I turned to her.

  She was gone again. Just like that. The Gilroy’s manger may have lit up, but that brief light in Mom’s eye had flickered out. She asked Amber who she was again and Amber repeated, “I’m the EMT who helped Jenna and Casey. We talked last night, remember?”

  Mom nodded, her attention scooting this way and that. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I do know, don’t I?”

  “Absolutely.” Amber smiled.

  It reminded me of when I was little—three or four maybe—and how I hated banana pudding even though the rest of the family loved it. Mom would make it and when I wrinkled my nose, she’d tell me, “You said last time that you liked it, Jenna.” And I’d take a bite or two, believing her. It always took a few swallows before I realized I’d been duped. Mom was even more forgetful than that.

  Casey helped her back to bed. Part of me wanted to tell her everything. Part of me didn’t. And all of me knew that there were things she might never get to know. Things I did. Like how Casey hadn’t exactly made it out of the accident. Mostly though, I felt impatient. We needed to get going. We needed to make sure that Mom stayed safe from now on. I watched as Casey settled Mom against the pillows and pressed two fingers gently to her forehead, keeping them there until Mom’s eyes fluttered and began to shut.

  “You rest now,” he whispered.

  Mom was already asleep.

  A new worry surfaced. “Do you think it’s permanent?” I asked Amber. “Even if she never takes a tainted vitamin again?” I didn’t say the rest of it, the part where I wondered what would happen if Casey was gone for good, if we didn’t find Dad, if I was left with a Mom who was still mostly incapacitated. I guessed that I would do what I’d been doing, only maybe better now that I wasn’t dying from boot poison.

  “We’ll hope for the best,” was what she said.

  Right, I thought. Shit happens.

  I wished she’d touched me when she’d said it. But she didn’t.

  I CLIMBED INTO the back of the Merc and let Amber ride shotgun. Mamaw Nell’s photo was still lying on the backseat. I studied it as we headed to Houston.

  “Here’s what I still don’t get.” I eyeballed the image of Dr. Renfroe. He looked so sad and desperate. Even his chest hair looked sort of droopy. “We can prove that Dr. Renfroe gave Mom the vitamins. But we can’t prove he knew what was in them, can we? And that’s not even what’s bothering me.”

  (Note: Lots of things were bothering me, including the fact that Casey had changed his mind about stopping for Chinese. Saying them out loud helped.)

  I tried to put myself in Dr. Renfroe’s place, but without the chest hair. He had done good work for people with serious health problems. But then what? Had he woken up one morning and decided to screw with old people, and then with my family? That could be true only if my mother had somehow stumbled on something going wrong at Oak View. We had placed him at the Isle of Capri in a snit. We had placed him at our house, visiting Mom and bringing her bottles of vitamins that had just about made her forget who she was.

  On the other hand, he had taken care of me in the ER not once, but twice, and had diagnosed—correctly I hoped—the poison. He made me give up my damn boots to save my life. Unless of course, I took a turn for the worse.

  “He’s a smart dude,” Casey said, with that unnerving new habit of saying the words that were forming in my brain. “I mean, you have to be pretty genius to fake a vitamin that takes away people’s memories. The drug world would kill for something like that. A pill that makes people forget? That’s why I started toking up in the first place. That and it feels good.”

  Amber flashed him a disgusted look: Seriously?

  “What? When I’m high, I’m not worried. Unless I smoke too much. Then I get kind of paranoid, although not as much as Dave.” Here Casey paused, probably because he was remembering that Dave’s marijuana-induced paranoia about the flashing Prius dash display was how the Prius got smashed the first time.

  “Wait a second,” said Amber. “Go back—”

  “Dave’s an idiot,” I told her. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Not that,” Amber muttered impatiently. “This. Why would a doctor who works with people who are already losing their memories create a drug that would make them forget?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I agreed. “How long does it take to create a new drug?”

  “Depends on what kind,” Casey said. I guess hanging out with Dave gave him some expertise. “People cut stuff into marijuana all the time. But actual drugs that you prescribe to people—that takes years. There are tests and trials and it has to get approved by the FDA. That’s why people get so upset sometimes with stuff like cancer drugs. If you’re sick, you want the cure right away. You don’t want to wait five years for it to be tested because you might not have five years.”

  Amber nodded in the front seat. “Exactly. I’m happy to see you’re not stoned right now.”

  It was like a knee-jerk thing with her, being all bossy. Casey flashed me a fed-up look in the rearview mirror.

  He checked behind us and changed lanes to merge with Highway 59 and then 288 to the Med Center, spread out block after block with tons of hospitals and rehab centers and smaller specialized places like Oak View.

  “Okay,” I said. “If Dr. Renfroe somehow created a drug that made people forget—which is totally illogical but let’s go with it—it’s not something he’d come up with spur of the moment. So even if he wanted to hurt Mom’s memory because she knew something was fishy about him, it’s not like he could just create a pill for that overnight.”

  “Your father’s been gone for five years,” Amber countered. “I’m sorry. That came out harsher than I meant.”

  I wasn’t offended. Amber the Annoying was right. I glanced at the photo again, forcing myself to concentrate, to make everything click into place. Even if he was a twisted psychopath—and several signs pointed that way—Renfroe, unlike two of the people in the car with me, was still human. He was smart, yes—genius, maybe—but not Einstein genius. The facts we knew for sure: he was a hairy guy who ran a convalescent home and moonlighted in the ER. How could he possibly have created a miracle memory-erasing drug?

  Miracle.

  Something in my head shifted. My own lights lit up. In English class last year we learned Greek mythology. The ancient Greeks believed that the Goddess Athena sprang out of her dad Zeus’s head fully grown. Athena. Goddess of Wisdom. When the thought I was
trying to form finally squeezed its way out of my brain and onto my tongue, that’s how it felt. Like Athena popping out of my head.

  “Listen!” I poked between the two front seats. “Think about it. The guy doesn’t have enough hours in the day to make a memory drug just for Mom. So what does that mean? It means that he already had the drug. But it means more than that. There’s probably no way he would have purposely come up with something to hurt memory. That’s goofy, right? He’d want something that would help it. Even I remember Mom talking about that kind of stuff before she lost it, how doctors are creating drugs all the time to improve short- and long-term memory. That’s what everyone wants with Alzheimer’s right? The miracle cure.”

  “Holy crap,” Casey said. Oak View was just down the block, but he slammed the brakes so fast my stomach lurched. My body remembered the panic when we’d crashed the Prius. The Merc slowed to a stop, its right tires scraping the curb. He angled in his seat and looked at me. “That’s it,” he whispered, his eyes pulsating. “He wanted to get rich off making people remember. That’s why there was gingko whatever in the drug.”

  “Which means,” Amber said, in a voice that was pure East Texas high-pitched excitement, “that maybe something went wrong. And maybe the reason all those people have been dying is because he tried it out on them. He took a gamble. We know he’s the gambling kind.”

  I had to smile. “Exactly.” I waved the photo. “Look at him. People like Mamaw Nell go to gamble because it’s fun. They don’t mind losing a little cash. It’s just an afternoon of slots. But what if you were really desperate? What if you lost a bunch of money and wanted to get it back?”

  Both Casey and Amber nodded, waiting for me to go on.

  I couldn’t. That was all I had. We weren’t quite there, but we were on to something.

  “Okay, here’s another thought,” Casey said quietly, “What if Dad knew, too? Dad was a journalist. He might have been doing sports reporting, but what if he decided to investigate something Mom had tipped him off to? Or even something he was doing secretly behind her back, to protect her? What if that’s what he was doing the day he went to Manny’s?”

  My squirming insides turned to ice. “And something went wrong,” I said. “So Renfroe tests a memory drug on his patients. Only it makes them forget. Or makes them sick and eventually dead. What if whatever he was putting in them, he forced on Dad? And then put in Mom’s vitamins?”

  “I have an idea,” Amber said. “Wait a second.” She pulled out her cell. “Either of you know the Oak View number?”

  We both knew it by heart. She pressed it into her cell.

  Casey and I held our breath.

  “Hello,” Amber said in the sweetest of voices. “I need to speak to the office manager, please.” She waited. Then she started talking again, her drawl slower now and so sweet it made my molars twitch. “This is Lara Jean Simpkins over at Chase Bank. We’ve found some discrepancies in the Oak View Convalescent account records that we need to discuss with y’all. I’m sending a bank examiner out your way. I’ve already been in contact with Dr. Renfroe. He told me you’re the one who’s in charge. Said you’d be happy to chat. Yes, that’s Simpkins with an s on either end. Thanks so much. The examiner’s name is Rodney Baker. He’ll be there within an hour.”

  She hung up and shoved the phone back into her jeans pocket. Then she smiled at the both of us.

  “You’re good,” Casey told her.

  “Pull up some, but not all the way to the parking lot,” Amber directed, all business again. “We need to be able to see the driveway. If I’m right, it won’t be long.”

  Not ten minutes later, Dr. Renfroe’s shiny black Audi shot out of the Oak View lot, hung a right, and barreled down the block.

  Three Things I Now Know About Tailing Someone Near Oak View:

  1) It stinks if you are driving in a car the size of a medium motor boat, with the get-up-and-go of a horse and buggy.

  2) The neighborhood has a lot of twists and turns. It would have helped if we were chasing a slower car than an Audi. (Dr. Renfroe should have moonlighted as a NASCAR driver instead of an ER doctor and/or psychopath.)

  “SHOULD WE CALL the cops?” I asked.

  We were chugging a few cars behind Renfroe, who—(for reasons unknown) was now headed uptown. The Galleria Mall loomed ahead.

  “And tell ’em what?” Casey executed a sharp left across traffic as the Audi scooted into the Galleria underground parking lot.

  I stifled a yelp. The place was jammed with cars. Three weeks before Christmas, after all. If Renfroe was looking for a space, this was going to take awhile.

  “The truth,” Amber said. “Well, not all of it. They wouldn’t believe it. Let’s see what he’s up to first. When we’ve got proof, yes, we need to involve the cops.”

  I took two things from this. The first was that Amber seemed to have a plan to bring the guilty parties to justice. The second was that she was right. People were strange. They believed all sorts of stupid crap. They fell for Internet scams asking to save Nigerian princes. Watched reality TV like it was real. But if I walked up to that knot of Christmas shoppers standing at the entrance to Nordstrom’s, and I told them I’d sped here in Mamaw Nell’s borrowed Mercury Marquis in hot pursuit of a man whose miracle drug had gone wrong and had attempted to destroy my family, they would gawk at me like the lunatic I appeared to be. And that was leaving out the angel part.

  We tailed the Audi around and around the packed garage. Up two floors, down two floors, this way and then that in the aisles of cars. Was it always this crowded? Truth was: I hadn’t been to a mall in a while, not since before Halloween, anyway. Finally Renfroe slowed to a stop. A Range Rover pulled out, leaving a vacant spot.

  “Follow him, Amber,” Casey said. “I’ll figure something out.” I kept my eye on the Audi, hoping that Renfroe was so focused on going wherever he was going that he wouldn’t look our way. There was no mistaking Mamaw Nell’s Merc.

  “Stay with your brother,” Amber commanded. She leaped from the car and crouched low between a BMW sedan and a Honda.

  Screw this. I was out of the Merc and squatting next to her before either of them could protest.

  “Get back in the car!” Amber hissed. She hunkered lower as the driver’s door of the Audi swung open.

  I peered around the BMW’s fender. Dr. Renfroe straightened. He glanced behind him nervously, but didn’t seem to spot the Merc. I held my breath and withdrew my head. The Merc idled, exhaust fumes billowing up my nose. Any second now I was going to break into a coughing fit. Amber peeked over the Honda. When she sighed, I knew Renfroe had entered the Galleria.

  She glared down at me. “If you’re coming, then c’mon. We don’t want to lose him.” She slapped the Merc’s trunk like she was hitting the rear end of a horse. “Go!” she shouted in my brother’s general direction. “Text me when you’re inside.”

  Amber took off at a race walk, her pointy-toed boots slapping the concrete. I chased, my Converse soles a lame squeak in comparison.

  “Don’t you just know?” I hollered.

  She gave me the stink eye over her shoulder. “Know what?”

  “Know where Renfroe is. Where he’s going. Like with Casey. You know where he is all the time—”

  “You’re kidding, right?” she spat. She pushed through the doors into the brightly lit mall. Christmas assailed us: silver and white snowflakes, a display of ginormous gold ornaments, red and green “50% OFF!” banners, a grouping of life-sized nutcrackers, all in a backdrop of glittering store windows and faux marble flooring. I felt woozy. Amber picked up the pace. I spotted Renfroe’s curly dark hair ahead of us, near the Starbucks kiosk.

  “Don’t let him see you,” she whispered.

  Casey better get in here pretty quick. Otherwise Detective Bossy and I were going to end up throwing down in front of Armani.

  Dr. Renfroe moved briskly into the vast atrium, past the giant Christmas tree in the middle toward the bank of elevators a
t the far end. He pressed the up button. I heard Amber’s cell buzz in her pocket. Casey.

  “Ten to one he’s headed upstairs in the Financial Center,” she told my brother. “We’re right behind him.”

  I tapped her on the shoulder. “Shouldn’t we—”

  “Wait,” Amber snapped, not bothering to let me finish.

  I returned that stink eye. But I waited.

  Renfroe stepped into an elevator. The door closed. Amber crept closer, gesturing for me to follow. She raised a finger to her lips and pointed towards the upper levels with her other hand: six levels that ringed the atrium and the big, fat, too-tall Christmas tree smack in the middle. I squinted in the glare of the skylight.

  “Fifth floor, if I’m right,” she whispered. “Wait for it.”

  Was she listening for something? Because all I could hear was a bunch of eager-beaver Christmas shoppers with way too much time and money on their hands. That, and the faint muzak strains of “Jingle Bell Rock” echoing from every direction. I tried to follow her eyes, counting upwards.

  All at once, she grabbed my hand. She dragged me to the elevator bank.

  When the door opened, Amber whipped her EMT badge from her back pocket. “Out!” she demanded of the crowd inside.

  There was a slight murmur. It was holiday time, and the way I figured it, people were already irritable with the need to pretend that they were happy. Plus Amber was dressed in jeans and a low-cut shirt. She didn’t look like an EMT. This had to be confusing.

  “You really authorized?” asked a tall guy in a business suit and cowboy boots.

  “Do I need to call someone?” Amber asked him right back.

  Everybody hustled out, double-time.

  Amber jabbed the 5 button and the doors slid shut. Up we went. One. Two. Three. Four … The doors slid open. Quieter up here, except for one loud shouting voice. My blood ran cold. I knew that voice. We stepped out. On the other side of our ring, across the vast empty expanse of the atrium, Renfroe was shouting at two men.

  Two very familiar men.