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Karen (Al & Karen) Sunday, 9:00 a.m.
When I stopped at Julie’s Sunday morning, she sat at the computer desk on the lanai, chin in one hand. “Hey, kid, what’s happening?”
She motioned me in and pointed to the couch, inviting me to sit. “You know my idea, the argument Ron and I were supposedly having about how two people meet? Well, Nan Shaw heard about it, and she thinks ‘we’—meaning me—should find out where every single person in the park was on that date.”
“Why?”
She sighed. “She wants me to make a big display to show how the residents came from all over and ended up here. ‘Building community,’ she calls it.”
“Well, tell her you don’t want to.”
Julie chuckled. “You have met Nan, right? Two seconds after the idea hit her, she was telling everyone around us what a cool thing I was going to do and how great it will be when everyone gets to see the results. She’s talking about having some sort of party for the unveiling. How could I admit I only meant to contact seventeen men?”
“Simple. You say, ‘Nan, I don’t want to do that.”
“She was so excited, Karen, and I hate disappointing...” With a rueful grin, Julie stopped herself.
“You hate disappointing anyone, so you do things you really don’t want to do to make them happy. You are too nice, Julie Rogers.”
That brought a snort of anger, but it was directed at herself. “I’m not nice. I’m...spineless. I’m weak. I’m a pushover.” Picking up a sheet of paper with drawings all over it, she said, “I’m working on how it can be done, but it will take hours and hours of canvassing and collating. Plus, Nan’s picturing the display as something fancy, and I’m no artist.” She chuckled grimly. “The instructor at art class tries so hard to find something to praise in my paintings. ‘That’s really colorful,’ she’ll say, or, ‘You’re good with shapes.’ What she means is my trees look like green triangles and everything else is out-of-whack rectangles.”
“Get Wilma to help,” I suggested. “She’s creative, and she has all kinds of crafty odds and ends.”
Julie’s face brightened. “That’s a great idea.” But she wasn’t done listing problems. “Even if she can make it pretty, I don’t know how I’ll fit hundreds of bits of information onto one chart.”
I scratched at my neck. “Could you use a template, like the ones they have for address labels? Alice would probably help you type the information in, and then you could print the labels and stick them where you want them on a big map.”
“I like that. They’d be uniform and fairly small.”
“I’d keep it simple: name, lot, and where they lived on the date.”
“Okay, but I have to get that information from everyone in the park,” Julie said. “Nan’s got people knocking on my door asking to be my little helpers, and I don’t know what to tell them.”
An idea popped into my head. “What if we use this display thing to justify our whole investigation?”
Julie caught on immediately. “We give up on separate stories and collect the information directly.”
“We can claim that was the plan all along. Nan spoiled the surprise, but you’re thrilled that everyone is responding to it positively.”
“That will resolve any suspicions people had about our odd questions over the last few days.” Julie’s energy seemed to flow back, and she sat up straight. “I’ll have the volunteers cover the women, Canadians, and men too old or too young to be Greg Miles. The eight of us will keep our lists, but now we have a good reason to ask for specific information on that date.”
“If you want, I’ll organize the volunteers. You make the lists, and I’ll see that they get them and do the work.”
“Would you? That will free me from daily questions and let me start figuring out the map.”
I looked at the calendar behind her. “With a squad of volunteers, I bet we can get the interviews done in a week. What do you think?”
Julie rose and held out her arms for a hug. “I think it’s great to have friends like you and Wilma and Alice.”
I hugged her back. “In this case, you should probably call us minions. But hey, that’s what friends are for, right?”
