Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  “Four weeks?” I ask.

  My subconscious has turned into an echoing mess. That word accident still clangs around there like a ball in a pinball machine that can’t find its pocket, but there’s also this new word making its own noise. About something else, something cold and really evil.

  Mrs. Goliard is still talking, “I told myself that was what I got for being so pleased about your aunt. Something bad always happens right away if something good does. And then I just waited to hear from her and when I didn’t, well, that was all right at first, and I could tell myself not to be silly. But now that it has been almost a month . . .”

  That’s it, that’s it, I think. When, that’s the cold word. A month. A month since when. I open my mouth, and I can’t speak. I close my mouth, and I try again. “Mrs. Goliard,” I say finally, “when was Aunt Crystal here?”

  Mrs. Goliard thinks I am accusing her of something. She says, “When,” and “My goodness.” She drops a cookie. “It was . . . I can’t remember the date exactly. Just about a month ago. Just before I fell out the window.”

  The lady’s name is Mrs. Bascomb.

  I reach her right away.

  She’s the cheerful sort, at least at the beginning of our conversation. “Crystal’s niece? Yes, of course, you’re Carla, yes, I heard about you. So glad you called because I must say, I had begun to wonder . . . I mean, I’m glad to go on with the watering and all that, but the garden is getting out of hand and the mail is piling up and some of it looks like bills and . . .

  “Well,” she asks, pausing for breath, “when is Crystal coming back, anyway?”

  I find myself going breathless and oddly unwilling to tell Mrs. Bascomb that I have no idea where Aunt Crystal is. “When did she leave Venice?” I ask. And Mrs. B., sounding surprised, says, “Why, last month . . . yes, maybe in the middle of the month. She was going to stay at her brother’s place, a very nice place—oh, he would be your father, wouldn’t he? Then you know the place, that’s where she would be staying. Do you mean, are you telling me, you’re not in touch with her?”

  Mrs. Bascomb hasn’t put it together that I live at the Manor and that I don’t know where Aunt Crystal is. And when at last we connect on this, she is quite horrified. She does the acting out for me. I am sitting holding the phone, feeling all kinds of heat changes and freezing changes as if a new temperature-altering substance has been invented and applied to me from head to toe, but especially in the gut area. My personal alarm system is going: Yes, I knew it, I could feel it; Aunt Crystal is missing, she’s the one, she was here at the Manor. She’s the woman who went away and didn’t write home.

  Mrs. Bascomb of course doesn’t have all the history I have, and after her initial shock wants to believe various harmless things until finally I manage to say, sounding all right and in charge when I say it, “Thank you, you are so good to worry. I’ll take care of it; I’ll look into everything, and I’ll call you back. You’ll hear from me.”

  Then I hang up and think I’m going to be sick. I waste about ten minutes in the employees’ bathroom down the hall, hanging on to the enamel toilet bowl and feeling dizzy and weak. I can’t throw up; all I can manage is staring at the white enamel and then fixing on the stainless steel handle and feeling awful. When I finally stagger out into the hall I meet Belle who says, “Hell’s bells kid, you look like shit.” I squeeze by her not answering and make it back into my little cell, where I lie down for a few minutes before I call Mrs. Sisal’s office.

  She stayed a week, Rebecca says, and her bill was paid by Dr. Day’s account.

  Skrrtch, skrrtch over the telephone, it’s Rebecca turning pages. “Left something, I guess,” she adds. “We mailed it to her. Doesn’t say what.”

  I hang up and make my way to the bathroom again. But I don’t throw up this time, either. Then I come back and call the sheriff.

  Sheriff Hawthorne is downstairs and can see me right away.

  He’s standing by his partially dismantled desk, surrounded by cardboard cartons and rolls of sticky tape. He, with his crew, is leaving us tomorrow. He’s only moderately happy to see me. “Came to confess, I guess,” he says, projecting irony. He’s not at all interested in my most recent wild story. “Your aunt? You have an aunt that doesn’t write to you?

  “Tell me something useful for a change,” he suggests. “You remembered a fact. Your dad remembered a fact.

  “And cut it out with this bullshit about a missing aunt who doesn’t send postcards. Lissen. We got a murder. The lady had your house number down her bra. Somebody tossed your room. You’re into this mess, in like Flynn.”

  On the Aunt Crystal question he tells me I’m being a female overreacter. “You got a lot of things to think about lately, right?” After which he walks around, slapping Scotch tape onto packages. “Right in the middle of leaving here,” he mutters. “Kee-reep. . . . Just tell me, back to basics, why were you in the meadow that night, huh?”

  When I don’t give up and keep trying to convince him that my aunt is missing, and it’s his responsibility to do something, he snorts his walrus snort, “She was an independent kind of lady, right? Traveled a lot? Librarian, you say, teacher. Yeah, your dad maybe hasn’t heard from her, but your dad forgets, correct? . . . Hey, on that, have you thought about it, how about . . . could we jump-start him? You realize, it looks pretty suspicious the way these pointers keep aiming at him.

  “Okay, okay,” he says, in response to a semihysterical outburst from me. He sits down. “Of course if you insist, I’ll fill out a form, but listen, Miss Day, you’ll see, this’ll be one of those times when the lady shows up with a suitcase full of souvenirs from Yosemite and talks about the wonderful time she had and that impulse just to climb on a bus and explore . . .”

  I am sitting in Sheriff Hawthorne’s temporary office, one of our Victorian type of Manor rooms with the whipped-cream ceiling molding. I am shifting back and forth in a cerise velvet Manor chair and looking at his collection of cartons containing details of the Mona murder, and I’m fighting down a tide of anxiety and going Yes, no, yes, no at myself; the question being, do I finally have to tell Sheriff Hawthorne about what Daddy saw from the cliff top? (“Listen, Sheriff Hawthorne, my father thinks he saw this murder where they rolled the woman in a net, but of course he’s not a very reliable witness, and I don’t want him questioned at all . . .”)

  “We have these things all the time,” the sheriff is droning on, paying no attention to my projected thoughts. “People are goddamn stupid; they go away, and they just don’t make sense. Now, Miss Day, why don’t you try to concentrate on the murder you walked in on, remember? Let’s not let some other damn thing make us go off half-cocked.”

  “Listen, Sheriff Hawthorne,” I break in, “I do emphatically want you to list my aunt as missing. She left some stuff in her room, the Manor had to send it after her. And she was close to my dad. She had special information about him that might help us now.”

  Maybe the idea of Aunt Crystal knowing things about Daddy interests the sheriff. The left-behind objects certainly do, because he asks what she left and is disappointed I don’t know. He snorts his walrus snort, “Her toothbrush, that’s what it always is, toothbrush.

  “But, yeah,” he concedes, “okay, okay, we’ll list her.” And he locates a half-empty box and digs around until he comes up with a paper that he proceeds to write on. And I sign it, watching my hand write my name and thinking, That hand is going to start shaking in a minute. But it doesn’t.

  On the surface I guess I seem pretty calm. I even get another helping of sympathy from the sheriff, who looks at me sideways and says, “Hey, well, I guess you’ve had a pretty tense time of it these last few days, huh?”

  I want to reach down and clasp one of his loosely positioned hands. But I don’t do that because it would wake him up, and I figure he needs his sleep.

  And now that I’ve decided Aunt Crystal is gone and that she was the woman in the net, my emotions are all direct and forceful
, emotions of love and loss, a surprise to me. Maybe they’re the thoughts I didn’t have when Mother went. Maybe displaced feelings, a textbook case. Think of all the times I complained about my anally retentive Aunt C. About how she bossed me. But now I’m remembering her again, very specifically, my thorny, brisk, bossy aunt; the one who came up to Berkeley and criticized my hair, my homework, my bedmaking, the way I washed the colored and white laundry together, and then said, “Well, at least you do try, Carla. I give you that.” Wasn’t she, together with Susie, the only mother I ever had? Shake them up together, Susie, Crystal, Susie, Crystal, and you get . . . some kind of a mother, maybe.

  Oh, shut up, I tell myself.

  Mostly, I seem to be lying on my bed seeing that scene of Daddy’s, the woman rolled in the yellow binding on the edge of the tide, the three people around her poking at her. A scene out of an old picture of hell—what was the artist’s name? Breughel? But this isn’t a scene from someone’s imagination; it happened, and who it happened to is real. My own crusty, difficult, pain-in-the-neck aunt.

  If I could cry I would feel better. In a while I’ll call Robbie; at least I finally have someone I can talk to. For now I just want to lie here on my flat hard IKEA bed and think about Aunt Crystal and project words at her in whatever new space she’s gotten to. Aunt Crystal, I’m sorry. Hey, Aunt C., I’ll get even with them, honest to God I will.

  I’ll nail whoever it was did that to you.

  Chapter 17

  My phone call to Robbie is confused by the fact that Arlette answers his phone and I try to be polite and not to sound panicky or possessive, as in, “Come on, Arlette, get off the phone, I need Rob now.” Anyway, he isn’t there. I attempt polite and strained; Arlette attempts polite and strained. I’m glad Rob is at the hospital. I don’t know whether I could tell him my news with Arlette hovering in the background.

  Rob at the hospital takes a while to pick up his phone. He seems to be with a patient; from the sound of it, at the patient’s bedside. He hears my story, at first with grunts and then with exclamations of “Jeez” and “Holy God” and finally with an outburst of, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Carly. Oh, that’s awful. No, no, Leona, nothing to do with you”—this last apparently to someone behind him—“Oh, Carly, that is so goddamn awful, of course you’re upset, it’s dreadful. Listen, honey, I’ll be over as soon as I get off; late though, after eleven. Can you wait up? Okay, chin up, honey.” He starts to hang up and then says, “Listen, call Mom, she’ll hold your hand for a while,” and then he signs off to comfort Leona, whoever that is, and reassure her that his phone call wasn’t the news that she had a terminal something.

  And I do call Susie, but I’m hampered by the weirdness of my story. I simply can’t bring myself to drag that nightmarish medieval torture-net scene across Susie’s bright horizon. Although what’s the matter with me? Susie is a lady from the sixties, she knows all about drug nightmares and bad trips. Nevertheless, I just say that Crystal is missing and her neighbor thinks . . . and here I supply a few extra false details to strengthen my case: Crystal promised the neighbor she would call every week. She was supposed to deliver a talk on computer systems at the local library last Tuesday. She owed the neighbor-lady money. This last false detail is convincing to Sue because both of us know that Crystal would never owe anyone money for more than a day.

  So Susie is worried and immediately starts out being comforting. She promises to call me every night. She’ll think of me, she’ll hold dear Crystal, and me, in her best thoughts. “And, Carla, isn’t it possible that Crystal—no, no, it’s not possible. She wouldn’t suddenly give in to impulse and go off somewhere; that’s the way I’d behave. Oh, dear, Carla darling, I’m so sorry. Have you talked to Robbie?”

  I depart for work on my aide’s rounds grateful that I have a job to report to and clients that I have to be cheerful and competent for. I’ve decided I’m not going to tell my trio of old ladies anything yet; all I have so far is suspicion, not any actual certainty about Aunt Crystal. Heavy suspicion, of course, but still.

  Actually, I’m not being fair. I asked the three ladies to pry and inquire and search, and they have been doing that, and now I’ve found out something and I’m not telling them what I’ve found.

  Maybe the truth is that I don’t want to talk about it.

  Sophie’s World is an innovative and straightforward philosophy book. The good thing about a book like Sophie is that it juggles lots of ideas but at the same time is clear and absorbing; you can read it in a crisis, getting pretty much intellectually involved, and then sometime later in another crisis be perfectly ready to read it again. Robbie knocks when I’m halfway into Heraclitus and his idea of the way up and the way down so I dog-ear the page and go to the door for a hug and a “Carly . . . My God. Hey, baby, it’ll be okay.”

  I hold on to him, “It isn’t okay, it will never be okay.” I probably say some other stuff about how the world is barbaric, life is barbaric, and how can there be a world where things like this happen. Although maybe I don’t say any of this; it’s hard to remember afterwards whether you’ve really said something aloud or just felt it. After a while Rob and I are walking down the hall with our arms around each other; the hall is big and wide and spooky looking. The sheriff’s crew left this afternoon, and there aren’t any people here unless you count the Renoirs. The one I’m looking at now is a seminaked lady holding a white kitten; I hate her for it. She’s a fake Renoir. No real Renoir would have a white kitten, since he would know that the lady and the kitten are too much alike to share a painting.

  I’ve noticed that when you’re depressed you hate things like that more.

  I call Mrs. Dexter and ask her if she’ll sit in Daddy’s room while Rob and I go for a walk. I tell her he’s been having bad dreams, which is a lie. I’m the one with the bad dreams, but I’m afraid to leave my father alone.

  Outside, it’s an absolutely clear night (I just stopped myself from thinking crystal clear), with no fog, no wind, the air almost warm, which it practically never is on the northern California coast, and about eight million stars lined up overhead, so tight you feel there just wouldn’t be room for another one.

  Rob talks about a patient he had this morning—not the Leona who was part of our phone conversation, but a more seriously ill patient—and how she told him she’d valued her family and she’d had a good life, and she was ready to die now and it had all been worth it. “She looked great when she said that,” he reports, “as if she really meant it.” He can talk about things like this and not sound sappy. It has to do with an unforced enthusiasm, a tone of absolute commitment. He doesn’t have to try for this; it’s just there. Which is another reason why I look at him and think what a great guy he is, then look at him again and get cross.

  We make the mermaid-circuit talking first about his patient, then about me and how totally awful I feel. After that, about him, how he feels guilty and thinks that he should have guessed Aunt Crystal was the one in the net, though why he thinks that I haven’t a clue. I take a minute to smooth the mermaid’s red—or pink—bronze hair, touching her seems like a hopeful act because she’s such a special favorite of Daddy’s.

  After a while we turn and go around the buildings in the other direction, toward the county road. Then finally we head up into the hills and woods on the north side of the Manor complex. There are hiking trails up here that I’ve been intending to explore ever since I arrived, but I’ve never quite gotten around to it.

  It’s dramatic scenery because suddenly, without what I usually think of as the border between one kind of coastal foliage and another, we’re in the middle of a forest primeval: thick, soft-looking, hairy, shedding redwood trees mixed in with twisted bent-over cypresses. Underneath this tree canopy is a soft mat of leaves, pine needles, and roots. We walk for a while, climbing slightly, holding hands. The feel of the pine-needle floor giving under my feet sends up a kind of comfort, and so does the smell of evergreen, cypress, redwood—tree-essence perfume. Rob s
queezes my hand as we stumble uphill into the almost complete dark, with just an occasional glimmer of light. The path wants you to follow it; it feels different, firmer than the yielding rest of the terrain.

  Rob says, “Carly, what a pileup of scary pain.” I get the feeling he’s trying to look at me, but I can’t really tell. I just have an idea of where the side of his body is.

  We keep on walking up and up, half-feeling our way, the night so heavy and dense it’s like stepping into somebody’s sauna. With that smell of cedar chips that’s a sauna-thing, too.

  Suddenly I stop and say, “Oh, God.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You don’t know. I was going to say, ‘What happens when he gets it?’”

  “Hey,” Rob says, then again, “Hey,” after which we stop, teetering because it’s hard to stay straight when you’ve lost your visual guides about up and down. He puts out a hand to support me. The hand stays for a while at my waist, big, warm, comfortable. I can feel myself letting go—leaning into it. Now both of his hands are there; big thumbs and fingers, substantial hands, and I’m pretty slim. A single hand can almost half-encircle me. It feels nice. A minute later the arms are up and around. And mine, too. I think, Yes, as my hands go up. We’ve got an interlocking deal here, a nice pretzel-puzzle. This hug gets substantial and real; squeeze and gasp, it becomes a genuine hug. We hold it; we rock back and forth and lean. Maybe I even say, “Mmmm.” After that we do a kiss.

  The kiss, though, is a just a halfway job. Halfway between a lot of things—sad, scared, brotherly, loverly. Mouth only half-open, so to speak. After all, Robbie and I were brother and sister for a while, and then lovers for a while.

  There’s a muffled crash in the underbrush over to the side of us. The sort of noise you get if you step on a stack of twigs and it gives way. We jump. Rob heaves back, and I lurch in the opposite direction. The whole kiss effort gets stopped. He’s holding me off at arm’s length and saying “Wha . . . what?” and then amending, “Oh, sure, deer.”