Final Breath (22 page)

But she had an awful feeling Eli wasn't anywhere near here.

Eli waited for the swarthy man in the green shirt to take off his sunglasses. He wanted to see if one of his eyes was infected. But the man's glasses stayed on.

Eli remembered a ValuCo price tag had been sticking out of the sleeve of the guy's beige jacket at the fun fair yesterday. Obviously the guy had picked it up in a hurry so he could cover his Mariners 59 T-shirt. Maybe he'd grabbed the baseball cap, too; anything to alter his appearance--just in case his target had started to catch on to him.

The closer they got to downtown Seattle, the more the bus filled up, and now people were standing. The bus driver announced they were in a free-ride zone, and people started getting on and off through a door closer to where that man sat--as well as the one up front.

No one had asked Eli to give up the handicap seat, thank God. He'd been able to sit there while the driver told him where to transfer for the bus to Evergreen Point Manor.

A woman in the back pulled the Stop cord for the driver. Eli watched her get out of her seat and waddle over to the bus's back door. Eli stood up. "This isn't your stop yet, honey," the driver told him.

"I know," Eli whispered. He held onto a pole and leaned close to her. "There a creepy guy in a green shirt back there. He's got sunglasses on. I think he's been following me."

Her eyes searched in the rearview mirror. "Looks normal enough," she said. "What--is he a pervert or something? Want me to radio it in?"

"No, but I'd really like to lose him."

As she pulled over to the next stop, Eli moved closer to the door. Casually glancing back, he saw the man get to his feet. He shuffled past a few passengers in the aisle, then stood behind the woman at the back door.

No one was at the stop as the bus ground to a halt. And no one stood behind Eli at the front door. It whooshed open. He took another step toward the door, then crouched down and turned to the driver. "Has that guy stepped off yet?" he whispered.

Her focus shifted up to the rearview mirror. She kept one hand on the door lever. "One second...okay..."

Eli heard that whoosh sound again, and the doors closed right behind him. He felt the draft on the back of his legs.

Grinning, the bus driver started to pull into traffic. The man in the green shirt pounded on the rear door to get back in. Eli spied him through the window. He looked so pissed off. He was running alongside the bus.

"Hey, stop!" yelled a woman passenger. "Stop, driver! Somebody wants to get on!"

The driver picked up speed. "Like the song says, 'It's Too Late, Baby!'"

"Thank you," Eli whispered, and he returned to his seat.

The transfer stop to the Number 41 was only a few blocks from where they'd ditched the creepy guy in the green shirt. So while Eli waited in the bus shelter, he kept a lookout for the strange man. He felt bad for not taking his mom more seriously when she'd said she might have a stalker. But his mom was wrong about one thing: this weird guy wasn't stalking her; he was stalking
him
.

The bus driver on the Number 41 wasn't nearly as nice as the lady driver on the Number 11. He was a pasty-faced guy in his forties. When Eli asked if this was the bus to Evergreen Point Manor, the driver nodded tiredly. "Your stop's Northeast 125th. You'll walk three blocks north from there."

"Um, how will I know if--"

"I'll announce it," he interrupted. "You got about twenty minutes. Take a seat."

Eli did as he was told. He found an empty seat. But at the first stop on I-5, the bus filled up with a score of noisy, obnoxious teenagers who kept screaming and laughing. A big woman with BO ended up sitting next to him, and she talked loudly on her cell phone the whole time. It was all Eli could do not to rip it out of her hand and hurl it out the window. The noise died down when most of the people got off at Northgate Shopping Mall. His stop was two stops later.

It was an industrial park area bordering on a big forest. The buildings housed medical and dental offices, as well as some insurance company branches. Every building looked the same: cold, sterile, and boring--each with a big parking lot. Eli couldn't find Evergreen Court Northeast. He wandered around for fifteen minutes until he saw a bus pull into another parking area beyond some trees. Then he noticed the big stone slab with raised lettering on it at the edge of the lot:

EVERGREEN POINT MANOR

A Seniors Community Since 1998

There was also a sunflower carved in the stone. That must have been their symbol, because the same sunflower was stenciled on the orange awning over the front door. The drab three-story building was beige with tan trim and a lot of balconies--probably with views of the boring industrial park. A couple of woman with walkers slowly lumbered toward the front entrance. Eli was amazed to see one bundled up in a sweatsuit, and the other had a sweater on--in this warm weather. Two elderly men sat on a bench by the door. One wore a hat and a sweater; his buddy appeared to have dressed for a golf game, only his shirt was inside out and he held onto a cane. "Hey there, sport!" the hat-wearing old man on the bench called to him. His friend with the cane waved and smiled.

Eli was waiting for the two ladies with walkers to make it through the door, which opened automatically. He smiled and waved back to the guy on the bench. "Hi, how are you?"

"Finer than frog's hair!" he replied. "And it's a beautiful day!"

When the old ladies finally made it inside, they turned and smiled at him and said hello. They seemed nice and so happy to see him. It was weird being in this strange place in a city he still wasn't used to. This whole trip had been pretty scary. He felt so grateful for the friendly smiles. He even started to tear up a little, and he wasn't sure why.

At the front counter, there was a sign,
BINGO
2-
NITE
! 6:30--
ACTIVITIES ROOM
.
Beside it was a Latino woman with shoulder-length hair and orange scrubs that had the sunflower logo on it. She smiled at Eli and asked if he needed any help.

"Yes, I'm here to see Vera Cormier," he said.

She reached for the phone. "I'll see. I doubt she's in her suite."

Eli's heart sank a little. Had he come all this way for nothing?

"Are you Vera's grandson?" the young woman asked. She had the phone to her ear. "I didn't think Vera had any kids."

"Um, my mom's a friend of hers," Eli lied.

She hung up the phone. "No answer." She turned toward the doorway to a room behind her. "Hey, Noreen, have you seen Vera? She isn't in her digs. Do you know where she might be?"

"Three guesses!" called the woman from the back room.

The pretty receptionist nodded, then smiled at Eli. "She's in the garden, honey--"

"You guessed it," said the woman from the back room.

The receptionist told Eli to go straight down the hall to another set of doors that led outside. The garden was just to the right of the flagpole. He couldn't miss it.

As Eli headed down the corridor, a slightly putrid smell filled his nostrils. He passed a few people in wheelchairs parked in the hallway. Some of them were in their robes or nightclothes, and they looked pretty out of it.

He breathed easier outside. The lawn in back was bordered by the forest. A winding path snaked through the yard and the garden area. Several benches flanked the path, most of them occupied by the elderly residents. A few nurses in scrubs were pushing folks in wheelchairs.

Eli headed to the garden, dense and cluttered with tall plants, flowers, and blooming bushes. Someone had set a bunch of different lawn ornaments in the garden--a birdbath, a fake deer, a couple of gnomes, a Cupid, and even a small replica of the Statue of Liberty. It reminded Eli of a miniature golf course.

A blond woman was on her knees at the edge of the garden, planting some pink, purple, and white flowers. She wore a straw hat and gardening gloves. On the back of her tan sweatshirt was a drawing of some flowers over the words:
COMPOST HAPPENS
.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Eli said, approaching her. "Are you Vera?"

The sweet-looking old lady turned and gaped up at him. "Am I under arrest?" she asked.

Eli was confused for a moment, then he looked down at his
CHICAGO POLICE
T-shirt. "Oh, um, no."

"Well, that's a relief," she said, with a grin. Holding the hoe, she dabbed her brow with her sleeve. "For a minute there I thought I'd forgotten to pay a parking ticket back in 1973 or something. Do I know you, dear?"

"No, we--we haven't met," Eli said, a bit nervously.

Setting down the hoe, she took off a gardening glove and held out her hand to him. "Well, I'm Vera, resident tiller of the soil here."

Eli shook her hand. "I'm Eli. I--um, I like your garden a lot."

She frowned at the fake deer. "Personally, I think some of this tacky stuff can go, but I've been outvoted. These new petunias ought to be nice. They're such a cheery flower." She looked him up and down, then smiled. "Eli, that's a nice name. So what did you want to see me about, Eli?"

"I live in the Tudor Court Apartments with my mom," he said. "We moved in about five weeks ago. We're in apartment number nine."

The smile ran away from her face. "Oh."

"We've had some pretty weird things happen in there." Eli squatted down so they were face-to-face. "We figured out the place is haunted. I hear this woman killed her son in there, and then she shot herself. I was talking to the caretaker, Larry, and he said you were living next door in number ten when it happened."

A slightly pained look on her face, she nodded again. "How is Larry? Does he still have the canary?"

"Yeah," Eli said. "Larry's fine."

"A nice man," Vera said. "Bit of an odd duck, but a nice man and a hard worker."

Eli could tell she didn't want to talk about the murder-suicide. She was changing the subject on him. "Anyway," he said. "I was hoping you could tell me something about what happened with that woman and her son. No one seems to know what really went on. No one even remembers their names and when it happened."

With a long sigh, the old woman glanced down at the box with three more petunias in plastic pots. The rest of the box held empty pots. "You know, these petunias can tolerate a lot of heat," she said. "But this afternoon sun is a bit strong for yours truly. Why don't we sit over there in the shade?" Pulling off her other work glove and dropping it on the ground, Vera nodded toward a nearby bench--beneath a sycamore tree. "First, help an old lady up. These knees aren't what they used to be."

Eli took her by the arm and helped her up from the kneeling pad at the garden's edge. He noticed she had some trouble walking, and she clung to him until they sat down on the bench. "Whew!" she said, taking off her hat and fanning herself. "So--you want to hear about Loretta and her boy?"

"Loretta? That was the mother's name?" Eli asked, sitting beside her.

Vera nodded, then she squinted at him. "Say, why don't you just look up all of this on the Internet World Wide Web or whatever?"

Eli shrugged. "Because I don't know their names--or when it happened."

She stopped fanning herself with her hat. Her mouth twisted into a frown. "You know, Eli, you and your mother should just find another place to live. Ever since Loretta and her son died there, something's been wrong with that apartment."

"Do you remember the son's name--and how old he was?"

She nodded. "He was about your age, fifteen."

"I'm going to be thirteen soon."

She smiled at him. "Well, you're very mature for your age. Earl, he was a
young
fifteen."

"Earl," he repeated. The Ouija board had said that the boy's name was
Carl
and he was fourteen--just one letter and one year off.

"You remind me of him," Vera said. "Your names are similar, too, Earl and Eli. He was a good-looking boy, too, and very sweet."

"What was their last name?" Eli asked. "Do you remember?"

She nodded. "Sayers, Loretta and Earl Sayers." She slowly fanned herself with her hat again. "They moved to Tudor Court in July 1974. Loretta had just left her husband, an older man who lived in--um, Magnolia, I think. And he had some older children from a first wife who died." She ran her bony fingers over her mouth. "I can't for the life of me remember his name. He and Loretta weren't married for very long. His name wasn't Sayers. That was the name Loretta went back to. Earl was her son from a previous marriage, this Sayers fellow. I don't know what happened there."

"What was she like?" Eli asked.

"Oh, she was a very beautiful girl--or I should say,
woman.
She was in her late thirties and a bit withdrawn--moody at times. Maybe she was just lonely. I never saw her with a friend or a boyfriend."

"What about Earl?" Eli asked. "Did he have any friends?"

"Only one that I ever saw, but he was over quite a lot," she answered. "I forget his name, but he was a little older than Earl. He had to be at least sixteen, because he usually drove over, and ended up blocking my car in the garage. It really got my goat, the way he'd just leave his car right in front of mine for hours on end. I don't know how many times I had to call Loretta and ask Earl's friend to move his silly car..."

"When did they die?" Eli asked. "Do you remember?"

"November, that same year," she replied. "The shot woke me up. It was around three in the morning. I thought someone had lit off a rocket-bottle on the beach."

"Bottle rocket," Eli said. "Did you call the police?"

Vera shook her head. "No, but the next morning, her husband came by--I don't think they'd officially divorced yet. He got the super to let him in, and they found Loretta and Earl upstairs. A lot of people talked about how the murder-suicide looked
staged
. I don't see how they could say anything like that, because the police sealed off that place right away. So no one saw anything in there except for the authorities. But there was some gossip that maybe the husband had murdered them both, only he'd set it up to look as if Loretta had killed Earl and then herself. I suppose I did as much to fan those flames. The police asked me about him. He visited there quite a lot, especially during the first month or so. It was late summer, and with the windows open, I could hear them arguing. For such a quiet little thing, Loretta's voice sure got loud at times. I'd hear her screaming at him on the phone sometimes, too. I got the distinct impression he didn't want to let her go--at least, not without a fight. And fight, they did."