by Hillary Avis
“Drop it!” Allison said, laughing, and Pogo obediently released the pen into her grasp. “You’re going to end up with a blue mustache if you chew on that. Go get your bone.”
With a resigned sigh, Pogo got up and trotted into the kitchen to retrieve his rubber chew toy, and Allison went back to her task: figuring out exactly what was in the envelope on top of Gertrude Winter’s bureau. She’d collected several promising books that were now spread out before her on the leafy green carpet. She bent her head over her notebook and recorded their titles, leaving room for notes just like she’d learned back in her high school’s study skills class.
If Allison could find Theo’s memory of delivering Gertrude’s mail in one of these books, she might catch a glimpse of the return address on the envelope. She’d noticed that the memories she read in the books were much more vivid than her own memories. She could reread them to look at every detail, decipher every street sign. It might take her some time to wade through the books, but it’d be worth it if she could find out who sent Gertrude the envelope that was so tempting to her killer.
She cracked open the first book, Important Deliveries. She scanned the first few chapter headings—Anniversary Gifts, Apple Pies, Babies, Birthday Greetings—and groaned. The table of contents was listed by topic, not recipient or delivery person. She’d never find Theo’s memory in this book unless she knew what was inside the envelope.
Allison set it to the side and crossed it off the list in her notebook. She picked up the next one, Good News. A smile spread across her face when she saw the table of contents was a list of names. But when she checked for “Curtis, Theo” and turned to read the memories, her heart sank. All the memories in the chapter were Theo receiving good news, not delivering it. The book was organized by recipient, and of course, “Winter, Gertrude” was nowhere to be found on the list.
Allison reluctantly scribbled out the book’s title in her notebook. After another hour of similar disappointments, she ran out of books. None of the ones she’d found showed mail delivery from a postal carrier’s point of view. She stared at her list, now just a swath of blue ink. Where were Theo’s memories of delivering mail?
She stacked up the discarded books and sat back on her haunches, thinking. Maybe Theo’s memories of his route weren’t stored under “mail” or “envelopes,” but under “work” or “daily grind” or something more general like that. Dusting off her knees, Allison stood and began re-shelving the volumes where she’d found them on one of the bookcases nearest the foyer.
Of course, even if she located Theo’s memories of delivering mail, it’d be near impossible to sift through them to find a single envelope, especially if it didn’t stand out to Theo in some way. Allison’s shoulders sagged at the thought of the thousands of return addresses she’d have to check in his memories. It was a shame that nobody else had witnessed the letter being delivered or being opened. But Myra said the residents usually opened the mail in their rooms.
Allison nearly dropped the book she was “shelving” under the sofa. Of course, someone else might have witnessed Gertrude opening her mail! Lilian hated leaving her room, so she might very well have seen what was inside the envelope.
She grabbed her notebook and looked over the list of titles again, squinting to make out the words behind her blue scratch marks. Good News. That was it. She hadn’t even thought to check for Lilian’s name in the table of contents, but there it was. Hale, Lilian — page 147.
Allison skimmed Lilian’s memories until she caught sight of Gertrude’s name.
“Gertrude tore open the envelope, making much more noise than was necessary. She screeched like a banshee when she read the paper inside...” The bedroom at Golden Gardens came into focus before Allison’s eyes. She was sitting on the bed, perusing a magazine about cats for the lack of anything better to do. Gertrude waved the paper at her from across the room.
“Read this!” Gertrude demanded.
“I have my own reading to do, thank you,” Allison said primly, turning the page to a list of tips for grooming Persians. She pretended to be very interested in the article, even though she thought Persian cats looked ridiculous with their smashed-in faces.
“It says I won the grand prize.” When Allison looked up, Gertrude’s eyes were feverishly bright in her lined face. “I’m the big sweepstakes winner.”
“It’s just junk mail. We all got those.” Allison rolled her eyes and went back to her silly cat article.
“Did yours have a gold sticker?” Gertrude asked, squinting at her letter.
“Hush now,” Allison muttered. “I can’t concentrate with your yapping.”
Gertrude snorted. Out of the corner of her eye, Allison saw her tuck the paper in the envelope, then take it out to reread it, then put it back again. “I’m going to call Harman,” she announced.
Allison didn’t say anything. She knew Gertrude only said it to bother her. Maybe this would be the day that Gertrude forgot that man’s phone number. Of course, she didn’t. Allison watched out of the corner of her eye as Gertrude grabbed the handset and dialed like she was a teenager late to a party.
Allison hid her crossed fingers under the magazine and hoped Harman didn’t pick up; she wasn’t in the mood to hear Gertrude’s sweet nothings.
“Shoot,” she said under her breath when Gertrude’s face lit up. She turned over and put a pillow over her head, but it still didn’t muffle the sound of Gertrude’s voice.
“Guess what? I’m gonna buy you a new Stetson, honey...I won a sweepstakes that came in the mail today. I got the gold sticker!” Gertrude crowed, the scratchy sound grating on Allison’s last nerve. “Can you believe it? You can go ahead and cash that check I gave you.”
The memory wavered, and Allison—the part of her that wasn’t Lilian—knew it was fading. She strained to hear the last few words.
“We’re rich now...”
Allison put down the book, stunned by what she’d seen in Lilian’s memory. Was Gertrude confused about the sweepstakes, as Lilian believed, or had she really won a lot of money? It was impossible to know without seeing the insides of that envelope...the one the killer had taken.
“I guess it doesn’t matter what’s in it,” she said aloud. All that mattered was that someone thought Gertrude won a prize. Someone believed it enough to sneak through Gertrude’s window and steal the envelope from her.
But who would believe an elderly lady with dementia and take that kind of risk? Lilian hadn’t believed Gertrude, and neither had Myra when Gertrude claimed she was filthy rich. They both just chalked it up to delusions caused by her disease.
But there was one other person who definitely knew about the sweepstakes—Harman Winter. And judging from Lilian’s memories, he was the kind of guy who was very interested in getting his hands on free money.
Chapter 19
Tuesday
“Paul’s over there, hon. He’s just finishing up his oatmeal.” Myra nodded toward the table by the sliding door to the back courtyard. “What do you have in there?”
Allison shifted her heavy tote bag on her arm so the straps wouldn’t press into her flesh. “It’s that baking activity I mentioned. I brought enough for everyone. It’s just vanilla-scented playdough, but it feels like real dough...and then I made some actual rolls to bake so they can eat them later.” She’d made a late night flour run and stayed up until the wee hours mixing up batches of each, and exhaustion was leaking from her every pore.
Myra clasped her hands. “You are heaven-sent. I’m one assistant short today, so it’ll help out so much to have an activity going on. Our caregiver ratio is still OK, but nobody has an extra minute.”
Allison winced. “Well, I was hoping you could spare a minute to put the buns I made in the oven so they can bake while everyone is playing with the dough. I can do it if you don’t have time, though.”
“You’re saving me time now that I don’t have to get snacks ready.” Myra made a “gimme” motion, and Allison set the o
versized tote down so she could pull out her Tupperware of shaped cinnamon-raisin bread dough.
“Three-fifty for thirty minutes,” Allison said, as she handed the containers to Myra. “Space them out a little on the baking sheet so they don’t get stuck together. Oh, what am I saying? You know how to put buns in the oven.”
Myra shook her head, chuckling. “I’m no baker, but I’ll take good care of them.”
Pogo strained on his leash toward Paul, reminding Allison of why she was there. “Good boy,” she murmured. Shouldering the tote bag again, she left Myra with a quick side-hug and made her way to Paul’s table.
His face lit up when he saw Pogo, and he leaned down in his chair to brush his hand along Pogo’s back. “Is this your dog?” he asked.
Allison nodded, swallowing the conflicting emotions that always welled up when she and Paul did this little dance like they were strangers. “I’m fostering him until the Oregon Tails Dog Rescue can find him a permanent family.”
“I wish I could adopt him,” Paul said wistfully. “I had a Yorkie once. Best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Well, I’ll just have to keep bringing him to visit, then.”
“You live around here?” Paul asked, patting the chair next to him. Allison sat down in it, suddenly self-conscious about the bulky tote at her side.
She eased the heavy bag to the floor and nodded. “I just moved to Rosemary Street, a couple of blocks up.”
“Welcome to town.” Paul flashed her a bright smile as though he were meeting her for the first time. He probably smiled at her exactly the same way on her first day of work at the Ryes & Shine Bakery, now that she thought about it. “Enjoying it so far?”
She paused, torn about whether to tell him that she’d lived here all her life. If she did, he’d probably ask her about her family—it’d be a natural question, designed to figure out whether or not he knew her parents. That conversation would run up against his missing memories real quick, quicker than she wanted, and would probably send him into a spiral of frustration and sadness. So she just nodded and told a partial truth. “Still settling in.”
“Well, if you want a nice walk with your dog in the morning, Claypool Creek has a beautiful trail alongside it, and in the morning before it gets too warm, all the water birds are out. Herons, mallards. My dog loved walking there. I didn’t let him chase the birds, but he enjoyed seeing them.” Paul began tracing the woodgrain on the tabletop as he reminisced. Allison’s heart leaped. He hadn’t mentioned the birds before. Maybe he was making new connections!
“Where did you go after your walks?” she asked carefully.
“Oh”—his unconscious fidgeting changed and he began rubbing the surface of the table as though he were pressing his fingers into bread dough—“we probably went and got some breakfast.”
“Any place in particular you liked to go?” Of course, she knew where he liked to go. He liked to go home—home to the bakery, upstairs to their little kitchen, where he’d eat two scrambled eggs, open face on toasted, day-old pumpernickel-rye bread. Or sourdough, if they’d sold out of pumpernickel.
“Why do you ask? Are you inviting me out to eat?” He flashed her another grin, and she realized he wasn’t just avoiding her question. He was flirting with her.
She froze, half flattered that he still found her attractive and half horrified that he was flirting with anyone at all, especially someone he didn’t remember. She hadn’t thought about it before, but if he didn’t remember that she was his wife, of course he didn’t remember that he was married!
Stay in the moment. Meet him where he is, she reminded herself. And where is he right now? Flirting with me.
She nudged his empty oatmeal bowl and grinned at him. “Looks like you’ve already eaten breakfast. I’m just trying to get to know the town. I’m always looking for good places to eat.”
“I could show you around,” Paul said eagerly, but then his face fell. “I mean, I could if they let me. They don’t really like us to walk around town.”
“I’ll ask Myra if we can take a walk together sometime,” she said gently. “I’ll bring Pogo, and you can show me your old route along Claypool Creek.”
He nodded, his gaze distant. Remembering? She bit back a cascade of questions as his fingers resumed their unconscious work, reminding Allison about the activity she’d brought. She quickly unpacked her tote and pried open a container of dough. She’d cooked it up using an old playdough recipe from when Emily was still in preschool. The soft, pliant dough only had a few ingredients, so it was easy to make a big batch. Instead of the bright food coloring she used to put in Emily’s playdough, she’d added a few drops of vanilla flavoring, so it smelled like sugar cookie dough.
She hoped the sight and scent of the dough would capture Paul’s attention, but he remained lost in thought.
“Will you help me with something?” she asked. He looked up, seemingly surprised to be addressed, and nodded. She pulled a couple of small baking sheets from the tote bag and spread them out on the table. “I need to make some sweet rolls out of this dough, and I could use some extra hands.”
She plopped a chunk of dough in front of him and was gratified when he started dividing the dough and rolling it into perfectly portioned balls. As he set them on the baking sheets, a few other residents—including Lilian, Allison was happy to note—took interest and came over to the table to see what she and Paul were up to.
“Do you want to help?” Allison asked Lilian.
Lilian made a face and sat down next to her. “I don’t cook anymore. I’m not sure I even remember how.”
“Aw, give it a shot.” Allison grinned and pushed a chunk of dough toward her and then distributed some dough to Simon and another woman who’d made themselves comfortable at the table. “Don’t worry too much about the shape. Just have fun with it! And don’t feed any to Pogo no matter how much he begs!” At the sound of his name, Pogo paused in his rounds of the table and gave Allison a hopeful look.
She stood back and watched them poke, prod, roll, twist, and smash the dough into shapes, their shoulders relaxing and faces smoothing as they worked with it. Paul was more cheerful than she’d seen him in weeks, chatting with the others at the table and showing them how he made such perfectly shaped rolls. If she just let her vision blur a little bit, he was his old self at work behind the counter of the Ryes & Shine, sharp and confident, with thirty years of baking experience guiding every move of his strong hands.
It was all still in there. He was still in there.
When they’d filled the baking sheets, Allison whisked them away to the kitchen, where Myra was pulling the finished cinnamon-raisin buns out of the oven to cool. Allison set the sheets of playdough pastries on the counter next to the cooling racks.
“Can we bake that off, or does it just go in the trash?” Myra asked.
Allison shook her head. “We can save it in a plastic bag and use it again. It lasts a long time if you don’t let it dry out.”
They worked together to ball up the playdough into a zipper bag, and then Myra transferred the rolls from the cooling rack to the empty baking sheets. “They’re going to love this,” she said. “We should take them out while they’re still warm.”
Allison checked the clock. “Think they’ll buy that it only took five minutes to bake the rolls they made?”
Myra chuckled. “The one luxury you have with dementia patients is that you can play with time a little bit. Anyway, nobody’s going to question a warm pastry. Not if they have good sense.”
Good sense or not, all the residents seemed to like Allison’s buns, and Lilian and Paul and Simon, who’d “made” them, were proud and happy seeing the fruits of their labor being enjoyed. The atmosphere was almost celebratory, a big change from the usual sedate feeling.
“Shoot, this is good,” Myra said as she nibbled one of the buns herself. “We should have you baking in here every day if it’s going to be like this. Look at how happy you made these folks.”
Allison grinned. “I think everyone’s just relieved that Lilian is back in gen pop.”
“You just may be right. It feels more homey around here without an armed guard on duty. Of course, we all warmed up to Kara by the end.”
“I hope so, because apparently we’re all brunch-level friends now,” Allison joked.
Pogo looked over at her from where Lilian was feeding him crumbs. Allison reached down and snapped her fingers. “C’mere, boy!”
Paul’s head snapped up as Pogo bounded toward her. He stared at her for a moment, watching while she clipped Pogo’s leash back onto his collar and straightened his “Adopt Me” bandana. Then Paul shook his head and looked away, the muscles in his jaw tense.
He was frustrated. Allison recognized the expression from years of working alongside him in the bakery. When he was up against something that he couldn’t work out, he ground his teeth. Something about today had bumped him up against the injured parts of his mind and he was trying to make sense of the missing pieces. Maybe a thread of a memory had tickled him when he saw her with Pogo—or who knew, maybe it was the baking and flirting that had done it.
A small worm of guilt gnawed at her for being thrilled at Paul’s frustration, but she couldn’t help being a little happy. They were getting somewhere, even if that somewhere was just rebuilding what they had from scratch. They’d fallen in love before and they could fall in love again if he could just remember her from visit to visit. Maybe they could begin again with baking and flirting just like they had twenty-something years ago when she started her summer job working for him. They could take a walk around town—and maybe even stop at the gazebo in Founders Square to see if it could enhance the fragments of memory still remaining in Paul’s mind.
“Are you heading out to find your little pup a new home?” Myra asked, breaking into Allison’s daydream.