Woodlands (20 page)

It was nearly three o’clock when Leah and Ida pulled out of the conference grounds with their flower wagon. “Would you like me to take you home first?” Leah asked.

“Oh, no! I’d like to see the look on Franklin’s face when he discovers what you’re bringing him this year,” Ida said with a cluck of her tongue. “And just where is that poor man supposed to put all these flowers?”

“All over!” Leah said. “Aren’t they wonderful? Take a deep breath.”

Ida rolled down her window halfway. “It’s overwhelming. And overdoing it, if you ask me. Why must you lavish so much attention on Franklin?”

“I don’t know. I like to. Nobody else seems to.” Leah pulled up in front of Franklin’s house and opened the back of the Blazer. She carried a bucket in each arm up to the front door while Ida waited in the car. Placing them on the doormat, Leah rang the doorbell and dashed around to the side of the house just as she used to when she was a kid. She expected Mavis to come tottering to the door, but she didn’t.

Leah went back to the door and rang the doorbell again. This time she waited. When Mavis didn’t answer, Leah tried the doorknob, planning to let herself in. But the door was locked.

This is a first
. Leah knocked and called out. Still no answer. She peered in the front window. Franklin’s recliner was in clear view, but no one was in the room.

Returning to her car, Leah reached inside for her cell phone.

“No one home?” Ida asked.

“I’m not sure. No one came to the door, and it’s locked.” Leah dialed Franklin’s phone number and let it ring ten times before she hung up.

“Where do you suppose he is?” Ida asked.

Leah paused before answering. She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. With a hesitant finger, Leah punched in the number to the hospital emergency desk.

“Annie? Hi, it’s Leah. By any chance was Franklin Madison admitted today?”

“He arrived about an hour ago,” Annie told her. “I don’t
know the status. Would you like me to check?”

“No, I’m coming right over.” Leah hung up and jumped in the car, leaving the flowers on the doorstep.

“The hospital?” Ida asked, as Leah’s car lurched onto the street and sped toward downtown.

“Yes. About an hour ago. Do you mind going with me, Ida?”

“Of course not. Watch how you’re driving, Leah!” Ida was clutching the door and seat with her thin hands. “It won’t do to get us in a wreck on the way there!”

Leah slowed down, but inside her heart was still racing. She was blaming herself for not taking her May Day bouquet to Franklin that morning before picking up Ida and going to Camp Heather Brook. That meant she would have been ringing his doorbell before 7:30 that morning, but at least he would have been there.

When Leah pulled into the emergency parking lot, Ida had her seatbelt unbuckled and her door open before Leah did. But Leah had to slow her steps so Ida could keep up with her. The two approached the emergency desk with flushed faces.

“How is he?” Leah asked Annie.

Annie glanced at Ida and then back at Leah as if she weren’t sure what to say. “You can go on back, Leah. Dr. Schlipperd is on duty. Ida, perhaps you should wait here.”

“I have a right to see Franklin,” Ida spouted.

Patting wiry Ida on the shoulder, Leah said calmly, “I’ll come right back after I’ve checked on him. Then we’ll see about letting you visit him as well, okay?”

Ida looked worried. “You come right back, now.”

“I will,” Leah said, leading Ida to a chair in the nearly vacant emergency waiting room. “You wait right here for me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ida said.

Leah headed for the back emergency area, and Annie rose
to follow her. When they were out of Ida’s view and hearing, Annie reached over and laid her hand on Leah’s arm.

Leah froze and forced herself to look at Annie and to read the message in Annie’s expression.

“I’m sorry,” Annie said. “He was dead on arrival, but I didn’t know that when you called. I wasn’t sure what to tell you with Ida standing there. You can talk with Dr. Schlipperd if you want, but the cause of death was cardiac arrest.”

“Do you know anything else?” Leah asked, trying to remain calm as she always had in the past when bad news came her way. She refused to let herself feel anything.

“Mavis left only a few minutes ago. She called the ambulance. She said he didn’t respond when she brought him his lunch. He wasn’t in any pain. She said he was sitting in his recliner and appeared to be napping.”

“And he slipped into heaven on a dream cloud,” Leah said, quoting a line from an old poem her mother used to say.

“He was an old man,” Annie said in a comforting voice. “His heart simply stopped.”

Leah drew in a deep breath. “He was a very special old man.” To her surprise, no tears came. “Has anyone notified his relatives?”

“Mavis probably will. I don’t know. She was going back to his house.”

“Okay,” Leah said, her mind beginning to line up all the details. “I’ll tell Ida and take her home. She can make some calls around town. I’ll check on Mavis, and then I’ll call Seth.” As soon as she said his name, Leah slapped her forehead, remembering that Seth didn’t have his car with him. It was still in the hospital parking lot since she had driven him home last night.

“Thanks, Annie,” she said, giving the attendant a quick hug.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.”

Leah sat down next to Ida and spoke to her the way she had spoken with dozens of people in the hospital waiting room. She calmly explained the situation and immediately gave a direction so the stunned recipient of the news would have something to do while the news sunk in.

“I’ll take you home first,” Leah told Ida. “And then would you mind making a few calls? Let Pastor Mike know and Kyle and Jessica.”

“All right. Yes, I can do that.” Ida rose and started toward the parking lot. “It shouldn’t be a surprise, you know. He was an elderly man.”

“Yes,” Leah agreed, offering Ida her arm as they stepped down from the emergency room entrance curb into the parking lot. “He was a very special elderly man.”

They were quiet on the drive to Ida’s. Right before Leah pulled up in front of the house, Ida said, “You know, when I go, I think that’s the way I’d like to go. In my sleep.”

Leah nodded. As soon as Ida was safely in her front door, Leah called Mavis on her cell phone and heard the details Annie had told her repeated. Right before Leah hung up, Mavis said, “He would have liked all the flowers. This morning he asked if you had come yet.”

Leah felt her throat tighten. “I should have come before the event out at Camp Heather Brook.”

“No, no,” Mavis said gently. “I told him you were coming after the May Day party, and he said he would wait in his recliner. He knew you were coming. But bless his soul, he just couldn’t wait.”

Leah drove the few blocks to her house. She was eager to burst through the front door and let her tears have a private place to fall before she went out to Seth’s apartment and drove
him back to pick up his car. That is, if he was well enough to drive.

Unlocking her front door and stepping in, with the tears clinging to the edge of her eyelids, Leah stopped short at the sight that greeted her. One frolicking ball of vanilla fluff with an eager yelp came bounding up to her. Somehow Bungee had managed to knock down the barricade she had put up to keep him in the mudroom with Hula. Bungee had shredded a stack of magazines and dragged the pieces all through the living room. He had knocked the trash can over, and garbage trailed across the kitchen floor. Half a bag of flour that she had thrown in the trash last night when she spotted little bugs in it was now torn open. A white trail of buggy flour dust streaked across the floor in loops, as if Bungee had sunk his teeth into the bag and turned around in half a dozen prancing circles, trying to make as big a mess as possible.

And the little scoot had succeeded right down to the flour on his nose and the barbecue sauce on his front paws. Evidence of where he had romped after he stepped in the nearly empty trash led through the house to Leah’s bedroom. There she found one of her slippers gnawed to a slimy pulp. The matching slipper appeared to be MIA.

With a filthy Bungee under her arm, Leah marched to the mudroom. Poor Hula hunkered back in the corner on her beanbag bed. She lifted her head when she saw Leah and looked at her with pleading eyes as if to say, “Please, take that rabble rouser away from here and leave me in peace!”

“I really didn’t need this today, Bungee,” Leah said, placing the culprit in the deep basin sink. “You’re getting a bath, and then you’re going home!”

Hula thumped her tail against the wall.

“I know, Hula. It’s been a trying day for both of us. But you didn’t just lose one of your oldest and dearest friends.” Leah’s
quick tears tumbled into the sink, mixing with Bungee’s bath water. Hula rose and came to Leah’s side, pressing against her leg.

“Franklin is gone, Hula. And I’m going to miss him.”

L
eah decided it was pointless to start cleaning up her destroyed house until after the pesky Bungee was far, far away.

After she had washed him and allowed her tears to dry up, she found a large box in her side garage and planted Bungee in the box on the car’s backseat. She returned to the house to pick up a few items to take to Seth’s and decided to grab the frozen spinach. With an apologetic pat on the head for Hula, who refused to move from her bed, Leah hurried to the car only to find Bungee had tipped over the box. He was on the floor, gnawing on the backside of the passenger’s seat.

“You are amazing!” she said scooping up the rambunctious boy. “Come on. Let’s try this again—with you in the front seat where I can keep an eye on you.”

Leah moved the passenger’s seat all the way back, wedged the box in between the seat and the dashboard, and settled Bungee in his cell. He yelped at first. Then the car’s motion on
the open highway and the soft jazz radio station lulled him to sleep.

The lack of distraction from Bungee allowed Leah to make several phone calls to locate a number for Seth’s apartment. When she finally reached him, he answered on the first ring.

“Oh, good, Leah, it’s you. Did you get my messages?”

“No, I didn’t listen to my machine. I was only home for a few minutes.” She decided not to mention the disaster that had met her at her house.

“Mavis called about forty minutes ago,” Seth said. “Where are you now?”

“I’m on my way to your place with your little pal. I thought you might want a ride back to the hospital to pick up your car. By the way, how are you?”

“I think I’m in shock. How are you?”

“I’m okay. How’s your shoulder and back feeling?”

“They’re not bad. I’m taking the painkillers so it might be worse than I think. I don’t know. The doctor did say everything checked out clear, didn’t he? I’m a little fuzzy on what actually happened yesterday after they took me into the operating room.”

“Yes, it’s all good news for you. The original spot was clean so he didn’t have to go all the way to the bone. He found several other suspicious places, which he removed and tested, and they were all negative as well.”

“I thought that’s what I remembered. I wanted to make sure.”

“I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

“Good. I’ll be ready when you get here.”

Bungee slept the whole way like an adorable angel. When Leah stopped the car, she had to lift him out of the box and carry him to Seth’s apartment while he was still conked out.

“Oh, sure, you’re a tired fellow, aren’t you? Well, you just wait until I clean up my house tonight. I’m going to be more tired than you!”

Leah knocked on the door, and Seth met her with his hair still wet from the shower. “Come in. I need to grab my shoes.” He scratched Bungee under his chin and said, “Boy, I wish he’d sleep like that for me!”

Leah bit her tongue and shook her head.

While Seth went to put on his shoes, Leah settled Bungee in his bed in the barricaded kitchen. She remembered the spinach and told Seth she would be right back. When she returned, Seth was ready to go, and Bungee was wide awake and ready to play.

“I brought you a spinach casserole,” she said. “Should I leave it in your freezer, or do you want it to thaw out in the refrigerator?”

Seth looked surprised. “You didn’t have to do that. Thanks. Here. I’ll put it in the refrigerator.”

Leah noticed that the living room was all picked up, not that there was much to straighten. The kitchen was clean as well. She remembered how Seth had automatically begun doing her dishes when he was at her house. Tidiness was a trait she admired.

Maybe you can teach Bungee a few tips!

“You’re feeling okay, then?” Leah asked once they were in her car and on the way back to Glenbrooke.

“Yes, I’m doing okay. I’m supposed to take another pain pill in half an hour, but I don’t think I should since I’ll be driving.”

“Wise choice.”

They traveled in silence for awhile before Seth said, “I can’t believe he’s gone. I only knew him for these few short weeks. He was quite a character, wasn’t he?”