Secrets and Scandals by Glendale Piper

Author:Glendale, Piper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Town & Sky
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

See you there, and calm down. I text back.

He immediately texts back: You calm down.

And here were go.

Chapter 15

Sitting in the parking lot of the retirement center, I review what I’ve been able to find out about Janice Webster on MegaPeopleFinder. She was in her mid-twenties when she died but had been living just outside of Talon with her husband who had since died of a drug overdose. Her mother, Helen Webster, has been living at the retirement center for the past three years.

Inside the lobby is heated to about eighty hundred degrees, and even so, they have a fire going in the river rock fireplace.

“Can I help you?” asks a polished young man at the front desk.

“I hope so.” I paste on my best friendly smile. “I’d like to - ” I start but then stop short as I read the sign behind the desk that says No Soliciting, followed by Visitors Must be Approved Family or Registered Friends.

I regroup and look at the clipboard setting on the counter, which holds a paper that says volunteer sign-in.

“I’d like to sign in to…” I scan the volunteer sign-in sheet while the front desk attendant furrows his brow. Volunteers have signed in for kitchen duty, bus driving, and—ah-ha—reading. “To sign in to read.”

“Fantastic!” his brow unknits and as he clasps his hands together in delight. “Have you volunteered with us before?”

I shake my head no.

“No worries, just fill this out.” He hands me a form. “And I’ll just need your driver’s license.” He runs it through a little scanner and hands it back to me. As I finish the form, he hands me a sticker with my name in gigantic letters. I peel it off the back, and when I stick it on, it takes up half my shirt.

“We like our residents to know who they’re talking to,” he explains. “Just go straight through those double doors and take a right. You’ll see the library on your left.”

I walk through the doors, shedding my cardigan. The walls of the library are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and the room is decorated with several couches and rocking chairs. There are only three people in the library, and two are asleep. The third is a compact, gray-haired lady wearing purple-rimmed glasses with her nose in a romance novel.

“Hello?” I say. She looks up for a moment, sniffs, and looks back to her book. “I’m here to read.”

“Congratulations.” She waves her hand as if to shoo me away.

“I’m supposed to read to Helen Webster.”

“No, you’re not,” she says.

I purse my lips and wonder how it is this octogenarian is already on to me.

“That’s what they said down at the front desk.”

She puts her finger in her book to mark her place before looking up at me. “No, they didn’t.”

“How do you know?” I ask, sounding like a little kid.

“Because Helen Webster is in the memory care wing. They don’t let the memory care patients over here with the rest of us.”

“Oh, I must have misunderstood,” I say, beginning to back out of the room.

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