“Ms. Beadsman, please rest assured that you and I are in more than complete agreement on this. That I am as confused and distraught as are you. As disoriented.” Mr. Bloemker’s cheeks yielded to the force of his beard-abuse, began to move around, so it looked like he was making faces at Lenore. “I find myself facing a situation I, believe me, never dreamt of possibly encountering, monstrous and disorienting.” He licked his lips. “As well, just allow me to say, one for which my training as facility administrator prepared me not at all, not at all.”
Lenore looked at her shoe. Mr. Bloemker’s phone buzzed and flashed again. He reached and listened. “Please,” he said into the phone. “Thank you.”
He hung up and then for some reason came around the desk, as if to take Lenore’s hand, to comfort. Lenore stared at him, and he stopped. “So have you called my father over at Stonecipheco?” she asked. “Should I call him? Clarice is just over in the city, my sister. Is she in on this news?”
Mr. Bloemker shook his head, his hand trailing. “We’ve contacted no one else at this time. Since you are Lenore’s only really regular visitor from among her family, I thought of you first.”
“What about the other patients’ families? If there’s like twenty gone, this place should be a madhouse.”
“There are very few visitors here as a rule, you would be surprised. In any event we have contacted no one else as yet.”
“And why haven’t you.”
Mr. Bloemker looked at the ceiling for a second. There was a really unattractive brown stain soaked into the soft white tile. Light from the sun was coming through the east windows and falling across the room, a good bit of it on Bloemker, making one of his eyes glow gold. He leveled it at Lenore. “The fact is that I have been instructed not to.”
“Instructed? By whom?”
“By the owners of the facility.”
Lenore looked up at him sharply. “Last I knew, the owner of the facility was Stonecipheco.”
“Correct.”
“Meaning basically my father.”
“Yes.”
“But I thought you said my father didn’t know anything about this.”
“No, I said I had not contacted anyone else as of yet, is what I said. As a matter of fact, it was I who was contacted early this morning at home and informed of the state of affairs by a…,” sifting through papers on his desk, “… a Mr. Rummage, who apparently serves Stonecipheco in some legal capacity. How he knew of the… situation is utterly beyond me.”
“Karl Rummage. He’s with the law firm my father uses for personal business. ”
“Yes.” He twisted some beard around a finger. “Well apparently it is… not wished to have the situation of cognizance to those other than the owners at this moment by the owners.”
“You want to run that by me again?”
“They don’t want anyone to know just yet.”
“Ah.”
“….”
“So then why did you call me? I mean thank you very much for doing so, obviously, but…”
Another sad smile. “Your thanks are without warrant, I’m afraid. I was instructed to do what 1 did.”
“Oh.”
“The obvious inference to draw here is that the fact that you are after all a Beadsman… and enjoy some connection to the ownership of the facility through Stonecipheco…”
“That’s just not true.”
“Oh really? In any event it’s clear that you can be relied on for a measure of discretion beyond that of the average relative-on-the-street.”
“I see.”
Bloemker took a deep breath and rubbed a gold eye with a white finger. In the air around him a whirlpool of dust motes was created. It whirled. “There is in addition the fact that the resident whose temporary unavailability is relevant to you, that is to say Lenore, enjoyed a status here — with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents — that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion on the part of some outside person or persons, which seems unlikely, it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties.”
“I didn’t understand any of that.”
“Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here.”
“Oh.”
“Surely you knew that.”
“Not really, no.”
“But you were here,” looking at a sheet on his desk, “often several times a week, sometimes for long periods. Of time.”
“We talked about other stuff. We sure never talked about any rings being led. And usually there wasn’t anybody else around, what with the heat of the room.” Lenore looked at her sneaker. “And also you know my just plain grandmother’s a… resident here, too, in area J. Lenore’s daughter-in-law.”
“Concamadine.”
“Yes. She… uh, she is here, isn’t she?”
“Oh yes,” said Bloemker. He looked at a sheet, then at Lenore. “As… far as I am aware. Perhaps you’ll excuse me for a moment.” He went to his phone. Lenore watched him dial in-house. A three-digit relay means no crossbar. Bloemker was asking someone something in an administrative undertone Lenore couldn’t hear. “Thank you,” she heard him say. “Yes.”
He smiled. “We’ll simply check to be sure.”
Lenore had had a thought. “Maybe it would be good if I had a look at Lenore’s room, took a look around, maybe see if I could notice something.”
“That’s just what I was going to suggest.”
“Is your beard OK?”
“I’m sorry? Oh, yes, nervous habit, I’m afraid, the state of affairs at the…” Mr. Bloemker pulled both hands out of his beard.
“So shall we go?”
“Certainly.”
“Or should I call my father from. here?”
“I cannot get an outside line on this phone, I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“After you.”
“Thank you.”
/e/
The Home was broken into ten sections, areas they were called, each roughly pentagonal in shape, housing who knows how many patients, the ten areas arranged in a circle, each area accessible by two and only two others, or via the center of the circle, a courtyard filled with chalky white gravel and heavy dark plants and a pool of concentric circles of colored water distributed and separated and kept unadulterated by a system of plastic sheeting and tubing, the tubing leading in toward the pool in the center from a perimeter of ten smooth, heavy wooden sculptures of jungle animals and Tafts and Stonecipher Beadsmans I, II, and III, with a translucent plastic roof high overhead that let in light for the plants but kept rain or falling dew from diluting the colors of the pool, the interior planes of each of the ten sections walled in glass and accessing into the courtyard, the yard itself off-limits to residents because the gravel was treacherous to walk in, swallowed canes and the legs of walkers, mired wheelchairs, and made people fall over — people with hips like spun glass, Lenore had once told Lenore.
Down a corridor, through a door, around the perimeter of one area, past a gauntlet of reaching wheelchaired figures, out a glass panel, through the steamy crunch of the courtyard gravel, through another panel and halfway around the perimeter of area F, Mr. Bloemker led Lenore to her great-grandmother’s room, put his key in the lock of another light, pretend-wood door. The room was round, looked with big windows into the east parking lots with a view at the comer of which glittered, spangled with light through the trees in the wind, Lenore’s little red car again. The room was unbelievably hot.