"Not really. I mean, Mrs. Sloan was the manager. And since she wasn't here most of the time, the entire burden of responsibility fell on Grant's shoulders for the hotel and Mrs. Johnson's with regard to the Bed & Breakfast. Nevertheless, every issue concerning money had to go through my hands and, that way, under Mrs. Sloan's surveillance."
"So the person she really, really trusted was you."
"Oh, she wouldn't have hired Johnson and Grant if she hadn't thought them reliable. It's just that she hated dispersion. She didn't want to have to talk to several people to know how her businesses were doing."
"I still think you had a great deal of power in Mrs. Sloan's life."
"I'd rather call it responsibility. And I assure you I did my best to live up to her expectations."
"I'm sure of that."
Kathy felt his words meant more than he was now ready to reveal and she didn't want him to feel uncomfortable, so she complied with the task of meeting everybody, trying to remember as many names as possible.
They decided to have lunch at Henry's Café and invited Patricia Johnson to join them. She was twenty nine years old, divorced, and had been hired by Mrs. Sloan a year before, when she'd bought the house next door to this café and turned it into a Bed & Breakfast. They had been formally introduced the previous morning, but Kathy remembered seeing her around during her recent one-week vacation on the island. Patricia recognized her too.
"Please, call me Pat."
"Pat?"
"Yeah, I know. It tends to make people think I'm the owner of the place, but… It's the way I've been called all my life. Mrs. Sloan used to joke about it, saying that's why she'd hired me. Oh, I wish I could've been at her funeral, paid my respects to her family…"
Pat reminded Kathy of Shirley Temple - the same smile. Her curly hair a little bit longer, gathered into a ponytail.
"So why was it called Patty's?" asked Kathy, not very sure who she should be addressing the question to.
"Patty was my mother," answered Ms. Johnson. "I'm an only child, so when she died I inherited the house - my father had passed away several years before. By then, I had just got divorced and the three of us - my mother, my daughter Stephanie and I - were living at my aunt Libby's.
After my mother's death, I didn't have a job so I decided to sell the house to make some money until I found something to do. I was planning to maybe study to become a hairdresser and open my own small business. But then Mrs. Sloan bought it and explained to me the idea of turning it into a Bed & Breakfast. It was a nice, big, Victorian-style house, and so it sounded like a marvelous thought. She named it after my mother and offered me a job. I couldn't be more grateful to her."