Everybody clustered around the old man, all with that same damn smile. Old people wept and staff laughed and Joe stood there, the power draining away from his features like a flashlight with a failing battery, the tremble reappearing.
He began to look around, as if trying to remember something, and then one of the staff asked him to refresh her about the rest of the story. Joe settled, turned to her, smiled.
"The story is as old as time," he said, reaching to take her small hand, and everyone listened.
Murphy knew then why Timmie didn't want to indict Restcrest for anything. What he didn't understand was why, as everybody else crowded around in rapt attention to catch some of Joe Leary's infectious enthusiasm, the one person who walked away, movements as tight and contained as fury, was his daughter.
* * *
It was two more days until Halloween and Timmie hadn't finished sewing the damned costume yet. Why couldn't Meghan want to be Pocahontas like every other kid on the block? Why couldn't she even want to be a pumpkin, like last year? That costume was still around somewhere, a masterpiece of orange-and-green felt, and Meghan certainly hadn't grown out of it yet.
No, Meghan had to be Scheherazade, just like in one of Grandda's stories, and that meant she had to have yards of netting and those stupid bloused pants. It meant that all that damn material was draped over Timmie's dining room table like a taunt as Timmie skimmed pages of death notices.
She should be finishing the costume, or Meghan was going to be trick-or-treating with straight pins in her crotch. She should be getting ready for work so she could afford to extend her father's run at the Restcrest Playhouse. Instead, she read about dead people.
Normal dead people. Old people, young people, all reduced to a single line of print. Name, age, date of birth, date of death, unit, cause of death, disposition.
William Anthony Marshall, 47,
1/15/50, 2/25/96,
CCU, Acute MI,
Breyer's Mortuary
She had to find some direction other than Restcrest for Murphy to point his finger. Somebody other than Alex Raymond to be responsible.
Minerva G. Wilding, 71,
6/23/25, 6/30/97,
Oncology, CA, Liver,
Breyer's Mortuary
Some of the names she recognized. Some of those spare statistics could still ignite melancholy or delight or frustration, like surprising scent from long-pressed flowers. Some just made her sad.
William R. Porter, 8,
11/1/88, 8/15/97, ER,
MVA, Head Trauma,
hold for coroner
Well, so there had been cases Van Adder had investigated. Timmie could swear his numbers were awfully low, though. Especially when she considered the fact that the hospital mortality rate was an average of thirty a month, increasing to almost forty in the last few months. What were the odds that in over 360 people, not one was a suspected suicide or homicide?
Maria Salgado, 76,
10/1/22, 10/22/97, ER,
Cardiac Arrest,
Van Adder Mortuary
Timmie looked again, all the way through, just at the disposition line. She checked every time she found the word "coroner," and what it was for. Two gunshot wounds and a stabbing. An overdose. Little William who had died in the car accident, and another motorcycle accident. Two other overdoses that went to Breyer's and a head injury that was taken back up to St. Louis to bury.
Van Adder wasn't doing his job. Not a huge surprise, after meeting the man. But it would take that lunch with Conrad to get the whole skinny on that.
Timmie flipped the pages back to the last few months, running her finger down the lines just to see if anything stood out. Anything she should have noticed as unusual.
"Don't you have to go to work?" Meghan asked, skipping over from where she'd been finishing her homework.
"Yes," Timmie assured her daughter, her eyes still on the page. "I do. You probably could have figured that out when Heather came to baby-sit."
A name. Something about a name that niggled at her.
Wilhelm Reinholt Cleveland, 76,
7/1/21, 10/20/96,
ER, Cardiac Arrest.
Breyer's Mortuary
What should she be noticing here? What made her uneasy?
"Heather's boring," Meghan complained, leaning against Timmie's arm.
That was Meghanese for "I need some hugs here." Meghan was not the type of kid to demand emotional outbursts. She expected them as her right. Far be it from Meghan to admit that all the upheaval in the last few months—not to mention the last few days—would make her need them a little more.
Leaving a pen in the fold of the printout, Timmie turned to put her arms around her daughter and squeezed hard.
"At least she likes Renfield," she bargained.
"I can't go over to Mattie's again?"
"Sorry, hon. You're going to spend the night there tomorrow so Mommie can go out."
"Again." Meghan sighed like the orphan kid in a melodrama. "You're always gone now."
Timmie gave Meghan another squeeze. "Don't give me grief, kid," she teased. "This will be the first time I've put on panty hose for anything but a funeral since your dance recital last year. Mommies need to play, too, you know."
"But Daddy will be mad," Meghan insisted. "Especially if he comes here and finds me gone."
Daddy. Timmie did her best not to flinch. She'd forgotten. Well, probably not forgotten. Done another Scarlett. She had to find that lawyer and head off that "miscellaneous action" Jason had filed to harass her about not being able to get in touch with him. She had to start looking for him around every corner so she'd be ready when he walked up to her door to delight his daughter and harass his ex-wife. Damn, it was always something.
"We'll leave Daddy a note," Timmie promised.
Meghan leaned her little head against Timmie's chest just as she'd done since she'd been a baby, so that Timmie could smell Johnson's shampoo and fresh air. "I want to go to Mattie's tonight," she said.
"I know."
"I like them. Mr. Mattie lets me help him barbecue."
Timmie stroked silky brown hair and smiled. "Not mister. Reverend. And his name isn't Mattie. It's Wilson. Reverend Wilson."
"He thinks it's funny when I call him Mr. Mattie. He says it's okay. What's vengeance, Mom?"
Timmie pulled back. "What?"
Meghan screwed up her face. "I thought he said penguins. I thought he said penguins were the Lord's, and I thought that was silly, so I asked. He said it was vengeance, but that wasn't for little girls."
"When did this happen?"
"The night before you took Grandda away, I think. Cindy was there, and, oh, Barbara. I remember Barbara because she took us all out into the street to play cork-ball after dark. After dark, Mom, isn't that cool? Do you know we even went for a walk and saw a shooting star? You never showed me a shooting star before."