“Well, that dog wouldn’t have attacked you,” a man said, his hard voice coming from down the hallway, “if you hadn’t gone after Doreen.”
The kid immediately turned and looked up at Mack, then frowned. “Hey, who are you?”
“I’m the cop she called on the phone,” he said, crossing his arms.
Young Darren was here too. He walked immediately over to Richie. “Granddad, you okay?”
“You need to deal with him,” Richie said, flicking a hand at Danny. “He was in poor Rosie’s room, looking for anything he could steal.”
Darren looked at Danny and frowned. “You have no rights to anything in that room,” he said.
“She was my grandmother,” Danny said. “I get anything of hers now.”
“Good. Including her debts, I hope,” Doreen said.
“No,” he said. “Not her debts. I get her assets.”
“Well, that isn’t for you to choose on your own,” Mack said. “Maybe a will gives you those rights.”
“Well, there will be a will,” he said, sticking his chin out pugnaciously. “We just have to find it. I was looking for it.”
“I don’t care if you were looking to find it or not,” Mack said. “You’ve got no business being here.”
“Well, you can’t stop me,” he said. “You aren’t anybody in power here.”
“Not here at Rosemoor per se, but I’m the law,” he said, “and I’m not giving you a choice. You’ll go home now, and one of our lovely officers will take you there, so we can find out exactly where you live, and then we’ll contact whatever lawyer was looking after Rosie’s will, and we’ll see whether you’ve been left anything or not.”
Frustrated and obviously angry and upset at the turn of events, he turned, looked at Doreen, and glared at her. “I’ll get you for this.”
“Duly noted that you’ve now threatened me publicly in front of two officers of the law,” she said in a calm voice.
Danny clenched his fists and took a step forward. Immediately Mugs growled. Danny looked down at Mugs and drew his leg back.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Nan said, her voice very deep. She stood stiff-backed, glaring at the young man. “Only the lowest of the low would attack an animal, particularly in anger.”
At that, Mack grabbed Danny by the upper arm, then tugged him down the hallway.
“I think a night in jail would help him,” Doreen said hopefully.
“No,” Danny yelled. “That’s not what’ll happen.”
“He did attack me,” Doreen said. “What if I want to press charges, Mack?”
He turned, looked at her, and asked, “Do you?”
“How about we throw him in jail overnight, and I call it off tomorrow?”
He sighed. “And how about we send him home, and maybe, if he owes money to somebody else, they can find him instead.”
“Hey, you can’t do that,” said the skinny kid.
“Why not?” Mack said, now pushing the kid who didn’t want to be at the home.
“Because I do owe money to somebody,” he said, and a note of desperation had entered his voice. “If they find me, I’m in trouble.”
“And why is that our problem?” Doreen asked. “Here you were breaking into a woman’s room who had just died to see what you could steal. Did you get her candy too?”
He turned and glared at her. “It’s my candy now,” he said with that sneer of his.
“Just because you are a living relative of Rosie’s,” she said, “doesn’t mean you get everything.”
For a moment, he stared at her. “Yes, it does.”
Mack shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. It depends on the will.”
“Well, I was trying to get the will,” he said, “but she and Richie wouldn’t let me.”
“Good thing,” Darren said. “We don’t want you upsetting the seniors here.”
“Too late,” Richie said, shaking a fist in Danny’s direction. “I think the punk should be let go, so he can go back home again, and we’ll see if the guys who he owes money to then find him.”
And still screaming and squawking, Mack led the kid out of the old folks’ home.
Doreen turned to look down at Nan. “Will you be able to sleep tonight?”
Nan let out a deep breath. “I’ll have to calm down first,” she said. She looked up at Richie. “I don’t know. It’s been a pretty rough day, hasn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Richie said. “These young ones, they get worse every time.”
Nan nodded. She patted Doreen’s hand. “Thank you so much for coming to our rescue,” she said nodding at Rosie’s room in front of her. “I’ll miss her.”
Doreen shook her head. “It breaks my heart to know that her sorry grandson’s trying to take what little Rosie had,” she said. The door was open to Rosie’s room. “She was bringing me that note too, and I wish she had made it to my place, so I could have talked to her, could have seen what it was that she wanted me to do.”
Richie asked her about the note, and she told him a condensed version. He sighed, then said, “She was really bothered about her grandson. She had talked to her lawyer about the will, but I don’t know if she ever did anything to follow up on it.”
“It’s a tough situation,” she said.
“I guess we wait and see whatever is in her room,” Richie said.
Doreen turned to look at Darren and asked him, “Did you guys go through her room today?”
“Two officers did,” he said. “I’m not sure if they found anything.”
She hesitated. “And no way I’ll be allowed to go in there and take a look, will I?”
Darren shook his head. “Can’t let you do that.”
“That’s fine,” she said, “but my name is on the Post-it Note on the wall up there. Can you at least go see what that says?”
He looked at her in surprise, then looked at the note on the wall and stepped into the room, while everybody crowded at the
