Bitter Sweet (25 page)

She slipped the note into a
plastic bag and set it aside. Then she speed-walked through the shop to the
front door to be sure it was securely locked, although clearly the note had
been stuffed underneath. She locked the back door and shook her arms and hands
to work out the tremble.

“Okay, nothing has changed from
an hour ago. I just need to get to work.”

But her hands shook as she tried
to pipe flounces on the doll’s skirt and she gave it up after a few minutes.
Typing on the computer was marginally easier and at least she could go back and
erase her mistakes. She finished the supply order and looked at the clock.
Nearly six, but that was still too early to disturb Beau.

She stretched her limbs and
discovered that her hands were steadier now, so she began work on the cake.
When her cell phone rang she literally came off the floor and icing squirted
across the work table.

“Damn!” She dropped the pastry
bag and wiped her hands on her jacket as she walked toward the desk.

The readout showed her home
number and a dozen scary thoughts went through her head. But it was only Kelly,
telling her that she’d gotten an invitation to drive up to Eagle Nest Lake with
some friends and not to worry if she was late getting home. They would probably
stay and picnic by the water.

The normalcy of Kelly’s voice
reminded Sam that things really were fine and she shouldn’t be so jumpy. She
wiped up the string of pink icing and stretched her fingers again, then
finished the cake without further incident. Deciding that Beau would surely be
up by now, she punched in his cell number while she carried the dirty utensils
to the sink.

“Hey,
darlin
’,”
he said. “Did you and Kelly have a nice dinner last night?”

She’d practically forgotten about
that. “It was great. Look, where are you right now?”

“Just leaving home for the
office. But I don’t have to stay all day, only long enough to get some
assignments handed out. Why?”

“Let’s just say that someone left
me a little present and I better show it to you.”

“Sam—”

“It’ll make more sense when you
see it. I’ve got a cake to deliver and then I’ll come by your office.”

Showing up at her customer’s
house before eight a.m. might be risky—they could be asleep or leaving for
church or something. Sam called the number the lady had provided and verified
that someone would be home to accept the cake. Then she rechecked the shop’s
doors, turned out lights and put the cake in the van.

Twenty-five minutes later the
cake was safely in the hands of the customer, with one little girl excitedly
dancing around in anticipation of her birthday party later in the day. Sam
turned the van around and drove the back roads to Beau’s office.

“So, what’s this little gift you
said you got?” he asked after they’d retreated to the privacy of his office.

She pulled the plastic bag from
her pack and handed it over. “I touched it before I thought about there
possibly being prints on it.”

He plucked it out by one small
corner and shook it open. His jaw tightened when he read the words. “Where was
this?”

“Jammed under the front door of
my shop.”

He looked up at her.

“I’m sure it’s for me, not my
employees. The part about ‘meddling.’ Somebody knows we’ve been asking
questions.”

The note still dangled from his
fingers. “Who, I wonder. Or maybe I should say, which one?”

“I have no idea. None of the
suspects have ever confronted me, especially with that kind of language.”

He dropped the note to the
desktop and sat down, tapping his index finger against the laminated surface.
Sam pulled one of the spare chairs closer and flopped onto it.

“On another subject—or maybe it’s
a related one, Kelly told me some interesting things your mother had said to
her, that Iris was afraid of someone. Did you know about that?”

He went dead still. “Tell me.”

She repeated what Kelly had told
her, as word-for-word as she could remember, including the parts about how
garbled Iris’s speech had become and why Kelly wasn’t even sure she’d heard
what she thought she’d heard.

“She would have come directly to
you,
hon
, if she’d believed there was a real threat
to your mother. You know that.”

He nodded slowly. “What I think
we better do now is to revisit that place and ask some tougher questions.”

Traffic was light and the few drivers
who saw a department cruiser come up behind them quickly changed lanes and cleared
the path. They arrived at Life Therapy within fifteen minutes and Beau took a
parking slot near the door.

Robert Woods came out of his
office after they pressed the issue with the receptionist.

“Another visit,” he said,
ushering them into his office. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Sam noticed the vaguest
hesitation before he actually said the word pleasure.

“I’d like for you to pull my
mother’s file,” Beau said.

Woods remained in his chair.
“Might I ask why?”

“I don’t want to turn this into
an official investigation, but I will if I need to,” Beau said. “I have some
questions and I’d like to see what the records indicate.”

Sam could practically see the
word
lawsuit
zip through Woods’s mind.

The man finally rose from his
chair and walked to a set of file cabinets. He pulled a slim folder and sat
back down.

“Your mother died of a massive
stroke, her second, I believe,” the director said after a quick glance into the
file.

“That may be. But my questions
relate to something else. I’d like to see that file, please. Unless you plan to
demand a warrant. I can get one.”

“What, specifically, do you need
to know?”

“I’d like to refer to the nurses’
notes, to see whether anyone noted that my mother was being harassed by a man
who came to visit her. Whether anyone bothered to pay attention to the fact
that she was afraid for her life.”

“What are you saying, Sheriff?
That we have killers roaming the halls?” Woods’s hand shook. “That’s
preposterous!”

Beau held out his hand.

Woods thumbed through the sheets
of paper that were clipped to the manila folder at the top. “I see nothing
here.”

“I’d like to look.” Or there
will
be a court order, his look said.

Woods slapped the cover closed
and pushed the file across the desk. Beau opened it and scanned the pages.
Beside him, it appeared to Sam as if the sheets referred to medications and
treatments.

“You have to understand that many
of these older women have paranoia issues,” Woods said. “It’s not at all
unusual for them to have groundless fears, and while we would never ignore a
genuine concern . . . you understand that we don’t make notes of every little
thing they say to us either.”

“So you often simply ignore their
fears?” Sam asked.

“Not at all. I never said that.”
He splayed his manicured hands on the desk top. “We want their time here to be
as comfortable and quieting as possible. It’s important to their cure, to the
body’s natural healing ability.”

Beau flipped to the final page of
the folder, read down it quickly, and closed it. “I think I understand,” he
said as he laid it down. He stood up and the others followed suit.

“If there is anything else, at
all . . .” Woods said.

“I’ll be in touch,” said Beau.

He didn’t say another word until
they were out in the parking lot and he’d unlocked the doors to the cruiser.

“Looks like Kelly was right about
Mama being sedated. I recognize the names of some of those medications.”

“Do you think they over—”

“I’m not saying anything, really.
And I’m not looking to start a lawsuit or place blame. Mama’s gone and we can’t
be sure exactly what happened.”

“Do you think her fears could be
tied in with these recent cases, Beau? Sadie Gray or Lila Coffey?”

He cranked the ignition. “I have
no idea. But I know someone I can ask.”

He backed out of the parking
space and turned east out of the lot. Sam tried to get her mind around the new
information, to figure out his train of thought.

“One of Mama’s nurses was a gal
named Sally
Roundtree
. I saw her name in the file
just now, and I happen to know that she no longer works at Life Therapy.”

Sam sent him a questioning look.

“She’s a nurse at my doctor’s
office now, just started there a couple months ago, and she remembered me from
when Mama was out here.”

“And she might remember more of
what Iris said back then.”

“And she will most certainly be
more willing to talk about it than that little condescending corporate flunky.”

Away from the nursing home Beau
pulled off the road and grabbed a telephone directory from under the car seat.
A couple of minutes later they had Sally
Roundtree’s
address.

He pulled up in front of a tiny
bungalow with neatly landscaped yard and bright flowerbeds. A woman in her
forties, with soft
Tewa
features and long black hair
done in a braid down her back, was standing in the midst of them. A stack of
wilted weeds lay at the edge of the lawn.

“Miss
Roundtree
?
Beau Cardwell. Remember me?” He crossed in front of the cruiser and stood
outside her gate.

“Well, Sheriff, sure I do. You
were in the office a few weeks ago. Is there a problem?”

“I’m just fine, thanks. This is
actually about the time when my mother was a patient at Life Therapy, about six
months ago,” he said. “Could we ask you a couple of questions?” He quickly
introduced Sam.

“Absolutely! But let’s get
inside. This sun’s getting to me.” She motioned them through the gate as she
stepped away from the flowerbed, leaving the weeds where they were. “I swear
I’m losing my natural ability to deal with the heat. My mother could work in
the fields all day long, winter or summer. Not me. I’ve been in air conditioned
offices too long.”

Sam and Beau followed her up a
flagstone walkway to the front door and she led them inside.

“Let’s have us a lemonade,” Sally
said, leading the way to a kitchen wisely placed on the north side of the
house.

While she rinsed her hands at the
kitchen sink Sam admired her oven, which looked fairly new, and the collection
of cookbooks on a shelf above it.

“You like to bake bread?” Sam
asked, noticing a common theme among the books.

“When I get the chance I try to.
Work takes up a lot of time, and I still can’t duplicate my mother’s Indian
bread. She sells it up at the Pueblo, you know. Everybody wants Mary
Roundtree’s
bread. I use her recipe, I try all these others
. . . I just don’t have that knack, I guess.”

She poured three glasses of
lemonade and carried them to the table.

“So, Sheriff, hearing about
Indian bread isn’t why you looked me up.”

“No, actually. And call me Beau.”
He complimented her on the lemonade before he continued. “You were one of my
mother’s favorite nurses at Life Therapy.”

“And Iris was one my favorite
patients. Well, everyone’s really. Such a spunky lady, a real fighter. She was
making real progress with her speech therapy and getting better movement too.
If only that second stroke hadn’t happened. I was so sorry to lose her.”

Beau nodded. “Thank you. We all were.”

Sam sensed that he wanted her to
introduce the other subject. “Sally, Iris told my daughter some things, and
we’ve become a little concerned recently.”

“Your daughter was Kelly, wasn’t
she? She was always there, always so good to Iris.”

“She’s a great young woman.
Anyway, she just recently told me that Iris was convinced that some men were
spying on her at the care home and that Iris felt she might be in danger. Did
she ever say anything like that to you?”

Sally’s face went bland, her
Indian inscrutability showing.

“You certainly won’t be in any
trouble for telling us,” Sam hastened to add. “Neither will the home. We just
have reason to believe that two men who might have visited Iris are now
involved in something . . .”

“Other women, in other care
homes, have died, Sally,” Beau said. “A lawyer named Joe Smith visited both of
them, and we found his card among my mother’s things too. And there was a
preacher named Ridley
Redfearn
. Mama would have never
given a preacher the time of day, but she kept a brochure from this one.”

“Oh, dear.” Sally’s expression
had crumpled. “I know what you’re saying. I remember the brochure you’re
talking about. Iris told me she didn’t want that man around. The preacher, I
mean. Well, you have to understand that her speech was impaired, but she
communicated with me pretty well. She had me toss the brochure in the trash
right after he left it on her nightstand. But later that afternoon, I was in
her room and she indicated that she wanted it back.”

Sam leaned forward.

“ ‘Put it away. In case.’ That’s
what she said. You know, as much as she
could
say it.”

“In case of what?” Sam asked.

Sally shrugged. “I don’t know.
I’m sure she didn’t mean in case she died. She would not have had that man do
her funeral service.”

Beau spoke up: “No way. She wanted
what we did, the small memorial with friends and family.”

“Did you ever see Redfearn around
the home again?”

“Oh, lots of times. He visited
several of the patients.”

“Do you remember specific ones?”
Beau asked, pulling a pen from his pocket.

“Not really. He was just, you
know,
around
.”

“What about the business card
from the lawyer, Joe Smith. Do you remember him?”

Sally shook her head. “Not
really. I think I do remember there being a business card. It might have been
his. That was another thing Iris asked me to put away, in case.”