Lisa Miscione - Twice

It was a bright, clear day as Ford McKirdy pulled his Taurus up the sidewalk in front of the Sunnyvale Retirement Home on Broadway in the Bronx. It was a sad-looking place, as were all nursing homes, no matter how hard they tried. Really, there was no escaping the fact that even the best of them were the antechamber to death. As he pushed open the white double doors and was assaulted by the odors of decay and disinfectant, he tried not to imagine himself in a place like this, nothing but a nuisance to his children, awake all day with his regrets, waiting to die.

Geneva Stout didn’t exist. Well, she had existed, until two years ago when she’d died alone at the age of eighty-eight in a nursing home in Riverdale, leaving no children, no relatives at all. There was no one registered at NYU under that name. So the nanny, whatever her real name was, had disappeared.

But he had to wonder how the nanny had managed to usurp Geneva’s identity, and his wondering had led him to the place where the old women had died, looking for answers.

Nurse Jeremiah was about as pleasant and easy on the eyes as an old bulldog. With a pronounced underbite, and a head of gray hair that was clearly store-bought, her tremendous girth commanded about two-thirds of the counter behind which she sat. She turned an evil eye on Ford as soon as he’d put foot on the linoleum floor, her scowl seeming to deepen the closer he came.

“Good morning,” he said with his most winning smile.

“If you say so,” she answered, staring at him as if trying to figure out his game.

He took out his gold detective’s shield and placed it on the counter in front of her, expecting her attitude to improve.

“I’m Detective Halford McKirdy from the New York City Police Department,” he said.

She glanced at him, then down at his shield with cool distaste.

“That supposed to scare me?” she asked.

“Uh, no.”

“What do you want, Officer?”

“Look, what’s your problem? You get bonus pay for attitude?”

“I don’t get bonus pay for nothin ’. I see you walking in here and I know you’re going to make my morning difficult. I can just see it in that cocky walk of yours.”

Ford looked into her middle-aged face and saw that beneath the crust was a marshmallow center. There was a glitter to her brown eyes and just the slightest upturning of the corners of her thin pink lips. In the lines on her face, he saw a woman who had changed diapers, read stories, gone to graduations. He saw a woman who, in spite of her size, still got out on the dance floor at weddings, whose generous arms were a safe place for the people who loved her. He smiled and leaned in to her a little.

“Come on,” he said. “Give me a break?”

She gave a little laugh, knowing somehow that he’d seen through her. “All right,” she sighed. “What is it?”

“Does the name Geneva Stout mean anything to you?”

She looked past him as if running the name through her mental database.

“I do remember Geneva,” she said finally. “A sweet, sweet old woman. She liked to play Scrabble. Never gave anyone a moment’s trouble. She was all alone, I remember. No one to visit.” She followed her sentence with a quick little cluck of her tongue, a noise that communicated sympathy and a little sadness. “What about her?”

“It’s not her so much as who was working here when Geneva died that interests me.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “This place has a revolving door. It’s gritty work, sad work. Reminds people of what the end could bring.”

“She’s a young woman, maybe in her late teens, early twenties when she was here. Exotic-looking, long dark curly hair. Pretty, petite. On the short side, maybe five-two, five-three.”

She shrugged. “Like I said, a lot of people have been through here.”

“What about employment records?”

The woman heaved a sigh. “See, now, there you go.”

“What?”

“I knew you were gonna make me get up from this seat,” she said, but she gave him a smile and hefted herself from the desk.

“Follow me,” she said, buzzing him through a door to her left.

She asked another woman to watch the front for her and led Ford down a hallway, and through a door marked RECORDS.

“What’s your name?” he asked her as they walked into the room.

“Katherine Jeremiah, my friends call me Cat. You can call me Nurse Jeremiah,” she said with a teasing smile.

When she flipped on the light switch, he expected to see rows of file cabinets; instead, he stood in a room filled with computers. The room was ice-cold and somewhere a vent rattled.

“Most everything is on computers these days. It took years to convert all our records. But we’re mostly caught up. The older files got moved into the basement. And these machines hold all employee and patient files since, I think, 1980 or something.”

Ford just nodded and smiled politely as if he cared. She pulled up a chair in front of one of the computers and began to type.

“Let’s see, if she was that young, then she probably wasn’t a nurse and definitely not a doctor,” she muttered, thinking aloud. “I’m going to search for all females between the age of seventeen and twenty-five working here from 1998 to 2001, and that should cover it.”

She typed a few things on the keyboard and then sat back. “Should take just a minute.”

“You have photographs on there?” asked Ford after they’d waited for a minute.

“There should be a photograph for everyone who worked here.”

She swiveled around in the chair and gave him a blatant once-over. “Wife left you?” she said out of nowhere.

“What?” Ford felt like she’d punched him in the gut.

“I’m just wondering because I see you’re wearing a ring. But no wife would let her husband go out of the house looking all messy like you slept in your clothes. You have a five o’clock shadow and it isn’t even noon.”

“It’s none of your business, Nurse Jeremiah,” he said with a frown.

She shrugged and gave him a knowing smile.

“Get her back,” she said, turning back to the computer. “All women who leave are hoping you’ll beg them to come back.”

“Thanks for the unsolicited advice,” he said, a little angry, a little embarrassed, and a little bit wondering if she was right.

A soft bing from the computer announced that twenty-five matches had been found to the criterion she had entered. She motioned Ford over and he came to stand behind her as she scrolled through each of the entries, each record complete with driver’s license photograph. She flipped slowly through and each face was unfamiliar to him, all of them young, most of them pretty, none of them the woman he was looking for.

He was starting to think he’d hit a dead end when she came to one of the last records. Her hair was much shorter, her face rounder. The picture didn’t at all capture her fiery beauty, but there was the woman he knew as Geneva Stout.

“That’s her,” he said, moving in closer.

“I remember that one,” said the nurse with a snort. “She walked around here like she owned the place. Lazy as the day is long. Then one day she didn’t show up for her shift. Never came back again.”

“Right after Geneva died?”

She thought about it a minute. “I guess that’s right.”

Ford leaned in to the record to read her name. “Oh, Lord,” he said with a shake of his head. “I should have known.”

“That sure is an odd name for a town,” Nurse Jeremiah said, reading the young woman’s address. “Haunted? I’ve never heard of such a place.”

“Unfortunately,” said Ford, “I have.”