“That’s it?” he asked. “All you have to tell me?”
“That, and my cop’s instincts are screaming there’s something going down in this place.”
Amos bit off his last word and clamped his lips together. Then he beamed and said, “This is Miss Jane Worthington.” There was something about the way he pronounced her name, like a sailor saying the name of his ship.
An old woman with cottony white hair and parchment skin was standing over them. She looked almost as tall as Amos and had a face from a Renaissance painting, oval and pure and somehow noble. She had the kind of beauty that never faded but instead settled in deeper with the years and made a mockery of superficial attractiveness. It had nothing to do with button noses or long eyelashes; it had to do with what she had been and was now, and how she would play in memory.
Jane Worthington waited a few seconds and saw that Carver wasn’t going to be introduced and wasn’t about to volunteer his name. Without commenting on this breach of etiquette she said, “Amos, you telling your lies to this fine young man?”
Amos didn’t answer. Carver smiled. “What lies are those?”
Her wise gray eyes flicked to his cane but registered nothing. She’d seen handicaps before and knew what they did and didn’t mean.
“I confided in Jane,” Amos said in a near whisper. “Had to tell somebody what I thought. Damn it, I ain’t Catholic-I couldn’t tell a priest.”
Jane shook her head. “Tell you the truth, Amos, I think you got two bolts and a nut loose. But it isn’t hard to understand why. It’s just that we don’t like to think our friends should die and leave us, even in a place like this. It doesn’t seem natural, though it’s the most natural thing in the world.”
“You don’t think there’s anything wrong here?” Carver asked.
“No, I don’t. But I play along with Amos and don’t tell anybody about his harebrained suspicions.”
“I told you Sam Cusanelli had the same suspicions. Somebody else around here does, too. I ain’t alone in this, Jane.”
“I know you’re not. It’s the kind of thing that spreads. An undercurrent of gossip.”
“Some gossip’s true.”
“Most isn’t. That’s why it’s called gossip.”
“See enough smoke,” Amos said gloatingly, “and you look and you’ll find a fire.”
“And sometimes an arsonist.”
Amos put on a huffy expression and leaned back in the sofa. He clearly didn’t like being one-upped. This was a difficult woman for sure.
“I’ve heard enough and played enough games for today,” Jane Worthington said. “Morning, Mr. Carver.”
She left them, moving regally, her tall, lean body still graceful and not acknowledging her years.
Amos looked embarrassed. “Well, I did tell her who you were and that I’d invited you here to talk. She’s the kinda woman you talk to and secrets sorta slip out.”
“Amos, I think you’ve got a crush on Miss Jane Worthington.”
The old man’s long face turned tomato red. “Piss on you, Carver! I was married to Mrs. Burrel forty-three years before she died of a liver infection in ’eighty-two. Besides, Jane’s too young for me. There’s damn near five years’ difference in our ages. I thought you’d take what I had to say serious instead of funning around.”
“I do take it seriously,” Carver said. “But what if I take what Jane Worthington says just as seriously? According to her, you tend to exaggerate now and then. Lies, she called them. But I don’t figure you for a liar.”
Amos’s face creased into a grin. “Then you believe me?”
“I do more or less. You’re the second person I’ve talked to who thinks Sunhaven’s something other than it should be. And we’ve got to include Sam Cusanelli’s opinion.”
“Sam seen the fella once, too,” Amos said.
“What fella?”
“Why, the fella Nurse Rule was talking to in the big white Cadillac night before Jim died. One you said mighta been her boyfriend.”
Amos suddenly drew in his breath in a gasp and his eyes fixed on something behind Carver and then wavered and dropped. He was staring at his lap as if he’d just spilled food there.
“Who’s your friend, Amos?” a crisp female voice inquired. Without looking up, Amos said, “This is Mr. Fred Carver, Nurse Rule.”
Though she was stockily built, she didn’t give the impression of being a large woman; yet she filled her space in the world. She was wearing a white uniform with a squared blue collar and carrying an empty clipboard with a pen clamped to it. Brown hair, narrow blue eyes, very thin lips that were probably always curved in a smile that meant nothing. A face like a lumpy potato, yet, as Amos had said, for some reason not exactly homely. Her hands were surprisingly small but strong-looking. Square-fingered and without nail polish. Functional tools of her trade.
She trained her dead but bright eyes on Carver and he felt a current of cold, primal knowledge; she was the stuff of black widow spiders and feral animals. She repelled and frightened and fascinated people more as they got to know her and depend on her.
“Are you a relative?” she asked Carver.
“He’s a friend,” Amos mumbled. The son-from-Syracuse story was forgotten. It wouldn’t wash with Nurse Rule.
She stared at Amos, her flat, bland features registering mild curiosity. “Amos?”
His head trembled on the stalk of his neck, but he looked up at her with effort.
Her curved lips arced in a wider smile that gained no warmth. “Have a nice visit, Amos.” Her gaze swung to Carver again. It meant something when she looked at people, every time, or she wouldn’t have bothered. “You, too, Mr. Carver.”
She walked away. A no-nonsense stride, no excessive arm-swinging and very little hip motion. Her white shoes trod soundlessly on the earth-colored carpet.
“Why are you so afraid of her?” Carver asked.
“My bath…” Amos said, still obviously shaken by the possibility of having been overheard by Nurse Rule.
“What about your bath?”
“Last time my back went out and I couldn’t move, I wrote a letter of complaint to the state about the way I was ignored all night when I kept ringing for help. Nurse Rule gave me my bath the morning after that and threatened to scald me bad if I wrote any more letters. She’d say it was an accident, something wrong with the hot-water thermostat. She’d get away with it, too; you can be damned positive of that.”
Carver wasn’t sure he was hearing right. “She what?”
“You heard,” Amos said softly. “I ain’t never told anybody till now. Not even Jane.” He stared into Carver with eyes that had completely lost their glint of defiance. “My back goes out from time to time. Never can tell when. Jesus, it makes me feel helpless! I’m counting on you, Carver.”
Carver stood up and leaned on his cane. He rested a hand on Amos’s thin shoulder but withdrew it hastily when the shoulder began to quake. Amos quickly shoved something into the hand. A damp scrap of white paper, tightly folded.
“What’s this?” Carver asked.
Amos wasn’t going to answer. Wasn’t going to look up from staring at his lap again. He was crying soundlessly when Carver limped away.
Was Jane Worthington right about Amos’s overactive imagination and his suspicions? Was the story about Nurse Rule and the bath true? Maybe Carver had wasted his time listening to the paranoid delusions of an old man haunted by the past.
An old man who’d seen Nurse Nora Rule sitting with someone in a white Cadillac.
Or thought he had.
The sun was still beating down outside, but Carver was chilled.
In the parking lot, he stood near the Olds and laboriously unfolded the scrap of paper Amos had given him. Scrawled in light pencil was a series of numbers. Carver knew immediately where Amos had copied it from.
A license plate.
