Can't Wait to Get to Heaven (21 page)

A Disturbing Call

9:48
AM

U
pstairs in the executive offices, Franklin Pixton had just received a disturbing phone call and had called his lawyer again.

“Gus Shimmer was here. Somebody spotted him talking to Mrs. Warren. Should we be worried?”

Winston Sprague thought a moment, then said, “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to get a deposition from the old lady, in case Shimmer tries to make trouble.”

“What about Mrs. Warren?”

“Give me an hour, then think of something to get her out of the room for a while. It’s better if she’s not there.”

An hour later Norma, still somewhat thrown for a loop, was trying to act as normal as possible, considering that Aunt Elner was convinced she had died and gone to heaven. Norma and the nurse were busy rearranging the flowers around the room when there was a knock on the door.

“Mrs. Warren?” said an attractive older woman in a gray dress.

“Yes?”

“I’m Brenda Hampton, Mr. Pixton’s assistant, and he’s wondering if you could come upstairs to the office.”

“Oh. Well, I hate to leave my aunt, I just got here.”

Unfortunately, Elner piped up. “You go on, Norma, I’m fine.” Norma really did not want to go. She was still concerned about Aunt Elner telling someone about her trip, but she couldn’t be rude, so she reluctantly went upstairs with the woman.

As soon as Winston Sprague saw Miss Hampton and Mrs. Warren get on the elevator, he and paralegal Kate Packer walked into Elner’s room. “Good morning, Mrs. Shimfissle,” he said. “How are we today?”

Elner said, “Just fine, thank you, and how are you?”

“Fine. Are they taking good care of you?”

“Oh, yes. I had a good breakfast, right here in bed.”

Sprague turned to the nurse and indicated rather rudely that he wanted her out of the room.

After she left, he said, “Mrs. Shimfissle, we need to ask a few questions. It’s just boring legal stuff, but we need to get it down on record.”

Elner said, “Oh well, if it’s legal, maybe we should wait for my niece, she handles all my paperwork.”

“No, we really don’t need her to be here, and this will only take a minute. Go ahead, Kate,” said Sprague, snapping his fingers at her. “This is Miss Packer. She’ll be asking the questions.”

Miss Packer, an efficient-looking young woman in a blue business suit, came over and sat by the bed.

“Mrs. Shimfissle, do you swear that the facts you are about to state are the truth and nothing but the truth?”

“Oh, sure,” said Elner, raising her right hand. Then she looked at Miss Packer. “Aren’t you going to make me swear on the Bible?”

“No, that’s not necessary. State your full name, please.”

Elner held out her arm. “Look for yourself, here’s my name written out on my wristband, only they misspelled Shimfissle.”

“Just skip to the questions, Kate,” said Sprague, who was standing by the door making sure no one came in.

Miss Packer looked put out. She liked to do things by the book, but she did what he said.

“Could you please state the events of the morning of April first to the best of your recollection?”

“Yes, I can,” said Elner. “I woke up, and as usual had my coffee with Macky. After that, I had just finished jotting down the question of the day on the Bud and Jay show. It was ‘How tall is the Empire State Building?’ So I thought I’d call my niece Dena in California and ask her, she used to live in New York, and she sent me a paperweight with the Empire State Building inside, so I figured she might know. It’s not cheating, they say you can phone a friend. The trick is to be the first to call with the right answer, and I was just about to pick up the phone when that nice lady Mrs. Reid from up the street brought me a basket of cherry tomatoes, and I said, ‘Oh, won’t you come in and sit awhile?’ And she said no, that she had to get on back home. Her husband had just had all his teeth pulled and wasn’t feeling so well, so she needed to run to the store real fast and pick up some apple sauce, and I said, ‘Well, thank you so much—’”

Miss Packer was busy taking down every word, but Sprague was impatient and started cracking his knuckles. “Uh, Mrs. Shimfissle…you can skip that part. We really need more about the accident.”

Elner said, “Well, I’m getting to that part. So after Mrs. Reid left, it occurred to me that she might like some fresh fig preserves, and I thought about calling Macky, but I hated to bother him for a few—”

“Then what happened?” Sprague interrupted her again.

“Then I went out and got up the ladder and I was reaching for a fig, when all of a sudden here comes a load of wasps right at me. I remember thinking to myself ‘Uh-oh,’ and then the next thing I knew, I looked up and saw people in green shower hats leaning over me and talking a mile a minute.”

“Do you recall what they were saying?” asked Miss Packer.

“No, because I didn’t have my hearing aid on, I just knew they were talking because their lips were moving. Then I wondered where Norma and Macky were, and if she was going to take my ladder privileges away, and then I took a nap.”

Miss Packer looked up. “Yes?”

“And then the next thing I knew, I woke up in a dark room. I waited for somebody to come get me but they never did, so I just lay there for a while.”

“Did you push your call button for help?” asked Miss Packer.

“No, at the time I didn’t even know I had a call button. If I had known I had one, I would have pushed it.”

“How long did you wait?”

“I don’t know. It was dark and I didn’t have my watch on, but it seemed like a long time, and after a while I started to wonder if they might have misplaced me or something so I got up and went down the hall looking for somebody, but there was nobody there.”

Sprague interrupted again. “Mrs. Shimfissle, are you aware that the nurses say they never left the nurses’ station?”

She looked over at him. “Well, honey, I don’t know what to tell you, because when I came out, there was nobody there.”

“Is it possible that you could have somehow slipped by them without them seeing you?” he asked.

“Anything’s possible, I guess. But I’m a big heavyset woman, so I would be hard to miss, don’t you think? Besides, I was calling out asking if anybody was there. If they didn’t see me, they would have heard me.”

“What specifically did you call out?” asked Miss Packer.

“I said, ‘Yoo hoo, anybody here?’”

“How loudly did you say it?” asked Miss Packer.

“I didn’t shout it at the top of my lungs. I didn’t want to wake anybody up. But I said it loud enough for somebody to hear me if they had been there.”

“Mrs. Shimfissle, is it possible that you were confused and just think you left your room?” asked Sprague, peeping out the crack of the door.

“All I can tell you is what I remember, and I’m under oath.” Elner looked at Miss Packer.

“Are you a candy striper?”

“No, ma’am, I’m a paralegal.”

“My late husband Will’s cousin in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, was a candy striper, worked her way up the ranks until she was running the hospital gift shop. From bedpans to gift shop manager in less than two years, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” said Miss Packer.

“Then what happened?” Sprague shot an impatient look at the paralegal.

Miss Packer asked, “What happened next, Mrs. Shimfissle?”

Elner had been hoping Miss Packer wouldn’t ask that. She was now in a real dilemma. She had to make a decision whether to lie under oath and break the law, or break her promise to Norma.

And so she decided to apply the “What they don’t know won’t hurt them rule,” and left out the part about visiting with everybody and skipped on to the end and said, “Well, I remember just floating around in the air above the hospital.”

Kate looked up from her pad, not quite sure what she had just heard. “Above the hospital?”

“Yes, and I just kind of hovered up there in the air for a few minutes, kind of like a hummingbird.”

Kate looked over at Sprague, her eyes wide. “Should I write this down?”

“Keep going,” he said, nodding, as Elner continued.

“Then I remember looking down and wondering who lost their shoe up on the roof.”

“Could you describe it?” asked Kate.

“Just an ordinary roof, with a ledge around it, and the flat part was gray, with what looked like some sort of gravel and some black tarlike stuff in a few places.”

“No, the shoe, Mrs. Shimfissle.”

“Oh, it was just a plain old brown leather shoe, lying over in the corner by one of those square chimneys.”

“Was it a man’s shoe or a woman’s shoe?” Kate asked.

“A man’s, unless some woman has mighty big feet. Will’s other niece, Mary Grace, wore a size nine narrow, they had to special order her shoes all the way from St. Louis. She could be standing in one room with her toes sticking out the other, that’s how long they were.”

“Anything else?” asked Kate.

“Humm, well, I didn’t pay all that much attention, I was too busy wondering what I was doing floating around up in the air, but I do remember the shoe had some kind of spiky things sticking out of the bottom of it. Little nail-like things.”

Miss Packer was now fascinated. “Like cleats? Like what you might find on a baseball shoe or a golf shoe?”

“Forget the shoe,” Sprague said. “What happened next?”

Miss Packer repeated the question. “What happened next?”

“Right after that, I was back in my room, and Norma and them were standing right beside me, and I thought, ‘Norma is going to be mad at me for getting up in that tree,’ and I was right, she was. She’s like her mother in that respect. She doesn’t let go of a thing. Not that I’m saying she isn’t right. I should have listened to her. Hey. I just thought of something you might want to write down, honey.”

Kate looked up. “Yes?”

“I had a cat that lived to be twenty-five years old.”

Later as they walked down the hall, Miss Packer, a rabid
Star Trek
fan, said, “Don’t you wonder if she entered another astral plane, and went into another dimension?”

Winston Sprague looked at her as though she were insane. “All I wonder is, was she nuts before she came to the hospital, or after?”

Oh Dear…

11:30
AM

A
s she left the office, Norma was a little confused. Mr. Pixton was very nice, of course, but she wondered why he had wanted to show her all those blueprints of the new buildings they were going to build in 2012. When she got back down to the room, Aunt Elner was sitting there with the remote in her hand, busy flipping back and forth from channel to channel on the television set up above her head. “Hey, Norma,” she said, “I don’t think they get cable here. I was hoping they got the Discovery Channel, but I can’t find it.”

Norma sat with Elner while she ate her lunch, and Elner was as happy as a lark. She had ordered three Jell-Os and two orders of ice cream, and for some unknown reason they had brought it. Nevertheless, Norma watched Elner carefully for signs of anything unusual, but she seemed perfectly normal, chatting away with every Tom, Dick, or Harry who came into the room. Norma was beginning to feel a little better, but just to be on the safe side, when they were alone, she asked, “Aunt Elner, now you’re
sure
you didn’t tell anybody else about your…little trip?”

Elner looked at her. “No, honey,” she said. “Just you.”

Norma was relieved for a moment, until Elner added, “And those people that just took my deposition.”

Norma said, “What? Oh my God. What people?”

“Just some redheaded lawyer and a girl.”

“When?”

“Just now, while you were gone,” she said, still flipping the channels. “But don’t worry, I didn’t tell them about seeing your mother or Neighbor Dorothy, I just told them about floating over the hospital roof and seeing the shoe.”

Norma cringed. “Oh my God.” Norma suddenly was afraid that something like this could hit the papers, and then the entire family could wind up as tabloid fodder. “Oh my God,” she thought, “they could be checking for family skeletons right now,” and she started to hyperventilate and ran over to the sink and threw cold water in her face.

Elner looked over at her. “Well, Norma, the girl made me swear to tell the truth, the entire truth, and nothing but the truth. You didn’t want me to outright lie, did you?”

“Yes! Oh…no. Oh Lord.”

Norma excused herself and quickly ran up to Franklin Pixton’s office, while doing her deep breathing, and asked Miss Hampton if she could see him right away.

As she walked into the room, her knees were shaking. “Mr. Pixton, I’m so sorry to have to bother you, but…” She looked around the room and lowered her voice. “This is a little embarrassing, but I wanted to speak to you about that…deposition?”

Pixton pretended he did not know what she was talking about.

“Deposition?”

“Yes, my aunt said your lawyer just came in and took her deposition?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “Oh, yes, I forgot. It was just a quick little thing for our records, nothing to be alarmed about.”

“Yes, well, I just wanted to explain to you that my aunt…Well, she may be just a little bit confused, and anything she might have mentioned about, uh, floating around in the sky and seeing strange shoes or anything…I just hope it won’t be used against her or get out in public.”

Franklin was quick to reassure her. “Oh, of course not, Mrs. Warren. That deposition is
strictly
a confidential matter, and as far as anything she may have mentioned about floating, don’t think a thing of it. NDEs are a fairly common occurrence.”

Norma said, “I’m sorry?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. NDEs. ‘Near-death experiences.’ Reports of people experiencing a floating sensation, seeing white light, speaking with dead relatives, religious figures, and so on and so forth. Quite common.”

Norma was somewhat relieved. “So, it’s not unusual?”

“Not at all. It’s sort of a hallucinatory experience, caused by oxygen suddenly leaving the brain, certain endorphins being released. But as far as we are concerned, it’s completely unimportant.”

“I see, and so it won’t be on public record or get in the papers or anything?”

“Oh no, never, and frankly, Mrs. Warren, I see no reason why we shouldn’t just strike anything of that nature out of the deposition. I’ll call Winston and take care of it right away, so you have nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, thank you so much. I was a little concerned.”

“Rest assured it will be taken out.”

Norma thanked him profusely and left feeling much better.

Franklin didn’t know what was in the deposition, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that Winston Sprague thought the old woman was as nutty as a fruitcake, and he was beginning to wonder about the niece, as well.