Twenty-Seven Bones

2

“How was that, Miss Brown? Are you feeling better?”

“Heavenly.” The toothless ancient glanced over her shoulder at Holly, who had just finished deep-massaging her withered glutes, and gave her a blue-black, gummy grin. “Gyirl, nobody ain’ touch me like dot in go’ on forty year, y’know?”

Holly’s Tuesday/Thursday morning gigs at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home were simultaneously her most rewarding and her least remunerative. It would take her three hours of hard work to earn what she could make in a single hour elsewhere, but the head nurse had told Holly privately that the incidence of decubitus ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, had decreased 25 percent since Holly had begun working there.

Some of the improvement, of course, was the direct result of therapeutic massage bringing increased blood flow and muscle tone, but the most important benefits, Holly suspected, were indirect. When your body feels better, you move around more; when you move around more, you get fewer bedsores.

After the rest home, Holly drove by Busy Hands, located in a sprawling single-story cinder-block building situated directly across the Circle Road from the Sunset Bar, to pick up her messages and maybe a little work-after paying her rent, she’d be closer to broke than she had been all year.

The front room, which looked more like the waiting room of a seedy transmission repair shop, was empty. Mrs. Ishigawa was at her desk in the front office, behind the counter, cooking the books for lunch.

“I just dropped by to see if there are any extra shifts available this week.”

“Nope.” As always, Mrs. Ishigawa looked like the world’s oldest geisha, dressed in kimono, obi, split-toed ankle socks, and split-toed sandals, with a chopstick through her upswept, improbably black hair. As always, she was holding a lit cigarette between the ring and pinky fingers of her left hand. “But you got two terephone corrs, one woman, one man,” added the old woman, in her mincing, West Indian-flavored Japanese accent. “Man was Apgard-I terr him, shoot, mon, you run terephone rine up to Core, you cheap bassard, you don’t gotta bodda me ev’y five second.”

“And the woman?”

“I don’ ’membah name. You check burretin board.” Mrs. Ishigawa waved her cigarette in the direction of the corkboard next to the pay phone on the cinder-block wall behind her.

The woman turned out to be Emily Epp, half of a nice couple who’d been among Holly’s earliest non-Busy Hands clientele. Holly called her back first, set up an appointment, then returned her landlord’s call.

“Apgard here.”

“Mr. Apgard, it’s Holly Gold.”

“Miss Holly! Good to hear from you, thanks for calling me back. I find myself in desperate need of your services. What’s your schedule like this afternoon?”

“Conveniently enough, I just made an appointment with your tenants at the overseer’s house. I should be done around two.”

“How about two-thirty at the Great House, then? We’ll set up your table by the pool. Be a lot more comfortable, and you can take a dip afterward.”

Holly thought about it for a moment. She’d never been out to the Great House before-she rarely paid home visits to single male “happy ending” clients like Apgard. But the Great House was supposed to be quite a place-not to mention she’d get to keep everything she made instead of turning half of it over to Mrs. Ishigawa. “Two o’clock it is.”

“I’ll be looking forward to seeing you,” said Apgard warmly.

There was something in his tone of voice that Holly found faintly disturbing-it set off what she thought of as her uh-oh alarm. She would have called him back to reschedule at the Busy Hands, house cut or no house cut, but she couldn’t think of an excuse. The man was her landlord: piss him off, and she and the kids might end up living under a green plastic roof in Sugar Town.