If Longwood doesn’t profit from the demise of the elderly, then it is an individual or individuals using Longwood. The profit must be significant to be worth the risk. But then, how great a risk is offing demented elders? Probably not a lot. Loved ones would drop a tear and breathe a huge sigh of relief, the body would be interred or cremated, and room would open up for the next victim.

Caring for the aged is harder than caring for little kids. Children will stop wetting the bed, begin speaking in full sentences, become more help around the house. With the old it is the opposite. Rose’s mother died of complications from dementia in Rose’s living room. Hospice had given Rose all the morphine she needed. No one did a postmortem, no police came, no autopsy was suggested. Hospice didn’t ask for the unused morphine to be returned. If Rose had wanted to off her mother, she could have, no questions asked.

People grow old, they sicken, they die. Sometimes assisted living becomes assisted dying. Rose accepts that. Accepting what is doesn’t mean giving the nod to ongoing evil. Even the Buddha, if the stories were true, killed a man during one of his incarnations: A pirate was set on murdering five hundred people. In his great kindness, the Buddha slew the pirate, taking on the karma of one murder to save the pirate from the unutterably bad karma of five hundred murders.

Not that, in all honesty, Rose gives a flip about the next lives of whoever is intent on ruining hers. Compassion is all well and good—Rose is a hundred percent in favor of it—but it has been a heck of a night. Besides, after all the effort she and Mel and Marion have gone to getting hold of the files, it would be a shame not to even look at them.

She won’t go back to Longwood.

Nor will she sit here uselessly waiting for Mel to return. Muscles are starting to set up, concretized by trauma and neglect. Either she gets up now, or she’ll have to be hoisted with a forklift, all in a chunk like the statue of Jeff Davis. Gingerly, she makes it to her feet. She tries a Warrior Pose to get the energy flowing. Too much pain to breathe in and embrace at that given moment; she settles for shuffling up the grassy knoll.

Her invasion of Longwood’s turf will undoubtedly inspire another attempt to get her back in the MCU, or quiet her in a more permanent fashion. Finding Applegarth untenanted, they will come here. She will take first watch. At present, watching is all she can fathom doing with any degree of success.