“You didn’t turn the heat down?” Lenore said.
Mr. Bloemker stayed in the doorway. “The owners had installed an automatic duct complex to this room that is as difficult to dismantle as it is resistant to malfunction. We are also of course expecting that Lenore will be back with us very soon.”
Steam hung in the air of the room, you could feel each breath on your lips, the windows sweated broadly, the movement of the sun through the trees made a dark green flutter on the white walls.
Lenore Beadsman, who was ninety-two, suffered no real physical disability save a certain lack of capacity on her left side, and the complete absence of any kind of body thermometer. She now depended for her body’s temperature on the temperature of the air around her. She had in effect become sort of cold-blooded. This had come to the attention of her family in 1986, after the death of her husband, Stonecipher Beadsman, when she began to take on a noticeable blue hue. The temperature in Lenore’s room here at the Home was 98.6 degrees. This simultaneously kept Gramma alive and comfortable and kept her visitors down to Lenore and a brief bare minimum of other patients and staff and very occasionally Lenore’s sister, Clarice.
The room contained a bed that was made, a desk and bedside table sheened with humidity, a water glass on the bedside table whose contents had almost evaporated, a bureau on which were ranged some jars of Stonecipheco baby food, some vaguely malevolent black cords snaking out from a wall, the remnants of a cable hookup to a television Gramma had caused to be removed, a chair, a closet door, a clotted shaker of salt, and on a black metal TV tray a little clay horse Lenore had gotten Gramma in Spain a long time ago. The walls were bare.
“OK,” Lenore said, looking around, “she pretty obviously took her walker.” She opened the closet door. “She couldn’t have taken very many clothes… here’s her suitcase… or taken much underwear,” looking in the bureau drawers. Lenore picked up one of the jars of Stonecipheco baby food, one with a red-ink drawing of a laughing baby on the label. Strained beef flavor. “She eats this stuff?” she asked, looking over at Mr. Bloemker, who stood with a sweat-shiny face in the doorway, massaging his chin.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“I’d bet money she doesn’t.” Lenore went to the desk. There were three light, empty drawers. One locked drawer.
“Did you open this drawer, here?”
“We were unable to locate the key.”
“Ah.” Lenore went to the TV table, took the little clay horse and popped its head off, and out fell a key and fluttered a tiny picture of Lenore, out of a locket. The picture was old and dull. The key made a sound on the metal table. Mr. Bloemker wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his sportcoat.
Lenore opened the drawer. In it were Gramma’s notebooks, yellow and crispy, old, and her copy of the Investigations, and a small piece of fuzzy white paper, which actually turned out to be a tom-off label from another jar of Stonecipheco food. Creamed peach. On the white back of the label something was doodled. There was nothing else in the drawer. Which is to say there was no green book in the drawer.
“This is just weird,” Lenore was saying. She looked at Mr. Bloemker. “She didn’t take the Investigations, which is like her prize possession because it’s autographed, or her notebooks either. Except I guess she did take a book. She kept a book in here. Have you ever maybe seen a green book, pretty heavy, bound with a sort of greenish leather, with like a little decorative lock and clasp?”
Mr. Bloemker nodded at her. There was a drop of sweat hanging from his nose. “I do think I recall seeing Lenore with such a book. I had rather assumed it was her diary, or a record of her days at Cambridge, which I knew were immensely important to her.”
Lenore shook her head. “No, that’s more or less what these are,” indicating the yellowed notebooks in the open drawer. “No, I don’t know what this thing was, but she had it and the Investigations with her all the time. Remember how when she’d go out of her room here her nightgown would be all sagging down in front? She couldn’t carry the books and use her walker, so she had this big pocket on the front of her nightgown, and she’d put them in there, and it’d sag.” Lenore felt herself beginning to get upset, remembering. “Did she, had she gone out of the room much the last few days?”
There were wet sounds as Mr. Bloemker worked at his face. “I know for a fact that as a matter of established routine Lenore was out in the area F lounge for some period every afternoon. Holding forth. When were you last here, may I ask?”
“I think a week ago today.”
Mr. Bloemker’s eyebrows went up. Drops stopped and started on his forehead.
“The thing is that my brother was getting set to go back to college,” said Lenore. “I’ve been helping him buy stuff and arrange things and work out some things with my father, when I haven’t been working. There was a lot of stuff to arrange.”
“His college must begin terribly early. It’s not yet even September.”
“No, the place he goes — which is this place called Amherst College? In Massachusetts? — it doesn’t start for a couple weeks yet, but he wanted to go visit our mother before the year started and everything. ”
“Visit your mother?”
“She’s sort of resting, in Wisconsin.”
“Ah.”
“Listen, should I call her and tell her what’s going on? She’s Lenore’s relative too. I really think we better call the police.”
Mr. Bloemker’s glasses had slipped almost all the way down his nose. He pushed them up, and they immediately slid down again. “What I can do at this point is pass along to you the information and requests relayed to me very early by Mr. Rummage.” He tugged at his cuffs. “The police are not going to be contacted at this point in time. The owners are of the opinion, for reasons which I must in all honesty confess remain at this moment hazy to me, that this is an internal nursing-care-facility matter which can be brought to some quick resolution without resort to outside aid. If of course it be so, the advantages accruing in terms of minimal embarrassment and impediment to the facility are obvious. You are requested to inform no one of any details of the situation until you have spoken to your father. You are requested to contact your father at your very earliest opportunity.”
“Dad is really hard to contact, usually.”
“Nevertheless.”
Lenore looked back at the open desk drawer. “This is making very little sense to me. And what about the relatives of the staff who are… unavailable right now? Won’t their families find their unavailability a little out of the ordinary? They’re going to be apt to want to call the police, don’t you think? I don’t blame them. I’d like to call the police, too.”
Mr. Bloemker’s glasses suddenly fell off his nose and he caught them, barely, and wiped the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “It is at this point unclear whether the families of the unavailable staff are themselves unavailable because of normal extra-Home commitments, or whether they too have become unavailable in a manner similar to that of the staff, but the in a way fortuitous though of course also quite disquieting fact remains…”
“What was all that?” Lenore said from back at Gramma’s drawer.
“The families aren’t around, either.”
“Gosh.”
“What are you doing?” Bloemker asked. Lenore was looking at the ink drawing on the back of the Stonecipheco label that lay on top of the notebooks in the desk drawer. It featured a person, apparently in a smock. In one hand was a razor, in the other a can of shaving cream. Lenore could even see the word “Noxzema” on the can. The person’s head was an explosion of squiggles of ink.