“I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner,” I said. “Tom and Katie say hello and Molly made you this.” I handed over the card.
Katie had slipped it into a large brown envelope. Angie pulled out the folded sheet of construction paper and smiled. “She made this all by herself?”
I nodded. “That’s a self-portrait inside so you won’t feel lonesome.”
Angie looked at Molly’s drawing. “It looks like her,” she said. “Do you think Katie and Matt would let me give her art lessons for her birthday?”
“Maybe you could start with some art supplies,” I suggested.
I set a china cup and saucer down on the tray table next to the professor’s bed. It held a small green and white Haworthia plant. We sold the tiny arrangements at Second Chance, and they seemed more like Angie’s style than an arranged bouquet of flowers.
“Sarah, that’s beautiful,” Angie said, turning the saucer in a slow circle on the table.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said. “Oh, and I almost forgot.” I leaned over, careful to avoid Angie’s injured arm and gave her a sideways hug. “That’s from Molly, too.”
“Better than any medicine,” she declared. Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid and I could see the edge of a bandage peeking out of the neck of her pajamas.
“How does your shoulder feel?” I asked.
“Pretty good, actually,” Angie said. She gestured at my splinted left hand. “How’s therapy going?”
“Not as fast as I’d like,” I said. “But it’s been suggested that I’m a little impatient.” I looked around the small room. “Would you like to go for a walk?”
Angie nodded. “Please. Or I really might start tearing up the sheets.”
We headed down the hallway together and Angie explained the surgery that had repaired her broken clavicle. A nurse in lavender teddy bear scrubs passed us, smiling at Angie.
She caught the woman’s arm. “Could I go outside to the garden?” she asked.
“I’ll stay with her,” I offered.
“All right,” the nurse said. “But don’t overdo it.”
“I won’t,” Angie said. “Thank you.”
The garden was a small outside terrace at the end of the hall, with benches and raised planters. Angie turned her face up to the afternoon sun and sighed happily. “It feels so good to be outside.”
I steered her over to a bench, mindful of the nurse’s admonition not to overdo.
“I’m so glad you came,” Angie said, pulling the wrinkled blue robe a little tighter around her. “You’re my first visitor since the surgery.”
Jason hadn’t been to see his aunt, I realized, even though family had been permitted to visit Angie from the beginning.
“Tell me what I’ve been missing,” she urged.
I told her about Elvis having dispatched the vole that liked to eat Tom’s flower bulbs and how I’d used peanut butter to get the burdocks out of his fur. I didn’t say anything about Jason’s interactions with Tom and Katie. There was nothing the professor could do, and I didn’t want her to worry.
“I hope I can come home in a couple of days,” Angie said, shifting on the bench. I noticed her wince and guessed that the shoulder was a bit more painful than she was letting on. “Jason is between jobs at the moment so he’s offered to stay and help me for a while.”
My heart sank. I hoped my face didn’t give my feelings away. “Are you going to have the carpet taken off the stairs?” I asked.
Angie nodded. “Jason is going to do that for me. I don’t have a lot of faith in that installer. He was supposed to have fixed that loose edge but I think he just made things worse. Not only was that section still loose but Jason said there was a small nail that hadn’t been hammered in all the way.”
Katie had said that the carpeting on the stairs had looked fine to her. Could she have been mistaken or . . .
“Jason thinks I should sue,” Angie was saying. “But I have to take some of the blame.”
I frowned. “What makes you say that?”
The professor gave me a wry smile. “I was so sleepy that night I could barely keep my eyes open. Jason and I were having tea and I almost dozed off there at the table. I was on my way up to bed when I caught my foot on that loose piece of carpet. Maybe if I hadn’t let myself get so overtired, I might not have lost my balance.”
“It’s good that Jason was there,” I said. Even though the sun was warm on my head and shoulders, I gave an involuntary shiver.
Angie nodded, her hand going to her injured shoulder. “I know Jason can be”—she shrugged—“well, a bit of a jerk sometimes. He’s just like my brother James. But I don’t want to think what could have happened if he hadn’t been around to call 911.” She ducked her head and studied her hands for a moment. “I feel a bit guilty.”
“What about?”
Angie looked up at me then. “I had been planning on amending my will and leaving less of my estate to Jason because he’d never really seemed that interested in staying in touch. But then he stepped up after the accident and he offered to stay for a while to help out. So I decided to leave things the way they were.” She shrugged. “I guess you can’t always tell what people are capable of.”
I had a sinking feeling I knew exactly what Jason Bates was capable of.
When I got home, I half expected to find Elvis sitting on the veranda railing, but there was no sign of the cat. Liz had offered to bring Rose and Elvis home, and I realized he was probably in Rose’s apartment.
She was feeding me again and I hated to show up empty handed so I went to the front of the house to cut the last of the narcissus, arranging the stems in a mason jar of water and tying a length of wide green paper ribbon in a bow around the neck. I was about to head for Rose’s apartment when I heard shouting from outside.
I went out into the hallway. Rose was standing in her doorway, a yellow-flowered apron tied at her waist. Elvis was at her feet. “What’s going on?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I opened the front door.
We heard a shout. “Help! Somebody help!”
“That’s Tom,” Rose said.
I bolted across the grass, through the gap in the hedge, into the Tom’s backyard. He was crouched on the lawn, leaning over Matilda. The little corgi seemed to be having a seizure.
My chest tightened. “What happened?” I said, bending down next to the old man.
He looked up at me, his face ashen. “I don’t know. I was just throwing the ball for her. She was bringing it back to me when she suddenly stopped. She took another step and then she just fell over and started shaking.”
I put a hand on his back. “I’m going to get the car and we’ll take her to the vet.”
Rose was behind me. “What happened?” she whispered.
I gave my head a little shake. “I don’t know.”
Rose dipped her head in the direction of my SUV. “Go,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”
I ran back to the house, grabbed my purse and keys and hurried back out to the SUV. I pulled into Tom’s driveway and grabbed the blanket I kept on the backseat. “Here,” I said to Rose. “Wrap her in this.”
Rose swaddled Matilda in the blanket and I helped Tom get to his feet. The corgi’s eyes were open and she wasn’t seizing anymore but she seemed lethargic and disoriented.
Rose was still holding the little dog. Tom put one hand on the blanket and they moved toward the car.
“Matilda may be little but she has a big heart,” Rose told the old man.
Elvis had followed us over to Tom’s yard. He made his way to the knobby red ball Matilda had been chasing and craned his neck to sniff at it. Then he made a face and turned to look at me.
“I’m sorry. I have to go,” I said.
Elvis gave the ball a nudge in my direction, meowed loudly and looked at me again. There was something about that ball he wanted me to see. I hesitated and then pulled a nylon shopping bag from my purse, picked up the ball carefully between my thumb and index finger and dropped it in the bag. That seemed to satisfy the cat.