Someone stole my jacket!

One day I arrived to find Nellie waiting for me at the front door of the nursing home. “Hello! How are you?” I said brightly.

            “Bad,” was her terse reply.

            “Why bad? What’s wrong?” I asked.

            “Somebody stole my jacket!” Nellie was nearly bursting with indignation.

            Oh, dear. “Which jacket?” I tried to think of what might have happened. “Where was it?”

            “It was my white one—the knit sweater jacket that I always wear. It was hanging in the closet and now it’s not there. That new girl must have taken it. I know she took it.”

            Ahh. That jacket. I knew it well—and I’m sorry to say that I am quite certain no one else would have wanted it. It’s old and yellowed, stained from years of wear, not at all pretty. But the fact remained that it seemed to be missing. “You say it was in your closet? Did you look all through, on the floor and everything?”

            “Yes, yes, I looked and everybody else came and looked and the director looked and nobody can find it. You can look again if you want to, but it isn’t there. It was that new girl. I asked her about it and she just acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about!”

            That poor attendant. I could imagine the hullabaloo Nellie had raised when she noticed her loss. She is extremely vocal when she is upset, and even though her rantings are all in Russian I am certain that everyone within earshot must have been fully aware of her displeasure. Hoping to miraculously see the missing article of clothing, I looked in the closet, and found no jacket. I looked on the floor, and found…no jacket. She continued to fume as I tried to calm her. “Everybody keeps saying to me, ‘Maybe it’s in the laundry, maybe it’s in the laundry.’ But I don’t use the laundry!” Her voice rose again to a near-yell. “The director came and looked earlier, and he said that if we don’t find it, they will buy me a new jacket.”

            “Well,” I ventured, “that’s good, right?”

            “But I bought that jacket myself!” She was almost wailing. “It was a good one, and I liked it. It had a little crocodile right here on the front…I liked it.”

          I'm afraid I haven't seen the jacket yet, though weeks have passed now. Happily, Nellie hasn't brought it up again. I am forced to the conclusion that either she has forgotten it, or she's ashamed to tell me that the same thing happened as the last time "someone stole her jacket." Last time it turned out that she had simply left it at her nephew's house.