She realised she’d shredded a grape into pulp and set it aside on a napkin. ‘When she was living at Acacia View, I would visit, and after a while, I started noticing … stuff.’
‘What sort of stuff?’
‘Unwashed hair. Her bedding or clothing not being changed. Staff never the same so you couldn’t be sure there was anyone there who my aunt could recognise.’
‘That’s terrible. Could your aunt not care for herself at all?’
‘At first, yes. She could shower, watch TV, play cards with the other residents. But she has vascular dementia and problems with her heart and the decline has been steep.’
And crippling to watch. Vera sighed. ‘As her ability to communicate with me deteriorated, I became more and more concerned. So I started looking out for other people there visiting relatives and I talked to them. Turned out I wasn’t the only one with concerns. I spoke to the facility manager and asked for something to be done.’
‘And, what, they did nothing?’
‘They brushed me off. Sure, my aunt’s room would be given a spring-clean, she’d be in a different nightie the next time I visited, but the change never lasted. I was upset about it. I mean, this place and her medical bills were sucking her and me dry financially, yet they couldn’t even roster enough staff on duty so someone could brush her hair.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘So I decided to take my concern public.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know I was a journalist before I moved here and became a cook?’
Josh nodded. ‘Yep. Quite a career change.’
She shrugged. ‘You do what you must.’
‘So true. You know, before I came back to Hanrahan, I wasn’t a vet.’
She smiled. ‘Josh Cody. The town’s prodigal son, who knocked up the high school science teacher, chucked in his uni scholarship and left town. Worked construction, came back fifteen years later with a daughter and a vet degree. His little sister Hannah let him buy into her vet practice. How’d I do?’
A cracker in his hand snapped in two, showering crumbs all over her sofa. ‘I see small-town gossip is alive and well.’
‘In my defence, I’m not gossiping, I’m just boxing up blueberry and limoncello cheesecakes. It’s the Hanrahan residents who like to overshareeverything.’
‘I can imagine. So you decided to do a story on the aged care facility. Newspaper journalism, right?’
‘TheSouth Coast Morning Herald. Not a huge paper, but syndicated, so stories we wrote could go national if the interest was there.’
‘Sounds ambitious.’
Yes, ambition had played its part. Her own, in particular, and that’s what made her guilt so unbearable. She had hated seeing her aunt’s living conditions, but at the same time, she had been congratulating herself on what a boost this exposé would give her career.
She dragged her mind back to her story. ‘The first article was well received. My, um, boss received a lot of feedback from readers, so I got the go ahead to do more. That’s when I started writing about the Acacia View Aged Care Facility in detail. That’s when it all went bad.’
‘Bad how? I’m not hearing anything so far that explains why you’d be appearing in court.’
‘One day I found my aunt on the floor of her room, a big bruise on her face. She’d fallen, and no-one could tell me when she’d last been checked on. She could have been lying there on the floor for hours. So … I planted a hidden camera in her room.’
‘Oh.’
‘Uh-huh. And I wrote another article describing how I’d found her on the floor.’
Josh winced. ‘That can’t have gone down well with management.’
‘It was never published.’ Here it was. The Big Bad Wolf of a thing that had taken over her life. ‘My … er … boss saw an opportunity. He pulled my article in return for a lucrative advertising contract with the Acacia View owners. When I called him on it, he sacked me.’
‘Surely that’s unfair dismissal.’