“There’s juice and breakfast pastries in the kitchen. Help yourself to whatever you want, and join me in the main parlor.”

I skipped the pastries but poured myself a small glass of OJ from a carafe in the huge refrigerator. When I put it back, I inventoried the supplies and saw enough for ten days or so. Two weeks if they were stretched. Was that how long we were going to be here, or would either Jenny Knowlton or myself be making a grocery run to Yarmouth, which was probably the closest town with a supermarket?

The guard service was finished. Jacobs had replaced the nurse—which didn’t completely surprise me, given Jacobs’s own increasingly iffy condition—but not the housekeeper, which meant (among other things) that Jenny must also have been cooking his meals and, perhaps, changing his bed. It was just the three of us, or so I thought then.

We turned out to be a quartet.

 • • •

The main parlor was all glass on the north side, giving a view of Longmeadow and Skytop. I couldn’t see the cabin, but I could glimpse that iron pole jutting up toward the hazy sky. Looking at it, things finally began to come together in my mind . . . but slowly, even then, and Jacobs held back the one vital piece that would have made the picture crystal clear. You might say I should have seen it anyway, all the pieces were there, but I was a guitar player, not a detective, and when it came to deductive reasoning, I was never the fastest greyhound on the track.

“Where is Jenny?” I asked. Jacobs had taken the sofa; I sat down opposite him in a wingback chair that tried to swallow me whole.

“Occupied.”

“With what?”

“None of your beeswax now, although it will be shortly.” He leaned forward with his hands clasped on the head of the cane, looking like a predatory bird. One that would soon be too old to fly. “You have questions. I understand that better than you think, Jamie—I know that inquisitiveness is a large part of what brought you here. You will have answers in time, but probably not today.”

“When?”

“Hard to tell, but soon. In the meantime, you will cook our meals and come if I ring.”

He showed me a white box—not so different in appearance from the one I’d used that day in the East Room, except this one had a button instead of a slide switch, and an embossed trade name: Notiflex. He pushed the button and chimes went off, echoing from all the large downstairs rooms.

“I won’t need you to help me go to the toilet—that I can still do myself—but I’ll need you standing by when I’m in the shower, I’m afraid. In case I slip. There’s a prescription gel you’ll rub into my back, hips, and thighs twice a day. Oh, and you’ll have to bring many of my meals to my suite of rooms. Not because I’m lazy, or because I want to turn you into my personal butler, but because I tire easily and need to conserve my strength. I have one more thing to do. It’s a large thing, a vitally important thing, and when the time comes, I must be strong enough to do it.”

“Happy to make and serve the meals, Charlie, but as far as the nursing part goes, I assumed Jenny Knowlton would be the one to—”

“She’s occupied, as I told you, so you must take over her . . . why are you looking at me like that?”

“I was remembering the day I met you. I was only six, but it’s a clear memory. I made a mountain in the dirt—”

“So you did. It’s a clear memory for me, too.”

“—and I was playing with my soldiers. A shadow fell over me. I looked up and it was you. What I was thinking is that your shadow has been over me for my whole life. What I ought to do is drive away from here right now and get out from under it.”

“But you won’t.”

“No. I won’t. But I’ll tell you something. I also remember the man you were—how you got right down on your knees with me and joined in the game. I remember your smile. When you smile now, all I see is a sneer. When you talk now, all I hear is orders: do this, do that, and I’ll tell you why later. What became of you, Charlie?”

He struggled up from the sofa, and when I moved to help, he waved me away. “If you have to ask that, a smart boy grew up to be a stupid man. At least when I lost my wife and son, I didn’t turn to drugs.”

“You had your secret electricity. That was your drug.”

“Thank you for that valuable insight, but since this discussion has no point, let’s end it, shall we? Several of the rooms on the second floor are made up. I’m sure you’ll find one to your taste. I’d like an egg salad sandwich for lunch, a glass of skim milk, and an oatmeal-raisin cookie. The roughage is good for my bowels, I’m told.”

“Charlie—”

“No more,” he said, hobbling toward the elevator. “Soon you’ll know everything. In the meantime, keep your bourgeois judgments to yourself. Lunch at noon. Bring it to the Cooper Suite.”

He left me there, for the time being too stunned to say a word.

 • • •

Three days went by.

They were broiling hot outside, the horizon blurred by a constant haze of humidity. Inside, the resort was cool and comfortable. I made our meals, and although he joined me downstairs for dinner on the second night, he took all the rest in his suite. I heard the TV blaring loudly when I brought them, suggesting that his hearing had also gone downhill. He seemed especially fond of the Weather Channel. When I knocked, he always turned it off before telling me to come in.

Those days were my introduction to practical nursing. He was still able to undress and start the water for his morning shower himself—he had an invalid’s shower-chair to sit on while he soaped and rinsed. I sat on his bed, waiting for him to call. When he did, I turned off the water, helped him out, and dried him off. His body was a wasted remnant of what it had been in his days as a Methodist minister, and his later ones as a carny agent. His hips stuck out like the bones of a plucked Thanksgiving turkey; every rib cast a shadow; his buttocks were little more than biscuits. Thanks to the stroke, everything slumped to the right when I helped him back to his bed.

I rubbed him down with Voltaren Gel for his aches and pains, then fetched his pills, which were in a plastic case with almost as many compartments as there are keys on a piano. By the time he’d gotten them all down, the Voltaren had had a chance to work, and he could dress himself—except for the sock on his right foot. That I had to put on myself, but I always waited until he’d hauled on his boxers. I had no interest in being eye-to-eye with his elderly schlong.

“All right,” he’d say when the sock was pulled up to his scrawny shin. “I’ll do the rest myself. Thank you, Jamie.”

He always said thank you, and the TV always went on as soon as the door was closed.

Those were long, long days. The resort’s pool had been drained, and it was far too hot to walk the grounds. There was a health club, though, and when I wasn’t reading (there was a shitpoke excuse for a library, mostly stocked with Erle Stanley Gardner, Louis L’Amour, and old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books), I exercised in solitary, air-conditioned splendor. I jogged miles on the treadmill, pedaled miles on the stationary bicycle, stepped on the StairMaster, curled hand weights.

The only station the TV in my quarters got was Channel 8 out of Poland Spring, and the reception was lousy, producing a picture too fuzzy to watch. The same was true of the wall-size job in the Sunset Lounge. I guessed there was a satellite dish somewhere, but only Charlie Jacobs was hooked up to it. I thought of asking if he would share, then didn’t. He might have said yes, and I’d taken everything from him that I intended to. Charlie’s gifts came with a pricetag.

All that exercise, and still I slept like shit. My old nightmare, gone for years, returned: dead family members sitting around the dining room table in the home place, and a moldy birthday cake that gave birth to huge insects.