Last Licks

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.”