She tried to push me away, but her gesture was feeble. I found the side zipper to her dress and thrust my hands inside, unhooking her bra, pushing on her chest, phone tucked under my ear. When the dispatcher came on, I gave her Albritten’s address, with a command to come at once.

19
Dead End

It was long past sunset when Peppy and I drove east of town, looking for Doris McKinnon’s farm. I’d spent a tense two hours at the hospital but had finally received a reassuring report on Ms. Albritten.

I’d followed her into the emergency room, making sure she was getting priority attention, before checking in at the front desk. The ambulance driver was standing there. It turned out he was the same person who’d come for Sonia Kiel twelve hours earlier—he was working double shifts this week.

“Are you with some kind of Guardian Angels organization?” he demanded with heavy humor. “You go through the streets of Lawrence looking for ladies who’ve keeled over?”

“Hard to know what you would do without me,” I said, trying to get into the spirit of the exchange.

Actually, I was tense. Say, scared. I was in a strange town with a woman who had a bitter history with the place. If she or her son claimed that something I’d done had pushed her over the brink, I would be in a lonely spot.

Albritten had never completely lost consciousness. She’d thrust her pocketbook and phone at me as she was wheeled out of her house, making the crew stop to watch me lock the door before she let them put her in the ambulance.

“Better you than them. At least I’ll know who stole my money if it disappears,” she said to me.

At the hospital, while I was filling out forms for them, I went into Albritten’s phone. Her son’s number was fortunately one of seven numbers in her favorites screen. It unnerved me when he answered the call with “Yes, Mother?” but of course her name had shown up on his own phone.

He lived in a town called Warrensburg, about ninety miles east of Lawrence, he said, when we’d sorted out who I was and why I was calling.

“Just who are you, and what were you doing with Mother?” he demanded.

“Do you remember Emerald Ferring?” I didn’t say I was a detective, just that I had come from Chicago looking for her and a neighbor had directed me to Ms. Albritten.

“She was in the middle of telling me about Doris McKinnon, who owned the farm where the Ferrings moved back in 1951, when she suddenly collapsed.”