Chapter 7

Ms. Provost was a small woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a canvas tote bag full of folders. She shook my hand and said my name right.

She shook Corinne's hand and said hers.

Then she sat down in Glen's kitchen with a legal pad on her knee and asked Corinne to tell her about the household.

I stood at the sink and washed dishes I'd already washed, and listened.

Corinne did most of the talking. She talked about how hard she'd worked to keep the family together, and how much she loved her father-in-law, and how Glen had started to decline. She talked about the pillbox. She talked about how worried she'd been. She used the word paranoid three times, and every time, she was talking about me without saying my name.

Seth stood by the door with his arms crossed and agreed with everything.

Then Ms. Provost asked to see Glen.

She got ten minutes with him. I know, because I counted them at the sink while my hands went cold in the dishwater.

When she came out, her mouth was a flat line.

"Mrs. Tilden," she said. "The report mentions that Mr. Tilden's medication has been going missing."

"That's right," Corinne said. "Josie has struggled with it-"

"I'd like to hear from Josie, please."

Corinne's eyes came up and met mine, and for half a second there was something in them that wasn't charm.

I dried my hands and sat down at the table.

I told her about the counts. I told her about the receipt in my apron. I gave it to her and she looked at it and turned it over and put it on her pad, and then she asked me a question I wasn't ready for.

"How does Mr. Tilden seem to you when he's been given his evening medication, compared to when he hasn't?"

"Different," I said. "When he doesn't get it, he's loud and he wanders and he doesn't know me. When he does, he's calm. He sleeps."

"And this morning?"

I looked at Corinne. Corinne looked back at me with her eyebrows up, polite, interested, willing to be helpful.

"May I see the pill organizer, Mrs. Tilden?" Ms. Provost said.

Corinne got it off the counter and set it in front of her.

Ms. Provost opened Tuesday.

Tuesday's morning slot was empty. So was Monday's. So was every morning slot in the box from that day forward.

"These are all morning doses," she said. "Where are the evening doses?"

"Those get taken out at night," Corinne said.

"By whom?"

"By whoever puts him to bed."

"And who puts him to bed?"

Nobody said anything.

Ms. Provost looked at the empty morning slots for a long moment, and then she looked up at Corinne, and her voice was perfectly even.

"Mrs. Tilden, how many of Mr. Tilden's evening sedatives have been dispensed this week?"

Corinne's mouth moved. Nothing came out.

The back door banged.

We all turned. Seth had gone out to the dooryard and come back in, and he was carrying Glen's snow boots, which made no sense, because Glen couldn't walk in them anymore and everybody in the room knew it.

In the mudroom behind Seth, I heard Glen's voice. Not calling. Mumbling.

Then I heard him fall.

I was up and moving before Ms. Provost had her pen down. Glen was on the floor of the mudroom in his socks and his cardigan, half in and half out of his chair, and his eyes were open but they weren't on anything. His hands were cold. His breathing was wrong, slow and shallow and far apart.

"Call 911," I said.

Corinne was behind me in the doorway, and she didn't move.

"Call 911," I said again, and it came out of me as a scream.

Seth called. Ms. Provost knelt by Glen and took his wrist and looked at his color and looked up at me, and then at Corinne, and something hardened in her face that I will remember for the rest of my life.

"Where are his pills," she said.

Nobody answered.

Corinne said, "He's eighty-one."

Ms. Provost said, "Where does he keep his pills."

I got up and went through the kitchen and down the hall to the office, and this time the door wasn't locked, because Seth had other things on his mind.

I opened the drawer.

The walkie-talkie was sitting right on top of the folder, like he'd put it there for me.