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  But when she fell asleep that night, the old dreams crept back into her subconscious and she awoke the next morning feeling sad and depressed.

  Chapter 11

  With Michael Meredith out of town at a conference and Vera Johanssen on a short leave of absence, the mood at Riverview was even more relaxed than the usual casualness of a winter weekend.

  On Saturday afternoon the halls were especially quiet, with many of the residents out with their families and others down for afternoon naps. On the north wing two girls from housekeeping folded laundry, speaking rapid Spanish as they worked. A pretty young nurse caught up on med charts and snuck a candy bar at the nurses’ station.

  Down the hallway in the broom closet, Oliver Moon’s mumbling and snorting could be heard, a sound that—to all but the most infrequent visitor—was a familiar, soothing cadence of the everyday workings of Riverview Manor.

  Geneva Grayson was the charge nurse on North this weekend. She was never happy about having to work the weekend shift, but it was policy that even those with as much seniority as she had took their turn. It wasn’t so bad, really. The time usually went quickly and there were rarely admissions or dismissals to deal with on those days.

  Geneva walked briskly down the hallway, her thick-soled nursing shoes barely making a sound on the tile floors. She looked into several rooms as she moved down the hallway, making sure call buzzers were within reach, tucking an afghan around slippered feet here and there. Her true destination was Room N-18. Helga Schultz had taken ill several days ago, and Geneva suspected she'd developed pneumonia. It seemed there was a rash of that dreaded disease every winter, and among the elderly it was a killer.

  Helga was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and her family rarely bothered to visit anymore. Geneva couldn’t blame them, really.

  The woman hadn’t recognized them for years and lately had been completely bed-ridden. Still, it seemed sad to Geneva to see a human being abandoned that way.

  As she approached the room, Ollie came out of the door pushing his cart of cleaning supplies.

  “All through in here, Ollie?”

  He gave her his trademark grin and nodded.

  She entered the room and immediately heard the rattled breathing, which was a tell-tale sign of pneumonia. She’d have to call the doctor and see if he wanted to order any new medications. Unfortunately for Helga Schultz, it probably wouldn’t make any difference at this point.

  Geneva emptied the woman’s catheter and recorded the measurement on the chart on the back of the door. She elevated the head of the bed a bit to hopefully ease the elderly woman’s breathing and checked the IV line that provided the only nutrition she could tolerate. The nurse carefully adjusted the drip and smoothed the tape that held the needle in place.

  “How are you doing, Helga?” she asked, not expecting an answer.

  Even before she'd become ill, Helga Schultz would have understood little the nurse said. Since the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, the German-speaking woman had lost even the rudimentary English she’d once known.

  But Geneva prided herself on speaking even to those patients who were thought not to hear or understand. She firmly believed the studies purporting that hearing was one of the last senses to go, and she determined early in her nursing career that her patients would go with a gentle word in their ears.

  “Everything’s going to be all right now, Helga. You just rest. . . just rest. It won’t be long. It won’t be long,” she told the woman now.

  She left the room, pulling the door partially closed behind her. As she headed back toward the nurses’ station, she spotted Ollie at the end of the hallway. He was fidgeting with something, mumbling under his breath like always. When he saw Geneva he quickly turned his back to her, and she saw him put something carefully into the pocket of his blue coveralls. Probably a cookie from the cafeteria. She'd told him a hundred times not to bring food onto the wings.

  Hurrying toward him she confronted him with her suspicions.

  “Ollie, please don’t tell me you’ve been eating on the floor again. You know we have a bad enough problem with bugs as it is.” She held out a hand. “Give it here, please.”

  “Nah . . . nah . . . nah foo. Honst.”

  “What do you have, then?” Ollie wasn’t a liar, but he did like his cookies.

  Reluctantly, he put his hand in a pocket and pulled out an object, showing it to Geneva.

  She stifled a gasp. In his hand was a syringe. Where on earth had he gotten it?

  She had learned that Ollie upset easily, so forcing herself to speak calmly, she held her hand out again. “Give it to me, please, Ollie.”

  He dutifully handed over the contraband. “Where did you find this, Ollie?” She had to know.

  Without a word, he began to shuffle toward Helga’s room. He pushed the door open and went directly to the bedside table. Pointing to the spotless surface, he grunted.

  “You found this on the nightstand?” She could scarcely contain the anger in her voice. “Ollie, you know you are not supposed to take things from patient’s rooms. There are things here that could hurt you very badly.”

  Becoming very agitated, Ollie began to circle his hand over the night table, pretending to clean.

  Geneva understood. “I know you needed to clean in here, but this is sharp. You could have been hurt.” She made her voice as stern as possible. Sometimes that was necessary to make Ollie understand that you meant business.

  He began to rub his hands back and forth through his sparse crew cut, obviously distressed. “Nah . . . nah . . . Murrmuff. . . nah,” he pleaded with her.

  “No. I’m not going to tell Mr. Meredith, Ollie, but so help me, if I ever, ever find you with something like this again, I won’t have any choice but to report you. And that goes for cookies, too. You keep them in the cafeteria. Do you understand?”

  Ollie nodded vigorously and gave the charge nurse a weak smile.

  “Go on now,” she told him affectionately. “Get back to work—and stay out of trouble.”

  Ollie shuffled back toward the broom closet with his cleaning cart, muttering all the way. Sighing with barely concealed relief, Geneva wrapped the syringe carefully in paper toweling and discreetly disposed of it in the sharps container.

  The conference room had grown stuffy with the warm bodies of more than a hundred health-care professionals who had crowded in to hear a lecture on the philosophy behind the hospice movement. The acrid smell of stale coffee and the faint odor of cigarette smoke drifting in from the hallway made Michael Meredith feel desperate for fresh air.

  He loosened his tie and inconspicuously began to gather his notebooks and briefcase. When the speaker broke into a question and answer session, he quietly excused himself and wound his way through the linen-covered tables toward an exit at the back of the room. He walked through the lobby of the hotel and out to the covered courtyard near the swimming pool, now abandoned in the frigid winter air.

  He took a deep breath and moved back a few steps to position himself downwind from a small group of businessmen who were smoking at the edge of the courtyard.

  The conference had been interesting. Besides gleaning much helpful information from the workshops and lectures, the program had allowed him to fulfill a continuing education requirement. But it had been a long three days and he still had the drive back to Hanover Falls ahead of him.

  He filled his lungs with another gulp of the brisk February air and turned to go back up to his room to pack his bags. As he passed the restaurant just off the lobby, two men emerged from the bar, drinks in hand.

  Michael slowed his pace to let them go ahead of him. Suddenly, the older of the two men looked up, recognition dawning on his face.

  “Michael Meredith!”

  Michael suddenly realized why the man knew him. It was his predecessor, Gerald Stoddard. The stocky man extended a hand in greeting and Michael shook it warmly.

  “Well, hello there, Mr. Stoddard. I didn’t expect
to run into you here. I thought you’d retired.”

  “So did I. And so did the wife.” Gerald Stoddard laughed, his words slightly slurred

  And when the man thrust his face close to Michael’s, the smell of alcohol was on his breath.

  “That sittin’ around stuff just wasn’t for me. I’m doing consulting work now. Get to set my own hours.”

  “That must be nice.” Michael struggled to be polite.

  “Oh, it is. It is.” Suddenly remembering his dinner partner, Stoddard turned and introduced him to Michael, then urged his friend not to wait for him. “You go on, Merle. I’ve got some catching up to do with this young man.”

  Gerald Stoddard motioned toward a lounge area in the lobby and, without waiting for Michael’s assent, steered him to a deep corner sofa. Stirring his drink with a pudgy finger, he motioned for Michael to sit down.

  “So how are things at Riverview?”

  “Things are busy.” Michael perched tentatively on the arm of the sofa. “I can say that for sure. My assistant administrator has gone back to school, so I’m putting in quite a few more hours than I’d really like.”

  “Don’t I remember.” Stoddard laughed derisively. “They’ll work you to death there if you let them.”

  Michael was uncomfortable with the bitter edge in Stoddard’s voice. He liked his job at Riverview and had never felt taken advantage of. He stood and edged toward the main lobby, anxious to extricate himself from the conversation.

  “Hey, tell me something, Meredith,” the less-than-sober man asked before Michael could free himself.

  “Yes?”

  “There still a nurse there by the name of Harper? Cynthia Harper?”

  Curious and a bit startled, he nodded a reply.

  “She still strange as a three-legged duck?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Ha! You must not know her very well.”

  Michael said nothing.

  But Stoddard rambled on. “I didn’t know the woman either when we hired her. Oh, did I ever get into it with Vera Johanssen over that one. Is Vera still there?”

  “Yes,” Michael answered, impatient for the man to get to the point.

  “I tell you . . . that’s only one of my regrets from my stint at Riverview. But it wasn’t like I had a choice. It was coercion, if you ask me. No, I never should have let that one fly.”

  Michael was more than curious now. “What do you mean, coercion?”

  “Cynthia Harper.” Stoddard waved his vodka glass in the air, sloshing the last drops out onto his suit. “Her old man—he’s dead now—but the family owns half of Thomas County. There’s just the one sister left now, Cynthia’s aunt. Seems she planned to leave a nice chunk of land or money—maybe both—to the manor. Nita Dalhardt’s her name. Kind of a recluse—still lived alone on the family place out by the lake last I heard. Anyway, the board didn’t want to do anything to make her change her mind. It was never really said, but I got the message that if I knew what was good for me, I’d convince Vera to hire that crackpot.”

  As much as he hated to stand here and take the words of an inebriated man to heart, he had to ask. “Why do you call her a crackpot?”

  “That woman has some strange ideas in her head. Strange ideas about life.” Stoddard, his tongue loosened by the liquor, was wound up now. His voice rose a pitch. “I suppose she was a decent enough nurse if you could overlook her strange ways, but how she’s managed to succeed in her career, I don’t know. It makes you wonder.”

  Stoddard shook his head and went on. “She cornered me more than once and went off on a tangent . . . some fool thing about her husband being an angel. I don’t think she meant it figuratively,” he sneered. “How he didn’t deserve to suffer the way he did and she hoped, wherever he was, he was getting rewarded for all the pain he went through.”

  “How did her husband die?”

  “Long and slow, to hear her tell it.” Stoddard smirked. “I really don’t know. Cancer, I assume. I never knew him—I think his name was James—but I can’t imagine anyone staying married to a loony like her. I always thought she and Ollie would have made a good couple.” He laughed derisively. “I suppose ol’ Ollie’s still there. He’s a character, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, Ollie’s still at Riverview. We wouldn’t know what to do without him,” Michael replied, trying to give the faithful employee back some of the dignity Stoddard’s boorish comments had stolen.

  Michael had heard enough. This whole conversation was bringing back doubts that he'd hoped to put to rest. To make things worse, his source was conceivably credible because of his past connection to Riverview and to Cynthia Harper, but at the same time quite suspect because of his questionable state of sobriety and his admitted resentment toward the board of directors over the alleged incident with Harper.

  Michael looked pointedly at his watch and eased toward the elevators across from the lounge. “Well, I really need to get packed and out of here, Mr. Stoddard. It was good to see you again.”

  “Yeah, you too. You take it easy now.”

  Stoddard headed back toward the restaurant, weaving slightly as he disappeared into the bar.

  As Michael drove home that night, he mulled over the things Gerald Stoddard had told him. His comments about Cynthia Harper were particularly unsettling to Michael. The only contact he'd personally had with the woman was the brief interview before Christmas when they'd questioned her and several other nurses about Frederick Halloran’s files. Michael remembered that Harper had seemed somewhat socially inept and nervous. But certainly that was understandable under the circumstances. However, if it was true that she'd been hired because of her connection to one of the center’s main benefactors, the fact lent one more edge of credibility to Vera’s misgivings. He wondered if Vera knew about the connection. Surely she would have said something had she known.

  Stoddard’s affirmation that Cynthia Harper was at least a bit odd was disconcerting. Still, none of the things Michael had heard offered a genuine reason for him to take action. Besides, he reassured himself, the man was drunk. Still, he wanted to talk to Vera about this disturbing encounter.

  As he drew closer to Hanover Falls, he convinced himself that Gerald Stoddard’s babblings had been just that. Babblings. He forced himself to think about other things.

  One pleasant realization made it easy to put the nagging concerns out of his mind. Tomorrow night he would see Claire again.

  Chapter 12

  Claire went to early services Sunday morning and hurried home to tidy the house up a bit before she got busy in the kitchen. Afraid to risk trying a new recipe, she made the same chicken dish she’d served Millie. Why mess with success? she thought as she assembled the ingredients. She baked banana bread and an apple pie, all the while blessing Nana for passing down her culinary skills.

  While the pie was in the oven, Claire went for a short walk, relishing the brisk winter air and daydreaming about the evening to come.

  Once home she took a quick shower. When her hair, damp and unruly from the shower, wouldn’t cooperate, she plaited it into a neat French braid. She brushed a touch of pale blush on her cheeks and glossed her lips. Peering critically into the mirror, she saw tendrils of hair had already escaped the braid, and she wished for the thousandth time that she'd been born with smooth, straight hair. But a glance at the clock told her she didn’t have time to worry about her hair.

  She set the small kitchen table with her best dishes, put classical music on the stereo, but decided against candles, fearful that they might seem too much an attempt at romance.

  By the time the doorbell rang at six o’clock Claire was a bundle of nerves, but the casserole was cooked to perfection, her hair had settled down a bit in the dry heat from the fireplace, and the house was fragrant with the scent of apples and cinnamon and woodsmoke.

  She took a deep breath and opened the door.

  “Hi, Michael.”

  “Hi.” He gently turned her around for in
spection. “Your hair looks really pretty like that.”

  His tender touch, the warmth of his hands on her shoulders affected her deeply, but she laughed nervously at his comment. “Oh, if only you knew how I agonized over this dumb naturally curly hair, you’d know how sweet it is of you to say that. Thank you.”

  “That doesn’t smell like liver and onions to me.” He grinned and sniffed in the direction of the kitchen.

  “I changed my mind. It’s a chicken recipe I got from Becky. I hope you like it.”

  “If it tastes as good as it smells, I’ll love it.”

  “Then let’s go find out. Oh, I’m sorry. Here, let me take your coat.”

  He shrugged out of the heavy overcoat and she hung it in the hall closet, then led the way to the kitchen.

  Supper was a huge success. Michael ate everything with gusto, including two slices of apple pie. She would have to remember to send some of it home with him. She’d never be able to finish it herself.

  When the second piece of pie had disappeared from his plate, he leaned back in his chair and groaned miserably. “Oh, Claire, I’m afraid this was a big mistake.”

  “Why?” she asked suspiciously, recognizing his prelude to a joke.

  “I’m never going to want to take you out to eat again now that I know we can get the best meal in town right here.”

  “Maybe I will make liver and onions next time, just to be sure you don’t take advantage of my culinary talents,” she shot back.

  “Okay, okay, you win.”

  “Also”—she winked—“at Claire’s Restaurant you have to do your own dishes.”

  “Lady, you are one tough taskmaster. Well, let’s get it over with.” Sighing, he pushed away from the table and started to clear the dishes.

  Laughing, she followed suit, and when they moved into the living room half an hour later, the kitchen was spotless and a triangle of foil holding three generous slices of apple pie for him to take home sat waiting on the still-warm stove top.