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cul-de-sac bore to the rest of the lower city. Gorgeous mansions sat like haughty, overdressed dowagers at a nineteenth-century garden party. At the far end, the sheer face of the Niagara Escarpment defended the enclave from the riffraff to the south with its rampart of wooded limestone. Again, Zol felt uncouth driving his muddy minivan into such opulence. Everyone here would have a Porsche or a Mercedes tucked in the garage.
    Camelot Lodge occupied one of the most well-known heritage structures in Hamilton. It had been built in the 1880s as a mansion for an industrialist’s family. Now it loomed on a snowy island in the circular roadway, where it boasted three stories of intricate stonework, a tall square tower, a round turret, and a forest of chimneys.
    â€œI guess the previous owners didn’t fuss over their vows of poverty,” Zol told Natasha, who was beside him in the passenger seat.
    â€œSorry?” she said.
    â€œI thought you knew. A few years ago it was full of nuns. A Catholic convent.”
    The massive slate roof capped the original structure and the boxy addition beside it, which included the elevator shaft and glassed-in fire escape. Despite its storied grandeur, the place looked drab in grimy, leafless March. It would look better in May when its lawns and trees turned green.
    An anxious face peered through a mullioned upper window and quickly disappeared. A wild-haired soul in a pale nightgown rapped her fist at another window and called inaudibly through the triple-pane glass.
    â€œDoes your grandfather like living there?”
    Art felt like a grandfather, so Zol didn’t correct her. “He appreciates the company and the amenities, I think. A single room with his own bath and toilet. Says he’s glad the Lodge is a small operation that doesn’t feel like an institution.”
    Thirty active seniors lived in the original part of the building, known as the Belvedere Wing. It was a shame the renovators had removed the grand staircase, which Zol had seen in old photographs, to make space for an enlarged dining room and several more bedrooms.
    â€œThe common sitting room is just the right size,” Natasha said. “Cozy but not cramped. And I love its chintz curtains.”
    Zol never noticed curtains and had yet to figure out exactly what chintz was. “Don’t think there’s any chintz in the Mountain Wing infirmary. According to Art and Earl, it’s the dark empire on the far side of the moon. I’ve never had occasion to go in there.”
    Natasha pointed to the second floor of the addition and made a face. “You haven’t missed much. Bare walls, ugly blinds on the windows. Eight patients, in four double rooms. All in various stages of dementia, poor things.”
    Zol thought of his parents, currently on a month-long golfing holiday in Florida. They lived thirty minutes west of Hamilton, off Highway 403. His dad was pushing seventy but still active on the farm and secretary of the Ginseng Growers Association of Brant County. He’d switched from growing tobacco to harvesting ginseng seven years ago, soon after Zol started his public-health training. Zol couldn’t imagine his mother, so fastidious about her appearance, as anything less than a commanding presence in her own home. She was a super cook and a whiz at crosswords and Sudoku.
    He had no warm and fuzzy illusions about nursing homes and retirement residences, no matter how many luxuries they purported to offer. He knew they were businesses, first and foremost. And visited by battalions who packed the parking lots: doctors, nurses, chaplains, chiropractors, chiropodists, physios, pharmacists, herbalists, hairdressers, and the delivery guys who lugged in everything from flowers to oxygen tanks. Today, only three vehicles sat in the lot: a blue Dodge van, a grey Chevy Malibu, and Phyllis Wedderspoon’s long, snow-white ’72 Lincoln.
    The place was owned by someone offshore, a