Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  “Well, my dear,” she says, rising in one graceful gray silk motion, “I’ll leave you now. Good night, Edward. You look sweet, there.”

  “Do I? How nice.” He smiles after her as she rustles out the door. “She helped me quite a bit,” he confides.

  I’ll bet she did.

  This is a lady with remarkable savoir faire. How many other people, projected into sudden intimacy, right in the middle of a brand-new murder case, could resist asking questions? Apparently Mrs. La S. could. She didn’t come up with a single one.

  I sit down in the chair she’s just vacated. “I’ll stay in your room tonight.”

  Don’t hover too much, I tell myself, and then issue a correction: Go ahead, hover. This frail old gentleman discovered a dead body tonight. He did a ninety-mile dash through the moonlight. And some time or other in the past he watched a woman die in a net.

  He’s in the middle of the dangerous action.

  So am I.

  I get a blanket, a quilt, a pillow, and I curl up on the window seat. Tomorrow I have to talk to the sheriff. I better be careful; if I tell him too much he’ll be quizzing my father, who can’t take it.

  But I, myself, have to quiz my father. The time has come for me to know a few things. Find out about that net-woman. I start framing questions, oblique ones, not scary-direct.

  And after that, there’s what Mrs. Dexter is hiding. The lady’s silence is downright dangerous. Think up questions for her, too, I tell myself.

  I’ll never get to sleep.

  “Okay.” I have trouble orienting. Not the trouble where you can’t figure out where you are, but the other one where you can’t decide what you’re supposed to know this morning. Something different from yesterday, you’re sure, but what? “How is it down there?”

  “Wild. Everybody talking at once.” Belle is helping Daddy out of bed, and he looks over her shoulder at me. “All of ’em wondering about you. You found her, huh?”

  “We both did.”

  “Umph.” I interpret this grunt as, Boy, are you in major difficulty. “Lady, get down there, now. That sheriff really wants you.”

  The main sitting room of the Manor looks like an airport after an all-day plane-arrival embargo. People are huddled in clusters, half-asleep, where the sheriff’s deputies have set up interviewing centers—islands of tables, chairs, and foot-stools, each with a uniformed cop and a witness. A bosomy spike-haired woman sergeant greets me, “Hey, Miss Day, we been looking for you. Sheriff Hawthorne, he’s been looking. He’s back there in some office.”

  The sheriff, whom I didn’t really see last night because he was hidden under his yellow slicker and hat, turns out to be a cadaverous man with gray hair and rimless glasses and stubble. He has liberated a tapestried cubicle down the hall from Mrs. Sisal’s office, where he scribbles at something for a few minutes. He tells me to sit and finally pronounces, “Okay.”

  “So,” he says, “you found the decedent.”

  I resist saying huh? Decedent, I translate, equals dead person equals Mona. I agree, “Yes.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Well, we were walking . . .”

  The sheriff tips his chair back to make it squeak. He runs his hand backward over some thin, defeated hair. He aims his glasses at me. And then proceeds into a barrage of official sheriff-type questions. Walking? Where? Why? Middle of the night, foggy, cold, you go for a walk? Your dad not so good? What kind of not so good? Why a walk? Why not back to his room?

  Now, Miss Day, you just tell me.

  It’s at this point, when he squeaks his chair again and does his sheriff-challenge, just tell me, that I catch on. I, Carla, am the Prime Suspect. First on the scene. Discovered the body. What do you mean, body still warm, just dispatched? Of course he has you in his crosshairs.

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  “How well do you know the decedent?” he asks.

  My brain is temporarily numbed so I have to do it all over again, decedent means Mona. “I didn’t.”

  The sheriff’s eyebrow’s come up over his glasses.

  “I mean, I only spoke to her twice.” I don’t feel like telling him about my special interview with Mona. I’m not sure why.

  “Like,” I feed this information into a meaningful official silence, “I went to the hospital to see a friend, and she was there, and I spoke to her.”

  “You said?”

  “I said, ‘Where’s Mrs. Dexter?’”

  He’s ready to be suspicious now. He shifts and looks at papers and says, “Well.” Then suddenly he starts asking me about college. I was at Santa Cruz, did I like it? A good student, was I? Any trouble at Santa Cruz? I graduated? Oh, yeah. Uh-huh.

  He shifts some more papers, which I guess confirm, yes, I graduated, and no, I wasn’t in any trouble, none that shows.

  “This Habitat thing. Buildin’ houses for poor people, huh.”

  “It’s a cooperative exercise.”

  The sheriff squints at me. I have a feeling he knows perfectly well what Habitat for Humanity is about.

  Santa Cruz is a famous bliss-out campus, maybe that’s what he’s been digging for.

  Suddenly he deflates. Almost as if he’s lost interest in the project. He reads through some more of his papers and puts them down and breathes out, a walrus snort, and I get the feeling that the papers have pretty much confirmed that, no, I didn’t know Mona and probably wouldn’t have wanted to kill her. And that he’s been kind of bluffing this whole time. After all, I’m not his first interview of today. He must have talked to the doctor. And to Mrs. Sisal. And some of the aides. They would have told him how innocent-appearing I am.

  “Well,” he says, and squeaks the chair in a semicircle until it faces the window. “So. Tell me what you remember. From your walk into the dark and stormy night.” I stare at him. A humorist, no less. He reads Peanuts, just the way Daddy used to.

  It turns out he wants me to review last night’s route, trying for total recall. “Anything,” he says. “Anything extra.”

  “And,” he adds, “I asked to talk to your dad, too, but the doc says he’s not too good on memory, is that right?”

  I send a mental thank-you to Dr. Kittredge. “That’s right.”

  The sheriff now presents obvious questions: “When you turned at that first bend, notice anything? . . . When you went around the statue, anything at that point?” He’s not too bad at doing this. I always thought the sheriff of a back-woods stronghold like Del Oro County would be the one that had bought the most people the most drinks in the bar, but now I start wondering if maybe this guy has read a book or two. “Now, beyond that turn there’s a bank of white rock, remember it, did you stop there?”

  And I find that just being prodded sparks one of those trains of association they write about: I see again the clusters of grass and trails of white rock and walls of moon-splashed fog and get an occasional cold warning (“Just a suggestion, I guess,” I tell Sheriff Hawthorne), a hint that maybe at this curve or the next one some tiny movement has just happened. “But I wasn’t noticing,” I add. “I was paying attention to my father; he’s kind of . . .”

  “Yeah, I know, I heard. Now when you reached the lady, the body . . . anything special?”

  “She was laid out too neatly, not right for a broken neck . . .” We have to stop here for a discussion (one I wish we weren’t having right now; I hate knowing so much about this) of my work in the Santa Cruz animal lab and what I know about broken necks.

  I don’t mention about Mona’s moon-and-stars cloak, how she had it earlier and then she didn’t. I want to keep that fact for myself. Knowledge is power, somebody or other said.

  The sheriff thinks for a while. “Her hands. She holding anything?”

  “Holding something?”

  “No little piece of paper, maybe?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  He exhales loudly. That walrus snort again, the male equivalent of a sigh. “Your dad. Do you think . . . if we helped
him . . . couldn’t he remember a little?”

  “He’d remember something from twenty years ago. Something that happened in Egypt. That’s mostly what he talks about lately. He gets it mixed up with now.” Jesus, I don’t want Daddy questioned; he’s confused enough already.

  The sheriff snorts some more and hands me a sheet of paper, a photocopy that looks as if it might be a picture of something smaller, a ragged little scrap that sits lightly outlined in the middle of the page.

  The scrap has numbers on it. They’re uneven; maybe they were written down fast.

  “Those numbers mean anything?” he asks.

  I squint at them. 1028, the 8 not very well inscribed but recognizable. It takes a minute or so, but then it clicks, and I feel a knot in my throat and a weight on my chest, my heart goes queep. But I ask, “What is this? Where’s it from?”

  “The victim—Miss Mona—had it on her person.”

  “On her person?”

  “Down her bra,” he projects this in a funereal voice. “You do recognize it?”

  I’m afraid my unsteady hand is giving me away, but the sheriff doesn’t seem to notice. Yes, I recognize it all right. I hate being drawn into this web any closer. “That was our old house number. 1028. 1028 Klamath Avenue.” I dab at my nose to deflect attention.

  “Right.” He looks as pleased as if he’d forced me into a confession. “Your dad’s old house.” When I stare at him, he says, “The first thing we did was try it on the Manor computer, and it came up a match. It was his address when he applied here. That’s where he used to live.”

  And where I lived for a long time and also my mother. And Aunt Crystal for a while, too.

  “You got an idea?” Sheriff Hawthorne asks.

  He thinks I’m hiding something. I don’t blame him; I am hiding several things. I shrug and say, “Absolutely none.”

  “This Mona lady knew your dad?” he asks, and I say the obvious: Daddy must have met her in the hospital, he never talked to me about her. I don’t repeat Daddy’s peculiar question about the “lady with the scissors on her belt.” Why puzzle this poor guy any more than he already is?

  “He knew her the way anybody here would.”

  “What did you think of her?”

  “Me?” I don’t understand this question.

  “Yeah, you. How do you appraise her as a fellow human?”

  I decide I don’t much like this psychologically oriented side of the sheriff. “I only saw her twice.” (Lie.)

  “Yeah. What’d you think?”

  “She was a weird, wispy little thing. Not like you expect a nurse to be. Jittery.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “Like her?” I don’t say, “What a peculiar question.” I don’t say, “No,” which would be true. “I hardly knew her. I already told you.”

  “Yeh.” The sheriff dismisses this. “But a lotta people here are sayin’ they had a personal opinion, that they didn’t like her. People in a place like this like to talk. They never hearda the word incriminating. They say Mona asked for it.”

  “Asked to be killed?”

  “Yep.” He eyes me expectantly, but I probably succeed in looking blank. Mona asked to be killed? Did she expect it? Is that what she was blathering about in the hall outside my door? Oh, my God. That poor, stupid, fluttery person.

  Sheriff Hawthorne is regarding me askance (I think that’s the proper word). After a while he asks what medicines Daddy takes. I start to say, “No painkillers,” but decide that’s too much of a leading answer. Painkillers are a danger signal: painkillers cause addiction; addiction is always bad. So I tell him that Daddy took a multivitamin compound for his general health and Aricept for his forgetfulness. “I guess the Aricept doesn’t work too well,” I say innocently.

  While I’m talking, I’m trying to figure it out. Our old street address. What on earth use is it to anybody? It’s just part of the old history of me, Daddy, and Aunt Crystal.

  No wonder the sheriff is looking at me in that tone of voice. I’m beginning to feel it again—that caught-fly shiver of being trapped in an immense, insecure, quivering spiderweb—one with a lot of sticky strands that glimmer in the light and lead off into space at one end and down to a gummy center at the other. And there wrapped around with filaments is . . . I hope the figure caught in that sticky spider structure isn’t my father. He’s old, he’s basically gentle, he’s hopelessly naïve. He wants to believe good of everyone. And he forgets. He forgets a whole lot of everything, but he tries especially hard to forget anything bad. Up until now, he’s sort of succeeded. It would be downright mean if fate brought him face to face with a spider right now, when his guard is down.

  What has he done, or have I done, that all these trails seem to converge on us?

  The Lady on the Beach, of course, that’s what my father has done.

  Sheriff H. is watching me. Some of this speculation probably shows in my face. And this man isn’t anywhere near as dumb as I thought he was.

  “Think about it,” he says.

  “Okay,” I sit there doing that. Thinking. But nothing happens. I tell him, “No. No ideas.”

  Probably he’s not happy with that answer, but it’s the one he’s got to put up with for the moment.

  I don’t stop to quiz Mrs. La Salle on why she dislikes Mona because the client I really need is Mrs. Dexter; I’ve been thinking about her ever since last night. I’ve saved her for now. I’ll be firm with her; I’ll hector her even if I hate doing it. I’m putting aside my other concerns and concentrating on my Dexter-approach.

  And she must have guessed what I’m planning because she’s slow at answering her door. She tries a version of Mr. Rice’s “Who is it, who is it?” and then, when I say “Carla,” she goes “Who?” as if she’s never heard of Carla. Finally she gets the door open with a lot of clanking and banging; she pokes her head out like a little pug-nosed Walt Disney animal, blinking and half-cringing, doing the pantomime where she leans helplessly on her walker, backing slowly away and letting me loom after, forced into playing the part of the Nazi storm trooper.

  “Mrs. Dexter,” I say, “this is ridiculous; it’s totally silly. What on earth are you afraid of? You’ve got to talk. This business of you not saying what you know has gone much too far . . .” I stop for a breath here, “it’s your duty—you can’t hide any more—you’re doing damage.”

  “Please call me Louise.” She offers this humbly, plaintively.

  I don’t call her Louise. “You know something,” I persist. “Mona is dead. I mean, murdered. And whatever you know might have saved her life—no, don’t look at me like that.”

  I’m cranking my performance up to warp speed because I’m fond of Mrs. Dexter. She’s my second-favorite person in this peculiar place, right after my darling father. And now I have to be mean to her. But, yes, I have to. I feel responsible. Maybe I could have made her talk earlier if I’d been mean earlier. Maybe I could have saved silly little Mona’s life.

  “You’ve absolutely got to say what you know,” I announce. It doesn’t help that I’m tense about the sheriff and that my clients have said a lot of very dumb things in the last half hour. “Mrs. Dexter,” I can hear myself getting even more shrill, “a woman is dead, what you know and won’t talk about maybe did it. It may have caused her death.”

  My victim clunks the walker ostentatiously; she turns her back and makes a lot of metallic noise. Then, body crunched and walker rattling, she clomps across the apartment. When she gets to her easy chair, she turns to fix me with a beady little eye.

  And she says, “Oh, poo.” Which isn’t at all the response I’ve been expecting. I guess you could say her attitude is somewhere halfway between defiant and don’t-hit-me. “You’re very unfriendly,” she mentions.

  “You’ve got to come clean,” I babble. Having run out of reasonable remarks to make, I’m now relying on the movies. “There’s been a death. A woman killed.” A lot of righteous energy gets into this.

  “Yo
u don’t know a single solitary thing, do you?” She brings the walker down, all four wheels at once.

  I don’t answer No, lady, I don’t know hardly anything, though that’s what I think. I simply stare while she parks her equipment and wriggles into the easy chair.

  “You made assumptions,” she announces.

  “Of course.” I’m trying not to act impatient.

  “No, you really don’t know a single thing.”

  I say, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “You think Mona was poor, little, silly, gushy Mona, and that she was a harmless person who got killed. That’s what you think.”

  “Mrs. Dexter, the point is . . .”

  “No. The point is that I know—I absolutely know—I really know, I tell you—she was doing it.”

  That’s a stopper. “It? What’s it?”

  She squints at me, defiant. “Why, Carla. It. Everything. All the bad events that have happened.”

  “You mean the accidents? You think Mona was feeding you glass? Starting fires? Leaving windows open. All that weird stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  I say, “But.” After which I add Mona and the words ditsy and scared. I think back over my session with Mona. She acted peculiar; she said she shouldn’t have done it, but somehow I don’t see her engineering the Manor’s accidents.

  Mrs. Dexter gestures. “What does that have to do with it? She was. I know it for a fact.”

  I say, “You have completely flipped.” Normally, I’d sneak up on an unflattering opinion like that. I’d reason, or ask intelligent, meaningful questions first. But today’s been a hard day. “You’re nuts,” I elucidate.

  There’s a silence while Mrs. Dexter rocks the walker to make it squeak and stares at me.