Rose will be buckled into a straightjacket, dragged from the Alzheimer’s ward, shut in a hospital for the criminally insane, and chained to a radiator in a sooty cinder-block building with Mrs. Jeffrey Dahmer for a cellmate.

As gently as she can—the woman is a seriously large individual—Rose rolls the nurse onto her back. One of Karen’s Crocs-shod feet bangs the metal desk as her legs uncross. Plugging one ear with her forefinger, Rose presses the other to the woman’s chest. Fear renders her deaf for a second. It spikes, then begins to recede. She hears the steady thump of what, to her, sounds like a strong regular heartbeat.

But what does she know?

Nurse Karen might be dying.

Rose glances at the black desk phone with the line of buttons down one side. All she has to do is push one of those buttons and cry for help. In seconds someone will come. In minutes the nurse will be on her way to a hospital to get her stomach pumped. Rose will still go to prison, but only for attempted murder.

She reaches for the phone. Her hands are shaking so badly, the handset knocks over the soda can. Brown liquid pours out like Texas crude to soak into papers stacked neatly by the mouse pad.

The night nurse has consumed about two-thirds of the drink and is out cold. Not even a full day’s dose for a sixty-eight-year-old woman, weighing one hundred and ten pounds, has dropped a woman a quarter of a century younger, and nearly a hundred pounds heavier, as if she’s been struck between the eyes with a sledgehammer.

Paranoia, my foot, Rose thinks. She pats the nurse’s cheek softly. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Rose trots back to her room. Free from the constraint of silence, she snips the edge of the bedspread, then, with a satisfying ripping sound, tears off a four-foot-long, eight-inch-wide strip. Her slippers are beneath the bed. Using blue and green markers, Rose scribbles the toes until they look more like colored flats than hospital shoes. Not great, but at a glance they will pass. The strip of flowered bedcover she wraps twice around her waist, then tucks the ends in, fashioning a colorful cummerbund over the nightie. The flower-and-vine motif picks up the blue-green of the slippers and the pink of the gown.

Once on, the mutilated bathrobe serves as a three-quarter-sleeve short jacket. Up close, if anyone really looks, it will be obvious there is something distinctly odd about the ensemble, but at least any passing kid on a bike won’t pick her out for a lunatic escaped from the asylum.

Ideally, before the sun rises, like any self-respecting murdering night creature, she will be hidden away, safe from the light of day.