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I had nada.
    I stuffed an old pair of binoculars that I’d used for bird-watching back in my nature-loving days of the eighties, a 35 mm camera with film from my cousin’s wedding two years ago still inside (please don’t get my mother started on that), and two chocolate power bars into my bag and looked at the video camera on the counter. A prehistoric elephant was smaller. Still, I couldn’t buy anything new yet. Goldie needed all his stuff for a job he was working on, and couldn’t stop since he was nearly finished. So, no loaners.
    Okay, I’d wing it.
    Adele was a whiz at getting personal info on the claimants, I’d found out through Goldie. She’d given me Tina’s address and where she worked. Damn if Tina wasn’t a nurse too. Small world. Goldie had said he’d start me out first thing on Monday with “on-the-job training” by working on this case with me. But that was days away, and that money thing wouldn’t leave my thoughts.
    Hey, what could it hurt to start on my own?
    I let Spanky out and back in, gave him a hug and made sure he had enough water before going out the door.
    Out in the parking lot, I climbed into my Volvo and drove out rather exhilarated. There was something mysterious, almost orgasmic about heading off to spy on someone—legally. My fingers danced across the steering wheel while the tires crunched along in the snow, and Frank Sinatra crooned on my favorite AM station. Wow. Who would have thought a non-nursing job could cause such excitement.
    What a natural rush!
    I reached over to my purse, dug out my cell phone and punched in Doc Taylor’s number. Got his voice mail. Shoot. “I’m free for dinner Saturday. Call me.” No need to mention
that
was the real reason I’d called.
    Snow had my windshield wipers going nonstop. Damn. It wasn’t going to be the best of days for surveillance. Surveillance. Pauline Sokol on surveillance. My laughter mixed with Frank’s singing as I turned onto Maple Avenue.
    Hope Valley wasn’t a metropolis, to say the least. But it was a decent-size town and had a decent-size hospital. A very ethnic New England town. Immigrants from Italy, Poland, Russia, Germany and several other countries had settled here. I can only assume they heard the name and thought it would bring them good luck and lots of hope. They remained in their little ethnic groups: Even the Catholic church in each neighborhood was attended by predominantly one nationality. Needless to say, the Sokol family belonged to the Polish one, Saint Stanislaus Church.
    My great-grandfather must have had the same idea when he arrived in the United States at the ripe old age of eighteen on the S.S.
Ethiopia
from Glasgow, Scotland, landing on Ellis Island. Not that he was Scottish. That was only his point of departure from Europe. He and his soon-to-be wife, Amelia, came from what they referred to as White Russia in Poland. Thus my very ethnic clan ended up in Hope Valley.
    Hope Valley had some manufacturing left from the 1900s, a mall and—of great interest to me now—one of the biggest insurance companies in the country. Global Carriers was several blocks over and certainly the biggest outside the Hartford area. I turned down Pine Street, heading to the residential area Adele had told me about.
    Tina Macaluso lived in a trendy New England subdivision near the Connecticut River. Houses in her neighborhood, circa 1700s, gave me the feeling that I’d driven back in time. The wooden structures were mostly saltbox style. No split-levels with aluminum siding like my folks’ house. Nope. This neighborhood had ordinances that said residents had to comply with rules like no electric door openers, no chain-link fences and nothing that made them look as if they were in the twenty-first century.
    I pulled up alongside a slate blue house and looked at the number. One hundred seventy-one. Macaluso’s. Perfect.
    I looked at