Dead Man Docking - Mary Daheim [8]
“Lorenzo?” Judith echoed. “Is that the patient’s name?”
“No,” Renie answered. “Even to me, Bill never discloses his patients’ names. But that’s what we call him. I forget why.”
As the doorbell rang, Judith excused herself and hung up. Two embarrassed old ladies from Springfield, Illinois, had forgotten their keys.
“We’re going clubbing after dinner,” the one with the very blue hair said, “so we won’t get back until after you lock up at ten.”
Judith went upstairs and found their keys on the Bombay chest in Room One. “Have fun,” she said to her guests.
“We be cool,” the other elderly lady said as they headed back to their waiting taxi.
Just after Judith delivered her mother’s “supper”—as Gertrude preferred to call it—Renie phoned again.
“Down to seven,” she announced. “Oops! Got a call on the other line. It may be one of the kids.”
Renie and Bill’s three children had all gotten married on the same day almost two years earlier. The newlyweds’ careers had taken them to distant places around the globe. After constant griping because their thirtysomething off-spring hadn’t moved out of the house, the senior Joneses now complained because they saw their children only once or twice a year. Judith and Joe, meanwhile, were thankful that Mike and his family lived at a ranger station only an hour away.
At last, Judith had some free time to go through the unopened parcels from the toolshed. She started in chronological order, dating back to September. Scanning the script revisions, she saw that less fact and more fiction had been put into the script. Judith wasn’t surprised. She—and Gertrude, for that matter—knew that the protagonist had become more of a symbol for the Greatest Generation than the real life Gertrude Hoffman Grover. But her first name was the same.
In the movie, Gertrude was a deeply committed women’s rights advocate, speaking at rallies and shouting from a soapbox in New York’s Times Square. Well, Judith thought, her mother was certainly one for equality, even if she’d never been farther east than Montana. The job as an ambulance driver in France during World War I was a stretch—Gertrude had never left town. She had joined the local Red Cross auxiliary, knitting items for the Doughboys and buying a couple of Liberty bonds. But her involvement in supporting Prohibition and busting up bottles of booze was going too far. Gertrude had never been a serious drinker, but she had been a flapper, rolling her stockings, dancing the black bottom, and drinking bathtub gin.
That, however, was included in the next few scenes covering the twenties. Judith had reached the part about Gertrude meeting Al Capone when the phone rang.
“Lorenzo’s down to the third floor,” she said. “Even if he jumps, he’ll probably just bounce around and get banged up. You’d better check with the Rankerses to see if they can take over for you at the B&B.”
Hanging up, Judith wondered if she might, in fact, be joining Renie on the cruise. It still seemed like an outside shot, however. She kept going through the script, marveling at the fantasies the writers had concocted for Gertrude’s life.
The final scenes involved the doughty heroine in her advanced years, using a high-tech telescope to scan the heavens and wishing she could land on Mars. There were days, Judith thought wryly, when she wished the same for her mother.
But what startled her most was the separate envelope that had gotten stuck to the last page. It was addressed to Gertrude and marked URGENT.
Carefully, Judith opened the sealed envelope. Her dark eyes widened when she found a check made out to her mother. The amount was twenty thousand dollars. A brief note was attached stating that the sum was due to Gertrude on the first day of principal photography, September 10. Quickly, Judith opened the other envelopes. They contained more script revisions, but no checks. She hurried to the toolshed.