Best Place to Die Read Free Page A

you home. Just come with me, we’re going home.’ Strangely, just saying those words, gave her hope, even though they contained not an ounce of truth. ‘Yes, we’re going home.’
    â€˜Oh goodie,’ Alice said, and like a switch had been thrown, she stopped resisting.
    Moments later they’d found their way through the smoke and the frightened cries of the residents of Nillewaug Village Assisted Care to a still dark and very cold early April morning. The only illumination coming from the burning building’s windows, exit signs, and faux gas lanterns that lined the property’s drives.
    Soaked to the skin, her nostrils thick with smoke, and heart beating out of rhythm, Rose steered them to a wooden bench at the periphery of the sprawling facility. A wave of shivers shook her stocky frame as she sat, pulling Alice down beside her.
We’re still too close
, she thought, not more than fifty feet from the side of the four-story structure, where dense smoke billowed through two shattered second-story windows and glimmers of orange flames peeked over the sill. A few other residents trickled through the side exit, one woman with a walker crumpled to the ground, a man with a cane stood behind Rose and Alice, using the bench for support.
    â€˜What’s happening?’ Alice asked, as they stared back at the central building of the assisted care facility, with its ersatz Georgian brick architecture and white shuttered windows. Sirens wailed and the first red engine with its lights flashing roared down the long drive, with its ornamental pond and beautifully tended boxwood hedges.
    Clutching her pocketbook Rose had no answers, just a growing ache of loss. She thought of her home on Rivington Street, the three-bedroom apartment in which she’d raised her children and sent them out into the world. The furniture she and Isaac had bought when they’d learned they were going to be able to move out of their cramped tenement quarters on Delancey and into the brand new rent-stabilized towers.
Everything’s gone,
she thought, and what little she was able to take from New York, now likely ruined.
What was so wrong?
she fumed.
Why couldn’t you have let me be? I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want this. And now . . .
    â€˜What’s that?’ Alice asked as her hand patted Rose’s. ‘Up there, what’s that?’
    Through smudged glasses Rose tried to see what had Alice so excited. Something sparkly was falling, like glitter coming down. She tried to see what Alice was pointing to, at first she thought it was the windows now spitting flames over thick waves of dark gray smoke, but no, something higher up on the top floor. A blackened window surrounded by jagged shards, bits of glass falling and then something . . . someone . . . at the edge, paused and then dropped to the ground not forty feet from them.
    â€˜What’s that?’ Alice repeated, now pointing at the unmoving shape.
    â€˜Oh God, no! Stay here,’ Rose said with a sick feeling in her stomach, and, leaving her pocketbook, she stood. Her knees felt like they might buckle, but she had to see, maybe they were OK, just unconscious. But in her gut, she knew it was just like 9/11 – people jumping to their deaths. She edged forward, as flashing lights bounced off the brick. A shiver edged down her spine, and she had to clamp her mouth shut to keep her teeth – mostly still her own – from chattering. As she approached, the crumpled shape didn’t move. Through smeared lenses she saw it was a blonde woman with one pump on and one missing. Years of being in retail identified her cherry-red suit as a good Chanel knock-off, probably from Talbot’s. Closer still, she recognized her – Delia Preston, the administrative director of Nillewaug Village and the woman who had rolled over her every objection to this ill-fated move. The energetic Delia who had talked, seemingly without