Thirty Days

The envelope under Imogen Hartley's door was the color of old teeth.

She didn't open it. She didn't have to. FINAL NOTICE, it would say, in the same polite typeface as the first three. Thirty days. Then the house on Comfrey Lane, the only thing her mother had managed to keep, belonged to a company that mailed its threats on cream paper.

She set it on the hall table under her keys, where it could wait the way everything in her life waited. Unpaid. Unopened. One day closer.

St. Augustine's swallowed the rest of her. Twelve hours became fourteen, because Marta's sitter had quit and Imogen needed the shift differential more than she needed sleep. By nine that night her shoes felt like wet cement and she had eaten half a granola bar.

"Four-twelve is asking for you again," Marta said, passing the meds cart. "Refused his dinner. Says the soup is a conspiracy."

Room 412. Walter Crowther, eighty-one, a heart like a worn-out engine, and a standing order that no family visitors were to be admitted. In three weeks Imogen had never seen a single one try.

He was sitting up with the chess board open on the tray table, playing both sides, losing to himself.

"You look terrible, kiddo."

"You refused the soup."

"It was beige." He moved a knight, then frowned at it like it had betrayed him. "Sit. Five minutes. That's an order from a dying man, and those are legally binding."

"That's not a real law."

"It's a hospital law. Ask anyone." He coughed, and the cough went on too long, and she watched the monitor the way she had learned to watch it with him: without letting her face do anything.

She sat. He beat her in eleven moves, because she let him have the first ten and lost the eleventh honestly.

"How much do you owe them?" he asked, out of nowhere.

Her hands went still over the pieces. "The soup really was fine, Walter."

"Don't." His voice was gentle, and that was worse. "The envelopes. I saw one in your bag last week, the cream kind. I spent forty years making men in suits sweat, kiddo. I know what a threat looks like when it's trying to be polite."

She put the white king back on its square. "Thirty days," she said, because he was the only person she'd told. "Then the house goes. It's fine. It's a house."

"It's your mother's house."

"It's a house," she said again, and got up, and fixed his pillow so she didn't have to look at him.

Walter caught her wrist. His hand was all knuckles and paper skin, but the grip surprised her. "Some debts aren't meant to be paid in money," he said. "You remember that, when it matters."

"You're being strange."

"I'm dying. I'm allowed." He let her go and smiled like a man who had won something she couldn't see. "Same time tomorrow, nurse. Bring better soup."

At twenty-one thirty-eight the alarm went off in 412.

The code team worked him for seventeen minutes. Imogen did compressions until Marta pulled her off, and she stood in the corner of the room in her own sweat while the attending called it. Time of death, twenty-one forty-one.

His hand was still warm. The chess game was still mid-board, her king one move from a mate he had set up for her and never told her about.

She found out at the desk that family had been called. One contact. A grandson. The nurse who took the call came back pale, and said only, "He's on his way," the way you'd say a storm was on its way.

Imogen stayed past her shift to do the post-mortem care herself, because Walter Crowther had spent three weeks telling her she was the only person in the building with any sense, and it felt like the last chess move she could give him.

She never saw the grandson. He came and went through a different door, the way storms do.

Two nights later she walked out of St. Augustine's into rain that hadn't made up its mind, and a man in a dark coat unfolded himself from beside a black car at the curb.

"Miss Hartley."

Her keys were already laced between her fingers. Debt collectors had gotten bold, but not this well-dressed. "Whatever they're paying you, the house isn't worth it."

"This isn't about your debt." He held the car door open like her answer didn't matter. "My employer would like thirty minutes of your time."

"Your employer can make an appointment like everyone else."

The man reached into his coat and produced a card, and even in the streetlight the stock was thick enough to have opinions. One word on it. CROWTHER.

The rain chose that moment to commit.

"It's about Walter Crowther's will," he said. "And what his grandson intends to do about you."