Codebreakers

Jo was stunned. She watched the girl walk into the kitchen. She wondered if she should phone the agency. Or perhaps, the police. She would but first, she needed to rest for a moment – all the excitement wore her out. She tried to fight falling asleep, after all, there was a stranger in her home but her weariness won out over concern about the blue-haired girl.

She woke to glorious smells wafting from the kitchen. The girl held a plate in front of her. She was smiling. Eggs Benedict – Jo’s favourite – looking like something produced on a cooking show.

“Try them. It’s my special Hollandaise sauce. Tell me what you think.”

Jo wavered. Maybe she poisoned them. Just a taste. She looked up.

“This is delicious.”

The blue-haired girl grinned.

When she finished eating, Jo dabbed at her mouth with her napkin pondering the young woman who looked the way she did yet whipped up a sumptuous dish.

“Martha … Martha Goode. Such an old-fashioned name.”

“I know, who names their kid Martha? Well, whoever my mother was named me Martha. The people who adopted me – the Goode family – should have been called the Bad family. Anyway, they kept ‘Martha’ and got my birth certificate changed to Goode and then decided I was too much trouble and gave me back. Nobody thought to change my last name because I was passed from dysfunctional foster family to dysfunctional foster family. Enough about me – tell me about you – Josephine, right?”

“It is Mrs. Dardenne, if you please.”

“So what happened to Mr. Dardenne?”

Jo coughed and put her hand to her throat. Martha ran to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. Jo reached for it and sipped. As she recovered her equilibrium, Martha continued.

“You know Mrs. Dardenne, hard as it may be to believe, some people think I’m a bit nosy. But I’m not really. I’m just interested in knowing a little about my clients so I can care for them better. But if you don’t want to tell me what happened to poor Mr. Dardenne – because you planted him under the tomatoes, fine and good. You’ll come around though, they always do, you’ll end up telling me all about you by the time I’m ready to move on to my next client.”

Jo thought of herself as a pragmatic person. Yes, this blue-haired girl talked and revealed too much. Yes, she looked and dressed like an escapee from a circus. But then, her culinary ability would help in her recovery. And in an odd way, she was entertaining – she hadn’t thought about her pain since Martha arrived.

“Martha, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, anything.”

“What kind of training do you have for this type of work?”

“I’m an RN and I have five years experience taking care of old folks just like you.”

Jo was surprised and skeptical.

“Why, if you are indeed an RN, would you not be working in a hospital?”