The World of Pondside

Thursday, October 10

6:30 a.m.

It was pretty sad when you had to go outside to warm up, Foster thought. In October, no less. You’d think the geezers were already dead for how cold they kept the place. I’m taking a break, he announced to Jenny, the breakfast and lunch cook. They were the only two in the kitchen at this hour. It’s like a meat locker in here.

If you put some meat on your skinny little butt, Jenny said, you might not feel the cold so bad.

Foster was supposed to come up with something clever to say in response. Normally, Jenny Williams was one of the few people on staff that he could talk to. This morning Foster was too pissed and too sad to talk to anyone. He’d thought it was a mistake when he first saw it: Robert Kallman on the pureed list.

What the hell is this? Foster had asked Jenny.

She’d looked up, with a frown, from the great stainless steel pot she was filling with uncooked oatmeal. Jenny didn’t like cussing. She said it was a way to let the devil sprinkle a little poison into the course of human events. (That was the way she always put it, Declaration of Independence style.) She looked at the spreadsheet taped to the wall next to the All Employees Must Wash Their Hands poster over the sink. You appear to be looking at the diet list, Jenny said. She resumed pouring oatmeal into the pot.

It says Robert’s on pureed. Robert Kallman.

That’s new, Jenny said lightly, as if it wasn’t a death sentence or anything.

He’s mechanical soft, Foster argued. He knew this for a fact. Clearing supper tables last night, he had to wait, as usual, while Robert cleaned his plate. Spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread (no crust), coleslaw, the works. Robert had eaten it all. Some staffers complained about Robert taking the whole day and half the night to finish eating, but Foster didn’t mind waiting for him. Whenever he could, Foster took a break from clearing and sat down to eat dessert with the man. Robert Kallman had an impressive career in the military before he got hit with ALS. He had been all over the world: Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, China. Plus, he knew everything there was to know about computers. He had created the game, for God’s sake. The World of Pondside.

He had mechanical soft at supper last night, Foster said. I was there.

Mechanical soft was one giant step above pureed. On mechanical soft, there was plenty a person could eat: pasta, meatloaf, all kinds of cooked vegetables and fruit, eggs, hash, mashed potatoes, ice cream, even pie. Eating was the one thing Robert had left. He’d been diagnosed in his midthirties, and in the decade or so since then, ALS had crippled his hands and arms, wasted his leg muscles, weakened his neck and back until he needed specially designed cushions and supports to keep upright in his wheelchair. It had muddied his speech so that only a listener as dedicated as Foster could understand him. But his left hand could still grip a fork or fat-handled spoon and bring it slowly to his mouth. He could dump it with a turn of his wrist onto his tongue, and then chew, chew, and chew, and trickiest of all, swallow it, swallow it hard, the right muscles sending the food down the right hole, getting it down and then remembering how to open up and take a breath. Just thinking about it made Foster’s jaws and throat ache, but, like Robert said, what else did he have to do?

Pureed, on the other hand, meant eating nothing thicker than what you could suck up with a straw. At Pondside, that meant a plateful of normal food run through the food processor. Foster had seen the dinner chef puree a salad and send it out: iceberg lettuce turned to green slush.

Jenny reached for a wooden spoon. She raised an eyebrow in Foster’s direction. What were you doing here at supper last night and now you’re here this morning? You been working twelve-hour shifts again?

Wait a minute, Foster said, suddenly all too certain that he had figured it out. It’s Thursday. Speech therapy came through on Wednesdays. You think they reevaluated him? Knocked him down to pureed? The bastards, Foster thought.

He should’ve got pureed at supper then, Jenny said. Somebody slipped up.

Foster pulled the paper kitchen cap off his head in disgust. His hair sprang free.

He stopped at his locker to pick up a cigarette on his way outside. Employees were strictly forbidden to carry a pack in any visible pocket. He punched the four digits plus pound sign on the pad beside the heavy glass door, waited for the click, and threw himself gratefully outside into thick warm air, currents of it you could almost see snaking into the building behind him, like the arrows that mark a storm front rolling across a TV weather map.

Outside it was just getting light, the trees and the cornfield and the Heartland Trucking warehouse emerging from the darkness beyond the parking lot, frogs trilling their last-chance love songs down by the pond. Pondside Manor had the look of a medium-priced motel: three redbrick and fake-stone wings guarded by a phalanx of stunted evergreens, with an atrium wrapped in windows up front. It sprawled on its own frozen lake of concrete in the middle of the kind of nowhere that exists at the edge of most midsized towns in the Midwest, where you might spy a horse or two nibbling some grass in the shadow of a giant billboard or discover an old fishing pond hosting its ducks and bluegills behind the box stores that line the highway. Foster crossed the concrete, tacking through a smattering of employee cars. He kept his eyes on the prize that lay at the edge of the parking lot: a wooden bench under a tree overlooking the pond. He could see only one end of the bench as he approached; most of it was hidden by a border of variously successful spirea bushes that made a broken line around the parking lot.

At this hour, so close to the shift change, Foster expected the bench would be unoccupied, the sand-filled bucket beside it overflowing with butts. He was close enough to stub his toe on the bucket before he noticed the tendril of fresh white smoke rising from the hidden end of the bench.

Hey! he said.

Hey, Foster, a husky voice replied. It was Tori, the first-shift RN. She didn’t turn her head right away to look at him, but kept scowling down at the pond, her arms folded over her scrubs—it was light enough now for Foster to make out the teddy bear print—and her crossed leg bouncing on top of the leg that was jiggling up and down underneath it. Foster had never seen Tori sitting—or for that matter, standing—still. When she finally looked up at him, simultaneously blowing out a stream of smoke, she tipped her head toward the end of the bench—an invitation to sit. The loose topknot of her blond ponytail bobbed sideways, seconding the motion.

Foster sat. What’re you doing here so early? He flipped his dumb phone open and shut. It was 6:32. Her shift didn’t start until 7:00.

I have charts to finish from yesterday. She sucked on her cigarette, held it, pursed her lips to exhale noisily. Don’t tell.

Foster breathed in the smoke that wafted toward his end of the bench and remembered harder times, before his latest employment at Pondside Manor, when he used to stretch out his cigarette money by positioning himself downwind of people on their smoke breaks. Usually, he didn’t like to think about the fact that he was breathing in what had been inside somebody else’s lungs. With Tori, he didn’t mind that so much. He thought about asking her if she knew why Robert Kallman’s diet got downgraded, but that seemed like too low a note to start her day on. Of course, now that he’d thought of that, he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He inhaled one last secondhand breath and reached for the Camel in his pocket, surveying the pond.

What do you think that is, down there? he said.

He pointed to the end of the short wooden pier a farmer up the road maintained on the pond for fishing purposes. A couple of the old guys used it when they could get somebody to take them down there. Wheelchairs needed help getting over the bump where the boards met the shore. A curve of silver emerged from and returned to the water at the end of the pier. He could tell it was something that didn’t belong there.

Tori looked where he pointed. Is it a bicycle? She stood up to have a better look. Didn’t yours get stolen from the rack?

Not lately, Foster said, and he stood up, too.

It was that time of the morning, right before the sun showed its true colors, when the stillness got whipped up into a distinct breeze. The leaves over their heads rustled and the pond suddenly scalloped into little waves. The frogs fell silent. Ducks bobbed into view from the reeds behind the pier. One of them stopped and plunged its head into the water and its tail into the air, the way ducks do, as if to have a look at the rest of whatever was out there, the part that was underwater. When the duck popped up again, the silver half circle behind it suddenly became to Foster’s eyes what it had been all along.

He crushed his unlit cigarette in his fist.

Tori said, My God.

Then they both took off at a run, Tori pulling out her phone and racing across the parking lot to the building, while Foster stumbled down the steep hill to the pond.

Chapter 1

Laverne Slatchek had been hiding in her room since breakfast—not that she had eaten any. Who could eat breakfast with all those red and blue lights zooming along the walls in the dining room, and the food-service people gawking at the windows—blocking her view—instead of feeding Screamin’ Jeannie and the others who moaned more quietly but could not feed themselves? Laverne had gotten a few glimpses of police cars, an ambulance, a fire truck—they always sent a fire truck, just in case. She asked a staff member what was going on, but the girl didn’t seem to know anything. Or, if she did, she wasn’t talking. Laverne had given up on getting any more coffee. She removed her clothing protector, which was actually a towel-size bib, and hotfooted it down the hall toward the library, where she found Duane Lotspeich already hunched over the computer in the corner. After cursing her luck loud enough to make Duane’s narrow shoulders twitch, Laverne had taken a left out of the library and scooted down Hawkeye Lane toward her room.

All the hallways at Pondside Manor had street names. Laverne’s room was in Boysenberry Boulevard, which was home to residents who were independently mobile, mostly continent, and fully aware of their circumstances. The last of these characteristics is what made Boysenberry Boulevard the quietest and arguably the saddest hallway in Pondside Manor. Laverne had been living in room 2021B for two years now, ever since her son Joseph and his wife moved away to a western suburb of Chicago. Joseph couldn’t bear to think of Laverne rattling around in her two-bedroom condo with no one in town to replace light bulbs or to take up the throw rugs she persisted in scattering all over her floors despite the well-documented trip hazard they afforded. Laverne had held out in her condo until one day she tripped, as predicted, on one of the rugs and broke something. Fortunately, your arm and not your hip! exclaimed Joseph’s wife, whose name Laverne had only recently begun to forget for hours at a time. The arm, which was broken in two places, required a brief hospital stay followed by a lengthy period of rehabilitation, and it was a far, far simpler thing to check into Pondside Manor, where physical therapy was available daily on site, than to arrange pickup and delivery via Bionic Bus.

Somehow Laverne’s slow but measurable progress in squeezing foam balls and reaching for the ceiling had stretched to fill the up-to-one-hundred days of skilled nursing care fully covered by her Medicare plan. She was just about to go Private Pay—an inheritance-guzzling prospect that had her son and daughter-in-law talking in low tones about turning their garage into a mother-in-law flat—when a stroke knocked out her right field of vision and, more importantly from a financial standpoint, put her back in the hospital for three fully covered weeks of acute care and rehabilitation. The hospital stay set her one-hundred-day skilled nursing clock back to Day One.

During her second hundred days at Pondside Manor—around Day Thirty-Seven, in fact—the right half of Laverne’s world, nonexistent since the stroke, began to be populated by shadowy figures and the occasional cloud of bright light. By Day Sixty-Three, when she could discern the outline and contents of her whole dinner plate and no longer needed to turn it to find the hash browns to the right of the Salisbury steak, it seemed likely that she had recovered as much vision as she was going to recover.

On Day Seventy-One, the kind of bright Sunday in April that made visitors bloom like algae in the hallways and courtyards of Pondside Manor, Laverne took her visitors to a trio of rocking chairs on a porch overlooking the pond, and having carefully situated herself across from them with her son Joseph in her left field of vision and her daughter-in-law cast into semidarkness on her right, Laverne informed them that she had decided to stay where she was until she moved on to her final resting place, or until her money ran out, whichever came first. (She had done the math, with the help of Pondside’s business manager, and was pretty sure her funds would last a lifetime of reasonable length. She was already almost eighty-six.)

But, Mother, the voice of her daughter-in-law came at once from the shadows, we have the garage—the apartment, I mean—all ready for you. Her son Joseph was silent, his tall forehead beading up in the sunlight.

Laverne suggested that they might buy themselves a new car to put in there instead.

It was a shiny little moment of triumph that Laverne had lived to regret. By midsummer, she had listened to every audiobook in the library, watched all the videos (some of them twice), and made a lot of handcrafted items (every pot holder and clay pot and macramé wall hanging a bit more developed on the left side than on the right). She had learned the names of all the plants in the front and back courtyards, and planted a few of her own. She had attended every ice-cream social and had taken what she soon decided was one too many field trips in the SeniorMobile. She was just about ready to consign herself to living out her days in a converted garage under her daughter-in-law’s watchful eye when somebody donated three computers to the facility and, shortly thereafter, with the help and encouragement of the very Duane Lotspeich who was currently hogging the computer in the library, Laverne had started playing the game.

Only one of the three donated computers was powerful enough to play the game, although the skinny young fellow who worked in the kitchen intended to upgrade the other two, he kept saying. The game had been invented by the poor man across the hall who had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Robert was his name.

Laverne could not begin to imagine how anyone could invent what happened when she clicked the little duck on the computer screen that had the words World of Pondside under it.

In The World of Pondside, Laverne Slatchek was not a former high school biology teacher, long retired. She was a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of a team racing against the clock to crack the code that would put the kibosh on Alzheimer’s and other dementias, once and for all, earning the team a nice pile of money in the process and maybe a free trip to Sweden. Laverne had always wanted to live in the Bay Area, ever since she and her long-departed husband Bill spent their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary there, more than thirty years ago. Sitting in the upper deck at Candlestick, where they could look right out over the bleachers to the sailboats in the bay, Laverne had been surprised every time she glanced at Bill by how young he looked (he was fifty-seven on their twenty-fifth) with his Giants cap settled low and shading his face, turning the yellow tinge of his skin back into a golden tan. His liver was halfway to gone then, although they didn’t know it yet. In The World of Pondside, Laverne could see the Golden Gate Bridge from the glass wall of her beautifully decorated condo. She and Bill went to see the Giants play at Candlestick Park (not at Ma Bell or wherever they played now), and the notorious offshore winds were always in the home team’s favor.

Surely Duane Lotspeich was finished with the computer by now. If not, she’d go ahead and ask him to log off and let her have a half hour or so, just to tide her over. Laverne poked her head into the hallway. Boysenberry Boulevard was empty of traffic, although there was still some commotion going on at the far end of it, where it opened on the atrium, which is what the brochure called the many-windowed and almost always empty front lounge. (Duane Lotspeich called it the Aquarium, due to all the glass.) It wasn’t empty now—Laverne caught a glimpse of reflective tape on the back of a fireman’s coat—but everyone’s attention was directed at the windows. Nobody was looking down the hallway toward Laverne’s room. She followed her walker (which she didn’t need but often used as a kind of rolling handrail) in the opposite direction, letting it lead her past the deserted nurses’ station and back down Hawkeye Lane toward the library.

The good computer—Glory be!—was free. Duane Lotspeich was nowhere in sight.

Laverne eased herself into the Easy-Up, Easy-Down ergonomic chair, her heart already beating faster and her fingertips almost tingling. She took the headphones out of the drawer—surprised that Lotspeich had bothered to put them away—and plugged the cord into the hole before she put them on. She experienced a moment of not exactly panic when she couldn’t find the little picture of a yellow duck that opened The World of Pondside. The ducklink, they called it. Had Duane Lotspeich moved it? Or worse—had he stolen it somehow? She turned her head to search the screen with the good side of her brain—and there it was! Laverne maneuvered the mouse to bring the arrow over to the right side of the screen, where somebody—she supposed it had to be Duane—had moved the ducklink into a row of other little pictures: the camera, the fox, the wastebasket. Finally, she got the arrow to settle on the duck. This took a while of dancing all around it first. Reminding herself to breathe normally, she clicked once and waited for the arrow to become a little hand.

Mary McIntyre took deep breaths and tried to keep her heart from racing. She had heard the sirens but told herself that didn’t matter. You could always hear sirens this close to the base—well, not always but often enough. Her sister Mildred said that if there ever really was an air raid, everybody’s goose was going to be cooked because they had learned to ignore the sirens. Mary couldn’t ignore them, unfortunately; they were making her head feel like it might explode, but she told herself that the sirens didn’t have a thing to do with her. She told herself that she knew exactly where she’d left the baby. She’d left him with Mildred.

Mildred could be trusted to take excellent care of a baby, having already had two of her own—beautiful children, dark-haired and dark-eyed with creamy skin like Mildred’s and wavy hair like their dad’s. They had been so excited to meet the baby. They planted kisses on both of his fat cheeks at once. It looked like he might cry with all that smooching, but then they backed off and he changed his mind and gave them a big open-mouthed grin, sticking his tongue out the way he does, like a happy puppy. Blinking his big blue eyes. Looking like the world was his oyster.

Mary was not herself today, not at all. Something was wrong inside her head, she thought, looking up and down the street. How could she tell anyone that she couldn’t find the baby? They would probably put her in jail. This place didn’t help matters: one redbrick house after another, so close together they were almost connected, all of them with what Mildred called her picture window looking out at a front yard paved with pebbles instead of grass. A few sad-looking evergreens poking up here and there.

Mary wished she’d paid more attention to the evergreens. Hadn’t she walked between a pair of them when she came out the front door? Just like those two there! she thought hopefully. She was almost sure that was the house. Mildred’s house. Even the drapes were the same, Mary thought, what she could see of them anyway, hanging down on either side of the giant picture window. Maybe she would walk down the sidewalk, right on past the house, as slowly as she could without looking peculiar about it, and maybe then she’d catch a glimpse of somebody inside.

When Mary was right in front of the right pair of evergreens, she turned her head to look into the picture window. At first, all she saw in the open space between the drapes was the dark interior of the house—no Mildred, no baby—and then, all at once, from deep inside the dark interior, she saw a light, several lights, red and blue and white ones, spinning and darting, growing larger as if they were moving toward the window, coming closer, something big inside the house moving toward the window—no! The lights were a reflection, weren’t they? She hadn’t meant to stop as she walked by, but here she was, standing in the way of whatever was coming toward the window from behind her. She spun around, ready to throw herself out of its path, and ran smack into a policeman who appeared out of nowhere and said, kindly, Ma’am? Are you all right? Can I help you?

Mary could only look at him at first. He was not someone she knew, of that she was fairly certain, although the uniform made them all look—and even sound—more like each other than like themselves. She remembered how startling it was the first time her husband came home in the uniform: the double-breasted greatcoat with Police Department patches on the sleeves, the flat-topped hat with the gold-and-silver badge over a shining visor. This one here was in blue shirtsleeves. He had a sweet, narrow face. The longer she looked at him, the more he reminded her of George. She felt something expand in her chest and rise in her throat and she knew: he wasn’t here to lock her up! He could help her find the baby. She let him take her arm. If she told him, he could help. All she had to do was say it. She took a breath.

Mary, honey! said a husky woman’s voice, and all of a sudden, there was a woman next to the policeman, peeking around his shoulder—a young woman in pajamas with her blond hair in a ponytail, like a fountain coming out the top of her head. What are you doing out here in the parking lot? Are you looking for the baby?

Maybe your baby’s inside the building, the policeman said then, just as kindly, but Mary had already turned herself to stone.

Foster Kresowik sat shivering in wet scrubs and a blanket in the arts and crafts room. He had dry jeans and a T-shirt in his locker, but no one asked him if he wanted to change. Two uniformed officers, a youngish man and a middle-aged woman who reminded him of his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Appelford, did the questioning. The first question—after he had given his name and position—was easy: What time had he arrived for work? He always looked at his dumb phone to see if he was late or not before he went inside. It was 5:59 a.m., he told her. Did he see anything at all unusual in the parking lot upon his arrival? It was still dark, Foster said. But the lot was well lit, Mrs. Appelford pointed out. Where did Foster park his car?

He hesitated then. Both officers looked at him expectantly. Foster hated to admit that he didn’t have a car. In the midwestern heart of this great land of ours, to be twenty-six years old and not own a car marked a man as a loser, if not a criminal or weirdo of some kind. At the very least, people assumed that your license had been revoked, but in Foster’s case, it was economics, pure and simple. After wasting his money on three different vehicles, each of which ran briefly and would have cost more to repair than he paid for it in the first place, Foster had decided to save his money until he could afford the monthly payment, along with gas and insurance, for a car that wasn’t just another piece of crap. He told them that he rode his bike to work and brought it inside the building through a service entrance at the back. The youngish officer wrote that down.

The questions got harder as they went on. Asked to describe exactly how he had discovered the deceased, Foster hoped that he was giving the cops the exact same details that Tori would give them about spotting a silvery half circle in the water at the end of the pier. Foster knew—because the officers told him—that a second body had been found, another one of the residents evidently, as yet unnamed. The officers wondered why neither Foster nor Tori had seen the second body at the edge of the parking lot. In fact, Mrs. Appelford expressed surprise that Foster hadn’t tripped over the body on his way to the path that led down to the pond. He reminded her that he hadn’t taken the path; he had charged directly down the hill from the smokers’ bench to the water’s edge. By the time it was light enough to see the shadowy reaches of the parking lot, Foster’s attention had been focused elsewhere.

Then he was supposed to explain how and why he tried to extricate the body from the pond. What was his intention going into the water? At least ten minutes had passed, Foster himself had told them, between his arrival at the smokers’ bench and his realization that the object submerged at the end of the pier was a wheelchair. What was he trying to do? What did he hope to accomplish? Surely it was too late—he couldn’t be hoping to rescue Robert Kallman?

Foster had almost drowned himself, trying to get Robert out of the water that morning. He had plunged down the hill and splashed directly into the pond. The water was shallow, or would have been, if the mud underneath it had been less deep. Foster sank to midthigh in the water by his third or fourth step, and knew, too late, that he should have run along the path to the little pier, instead of splashing into the pond from shore. The mud almost sucked one of Foster’s shoes off. It closed around his ankles and then his calves, making each step harder than the last. Somehow, though, he reached the pier. The wheelchair lay in the water at the end of it, tipped back and to one side. His first effort to pull the deeply mired chair upright had no effect whatsoever. He abandoned that, filled his lungs, held his breath, and went under to tackle the straps that not only kept Robert in the wheelchair but normally held him upright—so many straps! Foster pulled on Velcro and tugged at buckles. When the straps wouldn’t budge, he had no choice but to straighten up, gulp air, and look down through four or five inches of water at the man in the tipped-over wheelchair. Robert’s eyes and mouth were open, and his arms moved freely in the muddy currents Foster himself had stirred around the pier—more freely, in fact, than Foster had ever seen them move in the unaccommodating air.

Foster wanted to tell the cops, Yes, I was hoping to save him. Even after all that time. Instead, he shrugged. When Mrs. Appelford pressed him a little, he said, I couldn’t just leave him there.

Afterward, they offered to give him a ride home. Foster didn’t know why—maybe to keep him from skipping town on his bicycle? Was he some kind of suspect? Whatever their reasons, his arms and legs were feeling rubbery, and he was glad to have a ride from anybody, even the cops. Mrs. Appelford spoke to the administrator about it while Foster went to change his clothes. Still shivering, wearing the blanket like a cape over his wet scrubs, he paused at the intersection of Iowa Avenue and Hawkeye Lane—both routes that led to the employee lockers—and chose the one that would take him past Robert’s room.

The hallway was entirely deserted, the door to Robert’s room not quite closed—which was just the way Robert used to leave it, open a hand’s width, to signal that he was accepting visitors. Foster stopped outside the door and listened for a moment. He had to stop himself from saying, Hey! or, Foster here, before he pushed it open.

Robert Kallman’s private room was large enough to accommodate the standard adjustable bed with a space to park his wheelchair beside it, a Pondside dresser and nightstand, his mother’s favorite armchair, and, taking up the length of one wall, a desk made out of two wooden doors resting on four short filing cabinets. The door-top desk was home to not one, not two, but three personal computers and four flat-screen monitors (two of them paired to make an extra-wide display), along with a variety of external hard drives and modems, a router, two scanners, the eye-tracker screen and digital speech generator that could be attached to the arm of Robert’s wheelchair, and the powerful laptop that served up The World of Pondside.

There was something Foster hadn’t told the police. Something Robert said not long ago. They had been alone in the dining room, Robert working on dessert and Foster clearing tables, when Robert’s speech device piped up to say: If something happens to me, I want you to give the server to my mother. Foster, who had never spoken more than two words at a time to Robert’s mother, wasn’t sure he’d understood. He stopped stacking plates and said something brilliant like, What do you mean, if something happens to you? Robert had given him the kind of look people give you when you’ve asked a question they know you know the answer to—ALS was a one-way ticket, everyone knew that—and then he responded with his own voice, pausing between words to get his lips and tongue in line. You know howww it goes, he said. I don’t wwant that laptop to disappearrr.

Standing wet and cold in the doorway, Foster was all but overwhelmed by—what? He couldn’t say. Sadness, strangeness, disbelief. The words unfinished business came into his head. Robert’s room looked pretty much the same as it had the day before yesterday, the last time Foster was in here. The day before yesterday, Robert’s wheelchair had been rolled up to the big PC with the paired screens, where they did their 3D modeling. Foster had been scooting back and forth between the big PC and the World of Pondside laptop, which they kept tucked between the flatbed scanner and the wall, beyond the view from the door. He took a few steps into the room, wet shoes squishing.

The laptop wasn’t there.

He stood very still for a moment, as if that might make it reappear. Then he made a quick search of the computer desk, opening and shutting drawers as quietly as he could, and crouching to check underneath. Sliding open the closet door was harder—nothing but familiar-looking shirts, Robert’s down jacket, two of his three fleece hoodies, and a pair of slip-on shoes that made Foster close his eyes and squeeze them tight to shut out the image of Robert’s slipper floating like a little boat under the pier. Foster closed the closet door. He moved to the dresser: one drawer of socks and underwear folded with military precision, another full of Mrs. Kallman’s balls of yarn and knitted scarves and mittens she worked on while she and Robert spent long evenings watching the wall-mounted TV. The remaining two drawers were stocked with packages of plastic tubing and waterproof Chux pads. There was no need to disturb the bed, which Robert almost never slept in. It was made up as tight as a drum, nothing but dusty floor underneath.

Foster straightened up slowly, clutching the damp blanket around his shoulders. Someone had taken the laptop. Probably not the cops, since they hadn’t asked Foster anything about Robert’s computers, and surely not Mrs. Kallman herself—someone would have called her, made sure she didn’t show up for breakfast with Robert today. Maybe Robert had changed his mind about counting on Foster and asked someone else to take it out of his room.

Or maybe Foster was just too late.

Whoever took the laptop had left no trace. Foster looked down at his trail of muddy footprints. He dropped the blanket to the floor and wiped the shiny no-skid vinyl clean as he backed out of the room.

Chapter 2

By lunchtime that Thursday, all the staff on-site and many of the residents at Pondside Manor Rehabilitation and Long-Term Care Center were aware that two bodies had been carried away from the grounds of the facility that morning. First, to the surprise of some and the dismay of many, there was Robert Kallman, age forty-eight, whose wheelchair was recovered from not quite three feet of pond water. The divers had found the wheelchair on its side, mired in the mud at the bottom and almost completely submerged, with only one wheel visible above the surface of the water. Robert, whose late-stage ALS had left him unable to sit upright without support, was strapped securely into the chair. The medical examiner’s report would later confirm what seemed obvious at the scene: Robert Kallman’s lungs were full of water, his death due to drowning.

The second body, discovered after the first responders appeared on the scene, was that of James Witkowski, an ambulatory eighty-seven-year-old who had collapsed in the parking lot, just beyond the modified school bus they called the SeniorMobile. Two fishing poles and a tackle box on wheels—known to be Witkowski’s property—were found in the parking lot, not far from the top of the grassy hill leading down to the pond. Since Robert Kallman was known to have little fondness either for fishing or, frankly, for James Witkowski, a majority of the staff and a substantial number of residents were inclined to believe that James had probably left the building independently of Robert. It seemed clear to everyone that James had hurried up the hill and across the parking lot in search of help, and that this unaccustomed activity, perhaps combined with the shock and excitement of finding the wheelchair and its occupant in the pond, had proven too much for the older man’s heart.

But how had Robert ended up in the pond? Everyone agreed that he could have maneuvered his motorized wheelchair down the difficult but not impossible asphalt path that began at the corner of the visitor’s parking lot. From there, he would have had to make at least a half circuit of the path around the pond to reach the pier, but this, too, seemed possible, although he would have needed help getting his wheelchair over the bump onto the pier. As to whether he had gone into the water intentionally—the