Mysteries on the Side

	I saw him walking in the parking lot though, and I left Mrs. Izato to run after him. “Carson!” I yelled out.
He turned to look at me.
“Mrs. Izato needs to talk to you.” I said when I caught up to him.
“I’ll wait here.” he stated and did not move.
When we arrived Mrs. Izato didn’t hesitate, “That night, was the door opened or closed?”
Carson thought about it for a minute. Odell was screaming, he had to call Meadow side and wait for them. Odell was still in meltdown mode, he walked down the hallway to the screaming beep. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped, “The door was open, not wide open, just a little bit.” He shook his head in disbelief, “Why didn’t I notice that. He never leaves the door open, I closed it myself when I left.”
Dorthy almost sounded like she was scolding, “Don’t blame yourself. There was a lot of chaos there, and it was meant to distract you.”
He stopped worrying about himself and began to wonder who could do this.
“Now we have to figure out the who and how.” Dorthy stated plainly. “How did they keep his heart monitor beeping while he’d been dead long enough for rigor mortis?”
Carson turned white as a ghost, the blood ran from his face straight to his feet. “They stayed in the room the whole time.” His stature changed even more as he seemed to crumble from the realizations at hand, “They switched the monitor, put it on themselves.” Shame and blame now wrapped themselves around Carson, “Odell was right, she did see someone come out of that room.” He looked away from Dorthy in shame and regret.
Dorthy waved at Carson as if she could single-handedly dispel his self doubt. “You can’t worry about that now.” She then motioned for me to turn the wheelchair around, “We need to get inside.” Dorthy looked down at her phone the time was one thirty pm. “Carson does morning shift always end this late?”
Carson caught up to us, “The shifts here are strange. They are rolling shifts, first off which is a nightmare in itself. But different staff have different hours, so the shift change for the nurses is different than the shift change for the receptionist. The only normal steady hours here are the cafeteria workers. I’m rambling, I’m sorry. Seven am to one pm is first shift, one pm to seven pm is second shift, seven pm to one am is third shift, and one am to seven am is fourth.” He started to walk away, but then called back to us, “He was fine at seven pm, three and a half hours later…”
I didn’t catch the last as he walked out of earshot, I pushed Mrs. Izato back into the building.
Mrs. Izato had already texted Gertrude, “Odell was right.”