By this time Alma and the rest of the Belasco clan knew Irina was living in Seth’s apartment, if not permanently, then at least several days a week. Doris and Larry made no comment, in the hope that this pathetic immigrant from Moldova was nothing more than a passing fancy on their son’s behalf. They received Irina with icy courtesy, and as a result she stopped going to the Sunday lunches at Sea Cliff that Alma and Seth had insisted on dragging her to. Pauline on the other hand, who had been against every single one of Seth’s athletic girlfriends, told her brother, “Congratulations, she’s refreshing, and she’s got more backbone than you. She’ll straighten you out.”
She had welcomed Irina with open arms.
Seth continued pressing Alma.
“Why don’t you tell me the whole story, Grandma? I’m not cut out to be a detective or a spy.”
Alma’s trembling hands risked spilling the tea, so her grandson took the cup from her and put it on the table. Her initial anger had subsided and given way to an immense weariness, a deep-seated desire to make a clean breast of everything, to confess all her mistakes to her grandson, to tell him she felt she was growing moldy inside, dying bit by bit, which was fine because she was so tired and would die happy and in love—what more could she wish for now that she was in her eighties and had lived a full life, had loved, and had always choked back her tears?
“Call Irina. I don’t want to have to repeat myself,” she told Seth.
* * *
Irina received the text message on her cell phone while she was in Hans Voigt’s office with Catherine Hope, Lupita Farias, and the heads of health aides and nursing. They were discussing the right to elective death, a euphemism that had replaced the term suicide, which the director had prohibited. A fateful package from Thailand had been intercepted at reception, and it now lay on Voigt’s desk as evidence. It was addressed to Helen Dempsey, a third-level resident without family, aged eighty-nine, who had cancer that had spread and could not bring herself to undergo another bout of chemotherapy. According to the instructions, the contents were to be taken with alcohol, and the end would arrive peacefully in the person’s sleep.
“They must be barbiturates,” said Cathy.
“Or rat poison,” added Lupita.
The director wanted to know how on earth Helen Dempsey had ordered this without anybody’s finding out. The staff were supposed to be on the lookout, since it wouldn’t do for word to get around that people committed suicide at Lark House; it would be disastrous for its reputation. In the case of suspicious deaths such as Jacques Devine’s they were careful not to carry out too thorough an investigation; it was better not to know the details. The staff blamed the ghosts of Emily and her son: they took the most desperate clients away with them, because whenever someone died, from natural or illegal causes, the Haitian aide Jean Daniel swore he saw the young woman in her pink veils and her unfortunate son. The sight made his hair stand on end. He had asked them to hire a compatriot of his, a woman who was a hairdresser out of necessity but by vocation a voodoo priestess, so that she could dispatch them to the kingdom of the other world, but Hans -Voigt’s budget did not stretch to that kind of thing; he had to juggle enough as it was to keep the community afloat.