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Reeves.”
    “Don’t forget Dr. Lee Macklin.”
    “Who’s that?” Carver asked.
    “Sunhaven’s chief administrator.”
    “The doctor who signed Sam Cusanelli’s death certificate?”
    “No,” Desoto said. “A young staff doctor named Pauly signed it”
    Carver looked out at the clouds scudding eastward, away from him, over the wide ocean. “I get the impression you might already have used the resources of the law to check on some of these people.”
    “Only Macklin and Pauly,” Desoto said.
    “And you came up with?”
    “Nothing surprising. Macklin has the sort of background you’d expect. Administrator of a nursing home in Chattanooga before coming here with glowing recommendations. Married. No kids. Pauly, first name Dan, is a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor and earned his medical degree at Washington University in Saint Louis. Did a general medicine internship in Miami, practiced there for a while at a medical clinic, and two years ago opened his own practice in Del Moray. He has a contract with Sunhaven and calls on patients there daily.”
    “It all sounds okay,” Carver said. “Nobody with an arrest record or a mail-order medical degree.”
    “Sounds okay far as it goes. But I don’t have all the answers yet. I’ll feed the names you just gave me into the wonderful world of the computer and see what happens. Shouldn’t take long. You be around wherever you are for an hour or so, I’ll call you back. You home?”
    “Yeah,” Carver said. It still felt odd to realize he, and others, now thought of Edwina’s house as his “home.” Carver’s official home, a ramshackle cottage on the beach twenty miles north, was where he’d lived until he became involved with Edwina. He still slept there occasionally, when he had business in that direction and it was convenient, but less often every month. “I’ll be here till you call.”
    “Get back to you,” Desoto said, and hung up.
    Carver replaced the receiver, shoved the kitchen phone back to its customary place near the wall, and downed the rest of his beer. It was already going flat and warm.
    He’d limped over to the refrigerator and was about to draw out another can when he heard the diminishing snarl of Edwina’s Mercedes as she downshifted to make the turn into the driveway. Then the faint swishing of tires on the hot concrete, soft against hard.
    A car door slammed solidly out near the side of the house. She hadn’t parked in the garage; she was going out again soon.
    Carver decided to forget the second beer. He gingerly shoved the refrigerator door shut with his cane, careful not to dent or scratch its gleaming white surface.
    “Too early to drink,” Edwina said. She’d seen his car parked in the shade alongside the garage and knew he was in the house. And when she’d entered the kitchen she immediately saw the opened beer can on the table.
    “Imagine me a thousand miles east,” Carver said. “It’s later there.”
    “Wetter, too,” Edwina said. “Unless you want me to imagine you on an island.”
    Subject-changing time. “Show the condo?”
    She put down her purse next to the Budweiser can and walked over to the sink. “Looks like I’ve got a contract. I’m supposed to meet the buyer at Quill this afternoon and write it up officially.” Quill Realty was her employer and the beneficiary of her uncommon determination. “It’s a close enough offer I think it’ll be accepted without a counter.”
    “Congratulations,” Carver said.
    “Not yet. Maybe this afternoon. How’d things go at Sunhaven?”
    “It’s a depressing place.”
    “It might not be that way from the inside.”
    “Oh, it is,” Carver assured her, “despite the cheery decor.”
    “I didn’t mean inside the building,” Edwina said. “I meant inside the heads of the residents. Your outlook and your expectations change when you get old. The things that make you content are different from when you were young.”
    “I’ve noticed that already,”