Mystery

“Should have too. Anyhow, you want Nancy’s address, I got it. I see Nancy once a week or so—she drops in to talk to me. Boney can try to get me thrown out of my house here, it might be harder than he thinks.”

“He said he’d get you evicted? Don’t you own this place?”

“Tossed out on my old black ass, was the way he said it. Every month but June, July, and August, I pay rent to a man who comes collecting for the Redwing Holding Company. Jerry Hasek is his name, and he’s just the man you’d send if you wanted to scare the rent out of seventy-seven-year-old ladies. He wouldn’t be good for much else. In September, he takes four months’ money all at once. Summers, he goes up north with all the Redwings, and a couple other no-goods Ralph Redwing keeps on the payroll.”

“I know him,” Sarah said. “Well, I know who he is. Acne scars, always looks worried about something?”

“That’s him, that’s my rent collector.”

“You know him?” Tom asked.

“Sure—he drives Ralph, when Ralph uses a car. And he’s a kind of bodyguard.”

“So,” Hattie said. “You gonna take on Boney? It don’t look that way to me.”

“No,” Tom said. “I just saw him at the hospital this morning—I asked him about Nancy, and he told me she was suspended, but he wouldn’t say why. I don’t think he wants you to tell me why, either.”

Hattie scowled down into her mug of tea, and all the lines in her face deepened alarmingly. An almost ferocious sadness had claimed her, and Tom saw that it had always been there, underlying everything she had said. “This tea’s gone cold,” she said. Hattie pushed herself up and went to the sink, where she rinsed out the mug. “I guess that man died. That policeman who got shot. Reminds me of the old days, with Barbara Deane.”

“Mendenhall,” Tom said. “Yes, he died this morning. I saw them taking his body out of the hospital.”

Hattie leaned back against her sink. “You think Nancy Vetiver was a bad nurse?”

“I think she was the only one as good as you,” Tom said.

“That girl was a nurse, same as me,” Hattie said. “She could have been a doctor but nobody would let her, so she did the next best thing. Didn’t have the money to be a doctor, anyhow, so she went to the nursing school at St. Mary Nieves, same as me, and when they saw how good she was, they hired her for Shady Mount.” She looked at each of them with the fierce sadness Tom had seen earlier. “You can’t tell someone like that not to do her job—you can’t say, do bad now, we don’t want you to be good today.” Hattie lowered her head and wrapped her arms around her chest. “This island, this is some place. This can be some damn place, Mill Walk.” She turned from them, and seemed to look at her wall of framed photographs.

“Nancy came here a couple times, the last few weeks. Seemed like it was getting worse. See, if she got suspended, that meant she couldn’t keep her place anymore, because the hospital owned her apartment. They told her. Told her.”

Hattie turned around again. “You know what? Boney’s scared of something. Tells you Nancy got suspended, and doesn’t have sense enough to make up a good lie about why.” She crossed her arms over her chest again, and looked amazingly like the stuffed hawk in the birdcage. “Makes me mad—damn mad. Because I halfway believed the man.”

She looked up at Tom. “Everything about this thing makes me mad. Two kinds of law—two kinds of medicine. Boney coming out here, all sweet and nice, then telling me that if I talk to you he might have to—to ‘respond to my disloyalty,’ that’s how he said it—hard as that would be for him, he says, when he already got Nancy out of the hospital. See, he went too far then too!” She seemed to blaze as she came across the floor to Tom: it was as if the hawk had come to life and swooped toward him. She put her thin old hand on his shoulder, and he felt her talons clamp down. “He doesn’t know who you are, Tom. He thinks he knows, he thinks he knows all about you. Thinks you’ll be just like all the rest—except one. You know who I mean, don’t you?”

“The Shadow.” He looked at Sarah, who sipped her tea and looked calmly back across the top of the cup. “You said something about a woman named Barbara Deane? She was a nurse?”

“For a time. Barbara Deane was your midwife.” She dug her fingers into his skin. “You want to see Nancy Vetiver? If you do, I’ll take you to her.”

“I want to come too,” Sarah said.

“You don’t know where she is.” Hattie turned sharply to face her.

“I bet I do. Dr. Milton or whoever it was wanted to scare her into doing what they wanted, right? So who owns the hospital? And what else do they own?”

Hattie nodded. “Dressed like that? Looking like you look? You can’t.”

“Can’t what?” Tom asked.

“Go with you to the Elysian Courts.”

Tom looked up at Hattie, and Hattie raised her eyebrows, amused and impressed.

“Give me something else to wear, then. I don’t care what it is, I just need something to cover me up.”