Fiji was surprised to see Lenore Whitefield from the hotel. She seldom saw Lenore, and had only spoken to her once or twice. Lenore was bursting with things to say, there was no mistaking the look, but she stopped in her tracks when she saw Manfred.
“Hi,” Fiji said. “Was there something I could help you with, Lenore?”
“Uh, yeah,” Lenore said hesitantly. “Your name is Fiji, right?”
“Right. And this is Manfred Bernardo from across the street.”
“Sure. Hi, Mr. Bernardo. I hope Tommy and Suzie and Mamie are well? I miss having them at the hotel.”
“They like Safe Harbor, but they do miss Midnight,” Manfred said, trying to be tactful. “Please, call me Manfred.”
Still, Lenore hesitated.
“Something’s on your mind, Lenore?” Fiji tried to be gentle, but she was conscious of the clock ticking.
Lenore took a big step into the store, committing herself to a conversation. “When the hotel opened, the project manager kept telling me that market research had proven that the hotel was in a good spot for its purpose. A place for old people to stay while they waited for an opening in assisted living. And if we had the divided use, with part of it being for regular hotel customers and part of it being for more extended stays, the hotel would be able to make a profit.” She paused, and to give her some kind of confirmation that they were on track, Fiji said, “Right.”
Lenore said, “Me and Harvey, we needed jobs, bad, and we were really glad to be picked out of the other couples who applied for the job. That Eva Culhane, she ran the interviews.”
It took Fiji a few seconds to remember that Eva Culhane had been the project manager who’d been on site while the hotel was being renovated. She had not, by Joe’s account, been warm or fuzzy or anything but brisk and efficient.
“I noticed that the couples who got asked to come back for a second round, they were like us,” Lenore was saying. “They didn’t have any other family with them. Well, even that made sense. Not too many people with little kids would want to settle in Midnight.”
Manfred and Fiji nodded in unison, like bobblehead dolls, Fiji thought.
“Naturally, I talked to the other women while we were waiting,”
Lenore said. “As you do.”
“Sure,” Fiji said. Manfred looked blank.
“And it seemed to me that we were the saddest of the lot.” Fiji opened her mouth to say something to refute that, automatically, and then she realized she had better wait and see what the bottom line on this conversation was going to be.
“What do you mean?” Manfred asked, practically.
“I mean that we didn’t have any kids at all, not even grown kids who would come to visit, or anything. Or living parents. Or brothers or sisters. Well, Harvey’s got a brother in Alaska, but they haven’t talked in five years, I guess.”
“No close connections,” Manfred summarized briskly. Lenore nodded. “This didn’t make any difference to my husband, but it worried me a little. Some of the other couples, the man was a good plumber, or carpenter, or had some executive experience, like running a couple of Holiday Inns or the like.”
“But not Harvey,” Fiji said.
“Not Harvey. He worked on the line at a factory that made salsa.
For twenty years. When he got laid off, he couldn’t find another job to save his soul. He tries to help, but he just hasn’t got the skills.
So we hire Teacher to come do repairs. I kind of lied to Ms. Culhane about that.”
“I understand,” Fiji said. “I suppose I would have, too.” Eventually, Lenore would get to the point.
“Culhane didn’t check up on us that much,” Lenore went on. “And that seemed pretty strange to me, considering how finicky she was about everything else. It was like she was looking for the least qualified, rather than the best qualified. See what I mean?”
Fiji, nodding again, said, “I do see.”
“But I was so glad to get the job, which included a place to live,”
Lenore said doggedly, “that I ignored all the signals.”
If Fiji nodded one more time she thought her head would fall off.
“I understand,” she said. It was impossible to read Manfred’s expression. He was watching Lenore with apparent fascination. “It come to me too late, after we’d already gotten here, that we’d been sucked into something that might kill us,” Lenore said. “Okay, why do you think . . . ?” Manfred didn’t have to finish the question.
“Me and Harvey, we’re expendable,” Lenore said with some dignity.
“To them, anyway. I’ve tried my best to make the hotel nice, to run it so it makes money. I knew the first batch of old people we got, them from Nevada, they weren’t really waiting for assisted-living places. They were window dressing, to make it look like the hotel was really what Culhane said it was.”