Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  I remember when he and Robbie had a discussion about that line. The German lady, whose English may not have been that great, translated it, “He abhors the sorrow of your ka,” but Robbie and Daddy were sure the correct translation was not abhors but grieves at. “Grieves, in an intensive, strong form,” my father had said, biting the end off his hot dog.

  “Daddy,” I tell him now, feeling inspired, wondering why on earth it has taken me so long to get this far, “will you lead me to the spot?”

  He nods, as if he’s been waiting for this. “Lead you. You want me as a guide?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will take the path, and you will follow?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And no part of that is telling, is it?” he asks.

  “No, it’s not telling.”

  “We will go up the path one by one,” he suggests, and I agree, “Yes.”

  He smiles. “Why, of course, my dear. I would be happy to lead you.

  “I enjoy the role of guide. Being a guide will be enjoyable. You will follow along and climb when I climb.”

  This must be what he wanted me to ask for all along, but he couldn’t say it. Or couldn’t figure out what he wanted. Maybe he promised somebody something? A not-saying promise? I’m on the verge of putting all this into a question, and then I don’t.

  He’s happy now but not exactly relaxed. He would like to set out on this trip immediately.

  “It isn’t far,” he says. “You won’t need a sandwich.”

  I have to slow him down; the outside grounds are full of the sheriff’s helpers measuring distances and searching for bits of rope or wire or whatever it is they look for, and decorating the bushes with festoons of yellow DO NOT CROSS tape. They would be very, very interested in any excursion my father and I made. But he’s not impressed when I tell him we should wait; it’s only when I say I’m really tired and want to take a nap that he responds, “Oh, my dear. Certainly. I demand too much. I understand about your feeling tired. I also will lie down for a few minutes.”

  He pats my shoulder and says, “That was a delicious little candy you brought me,” and offers his cheek for a kiss.

  Actually, I’m getting pretty fond of my plasterboardlined cubbyhole with the IKEA bed. That bed is a good one, and it’s the first absolutely brand-new bed I’ve ever had in my life. It still has those intrusive little NEW MATERIAL. DO NOT DESTROY THIS LABEL tags.

  I prop the pillow on end and squeeze my backbone against it and pull the quilt high. I need to do some serious thinking.

  I try to manage this sequentially, but I’m not good at that. The thoughts keep crowding in in a messy mixture.

  Here’s thought numero uno: My father keeps walking into the middle of this situation, whatever the situation is.

  Item: Mona is dead. And Daddy found her. Well, Daddy and I found her. Of course, that could be accidental.

  But, item: Mona had Daddy’s address down her bra. Could that set of numbers also be accidental? They couldn’t. Could they be someone else’s personal numbers? No. I took too many logic courses at Santa Cruz to believe in random events like that. Also, I took one stat course, at which I did abysmally, but got enough out of it to know that statistically that number cannot be anyone else’s number. It’s his. Or, ours. His and mine.

  And, further item: My father saw another murder. Which so far is confined to his head. Well, to his head, his memory, his consciousness, his pastel picture. He’s been trying plenty to publicize it. And now it’s part of my consciousness, because I believe in it now.

  Two murders have happened along this same little random plot of seacoast.

  Are they related? Of course they’re related, estupida. How much of your life have you lived elsewhere without even one single murder?

  And finally, the accidents.

  Mrs. Dexter’s accident seems the most dramatic because I saw it happen, but there are the other ones that I have simply heard about: the lady out the window, the beauty parlor fire, and then something about a gas heater. Dr. Kittredge says he’s really worried. He says this is far too much accident for an organized place like the Manor. He says the integrity of the Manor is threatened.

  I decide not to get into wondering about Dr. Kittredge and Mrs. Sisal and the suspects I’ve lined up for the role of who could have done all these things. I’ll stick to the tangle I have now. The tangle of the murders, the numbers, the accidents. Like a Jackson Pollock painting or one of those intolerable messes I used to scramble up in my sewing kit with a mixture of red thread, green thread, black thread, and, especially, invisible thread. Aunt Crystal would open the sewing-kit lid, pull out this ridiculous snarl, and get truly cross. “I know you don’t like to sew, but you don’t have to be so obstreperous about it.”

  I try to move my mind on to something peaceful. Susie. I get up and dig out a lined yellow pad and a ballpoint pen. I’m going to write Susie a letter. She’ll love that. Susie adores special attentions, and a letter from me is, believe it or not, special. I don’t do it very often, not that I’m not good at writing. I am very good, but what I find hard is the process that I’m performing now: getting together paper, pen, envelope, stamp, and then sitting back and thinking it out. And then, for God’s sake, getting it into the mailbox. “Hello, dear Susie,” I start out.

  “Okay, Superman,” I tell my father, “let’s go for our walk.”

  “I will lead,” he specifies. “You will follow.” He’s thrilled. He’s been waiting all afternoon to get this started. But the sheriff’s people have only just bundled into their cortege of black-and-white vehicles and departed for the town of Green Beach, leaving the downstairs living room littered with ballpoint pens, plastic cups, and crumpled wads of notebook paper.

  Outside, the yellow DO NOT CROSS tapes are still up, marking the path that leads to the Mona-discovery area as out of bounds.

  Daddy surprises me by understanding the purpose of the yellow tapes. “We don’t want to go there, anyway,” he says, and squeezes my hand. “I am pleased, my dear, that we are doing this.”

  Every now and then I really get it, how much this last year of not remembering and not managing has hurt him. It was a year that yelled, “out of control,” all the time. This comes out when he talks the way he does now, so proud and pleased, about leading and following. He’ll get to be in front, and someone else will follow, and he will be Dr. Edward Day, archaeologist, Reinhold Lecturer, Head, Department of Near Eastern Studies, once again.

  Hey, I think, I love you a lot.

  He starts off now across the Manor gardens, his torso energetically crisp, but his body canted forward. He’s following a course north, past the kitchens and the garbage can enclosures, beside the steam plant and the compost heaps, the nonscenic route that leads beyond the recycling bins. “Nobody walks here,” he says. He gestures, “Does it look like Egypt?”

  Sure, Daddy, right. It looks like the parts of Egypt that don’t get onto the tourist posters. Except that, in Egypt, those cardboard boxes would have been co-opted the minute they appeared and made into a village of houses with Hefty-bag roofs.

  “Now you see,” he says, “we’re almost at the highway. Then we turn again. Either north or toward the sun. I’m not sure which.” He waves at the horizon.

  “This highway is a very old one,” he lectures at me, “and quite narrow, perhaps the one Agamemnon’s herald traveled on? Highways are important in art and literature. There was a highway between Athens and Heliopolis.”

  I don’t say, “Sweetie, you’re mixing it up.”

  “I used to know this highway’s history; perhaps you can check it on your machine. Now, farther along, by that clump of coyote weed, do you see that little gap?”

  I want to ask him how he ever noticed the path beside the coyote weed in the first place, and, second, how does he know it’s coyote weed, which wouldn’t be an Egyptian sort of thing to know, but I reject these questions. No diversionary tactics. And anyway, he’s taken off, bullet
ing across the road, superior to the possibility of traffic.

  “And here,” he calls to me, “is the part where you, my dear, must be careful. I am very good at this.”

  And he wriggles his way through an opening that’s hardly there, overgrown, sandily uneven, obscured by long, snaky, scratchy branches. He scrambles and dodges and dips. There’s a lot of small boy in my father still.

  “If we just get there before sunset,” he says.

  “What is it about sunset, Father?”

  “Well, I really did know that, but I forgot. Sunset. The sunset and the Eye. The sunset is the death of the Eye. It was something on an e-mail.”

  Carla, you half-wit, you know better than to ask a question like that. “Sunset’s a long time off,” I say very firmly. “You’re going to lead me, remember?” And I think, maybe I really should start feeling sorry for myself. Here’s my father, who never exactly was much of a father and now has started acting like a child, but the kind of child that you can get to do things by pretending he’s in charge. “You’re leading,” I repeat. “I’ll follow. I’m right behind you here.”

  “Yes. Yes, my dear.” He grabs my hand, pleased to be intent once more. We push our way through thorny bushes and high grass.

  Not only is this hard work, but we’re forging through major tick country, and I’ll probably pick up a few little passengers. Insects love me. I squint down at my sneakers.

  I stop thinking this because ahead of us the foraging aspect has gotten worse, Daddy has dropped onto all fours, vigorously endangering his elbows, knees, the crisp crease of his beautiful tweed pants, and he seems to be disappearing into a hole.

  It’s the culvert. Just like the rabbit hole in Alice.

  It happens too fast for me to get seriously upset about it, but I react viscerally, that sudden cramp in the belly when you don’t understand something, and then I try reaching an arm after him into the scratchy, weedy hole where I can see the bottoms of his shoes wriggling off.

  He calls back, his voice exaggerated by the passageway echo, “It’s all right! It’s fine. You didn’t know I was going to do that, did you? Just get down and try. You can do it.”

  Thank God, I’m wearing blue jeans. I can worry about my father’s tweed pants some other time.

  “It’s not a very long culvert,” he calls back.

  And then, “See, now. I’m almost out.”

  My dad is skinnier than I am. My rabbit-hole trip is a tight squeeze with a lot of grief from rocks and gravel and rusty splinters snagging at my hair, abrasions collecting on my elbows and the palms of my hands. But I do see light ahead; he’s right, as soon as the bottoms of his shoes disappear, there it is, flashing. This will be a short culvert creep. I marvel at the energetic scramble he’s performing ahead. How old is he? Sixty when I was born; that makes him eighty-five now. I knew that all along, of course, but I can still think, Wow.

  Suddenly the light gets much brighter. Ahead, Daddy has popped into the daytime, and in a minute, with additional damage to my elbows and the palms of my hands, I’m there, too.

  We’re on a cliff, lodged on our stomachs behind a barrier of high grass and seaside bushes, with a view over the edge down onto the beach that was in Daddy’s picture. Clearly it’s the same beach, with that exact stretch of sand and the three conical rocks at the end.

  I say, “Oh.” And then, “You did a great job of drawing this.”

  “Well, I’ve been trained, of course,” he lowers his voice modestly.

  The water’s at about the same level as in his picture, midtide, I guess.

  “She was down there,” he points.

  “And there were some other people?”

  “Three people. They didn’t fight at first. At first, they just talked. They came down from there.” He points to the north end of the beach.

  “You were following, sort of? You were an observer?”

  “Observer?” my father asks. “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I have told too much. It was important not to tell. Not telling was mentioned. In the usual context. And I still have my token.” He’s begun acting anxious, moving his hands back and forth over the flattened grasses.

  Token? I’ve got to come up with an unthreatening remark here. Repeating a fragment of conversation; sometimes that’s safe. “Not telling,” I say.

  He has lowered his head and is resting his nose against a rock. “‘Turn away at the sentence that Isis spoke,’” he intones into the grass.

  Oh, shit, I say, with energy, but, of course, not aloud.

  His voice has gotten high. “We’d better go now.”

  I try for a lure. “You were leading. I was following.”

  But he has already started scrambling to his feet. He’s pretty unsteady, and he’s awfully close to the edge of the bluff. I get up fast.

  As I stand beside him, holding his elbow, I take a last look down at that beach. It is certainly the one he showed us in his pastel picture, with the difference that it contains no body in yellow wrappings. The other people he has talked about weren’t in his painting.

  I’ve seen the beach. My father says it’s the one where a murder occurred, and I believe him.

  Maybe he knows the person who was killed.

  Maybe she told him something.

  Maybe she gave him something.

  Perhaps he recognized the people who killed her.

  We stand together, looking down.

  At the far south end of the beach, over by the rocks, there’s some kind of a mound. At first I think it’s seaweed, but then I see ropelike strands and tell myself no, it’s a stack of fisherman’s nets. There’s a lot of salmon and herring fishing on this coast, and someone has used this cove as a storage point. Or maybe these are nets that need mending or are being abandoned, the equivalent of the derelict machinery strewn about in rural yards. It’s hard to see accurately, but I squint and concentrate and decide that the net on the top is brown, the way nets always used to be, but underneath there is distinctly a glimmer of yellow, the same bright nylon yellow that Daddy used in his picture.

  Beside me, he has gotten persistent. “I have to get back. I think perhaps I have been careless. I want to be careful with my token. Take me back to my hotel. I am worried, my dear, really somewhat worried.”

  Chapter 12

  I ought to be grateful that Mrs. La Salle is taking such an interest in Daddy.

  She shows up nestled into a hand-woven gray tweed shawl, her short white hair topped by a gray velvet hat with mustard trim. I really like her clothes. She’s a smashing-looking lady; I’m just resentful of her.

  And suspicious of her.

  “Whatever he wants to do,” she says. “We can go for a walk. We can stay here and listen to music. We can play checkers.”

  When I mention Antiques Roadshow, she says, “Oh, but that’s my favorite program. Darling Edward, what fun we will have.”

  I go off to visit Mrs. Sisal, telling myself I must find a way of convincing Mrs. La Salle that Daddy is poor. I’ve complained to her about prescription bills; I’ve stressed that I’m working at the Manor because I need money. None of that seems to register.

  This will be my third obligatory visit to Mrs. Sisal.

  After all, I more or less promised to spy for her. So here I am, pretending I’ve been doing that.

  She greets me, “Well, Miss Day,” which maybe is her standard greeting, but this time is delivered with caution and a subliminal message, understood but not voiced: Well, Miss Day, you were supposed to report to me but so far have reported nothing, or, Well, Miss Day, you certainly have a talent for walking into messes.

  “Mrs. Sisal,” I say, and sit down.

  “That must have been a shock,” she says, now aloud, screwing her face into the right mix of distaste and sympathy, since she’s talking about how I found Mona. Then she adds, also aloud, all the things you’d expect, and I say back all the things I should, in the meanwhile thinking, Lady, I’m going to have to start being suspicious of people,
asking who’s been doing this and who that, and you’d be high on my suspicious list, if only I could think up a good motive for you. “Mona was dealing drugs,” is what I actually tell her aloud, only not quite that flat-out and accompanied by the bland stare that means, Of course, you’ve already heard this.

  Which of course she has; she evinces no surprise.

  Maybe she knew all along. Maybe she was in on it?

  “How is your father?” she asks.

  I think at her, You leave my father out of this. I’m getting hypersensitive about him. Meanwhile, I’m saying aloud, with my reliable-employee’s smile, “Fine. Daddy’s fine.”

  I hope Mrs. Sisal doesn’t have ESP. Basic parts of this conversation are being conducted in my head.

  On her desk there is a big vase of red hot pokers, supplied, I suppose, by secretary Rebecca. Mrs. S. and I play a dodging back and forth game with our heads around these flowers, trying to look sincerely at each other while we talk. She’s hunched in a protective posture in her chair, arms folded over her chest.

  We’ve reached a hiatus in the dialogue. I’ve finished my report. The residents are upset. They are talking about moving. Everybody says about Mona, “Well, she asked for it, didn’t she?” Or something like that. But nobody knows who finally delivered the final neck-twist. Or if they do, they aren’t saying.

  Mrs. Sisal unkinks her legs, which have been hunched up like the rest of her, and examines the toe of one black Gucci and says, “Well, for God’s sake.”

  And after that, she floors me. “Miss Day,” she asks, “What would you do? If you were me?”

  For once I don’t go off and blatt the first thing that comes into my head, which in this case is, Are you kidding? Nor the second, something like: If I were you, Mrs. Sisal, I think I would move to Juneau, Alaska, and open a nice B and B. Mrs. S. and I share a moment of contemplative silence while I debate whether she has finally and definitively snapped. But when I eventually speak it’s a modified version of, “You are doing just fine.” The words capable and aware and sympathetic response get elicited. I listen to myself using them and check them off one by one.