Bentley Dadmun

Mudgett and Brewster Bentley Dadmun

For six decades she did what was expected and generally played life's game by society's dictates. Then, three years into her sixth decade, Helen Mudgett found herself widowed, bankrupt, and forced to move into Cooper's Paradise Hotel, a dilapidated pile of sticks catering to indigent senior citizens who thought they could live their lives on the two hundred year plan. Within hours of her arrival, she is set upon by Ethel Mae Tibbets, a beer loving handicapped resident, and her ward, Sarah Brewster, an irksome ten year old refugee from a broken home. They strive to enlist Helen in helping Sarah search for a 1936 Packard Limousine that went missing twenty years ago, along with its owner, Sonny Zervas. Helen tells them that looking for the car is an exercise in futility and refuses. But after relentless badgering by Sarah, she agrees to spend one week looking for that damn car. In the week before Christmas they set out. They locate and talk to several people who lusted after the Packard, Sarah makes a rash wager with an ex Marine, encounters her old nemesis, Betty Worthen, a policewoman not adverse to wine and bribery, and annoys Helen to distraction with her observations and comments about people who are well into the "Really old," stage of their lives. Aided by frequent doses of Merlot, Helen tries to adjust to her new life of poverty and deprivation while being reluctantly involved with the hunt for the missing Packard, coping with Miss Em, the hotel's persistent canine, and engaging in hard labor on the snow covered veranda roof. As their quest pulls them ever closer to the Packard, they discover the back woods version of a chop shop, have a horrific encounter on a snow swept mountain, engage in some astute Christmas shopping, and carried on the words of an old man with no hands, head toward a deadly rendezvous with terror and death.