Ike knew enough to let me eat in silence. And then watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy in silence. At eight o’clock I made him a deal: he could watch The O’Reilly Factor if he turned the volume down. I went into my bedroom to pack. At nine o’clock we loaded James into Ike’s car-it was a lot like Sisyphus trying to roll that rock up the mountain-and headed out into the night. Ike knew enough not to hum along with the songs on the radio.
That’s the problem with Ike, by the way. He’s known me long enough to know what not to do.
It took us twenty minutes to get there. The huge, double-story building was dark except for a few windows at the rear. We drove toward them across the empty parking lot. Ike pulled up to the curb. He already had his instructions, but he knew enough to show a smidgeon of empathy anyway. “You sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”
“James would just throw a fit.”
He leaned across my overnight bag and kissed my lips. “You behave in there, okay?”
I got out of the car. Bent down and gave him the evil eye. “Not a minute after six!”
“I’ll be here.”
I forced myself up the walk to the door. The gold letters on the glass looked three feet high: HANNAWA SLEEP CENTER.
Behind the candy bowl on the counter sat a big woman wearing a white smock covered with happy blue bunnies. She was lost in a romance novel. “I’m here for my sleep test,” I said. “Sprowls.”
Without looking up she handed me a questionnaire snapped to a clipboard. “After you fill it out I’ll take you to your room.” Her voice was soft and breathy, no doubt very much like the voice of the beautiful heiress in her book at that very moment surrendering to the passions broiling within her for so very long.
I answered the questions as truthfully as I could. When I went back to the counter, she dog-eared her page, stuck the book in the pocket of her smock and led me down the hallway to my room. It was not the sterile hospital room I expected. It was as homey as anything you’d find at a Best Western. Double bed with a real wooden headboard. Paintings bolted to the flowery wallpaper. Fuzzy rug. TV on the dresser. I put my overnight bag on the bed. “How many are being tested tonight?”
“All five rooms are filled.”
“Men and women?”
“Men one night and women the next,” she said. “We don’t need anything interesting happening, do we?”
I was relieved. I’d been worrying about some grisly old sleepwalker trying to nuzzle up to me in the night. “You’re going to glue lots of wires to me, I gather.”
She headed for the door. Her hand was already retrieving the book from her smock. “Get into your PJs. Patti will be in shortly to prepare you.”
Patti turned out to be Patti Kapustova, a sawed-off girl with impressive hips that would serve her well once she was old enough to bear children. “You look too young to be a nurse,” I said.
She took it as a compliment. “I’m thirty-three-but thanks.” She looked tired and a bit agitated. She was having a devil of a time trying to untangle the wad of wires she’d brought in with her. “And I’m not a nurse,” she said. “I’m a polysomnographic technologist.”
She went into a lengthy explanation of the test, how those electrodes in her hand would be attached to my scalp, face, chest, legs, and fingers. How she would monitor my sleep from an adjoining room. How if nature called during the night I could call her and she’d help me waddle to the bathroom. “You have any questions, Mrs. Sprowls?”
I did have a question. “Kapustova-that wouldn’t be Romanian, would it?”
She softened a little. “It’s Slovak. My ex-husband’s name. I’m actually French Canadian and Welsh. Barbou and Jones and I end up with Kapustova.”
“I’m saddled with my ex’s name, too.”
She glued an electrode to the top of my head. “I recognized your name on the test order. You’re that newspaper woman who solves murders.”
Unfortunately, The Herald-Union had glowingly reported my role in solving the Buddy Wing and Gordon Sweet murders. “Just my luck,” I cracked. “A polysomnographic technologist with a newspaper subscription.”
Patti pushed up my pajama legs and glued an electrode to my calf, to record, she said, how much kicking and squirming I did in my sleep. “That’s got to be exciting. Solving murders, and all.”
“It’s a pain in the ass.”
She held up the last of her electrodes. Devilishly swayed it back and forth.
“Oh no you don’t!”
She glued it on my other calf. “Why did you ask if I was Romanian?”
It was time to obfuscate. “Names intrigue me.”
She hooked a small plastic tube under my nose, to monitor my breathing. “I thought maybe you we looking into the death of that woman who claimed to be a queen or whatever.”
Now it was time to lie. “Heaven’s to Betsy, no.”
“One of my uncles is married to a Romanian.”
I pretended not to be interested. “I had an uncle who married a Lithuanian. They’re both dead now, of course.”
“My uncle and his wife are still alive. In Youngstown.”
“That’s only half alive, dear.”
Patti was finally finished with me. “Comfy?”
“With all these wires I feel like a fly caught in a spider’s web.”
She smiled at me-just like a spider-and headed for the door. “You’ll be surprised how well you sleep.”
I hadn’t been very nice to her and I was struggling with an emotion that rarely bubbles up in me. Guilt. I called out to her. “Kapustova is a very pretty name!”
This time she smiled at me like a puppy. “You know what Kapustova means in Slovak, Mrs. Sprowls? Cabbage! Patti the Cabbage! Nighty night!” She pulled the door shut behind her. I clicked off my lamp and closed my eyes. I twisted this way and that until I was comfortable.
You’d think I would have used that opportunity to wrestle with the few facts I had about Violeta Bell’s murder, wouldn’t you? The skeleton keys. The lack of blood everywhere but on Eddie’s porch. Eddie’s aversion to guns. Kay Hausenfelter’s pretty pistol. Violeta’s fake Social Security card and surprising poverty. But all I could think about was Ike and why I was taking that damn sleep test for him. I didn’t like what my inner voice was telling me. Not one iota.
Saturday, July 29
Patti the Cabbage woke me up at 5:30. The poor girl had been worn to a frazzle the night before, but now, after eight hours of watching a gaggle of other women sleep, she was wide awake. And way too perky. She started prying the electrodes off me, humming through her nose like a Hawaiian guitar.
“How’d I do?” I asked her.
“You snored.”
I was afraid that was going to be the answer. “How bad?”
“Like a herd of wild pigs.”
“Sorry.”
“For what? I get $18.50 an hour to listen to people snore.”
The night before I’d had to struggle with guilt. Now it was envy. The young twit made fifty cents more an hour than I did! Then again, to be fair, all I did all day was test the upper limits of people’s blood pressure. “I didn’t stop breathing, did I?”
She pried off the last electrode. The one on the top of my head. “Your doctor will give you the bad news.”
I got dressed and headed for the parking lot. Ike and James were waiting for me. They both wanted to kiss me. But I wanted no part of that. I just wanted to go home and shower. I had little blotches of itchy glue all over me. “This might improve your mood,” Ike said, handing me a folded copy of The Herald-Union as we zipped across the empty parking lot. He proudly used the newspaper lingo he’d learned from me. “B-1, below the fold.”
