Simply Lies

Chapter 25

The hard bed, the hard chair, an empty bottle of Ensure on the nightstand, the cheerless room cluttered but now without its occupant. Her mother had come here with basically nothing and had now left with the same.

Clarisse sat in the chair and gazed around.

The management had groveled at her feet for an hour, begging for mercy, pleading for her not to sue their asses off. The police had been called and looked around and asked some questions. They came back to meet with Clarisse when she arrived. They told her that her mother might have simply wandered off. They had started a search. No foul play was suspected, they told her. Just an old woman wandering off. She would turn up soon. The weather was nice, not too hot, not too cold. She couldn’t have gone far. They’d find her soon enough. They left, their boredom barely concealed.

Clarisse slipped one glove off and then the other. She had gotten off the jet dressed to the nines. She wanted them to know who was in their presence. She wanted them to quake.

Though I’m really a nobody, I can act like SOMEBODY better than any other person on the planet.

The manager poked her head in the doorway. “If there’s anything you need, anything at all, Ms. Frazier?”

“My mother would be nice. See what you can do about that, why don’t you?”

The head disappeared like it had been jerked away, and the door closed.

Her mother had not gotten up and walked away, although it would have been easy to do so in this place. Except for the memory unit, the facility had not been built to prevent old people from fleeing. It had apparently never occurred to the dolts here that their charges ever could or would.

But her mother didn’t have the lungs to walk down the hall, much less out the door. She had told the police this but they clearly didn’t believe her. She hadn’t pushed it because the last thing she wanted was to start answering a bunch of questions about her and her mother’s past.

One cop had asked her, “Do you or your mother have any enemies, ma’am?” She knew the way he asked it, he was being tongue-in-cheek.

Oh, you have no clue, asshole. She truly hated men in uniform.

It was clear that someone had taken her mother. The puzzle was how they had found her in the first place.

She walked to the office, opened the door, and said, “Any CCTV? I saw what looked like cameras.”

A few minutes later, on the camera feed, she saw her mother come around the corner of the building, and the woman was not alone. She was in a wheelchair being pushed by someone in jeans and a bulky hoodie.

She was wheeled out of the building while the front desk was apparently unoccupied. The exterior cameras next picked her up being loaded into a van, then the hoodie driving them off. Only the first three letters of the license plate could be seen.

She looked at the manager, who was standing behind her, riveted by this spectacle.

“And no one saw this?” Clarisse said. “Do you have no one who actually watches this stuff? And no one thought to show the police this while they were here? They didn’t ask if there was footage? Is this a joke or what?”

“I... I don’t know what to say. We’re a little short on personnel. And we never really saw the need for security. We thought the cameras were enough. And who would want to hurt any of our dear, sweet residents?”

“You do realize that I could end up owning this place, right? And if I do, I sure as hell won’t be requiring your services.”

The woman swayed on her feet. “We can get the police back in here and show them the footage.”

Clarisse had already leapt ahead and thought this through. No police. She would handle this on her own. “I’ll make a deal with you. Say nothing to the cops and I won’t file a lawsuit against you and this place.”

“But—”

“It wasn’t really a request.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Now I need to transfer that video file to my computer, and then I want you to get out of my face. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

After the file was delivered, she returned to her mother’s room, sat down in the chair, rubbed her temples, and shut her eyes.

Hoodie and white van stealing her mother away. Not good in so many ways.

My defenses have been pierced.

She was sure the van was already abandoned and the hoodie abductor was long gone with their hostage, for that was what her mother had become. They hadn’t realized her mother was missing until her meds were due. That was five hours after she had been rolled out of the place. Wheels up on a private jet, she could be in another country now. Just being driven somewhere, she could already be in any number of states.

And what am I going to do about that? Because I’m not sure who it is, though I have my suspicions, strong ones. But the worst part is, I’m apparently no longer anonymous, when that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.

This was a race, a competition of sorts. That was why she had brought Gibson in. And it was the first time Clarisse thought that she might lose.

And now I have somewhere else to be.

It wasn’t connected to this, but it was connected to something else important. The most important of all.

My survival. Because I’ve damn well earned the right to keep on living.