Tomorrow's Vengeance

TWENTY-SIX

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he long’d to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

‘Requiem,’ Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894

Izzy and I were enjoying our ice-cream cones in our favorite spot on the front porch of Blackwalnut Hall when a Crown Vic pulled up along the drive. I thought we’d seen the last of Detective Powers, but to my surprise, an officer I didn’t recognize climbed out of the driver’s seat.

And he was not alone.

When I saw who he had with him I handed my cone to a startled Izzy, skipped down the steps and raced along the drive to meet them.

‘Jerry!’ I said, laughing. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

Dressed in a blue-and-gold navy tracksuit, Jerry was grinning like he’d just won the lottery. ‘Out and about, out and about.’

‘So, he does belong here,’ the officer added, chuckling.

‘Oh, yes,’ I fibbed. ‘There are people here who’ve really been missing this guy.’ I took Jerry by the hand and tucked it into the crook of my elbow. ‘How…?

‘Somebody spotted him wandering through Quiet Waters Park, looking confused. So they called us. He couldn’t tell us his name or address, and he had no wallet or anything on him, but… you know those little laundry labels?’

I nodded. Oh, yes. Mother had sewed the embarrassing tapes that practically screamed ‘Hannah Alexander is a bay-bee’ into my camping clothes every summer.

‘Well, we ran the name through DMV, checked him against the picture on the driver’s license we found, got the address and brought him back here.’

‘Thank you. Everyone will be so relieved.’

‘He’s not still driving, is he?’ the officer asked, his face a mask of concern.

‘Oh, no. He hasn’t driven for ages, not since…’ I tapped my temple. ‘You know.’

‘I heard the security around here was pretty tight,’ the officer said as he accompanied Jerry and me up the sidewalk. ‘I’m kinda surprised the old guy got away, you know?’

‘I have a Hyundai,’ Jerry said. ‘Don’t know where I parked it.’ He patted his pajama pockets. ‘Key’s here somewhere.’

‘He must have slipped out of his tracking device,’ I said, tap dancing as fast as I could. When we reached the steps, I turned. ‘Is there anything we need to do?’

‘No, no. Just glad we have a happy ending here.’ He gave me a two-finger salute, climbed back into his squad car and drove away.

I walked Jerry inside, heading straight for the memory unit where I knew Heather would be on duty. Holding firmly to Jerry’s arm, I stuck my head around the corner of her door. ‘Look who I have here!’

Heather shot out of her chair as if she’d been spring loaded. ‘Oh my God! Jerry!’ Even as she was hugging the prodigal son, she shot me a conspiratorial glance over his shoulder.

I nodded. We were in this thing together.

Heather held Jerry at arm’s length, grinning. ‘You are a sight for sore eyes. And I know someone who is dying to see you.’

Dying. I felt a pang. That was quite literally what Nancy Harper was doing. Dying. Wasting away of a broken heart.

‘Where is she?’ I whispered.

‘Watching TV.’ Heather bobbed her head in the direction of the unit’s lounge.

As we walked Jerry into the lounge, I held my breath. What if he didn’t recognize her? Or she him?

I needn’t have worried.

‘Frank!’ Nancy shouted when her boyfriend’s solid shape loomed between her and the image of Jack Lord on the oversized television screen. She rose from her chair, clapping her hands. ‘Frank, Frank, bo brank, banana fanna ro rank, fee fie mo mrank, Frank!’ she sing-songed, seamlessly regressing to a schoolyard chant.

‘Hey, Toots,’ he said. ‘What’s cooking?’ He folded her into his arms, rested his chin on the top of her head and patted her playfully on the bottom.

When Jerry finally released her she looked into his eyes and touched his face gingerly with her fingertips again and again as if to convince herself that he was real.

‘Is his room still available?’ I asked Heather.

‘As far as I know.’ She winked. ‘I’ll get someone to make up the bed. And in the meantime…’ She paused, letting me fill in the blank.

My stomach knotted. ‘I’ll need to tell Tyson.’

‘Right. Let him work something out. That’s why they pay him the big bucks.’

‘Frank,’ Nancy was saying as I turned to go. ‘That show you like is on.’

When I left, Nancy and Jerry were cuddling on the sofa and watching Hawaii 5-O, as if he had never left.

‘If the United States ever needs someone to negotiate with the North Koreans or solve a debt ceiling impasse with Congress, I’ve got the man for the job,’ I was saying to Paul several days later. He’d returned from the sea and was dumping the contents of his laundry bag into the dirty clothes basket when I cornered him.

‘Who?’

‘Tyson Bennett, that’s who.’

‘Have I met him?’ Paul wanted to know, holding up a pair of socks and studying them critically. ‘Dirty or clean?’

I snatched the socks out of his hands and tossed them in with the rest of his stinky laundry. ‘You sold beer at the Rotary crab feast together. There’s a Labor Day party at Calvert Colony and we’re invited, so you’ll see him there.’

‘OK, got that. So, why are we awarding this dude the Nobel Peace Prize?’

‘He got them to settle the whole mess with Nancy and Jerry out of court, but most importantly, Jerry can stay with Nancy at Calvert Colony.’ I brought Paul up to date on all that had happened since last we talked. ‘After the police brought Jerry back to the colony, Tyson called in both families and held a meeting with Nancy and Jerry actually in the room. I have no idea exactly what transpired – Heather wasn’t able to say because of patient confidentiality concerns and all that – but when they came out of the meeting the rape charges had been dropped.’

‘What turned the tide?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe making the families and those bureaucrats at the Maryland Department of Heath all sit down together so they could see how sweet Nancy and Jerry are together, how good they are for each other. Or maybe everyone simply put on their big boy pants and worked out a deal.’

Paul lugged the laundry basket down to the basement with me following behind carrying a load of sheets. ‘How about the nurse friend you were so concerned about. What was her name? Elaine? The one on administrative leave?’

‘That has a happy ending, too,’ I explained while stuffing the laundry into the washer. ‘The Department of Health gave her a formal reprimand, but didn’t yank her license, thank goodness. It might be an issue if she ever decided to look for another job, but as long as she stays at Calvert Colony where everyone worships the ground she walks on, it shouldn’t be a problem.’

I poured liquid detergent into the dispenser and set the dial for a heavy duty load. We left the washer chugging away and adjourned upstairs to the kitchen where I poured us each a cup of coffee.

‘You said Jerry was found wandering around Quiet Waters Park. Isn’t that a long way from Ginger Cove?’

‘Jerry’s son didn’t think that one through very well. He snatched his dad out of Calvert Colony in a fit of pique, really, but Ginger Cove had no vacancies, so he was keeping the old guy at home temporarily. One of the round-the-clock caregivers he hired fell asleep in the Lay-Z-Boy. Zing! Jerry opened the sliding glass door and got out of there. She didn’t call the cops until nearly six hours later. She’d been driving around all that time looking for him.’