Read Sleepwalk for Free Online Page B

but if you just wandered into the place, you’d swear you were in a resort. Everybody has private cabins, and they bring you your meals if you need it. But he figured out how to do it without making it too expensive It’s a great place for people who are too sick to stay home but can’t afford a hospital or a nursing home.”
    “It just seemed that there was a need for something in the middle,” Greg said, his expression serious now. “A nice environment for people who were either going to get better pretty fast or were really beyond treatment and just needed a comfortable place to live out their last few days or weeks. So I set it up as a foundation, and conned Uncle Max into donating the land and the buildings.”
    “And you put in a lot of your own money too,” Rita Moreland said, her voice reflecting the same pride in Greg as her husband’s had a moment earlier.
    “Not all that much,” Greg replied. “Actually, I’ve been spending a lot of time rustling up grants, and it’s working out pretty well. I guess,” he added, suddenly sounding shy, “what I’ve really done is build the kind of place I’d like to be in myself.”
    Judith sat silently for a few moments, then a thought came to her. “Is that where Mrs. Tucker is?” she asked.
    It was Rita who nodded, her expression somber.
    “What happened to her?” Judith asked Greg.
    He spread his hands helplessly. “It was one of those things you can never predict. She had a stroke. It surprised me—I’d been treating her for arthritis, and monitoring her pretty closely. Her blood pressure was fine, and except for the arthritis, she seemed to be in great condition.” He looked at his uncle, his features takingon an exaggerated cast of disapproval. “She wasn’t like some people I could mention, whose blood pressure is far higher than it should be, and whose arteries are totally clogged up from eating the wrong things for seventy-five years, and who are stroke victims waiting to happen.”
    “Doesn’t sound like anyone I know,” Max growled, and poured himself another shot of bourbon from the bottle sitting open on the coffee table in front of him. He held the glass up and grinned at his nephew. “Thins the blood, right?” he asked, and drained the slug of whiskey in one gulp.
    Greg rolled his eyes in mock horror. “Anyway, Mrs. Tucker seemed to be doing fine, and then one day last month she had a massive stroke. It happened during one of her classes, and I guess it was pretty bad for the kids. They didn’t know what had happened, and there was nothing they could do. She was teaching them one minute, and the next she was on the floor, caught up in a seizure. Now …” His voice trailed off and his hands spread in a bleak gesture of helplessness. “There just doesn’t seem to be anything I can do for her except make her comfortable.”
    The conversation had drifted on, but Judith was only half listening, most of her attention focused on the plight of her former teacher. She tried to imagine what it must be like to be trapped the way Reba Tucker now was, unable to take care of herself, unable even to communicate.
    Her whole life reduced to a small cabin, in which she waited to die.
    In such circumstances, Judith imagined, a person must pray for death every moment of every day. Longago she had come to realize that sometimes it was easier to die than to go on living.
    Heather Fredericks lay in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been awake, wasn’t even certain what it was that had awakened her.
    All she knew was that she felt perfectly relaxed—even the pain in her arm, a lingering throbbing that had been bothering her when she’d gone to bed earlier that night, seemed to be gone.
    Her mind drifted, her thoughts floating lazily, vague images appearing now and then, then fading away again.
    And then, from somewhere outside, she heard a voice.
    “Heather.”
    Just the single word; nothing else.
    She lay