I jotted down “previous heart attack,” mostly just because taking notes made me look more professional. “Why?”
“Because in Mrs. Claussen’s case, the alternative was a slow, protracted death from liver failure,” she said.
“So why is it that you’re reluctant to say a sudden death was a blessing this time?” I inquired.
Nurse Luisa pressed her lips together. “The look on her face.”
“Which was?”
“Terrified,” she said briefly. “That and what Connie said.”
“Connie’s the nurse who was on duty last night?” I asked. She nodded. “What’s her last name?”
“Adams.”
I wrote that down. “And what did she say to you about Mrs. Claussen?”
“Connie said she was passing her room at around four o’clock in the morning, and she heard Mrs. Claussen saying, ‘Get her off me, get her off me.’”
“Did she investigate at the time?” I asked.
“No,” Nurse Luisa said. “Not until the morning. You must understand, it’s not uncommon for residents to have nightmares or talk in their sleep. Unless there’s a medical issue, we try to respect their privacy. Connie waited a moment, and when she heard nothing further, returned to the office.”
“Was Mrs. Claussen prone to nightmares?”
She hesitated. “She’d had incidents in the past, yes. Lately it was hard to say. The medication she was on to manage her pain kept her fairly heavily sedated, but some patients do report nightmares as a side effect of opiate drugs.”
“So she could have been having nightmares,” I said. “But she was too sedated to complain about them?”
“Or possibly to remember them,” Nurse Luisa agreed. “Or to distinguish between reality and a bad dream.”
An assistant knocked on the door to let us know that Chief Bryant had arrived. I closed my notepad and put it away. “Thank you. If you don’t mind, we’d like to take a look at the body.”
In the foyer, the chief greeted me with a cordial nod. Nurse Luisa led us through the sunlit common room, where seniors looked up from their backgammon games and jigsaw puzzles—which, ew, reminded me of creepy Jigsaw from the movies last night—to speculate about our presence in loud whispers, to the residence halls, pausing outside room 14. It had a plastic nameplate with IRMA CLAUSSEN on it. The nurse swiped her keycard and opened the door.
Cody and I followed the chief inside. It was a modest room without a lot of personal effects—a few photographs atop a low dresser, a potted ficus tree in the corner. Mrs. Claussen’s body lay atop the bed, loosely wrapped in a clean white sheet that had been placed beneath her. Striding over to the bed, Chief Bryant gently folded the sheet back from her face.
“We closed her eyes,” Nurse Luisa said behind us, a slight tremor in her voice. “We did our best. We always do.”
I made myself look.
Last night, I’d watched a number of actors and actresses meet their demise in a variety of sadistic and gory scenarios. Irma Claussen’s death was infinitely more real and infinitely more affecting. She looked old and shrunken beneath the sheet, her fragile, liver-spotted skin tinged with yellow. At a glance, it wasn’t obvious that she’d died in a state of terror. The Open Hearth nursing staff had done a good job of closing her eyes, of trying to coax the muscles of her face to soften from a rictus of terror.
Still, the impression lingered. It was there beneath her sunken eyelids, there in the rigid muscles that bracketed her mouth and corded her throat, there in the swollen, crabbed hands raised in a defensive posture.
She had died afraid. Very, very afraid.
Chief Bryant fished the dwarf-wrought watch out of his pocket and held it dangling over Irma Claussen’s body. The watch began to rotate on the end of its chain, twirling like a gyroscope, the hands on its face spinning backward.
Night Hag.
The fucking Night Hag had scared this poor woman to death. A wave of helpless rage burst over me. Overhead, some old ducts creaked ominously in protest.
“Daisy,” Cody said in quiet warning.
The nurse glanced back and forth among the three of us. “What is it?”
I gritted my teeth, trying unsuccessfully to wrestle my anger under control, to tie it up in a box to be opened later. “Cody, can you fill her in and tell her what she needs to do?” I said to him. “I think I need to step outside for a moment.”
He nodded. “You’ve got it.”
“I’ll come with you,” Chief Bryant said. “I want a quick update on where we are with this thing.” He laid one meaty palm briefly on Irma Claussen’s brow, murmuring, “Godspeed you, ma’am.”
Outside in the parking lot, the cold air helped cool my temper. The chief listened impassively in his warm, fleece-lined uniform jacket while I told him the latest. “Why can’t Hel just banish the bitch herself?” he asked when I’d finished. “She’s a goddamn goddess, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it doesn’t work that way. See, Hel only has complete authority over her own subjects in Little Niflheim. Here, aboveground, she has to rely on an agent of her authority to maintain her order.”
“You,” he said.
“Me,” I agreed. “I can banish the damn thing in her name, sir.” Tears of frustration stung my eyes. “I just have to catch it!”