The Barker Street Regulars

for her, she said; she’d always had toy poodles. When the elevator finally came, she followed us in with no hesitation. The second the doors closed, she began to complain about the Gateway. The elevators took forever, she said. The food wasn’t what it used to be, and neither were the activities. There was a shortage of staff because everyone was underpaid. Furthermore, these days, the Gateway wasn’t in the least fussy about who got hired. “They’ll take anyone who’ll work for almost nothing,” she said. “And with what it costs to be here? Scandalous!” She went on to say that when she’d moved to the Gateway, it had been just like a hotel. Now, no one did anything for you. “And it used to be spotless!” she exclaimed indignantly. “How that’s changed! Yesterday, a cockroach crawled right across my windowsill, and I couldn’t get a soul to do a thing about it.” As the doors opened to the lobby, she lowered her voice and confided, “They pretended they didn’t believe me. They do that here, you know. It’s one of their favorite tricks.” Fact: The elevators were slow. Fact: I wouldn’t have hired the unresponsive Ralph as a kennel attendant. But the pay scale? The cost of living at the Gateway? The decline in the quality of staff and services? And the cockroach? As I returned my volunteer’s badge to the bulletin board in the office and signed myself out, I inspected the area for signs of infestation. I found none. On the contrary, the linoleum floor looked freshly washed and waxed, the desks and shelves were free of dust, there was no odor at all, and nothing was crawling along the baseboards or anywhere else. And there were plenty of activities, weren’t there? There had to be. Helen Musgrave was always attending something, wasn’t she? But if Helen showed up to find that an event had been canceled or didn’t exist, what would she do? With a sinking heart, I realized that she’d immediately forget her disappointment and happily bustle off elsewhere. The recent past disappeared from Helen’s mind as swiftly and as completely as every trace of Nancy had vanished from her room within hours of her death. Passing through the lobby, stopping to let Rowdy say goodbye to the women gathered there, I realized that although a prominent section of the big notice board by the front doors was devoted to welcoming new residents, there was nothing there or elsewhere to acknowledge the departure of those whose beds the new people now occupied. On the way out, I studied the Polaroid photos of the new residents. Well, what did I want? A notice that read Bon Voyage? And underneath it, deathbed snapshots of people breathing their last?
    So that was when the third incident really occurred. Studying the snapshots of the new residents, I realized that I’d learned of one death at the Gateway, Nancy’s. In fact, people had been dying there all the time. I’d simply pretended otherwise. Althea was older than I wanted to acknowledge. The Holmes nonsense was make-believe. Fact: Jonathan Hubbell had been brutally murdered. Fact: Although we are all dying all the time, Althea was going to die sooner than most other people, sooner even than most other people at the Gateway. The complaining woman in the elevator had definitely been wrong about one thing. The Gateway had never, ever been just like a hotel. Here, almost no one had ever checked out alive.
     

Chapter Eighteen
     
    A S I WAS CRATING ROWDY in the back of the car, Hugh and Robert suddenly appeared in the Gateway parking lot, hustled across, and abruptly demanded a sample of dog hair.
    “Hugh intends to perform a few experiments,” Robert explained. Half to Hugh and half to me, he added in the sort of voice people use when they’re quoting, “I gather we have your good wishes, Miss Winter. ” Lacking the correct Sherlockian reply, I just said, “Indeed you do, Mr. MacPherson. And if Rowdy were shedding, you could have enough hair to spin and weave into a deerstalker hat. But he isn’t.”
    Producing a pair of manicure scissors, Hugh started to speak. I cut him off. No pun intended. “Rowdy is entered tomorrow,” I said, shifting into what is literally my mother tongue-—she bred and showed golden retrievers. “In a dog show,” I explained. “I want someone chopping off a patch of his coat about the way you want someone hacking off the first paragraph of ’A Study in Scarlet.’ ”
    “ In eighteen seventy-eight ...” Hugh