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None of them dared to say anything, and Spencer made an effort not to think, either.
“You were seen pushing an individual in a wheelchair. He was wearing sunglasses and Mr. Truman’s hat—”
“Truedove,” said Spencer.
“‘True love’? Why are those words germane to our discussion?”
“Truedove. It’s my name. I was just correcting you,” Spencer said. Even as he spoke the word “correcting,” he deeply regretted having put himself in such a perilous position.
Britta regarded him as if he were something a dog had left on the sidewalk. “I see. Then may I ask—did your mother raise you to believe that interrupting your elders was acceptable?”
“My mother abandoned me to find herself. She now lives in New Orleans under the name Constanina de Fornay, which is who she was in some past life. I never hear from her, probably because Constanina never had children and doesn’t know how to relate to a son.”
“How interesting. Have you wondered, Mr. Truman, why she went to such lengths to escape the environment of which you were a part?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot.”
“Knowing you as I do, I assume all that thinking has failed to lead you to any conclusion. May I continue with what I was saying? Would that be an arrangement of which you would approve?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Britta said, “The individual in the wheelchair could not be identified from the video, but he slumped as if quite dead.”
“Oh, him,” said Rebecca. “That was Ralph Osmond. He was at the hospital to visit a sick friend. We gave him a lift home.”
“How gracious of you. Can you imagine how he might have gottentothe hospital?”
Spencer realized they should have left the answer to Bobby, but only after he had said, “His wife brought him and went home to wait for his call but got a terrible migraine.”
Britta stared at Spencer almost as long as she had regarded Bobby in silence when he’d said his face played tricks on him.
Then she asked, “Are you sure Mr. Osmond’s wife didn’t run away to New Orleans to live as a previous incarnation?”
Again, the amigos retreated into glassy-eyed silence.
Britta said, “The parking lot cameras didn’t have a view of the vehicle into which this Ralph person was assisted.”
Spencer knew better than to smile.
“The police, being of a caliber that makes them unsuited even to be crossing guards, say the doctors might have misdiagnosed my son. He might be alive and merely wandered off in some fugue state.”
“It happens,” Bobby assured her.
Britta skewered him with her stiletto stare. “They tell me that, in a missing persons case, I must wait forty-eight hours. If Ernest remains missing, only then can they begin a search for him.”
“Well, maybe Rebecca, Spencer, and I could go looking for him.”
“Illuminate me as to how you would do that, Mr. Sham.”
“Well, you know, we could cruise the town, see if we can find him wandering around somewhere. We care about him, too. We came all this way to see him.”
“Cruise around town.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She lifted her chin as if to be in a better posture to look down on him. “The books you have written that you wish to call ‘novels’—the events in those books, which I suppose you call ‘plots,’ are quite as overripe as this situation. Are they not?”
“Well, maybe, in some ways, I don’t know.”