Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

It is dark, the sun below a blackened horizon when I reach Fayth House, a brick complex, tidy and relatively modern, with deliberately placed flowerbeds and trees. A silver SUV is pulling out as I turn in, leaving very few cars in the parking lot, and I suspect most of the residents in the retirement community don’t drive. I walk inside a pleasant lobby with blue carpet and blue furniture and silk flowers, and Americana prints and posters on the walls that remind me of Peggy Stanton’s checks.

The receptionist is a stout woman with frizzy brown hair and thick glasses, and I ask her who’s in charge.

“Which resident are you here to see?” she says, with a cheerful smile.

I ask her if there is a director. I realize it’s after hours, but is there someone in administration I can talk to? It’s important, I let her know.

“I don’t believe Mrs. Hoyt has left yet. She had a late meeting.” The receptionist picks up the phone to make sure, and I notice a fall arrangement of fresh flowers on a table behind her, burgundy Asiatic lilies, purple lisianthus, orange roses, and yellow oak leaves.

A floral delivery with no card. Someone, possibly the receptionist, has taped to the vase a piece of paper from a Fayth House memo pad, a name with a room number written on it that I can’t make out from where I stand. But I recognize It’s her Bday written in large print and underlined .

“Cindy? There’s someone here to see you? I’m sorry,” the receptionist says to me. “What’s your name?”

I’m directed to an office at the end of a long hallway that takes me past a brightly decorated dining room where residents are finishing dinner, some of them in wheelchairs, a lot of walkers and canes by the tables. The beauty salon is closed for the night, and an elderly man is playing the piano in a music room, and a cleaning cart is parked outside the library. I notice boxes of commercial trash-can liners, a hundred to a carton, the same brand I found inside Howard Roth’s house.

I walk on to the administrative offices and knock on the open door of the one at the end where Mrs. Hoyt, young and very pregnant, is putting on her coat. I introduce myself and shake her hand and she seems puzzled.

“Yes, I recognized the name when Betty just told me,” she says. “Do you have family here? I saw you on the news yesterday. That huge turtle on the fireboat and then the poor woman. What can I help you with? Do you have family here?” she again asks. “I would think I would know.”

She sits down at the desk with her coat on.

“Or maybe you’re considering Fayth House for someone?”

I take a chair across from her and reply that my mother lives in Miami and is stubborn about leaving her house even though she probably shouldn’t be on her own anymore. What a lovely place this is, I say.

“I’m wondering if you know who Howard Roth is,” I begin. “He was local and lived just a few blocks from here. He did odd jobs, was a handyman off and on.”

“Yes.” She opens a bottle of water and pours some in a coffee cup. “He was nice enough, with some problems, though, and I heard about what happened. That he fell down his stairs. Very sad; his life was tragic.” She looks at me as if to say she doesn’t understand.

She can’t imagine why I’m here about him.

I ask her about volunteers and if they might include a Cambridge woman named Peggy Stanton.

“I don’t know what happened,” Mrs. Hoyt replies. “She just stopped coming. Why do you ask?”

“Then you knew her?”

She looks at me, baffled, and of course she has no reason to be aware that Peggy Stanton is dead.

“Okay,” she says, and she’s starting to get upset. “Please don’t tell me . . .”

For a moment she looks as if she might cry.

“Well, what a lovely woman. You wouldn’t be here if it was nothing,” she says.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I ask.

“I don’t recall exactly.” She nervously types on her keyboard. “I can check. It’s easy enough to take a look at our volunteer schedule. We have such a wonderful group of people who make the lives of the residents so much better, people who bring joy and hope where there wouldn’t be any for so many of them. I’m sorry. I’m talking too much. I’m just a little flustered.”

She asks me what happened, and I tell her Peggy Stanton is deceased. We plan to release the information to the media first thing in the morning, but a body has been positively identified as hers.

“Good God, what a shame. Oh, Lord,” she says. “Dear God. How awful. Well, I thought it was the spring, and I’m right. This is terribly upsetting. When the residents know, they’ll be heartbroken. She was so popular, had been helping out here for many years.”

The last time Peggy Stanton was here was the night she vanished, April twenty-seventh, a Friday, when she ate dinner with a group she was working with, a collage that night, the residential administrator explains.

“It was a true passion with her,” she says. “Teaching arts and crafts, working with your hands. Peggy was just very involved in improving self-esteem, reducing anxiety and depression in seniors, and when you actually shape something with your bare hands and watch it evolve into a work of art? There just isn’t better therapy,” she adds, and she describes Peggy Stanton as a fine woman shattered by personal devastation, by unimaginable loss.

“She had a healing touch, you might say. Maybe because of what she’d been through in her own life. She was just starting the residents on pottery,” she explains. “But then she didn’t come back.”

She assumed Peggy Stanton had gone to Florida, perhaps to her lake cottage in the Chicago area.

“I wasn’t concerned, just a bit disappointed, as we’d been investigating kilns,” she says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s basement, of work recently done and of the unusual tools on the table down there.

Not for baking but for pottery, and I ask her if Peggy Stanton might have been thinking about installing a kiln in the basement of her home and if she might have hired Howard Roth on occasion to do an odd job or two. Very possibly, she says, but she can’t be sure, and she offers to give me a tour of Fayth House.

“I’ve held you up enough,” I reply, and I thank her as a chime sounds on my phone.

A text message from Lucy.

Who is Jasmine? I read, as I’m leaving .

Mildred Lott’s missing dog that turned up later , I text her back in the dark, returning to my SUV, which is next to another SUV that wasn’t parked there earlier.

A silver Jeep Cherokee with a silver mesh grille right next to me when the whole damn parking lot is practically empty, and I get an eerie feeling, a sensation that flutters.

Missing??? Then why’s she outside at night calling it?

About to get in the car & will call, I reply .

The silver Jeep Cherokee that passed me a little while ago when I first got here, it occurs to me. The same one I saw earlier in my own parking lot or one just like it. I point my key to unlock my SUV while part of me wants to run, and another text chimes.

Jasmine! Jasmine! Where are you? Come!

thirty-nine

I’VE BEEN TAKEN BY PIRATES.

The boat I’m in has a metal hull with carpet. It is moving fast on a heavy surf. It is cold and claustrophobic, and I’m groggy and in pain. I want to sleep.

Don’t sleep.

I’m going to be sick, motion sick, vertigo. My stomach lurches as if it wants to climb up my throat, and I wonder if I was hit on the head, if that’s how they got me here, dumped me in the cargo area of an old boat. On my back, a fishnet wound around me, I’m nauseated, about to gag. My stomach has nothing in it, and I don’t want dry heaves, mustn’t start retching uncontrollably. They can’t know I’m conscious, and I focus on every part of me, not sure if I’m injured. I don’t feel pain, just my pounding head.