Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  Up there and ahead, along a brick walkway and some mossy stairs, is one of Green Beach’s fake Norman towers. At the top of this tower there’s an arched opening onto a projecting Romeo-and-Juliet balcony; this balcony holds a large terra-cotta flowerpot and a man on one knee balancing a rifle on the balcony rail. He is squinting along the barrel of the rifle and looks as if he’s getting ready to shoot it. The man is my father. He wears his best tie, a navy blue one, his Johns Hopkins tie. The rest of him is complete in a tan tweed suit and vest. Over his right shoulder there’s some kind of a rope or sling. Both he and the rifle look insecure; they wobble and vibrate.

  Mrs. La Salle is perhaps safe where she has hidden herself under the overhang of our bay window; she’s still bravely calling up, “No, Ed!” I ask, strangulated, “How do I get up there?”

  She points at a door half-hidden in ivy in the base of the tower. I start toward it fast, trying to run unthreateningly so as not to scare my father, who is watching. Meanwhile, I’m talking up at him. “Now, then, just stay put . . . don’t move your finger . . . it’s going to be all right . . . you’re going to be all right.” And whatever other feeble-minded cheery thing I can think of to yell as I pull the tower door open (it sticks) and squeeze through, and, feet stumbling and getting in the way of each other, scramble up the metal stairs that circle the inside.

  The stairs ring under my feet. Around and around. The wall of the tower is lined in brick, the sort of checkerboard pattern that makes you dizzy when you run fast in a circle. “Daddy, don’t move.”

  At the top of the stairs is a circular landing space floored in shiny gray material; its major feature is a view of the balcony with my father framed, dramatizing Shoot-out at the OK Corral.

  “Daddy,” I say in the calm voice you’re supposed to use with rabid dogs and small children in danger, “Put the gun down . . . on the floor . . . in front of you. Don’t move your finger. Then step back . . . little steps . . . one at a time. You can do it.”

  My heart is pounding so drumlike that I can hardly hear myself. And my father looks like a traditional madman, his normally neat, brushed hair scraggly from the wind, his eyes red. He’s wobbling that weapon. Pointing it off someplace down the road.

  “It’s not a gun,” he shouts into the air, “it’s a rifle.” He starts a rhythmic gesturing, he chants: “Here is my rifle, here is my gun; one is for fighting, the other . . .”

  This is the second time I’ve seen him look the way an Alzheimer’s patient is supposed to look, that is, crazy and dangerous. “Father. Put it down.”

  “Down? Why? They promised me. An e-mail. They need my token.” He waves this out into space; he semaphores.

  “Listen. Please.”

  “Please? What kind of a word, please? They promised.” More space gestures, rifle up, rifle down. I’m behind him, halfway out of the hole at the top of the stairs; I resist an impulse to grab him.

  “I could shoot them,” he says. “All of them . . . Good idea,” he adds. “She needs me.”

  “Just put it down. We’ll talk.”

  “But she needs me.”

  “Father, I need you.”

  “Then why is she dead? I knew her. The woman in the net.”

  “The woman in the net is over, Daddy.”

  “And the woman on the beach. The woman in the net and the woman on the beach. Woman in net. Woman on beach.” He makes a kind of chant of this, gesturing with the rifle to keep time. “Beach . . . net . . . beach . . . net. They said it. My token will help.” He has slid part way back into the room now. “Did you know? They left me a hangman’s noose.”

  His gesturing has got the rifle caught in the scalloped balcony rail design. He struggles and tugs.

  “Father,” I squawk. “Stop. Don’t pull.” Now I’m up and out of the circular staircase and almost behind him.

  He says, “Oh, no,” in a heartstricken voice, as he braces one foot. “Caught,” he wrenches something.

  A shot discharges; there’s dust, noise, a sharp dusty smell, and he tumbles backward into the room. Particles settle. A metallic clatter from below signals that the rifle has landed.

  My father lies on his back. He says, “Woman in net. Dead, and I couldn’t . . .”

  “Father!” I blurt out. I’ve had it. A mixture of fear and irritation overwhelms my social-work approaches. “Stop that. I can’t stand it.”

  And this works. He shifts; he’s lying on his back, half on the balcony, half in the room, a haze of dust and plaster settling around him. He shoves up on one elbow, thinking about this. I can see his mind starting to partly clear; it’s almost two images at once, like a montage in a movie. Slowly his shoulders realign, he straightens, he sighs. And then he pushes entirely away from the balcony. “Well, now.” He almost sounds like Edward Day again.

  Which doesn’t help me much. I’m still scared of him and for him.

  “Sit here,” I say. There’s a ledge around the inside wall of this landing, I pull him up and shove him on to it. He’s still hanging on to the rope across his shoulder.

  “I didn’t see her,” he says. “I saw you. And that lady. That particular lady. But I didn’t see her. That was a terrible thing. Did I frighten you? I’m so very sorry.”

  Yes, you frightened me. I guess this craziness will get worse from now on. “Where did you get that rifle?”

  “That? I hope it’s all right. It was a gift. It was sent to me in a package. Wasn’t that nice? It’s quite a good one. Did I frighten you?”

  My father isn’t a gun nut, but he knows how a rifle works. He had a rifle in Egypt where it might be useful against jackals and looters; I never saw him fire it, but I guess he knew how. “Yes, you frightened me. Who sent you the rifle?”

  “Some friend. A nice gesture.”

  From below Mrs. La Salle’s voice wafts up: “Are you all right up there? I have your firearm.” Mrs. La Salle knows enough not to call a rifle a gun.

  My father reaches up and touches my face. “I’m truly sorry, dear.”

  And all this time, the sweet man has been waiting underneath. That fact mixes with the panic I’ve been feeling, and I get a surge of anger. What business does he have being sweet during a crisis like this? “You must promise me you will never, never . . .”

  “Oh, but my dear.” His voice is mild. “They sent me an e-mail.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  He shifts his attention to the floor. “Curious. Linoleum. Not suitable.”

  “Daddy. Someone told you?”

  He’s still examining the floor, bent over and scratching with one finger at the crusty surface. “Yes, they. It’s important that it was they. Several people. More than one, I believe. I’m an archaeologist, you know. Interesting. Two different layers of time.” He lifts his head. “Here, would you take this rope? It’s beginning to scrape.” And he pulls at the tan rope hanging over his shoulder. The way he’s had it, over one shoulder and down his side, I couldn’t see the back of it, but now that it’s free I recognize that it ends in a kind of loop with a knot at the top. Heavy rope, the kind you’d want for tying a boat to its dock.

  He stretches it out and examines it interestedly. “A hangman’s noose. Hard to make. Do you know, I think it was for me?” And he stretches the loop wide, puts his head inside, rests his chin on the knot, and makes a horrible face, eyes crossed and tongue extruded. “Awwk!” he chokes.

  I tell him, “Stop it. You’re showing off.” Which is true. It feels good to tell him that.

  “Nevertheless, I wasn’t scared,” he says. “And I still have my token.” He crosses his eyes some more, “When you do this they don’t stick, though some people say they will.

  “But I wasn’t scared. It seemed too bad, with such a nice rifle. Do you know, I’ve just realized, it might be teatime. I want scones. And vanilla yogurt. I’m hungry!”

  He thunks the rope over to me. Yes, it is a hangman’s noose, no question about it. Made of rope so heavy that the whole arrangement mus
t weigh almost four pounds.

  Over the tea table I try several times to elicit details from my father. “Who sent the e-mail? Who said what?”

  “It was to help her, you know.”

  “But someone sent you the rifle?”

  “My dear, apparently.”

  “And the noose was in the same package with the rifle?”

  “I think he doesn’t want to talk,” Mrs. La Salle observes.

  Daddy is breaking his scone into small pieces. I’ve combed his hair and he looks like Edward Day again. “It probably wasn’t very safe. That end board, the one on the edge there, was unsteady.”

  “Listen, you must remember.”

  “Perhaps I tied that knot myself.”

  “Let’s just eat,” says Mrs. La Salle. She herself is managing fine, with three cucumber sandwiches and a cappuccino, and the rifle placed crosswise under her chair. She has promised not to talk about this adventure; she understands that management may still want to send Daddy off to the special facility. “You silly man,” she says to him now, approaching a firm, pink-tinged cheek for a kiss.

  “It was a symbol of something,” my father says.

  I take him back to his room, where I try to find a place to stash the rifle. I finally decide to take it back to my broom closet and stash it behind my cardboard dresser. This isn’t a good place, but nowhere is. A rifle is an inconvenient shape.

  The rope can be untied; I can keep it. A lot of people save rope.

  “Trying to scare him,” I say.

  “Trying to get him to tell them something,” Rob says.

  “Trying to get some object. Find some object.” I say.

  “To persuade him to give it to them. The token.” Rob suggests.

  “Trying to scare him,” I repeat. “A threat. A hangman’s noose. But he doesn’t seem really scared.”

  “He has Alzheimer’s. The response synapses are different.”

  “You mean you don’t get scared when you have Alzheimer’s?”

  “You can be plenty scared. Really frightened. Obsessive about it. But often it’s irrational. Scared of stuff that isn’t there. Of different things. Not the logical ones. Hangman’s noose didn’t connect for him. He knew what it meant, but it didn’t really matter, wasn’t part of his personal mythic history. Now if it were something Egyptian . . .”

  “Well, I’m scared.”

  Rob latches on to this. “Good. Leave. Pack up. Come stay with me.”

  “We did this already. No.”

  Rob says, “Oh, hell,” and kicks at the dirt near the mermaid statue.

  “Were they trying to make him fall?” I ask, after a prickly silence.

  “No. They can’t want him dead. Not now. He’s got something they want.”

  “Jeez Louise,” I say, imitating Henry the cabdriver, “It’s giving me nightmares.”

  “You should have nightmares. You’re the stubbornest human being in captivity.” For a minute I think Rob is going to walk off and leave me sitting there, but he doesn’t do that.

  Chapter 16

  Mrs. Goliard, the lady-out-the-window, the one with the birdcalls on her answering service whose brother doesn’t communicate, finally phones me back.

  We have an entirely confusing conversation in which I am saying, “I wondered if you had heard from your brother,” and she is saying things about me being Dr. Day’s daughter. “Is that possible?” she asks. “Are you related to Dr. Day? In that case you’re related to . . .” and her voice starts trailing off into the atmosphere. She has one of those indistinct whines that gets more inaudible with confusion, but she seems now to be talking about my Aunt Crystal.

  So at the same moment I’m saying, “Aunt Crystal?” and she’s saying, “My brother Kevin? Oh, yes, Kevin wrote to me, of course he did. I was so foolish; I worry too much . . . But your Aunt Crystal . . . I’m afraid I must have offended her.”

  It seems she was working with Crystal on some kind of project.

  I try to remember when Aunt Crystal was at the Manor last. About a week before I left Berkeley, that’s when I got the postcard with the mermaid statue and the spiky message: “Service fair; breakfast waffles leathery; yr fr. adjusting v. well.”

  “So your brother is all right?” I’m asking, and Mrs. Goliard keeps talking about Aunt Crystal, “Your aunt, how wonderful. I was working with her.

  “That is, I thought I was working with her,” Mrs. Goliard talks in a high bleat. “You simply must—oh, I would appreciate it if only—please do come to see me.”

  She and I make a date for later that afternoon.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she says. “Oh, Crystal’s niece. She mentioned about you, but I had no idea until Belle told me. I mean, that you were living here . . .”

  “Maybe we should go inside,” I say, since it looks as if she won’t be able to get out of her doorway unless I give her a shove, and she says, “Oh, my goodness, oh, yes,” and leads the way into a dark, overheated apartment full of brocade drapes and a lot of those little porcelain dancer figures up on one toe and with lace flounces baked into their porcelain.

  I get seated on a red velvet couch with an impossibly hard back, and she sits facing me in a flowered chair and stares and says, “Oh,” and “Please,” and “Oh, my, do you have any idea—well, you wouldn’t have, would you? Anyway, why did Crystal never get back to me? Was she angry? I didn’t do the research, but I couldn’t, could I, not knowing what it was supposed to be?”

  “I’d really like a cup of tea,” I prod, not because I really would (I wouldn’t; I’ve had enough tea since I joined the Manor to float myself all the way back to Berkeley), but in order to give her something specific to do, and at this she says, “Oh, dear,” and “Oh, of course,” and starts to fluster gratefully toward her small kitchen.

  Meanwhile, I’m trying to put together my idea of Aunt Crystal, so organized and precise, and asking myself what on earth would she want with this chaotic little lady, just the kind Aunt C. can’t stand. She must have an extra-special reason.

  Mrs. Goliard dithers out with apple-cinnamon tea and Pepperidge Farm cookie sandwiches that get displayed on a pink marble table, and while we sip and munch, her story slowly emerges.

  Aunt Crystal had looked up Mrs. Goliard because she, like Aunt C., used to be a librarian.

  “Not that I was in her class,” Mrs. Goliard dithers. “Oh, not at all. Your aunt, before she retired, was head of the main branch of the Ventura library, and she even taught a course at—where was it?”

  “USC,” I say. “University of Southern California.”

  “So prestigious. And I was just the weekend person at the downtown branch in The Dalles, Oregon.”

  Her voice fades here; she’s losing track of her thought. I jump-start her, “Aunt Crystal came to you . . .”

  “Oh, yes, yes. Though I must say for myself, I am trained in research; I do know about that. And your aunt had a research project.

  “I was so excited to be asked, because, you know, here at the Manor, it’s all very, very nice, or at least it was before all these accidents started, but still . . . well, anyway, you do start to feel, even though it’s so nice . . .”

  Here she begins a session of chin-pulling that makes me feel I’ll be doing it too unless I rescue her. “It’s nice here, but you were glad to have something to do.”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. You’re so like your aunt. Such an incisive mind.”

  Aunt Crystal, I am saying in my head, this will never work out.

  “But,” Mrs. Goliard continues, “I never found out what exactly your aunt was researching. She was coming back to tell me about it more fully. And then she didn’t.” Tug, tug on the chin. “And I wrote and got no answer. I blamed myself, of course. But it is confusing. What she wanted with me, here. Because we aren’t near a good library, now are we? Of course there is the little local library in Conestoga and then the historic mansion outside of town—maybe there’s a library there; I never asked . . .”
>
  I’m starting to feel some sort of cold warning, a clutch of danger deep in my belly. I try for a minute to identify it and can’t, so I grab back into the conversation, “But she didn’t give you any idea at all?” Aunt Crystal likes to be busy; I know that. She’s a volunteer teacher of reading and math, she visits hospitals. Those are great things to be doing, though I can’t help feeling sorry for the people she helps, having Aunt Crystal leaning over their shoulder like a witch out of Macbeth, tracing their mistakes with a bony finger. Research, I never heard about that.

  “Research on what?” I ask, stifling the cold feeling. Mrs. Goliard tugs and looks flustered.

  “Something about California history,” she suggests. “I mean, she didn’t exactly say it. Only that it’s important. And it’s local. I got that California-history feeling.”

  At the back of my mind somebody erects a large sign: WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MONA? WITH THE ACCIDENTS AT THE MANOR?

  I am saying “Accidents” to my subconscious at the same moment that Mrs. Goliard is telling me, “And then I fell out of the window.”

  Fell, I go. More like accident. Not saying it aloud, just thinking. I had pretty much forgotten that this was the out-the-window lady.

  “So very stupid,” Mrs. Goliard dithers on. “You know, I liked to go to the window and stand and look out; it gave me a feeling that I was getting out of my problems. Then, suddenly there wasn’t any glass, and I got dizzy. That’s one of my things, in a situation like that, if I’m up high and if the light comes from underneath, well, I get dizzy.”

  “So very foolish,” she adds, looking to me as if I will agree, yes, foolish. “If the new chef hadn’t come by and caught me . . . And it’s really only these last few days . . . I mean, it’s taken me four whole weeks to get over being scared about it.”