“Wait! I’ve never met Goode!” 

“Hands behind your back.”

“Tell them,” Slummings exhorted his companions. “I couldn’t have done it.”

“It’s true, officer,” Roberta spoke up, “Goode disappeared long before Mr. Slummings here bought the team. It’s unlikely he—”

“At the station, miss. We’ll take your statement there,” the officer said, then turned back to Slummings, now in cuffs, and said, “You have the right to an attorney …”

Neither Roberta nor Mayberry were listening. Slummings certainly wasn’t. All three were in shock. When the officers each grabbed one of Slummings’ elbows and started to direct him toward their squad car, Mayberry stepped up and said, “There must be some mistake. He’s been with me, locked in a mental hospital, for the past 3 days. He couldn’t possibly—”

“A mental hospital?” one officer asked.

“Yes,” Mayberry said, trying to be helpful, “Camarillo State Hospital. You can ask the head nurse there, name of Peters, she’ll tell you that—”

“Oh, we will,” the officer said, grinning at his fellow policeman. “Won’t we?”

As they marched Slummings to their car, one officer could be heard saying to the other, “A mental hospital! Do you believe it?”

In silence Mayberry and Roberta stood on the platform feeling utterly helpless as the cops drove off with the owner of the Yuma Arroyos. A minute passed with no one speaking, then Roberta said, “C’mon, let’s get your things and get you home.”

“Home?”

“My home,” Roberta said, then noticed the old man’s look of confusion. “Your old apartment, well, it’s gone. The whole building. Razed for the new railroad museum.”

“Fitting,” Mayberry said. “Maybe I could take up residence inside the museum. I’m old enough to be a relic.”

Robert nudged him. “You’re not.”

“Oh, yes, I am a walking museum piece. Or at least a shuffling one,” he added, lifting his slippers for her to see.

“You have a bag?”

“No, ma’am, just the slippers and gown I escaped in.” Mayberry opened the coat to reveal his hospital gown underneath. Roberta snickered. “Oh, you laugh now, but this is all the rage in Camarillo. Everybody wants one!”

They laughed for a moment, then remembered Slummings.

“C’mon,” Roberta said, leading him toward her car, “we’ll sort things out with the police in the morning.”

“Okay, but you need to know I haven’t slept with a woman in years—though there was this one nurse who—”

Roberta slapped his shoulder. “You haven’t changed, you dirty old man. And I still have a couch, so don’t get any ideas.”

“Ideas are all I have these days.” He shrugged. 

Roberta shrugged with him.

On the drive across the empty village of Yuma, Roberta finally asked, “So, about this promotion. You know all about it?”

“Only what he told me.”

“Which was?”

Mayberry turned in the front seat to look at Roberta. “I think you’ll make a fine GM.”

She couldn’t stop herself from smiling, then laughed. “I didn’t want to believe it. I mean … I would be happy to be your Assistant GM.”

“You’d do all the work anyway, so you deserve the title. I just … I can’t … it’s not possible anymore.”

“I understand.”

Mayberry looked at her. “You do?”

“I think so.”

“Good, because with this latest development,” Mayberry gestured back over his shoulder toward the train station, “I don’t know how or when … you know.”

Roberta smiled, “I know. And tomorrow we’ll get Slummings out and let him deal with it all. For the meantime, you’re on my couch and I’m still running the office. Right?”

“Yeah, we’ve done it before.”

“Not on my couch, we haven’t!”

And they laughed as the sky east of Yuma began to brighten with the first light of dawn.