Rogersville, Kansas, phone book. There were ten ending in Phillips: Anson, C.J., Donald, Harry, Keenan, Martin, Missey, Opal, Vernon, and Wyatt. It was ten o’clock. He could make Rogersville by eleven.
The addresses were a crisscross of numbered streets and dead presidents. Anson lived at 227 Jefferson and Wyatt at 1634 Roosevelt. The others were evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats. Once he figured out where the party lines were, he figured he could find them easily enough.
On his way, he called Blues. “I’m headed to Rogersville to find Meredith Phillips. I need you to track down Angela’s autopsy results.”
“You think I’m running a bar and you’ve got a tab?”
“We’ll settle up when this is over. I’ll call you if I find Meredith.”
Most small towns are laid out with Main and First as the north-south and east-west dividers. If you can count and tell your right from your left, you can’t get lost. Rogersville was no different except that the presidents weren’t in chronological order. Fillmore and Hoover were back-to-back. Maybe the city fathers just had a wry sense of humor.
Anson Phillips’s house was the third from the corner, west side of the street, on a block lined with heavy- limbed oaks leaning over the center of the street in a green canopy. Well-tended lawns, one-car garages, and sturdy wooden front stoops spoke to the longevity of the neighborhood.
Mason parked in the driveway behind a late-model white Buick, a car the size of Brazil. His TR6 looked like a mutant exhaust pipe protruding from its tail end.
Anson was as round a man as Mason had ever seen. He filled the width of the glider on his porch, work boots not quite touching the ground. His head perched like a paperweight on his shoulders, with no visible support from his neck. Eyes, nose, mouth, and ears melted into a pie-pan face. He was a denim-wrapped doughboy given too long to rise. Mason bet he hadn’t seen his feet in years.
“Morning,” Mason called out from the driveway. “You Mr. Phillips?”
“What you want, boy?”
No one had called Mason a boy in years. He liked this guy already.
“Help. I’m looking for a woman named Meredith Phillips. Last I knew, she lived in Rogersville. You’re the first Phillips in the book.”
“What d’ya want with her?”
“I’m a lawyer from Kansas City. She may have a child who’s inherited some money.”
“Don’t know her. Might try Vernon Phillips. That family’s been around here a long time.”
No one was home at Vernon’s, so Mason spent the next hour running down the rest of the Phillips clan. Only a few were home and none of them as helpful as Anson. He decided to try Vernon again.
This time there was a car in the driveway, a lime green, road-worn Chevy with a
A chorus of bleating kids sang their demands from the other side of the screen door. A loose-jointed girl no more than twenty, her right hip jutting out to hold the rheumy-eyed infant glued to her side, answered Mason’s knocks.
Stringy maize-colored hair hung over her narrow forehead as she examined him with defeated, washed-out eyes ringed by dark circles. She ran her tongue over chapped lips, while another toddler clung to her T-shirt, dragging it off one bony shoulder. The sour stench of soiled diapers followed them to the door.
“I’m looking for Vernon Phillips. Is this his house?”
“Yeah,” she said, pushing the older child behind her and tugging her shirt back over her exposed dull gray bra strap.
“May I speak to him, please?”
“He don’t live here no more. I’m renting from him.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
She disappeared for a minute and returned with a scrap of paper on which she’d written an address, 1860 Lincoln.
“Do you know Mr. Phillips?”
“Sure, known him all my life. We moved in across the street when I was five.”
“Did he have children?”
“A girl, Meredith.”
“She’s the one I really need to talk to. Do you know where she lives?”
“No place. She’s dead. Killed in a car wreck ‘fore my folks moved in.”
From the back, Mason heard another wailing voice cry out. The toddler bolted while the baby spit up. She didn’t have to say good-bye.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Eighteen-sixty Lincoln was the address of the Loving Hands Convalescent Center, a low-slung, U-shaped building made of sandblasted brick. Heat waves radiated off a playground on the south side. Overgrown weeds had erupted through the asphalt, wrapping around the legs of a steel jungle gym. It was the only landscaping. A faded tire hung from a chain in the center of an otherwise empty swing set.
Mason parked in the circle drive next to a barren flagpole. The plaque embedded at its base declared that the alumnae of Lincoln Elementary School had donated it in 1953. A pair of oversized, pale pink cupped hands had been painted over the entry beneath the gracious claim that those inside had cared for loved ones since 1985. He wondered if any of the alumnae had reenrolled at their alma mater, proving again that life is a circle.
Airplane propeller-sized fans stood in the lobby blowing antiseptic flavored air down each stuffy hallway, though the breeze passed by the closed doors of the patients’ rooms.
He shuddered, remembering when his aunt Claire dragged him to a nursing home to visit her mother. He was six. His grandmother was ancient. She lay in bed, near death, her hair fanned out around her head.
Claire had patiently brushed her hair, working out the tangles. He had looked into her cloudy black eyes sunk deep into her face. Her skin had been brittle and translucent, like looking through tissue paper into her skull. Her parched lips had been shut, silencing the voice that used to sing him to sleep, her gnarled hands lying uselessly at her sides. She had smelled like the stuff that the cleaning lady used to clean the toilets. He never went back.
Vernon Phillips lived in room twelve on the north wing. So did three other people, each cordoned off by a peach-colored vinyl curtain suspended from a track along the ceiling; four to a classroom, each bed with a view. Probably a lot less crowded than the days when kids roamed the halls.
A clipboard with an erasable surface hung on each classroom door, listing the occupants and their bed numbers. Vernon was bed number three. Each patient’s space was furnished with a chair for visitors. Sandra Connelly sat in Vernon’s.
“About time you got here, lover boy. I almost gave up on you,” she said as she stood.
Sandra had an inexhaustible capacity for the unexpected. She had made it plain that she was doing her own investigation. Still, he was surprised to see her.
“Sorry to keep you waiting. I had some other stops to make.”
“Tell me all about it.”
“Later. How’s Vernon?”
“Like all vegetables. Not good company.”
His chart hung from a hook at the end of the bed. The top page contained the admitting information. He’d been there five weeks following a stroke. Mason put the chart back and looked at the figure lying in bed.
He was propped up, placing them in his line of sight. His gaze passed through them, through the walls, and kept going. Ragged gray stubble covered his chin and peppered his mottled cheeks. A loose-fitting hospital tunic lay over his chest and upper arms. His Adam’s apple bobbed rhythmically, the only sure sign part of him was still with the living.
Mason couldn’t take his eyes off of him. Vernon knew the answers to Mason’s questions, but they were locked inside him. Mason sat at the foot of his bed, staring at him, weary at another dead end.
