Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,47

arm around the hunched shoulders while prying the desperate hand from Bell’s sleeve.

“Stop it, Millie,” the aide commanded. Her voice was firm. Coddling would not get the job done. “Let’s go. Come on. Back to your room.” She gave Bell a bleak smile. She looked almost as old as the woman she was subduing, but her eyes were inhabited; they carried rich notes of awareness, of sentience. Duty mingled with sympathy in those eyes, Bell thought. Fatigue, too.

By now the maintenance man had come into the hall as well. “Everything under control, Amber?” he said.

“Got it, Travis,” the aide replied. “Thanks, though.”

“Okay. Just give a holler if you need me.”

Bell continued her journey. She passed more residents up and down the hall, walking or standing, women and men who seemed as faded and diaphanous as pastel scarves tucked away in a forgotten drawer, their hair wispy, their skin dry, their spines crumbling under the steady assault of gravity and time. Most of them ignored her; some glared. A few smiled. One woman laughed, too loud and too long, and then stopped abruptly. A man cried—softly, with no emotion, and the only way you could know he was crying was the wetness on his papery cheeks. These people seemed like ghosts who returned again and again to a place that was supposed to be familiar, but somehow wasn’t. Ghosts who haunted themselves.

Bell felt a gradual recognition of memory as more than simply an assemblage of known facts and mastered capacities and recalled experiences, and more, even, than personal identity, but as the very tent pole of life, every life, the solid vertical rod at the center of things. When it collapsed, the fabric gathered in folds around your feet; if the wind blew, everything was swept away. And the wind was always blowing.

There was sadness here, to be sure, but it was a benign, thoughtful sadness, a sadness that was nobody’s fault. So different from a courthouse, she told herself, where the tragedies were vicious and deliberate, the wretched fates almost always self-imposed.

If Layman was hiding something diabolical, she had hidden it well.

In the lobby, the receptionist was dealing with a skinny, middle-aged woman who leaned aggressively over the desk, jabbing a finger in her face. As Bell passed them, she heard the skinny woman unleashing phrases like “know my rights” and “hearing from my attorney” in a dark, threatening voice.

The receptionist, however, was holding her own. To every point the visitor tried to make, she shook her head slowly, continuously, like a white-haired, pink-smocked metronome. “I’m sorry, Miss Ferris,” the receptionist said, in what was clearly a practiced spiel, “but you know the requirement. You agreed to it. Unless we have a staff member available to accompany you and your father to the lounge, or unless you bring along a third party, you have to stay here in the lobby. We won’t allow you to be alone with him. And one of our employees just went home sick, so we’re shorthanded. I’m sorry, but we can’t accommodate you today.”

“I don’t have to put up with this crap,” the woman muttered. “You know what, lady? I got nobody to bring with me. I got friggin’ nobody, okay? I used to have my brother Nelson, but he—” She broke off the sentence. She shook her head. “Stupid friggin’ rules.”

An elderly man waited at the other end of the reception desk. He was slender, and his clothes had a slouchy-casual look about them, giving him the relaxed aura of a retired golf pro: checkerboard driving cap; loose-fitting, yellow V-neck sweater; cuffed khaki trousers. Hands resting lightly in the pockets of those trousers, he seemed oblivious to the quarrel taking place just inches from him. Must be a resident here, Bell thought, basing her assumption on his vacant eyes and abstract, mindless smile, his lack of normal affect.

Before she had quite reached the front entrance, Bell took a quick look back. The old man winked at her.

“Hello there, sweet thing,” he said.

Chapter Seven

Digital recorder.

Check.

Notebook.

Check.

Pen.

Check.

ID.

Check.

Brochure explaining the oral history project.

Check.

Had she forgotten anything? Carla switched off the engine. She’d had no trouble finding a place to park along the run-down, curbless street on the west side of Acker’s Gap.

She wanted to wait a few more minutes before she got started. She sank back against the car seat. She closed her eyes and recalled her meeting with Sally McArdle yesterday morning. Especially the last part, right after McArdle had said, “Okay, fine, you’re hired. Don’t make