Chapter EightIrwin finger-combed his hair as he wandered along the shoreline behind the group of patients he’d brought down for recreation. Lester, the orderly who’d been so accepting, walked beside him while Barry, one of the residents who had improved to where he could be given minor responsibilities, led his fellow patients toward an outcropping of rocks some distance away. The sun played cat and mouse with cotton-ball clouds overhead. The tide was out, leaving a wake of shells, seaweed, and tiny creatures scrabbling for cover.
From the corner of his eye he studied his coworker. Lester ambled across the sand as if he didn’t have a care in the world rather than chaperoning a collection of psychiatric patients. Somewhere between fifty and seventy years old, he had the build of a middle l
