or without a half-completed jigsaw puzzle on it—like a carelessly thrown stole. All the residents seemed to like him (if there had been complaints about the House housecat, they hadn’t reached Dan’s ears), and Azzie liked them all right back. Sometimes he would jump up in some half-dead oldster’s lap . . . but lightly, never seeming to hurt. Which was remarkable, given his size. Azzie was a twelve-pounder.
Other than during his afternoon naps, Az rarely stayed in one location for long; he always had places to go, people to see, things to do. (“That cat’s a playa,” Claudette had once told Danny.) You might see him visiting the spa, licking a paw and taking a little heat. Relaxing on a stopped treadmill in the Health Suite. Sitting atop an abandoned gurney and staring into thin air at those things only cats can see. Sometimes he stalked the back lawn with his ears flattened against his skull, the very picture of feline predation, but if he caught birds and chipmunks, he took them into one of the neighboring yards or across to the town common and dismembered them there.
The rec room was open round-the-clock, but Azzie rarely visited there once the TV was off and the residents were gone. When evening gave way to night and the pulse of Rivington House slowed, Azzie became restless, patrolling the corridors like a sentry on the edge of enemy territory. Once the lights dimmed, you might not even see him unless you were looking right at him; his unremarkable mouse-colored fur blended in with the shadows.
He never went into the guest rooms unless one of the guests was dying.
Then he would either slip in (if the door was unlatched) or sit outside with his tail curled around his haunches, waowing in a low, polite voice to be admitted. When he was, he would jump up on the guest’s bed (they were always guests at Rivington House, never patients) and settle there, purring. If the person so chosen happened to be awake, he or she might stroke the cat. To Dan’s knowledge, no one had ever demanded that Azzie be evicted. They seemed to know he was there as a friend.
“Who’s the doctor on call?” Dan asked.
“You,” Claudette promptly came back.
“You know what I mean. The real doctor.”
“Emerson, but when I phoned his service, the woman told me not to be silly. Everything’s socked in from Berlin to Manchester. She said that except for the ones on the turnpikes, even the plows are waiting for daylight.”
“All right,” Dan said. “I’m on my way.”
3
After working at the hospice for awhile, Dan had come to realize there was a class system even for the dying. The guest accommodations in the main house were bigger and more expensive than those in Rivington One and Two. In the Victorian manse where Helen Rivington had once hung her hat and written her romances, the rooms were called suites and named after famous New Hampshire residents. Charlie Hayes was in Alan Shepard. To get there, Dan had to pass the snack alcove at the foot of the stairs, where there were vending machines and a few hard plastic chairs. Fred Carling was plopped down in one of these, munching peanut butter crackers and reading an old issue of Popular Mechanics. Carling was one of three orderlies on the midnight-to-eight shift. The other two rotated to days twice a month; Carling never did. A self-proclaimed night owl, he was a beefy time-server whose arms, sleeved out in a tangle of tats, suggested a biker past.
“Well lookit here,” he said. “It’s Danny-boy. Or are you in your secret identity tonight?”
Dan was still only half awake and in no mood for joshing. “What do you know about Mr. Hayes?”
“Nothing except the cat’s in there, and that usually means they’re going to go tits-up.”
“No bleeding?”
The big man shrugged. “Well yeah, he had a little noser. I put the bloody towels in a plague-bag, just like I’m s’posed to. They’re in Laundry A, if you want to check.”
Dan thought of asking how a nosebleed that took more than one towel to clean up could be characterized as little, and decided to let it go. Carling was an unfeeling dolt, and how he’d gotten a job here—even on the night shift, when most of the guests were either asleep or trying to be quiet so they wouldn’t disturb anyone else—was beyond Dan. He suspected somebody might have pulled a wire or two. It was how the