Page 13 of Her Last Refuge

Novak took the pillow from her and examined it himself, his expression more serious now. "You're thinking suffocation."

"I'm thinking it's worth asking Donna if she remembers seeing it on the floor before she started compressions." Rachel stood, brushing off her knees. "She was the one working on him. If it ended up under the bed during the code, she might remember kicking it or knocking it loose."

She headed back to the nurse’s station, hoping Donna had decided to leave after having spoken to them. But she was still there, speaking another one of the nurses. She did have her purse over her shoulder now, perhaps finally ready to get out of there after a long, traumatic night. She looked up when they approached, her eyes going first to the pillow in Novak's hand.

"This pillow," Novak said. “It’s pretty standard for all the rooms, right?”

Donna looked at it for only a moment before nodding. “Yeah, that’s right. Not very comfortable if you want my opinion.”

"This one had been kicked under Howard’s bed," Rachel said. "Pushed pretty far back. Do you remember seeing it on the floor when you started compressions on Howard?"

Donna's brow furrowed, and she took a moment before answering. Rachel could tell that she was trying to be careful about getting the details right, clearly trying to reconstruct the scene in her head. "Honestly, I don't know. I remember his hands being folded and having to move them out of the way, and I remember grabbing a pillow off the bed at some point because it was in the way and…I mean, I thought I just shoved it aside. I don’t remember it going to the floor. But, I mean, I wasn’t really paying attention to that, you know? Everything after that is kind of a blur. I wasn't thinking about pillows. I was thinking about getting his heart going again."

"That's understandable," Rachel said. "I'm not asking because I think you did anything wrong. I just need to know if it's possible the pillow was already on the floor before you got there, or if it ended up there during the chaos."

"I really can't say for sure." Donna rubbed at her temple, her exhaustion plain on her face. "I wish I could give you a better answer. It happened so fast, and I wasn't looking at the floor."

Rachel nodded and let it go, aware that pushing further wasn't likely to produce anything more useful. Her eyes drifted to the paperwork spread across the desk in front of Donna. "Would you be able to pull up your staff sign-in records? Just the last two weeks or so."

"Sure." Donna turned to the computer and clicked into a different system, her fingers moving swiftly over the keyboard. "You want just my shifts, or everybody's?"

"Everybody's, if it's not too much trouble. And while you're in there, could you also pull the resident rounding logs for the same period? Specifically for Ruth's room and Howard's."

"That's two different systems, but yeah, we can do that. But Miriam will have to get you access to other nurses. I can’t do that." She looked over to Miriam as she typed. “Miriam, can you come here for a second?”

Miriam came quickly from her place just a few feet away from the door to Howard’s room. She did her best to smile for Rachel and Novak, but it was clearly not real. Donna told her what Rachel had asked for and she didn’t argue. She simply gave a mm-hmm sound and pulled up the records in question.

"There you go,” Miriam said. “Everything from the last two weeks."

“Thank you.”

Rachel scrolled back through the entries, checking shift assignments against dates. As she did so, she noticed that this time, Miriam stayed at the nurse’s station. Donna's name appeared consistently on the overnight rotation for the east wing, night after night. She quickly came to the entry three nights ago when Ruth Durst had died. And there it was, logged plainly in the system: Donna Pryce, night shift, room 114, last documented check at 11:47 p.m.

"You were the last one to see Ruth Durst," Rachel said, looking up from the screen. "The night she passed."

Donna's face went still. "I didn't put that together until just now, honestly. I check on so many residents every night, it all runs together after a while. But yeah, I guess that's right. I did her vitals, tucked her in, same as always. I wasn’t the one who found her dead, though."

Rachel scrolled further into the rounding notes, back a few days before Ruth's death, and found a series of entries that made her slow down. Each one was brief, clinical, the kind of shorthand a night nurse used to log something out of the ordinary without dwelling on it. Resident agitated, requested forgiveness repeatedly, unclear referent. Redirected, resident settled. The same phrasing, or something close to it, appeared twice more in the days that followed, each time attributed to Donna's overnight checks.

"What's this about?" Rachel turned the monitor toward Donna. "These notes say Ruth kept making odd comments…that she was asking you to forgive her. More than once."

Donna leaned in and read the entries, and something crossed her face that looked like genuine confusion rather than evasion. It made her look even more tired, somehow. "She did do that, yeah. A few nights running, actually. She'd grab my hand and ask me to forgive her, real upset about it. I'd ask her what for, and she never could tell me. I figured it was just the dementia, you know? Sometimes they get fixated on things that don't make sense to us—guilt or fear over something from years back that gets all tangled up with the present. I told her whatever it was, it was alright, because that's usually what settles them down. I didn't think much of it beyond that."

"Did she ever say a name?” Novak asked. “Anything specific about what she thought she'd done?"

"Never. Just forgive me, forgive me, over and over, and then she'd calm down and forget she'd even said it." Donna shook her head slowly and for a moment, Rachel thought she might cry. "I've had residents fixate on all kinds of things. Usually it's nothing. But now, with everything else..."

She didn't finish the sentence, and Rachel didn't push her to. She looked at Novak, who was studying the screen with the same focus he'd given the pillow, and neither of them said anything for a moment.

“Mrs. Colt,” Rachel said. "Do you have security cameras on the premises?"

"We do. Common areas, mostly." Miriam nodded toward the far end of the hall. "The rec room, the game room, and we've got exterior cameras covering the garden and the parking lot."

"What about the residential halls? The individual wings?"

Miriam shook her head. "No. Nothing inside the halls themselves, and nothing in the rooms."

Rachel kept her expression neutral. "That seems like a significant gap, given the population you're caring for."