“That’s a lot to pack into a beer, Ma.”
“Hmpf. I’d give it a try.”
Beth smiled. She looked back over at Jack, who was still in her own world on the couch. “Perhaps you could apply your prodigious talents to find out exactly what Paul Hanley’s up to.”
Lana nodded. It was time to dig deeper on Mr. Fruitful. If her granddaughter was working for a murderer, she’d kill him.
Chapter Thirty-Six
There was nothing the residents of Bayshore Oaks enjoyed more than pointing out the deficiencies of the facility to which they had been confined. The checkers in the game room were chipped. The strawberry shortcake was served with Cool Whip and yellow cake instead of fresh whipped cream and biscuits. And they never, ever got their packages on time.
On this last issue, they might have had a point. The mail room was managed on a volunteer basis by a rotating group of residents, a mix of nearsighted bureaucrats and busybodies. After a Mother’s Day fiasco of bungled deliveries, the group decided each package should be cross-checked by no fewer than three volunteers to ensure it reached the correct destination.
In this case, however, it appeared a volunteer had taken matters into her own home-manicured hands. Beth entered Gigi Montero’s room for her infusion and found a manila envelope lying on the bed. It was thick, oversize. And addressed to Hal Rhoads.
“Miss Gigi?” Beth called out.
There was a low grunt from the bathroom.
“All right in there?”
“Beth! The devil is testing me.” There was a shuffle, a bonk, and then Gigi threw the door open in triumph. She gave Beth a brilliant smile and waved a bottle of nail polish in the air. “But today is not his day.”
The tiny woman’s pink hair was perfectly curled. A black sweatsuit hugged her birdlike frame, the words “Auntie Power” looping in silver puff paint across her chest. Beth looked down at her own blue-and-beige scrubs, feeling underdressed for the occasion.
“Where did you get this?” Beth pointed to the envelope.
“Mail room,” Miss Gigi said. She settled on a chair, pulled back her sleeve, and presented her arm to Beth. She gave a quick nod of satisfaction when the needle slid in clean on the first attempt. “I have Tuesday shift. And I remember you telling me about Mr. Rhoads’s funeral.”
“And?”
“And he has a very handsome son.” Miss Gigi looked up at her from under a halo of rainbow eye shadow. She pressed two freshly painted fingernails into Beth’s forearm. “You like it? Called crackle polish. I can have Cesar bring you some.”
“Miss Gigi, you can’t just take—” Beth pried the woman’s fingers from her arm, with a bit more force than she intended. Then she shook her head. “You know what? It’s fine. I’m . . . in touch with Mr. Rhoads’s son. I can pass it on to him.”
“In touch?”
The expectant look on Miss Gigi’s face was accentuated by the rainbows on her eyelids. Beth bent down, suddenly very focused on applying medical tape over the injection site to hold the needle in place.
“We’re neighbors,” she finally said.
“You bring him pie?”
Beth stared at Miss Gigi. The tiny woman beamed back. “You bring him his dead father’s mail, you bring fresh pie, he will look at you differently. You have a nice figure, Beth. Good heart. But you need to—”
“Miss Gigi, I’m not—”
The IV stand started rattling, shaking the infusion bag and giving Beth an escape route.
Beth reached over for her buzzing phone, glanced at the screen, and switched off the ringer. “Sorry about that.”
“Maybe it is your neighbor man. You should answer.”
“It’s my mother.”
“Then you should absolutely answer.”
“You don’t know my mother.”
“All mothers are the same. They call, you answer. You want your daughter to ignore when you call?”
Beth started backing out of the room. “Forty-five minutes for this infusion, then I’ll be back to set you free.”
“God has set me free, Beth! Take the envelope. And promise me you will comb your hair before you bring it to him.”
*
Lana hadn’t really expected Beth to call her back. She had extricated herself from the MRI and PET scanners, upgraded her outfit in the cramped clinic bathroom, and was now driving south into Carmel to hunt for Diana Whitacre’s precious country club.
“Is Jack okay?” Lana yelled through the car speaker. The views were incredible on 17-Mile Drive, all windswept Monterey pines and rocky coves and tourists snapping photos from their rental cars. The phone reception, on the other hand, was terrible. All that wealth and no one had figured out how to get decent cell service.