Marianne watched him leave, the notebook and recorder tucked into a messenger bag, then drove herself to the Largo Shores Club. It was getting late, the sky so inky it was hard to tell what was encroaching storm and what was night. The wind was picking up; she felt it buffeting the sides of her little car. Eric’s little car. The parking lot was nearly empty, but so many spots were marked handicapped that she still had to park far from the entrance.

The Largo Shores Club was nothing like the home where Marianne’s granny lived. Its lobby had leather furniture, lamps instead of overhead fluorescents, and real paintings on the walls—no ugly motel prints or crucifixes or no-smoking signs.

Hello? Marianne said at the front desk. Hello? she said to no one. She peeped over the front ledge to see that the surface of the desk was covered in papers and unsorted mail. It looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry, or else used by a number of people who didn’t have to sit there. She heard the sounds of people talking and laughing from a back room and followed them.

Hello? she said again, opening a heavy wooden door to a large and echoing recreation room, with four Ping-Pong tables manned by a half dozen deeply tanned seniors in coordinated active wear. No one noticed her.

“I’m looking for Frances Ketterling?” Marianne said. “She lives here?”

A woman wearing a pink sport visor and matching pink wristbands, who’d just landed a winning shot, knew where she was. “Frances is taking in the orchids!” she said. “Before the storm! I’ll show you.”

On the long walk to find Frances, the woman talked about the various features of the Largo Shores Club, gushing as if she were selling Marianne a timeshare. Swimming, tennis, competitive bocce, conversational French and Italian: it was for active seniors, she said, and also people with a certain kind of refinement. She looked at Marianne appraisingly as she said this—Marianne wondered a little anxiously if she would pass muster. Something about the phrases “conversational French and Italian” and “taking in the orchids” sounded deeply appealing to her.

Finally they found a woman carrying an armload of orchids in terracotta pots. The flowers trembled precariously on their stalks, and the whole collection seemed about to topple out of her arms, but she would not let them take any. She was shorter and stouter than the woman with the visor, and wearing an expensive-looking linen tunic. You have to wait until the very last moment to take in orchids, she was saying. They benefited from the prestorm humidity.

“I’m Marianne Stuart. From Genesis Ranch? I need to talk to you. Could I help you carry the orchids?”