And in the June of this year I found out one thing on my own, from a man at Marlcote who had no reason to lie.
Dorcas rang that home every Sunday. For fourteen months. She never came, and she never spoke to her mother, because her mother would not take the calls.
She rang the desk and asked how she was and the desk told her, and that was the arrangement, every Sunday, for fourteen months.
And I was on that desk for about a third of those Sundays.
I took some of those calls. I remember a woman’s voice asking about room eleven and I remember being short with her, twice.
I did not know it was the daughter. Nobody said.
And I had been telling the whole town that they visited twice and never rang.
Ida.
She knew from the second week of May.
And she said nothing to me for four months and eleven days.
