The Barker Street Regulars

reunion with him. Simon, Ceci had told me, was “coming home.” She’d meant the words literally: coming home to his house and his yard on Norwood Hill. To Ceci, Simon was as real as Rowdy was to me right now. But I could rest my hand on Rowdy’s head. In the darkness, I could feel his gaze. Jonathan, I thought, had threatened to deprive his great-aunt Ceci of precisely the kind of contact I had at this moment with my own living dog. But I needed no help to reach Rowdy. Ceci needed Irene. And to see and touch Simon she needed to be at home on Norwood Hill, not at the Gateway, not anywhere else on earth. If Jonathan had threatened to drive Irene away? If he’d questioned Ceci’s mental competence and threatened to move her from Simon’s home? If so, he had, in effect, threatened to kill her dog. And Irene and her confederate had unwittingly set Ceci up to commit murder.
    “The Gateway," Robert said with scorn. “The Gateway! Death and roaches!”
    “I’ve never seen roaches there.” I didn’t mention that I’d heard about them, looked for them, and found none.
    “According to our research,” Hugh countered, “there are five superior facilities in the area.”
    “There are probably hundreds of inferior ones,” I loyally replied. Then I did a mental double take. Research? Had Hugh and Robert been visiting nursing homes? I hadn’t done comparative shopping. When Rowdy and I had begun to volunteer, my expectations of nursing homes had been so low that almost any half-decent facility would have been better than I’d feared. For all I knew, the Gateway had roaches I hadn’t seen. I remembered the unresponsive attendant, Ralph, the one we’d met by the elevators, the one I wouldn’t have hired as kennel help. The roaches might be imaginary. Ralph was real. Rowdy and I arrived at the Gateway at ten-thirty one morning a week. What went on when I wasn’t there? And it was true that the Gateway offered Althea no intellectual companionship. Almost no one else showed any interest in books, and Althea had never shown the slightest interest in any of the social activities that drew Helen Musgrave. Helen was pleasant and cheerful, but wouldn’t Althea happily trade her roommate for the luxury of privacy and the space for more than a handful of personal possessions? Maybe Althea would be better off at one of the five superior facilities.
    But the Gateway simply had to be a better-than-average facility. There was nothing cheap-looking about it. It occurred to me that I had no real proof that Jonathan’s visit here had anything to do with Irene Wheeler, spectral dogs, con jobs, or the great-aunt at whose house he had been murdered. Maybe the purpose of his visit had concerned his other great-aunt, Althea. According to Ceci, Jonathan had Althea’s power of attorney. It had been Jonathan who’d written monthly checks to the Gateway. It might not meet Hugh and Robert’s standards as a suitable place for Althea—would any institution?—but those checks must have been for large sums. Any nursing home was expensive. Could Jonathan have come here not to protect Ceci from a con job, but to move Althea from the Gateway to some cut-rate place?
    Another possibility occurred to me. On the Saturday when Jonathan had arrived here, he had talked on the phone to Irene Wheeler, and she had come here to meet him. What else had he done? Had the psychic been the only one he’d talked to? Althea had known of his impending arrival. She must have told Hugh and Robert. Had they presented Jonathan with information about the five superior facilities? Hugh, I felt certain, had carefully entered tons of data on local nursing homes in a file on his laptop. With research data available, Hugh and Robert could have presented Jonathan with the demand that Althea be moved to a facility of their choice. Or perhaps they’d insisted that she at least have a private room. If Jonathan had refused? Ceci had told me that she was positively not going to take over Althea’s finances; with Jonathan dead, someone else would have to assume the responsibility. Hugh and Robert had known Ceci for decades. They’d surely have been able to predict that response. They were the obvious people to take over from Jonathan. Perhaps one of them already had Althea’s power of attorney. Perhaps plans were now under way to move her. But did Althea have the funds to pay for a palatial nursing home? The sister who did was Ceci. Could this entire Holmesian