"We should go inside and talk." He collected his package from the bench and headed for the door. The dead-eyed girl followed, mute.
For the first time Esther clearly saw the item he hefted from the tiny wooden bench. It was a large carved stone urn with a heavy cracked lid. On the sides were intricate raised images of intertwined snakes that had been worn smooth with age.
As the strange man passed into her home, Esther Clear-Seer caught the pungent odor of rotten eggs.
Chapter Two
His name was Remo, and he was tired of repeating it. "Remo!" he shouted for the third time to the umpteenth set of nerve-deafened eardrums.
"Zemo?" asked the elderly woman. She checked a clipboard on her desk. The clipboard was upside down. "Oh, dear," she clucked.
"I'm looking for Dr. Coffin," Remo explained as she made a vain attempt to search for the name Zemo Welby on the upside-down visitor's list.
The woman seemed lost somewhere on the page before her. When she finally looked up, it was as if she saw Remo for the first time. "Oh, hello," she said with a quavering smile. "Name?"
"Lawrence Welk," sighed Remo, walking past her and up the hall.
That was at the fourth-floor duty station. Things had gone pretty much the same at the third-floor duty station, the second-floor duty station, the information booth in the lobby and the guard's shack at the main gate of Sunnyville Retirement Community in Tampa,
Florida.
No one Remo encountered was a day under eighty.
He wasn't surprised. Upstairs had told him that this would probably be the case. There were only six
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members of the Sunnyville staff drawing a regular salary and, Remo was told, the half-dozen individuals he was after were fairly young and not likely to be doing anything more strenuous than overseeing the real Sunnyville workers.
It was no secret that Sunnyville thought the problem with most retirement homes was that the residents felt used up; they were of no account, their days as contributing members of society behind them.
It was with this mind-set that the upper echelon at Sunnyville reinvented the entire nursing-home concept from the ground up. The result was a pioneering retirement community boasting a totally new method of dealing with the elderly and infirm. They worked them like slaves. Some of the aged were put to work in the kitchen preparing the daily gruel. Those who were still lucid were put to work in administration, answering phones, filing or typing. The balance toiled as groundskeepers, cleaning women, carpenters and janitors.
In recent months, Sunnyville had made national news when an eighty-five-year-old retiree, tasked to cut down orange trees in the Sunnyville grove, was stricken simultaneously with a stroke, partial paralysis and a hemorrhaging occipital lobe. A cheery Sunnyville spokesperson, trying to happy-spin the "unfortunate, unavoidable incident," theorized the man's brain was probably already uncontrollably bleeding when he dropped the chain saw on his leg.
Once the story died down, Sunnyville lawyers opted for an out-of-court settlement, with a strict gag order. And so the matter faded from public view. But not in all quarters.
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Remo had been told about a rumor that Sunnyville had recently refined its lucrative business. Word going around was that whoever was too tired or old to work any longer, would suddenly succumb to death due to "natural causes." Just like that. And the vacant bed and job would go to the person next on Sunnyville's phone-book-sized waiting list.
Remo didn't bother to ask how the word got out. A private memo, some loose talk in a bar—it didn't matter to him. An assignment was an assignment.
Remo strolled down the antiseptic-smelling hallway, his thick-wristed hands swinging casually at his sides. Today his T-shirt was crisply white, his chinos black.
The building almost looked abandoned. The doors to the private rooms were closed. Remo could hear the faint rasp of asthmatic breathing coming from several of them.
The hallway itself was the opposite of his image of a nursing home. There were no laundry baskets, chairs, stools or medicine carts parked haphazardly about. Nor were there any elderly people bent over walkers or slowly pushing their blue-veined hands over the rubber tires of wheelchairs. It was as if the residents were under lockdown.
And there was something else. Something that lingered beneath the thick, combined odors of a thousand different prescription drugs.
It was fear.
There was no mistaking it. The smell was almost palpable.
It clung to the corridor walls, and no matter how many gallons of antiseptic cleansers were applied daily
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by overworked retirees, the odor couldn't be washed away.
Remo sensed the fear, though he didn't feel it himself, and he thought it odd that he could look back dispassionately on so strong an emotion.
When he was young, he had felt fear; but that was a million lifetimes ago, and at this point in his life he was able to remember the emotion as if it had been nothing more than a case of mild teenage acne.
The Sunnyville residents, however, didn't seem to have that option. The daily fear they lived with clung to them like garlic.
Perhaps, Remo thought, fear could be distilled like musk or sold in concentrated form like a can of frozen orange juice. Instant fear. Just add water. He decided that the market for prepackaged fear probably wasn't profitable enough. Why would people buy something they found in their everyday lives?
This in mind, he rounded a corner and nearly tripped over an elderly woman on her hands and knees on the floor.
A low, baleful moan escaped between the woman's parched and cracking lips. Her swollen, arthritic hands were extended before her. The flaking, bloated fingers of her right hand seemed to be clutching something as she painfully inched forward.
Remo gently took hold of the woman's birdlike shoulders and lifted her to her feet.
She wobbled unsteadily and leaned one gnarled hand against the wall for support, the other dangling by her side in a loose fist.
"Are you all right?" asked Remo softly.
"I'm not finished," the woman said. She panted as
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she forced the words out. "Please, I can finish." She struggled to make a fist. "There," she said triumphantly. "See? I can still do it. It's not so hard. Really."
She tried to get back to her knees, but Remo's seemingly gentle touch on her upper arms held her firmly in place.
"Let me take you to your room," he said softly.
Sudden concern showed in her eyes. ' 'Are you with Dr. Coffin?"
"No," Remo admitted.
"Oh, dear," the woman said. What little color she had drained from her face, and her exhausted frame tipped against the wall. "You mustn't tell them I spoke with you," she said desperately. "Please. They can't find out." Her watery eyes darted up and down the empty hallway in fear.
"Relax," said Remo quietly. With great delicacy he pulled the woman upright. "Everything's going to be just fine. Is there a nurse around here somewhere?"
"No!" she shrieked. She pulled away from Remo's grip with surprising agility. "Not the nurses! Please," she begged, her voice now muted. "Please, just leave. Leave me alone."
"Can I help you with something?" a voice behind Remo asked icily.
Remo turned to see a severe-looking woman standing near the empty nurses' station down the hallway. The knuckles of her plump hands rested on her boxy hips, and her eyes shot daggers at him. Her plain hair was pulled back in a bun so tight her eyes bugged out. She sashayed over to Remo, the coarse fabric of her heavy tweed skirt swinging like Quasimodo's bell.
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"Oh, no," groaned the old woman. "I'm fine, Dr. Coffin. Honestly. See? I'm working." Using the wall as a brace, she slid slowly to the floor and unfolded a moistened ball of rag clutched in her hand. Remo watched in amazement as the woman—she looked ninety if she was a day—began scrubbing the floor wildly.