“Maybe from the worst of it?” he asked gently. Abra was standing by the table, her wet hair pulled into a couple of horsetails that made her look ten again. Her expression was grave.
“Maybe,” she agreed, “but I can’t do this anymore, Davey. Not even with day help. I thought I could, but I can’t. There’s a hospice in Frazier, just a little way down the road. The intake nurse told me about it. I think hospitals must keep a list for just this type of situation. Anyway, the place is called Helen Rivington House. I called them before I called you, and they have a vacancy as of today. I guess God pushed another of His ornaments off the mantelpiece last night.”
“Is Chetta awake? Have you discussed this—”
“She came around a couple of hours ago, but she was muddy. Had the past and present all mixed together in a kind of salad.”
While I was still fast asleep, David thought guiltily. Dreaming about my book, no doubt.
“When she clears up—I’m assuming she will—I’ll tell her, as gently as I can, that the decision isn’t hers to make. It’s time for hospice care.”
“All right.” When Lucy decided something—really decided—the best thing was to stand clear and let her work her will.
“Dad? Is Mom okay? Is Momo?”
Abra knew her mother was and her great-grandmother wasn’t. Most of what Lucy had told her husband had come to her while she was still in the shower, standing there with shampoo and tears running down her cheeks. But she had gotten good at putting on happy faces until someone told her out loud that it was time to put on a sad one. She wondered if her new friend Dan had learned about the happy-face thing as a kid. She bet he had.
“Chia, I think Abby wants to talk to you.”
Lucy sighed and said, “Put her on.”
David held out the phone to his daughter.
2
At 2 p.m. on that Sunday, Rose the Hat hung a sign reading DO NOT DISTURB ME UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY on the door of her plus-size RV. The coming hours had been carefully scheduled. She would eat no food today, and drink only water. Instead of mid-morning coffee, she had taken an emetic. When the time came to go after the girl’s mind, she would be as clear as an empty glass.
With no bodily functions to distract her, Rose would be able to find out everything she needed: the girl’s name, her exact location, how much she knew, and—this was very important—who she might have talked to. Rose would lie still on her double bed in the EarthCruiser from four in the afternoon until ten in the evening, looking up at the ceiling and meditating. When her mind was as clear as her body, she would take steam from one of the canisters in the hidden compartment—just a whiff would be enough—and once again turn the world until she was in the girl and the girl was in her. At one in the morning Eastern Time, her quarry would be dead asleep and Rose could pick through the contents of her mind at will. It might even be possible to plant a suggestion: Some men will come. They will help you. Go with them.
But as that old-school farmer-poet Bobbie Burns pointed out more than two hundred years before, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and she had barely begun to recite the beginning phrases of her relaxation mantra when an agley came hammering at her door.
“Go away!” she shouted. “Can’t you read the sign?”
“Rose, I’ve got Nut with me,” Crow called. “I think he’s got what you asked for, but he needs a go-ahead, and the timing on this thing is a bitch.”
She lay there for a moment, then blew out an angry breath and got up, snatching a Sidewinder t-shirt (KISS ME AT THE ROOF O’ THE WORLD!) and pulling it over her head. It dropped to the tops of her thighs. She opened the door. “This better be good.”
“We can come back,” Walnut said. He was a little man with a bald pate and Brillo pads of gray hair fluffing out above the tops of his ears. He held a sheet of paper in one hand.
“No, just make it quick.”
They sat at the table in the combined kitchen/living room. Rose snatched the paper from Nut’s hand and gave it a cursory glance. It was some sort of complicated chemical diagram filled with hexagons. It meant nothing to her. “What is it?”
“A powerful sedative,” Nut said. “It’s new, and it’s clean. Jimmy got this chem sheet from one of our assets in the NSA. It’ll put her out with no chance of ODing her.”
“It could be what we need, all right.” Rose knew she sounded grudging. “But couldn’t it have waited until tomorrow?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Nut said meekly.