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the person so chosen happened to be awake, he or she might stroke the cat. To Dan’s knowledge, no
one had ever demanded that Azzie be evicted. They seemed to know he was there as a friend.
“Who’s the doctor on call?” Dan asked.
“You,” Claudette promptly came back.
“You know what I mean. The real doctor.”
“Emerson, but when I phoned his service, the woman told me not to be silly. Everything’s socked
in from Berlin to Manchester. She said that except for the ones on the turnpikes, even the plows are
waiting for daylight.”
“All right,” Dan said. “I’m on my way.”
3
After working at the hospice for awhile, Dan had come to realize there was a class system even for the
dying. The guest accommodations in the main house were bigger and more expensive than those in
Rivington One and Two. In the Victorian manse where Helen Rivington had once hung her hat and
written her romances, the rooms were called suites and named after famous New Hampshire residents.
Charlie Hayes was in Alan Shepard. To get there, Dan had to pass the snack alcove at the foot of the
stairs, where there were vending machines and a few hard plastic chairs. Fred Carling was plopped
down in one of these, munching peanut butter crackers and reading an old issue of Popular Mechanics.
Carling was one of three orderlies on the midnight-to-eight shift. The other two rotated to days twice
a month; Carling never did. A self-proclaimed night owl, he was a beefy time-server whose arms,
sleeved out in a tangle of tats, suggested a biker past.
“Well lookit here,” he said. “It’s Danny-boy. Or are you in your secret identity tonight?”
Dan was still only half awake and in no mood for joshing. “What do you know about Mr. Hayes?”
“Nothing except the cat’s in there, and that usually means they’re going to go tits-up.”
“No bleeding?”
The big man shrugged. “Well yeah, he had a little noser. I put the bloody towels in a plague-bag,
just like I’m s’posed to. They’re in Laundry A, if you want to check.”
Dan thought of asking how a nosebleed that took more than one towel to clean up could be
characterized as little, and decided to let it go. Carling was an unfeeling dolt, and how he’d gotten a
job here—even on the night shift, when most of the guests were either asleep or trying to be quiet so
they wouldn’t disturb anyone else—was beyond Dan. He suspected somebody might have pulled a
wire or two. It was how the world worked. Hadn’t his own father pulled a wire to get his final job, as
caretaker at the Overlook Hotel? Maybe that wasn’t proof positive that who you knew was a lousy way
to get a job, but it certainly seemed suggestive.
“Enjoy your evening, Doctor Sleeeep,” Carling called after him, making no effort to keep his voice
down.
At the nurses’ station, Claudette was charting meds while Janice Barker watched a small TV with
the sound turned down low. The current program was one of those endless ads for colon cleanser, but
Jan was watching with her eyes wide and her mouth hung ajar. She started when Dan tapped his
fingernails on the counter and he realized she hadn’t been fascinated but half asleep.
“Can either of you tell me anything substantive about Charlie? Carling knows from nothing.”
Claudette glanced down the hall to make sure Fred Carling wasn’t in view, then lowered her voice,
anyway. “That man’s as useless as boobs on a bull. I keep hoping he’ll get fired.”
Dan kept his similar opinion to himself. Constant sobriety, he had discovered, did wonders for
one’s powers of discretion.