with baggy sleeves.
“Mrs. Engleman,” the nurse was saying, “there isn’t any mail for you. I’m sorry.”
“He told me he would write every day,” the little woman said, reaching up to slap her palm on the counter.
“If a letter comes for you, I’ll bring it to your room personally.”
“You won’t look inside and read it?” the little woman asked with suspicion.
“Cross my heart,” Emmie Jefferson said, crossing her heart.
“A Bible promise would be better,” the woman said.
“Swear on a Bible,” the nurse said, holding back a sigh.
“Better if we had a real Bible you could put your hand right down on,” Mrs. Engleman said.
“There’s one in the library if you want to go get it.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” the old woman said, stepping back. “Maybe I’ll just do that. I won’t tolerate censorship.”
“I understand,” said Emmie Jefferson as Mrs. Engleman shuffled slowly away.
She hadn’t seen me yet, but now she looked up, let out a massive sigh and put her right hand to her forehead.
“Mrs. Cgnozic is sleeping,” she said.
“Really?”
“No, but that’s what I’ve been told to say if you or that old cowboy show up. Trent sees you here and he’ll throw a fit and probably call the cops.”
“I just talked to Trent. He said he had no objection to my talking to you,” I said. “Call his office.”
She folded her arms and looked at me, waiting for me to ask whatever it was I was going to ask.
“The night Dorothy told you she saw someone murdered, your first night on the job, Vivian Pastor checked out.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Her daughter-in-law checked her out. I asked her to wait till the morning. I don’t know the paperwork, but she insisted, said her mother-in-law wanted out right then. I called Marie, the head nurse, woke her up. She said we’ve got no legal right to keep anyone here who doesn’t want to be here. Marie told me where the forms were.”
“You saw Vivian Pastor leave with her daughter-in-law?”
“Technically? No,” she said. “I was down the hall in Mrs. Denton’s room. She needed help getting to the bathroom. I saw Mrs. Pastor, the daughter-in-law, waiting for me at the desk. Told me she was checking her mother-in-law out for good.”
“So you never saw Vivian Pastor?”
“Didn’t say that,” said Emmie Jefferson. “Daughter-in-law asked me to help her carry some of the woman’s things out to the car. I thought she was plenty big enough to carry it out herself, but she pushed hard and offered me five dollars. So I helped, carried a lamp and a suitcase. Old woman was in the car. Just sitting there smiling. Skinny bag of bones, hands shaking.”
“You’d never seen Vivian Pastor before?”
“That was my first time on the job. No, I hadn’t seen her before. I told you. She wasn’t dead. She was alive. That enough?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”
“What is going on?” she asked and then held up both hands and added, “Don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know.”
I got back to my car without running into Trent and considered picking up Ames, but that would take time and I just wanted this over with.
Nothing had changed about the house on Orchid, but it felt different. There was no car in the driveway and the garage doors were down. When I knocked at the door, a plain woman of about forty wearing a wary smile, which showed clean but uneven teeth, answered it.
“Mrs. Pastor home?”
“Vivian is,” she said with a distinct inland southern Florida accent.
“No, Alberta,” I said.
“At work,” said the woman.
“You take care of Vivian?”
“Yes, I do, but we don’t call her Vivian. Her nickname is Gigi. Mrs. Pastor, Alberta, says she was given the name by one of her grandchildren and it stuck. That’s what she wants to be called.”
I looked over her shoulder into the dark living room. It was filled with cardboard boxes.
“How long have you been taking care of her?”
“Two, no, three days,” she said. “Had a sheet of paper up at the Mennonite post office over in Pinecraft saying I was available for in-home care. Mrs. Pastor called and here I am. It’s only for a day or two more. They’re moving, you know.”
“I’m a friend of the family,” I said. “I’ve got some papers I need signed. You know where Mrs. Pastor works?”
“Sure,” the woman said brightly. “Over on Clark right near I-75. You know where the new building just went up is? Medical offices and such-like?”
“Yes,” I said.
“She has an office in there.”
“Trapezoid,” came the voice of the old woman inside the house.
The woman at the door said, “She’s a hoot. Poor old thing. Comes up with the darndest things. Doesn’t make much sense, though. Easy to take care of. Just feed her, remind her to use the bathroom and let her look at the TV or her ads.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sure you don’t want to just pop in and say hi to Gigi? She likes company.”
“Next time,” I said.
I stopped to make a phone call and then took the Trail to Clark and across to the new two-story medical /office building. The last time I had seen it, the building had been swarming with workmen and the land around it was a tire-rutted mess of dirt and mud. Now it looked finished, professional and surrounded by something that looked a little like grass. Two palm trees propped up by wires were doing sentry duty on the lawn.
I pulled into the lot next to the building. Eleven or twelve cars were parked there. One had a caved-in right front fender and a broken headlight.
The lobby smelled Lysol fresh with a hint of recent pain in the background. There was a bank of names, nine of them, black on white plastic tabs mounted on the wall next to the elevator.
Alberta Pastor, massage therapist, was in Suite 203. There are no offices in Sarasota. Everything, even a cramped single room with a desk and space for another chair, was a suite. Calling your business a suite was worth a 10 percent markup on your bill.
There was a carpeted waiting room beyond the door to Suite 203. It was big enough for two wooden chairs, a small table with a wooden dish filled with Tootsie Rolls and wrapped root beer barrels. A neat pile of old People magazines sat next to the dish. An orchestra played a languid Muzak version of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
I could hear voices through the closed door of the room beyond the one I was in. I sat, selected a root beer barrel, unwrapped it and placed it in my mouth. I sat for twenty minutes learning about the latest clothes, sex partners, awards, problems and triumphs of people named Justin, Renee, Antoine, Mel, and Russell.
The outer door opened. A young blonde woman with a pink, healthy face, large breasts, long legs came in, looked at me and said, “You waiting for someone?”
“Mrs. Pastor,” I said.
She looked at her wristwatch. It had a big round face with large numbers. She was wearing washed jeans and a white blouse.
“I think I’ve got the eleven o’clock,” she said.
“Mrs. Pastor may be running a little late,” I said.
“Emergency?” the young woman asked, sitting across from me.
