Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  I don’t try to talk Robbie out of it. For once I’m pleased with his take-charge attitude.

  Daddy has fallen asleep. His head is sideways on the pillow, mouth a tiny bit open, hair mussy and dandelion-fuzz-like across his forehead, a blade of grass in it from his meadow stay. He looks vulnerable and sweet. And surprisingly young.

  I settle down to fumble through the Best Western’s guide to Del Oro County.

  My father is still asleep when Rob arrives. We do a hasty kiss at the door and a whispered discussion that quickly escalates into almost normal volume because Daddy shows no signs of waking up. “He’s all right; he’s all right?” Rob keeps insisting/asking.

  “It was bad at first,” I say. “He wouldn’t move, couldn’t talk. Like last night.”

  “Catatonic,” Rob looks murderous.

  “But then he woke up and talked some. I think he’s okay.” Rob surveys the rag-doll shape of Edward, slumped against the pillows. He turns and puts both hands on my shoulders. “And you, baby?”

  I’m proud of Rob. He’s holding himself in, trying not to be too big-brother patronizing. Of course he shouldn’t call me “baby,” but old habits die hard.

  “Not great.” My voice goes down into my gut at this point, and Rob says, “Okay, okay,” and massages my shoulders. He gives me a muffled hug. “Come on, let’s sit here,” and he positions some furniture to face the window.

  I say, “Tea.” I’ve been too long at the Manor. If you’re going to sit and talk and cry and look at a view, you need tea. I establish myself in the alcove.

  “Shit,” Rob pushes his tea bag around.

  I say. “Yeah.”

  I fish up and squeeze my tea bag and watch myself drop it carefully onto the Best Western’s wall-to-wall. The carpet is one of those indestructible fiber-constructs that invites this kind of treatment, and I’m not feeling like a good member of society. “I guess we’re in real danger, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  After a minute I say, “Mrs. Sisal looked as if she had been violently killed.”

  Rob doesn’t answer this, so I go on, “Mona didn’t. Mona could have been asleep. But Mrs. Sisal looked as if her life had been stopped short in anger and upheaval and retribution. All that biblical stuff.”

  We’re silent for a while, with Rob blowing his breath out and making a noise like “Who-ee.”

  I pick my tea bag up off the floor and mash it from hand to hand for a while. “You ever think that everything, flowers and grass and sunsets, the whole gorgeous panoply of it all, is pretty damn pointless?”

  “No. Cut it out. And you don’t, either. What you mean is—”

  I interrupt, “Okay, I know what I mean. I want all this that we’re in now to stop. I want to be the one that stops it. I want to grab Dr. Kittredge by a tender spot. Get back at him. Do something major. This trailing around and waiting and lurking . . .”

  Rob just says, “Yeah,” but something in the way he says it works, and I start shutting up. “You don’t really know it’s Kittredge,” Rob says.

  “I do,” I come back. I talk for a while about why I think so.

  There is a fairly long silence. I slurp cooling tea and can hear Rob doing likewise. “Carly,” he says finally.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “It’s funny what bad luck and life’s trials and all that will do.”

  I hold out on saying “Yep.” I think I can feel where this is going. Not someplace I want to go right now.

  “Well, I think you and I have been getting closer.”

  I don’t respond.

  “I feel as if we need each other. I mean . . .” Here Rob, usually so ebullient, able to grab any situation by its tail, has to fumble around. “I need you, and you need me,” he elaborates not very sparklingly. “I mean, we really are a couple. We were before, and we’ve been getting that way more and more again. I mean . . .”

  I’ve lapsed into complete nonmovement, the lady congealed into a statue, so he goes, “Carly?”

  Oh, what the bloody hell, I tell myself, a phrase borrowed from some British movie. Why does everything have to get so complicated?

  Confess it, Carla. You wanted him to say that. Or something like it. But without any consequences, like a cartoon-strip comment floated in the air above his head. Not causing any repercussions in the real world, not needing an answer.

  Now I feel as if I’ve swallowed a large, round intractable object. A tortoise, maybe, complete with claws.

  What I say out loud, sort of desperately, is “Hey, Rob, you’re my brother!” Boy what a cop-out, but still fair, because he’s used it on me.

  He doesn’t answer at all. His shoulders slump. I want to comfort him, and I absolutely want not to do that, and I want to be free of this mess and the other ones I’m neck-deep in. And someplace at the meanest cockroach level of my personality, I’m pleased that Arlette now seems to be out in the cold without her mittens.

  After a very long wait I tell Rob that we should put this on the back burner. Then, slowly, I watch him get some of the starch back into his shoulders. After all, he’s a truly resilient type.

  What he finally says is that we should send downstairs for some steak dinners, which seems a perfectly all-right idea.

  Rob agrees. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “She gave it to him just before it happened; maybe in his room or maybe on her way down to the beach, she handed it to him and told him it was important. It was her last chance, she had to get through to him.” I wait a minute and add, “Maybe it’s what she had discovered, some special knowledge that she had and they wanted.”

  “Sounds good.” Rob doesn’t seem quite as convinced this time.

  “Hey,” he diverts, “they do pretty good steak here.”

  I agree; the steak is fine. The paper plates aren’t the world’s most elegant, and these plastic knives . . . the sawing motion has to be terrific for the upper arms.

  We’re sitting at the little round table that Best Western provides. The table rocks when you saw steak with a plastic knife.

  Rob is cheerful, or at least moderately so. He doesn’t seem to need to brood about our anti-romantic conversation.

  I’m beside him. “Take it easy, dear. Maybe you’ll be dizzy.”

  Which makes him cross. “Why, now, tell me, should I be dizzy. There we are.”

  But I’ve been distracted. Sitting beside him, I can see directly down into the meadow, and I’m seeing a wobble at the edge of my vision, right on the edge of the circle of light cast by the back of the Best Western. The sort of flicker you think might be made by someone dodging around among the California grasses. Someone trying to see up into our lighted window and then deciding not to be too visible.

  A resident of the back of Main Street wouldn’t be dodging around like that. A back-of-Main-Street person wouldn’t be walking there anyway; that grass is hard to navigate. I gesture at Rob and make faces, trying not to alarm Daddy.

  “Sweetheart, how about some steak?” I ask.

  When he says yes, I manage, while cutting steak and arranging a table setting, to huddle and whisper with Rob. Who is cool, only flicking a glance sideways at the window.

  The whatever-it-is out there stops. Creepy thought: It sees Rob and me huddled. And disappears, not even leaving a snaky trail.

  I remember that the more people who know where we are, the better, so I call the Manor, leaving a message for Mrs. Cohen. The person at the Manor sounds besieged and says, “Yes, yes,” vaguely.

  He eats for a while, appreciatively.

  “You know, it’s a curious thing,” he waves a scrap of meat skewered on a plastic forktine, “I was lying out there in the grass. Did you think I was sleeping?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I was thinking. Down in the meadow, among the deep grass, a fine, good place for thinking. And what did I think about?” He waits, fork upraised. “I thought about my daughter. And how good you have been. And how I should trust.”

  A moment for che
wing. “Trust is important, don’t you think?”

  Rob and I stare, each of us quietly willing this to be a turning point.

  “Especially in time of trouble, don’t you think?”

  Come on, dear, get to the point.

  Is my sweet, forgetful father playing games with us? Maybe so, because the next thing he says is, “Do you know, I’m remembering better. It comes and goes, but I truly believe, yes, I think I am.”

  Another beat, another mouthful of steak, “I think I should prove my full trust in you. Prove it entirely. Do you think?”

  Rob says, “Absolutely.” I say, “Wonderful. If you want to.”

  Rob scowls at his hands, says, “Of course.” I say, “Yes, you should.”

  There’s a moment of silence, which my father breaks by saying, “My token.”

  He waits about ten seconds while Rob and I hold our breath; he smiles sweetly. “Yes, indeed, my token. I’m going to entrust you with it. You helped me, you know. Out there in the meadow. I was lost among the wheat. And you found me. That was important. Anyway . . .” He stops eating, lays his fork neatly on the edge of the plastic plate and bends over.

  And takes off his right shoe.

  After the shoe is off, he lifts it up and looks critically at the lining. Which, a minute later, he peels up. It’s still partly stuck to the inside of the shoe and makes a ripping sound as he pulls. “There!” And he comes up with a small piece of paper, which he hands to me.

  It seems to be a receipt from a Walgreen’s drug store, $25.03, dated March 12, 2004. About five weeks ago. “There,” he announces again, in the tone that the geometrician uses to proclaim, “This has been demonstrated.”

  A receipt from a Walgreen’s drug store.

  I am staring down at this paper. My first thought is, Oh, for God’s sake, of course; it had to be something like this, and my second is, Well, you should have known, and my third is a lecture to myself about how my father has Alzheimer’s, had I forgotten? Meanwhile he’s saying, “No, no, darling, the other side! The other side of the paper.”

  Rob is being enormously disciplined and not scrabbling for control or saying “Let me see.”

  So I move to sit beside Rob in the armchair, and together we turn the Walgreen’s receipt over. The other side has writing on it in pencil. And also some kind of a drawing.

  First of all, the writing. This writing is important, and actually says so. Like, the first word is important, underlined. Here’s the way it reads, “Important. Edward. Go there.”

  And the handwriting of this message also is important. Because the handwriting is Aunt Crystal’s. Her tight, no-nonsense, slightly slanted script. I’d know it anywhere, if an example floated by my airplane window at thirty thousand feet.

  Rob asks “What the hell?”

  I say, “Oh.”

  Rob asks, “It means something?”

  I say, “Sure it does. Of course.”

  My father says, “Didn’t I do well to keep it in my shoe? They do that in spy novels, you know, but nobody would have thought I knew about spy novels and it was a lot of trouble. I had to keep gluing it back with rubber cement; we used rubber cement in Egypt on the lesser artifacts, it peels right off afterward, you know.”

  Rob asks, “Carly, what does it mean?”

  “It’s a hieroglyph, sort of, and hieroglyphs started out as pictures of something and ended up being words. So it’s a word or maybe a couple of them. But not necessarily a word that has much connection with the original picture. Is it a little person, do you think?”

  Rob squints. “No.”

  “The little person gets into hieroglyphs a lot. It indicates ‘me,’ or ‘men,’ or ‘people’ or a lot of other things.” I stop, feeling hopeless.

  I hold the unfolded paper under my dad’s nose. “Tell us what it means, Daddy.”

  He smiles.

  Rob says, “It looks like a tadpole to me.” In Egypt, he was principally interested in jumping down into dark holes and digging; he didn’t pay much attention to the written end of it.

  My father appears to be off on his own trail of association, murmuring about rubber cement, but he pops up right away, “From my coffin lid. That has hieroglyphs. Up one side of the lid and down the other. That’s what it’s from. I need to go see my coffin lid. It will tell us. Can we go right away to see my coffin lid? Please? Oh, it would be such a fine treat to go see my coffin lid.”

  Outside the window it’s starting to get dark, but I can spot again, over by the oil derrick this time, that little shred of movement. Someone has followed us; someone is watching.

  My father watches M*A*S*H reruns. He likes them; maybe he remembers the program from its first time around. Though he’s vague as to where and what the soldiers are. “It looks like California,” he says, accurately. “Are they fighting some place in California?”

  Robbie turns off his phone and won’t even check in with his hospital. “I’ve got a standby. Let them sweat.”

  We act like my idea of a normal American motel evening.

  With no murderous folk out there. No weird Gothic situation. And you wouldn’t think Rob and I this afternoon had a conversation that was sort of about marriage, and ended with me sort of telling him to get lost.

  For a couple of minutes there I worried that I’d hurt his feelings irrevocably, damaged him some way, and now it seems that my worry was unnecessary. Rob is okay. He recovers fast, not only because he’s ebullient, but also because he’s attractive and knows it. A man with plenty of fallback. He’s got ladies to apply comfort. Maybe Arlette will still be around, and if not Arlette, a new somebody.

  One of the things I liked about the Habitat guy was the need. He needed me. Damn flattering, that. I look at Robbie’s nice sturdy reliable meaty shoulders and feel like swatting him.

  Daddy pipes up in the middle of a Kicky Ketchup commercial.

  “It’s meaningful,” he says. “Really meaningful. What she told me. Are you listening?”

  Bam. Yes, we’re listening; you bet we are. Competition stops cold at the hangman contest.

  “She said it very slowly. She called me ‘Edward.’ ‘Take good care of it,’ she said.”

  Robbie and I watch each other. She. What does he remember? Should we push?

  “She was in a hurry,” my father says. “On her way down there, you know.” He stops and rubs the side of his face. “I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure.” Here he seems to be getting upset, and I decide that’s dangerous and I should change the subject; I dive into my backpack and resurrect a pack of peppermint Jelly Bellies, “Sweetie, break it open, don’t spill them all.”

  After that, though, there’s nothing more for a while. We don’t get back to the token again until after M*A*S*H.

  “That was very good,” my father judges the last episode, which ends with the nurse kissing somebody.

  He goes on, no preamble, “I sort of think I knew her, you understand.”

  Rob and I look at each other, then I look down. I make a quieting motion with the flat of my hand; let’s not push. Let it act itself out.

  But this is the last thing he says about the her of his token. The only other remark like that is, “We have to look there, you know.”

  This time Rob piles in and tries to pry. “Where, Ed? Tell us. Guide us.” That gets us no place. Daddy’s eyes get that curious Greek-statue hooded look. “I need to see my coffin lid,” in a whiny voice.

  Have I mentioned the stars? There are many of them, and quite low.

  Rob responds to my presence with a shoulder-quiver and a motion that means, “Come sit beside me,” which I don’t do. “So what do you think?” he asks.

  I settle in near the door. “I think like before. He met her. He sort of understands that but doesn’t want to remember. She was in a hurry. Crisis, danger. She gave him this little note. She made it Egyptian. Put it in a form he’d value.”

  “And if we translate it, it’ll tell us something?”

  I shrug. “He te
lls us, ‘We have to look there.’ And she says in her note, ‘Go there.’ So, if we can figure out where there is, I guess something in there will give us a fact. Or show us an object. Papers, isn’t that what it usually is? Aunt Crystal was into papers. Bits of record.” I’ve been thinking as I talk, and add, “I’ve just remembered, she wanted to work with Mrs. Goliard. Because she was a librarian.”

  Rob says, “Yeah,” in a thoughtful voice.

  And now we’re both silent for a while. I move in closer. It’s cold at night in our part of California.

  “What’s this place where the coffin lid is?” he asks. “This Egon person?”

  “Egon Rothskeller is an Egyptology nut. You know.”

  Robbie nods. Both of us know lots of them, the Egyptology addicts, people who’re sure ancient Egypt contains The Answer. Ancient Egypt is where they lived their life sixty incarnations ago. Where they’ll go next time round. Where they’ll find the message about Armageddon. And discover a rocketload of treasure. And regain the knowledge that drowned with Atlantis. Not to mention the proofs of inter-stellar travel hidden in the pyramid tip or under the pyramid base or inside the blue beads scattered in two thousand holes in the desert. Or in the wrappings of Tutankhamen’s decaying feet.

  “Except,” I say, “unlike most of them, Egon Rothskeller is majorly rich, and he built this museum that is more Disney than E. Wallis Budge.” E. Wallis Budge is a big-time, dead, white male Egyptian scholar.

  Rob lies down on his back and rests the back of his head on his cradled arms and looks up at the stars.

  “Rothskeller,” I tell him, “called his place Egypt Regained, and it has everything. Everything except a pyramid. Mummies, statues, vases, pots, papyri, stelae, bracelets, beads. Mummied cats. Stone statues, clay statues. Some stuff four thousand years old, some new. Egon can’t tell the difference.”

  After a pause I add, “Daddy could tell the difference. But he didn’t care. He was glad to have his coffin lid nearby. And that museum has climate control.”