“Good,” I said, moving toward the door. “Then I can tell Sheriff Grace exactly what I just told your brother, and he can look at those scratches.”
She slammed the phone down and glared at me, saying, “Maybe you had better go.”
Tom moved toward me slightly with a kind of growl in his throat, and I bolted outside. Heart pounding, I leaned against the brick wall. I hadn’t meant to get so worked up, but when I thought of how scared I was in the night, and how much it was going to cost to fix up the damage he was doing, I just lost it. When Tom stomped out the door, I don’t mind saying I hightailed it down the street, not wanting another confrontation. It was stupid to anger a guy who was that big and that short-tempered.
I strode down the sidewalk, heading who knew where, and dashed down a side street when I saw the sheriff’s car cruising toward the bakery. I didn’t know how to defend what I’d said, and didn’t want to deal with Virgil Grace at that moment. I walked along for a short way, leaving behind the clustered stores and buildings of downtown Autumn Vale, such as it was. I was fuming mad, at first, and didn’t much notice my surroundings, but the fog of fury began to dissipate.
I stopped and looked around; I was in a residential area now. The sign in front of me read Golden Acres. It was a lovely old manor, but didn’t look big enough to be a rest home until I started to walk up the angled drive. As I got past some of the century trees that shaded the grounds, I could see that a small, modern addition had been built behind the house. The drive sloped up to a prominence, where several park benches were set in the shade of a grove of maples along a smooth pathway. Some of Gogi Grace’s ‘oldsters’ were basking in the autumn sunshine, their faces turned upward like sunflowers, as the sound of warbling birds filled the air.
I nodded to them as I passed, and felt their eyes on me as I approached the door. I entered into a wide hallway, where a set of stairs ascended ahead of me and to the left. There was a reception desk, and the phone was ringing nonstop as the young woman who appeared to be the receptionist blocked the hallway.
“Mrs. Levitz, you can’t go out right now,” she said to an elderly woman. “It’s almost lunch. Don’t you want to stay and have lunch?”
The woman, wheeling along using a walker for support, had an angry look on her wrinkled face. She tried to dodge the girl, bellowing, “I’m going to see my mother. She’s waiting for me. School is over, and she always walks me home.”
“No, Mrs. Levitz, school’s not over yet,” the girl said, glancing to the left and right, probably looking for help.
“Yes, it is. You’re lying. If there’s anything I can’t abide, it’s a liar!” The woman plucked a stuffed animal out of the basket of her walker and chucked it. When the young girl dodged aside to pick it up out of the path of another resident, Mrs. Levitz rolled her walker around her and headed to the door.
I got in her way. “Ma’am, can you help me?”
The receptionist dashed behind her desk and hit a buzzer and another button. I could hear the lock on the front door snick into place.
“Who are you?” the old woman asked, glaring at me. “Are you one of the teachers?”
Just then, a big fellow in scrubs dashed down the hallway, and gently took Mrs. Levitz by the arm. “Dotty, your son is coming to see you this afternoon. Don’t you want to stay in? He’s going to come visit, and then he’ll take you for a long walk.” He gave the receptionist an apologetic shrug, and muttered, “She got away from Angie and we didn’t notice. Sorry, Jen.”
He got Mrs. Levitz turned around, confusion now wrinkling her brow as she plaintively asked, “I have a son?”
The receptionist swiftly answered the phone, transferred the caller, unlocked the door, and then smiled at me. “Thank you.”
“It was nothing,” I said. “Does she really think she was going to meet her mother? She must be about ninety!”
“Ninety-six and still hell on walker wheels,” the girl said and laughed. “Heavens . . . her son is over seventy! The dottiest ones are the most able to get about.”
She had a lilting Irish accent, and I smiled. “And Dotty is dotty, it seems.”
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I was wondering if Gogi Grace is here?”
The receptionist hit a buzzer, and said, “Mrs. Grace, someone to see you. Your name?” She looked up at me.
“Merry Wynter,” I said and she repeated it.
My new friend, today dressed in a soft-purple suit with businesslike gray pumps and a purple paisley scarf draped around her neck, emerged from a door down the hall and beckoned to me. “Come along, Merry. I’ll give you the tour.”