Page 76 of The Only One Left

Lenora makes no indication she wants to type more. Her hands sit in her lap, the useful left one atop the useless right, and she stares at them as if she didn’t hear me.

“Who was the father?” I say, pressing. “Was it Ricky?”

Still nothing from Lenora. No acknowledging the question. No acknowledgingme. Without saying a word, she’s made her message clear—she doesn’t want to talk about it.

I can’t blame her. She was pregnant. The baby’s now gone. She probably thinks there’s nothing else to be said.

Only there is.

And Lenora told it to at least one other person—Mary.

Considering what happened to her, I should be grateful Lenora now refuses to tell me. Maybe that’s another reason for her silence. She doesn’t want to put me in more danger than I might already be.

Once again, I think about leaving. It would take only minutes to pack my suitcase and box, grab my medical bag, and walk away from Hope’s End without looking back. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Even though I haven’t been told everything, what I do know is enough to keep me here. I need to learn the rest.

The Hope family murders. Lenora’s pregnancy. Mary’s death. They’re all tied together in a complex knot of secrets, lies, and misdeeds both past and present. I’m certain that if I can unravel it, the truth will be revealed. About Carter and Mary, yes, but most of all about Lenora. She’s the person I need to understand the most.

So I stay, letting the morning pass slowly and silently. With any other patient, I would have busied myself with light housework or cooking lunch or even just watching TV with them. None of those options are available to me at Hope’s End. So I pass the time reading a Danielle Steel novel on the divan while Lenora sits in her wheelchair and stares out the window.

It reminds me of my mother’s final days, when she was too fragile and pain-wracked to be moved to the couch in the living room. Stuck in a room without a television and its comforting background noise, the silence became so thick it was almost unbearable.

Today isn’t quite that bad, but it’s enough to make me appreciate the few moments of sound and activity. Fetching lunch. Feeding Lenora. Even assisting her in the bathroom because it’s something to do besides sitting here and thinking. While I tackle the tasks with endless chatter, Lenora does nothing in response.

No taps.

Certainly no typing.

She’s become the person I thought she was when I first arrived. Silent, still, almost a nonentity. It makes me wonder if this is what shewas like with all the nurses before Mary breezed in with a typewriter. If so, does Lenora regret indulging her? Does she feel the same about me and has decided this will be the way things are now?

And itisher decision. An afternoon at the typewriter could end all this. Yet we spend this long, dreary day in more insufferable silence. I finish my book. Lenora stares out the window. The day fades into dusk, which darkens into night.

Eventually Archie arrives, carrying dinner on a tray. Salmon and sweet potatoes that are roasted for me, mashed for Lenora. On the side are piping-hot rolls for me and a chocolate milkshake for Lenora.

“I thought Miss Hope could use a pick-me-up,” Archie explains. “She loved them when she was a girl.”

The gesture is so thoughtful it takes me a second to remember that he could have killed Mary. It doesn’t matter that Archie looks about as threatening as a teddy bear. He was here when Lenora’s family was murdered in 1929, and he was here when Mary plummeted off the cliff.

Yet that also makes him a perfect source of information about both of those nights. The challenge is figuring out if Archie’s a friend or a foe, a suspect or a potentially trusted resource. For now, I decide it’s best to treat him as all of the above.

“You didn’t need to go to all the trouble,” I say, taking the food from his hands. Because I haven’t yet attached Lenora’s meal tray to her wheelchair, I set it on the sideboard next to her snow globe and the cassette Jessie gave me yesterday.

“It’s no trouble,” Archie says. “Besides, I wanted to see how Miss Hope is doing.”

I glance at Lenora, who acts like neither of us is in the room with her. “Not too well.”

“I think that goes for all of us,” Archie says. “Poor Mary. Had I known she was hurting so much, I would have tried to help her somehow. And then the cliff giving way like that. These are not happy times at Hope’s End.”

I wonder if there’s ever been a time here that was happy. From what Lenora has written, I’ve gathered the place was doomed from the start.

“The other day, you told me that you and Lenora used to be close.”

“I did,” Archie says. “And we were.”

“How close?”

“Best friends, I guess. Although that was more from proximity than anything else. We were roughly the same age in a place where that wasn’t common.”

“What about Virginia? Were the two of you also close?”

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