Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  There’s a brief pause, after which he changes the subject, “I came by here to see Ed three times since your aunt moved him in. Did he say anything?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.” After a minute I add, “That shows how he’s not such a great witness; a couple of times when he talked about a nice young man who went to Egypt. I guess maybe he was telling me he’d seen you and I didn’t catch on.”

  “Lately, he has a new one,” I add. “He’s started talking about his token. ‘I have my token. Through all this I kept my token.’ What’s a token?”

  Rob says a token is whatever you want it to be. Like a sign. Or a word. Something that stands in for something else. “A bus token is a stand-in for money.”

  I want to tell him he sounds like my philosophy book, but I know he’s trying to be helpful. Instead I say, “I’ll get my old ladies on about the missing woman; they’ll love snooping around,” and right away feel guilty calling the trio the old ladies and talking about them snooping; they’re my good friends whom I like and who’ve helped me ever since I arrived here. So I make up for being mean about them by being mean to Robbie. “We’ve wasted all afternoon, let’s get going.”

  Yes, he and I are back to normal; each of us wants to pilot the plane. I take his hand and squeeze it for apology and think, Oh, hell.

  I start inquiries about the net-woman. Here I run into a brick wall at first. Everyone knows my father’s beach-murder story and thinks it’s Alzheimer’s. Even Mrs. Dexter, whom I tried to persuade that it was real. “Oh, but we can’t take that tale of his seriously?”

  And then, after pressure from me, they do begin to take it seriously. “You mean it was real? That scene he painted? How awful. Dear, what makes you think so?”

  “Just because his picture was so specific? Oh, you’ve seen the place? And he’s been talking about it, too? A lot? Oh, poor Ed. Poor you. How awful. So gruesome. Wrapped in gold cord. Yes, strange, terrible.”

  “But, darling, do you really think so?”

  I partly—or maybe mostly—convince them.

  Mrs. La Salle is the only one who continues unpersuaded. “It’s such a standard fantasy. Legendary. All those Greek stories with the woman tied up at the water’s edge, an offering for the sea god.” She touches her feathered white hair.

  For some reason I ask her about e-mails. “What’s an e-mail?” I ask.

  “E-mail.” She seems to welcome the question. “E-mail is magic. The air must be warm with those things.” She makes a flapping motion, as if she’s swatting flies.

  “Is that what my father thinks?”

  “Ed? Does he think about e-mail?” She stares at my face for a minute. “Ed’s probably afraid of them. I understand your father very well, you know.”

  “Did you send him an e-mail?”

  Her tone so far has been bantering, but she now sounds cross. “Why, Carla, of course not.”

  So I accept. Actually I like the phone a lot. It’s a black clamshell-type and feels good when you hold it.

  Of course, the first person who calls is Rob himself. “Hi, how are you? How’s Ed? Listen, I’ve been reading up some more on Alzheimer’s and about that excitation he had in the restaurant, the way he carried on and tried to get out the window. I think his problem is two different things, one is memory and the other is chemistry, but interdependent, you understand, interlocked and related. Did you know there are plateaus, times when the patient just stays the same for months? Then sometimes he goes back, gets better. And in Germany, they’ve been using special drugs that jack you up—make you a lot better for a while. But these may be dangerous. Fascinating stuff. Wow, what a lot of info, more than three thousand items; my mouse-hand went numb.”

  My old ladies telephone, even though they’re just a few feet away and could yell their greetings if they wanted to. All of them love telephoning. “Hello, Carly, how are you today? You know, I heard, and it may not amount to anything, that there’s a woman over in South Building hasn’t heard from her cousin . . .”

  Mrs. Cohen has met a lady whose brother visited a month ago. But since then he hasn’t written and hasn’t called; the lady is very worried. “Now I know Ed thought it was a woman, however, we hear so much about false memory and altered perceptions, and I just think it would be so very interesting if it turned out to be a man instead of, as far as Ed’s memory of it went . . .” The lady with the brother is named Mrs. Goliard; I take her phone number.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Cohen adds, “she’s the one that went out the window. I don’t think that figures, do you?”

  Mrs. Dexter has been talking to Rebecca, Mrs. Sisal’s secretary, who tells her that someone named Idora left the office a month ago and hasn’t been heard from since. “Not that I’d be heard from, either, if I’d worked for that Sisal woman,” Mrs. Dexter says. “But she is a Disappeared, and they seem to have hired her without any records. I think you should check.”

  Also, Arlette telephones. Robbie’s girlfriend, Arlette. She has a message for Robbie and thinks maybe he’s here with me. The fact that Arlette looks for Robbie at my new phone number cheers me up a lot. I am, I tell myself, really mean.

  Daddy wonders if I can call Cairo on my new telephone, so I do. He asks the operator, in Arabic, what time it is, and gets told, in English, that it’s two o’clock in the morning. Then he holds the phone against my ear and tells me, “Carly, this is absolutely wonderful, isn’t it?”

  He plays with the phone for a minute, flipping and un-flipping it. “It reminds me of something. What would that be?”

  I think my father is a little better these last few weeks. Asking me what something reminds him of is a sign of this; the buried messages are crowding closer, trying to poke their snouts out.

  I settle down into some new detective work, which gets me nowhere. First, I try some chasing and tracing with the secretarial agency that sent Idora. I call her former employer, the Portland Chamber of Commerce, after that I move on to Pacific Bell’s World Wide Information Service, and finally I’m calling Idora’s sister, who says, yes, of course she’s heard from Idora, Idora is having a great time with her new boyfriend. They are in Bermuda now, why am I asking?

  Mrs. Goliard is the lady with the missing brother. She lives at the far end of the Manor, so I call her but to no avail; she has birdcalls from three different birds tweeting at you for her answering message. Her own voice comes on the tape afterwards to say what kinds of birds they are, but they all sound alike to me. I leave her a message.

  All this time people are packing up and leaving the Manor. The hall is full of their stacked-up luggage.

  Mr. Rice on my corridor is going. “But it’s not your fault,” he says, “you really tried.” I’m touched by Mr. Rice’s compliment, since he’s been the most complaining of my clients. “You helped,” Mr. Rice says, “you and Belle. You two were responsible. You listened to my concerns.”

  None of my trio of special old ladies is leaving. “It’s much too interesting here,” Mrs. Cohen says. Mrs. Dexter tells her it’s damn boring, if you must know, but she’ll leave only when she feels like it. Mrs. La Salle just shrugs and says, “What for?” She has come around to take Daddy for a walk. “I’m not afraid of falling out a window,” she says, and pulls her fur hat down over one ear. Her white hair fluffs out on the other side. “I’m not troubled much by fear.”

  It takes me a minute to get it, to understand. I stand at the half-open door.

  I do a double, then triple take. This doesn’t make sense. What happened?

  The place is a mess.

  Clothes on the floor.

  Hand-lotion bottle on the floor, uncapped, big puddle, perfume smell, other smells.

  Broken mirror shards, glinting and reflecting, bits of china, mascara, lipstick, ripped-up underpants, unfurled rolls of toilet paper.

  Upside-down dresser drawers, rug in a heap, books, pages ripped out.

  Scattered papers, letters, newspaper, magazines.

  Something’s on the bed,
lodged high in a hill of bedclothes.

  A heaped-up bundle, red stains on it.

  I don’t want to see this.

  I’m going to back out of here, close the door.

  I don’t back out, I cross the room to the bed and the heap of blanket and sheet.

  The sheets are red-smeared, like butcher paper. I pull them down.

  There’s more red; it smears my hands. Inside is something. A red slimy object.

  It’s not meat exactly. It’s an object. An animal.

  I have trouble thinking. You saw a lot of animals when you worked in the animal lab, Carla. Never one like this.

  But you know what it is. You’ve seen something like it. At the butcher shop. Something red and bare. With the skin pulled off. This is an animal that has been skinned. All the natural, expected covering peeled away except at the head and the paws.

  The head is how I know what it is. Was. It’s one of our hares, those long-legged guys, scared eyes and upstanding ears. The ones that hung out in the meadow or near the mermaid statue.

  I pull the sheet completely off. Here it is. A body: red, oozing, muscles outlined. When the sheet moves over it a muscle twitches.

  That can happen after death. I know that’s true. A latent reaction. It doesn’t mean the animal’s still alive.

  I tell myself this several times.

  But that doesn’t work, and finally I have to do it. I don’t want to. But I have to. If there’s a chance this creature is still alive. I act fast. I put a hand at the back of its neck, grip firmly around flesh, bone, bloody fur collar, bend the head back, firmly, sudden, hard. And snap.

  Clouded brown eyes are staring at the wall. Surely you were dead anyway. You were dead, and you couldn’t feel. There’s a prayer for this. I can’t say the prayer. Something about Go in beauty, or some crap like that.

  I sit down on the floor. I’m crying hard, but I manage to pull my phone out of my pants pocket and call Rob. I leave sticky smears all over the push buttons.

  Rob says. “You need lunch.”

  I pick up a sandwich and pry it open and look at the filling. “What do they want? For me to get scared and get out of here?”

  “Maybe.”

  “For me to stop poking my nose into things?”

  “Very likely.”

  “Why should they care? I haven’t found out a single thing. Just . . . nothing.”

  “Carla, you have to leave the Manor.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “You’ve got to.”

  “I’m not. They can’t make me.”

  “The person who did that is crazy. Deranged. Dangerous.”

  “And wants to scare me.”

  “Yeah. You better be scared.”

  “I won’t be scared. I’m not going.”

  “Be sensible.”

  “No.” I can hear myself being unreasonable. I can feel my inner me doing a weird set of parallels: My mother went away. She got scared off. She was a quitter. Now my father’s going off someplace. A place very far away and unreachable. He’s scared; he’s backing off, afraid of life. He’s quitting. Not me.

  “They can’t force me,” I tell Rob. “I’m staying.”

  “And subjecting your dad?”

  “He’d want to stay . . . if he could understand.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m just starting to get some answers. All kinds of little pointers. One of them will pan out. That’s what they’re afraid of, one of the things I’m turning up being real.”

  Rob says, “Oh, for God’s sake,” again.

  “I have to stay. You can understand.”

  “I understand you’re being stupidly stubborn.”

  There’s a pause. I say, “I keep hoping it wasn’t still alive.”

  Rob says, “Huh?” and I say, “The rabbit.”

  And he corrects me, “Hare.”

  A car comes along the road and pauses. Children in the backseat are waving.

  “Well,” says Sheriff Hawthorne. “Big mess. Don’t touch anything. We’ll fingerprint.”

  He surveys me. I can’t decide whether his gaze is accusing, inquiring, or maybe triumphant. (You got into more trouble, like I knew you would. You had to come to me.) He’s chewing gum. “Come on down to my office.”

  He is still in his tapestry-paneled hidey-hole down the hall from Mrs. Sisal. It’s clearly his office now, with stacks of papers, green-and-tan boxes. A bosomy lady cop clutching a notebook shares it with him.

  The sheriff tips back his desk chair and stares at me some more. “So why’d they do this to you?”

  I debate being smart-alecky. They don’t like me. Or just dumb: I don’t know. I debate confiding my father’s net-woman story. Then I think again about having my father questioned. This sheriff has been okay so far, but with those slit eyes and those midwestern-dentist practical glasses and that set to his chin, I don’t trust him much. I imagine him grilling Daddy. Insisting on drugs, hypnosis. I picture a whole lineup of bosomy lady cops with notebooks.

  So I try to answer reasonably and humbly. “I must have done something. I’m not sure what.”

  The sheriff scoots his chair farther back. “Let’s think, sweet cakes.”

  Bosomy is poking away at her notes. Maybe drawing pictures.

  I make several efforts. “I did do a couple of things. I checked up on Mrs. Dexter and the oyster. I discovered Mona. Maybe I noticed something then. Before that. Afterward. My father fell in the garden. I was confused. I have trouble remembering.”

  Sheriff H. and I keep this up for a while, with me working hard to stress the two H’s—humble and helpful. I don’t think the sheriff trusts me for a minute, but he finally lets me go and says some of his guys will watch out for me until he leaves the Manor—“Just a coupla more days, sweet cakes. You better rilly watch it. That’s a mean summabitch did that there.” He chews gum and gestures upward in the direction of my room.

  I’m glad to have Sheriff H. say he’ll watch out for me. My father and I can use all the watching that’s offered.

  Chapter 15

  I sit staring at the mermaid and thinking—a peculiar mixture of Why am I here and What have I done with my life so far and How very odd, to be my age and have had such disparate adventures .

  Disparate is a good word. I think my life would be different if I’d had a mother. Even when Constancia was around she wasn’t there, and then when I was ten years old, she left for good.

  I don’t miss her, although there are times I think I ought to. I mean, I remember how handsome she was, straight back and calm perfect profile, and how she stood shoulders-erect, better than most people’s mothers. And how she wasn’t at all, not a bit, interested in clothes. She’d go into whatever store was nearby, Ross Dress-for-Less or Neiman Marcus or whatever, and buy anything they had; it always looked fine. I had a struggle with myself about the way she looked because I would feel proud of her and not want to. But then she’d stare at me when I came near, an expression like deafness across her face, as if I were a homeless person asking for a dollar, and she didn’t want to shut me up, so she’d wait to be polite and listen, then eventually maybe give me that dollar.

  Anyway, she was away eighty percent of the time. Well, seventy-five percent. Conferences in Jeddah, Haifa, Tehran, Istanbul. Teaching positions in London. Even in Vancouver. You wouldn’t think they’d want to know about Phrygian bowls in Vancouver.

  Susie says there was a lovely lady named Mrs. Esposito who got me through my infancy, and although I don’t remember Mrs. Esposito at all, I do understand some Spanish—that comes when I’m not expecting it, all of a sudden I’ll understand what the guys behind the counter in Subway Pizza are telling each other. And one of my lifetime projects is to go to Oaxaca, where Mrs. Esposito is living now, and get to know her again. Maybe she can tell me about myself when I was a baby.

  Susie was the other person who helped me through. And of course Daddy. Though I have to admit it, my father is vague
. But I do love him.

  Oh. And Aunt Crystal. Much as the idea of Aunt Crystal makes me cross, I have to state that, yes, she cared about my life, too. Aunt C. would come up from Southern California and march into our house and exclaim about how peculiar it all was, with my mother gone and my father never answering the mail. He liked getting mail and liked reading it. He just thought answering was too much trouble and took energy away from his archaeological studies.

  On the archaeology I think he was pretty good. Maybe very good. His book, The Coffin Lid Texts: Fourteen Hieroglyphs Reclaimed caused a stir in archaeology circles. After it came out he went to Egypt a lot. Which was okay, because when he was gone I stayed with Susie and Robbie. And sometimes he took me with him. Twice he took both Robbie and me. Rob discovered Egyptian archaeology in our library when he was fifteen; he was crazy about it. That was a really good year, the first time Daddy took me and Rob to Luxor. We rented a little tan stucco house with tame cockroaches and a big fan in the middle of the living room ceiling; we went every day to the Valley of the Kings, and I wrote things down in notebooks while Daddy and Rob dug. Maybe it was the best year of my life.

  But you hate to think you had the best year of your life when you were twelve. That makes you feel like a child gymnast, too old to do those quadruple flips any more. My future is behind me. The future is prologue. And all that depressing stuff.

  I sit on the bench by the mermaid statue thinking about all this long enough to eat four peppermint Jelly Bellies and to murmur a final salute to the mermaid circle’s former tenant, the long-legged hare, whom Rob has promised to bury beside a clump of wild iris in one of our cliffside meadows.

  “Who’s this? Where’s here?”

  The voice says, “Who is Mrs. La Salle and here is your father’s apartment—well not his apartment exactly. Outside his apartment.”

  Mrs. La Salle sounds upset, which is not like her, and also confused, again atypical. “Hurry up,” she says.

  Outside my father’s apartment Mrs. La Salle stands, clutching the ends of a purple-and-blue cloak and looking up. She is making sounds, negative monosyllables like “No,” and “Don’t.” And, twice, “Ed.” Just that, my father’s name. “Thank God,” she says about my arrival, and then, gesturing and flashing bits of chunky jewelry, “Up there.”