Treasure Box (19 page)

"Ms. Sannazzaro," said Quentin, "I honestly don't know what this visit will accomplish. But it was my idea to come here, not Chief Bolt's. He just came along to show me the way. I don't mean any harm to Mrs. Tyler or anybody in her family. But I'd like to
try
to talk with her. That can't do her any harm, can it?"

Sannazzaro considered this. "I guess you're right."

They followed her out into the corridor.

"She couldn't have stopped us anyway," said Bolt, obviously intending Sannazzaro to overhear him. "This isn't a prison and there's such a thing as habeas corpus and privacy rights."

Quentin wasn't a lawyer, but he was pretty sure that neither legal principle applied in the case of two non-family visitors without an appointment on a busy understaffed night at a rest home. But he said nothing to Bolt, not in the testy mood he was in tonight.

Sannazzaro also ignored Bolt. "I hope this won't take too long, Mr. Fears. We have a lot of baths to give tonight."

They followed her to an elevator and went up to the top floor, then down to the end of a corridor. "Our bedridden patients don't need to be particularly convenient to the recreation and dining areas," Sannazzaro explained. "They also have fewer visitors than anyone else, so it makes sense to put them in our remotest locations."

Mrs. Tyler had a room to herself. She lay stretched out on the bed, her hands at her sides. She might have been arranged that way by an undertaker. No human being would voluntarily assume such a symmetrical position.

It took a moment, looking at her, to be sure she was the same woman he had seen at breakfast in the Laurent house.

"I found you," said Quentin.

The old lady's eyes opened for a long moment, then closed.

"Well, I'll be," said Nurse Sannazzaro. "She actually noticed you."

Quentin sat down next to her and took her by the hand. "It's good to meet you in the flesh, Grandmother," he said.

"Grandmother?" asked Sannazzaro.

"Can't you at least
pretend
not to be eavesdropping?" snapped Bolt.

Sannazzaro stood in the doorway, silent now.

Not moving his lips, Quentin formed words carefully in his mind. Can you understand me? Can you read my thoughts the way Madeleine could?

No answer. Not even the fingers squeezing his hand.

"You wanted me to come," Quentin said quietly. "You wanted me to find you."

"She's a turnip," said Bolt impatiently. "Now you've seen her, let's go."

It bothered Quentin that there was no hint of affection for her in his words. Back in Mixinack, it had been obvious that Bolt really cared for the old lady. But now...

"Sorry if I'm boring you," said Quentin. "What do
you
do when you visit? Play chess with her? Go on walks?"

"I sit and hold her hand," said Bolt.

"And he plumps up her pillows," said Sannazzaro dryly.

Bolt glared at her. Quentin was surprised that a medical officer would taunt someone like that—especially someone who looked after a helpless old lady without being paid for it. Though come to think of it, he wasn't sure but what Bolt
was
getting paid out of the estate. All that mattered right now, however, was communicating with Mrs. Tyler, and the hostility between Sannazzaro and Bolt wasn't helping.

"If we can't all be friends," said Quentin, "can you both just shut up? Of course I mean that in the nicest possible way."

"It's stuffy in here," said Bolt, standing up. "Will you call your lawyers if I ask for leftovers in the kitchen?"

"Eat anything that isn't actually on the floor with a footprint on it," said Sannazzaro. "But not until the cook brings it out to you in the dining room. It really is against state health regulations for you to be in the kitchen."

Bolt got up and shambled to the door. "Of course, you both know that I'm really going to the john. That chili keeps coming back to me in waves."

For Quentin, the chili had seemed far too mild to cause any discomfort. But then it was only New York chili, and besides, he hadn't eaten half as much as Bolt.

The door closed behind Bolt.

Quentin turned back to Mrs. Tyler. "We're not going to be alone," he said quietly, "so if you're going to talk to me, now would be a really good time."

But she said nothing. Not even a blink or a squeeze of his hand.

Quentin sighed and leaned back in his chair, letting go of Mrs. Tyler's hand. "What a waste of time," he said. "I'm sorry, Ms. Sannazzaro."

"I do appreciate your help with the salad," said Sannazzaro. "We don't get much volunteer help here, as you might guess. Most of our residents are alone or forgotten. Living on their savings or the sale of their houses. Many of them never had children. Those who did generally seem not to have had very devoted ones. I'm afraid I've become cynical, but the only people who visit our bed-care residents seem to be heirs who need money, hoping to get a better estimate of how long the stubbornly nondeparted are going to keep on depleting the estate."

"I'm not an heir," said Quentin.

"But you called her Grandmother."

"That's how my wife introduced her to me."

"I don't know which lie is more obnoxious, Mr. Fears, that you claim to be married to her granddaughter or that you claim you were ever introduced to Mrs. Tyler."

" 'There are stranger things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' " Quentin quoted. "Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived."

"Why do you care what I think?" asked Sannazzaro.

That was a good question. There was more to it than trying to get along with the keeper of the gate. He wanted Sannazzaro to think well of him. He delivered his answer in the first words that came to mind. "Because you seem to be an honest person who performs well under pressure and genuinely has the best interests of the residents at heart." And then he thought of a few things he didn't say: That she wasn't trying to get anything from him. That she made snap judgments but then wasn't afraid to change her mind. That she said and did what she thought was right without apology but also without unnecessary harshness.

"It's obvious you don't care what
I
think," said Quentin, "and normally I could say the same about myself, but the truth is I don't like it when good people think ill of me. Actually, I don't like it when bad people think ill of me, either, but there's not much I can do about that without becoming one of them."

Sannazzaro smiled. It was better than a face-lift. "How good are you at telling the difference?"

"No better than anyone else," said Quentin. "I tend to trust people until they prove me wrong. I get fewer ulcers than the people who trust nobody."

"Not to mention saving yourself from a colostomy," said Sannazzaro. "Different generations seem to express stress through different body parts. Our parents got stomach disorders. Our generation seems to be more rectally oriented."

"Now there's a pretty thought."

"So you really thought you were being introduced to Mrs. Tyler?"

Quentin looked at the old lady and nodded.

"And your wife said she was Mrs. Tyler's granddaughter?"

"She took me to Mrs. Tyler's house and said it was her grandmother's."

"Where is your wife, Mr. Fears?" asked Sannazzaro.

Quentin chose his words carefully. "She left me under conditions that suggest our marriage wasn't quite as honest and openhearted as I thought it was."

"Well, then, you won't be surprised when I tell you that Mrs. Tyler has only one child, her happily married daughter Rowena, and
she
has only one child, a little girl named Roz. Ten or eleven years old by now."

"You know them?" asked Quentin.

"I have Mrs. Tyler's records. And my memory of our long conversations. She wasn't like this when she first came here. It was very sad to watch her slip away into this dreamy state after only a few months."

"Did you like her?" asked Quentin.

"Oh, yes. Not demanding, not complaining." Then Sannazzaro smiled wryly at her own words. "I suppose those are the virtues of the comatose, as well. No, what I valued about Mrs. Tyler was her grace and strength. I got the impression that she had seen the worst that life has to offer and still managed to find joy somewhere, hidden in the folds of despair."

"But then the despair won."

"I don't know about that. She's still alive. So I like to imagine that wherever she's wandering, she's not so much lost as simply contemplating the daisies she found in the midst of the wasteland."

" 'A host of golden daffodils.' " He quoted impulsively, almost before the thought came to mind. As if, talking with Sannazzaro, he had just opened a doorway into his mind and whatever he free-associated came tumbling out.

"Wordsworth," said Sannazzaro. At least she recognized the source. " 'I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vale and hill, when all at once I spied a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.' What a stupid poem, don't you think? Here I thought I had the only high school English teacher who made students memorize and recite bad Romantic poetry."

"You probably did. I just read things and some of them stick in my memory, kind of randomly."

"You mean you picked up Wordsworth voluntarily?"

"Until I got married I had a lot of time on my hands. For a while I tried to work my way through the entire Penguin library."

"What stopped you?"

"There's an awful lot of really dull stuff masquerading as English literature."

"I always think of books as being like people," said Sannazzaro. "Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don't have to seek them out and spend time with them."

"The disadvantage with people," said Quentin, "is you can't put bookmarks in them and set them aside till you want them again."

Sannazzaro gave a hard, sharp bark of a laugh, then raised an eyebrow. "On the contrary," she said, "I've had people do that with me lots of times."

"Feeling a little dog-eared?"

"Aren't you?"

"At the moment," said Quentin, "I'm feeling well-read."

To his amazement, she blushed slightly and looked away. Somehow things had got too personal. He could see her put on her business face again. "Well, Mr. Fears—"

"Please call me Quentin. Like the prison in California."

"Minus the 'San'?"

"You've got my 'San,' " Quentin said. "Doesn't your name mean St. Nazareth?"

"Holy Man of Nazareth, I think. Mostly it means my mother and father. Hardworking people and they loved me but it was my brothers who were meant to go to college."

"You were supposed to marry and have babies?" asked Quentin.

"Or disappear. They welcome me home for holidays but nobody ever, ever asks me what I do or cares when I tell them anyway. My married sisters and my sisters-in-law, though, there's always plenty to ask
them
about. They're ranked according to the number of babies they've had or are about to have. They've got quite a competition going."

"Babies are good," said Quentin, perversely. He had already convinced Chief Bolt that he was politically correct; now was he trying to make Sannazzaro think he was a neanderthal? Was he simply too tired to care what he said?

No, that was a lie. He liked Sannazzaro and so he didn't want to be polite with her, he wanted to be honest and so he said what he believed.

"I know babies are good," said Sannazzaro, predictably irritated. "I didn't say they weren't."

"I didn't say you said they weren't," said Quentin. "I just thought about babies and how my wife has left me and I'm not going to be watching our babies grow up around me. I'm just feeling sorry for myself. My babbling has kept you here when you have baths to give. Sorry."

He started to get up, but to his surprise Sannazzaro waved him to sit down, and sat herself in the other guest chair, the overstuffed one at the foot of the bed. "We're not going to be able to keep to the regular bath schedule tonight anyway. As soon as I go out there, the attendants will feel I'm putting them under pressure and everything will get tense for them. The truth is they're all working overtime and they want to go home and in a few minutes I'm going to dismiss all but the one who's really supposed to be on shift tonight."

"Your night shift is only one?"

"Supposed to be four after the dinner rush is over and then two after everybody's tucked in. But I'm staying the night so we'll be all right. And I've got to admit I enjoy a couple of minutes of visiting with somebody who isn't afraid of me."

He wasn't sure that was true—she
was
an intimidating person. But not because she wanted to be, or tried to be. Rather she was so direct, so forthright, so clearly uninterested in making a good impression that it gave her the upper hand. Quentin liked this about her. It made him curious. "I've never heard of a nurse being in charge of a rest home. Usually isn't it a salesman type who can sucker people in?"

"This really is a good rest home, so our residents aren't suckers," said Sannazzaro. Before Quentin could protest his innocence, she went on. "But you're right, it used to be a salesman type. Then they caught him with his hands in the till and his fly open in some of the residents' rooms—I don't know which was worse in the owners' minds. Anyway, they needed a fully trained replacement immediately. I was already here as medical officer. So I've been acting superintendent since October of '94."

"Why don't they just make it official?" asked Quentin.

"Because I don't want the job and I keep turning it down."

"So why don't you quit running the place and go back to your nurse duties?"

"Because if I do they'll bring in another salesman type to run the place, and I'd hate going back to that nightmare."

"So you won't take the job, but you won't give it up," said Quentin.

She laughed. "It sounds just as stupid to me, but what can I do? They're paying me at the nurse level plus a bonus, which saves them money, and in the meantime I don't have some cost-cutting moron glad-handing the public and stealing from the patients. Except that I'm tired all the time and don't have a life, things are going great."