“That would be foolish,” I said. “If you turned it down, you’d keep asking yourself what you might have thrown away. Hell, some of the world’s greatest medical advances must come out of that place.” I didn’t want to talk about Minnesota, despite my generous words. “Is Estelle still here? How’s her mother?”
Francis sighed. “She’s sleeping down in room one ten. Estelle, that is. She wouldn’t let me give her a sedative, but she finally just pooped out.” He grimaced and pulled his hands out of his pockets. “She was walking around here like a zombie. She worries so much about her mother that she can’t eat or sleep, and she’s worried about that missing youngster. Any word, by the way?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“She was talking about the case this afternoon, but we got sidetracked. There were some real problems stabilizing Carmina’s condition earlier this evening. It was touch-and-go. We’ve got a real unstable heart activity that’s causing considerable distress.” He shook his head. “That, and her kidney function is less than it should be. That’s worrisome.” He looked at me. “Lump all those things on top of a busted hip and you’ve got a real mess.”
“She was frail even ten years ago,” I said. The last time I had seen Carmina Reyes was at Carlos Guzman’s bautizo the previous spring. Eighty-seven years old and shrunken like a raisin, Carmina had held the hand of her other grandson, Francis junior, while his brother’s infant head was doused with holy water. I had thought then the tiny woman wasn’t a whole lot taller than little Francis.
Francis nodded. “If she doesn’t give up, I think she might make it. It’s going to be touch-and-go.”
“Does she know about Minnesota?”
Francis looked down the hall toward the ICU ward. “No. Not yet. I think part of her problem is that she knows perfectly well that she’s never going to be able to go home. Not unless there’s some kind of miracle that we’re not equipped to provide. She wants to be around her family, but not in the same house. To her, Tres Santos is a perfect compromise-in another country, but just thirty miles away.” He chuckled. “She’s never understood the pace of things in the United States.”
“Maybe it’ll all work out,” I said lamely, knowing full well that old age wasn’t something that “worked out,” except in the final sense.
“Estelle mentioned that you were thinking of selling your house.”
I saw no reason to hedge, since the good doctor’s X-ray eyes would see through me anyway. But I didn’t want to end up sounding like a spoiled child, either. “I wasn’t going to sell it,” I said. “I was planning to give it to you and Estelle. There is this other place I’ve had my eye on for a while, and the swap made sense. But Estelle told me about Minnesota, and Camille came up with an alternative, so, as I said before, it’ll all work out, one way or another.”
“Thank you for the thought,” Francis said softly. “If we were staying here, I’d be ready to draw up the papers tomorrow.” He glanced at his watch. “Hell no. Today.”
The door opened behind him, and Estelle Reyes-Guzman appeared, her long black hair tousled and her eyes squinting against the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hallway.
“Wow,” Francis said. “Twenty whole minutes.”
“Just right,” she said. “I zonked right out.” She looked about twelve years old. She let the door close behind her and leaned against the metal door frame. “Any changes?” Francis shook his head.
“You look like twenty hours sleep would be about right,” I said.
She smiled and stood up straight. “And you, of course, are home sleeping soundly yourself.”
“I was, but I got bored. I drove by Tiffany Cole’s place just a few minutes ago. It looks like both she and Andy Browers are down off the mesa for a little bit.” Estelle nodded, and I couldn’t tell if it was a nod indicating that she knew about the exhausted couple or if she just wanted me to continue before she fell back asleep herself.
“I also drove by Browers’s address just a few houses up the street. There’s an enormous RV parked beside the house. It’s even plugged in with an extension cord through what looks like a bathroom window.”
“Bruce Elders,” Estelle said. She covered up an enormous yawn with both hands and then blinked back tears. “Excuse me. I saw that thing, and I ran a check on it earlier this afternoon.”
“Ah,” I said, feeling as if I was about a lap behind. “And who is Bruce Elders?”
Francis held up a hand, and we both stopped and looked at him. “I need to do a few things. But I’ll be within buzzer shot if Carmina needs anything. And there’s a nurse with her all the time. You ought to go home for a while, before you fall on your face.” He looked at me. “You, too.”
“And I don’t even feel tired,” I said after his white-coated figure had disappeared down the hall.
“He gets that way,” Estelle said. “You want to go somewhere for coffee?”
“Sure. And you need to bring me up to speed. Who is Bruce Elders?”
“I have no idea. Let me get my bag.” She ducked back into the room and emerged with her brown purse. “There’s that little staff lounge just past the nurses’ station. They’ve always got something brewing there.”
I had been thinking more along the lines of an early-morning breakfast burrito, but I nodded in dumb agreement.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to Browers yet,” Estelle continued. “Maybe he’s just storing it for someone. Or planning to buy it. Any number of things. It’s up on jacks, so it’s been there for a while.”
“I saw those,” I said. “I just got curious, is all. I would guess a unit like that one is fairly expensive, although that’s a used one.”
“More interesting to me, though,” Estelle said as she pushed open the white door marked STAFF ONLY, “is what Francis said about Mrs. Cole.”
I followed her into the room. The place looked like an advertisement for white plastic garden furniture. The countertop was white. Even the cabinet doors were white. In a blast of independence, the flooring contractor had cut loose and installed a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.
“Now this is a cozy nook,” I muttered. The coffee urn was full, its red light on. I poured a cup and offered it to Estelle, even though I knew damn well she wouldn’t take it.
“No thanks,” she said, and we sat at one of the three small white garden tables.
“What did Francis say about Mrs. Cole?” I asked.
Estelle raised one eyebrow and said, “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I think her faint up on the mesa was fake.”
I had started to sip the coffee and stopped with the brim of the cup a half inch from my lips. “Fake? A fake faint?”
Estelle nodded. I placed my cup on the table carefully, lest I slosh a droplet of the brown stuff on the white surface. She remained silent, watching me. I tried to rerun in my mind the scene of Tiffany Cole’s backward topple. I remembered the whites of her eyes and the thud of her skull on the warty-rooted little oak sapling.
“It didn’t look fake to me,” I said. “Her eyes rolled up, and she even smacked her head against a tree trunk.” I frowned and added, “Don’t do that.” Estelle’s beautiful eyes looked as awful as anyone else’s when they were rolled back.
“You close your eyes a little and look up, and that’s all there is to it. Anyway, I happened to be looking directly at her when she fainted, sir. When her head hit the root, she grimaced. Not much, but a little. She caught herself.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“If she had truly fainted, she wouldn’t have felt her head hit the tree. She wouldn’t have grimaced.”
“Thin, Estelle. Thin.”
“That’s why I talked to Francis. It’s called syncope.”
“I know what no blood to the brain is called, sweetheart. I’m an expert in that field.”
“Yes,” Estelle said, and she started to move my coffee cup across the table. “And Francis said that fainting, or syncope, is caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain.”