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  “How’s everything going here?” I asked.

  “Mr. Fistula died,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t call him that,” Mr. Watnik said, his breathing labored. “Yeah, he was an asshole, but he’s dead now.”

  “The police have been here,” Allison said to me in a low voice. “They think maybe he was murdered!”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “I think it’s kind of dumb. I mean, the people here are almost dead anyway, right?” She looked at Mr. Watnik. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” he said. “I got one foot out the door and the other on a banana peel.”

  “People here didn’t like Mr. Fictura,” I prompted.

  “He was always making a fuss,” Allison said. “Ringing his call button non-stop until someone answered. He complained about the food at every meal.”

  “Don’t forget the son,” Mr. Watnik said.

  “Yeah, he used to brag about how rich and successful his son was,” Allison said. “Some of these people here, they don’t have kids, or they don’t talk to their kids, and you could see that upset them.”

  “I got two kids, and neither of them has a pot to piss in,” Mr. Watnik said. “I used to hate hearing him talk about his son’s Beemer and his trips to Europe. I hope the son is as miserable as the father.”

  He placed a run of cards on the table. “Gin.”

  “Mr. Watnik!” Allison said. “I only had two pair.”

  She picked up the cards and shuffled them, and Rochester and I walked down the hall to the lounge. Halfway there, we met Marilyn Joiner. Today’s turtleneck was dark brown against the white of her lab coat and the gold of that glittering necklace.

  “How sweet of you to keep coming back,” she said. She leaned down to chuck Rochester under his chin. “We’ve been getting some bad publicity, and we’ve had reporters from several newspapers and TV stations here. I’m afraid that may cause some of our residents to be transferred, and some visitors to stop coming.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I can’t say,” she said. “We’re under strict orders from corporate not to talk about Mr. Fictura’s death at all. I’ve had to reprimand several of the staff this morning. And that’s while trying to keep up with all the paperwork that corporate wants.”

  She brandished a clipboard and I could see the heading on the top sheet of paper was “Form D-10: Report of Client Death.” It was a different form from the one I’d seen on the computer, the one for the state of Pennsylvania, and I wondered which would be more honest. Would Marilyn Joiner be more candid with her employer? Or would she hide things to keep her job?

  “I work at Eastern College,” I said. “I’m very familiar with paperwork. At least most of ours has gone digital. I still remember the days of putting carbon paper between sheets to make multiple copies.”

  “Actually, I need to fill these out online,” she said. “But I’m a two-fingered typist so it’s easier to fill them out by hand and then give them to my assistant to type in.”

  She continued on, and Rochester and I walked toward the lounge. He stopped in front of Mr. Fictura’s room and wanted to go inside. “Sorry, puppy, he’s gone,” I said, and I scratched his neck. He looked up at me and I thought there was sadness in his eyes.

  “But there are lots of other people who want to see you,” I said. “Come on, let’s go to the lounge and see who’s there.” We walked inside, and Rochester stopped at the first patient, an elderly woman in a heavy green sweater with a reindeer on it.

  Through the big window that looked out to the backyard, I saw brown grass and small clumps of dirty snow, a patio with a few wrought-iron tables and chairs. A couple of stunted pines did an ineffective job of blocking the chain-link fence that separated the home’s property from the back of an auto repair shop. I knew that the grass would rejuvenate in the springtime, unlike the patients at the Manor, many of whom had probably seen their last spring.

  Mrs. Vinci and Mr. MacRae were sitting by the TV set, though neither of them appeared to be watching the program, one of those pseudo-reality shows about a bunch of strangers plunked down somewhere, trying to win a pot of money by being as obnoxious to each other as they could be.

  “Hey, boy,” Mr. MacRae said, and Rochester hurried over to his outstretched hand. He had a tattered brown cardigan over a plaid shirt and he looked chilled. His cheeks were sunken and what little hair he had was white.

  While Mr. MacRae petted Rochester and talked to him, I turned to Mrs. Vinci. “How are you today?”

  “Not a good day,” she said. “With Malavath gone, they moved me into a new room with an old lady who sleeps all day.” She wore a housecoat spangled with large orange flowers and terrycloth slippers.

  Mrs. Vinci had to be at least eighty, and I wondered how old an “old lady” would be to her. I figured it was more a matter of attitude than age. “Well, that’s almost like having a private room,” I said.

  She waved an arthritic finger at me and I moved in closer. “I talked to my son yesterday,” she said in a low voice. “I told him he gotta get me out of here or I’m gonna end up like Malavath.”

  “Are you that worried?” I asked. “This seems like such a good facility.”

  “Everything gives me the creeps now,” she said. “I can’t hardly sleep at night. I keep looking around wondering who’s gonna go next.”

  Rochester moved over to Mrs. Vinci, and he licked her hand. “You’re a sweet boy,” she said to him.

  I moved over to Mr. MacRae. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “That chariot’s swinging close,” he said. “Jesus is coming for me soon, I can feel it. My kidneys done cut out and now my heart’s going.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “But don’t worry ‘bout me,” he said. “I’ll see my Essie Mae again in heaven and we gone sit at Jesus’s feet.” He smiled his gap-toothed grin.

  “I wish you all the best,” I said.

  Rochester and I continued our circuit. There were fewer patients than ever before; I hoped that some of the ones who were gone had recovered enough to return home. I felt sorry for the ones who were left, who seemed more disheartened than in the past.

  We talked Mr. Bodnar, the man who’d been a paraplegic for years. “I want to go somewhere else,” he said. “But it’s hard to move from one facility to another when you’re on Medicaid. And I don’t have anybody outside to make the phone calls for me.”

  “But you said they’ve taken good care of you here,” I said. “Why would you want to leave?”

  “Because I want to live,” he said. “I haven’t come this far to give up now.”

  My heart was heavy by the time we left. Even Rochester, who was normally such a happy dog, seemed saddened by the people we spoke to. On top of that, the holidays had been grimmer than I expected, with the deaths of people we knew and the stress of Brody’s visit. “How would you like a new toy, puppy?” I asked him. “A little retail therapy might make both of us feel better.”

  I drove out to the big pet superstore on US 1 and Rochester and I shopped the aisles for treats and toys. The Christmas-themed ones were half price, and I bought him a squeaky Santa, a blue rubber bone with stars of David on it, and a candy cane made of alternating layers of red and white rope. I threw in a couple of bags of his favorite organic treats, too.

  By the time we got home, Lili was ready for a nap, and I joined her in bed, with Rochester sprawled on the floor beside me. I had trouble falling asleep, though. I kept thinking of the patients at Crossing Manor, and how trustingly they had lived there before this spate of incidents, hoping that human kindness, Medicare and the fees paid by their families would keep them safe.

  I remembered Marilyn Joiner’s comment about paperwork she had to fill out for “corporate.” I wondered if there might be a database somewhere that I could check to see how many deaths there had been at Crossing Manor, and how many of them had been a result of heart attack. I finally gave up o
n the idea of a nap and went downstairs to my laptop. Rochester followed on my heels, then promptly fell asleep at my feet.

  While I waited for the computer to warm up, I thought of my father. Soon after I began my sentence in California, he had a stroke. It was a mild one, and he recovered fairly quickly, but in hindsight it was the beginning of his decline. Once again I felt that that old guilt about not being able to be there for him.

  I had seen, from the patients I’d spoken with, that many of them were in the same situation as my dad had been back then. Either no family at all, or family unwilling or unable to spend much time looking after them. When I was a kid, I had several friends whose families had taken in elderly relatives. My own grandfather had stayed with us for a month or two at a time, often when recovering from some illness.

  In the twenty-first century, though, that kind of family caretaking was rare among those I knew. Many people my age were struggling to balance their own lives and careers with raising kids and looking after aged parents. The sandwich generation, we were called. One of the women at Crossing Manor had told me she’d outlived her husband, her siblings, and her two children, and all she had left were grandchildren—who had their own kids to raise. Enter the corporations to do what we couldn’t do for our families anymore.

  Maybe I was more interested in social justice than I had believed.

  I found the website for Associated Manors, the owner of Crossing Manor. They owned nursing home/rehab facilities in twelve states, almost all of them with the word “Manor” in their name. Their website was full of corporate blather and faux caring, with lots of information on how to choose a nursing home, how to pay for care, and so on.

  There was something so smarmy about it that I hated everything, even the colors they’d used. I knew that people considering the care of a loved one needed information, and would want the reassurance that the person would be in good hands. But I couldn’t get over the feeling that someone with a psychology background had designed the site to maximize that reassurance, and that put my teeth on edge.

  I had done some basic web development work in California, and then, when I returned to Stewart’s Crossing, I had tried to set up a freelance business doing web design and technical writing – mostly to avoid having to fill out job applications where I had to list my felony conviction.

  So I understood the basics of interface design, of the way you could lead a visitor through your site, directing his or her attention, using colors and fonts to reinforce the impression you wanted to create. Associated Manors had taken that to the Nth degree.

  There were no statistics on safety at the website, just a lot of bragging. I knew that those forms Marilyn Joiner had filled out had to be stored somewhere, and the only way to see them, and discern any patterns at Crossing Manor, would be to hack into the site.

  When I had hacked in the past, I practiced something called moral disengagement—using neutralizing definitions to justify behavior that I knew was wrong. I came up with excuses like protecting Mary’s and my credit rating in order to avoid feeling bad about what I’d done.

  I felt the same way that afternoon. It was righteous for me to hack into the Associated Manors database. And if I was careful enough, no one had to know what I’d done. That meant that I couldn’t do any serious hacking from my own home, anything that could be connected with my personal IP address.

  The library was one of the best places to launch a hack because of all the computers and the mostly clueless users there, but it was already closed for the weekend. Many of the other places in town where I could get free Wi-Fi were closed by then, too. And Lili would be awake soon, and wonder where I was.

  Rochester nuzzled my lap. I petted his head but kept thinking. Finally he jumped up and placed his front paws on my knees and tried to lick my face.

  That’s when I realized what I was doing. I couldn’t break the promises I had made to Rick and Lili. The smart thing to do was to tell Rick what I had learned, so that he could prepare a subpoena for the death records at Crossing Manor. It was a longer, less-rewarding process—but it was the way I had to act if I wanted to be the person my friends expected me to be.

  My head was jumbled with so many conflicting emotions. I felt guilty that I had not done more to help Felix Logato stay on the straight and narrow. I worried about the nice elderly people I had met at Crossing Manor. If someone was targeting them, didn’t I have a moral imperative to help?

  But society had determined that my actions in hacking into databases were illegal, and I had already been punished once for acting with impunity. How could I balance those two positions? Was I some kind of Lone Ranger of hacking, the only one who could figure out what was going on at Crossing Manor? Certainly not.

  But there had to be something I could do that was legal. What was it? I was staring into space when Rochester left my side and padded to the kitchen. He returned a moment later with a piece of paper in his mouth.

  He dropped it on the floor and I picked it up. It was a form Lili had to use to authorize a new adjunct professor to teach a particular course, and I realized she had found someone new to teach the pottery course in place of the previous instructor, who had disappeared without inputting grades.

  “What are you trying to tell me, boy?” I asked. “Does this adjunct have something to do with the case? Something about grading? Pottery?”

  He shook his big golden head and settled on the floor beside me. I read through the form, trying to make a connection to people at Crossing Manor, and got nowhere. Did potters use potassium? I Googled it. I discovered that potassium chromate was occasionally used as an acid-green colorant in raku pottery. But potassium chromate was very different from potassium citrate or potassium aspartate, and I doubted some rogue potter was killing people at Crossing Manor.

  “I don’t get it, boy,” I said. “What is it about this form?”

  He looked up at me with his big brown eyes, and I noticed again, as I often did, how his pupils covered most of the eye, with little white around them. “Of course!” I said. “It’s a form. A form like the ones from Crossing Manor. Maybe if I search for the form I can find some online.”

  Rochester rolled over on his side and went back to sleep, and I searched online for copies of the D-10 form Marilyn Joiner had been filling out. I found one on a woman’s website, which detailed the death of her late mother at Valley Manor, one of the corporation’s facilities in Nevada. She had been able to get hold of her mother’s complete medical records and uploaded them.

  It was more than a single form; there were pages of information required, including the complete medical history of the patient, copies of recent charts, and interviews with staff personnel.

  The woman had circled several places on the PDF, with notes like “lies” and “who do they think they’re kidding?” scrawled in places.

  I didn’t know the specifics of her mother’s case, but it was clear that there were some real discrepancies on the form. I saved it as an example for Rick, and then wrote up an email for him. I suggested that he subpoena the D-10s from the past year at Crossing Manor to look for patterns. “I could probably get this stuff for you, but you know, that would be wrong,” I wrote. Then I hit send and shut the computer down, before I could make myself into a liar.

  26 – Open House

  When I woke the next morning I was alone – no Lili beside me, no dog on the floor. I looked at the clock and realized I’d slept past Rochester’s normal walking time. When I went downstairs Lili was on the sofa with the Sunday paper, Rochester snoozing by her side.

  “He’s already been fed and walked,” Lili said.

  “You’re an angel.” I leaned down to kiss her.

  “Muffins on top of the fridge for breakfast.” She handed me the front section of the paper and went back to reading.

  As I ate my muffin, I read about unrest in Russia’s outlying regions, terrorist threats in the mountains of Afghanistan, monsoons in Bangladesh and a viral epidemic in West Africa
. At least Stewart’s Crossing was a safe corner of the world.

  When I checked my email, I found a message from Rick. He’d already put together the subpoena I suggested, for the death records from Crossing Manor, but was waiting until Monday to put it before a judge. He said that he’d add the D-10 forms to the request and thanked me for the information.

  Around noon, I took Rochester out for a walk. It was cold but the sun was out, and I began to sweat beneath my heavy coat. Annie Abogato, a Realtor friend of Gail’s who I often saw at the Chocolate Ear café, was running an open house down the street. She was a thirty-something mom who occasionally dog-sat Rochester for me, a cheerful blonde with shoulder-length hair and a taste for pink clothing. Her scarf and gloves were both pink, as were her rubber snow boots.

  She was showing a young couple the yard as we walked by, and she waved to me. “Steve, do you have a minute?”

  I walked up to them.

  “These are the Canninos,” she said. They were both in their late twenties; he was a hefty guy with a wrestler’s build, and she was a very pretty woman who could have been a model for plus-sized clothes. “This is my friend Steve. He can tell you what a great community this is for dogs.”

  “What kind of dog do you have?” I asked.

  “A Great Pyrenees,” Mrs. Cannino said. “It’s hard to find a community that doesn’t have rules against a hundred-pound dog.”

  “River Bend is the neighborhood for you. Lots of big dogs, and a couple of empty lots where dogs can run. Everybody’s friendly and the security staff does a great job.”

  Rochester put his paws up on Mr. Cannino’s thighs and though I tried to tug my dog down, the guy didn’t mind. We talked for a couple of minutes and then Rochester and I continued on our walk, darting around several cars parked on the street.

  One disadvantage to the neighborhood that I hadn’t mentioned was that River Bend was shoehorned into an area around a nature preserve, so the developer had to maximize the utility of the land—which meant narrow streets. If several homes had guests parked in front, Sarajevo Court could become a real obstacle course.