“Folks seem to take it more supernaturally,” Rafe explained, chuckling.
“You mean people think that once Portia the Psychic Cat puts her paws on them, they’ll die?” Sunny shook her head. “Seems to me I read something about a cat doing the same thing in a hospital, and there turned out to be a simple physical reason. Really sick people are usually bundled up, making them nice and warm. That’s pretty attractive for a cat.”
Rafe nodded. “I’ve heard the same thing. But even people who pooh-pooh the idea of a cat choosing people to die get skittish if Portia takes a shine to them.”
“That’s silly.” Sunny smiled down at the cat. “You wouldn’t go around marking people for death, would you, Portia?”
The calico cat raised guileless eyes to her, purring loudly as Sunny’s fingers went back to work. Rafe reached down and joined in. It was obvious he knew all the spots where Portia wanted to be petted.
Sunny glanced over at Rafe. “Well, you don’t seem to be scared off.”
“I found Portia and her brother Patrick abandoned as kittens outside in the parking lot,” he explained. “Used to take care of them through the night shift, bottle-feeding them, keeping them warm, and petting them when they got lonesome or scared.” He gave Sunny an embarrassed smile. “I guess you could say they think I’m their mother.”
The phone at his post rang. “Sorry,” he said, hotfooting over to answer it.
“I still think you’re getting a bum rap, Portia.” Sunny gently kneaded muscles while Portia purred. She knew how those things happened.
I wouldn’t mind some magical abilities, though, Sunny silently told the cat. Help get some idiots to steer clear of me if they thought that taking up my time might make them keel over.
*
Shadow marched along the hallway at a determined lope. He’d checked all the windows in the room with the picture box, trying to find a loose screen. The one by the couch had seemed like a possibility, but even though he worked very hard, he hadn’t been able to get it to move.
Stupid screen, he thought, investigating the eating room. The windows here were small and hard to reach, and besides, they were rarely open. Shadow needed the combination of an open window and a loose screen. Whenever he came to live in new places, he always made sure he had a way to leave if he had to. Shadow couldn’t imagine leaving Sunny, but he still managed to find an exit. He’d learned to jump up and bang the handle on the screen door until it finally opened enough that he could squeeze out. That was fine—he’d used it to get out of the house that day he’d stalked that stupid bird. Bad enough the bird got away, but then Shadow had found himself stuck outdoors.
Now he had a new hunt—to find a way in. Most two-leggity types he’d lived with hadn’t paid much attention to screens. They let corners get loose or left spaces where a careful cat could lever up the frame on the screen . . . In one place, if he’d hit the right place when he jumped, the whole screen fell right out of the window. Of course, the human he’d stayed with hadn’t liked that. But it seemed as though Sunny and the Old One who lived here took care of things too well. Wherever windows were left open, the screens were sturdily in place.
He moved on to the kitchen, jumping onto the table. The window there was barely open at the bottom, just about the width of his paw. Shadow crouched down, poking his paw out. The screen was solid, and he couldn’t catch hold of the frame. With a hiss of annoyance, he dropped down to the floor and then leaped up onto the counter and the place where Sunny washed dishes. He had to stretch to reach the window there, and he didn’t have any luck anyway.
Even more maddening, as he fruitlessly poked around, a bird came fluttering by.
Shadow looked over to the door. Maybe I’ll go outside and give that flapper a surprise, he thought. But then he realized that not only was the screen door closed, but the glass one was closed, too. He couldn’t find a way in or out . . . at least not on this floor.
He started for the stairway. Stupid house.
*
Sunny finally managed to disentangle herself from Portia the cat and continued down the corridor, passing several closed doors and a connecting hallway until she came to a broad open space with a desklike island in the middle, where several white-clad figures were working. This must be the nurses’ station.
“Hello,” Sunny said to the nearest nurse. “I’m looking for Mr. Barnstable in Room 114—”
The woman immediately rose and pointed down the leftmost of the three corridors that radiated from in front of her desk. “That’s down in the rehab wing. He’s with Mr. Scatterwell.” She gave Sunny a smile as she said it.
Hope that means this Scatterwell is a nice guy, not the joke of the floor, Sunny’s annoying internal voice piped up. Sunny thanked the nurse and set off down the hallway, checking room numbers—although she could just as easily have followed the sound of her dad’s laughter. He’s still here?
She entered a space larger than the living room in her house, with an Impressionist-style landscape on the wall between two wardrobes. A pair of wheelchairs sat in front of a closet door, along with a pair of walkers—the kind with wheels on front, the frames all folded up. And, of course, there was the pair of hospital beds, with fancy coverlets that matched the drapes on the windows and the curtains hanging from tracks in the ceiling, everything neatly arranged to camouflage the institutional nature of the room.
Sunny’s dad sat on a large, comfortable armchair under the painting, talking with the occupants of the beds. The man in the bed by the window was a stranger to Sunny, but he spoke to Mike as if they were old friends. Ollie lay on the other bed, still in pajamas, looking a lot less comfortable.
“Sunny!” Mike rose from his chair, turning to the stranger. “Gardner, this is my daughter, Sunny. Sunny, Gardner Scatterwell.”
The man fumbled for a device like a TV remote, and the bed moved him to a more upright position. He wore a track suit and had a pear-shaped, jowly face with just a fringe of white hair over the ears. His eyes were so pale blue they seemed almost colorless, and his nose was a sizable beak knocked a little off center. The creases around his mouth extended down toward his chin. Between the fixed gaze of those odd eyes and the slight bobbing to his head, he gave Sunny the impression of a life-sized marionette—with a less-than-experienced operator at the strings.
But Gardner Scatterwell gave her a wide smile and clasped her hand in both of his. “So you’re this old reprobate’s daughter? I knew your dad when we were in high school, back in the New Stone Age.”
“How do you do, Mr. Scatterwell?” Sunny said politely. She had a moment’s struggle extricating her hand from his double clutch. “Excuse me, I have to deliver something to Mr. Barnstable.”
Ollie wasn’t looking his best—not surprising when turning in his sleep or even sitting up to eat could trigger a stab of pain if he wasn’t careful. His skin looked a half-size too large on him, he had bags under his eyes, and he’d apparently collected a new crop of wrinkles. Sunny thought she’d seen her boss in a bad way those times he’d come in seriously hungover, but that Ollie had looked positively chipper compared to the way he looked now.
And the situation hadn’t improved his notoriously uncertain temper. “What is it?” he snapped. “Can’t a guy get any rest around here?”
Sunny held out her thick envelope. “Mr. Orton rushed this over.”
Ollie pushed the package away. “You think I’m going to worry about that, the way I feel?”
“The man said it was urgent.”
“Urgent for him maybe.” Ollie grabbed the envelope and glared at her over the big, dark, pouchy bags beneath his eyes. “He may lose a few bucks if the deal drags on, but it’s not costing me money. This can wait.”
Ollie contemptuously tossed the overstuffed envelope into his lap—then let out a stifled howl of pain as it landed on his bad leg. Sunny quickly collected the papers an
d deposited them on the hospital table at the foot of his bed.
“Oliver, you need something to take your mind off things.” Gardner looked at the gold watch on his wrist. “There’s some music over in the other wing right now.”
“I don’t feel—” Ollie began.
But Gardner just kept smiling. “Think you’ll feel better just lying here?” He hit a button on his souped-up remote, and a second later, a voice came out of a speaker. “Yes, Mr. Scatterwell?”
“Can we get an aide in here?” he asked. “My roomie and I want to get into our wheelchairs.”
While they waited, Gardner turned to Mike. “Go on, tell Sunny about our band.”
Mike laughed again. “We were the Cosmic Blade. I played bass, and Gardner here had a wall of drums. Remember how we used to start ‘Gimme Some Lovin’?” He began fingering chords on an air guitar. “Ba-da-da-da-dooomph, ba-da-da-da-dooomph . . .” Gardner immediately started wailing away on an imaginary drum set. Sunny couldn’t help noticing that he was seriously out of time with Mike—and that he quickly tired.
“Spencer Davis,” Gardner wheezed.
“A long time ago,” Mike said.
A young woman in a blue uniform came in, and began the process of transferring the patients from bed to wheelchair. Gardner Scatterwell was slow and awkward. “Damn stroke has really fouled me up.” His tone fell somewhere between explaining and complaining as he struggled into the chair.
Ollie was even worse. Pain not only made him clumsy, but also made him afraid to shift his weight at all. But at last both were in their chairs. Gardner looked up at Mike. “Would you mind wheeling Oliver?”
He grinned at Sunny. “At my age, and in my condition, I’ve got to grab any chance I can get to be with a lovely woman.”
Shaking her head but smiling, Sunny took the handgrips on the wheelchair. “Where to?” she asked.
He directed them around the nurses’ station and down one of the other hallways. Although it had the same floor and paint job, this corridor seemed a little narrower—older.
This must be the wing I saw coming up the walk, Sunny thought. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Mike looking around with interest as he followed along with Ollie’s wheelchair. Ollie sat in a dejected huddle, ignoring it all.
“Just keep going, right to the end, and then you make a left,” Gardner said.
Sunny followed his directions past a series of semiprivate rooms, finally coming into a combination sunroom and cafeteria, where a small collection of older folks—mainly women—clustered in wheelchairs and walkers around a younger man playing guitar. They were all singing “Pennies from Heaven.” Sunny, Mike, Gardner, and Ollie all waited in the doorway until they finished and rewarded themselves with a little applause.
“Got room for a couple of late kids, Luke?” Gardner called as the clapping died away.
“Always,” the guitarist replied with a smile. He was a guy about Sunny’s age, with a big mass of shaggy, curly brown hair that spilled down into a big, shaggy beard. A proud nose poked out of all that hair, and a pair of warm brown eyes beamed at them.
Like melted chocolate, Sunny couldn’t help thinking.
The man shifted his shoulder under the colorful strap on his acoustic guitar as he beckoned them into the circle around him. “Luke Daconto,” he identified himself. “Musical therapist. Tunes and therapy, at your service. So, Gardner, you brought me a couple of new recruits?”
“Yeah, it’s a little too quiet for us down in the rehab wing,” the older man replied, introducing Ollie, Mike, and Sunny.
“Well, let’s see if we can come up with a cheerful song.” Luke’s fingers seemed to dance along the guitar’s fretboard as if they had a mind of their own.
Ollie suddenly perked up. “That’s ‘Smoke on the Water.’”
“Guilty,” Luke admitted. “You can’t always be playing ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ How about this?”
He launched into a spirited version of “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Some of the older audience members didn’t know the words, but Gardner Scatterwell joined in. So did Mike, and then Ollie. Finally Sunny picked up the chorus. She noticed one woman who wasn’t singing, but still tapped out the rhythm on the armrest of her wheelchair. Luke played a selection of tunes from several generations, from hits to standards to children’s songs. It was kind of silly, but Sunny found herself chiming in with as much gusto as the older members of the audience. The grand finale was “On Top of Spaghetti,” where Luke did a sort of call and response routine. It was obviously a favorite of the regulars in the group, drawing hearty applause.
“I’m afraid that’s it for today,” the guitarist eventually said. “Thanks to all of you for coming. I’ll be back here in a couple of days. And especially thanks to Oliver, Mike, and Sunny. I hope I’ll see you again.”
“Count on it,” Mike said heartily, and then looked embarrassed. After all, he was only a guest.
Gardner Scatterwell laughed. “Well, I need someone to wheel me in here. You volunteering, Mike?”
As they rolled back to Room 114, Sunny was glad to see that Ollie looked a little more animated. “He seems like a nice guy.”
“Hell of a guitarist,” Gardner said. “Did you listen to those little snatches of song he plays between the sing-alongs? Folk, jazz, rock, classical . . . this kid would have been a big help on the Cosmic Blade, right, Mike? Why’d the band ever break up anyway?”
He continued with funny anecdotes about the high school band’s musical career until they reached the room—and a mean-looking heavyset man leaped up from the visitor’s chair to loom over Ollie.
“Where the hell have you been, Barnstable?” the man demanded in a gravelly voice that was all too familiar. This could only be Mr. Orton. “What are you trying to pull?”
3
The one certainty that Sunny had found in her work relationship with Oliver Barnstable was his uncertain temper—or rather, the certainty that sooner or later he would erupt over something. An unworthy part of her was just glad that this time around, she wasn’t the one he was unloading on, but the unpleasant Mr. Orton.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Ollie the Barnacle demanded. “Dancing Gangnam Style?” His normal red color came flooding back to his face as he pointed at his injured leg. “I busted this, and they doped me up to keep me out of it while they screwed with my leg—screwed in it, actually. So I haven’t paid much attention to our deal, Orton. I’ll get to it when I get to it.”
“Then you should have read this more carefully.” Orton jerked a thumb at the overstuffed envelope still sitting on Ollie’s hospital table. “If you had, you’d know that the option for that parcel of land you want has a time limit on it. Go over the time limit, and you’ll have to renegotiate the whole agreement. And I promise you, the longer you jerk me around on this deal, the more you’re going to end up paying.”
With that, Orton stomped out of the room, leaving Ollie to chew his lips in silence for a moment. Then he turned to Sunny. “Have you got the number for my lawyer?”
Luckily, Sunny had that one memorized. She recited it to Ollie, who punched it into his bedside phone. The conversation was brief and definitely unpleasant, with Ollie demanding his counsel get up to Bridgewater Hall as soon as possible. He hung up still angry. “We’ll have to go over this damned contract,” Ollie said as if it were all Sunny’s fault. “I’ll want you here in the morning to pick it up.”
Before he could complain any more, a woman in a white lab coat entered the room. From the way she walked, Sunny suspected this was a woman who didn’t put up with much. She didn’t look more than ten years older than Sunny, though a few gray strands were beginning to appear in the brown hair she wore pulled back. Her skin was pale, her cheekbones high, and her lips were full—or would be if she relaxed them from that tightly pursed expression—and her eyes were a stony gray, set on either side
of a proud beak of a nose.
“Evening, Doctor,” Gardner Scatterwell said, his voice sounding like a fawning grade school student.
The doctor paid no attention to him, nor to Sunny and her dad. “I am Dr. Gavrik,” she announced to Ollie in a slightly accented voice. “I have read your charts from the hospital and will perform an examination now.”
With a few brusque movements, she got Ollie back into bed and then pulled the curtains around them. “Your blood pressure is much higher than it has been at your other readings,” they heard her comment from behind the gaily patterned fabric.
“He just had a rather tense business discussion,” Mike called in explanation.
For just a second, Dr. Gavrik’s face appeared from behind the curtain, her expression withering. “Did I ask you for a diagnosis?” she all but hissed at him.
Mike glanced at Sunny and his own face reddened.
I suspect the blood pressure reading just went up on this side of the room, too, Sunny thought, but she said nothing and neither did her father.
The doctor vanished behind the curtains again for several minutes. When she reappeared, briskly moving the privacy curtain back to the wall with a rattle of hooks against the ceiling track, she seemed the model of serene professionalism.
“Except for the blood pressure, all the other exam results are normal. I’ll have the nurse check your pressure twice more this evening. I expect it will be acceptable. Then, tomorrow, you will be evaluated by our therapy department, and they will prepare a treatment plan for you. Good evening, Mr. Barnstable.”
With a nod, Dr. Gavrik headed for the door, leaving the room in silence.
Despite a wince of pain from the exertion, Ollie pulled himself up to make sure that the doctor was well and truly gone. Even then, he kept his voice low as he turned to Mike. “What kind of joint have you gotten me into?” he demanded. “Doctors like that—they bury their mistakes.”
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