“Maybe she’s one of those people who sees conspiracies everywhere.”

“I don’t know…it feels like there’s something more going on.”

“From what I’ve seen of her, I’m not a fan.”

“Nor am I. There’s something creepy about her.”

17 SOLANA

Solana opened her eyes and flicked a look at the clock. It was 2:02 A.M. She listened to the hiss of the baby monitor she’d put in the old man’s room beside his bed. His breathing was as rhythmic as the sound of the surf. She folded the covers back and padded barefoot down the hall. The house was dark but her night vision was excellent, and there was sufficient illumination from the streetlights to make the walls glow with gray. She was drugging him regularly, crushing the over-the-counter sleeping medications and adding them to his evening meal. Meals on Wheels delivered a selection of hot foods for the noon meal and a brown-bag supper for later in the day, but he preferred his hot meal at 5:00, which was when he’d always eaten supper. There wasn’t much she could do with an apple, a cookie, and a sandwich, but a casserole was excellent for her purposes. In addition, he liked a dish of ice cream before bed. His sense of taste had faded, and if the sleeping pills were bitter, he never said a word.

He was easier to get along with now that she had him on the right routine. At times he seemed confused, but no more so than many of the elderly she’d had in her care. Soon he’d be completely dependent. She liked her patients compliant. Usually the angry and obstructive ones were the first to settle down, as though they’d waited all their lives for her soothing regimen. She was mother and ministering angel, giving them the attention they’d been robbed of in their youth.

It was her belief that the contentious oldsters had been contentious as kids, thus garnering anger, frustration, and rejection from the parents who were meant to give them love and approval. Raised on a steady diet of parental aggression, these lost souls disconnected from most social interactions. Despised and despising, they had a hunger masked by rage and loneliness masquerading as petulance. Gus Vronsky was neither more nor less cantankerous than Mrs. Sparrow, the acid-tongued old harridan she’d tended to for two years. When she’d finally ushered Mrs. Sparrow into the netherworld, she’d gone out as quietly as a kitten, mewing only once as the drugs took effect. The obituary said she’d died peacefully in her sleep, which was more or less the truth. Solana was tenderhearted. She prided herself on that. She delivered them from suffering and set them free.

Now while Gus lay immobilized, she searched his dresser drawers, using a penlight she shielded with her palm. It had taken her weeks of incremental increases in his doses before she’d been able to justify staying overnight. His doctor checked on him just often enough that she didn’t want to arouse suspicion. He was the one who suggested that Gus needed the supervision. She told the doctor he sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, disoriented, and would then try to get himself out of bed. She said she’d caught him on two occasions wandering through the house with no idea where he was.

Extending her hours had necessitated cleaning out one of the bedrooms so she’d have a place to stay. As long as she was about it, she’d gone through both spare bedrooms, setting aside items of potential value and discarding the rest. With the Dumpster at the curb, she was able to eliminate most of the junk he’d been saving lo those many years. He’d set up such a howl about it early on that she’d taken to working when he was asleep. He seldom went into those rooms anyway, so he didn’t seem to notice how much had disappeared.

She’d searched his bedroom before, but she’d obviously missed something. How could he have so little of value? He’d told her, complainingly, that he’d worked for the railroad all his life. She’d seen his Social Security checks and his monthly pension checks, which together were more than sufficient to cover his monthly expenses. Where had the rest of the money gone? She knew his house was paid off, disgusting as it was, but now he had her salary to pay and she didn’t come cheap. Soon she’d start billing Melanie for overtime, though she’d let the doctor suggest the added hours.

The first week she worked she’d found the passbooks for two savings accounts in one of the cubbyholes in his desk. One contained a pathetic fifteen thousand dollars and the other, twenty-two thousand. Obviously he wanted her to believe that was the extent of it. He was taunting her, knowing she had no way to get her hands on the funds. In her previous job, something similar had occurred. She’d persuaded Mrs. Feldcamp to sign countless checks made out to cash, but four more big savings accounts had surfaced after the old woman was gone. Those four held close to five hundred thousand dollars, which made her weep with frustration. She’d taken one last run at the money, backdating withdrawal slips that she forged with the old woman’s signature. She thought the effort was credible, but the bank had taken issue. There was even talk of prosecution, and if she hadn’t shed that particular persona, all her hard work might have come to nothing. Fortunately she’d been quick enough to vanish before the bank discovered the extent of her chicanery.