Prompt: Nursing school doesn't prepare you for the number of elderly patients who will casually confess to decades-old murders. Wrote this during a creative writing workshop at work. Unedited.
I'd only been working at the memory care facility for a few weeks when Jack Martin, my self-appointed 'extra grandpa' first mentioned that he had strangled his first wife, Shirley, and hid her body in the walls of an addition he'd built onto his house in Port Jeff.
Memory care patients say all kinds of off-the-wall shit, so I brushed it off at first. Chilling, but people in Jack's condition aren't exactly reliable narrators. I developed a kind of weary affection for Jack's stories, but each time he brought up his first wife, I became a tick more uneasy.
What if he's telling the truth? What if this isn't his cognitive decline talking?
I kept going to work and kept listening to Jack's stories. Eventually Jack headed into hospice care and I didn't see him again. A few summers later, we took the ferry to Port Jeff for a day of shopping and eating. Coming out of the ferry terminal, I ducked into a C-store to grab a pack of gum. In line, I noticed the newspaper headline:
BODY OF WOMAN FOUND IN WALLS OF HISTORIC HOME
Presumed to be Shirley Martin, missing since 1962