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It HAD TO BE YOU It’s the 3rd of March 1933, the day before Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration. Robert goes to Washington D.C. for the event. He’s forced to sleep on the ground, and claims that at least a hundred people stepped on him in the dark. While he’s gone, Lily is visiting a nursing home close to Grace and Favor. The owner, Miss Twibell, an experienced nurse who owns it, is minus an assistant nurse. She’s also suffering from bunions. She needs Lily and Robert to fill in with cleaning and doing errands. One of the patients, a nasty old man, Sean Connor, is the only patient who is seriously ill, and not expected to live very much longer. The first day the Brewster’s work there, he goes into a coma and dies. Nobody’s surprised until it’s revealed that he’s been murdered. Chief of Police Walker can’t imagine why somebody would bother to murder old Mr. Connor when he had only hours to live. Several people visited that morning. There was the state-employed nurse, who randomly checks the conditions in private nursing homes, the old man’s wife, his grandson, and the local doctor, as well as the other patients and staff who might have entered his room without being seen. Walker also has another crime on his hands as well. The body of an unidentified young man was reported to have been pushed into an almost frozen lake near a town upriver just before the Christmas season three months earlier. A weird-looking hiker saw him go in the lake, but nobody knows who the hiker is. And no body was found. Recently, when the ice in the fetid, disgusting lake started the spring break-up, a body came to the surface, so deteriorated that nobody can figure out who it might be. Walker takes a brand new deputy, who is too wet behind the ears to ask good questions around for one day, to interview some of the people who have the misfortune to live on the hills above the stinking lake. Then Walker, having given the temporarily disabled chief of police a bit of advice, before going back to Voorburg. Gradually Walker, helped along by Lily and Robert’s snooping, starts to see the patterns of the pieces of both crimes starting to turn into good theories. But lacking solid proof, he has to call on Lily and Robert to acquire a vital piece of evidence.
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