August 4, 2018 AD
The Wintergreen Lozenge
Shortly after the evening meal at Vaucluse Nursing Home, Constance Addleton wheeled herself to Room 7 and offered Jane Lahey a wintergreen lozenge she had prepared weeks earlier. Jane took it as an old remedy for her cough. The two women spoke briefly of closer watching, of Thelma, and of a key Luke Smith had never returned. Constance folded the discarded wrapper into a triangle, left it on the side table, and went.
Constance Addleton had kept the lozenge for several weeks before she used it. It lay in the drawer of her bedside table in Room 3C, twisted into a square of waxed paper beside a photograph of Trenowyth House. To any eye it was one of the wintergreen lozenges sold by the tin at a chemist. She had prepared it herself.
Shortly after twenty past five, once the evening meal had been cleared, Constance left Room 3C in her electric wheelchair and crossed to the west wing. The door of Room 7 stood ajar, which it seldom did. Jane Lahey was sitting upright in bed against her pillows, her white hair combed back and pinned, a shawl folded around her shoulders. The curtains had been parted onto the last of the light over the Derwent. A mug of tea on the side table had gone cold untouched.
Jane had been coughing through the afternoon, a dry hoarseness that caught high in her throat. Constance offered her the lozenge for it. Jane knew the remedy as an old one, accepted it without hesitation, and let the wrapper drift into the folds of the blanket across her lap.
The conversation that followed was short and conducted in low voices. Jane observed that the staff had begun watching the residents more closely. They spoke of Thelma, who was growing tired and who forgot nothing. Both women understood that whoever Jane feared was no longer coming; they were already here. Jane knew that she was in danger, and that others were too. She did not count the woman beside her bed among that danger.
While they talked, Constance took the wrapper from Jane's lap and folded it, in halves and then in quarters, into a small, exact triangle. The talk turned to Luke Smith and the key he still held. Jane said that he should have given it back. Near the end she asked Constance whether her own end would come soon, meaning the cancer. Constance did not answer.
Jane let her eyes close. Constance leant in and whispered that he had never given the key back, and that this was how the rot began. She set the folded wrapper on the side table beside the cold tea, turned her chair and went back the way she had come, closing the door behind her.
