“Just got back,” Carver said. “I talked to Kearny Williams.”
“He’s a sharper old guy than they give him credit for around there,” Desoto said. “What’s he think?”
“He thinks what your uncle thought.”
“And you, amigo? What do you think?”
“That it’s too early even to make guesses.”
“Ah, you called to tell me you have nothing to tell me.”
“Not exactly. I called to ask. I need a rundown on some of the people out at Sunhaven. A Nurse Rule-don’t know her first name. She’s the head nurse there. And the receptionist, young girl name of Birdie Reeves.”
“Don’t forget Dr. Lee Macklin.”
“Who’s that?” Carver asked.
“Sunhaven’s chief administrator.”
“The doctor who signed Sam Cusanelli’s death certificate?”
“No,” Desoto said. “A young staff doctor named Pauly signed it”
Carver looked out at the clouds scudding eastward, away from him, over the wide ocean. “I get the impression you might already have used the resources of the law to check on some of these people.”
“Only Macklin and Pauly,” Desoto said.
“And you came up with?”
“Nothing surprising. Macklin has the sort of background you’d expect. Administrator of a nursing home in Chattanooga before coming here with glowing recommendations. Married. No kids. Pauly, first name Dan, is a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor and earned his medical degree at Washington University in Saint Louis. Did a general medicine internship in Miami, practiced there for a while at a medical clinic, and two years ago opened his own practice in Del Moray. He has a contract with Sunhaven and calls on patients there daily.”
“It all sounds okay,” Carver said. “Nobody with an arrest record or a mail-order medical degree.”
“Sounds okay far as it goes. But I don’t have all the answers yet. I’ll feed the names you just gave me into the wonderful world of the computer and see what happens. Shouldn’t take long. You be around wherever you are for an hour or so, I’ll call you back. You home?”
“Yeah,” Carver said. It still felt odd to realize he, and others, now thought of Edwina’s house as his “home.” Carver’s official home, a ramshackle cottage on the beach twenty miles north, was where he’d lived until he became involved with Edwina. He still slept there occasionally, when he had business in that direction and it was convenient, but less often every month. “I’ll be here till you call.”
“Get back to you,” Desoto said, and hung up.
Carver replaced the receiver, shoved the kitchen phone back to its customary place near the wall, and downed the rest of his beer. It was already going flat and warm.
He’d limped over to the refrigerator and was about to draw out another can when he heard the diminishing snarl of Edwina’s Mercedes as she downshifted to make the turn into the driveway. Then the faint swishing of tires on the hot concrete, soft against hard.
A car door slammed solidly out near the side of the house. She hadn’t parked in the garage; she was going out again soon.
Carver decided to forget the second beer. He gingerly shoved the refrigerator door shut with his cane, careful not to dent or scratch its gleaming white surface.
“Too early to drink,” Edwina said. She’d seen his car parked in the shade alongside the garage and knew he was in the house. And when she’d entered the kitchen she immediately saw the opened beer can on the table.
“Imagine me a thousand miles east,” Carver said. “It’s later there.”
“Wetter, too,” Edwina said. “Unless you want me to imagine you on an island.”
Subject-changing time. “Show the condo?”
She put down her purse next to the Budweiser can and walked over to the sink. “Looks like I’ve got a contract. I’m supposed to meet the buyer at Quill this afternoon and write it up officially.” Quill Realty was her employer and the beneficiary of her uncommon determination. “It’s a close enough offer I think it’ll be accepted without a counter.”
“Congratulations,” Carver said.
“Not yet. Maybe this afternoon. How’d things go at Sunhaven?”
“It’s a depressing place.”
“It might not be that way from the inside.”
“Oh, it is,” Carver assured her, “despite the cheery decor.”
“I didn’t mean inside the building,” Edwina said. “I meant inside the heads of the residents. Your outlook and your expectations change when you get old. The things that make you content are different from when you were young.”
“I’ve noticed that already,” Carver told her. When he knew she was watching he ran his gaze down her body, to the elegant swell of calf and curve of ankle beneath the severely tailored blue suit skirt. “Then, too, there are things that stay pretty much the same.”
“I only came home for a moment to get my listing book,” she told him.
“So you say.”
She gave him a grin he recognized, a sudden flash of wickedness across her strong, serious features. Her gray eyes were direct and challenging. “It’s someplace in the bedroom. Want to come help me find it?”
That had been the idea. But suddenly Carver realized he didn’t really feel like going into the bedroom with Edwina. He was still thinking about the old woman in the rocking chair. About all the misdirection in his world. Well, none of it’s true. Not much about Sunhaven was true, he suspected. The smiles, the soothing designer “up” colors, the lulling sense of bureaucratic routine. Something about the place…
“Fred?”
“Sorry,” he said.
His abrupt change of mood puzzled her.
“I think I’ll take time out for a drink myself,” she said, stalking to the refrigerator in her high heels. She was of average height but appeared taller. She had a marvelous walk. “You want another beer?”
“No thanks.”
She gazed into the refrigerator for a while, then poured lemonade into an on-the-rocks glass. She never drank alcohol when she was working, so she didn’t add gin, as was sometimes her practice. She didn’t even bother adding ice.
After closing the refrigerator door, she stood where she was and downed half the lemonade, as if she’d been parched and hadn’t known it until she’d touched the glass to her lips.
“You don’t realize what it means to grow old until you visit someplace like Sunhaven,” Carver said.
Down went the rest of the lemonade. The tendons in her throat worked beneath the smooth flesh as she swallowed. “Tell me about it. Cheer me up.”
Carver smiled. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be glum. But you go to an old-folks’ home, the experience stays with you for a while.”
“Retirement home,” Edwina corrected. She put the glass down on the sink counter.
“Well, that’s the most favorable if not the most accurate thing this one could be called,” Carver said. “You know how voodoo works?”
“I think so. Someone you believe in tells you you’re cursed and going to die. So you accept it and slowly kill yourself from the inside.”
“That’s how it seems to be at Sunhaven. The residents are already chalked up, crossed out of life, and it’s only a matter of time before breathing stops and it’s official. Death with a capital D, looking for a place to lie down.”
“Not everyone’s relatives think of them as already dead when they get past seventy,” Edwina assured him.
“But too many do,” Carver said. “Too many give them up to time because they know time always wins.”
“ ’Scuse me,” Edwina said. She left the kitchen and returned a minute later carrying the listing book she’d gotten from the bedroom. “I don’t think I want to hang around here while you’re in this melancholy mood.”
Carver smiled at her. He knew he was too cynical; he was trying to change that in himself. A lot had happened to him in the past three years. His divorce, the maimed knee and his new occupation, the death of his
