Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [77]
“No, that’s not necessary. State your full name, please.”
Elner held out her arm. “Look for yourself, here’s my name written out on my wristband, only they misspelled Shimfissle.”
“Just skip to the questions, Kate,” said Sprague, who was standing by the door making sure no one came in.
Miss Packer looked put out. She liked to do things by the book, but she did what he said.
“Could you please state the events of the morning of April first to the best of your recollection?”
“Yes, I can,” said Elner. “I woke up, and as usual had my coffee with Macky. After that, I had just finished jotting down the question of the day on the Bud and Jay show. It was ‘How tall is the Empire State Building?’ So I thought I’d call my niece Dena in California and ask her, she used to live in New York, and she sent me a paperweight with the Empire State Building inside, so I figured she might know. It’s not cheating, they say you can phone a friend. The trick is to be the first to call with the right answer, and I was just about to pick up the phone when that nice lady Mrs. Reid from up the street brought me a basket of cherry tomatoes, and I said, ‘Oh, won’t you come in and sit awhile?’ And she said no, that she had to get on back home. Her husband had just had all his teeth pulled and wasn’t feeling so well, so she needed to run to the store real fast and pick up some apple sauce, and I said, ‘Well, thank you so much—’”
Miss Packer was busy taking down every word, but Sprague was impatient and started cracking his knuckles. “Uh, Mrs. Shimfissle…you can skip that part. We really need more about the accident.”
Elner said, “Well, I’m getting to that part. So after Mrs. Reid left, it occurred to me that she might like some fresh fig preserves, and I thought about calling Macky, but I hated to bother him for a few—”
“Then what happened?” Sprague interrupted her again.
“Then I went out and got up the ladder and I was reaching for a fig, when all of a sudden here comes a load of wasps right at me. I remember thinking to myself ‘Uh-oh,’ and then the next thing I knew, I looked up and saw people in green shower hats leaning over me and talking a mile a minute.”
“Do you recall what they were saying?” asked Miss Packer.
“No, because I didn’t have my hearing aid on, I just knew they were talking because their lips were moving. Then I wondered where Norma and Macky were, and if she was going to take my ladder privileges away, and then I took a nap.”
Miss Packer looked up. “Yes?”
“And then the next thing I knew, I woke up in a dark room. I waited for somebody to come get me but they never did, so I just lay there for a while.”
“Did you push your call button for help?” asked Miss Packer.
“No, at the time I didn’t even know I had a call button. If I had known I had one, I would have pushed it.”
“How long did you wait?”
“I don’t know. It was dark and I didn’t have my watch on, but it seemed like a long time, and after a while I started to wonder if they might have misplaced me or something so I got up and went down the hall looking for somebody, but there was nobody there.”
Sprague interrupted again. “Mrs. Shimfissle, are you aware that the nurses say they never left the nurses’ station?”
She looked over at him. “Well, honey, I don’t know what to tell you, because when I came out, there was nobody there.”
“Is it possible that you could have somehow slipped by them without them seeing you?” he asked.
“Anything’s possible, I guess. But I’m a big heavyset woman, so I would be hard to miss, don’t you think? Besides, I was calling out asking if anybody was there. If they didn’t see me, they would have heard me.”
“What specifically did you call out?” asked Miss Packer.
“I said, ‘Yoo hoo, anybody here?’”
“How loudly did you say it?” asked Miss Packer.
“I didn’t shout it at the top of my lungs. I didn’t want to wake anybody up. But I said it loud enough for somebody to hear me if they had been there.”
“Mrs. Shimfissle,