I pull into a Starbucks to get a coffee, a double shot, black, as if that will help me collect my thoughts, as if caffeine will calm me, and I sit in my car for a few minutes and try Benton again. Next I text him, making sure he somehow gets the message that he needs to intervene without delay before Douglas Burke does something foolish, dangerous, possibly irreparable. She’s unstable and obsessed and armed. I drop my unfinished coffee in the trash and drive off, wondering if I should warn Lucy and decide against it. I’m not sure what she might do.

It is dark, the sun below a blackened horizon when I reach Fayth House, a brick complex, tidy and relatively modern, with deliberately placed flowerbeds and trees. A silver SUV is pulling out as I turn in, leaving very few cars in the parking lot, and I suspect most of the residents in the retirement community don’t drive. I walk inside a pleasant lobby with blue carpet and blue furniture and silk flowers, and Americana prints and posters on the walls that remind me of Peggy Stanton’s checks.

The receptionist is a stout woman with frizzy brown hair and thick glasses, and I ask her who’s in charge.

“Which resident are you here to see?” she says, with a cheerful smile.

I ask her if there is a director. I realize it’s after hours, but is there someone in administration I can talk to? It’s important, I let her know.

“I don’t believe Mrs. Hoyt has left yet. She had a late meeting.” The receptionist picks up the phone to make sure, and I notice a fall arrangement of fresh flowers on a table behind her, burgundy Asiatic lilies, purple lisianthus, orange roses, and yellow oak leaves.

A floral delivery with no card. Someone, possibly the receptionist, has taped to the vase a piece of paper from a Fayth House memo pad, a name with a room number written on it that I can’t make out from where I stand. But I recognize It’s her Bday written in large print and underlined.

“Cindy? There’s someone here to see you? I’m sorry,” the receptionist says to me. “What’s your name?”

I’m directed to an office at the end of a long hallway that takes me past a brightly decorated dining room where residents are finishing dinner, some of them in wheelchairs, a lot of walkers and canes by the tables. The beauty salon is closed for the night, and an elderly man is playing the piano in a music room, and a cleaning cart is parked outside the library. I notice boxes of commercial trash-can liners, a hundred to a carton, the same brand I found inside Howard Roth’s house.