Art said, “Why would they do that, luv?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Because I’m rich and famous. Like when those people snatched Frank Sinatra Junior or the Getty kid.”
“But those were for the ransom. The Brienings don’t need Mother Rita to extort money from you. They’ve got that letter instead.”
Mrs. Kerisiotis said, “Who are the Brienings?”
I could all but see the wheels spinning inside Hunny’s head and the terror he felt over the possibility of his mother’s being revealed in Golden Gardens as a thief. He said, “They’re people Mom had some trouble with a long time ago. It was an argument over a breaded zucchini recipe.”
“It’s hard to imagine your mother having a long-standing disagreement with anyone, Huntington. She is generally such a cheery lady. She can be outspoken, of course, and she has her opinions. And she doesn’t like to be bothered with Depends.
But five minutes after she lets off steam, she is back to being as sweet as can be. The aides all love Rita. She tells them stories that I would consider off-color, but the staff all think she is just a hoot.”
Tears welled in Hunny’s eyes. “That’s my mom.”
Now the large-breasted black man with a heavy beard and glittering earring who Timmy and I had seen on television at Hunny’s winning-the-lottery party came down the corridor in a green nurse’s outfit. His cornucopia of rhinestones still dangled from his left ear.
Hunny shouted, “Antoine!” and the two embraced and Art soon joined in the hug.
“Hunny, honey, we can’t find your mom, but I’m sure she is somewhere okay. That Rita can take care of herself, girl. You better believe it!”
“Oh, Antoine, honey, where in the world would Mom go? It sounds like she knew what she was doing — snuck out during the front desk shift change. Or maybe it wasn’t premeditated, and CoCkeyed 63 it was just a moment of opportunity and she took it. But Mrs.
Kerisiotis says you all have looked high and low, and now she’s going to call the sheriff. Oh God, please don’t let the police find her dead in a drainage ditch being gnawed on by wild dogs!”
This image seemed to spur the administrator to action, and Mrs. Kerisiotis headed into her office making speaking-into-a-receiver gestures.
“Hunny, honey, your mom is just such a dear lady, and I’m sure she is going to be back here where she belongs in no time at all.”
“Oh, Antoine, honey, I am trying to believe that.”
“Rita told us a joke the other day that had us all rolling on the floor and screaming our heads off. Did she tell you the one about the lady who led a cute bag boy out to the supermarket parking lot? The lady says to the bag boy, ‘I’m glad you came outside with me. I have to tell you, I have an itchy pussy.’ The humpy kid says to the lady, ‘Well, you’re going to have to point it out to me. All those Japanese cars look alike.’”
Hunny and Art’s laughter was so rollicking that several of the old folks staring at the floor in the corridor looked up.
“I know Mom gets on the phone with her old friend Tex Clermont once a week to trade jokes.”
“Hunny, I sure do see where you get your sense of humor.”
“Antoine, Mom has had a nice time here overall. Minus the disgusting food and so on. So I can’t begin to imagine why she would just walk out the door. It’s true, her mind is going.”
“I’ve noticed that, Hunny. But she has two or three marbles left, and on a good day she’s one hundred percent. Well, eighty-two.”
“Maybe she just went for a stroll. It’s such a sunny day out. It’s kind of hot, but Mom has never minded the heat. Or she walked down to Dairy Queen for a treat.”
“We all checked down there. But don’t you fret, Hunny.
Those girls in the sheriff ’s department will have her back here 64 Richard Stevenson in no time at all. One time a lady made it out the door and three miles down Route 43, and the officers found her in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube reading the Troy Record. She said she liked it there because the coffee at Jiffy Lube was better than the coffee at Golden Gardens. That poor lady — her name was Turalura Butterworth — passed away a week after the sheriff brought her back here. But that was just a coincidence, I am certain.”
Now Mrs. Kerisiotis came back out from her office. She said two sheriff ’s deputies were on their way, and they would get word out to all patrol officers in the region about the missing Golden Gardens resident. When Mrs. Kerisiotis told the duty officer the name of the missing patient, he had said to her, “Van Horn? Why is that name sounding familiar?”
“Huntington,” Mrs. Kerisiotis said, “you are such a celebrity.
The next thing you know I’ll go into the Grand Union and your face will be on the cover of the National Inquirer. We’ll find out all about your hidden secrets and scandalous love life.”
Mrs. Kerisiotis grinned, but Hunny only smiled back feebly.
The noontime sun was brilliant and the air steamy, and I cranked the AC as I sped down the interstate toward Cobleskill.
It seemed unlikely that the Brienings were in any way connected to the disappearance of Rita Van Horn. She was most valuable to them settled comfortably among her unknowing and potentially judgmental fellow residents at Golden Gardens. But I needed to talk with them anyway about their crude extortion plot, so it wasn’t going to hurt to gauge their reaction to Mrs. Van Horn’s having gone AwoL.
Hunny, meanwhile, was phoning family members and his mother’s friends and acquaintances to find out if any of them knew of her whereabouts. And the East Greenbush Fire Department was preparing to launch a volunteer ground search if Mrs. Van Horn had not been found by mid-afternoon.
I had never been to Cobleskill. It was one of the small towns off I-88 heading west toward the southern tier counties, about forty-five minutes from Albany. It had a thriving agricultural college that was part of the State University of New York system, and as I headed into town from the interstate the place didn’t have that woebegone feeling of so many upstate burgs whose original industrial reasons for existing had long since migrated to Central America and Asia.
My GPS led me to Crafts-a-Palooza in a strip mall in the west end of town. The Brienings had a place the width of two storefronts, and the vacant, former used bookstore next door looked like the spot where they might be planning their multi-million-dollar mega-expansion. I had a tuna sub at the Subway store at the other end of the mall, and when I walked outside and the sun pounded down on me I was sorry I had eaten the whole thing. I wasn’t going to be as alert with the Brienings as I wanted to be, not that I was under the impression that dealing with them was going to require subtlety.
The place was busy with Sunday afternoon young and old women perusing the paints, beads, sparkles, plastic water lilies the size of bed pans, and unpainted plaster dwarfs. There were front yard windmills whose vanes had the Ten Commandments printed on them and in the middle a picture of a smiling Sarah Palin. I had never set foot in an extruded-yard-novelty factory in Taipei, but I imagined that if I ever went there it would smell just like the Crafts-a-Palooza store in Cobleskill, New York.
A checkout clerk told me that Arletta and Clyde didn’t ordinarily come into the store on Sundays, but they happened to be nearby. They were next door in the former used bookstore taking measurements. I asked if that was because Crafts-a-Palooza was expanding, and the clerk said yes, probably in the early fall.
I hadn’t noticed the Brienings inside the defunct bookshop because the lights weren’t on, but I soon spotted them in the dim recesses at the rear. I shoved the front door open and walked in and they both looked my way, startled.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Briening?”
“Yes?”
They both gave me a sour-faced once-over.
“I’m Donald Strachey, a private investigator. My client, Huntington Van Horn, suggested that we talk.”
Four eyes narrowed at the mention of Hunny’s name.
