* * *
JORDAN
“What do you have there?” the detective said to one of his investigators, who was standing at the threshold of the dead woman’s living room. I didn’t have to stay for the whole interrogation, but I didn’t want to abandon Ashley, so I stuck around. Hearing the story of what that old woman had done made my face burn with rage all over again. Besides the psychological pain she’d inflicted on Ashley this past weekend and her kids over a lifetime, faking your own death is a crime, and an insult to doctors and the hardworking end-of-life professionals who devote their lives to giving the deceased a dignified passing.
“It was in the vent,” the investigator said as he held up a clear evidence bag with a baseball in it. “Completely blocked the airflow in and out.”
Those standard nine-inch MLB-regulation balls are ubiquitous. Half the neighborhood kids probably had ones just like it. I figured it had gotten lodged in there during someone’s backyard batting practice. I once hit a line drive that got stuck in the O in “OUTS” on our scoreboard; it’s still there to this day. Yes, there was a big box of them on my living room floor, but I didn’t see any reason to mention it. At least not yet.
“Could it have gotten in there by accident?” the detective asked.
And the investigator shook his head. “The vent has a little roof over it.”
“Prints?”
“Nope.”
Ashley was sitting next to me. As my backyard batting practice theory went up in smoke, I forced myself not to look at her. I didn’t want to see her fingers threaded together to keep her hands from shaking, or the pink stain that was spreading across her ears and neck.
The fact that Ashley was named in the will made her an obvious suspect, but—as she’d already explained—she hadn’t known she was Louisa’s heir until the will reading. And by that point she’d thought Louisa was already dead. Yes, she’d impersonated Louisa’s nurse, but she’d thought it was an audition. And Louisa had long since disappeared when she’d found out that it wasn’t. Plus Louisa was the one who wrote the copy and left the recording on Nathan’s voice mail, so it was clear who the mastermind was, and that it wasn’t Ashley.
“How old do you think that ball is?” the detective asked, peering into the evidence bag.
“Old,” his investigator replied. “We’ll send it to forensics, but I betcha ten years at least.”
The detective let us go with a promise to follow up in a day or two. Ashley and I drove home in silence. The rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle. When we got to the house, Brando jumped out of the car and trotted up the front walk with his nose in the air like a show pony who had just won the blue ribbon. And why not? He certainly deserved one. His timely disobedience had saved two lives. I shuddered to think how much worse this would have been if he had been a good boy.
“What a surreal morning,” Ashley said as I opened the front door for her, then followed her and Brando into the house.
“Horrifying,” I agreed, not elaborating on what I thought was the most horrifying part.
“Crazy how there was a baseball in there,” Ashley said, as if there weren’t an open box of them right by her feet.
“Sounds like they think it might’ve been in there for a long time,” I said.
“Well, it did look old.”
“Is that what you think?” I asked. And she kind of shrugged.
“It makes sense, I guess.”
I peered down into the open box of old baseballs. Twenty-one of them, to be exact. It would take all of ten seconds to count them.
“Louisa was a terrible human being,” I offered, in case Ashley had something more she wanted to tell me.
“Well, she won’t hurt anybody now.”
When I became a doctor, I took an oath to “do no harm.” It seemed a simple promise, but then again, there’s nothing simple about caring for humans. We murder healthy cells to kill cancerous ones; cut off damaged limbs to preempt infection; steal blood, marrow, organs from one human to save another. It’s easy to say “the ends don’t justify the means,” except when they do.
“One might argue she got what was coming to her,” I said. “Given that she was already supposed to be dead.” And Ashley just nodded and looked at the floor.
We stood there in silence for what felt like eternity. It was so quiet I could hear my heartbeat. Brando had his head down, but his eyes were on me, like he knew the next move was mine.