Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  And the commotion has another result; it also lures my father down here. He says good-bye to his gesso-wrapped friend and actually hurries toward us.

  Rob is an old meanie. There are no mummies upstairs, only small, mostly mud-colored ceramics. But I guess it will take the kids a while to find that out.

  Meanwhile, I have ascertained that there is an actual door to the Edward Day Exhibit. It’s folded back against the wall. I scoop Edward Day and Rob inside and close the door, which is tall and made of some sort of reddish wood and has a bronze clasp on it.

  “Now, Daddy,” I say. I unfold the token.

  There it is, all our token iconology, the little figure with its arms in the air, some straight lines.

  Aunt Crystal wasn’t an Egyptologist at all; she was mildly critical of archaeology in general because she didn’t like my mother. But she was proud of Edward Day and had learned a few things about his work. I’m almost certain her drawings will be translatable.

  If there are hieroglyphs on the lid that look like these, we’ve got a starting point even without the text that used to be part of the exhibit. Maybe I, or Rob, can free-associate some. And if Daddy is feeling anything like his old self, he’ll be translating clearly, right away.

  I turn up the lights on the enclosure and twist a handle on the bronze door. I don’t want to be interrupted while we’re doing this. I’ve locked us in.

  Chapter 23

  We’ve been in a huddle inside the Edward Day exhibit for twenty minutes now, and it’s beginning to feel like being barricaded in a besieged castle. Outside our door, the fifth grade has returned, and the conversation and scuffling has gotten oceanic; inside the temperature is rising.

  My father seems, at last, to be delighted at his reunion with his lid. He stands, hands in pockets, beaming down into the case, murmuring little snatches of phrases. “Victorious. . . . In the underworld.” I’ve asked him to look at the token, which I’m clutching in my hand, but he waves me away.

  Rob and I are bent double near the south end of the case, trying to match Aunt Crystal’s kneeling figure and the straight lines with the incisions on the lid.

  This is harder than you might expect.

  Incisions don’t stand out sharply on old, very battered, very scuffed wood.

  I’ve tried from every angle. The north end of the case. The south end. With the lights turned higher, which they aren’t supposed to be, because that damages ancient artifacts. “Daddy, help me,” I say. “You know what’s on there. You know it from way back.” I circle the case again.

  My father says something about opening the storehouses. He’s quietly cheerful.

  I’m wasting energy being angry about the lack of a printed translation. Certainly there used to be one; the big importance of the coffin lid was that it changed hieroglyphic readings. But Egyptologists are always fighting about what something means, maybe in one of those disputes the text got rewritten. And yes, I see it now; there’s a notice on the wall. WE ARE UPDATING THE COMMENTARY ON THIS EXHIBIT.

  Hell and hell.

  I’m glad Daddy hasn’t noticed that sign, evidence of people interfering in his history. I move around the case again, trying to get a better angle on those scratchy markings.

  I kick off one shoe, the one that had the token in it. It’s come untied, and I’ve been tripping on the lace.

  Suddenly, either light or association or the slant of the sun from outside—something works, and I can see a whole set of indentations. I can see them; I can follow them, and I know what they mean. “Hey,” I say. “Rob. I get it.”

  Rob says, “My God, my God,” and pushes up beside me.

  “See there,” I say. “And there? And then the straight lines. That’s our text. Don’t you think so? Yes, sure.”

  “Okay,” Rob says. “Yep, you’re right. Two lines, one heavy, one light and serrated. Yes. So. What does the rest of it say?”

  “I can’t read that part, but I can read the stuff before. I recognize it. Sort of a preamble. It’s a formulaic statement, something they ask over and over, always the same way. A ritual question. It looks like bird, pen, kneeling figure, bird, plus some other stuff. It means ‘What then is it?’ ”

  I’m so pleased at recognizing this that I don’t stop to evaluate what my find adds up to for us. How does it help us right now? For the moment I don’t care.

  But Rob cares, big-time.

  “What then is it?” He bleats. He says this twice, once as a simple question and a second time, loud and cross, as an angry exclamation. He follows that up with, “Jesus triumphant, you mean to say we’ve come so far and done so many stupid things to be asked ‘What then is it?’ ”

  My bird-pen speech has also awakened my father. “Bird, pen?” he asks. “Oh, daughter. I cannot believe it. Not bird, pen. A hieroglyph has a name. There is a proper noun for each hieroglyph. When I was younger I knew. I cannot believe that you would call it ‘bird, pen.’ ”

  My failure upsets him a lot. “Simplifying. Bad, very bad . . . your shorthand . . . for the hieroglyphs, my dear.”

  Well, at least I have his attention. I start out, “Listen, Father . . .”

  Outside, the fifth grade has gotten into a fight. Feet slide, voices screech, someone calls someone an asshole, a grown-up voice says, “All right, you kids, cut it out, cut it out and get away from here. Get away from that door. Come on now . . . Nobody, nobody at all is going to see even one mummy if you don’t . . . Now come on, get in line.”

  The outside gradually dies down into silence, and my father is still looking at me as if he’s interested. I seize the day. I grab one of his hands. “Listen, Daddy, after ‘What then is it,’ what comes next?”

  He looks puzzled. “Many things, I think.”

  I point down at the coffin lid. “It’s too scarred, I can’t read it. But you did. You read it when you wrote your book. What was the next thing it said?”

  “Why, my dear.” He puts his other hand to his forehead in a protective, shielding gesture. “Various things. Good things.”

  “No,” I announce fiercely. “You know. Just there, on your coffin lid. It is yours, you know.”

  “Why, of course, my dear. Certainly it is.”

  “What came after ‘What then is it?’ ”

  “Why . . .” He waits for a minute, tilts his head. “Why, darling, a song of some kind? Maybe ‘Wake up, wake up, darling Corey’?”

  “No,” I tell him, “absolutely not. Daddy, think.”

  My father surveys me and begins to get a pleased crinkle at the corner of his eyes, “Why, darling, I know, yes, of course I know. It was about the millions of years. The Dark Lake.” Chin up, he shows me his sunny smile. He moves a hand rhythmically. “ ‘Dark Lake is the name of the other,’” he intones, the singsong voice telling me it’s a quote.

  “Dark Lake?” I say. “What’s Dark Lake?”

  “Dark Lake. A deep lake. Sacred. There are two of them. Heracleopolis. I think that’s right.”

  I look at Rob. “Oh, my God, there it is.”

  “What?” ask Rob. “How? Where what is?”

  I’m remembering Belle’s statement about Daddy being interested in the well. The one in the hills behind the Manor. The one Rob and I walked up to. “And he calls it Dark Lake,” Belle had told me. “Of course it isn’t a lake, but that’s what he calls it.”

  “Listen,” I say. “Rob.” My voice is high; I can hear myself upping the volume. “It’s the well, Rob, the one up in the forest, the one we sat beside and you chucked a rock into; that well. I guess she knew about it, and she knew he’d understand. That’s where we have to look.”

  “Rob,” I grab him by his jacket collar because he’s staring at me as if I’m speaking a newly invented language, “listen. I get it, I get it; that’s where Aunt Crystal left the stuff; I know where to look.”

  The person with the key gets the door half-open and stands in the doorway. Outside, the exhibit hall is strangely quiet and looks empty. The person c
omes into our enclosure.

  The person is Dr. Kittredge.

  He enters sideways in a strange kind of half-shuffle. He has a gun, which he aims in our general direction. He gets the door shut with his foot and leans against it.

  For two days now I’ve been expecting Kittredge, so I am not exactly surprised, just startled, scared, heart pounding, telling myself, “Oh, Jesus.” I’ve even been expecting a Kittredge with a gun. But still I’m not ready. My heart skips, my throat is dry; I half-open my mouth to yell and then decide that that’s not a good idea.

  Something is different about Kittredge, who looks at me weirdly, almost sideways, making the gun veer from me to Rob to Daddy. His face is swollen and flushed; his forehead bulges. In a minute I understand. He’s drunk. I’ve seen him drunk before, but not this drunk, which I think is very drunk indeed. The drunkenness makes the gun behave erratically; it wavers, tries to aim at Daddy, finally settles on me.

  “Thank you very much,” Kittredge says.

  He pauses, gestures with the gun, a small, dark blue, shiny type. “That’s just . . . just what I hoped you’d do,” he says.

  He waits some more. “I heard it all. I was in the office with the sound system turned up; you enunciated great. Just . . . exactly . . . exackly what we needed. And now . . .”

  Here he wavers enough that it skips across the back of my mind how maybe I could grab at him, or Rob could, but then he straightens up, the unsteadiness passes. Kittredge is a big man, and he can be plenty drunk before it really stops him. “Too bad,” he says. “In a way. Because normally . . . Miss Carla . . . I’d just send you on your way. But howinhell can I do that?” He looks down at the gun and makes a noise with it that I think is taking the safety off.

  Rob calls out, “Patrick. Hey. Don’t be dumb.”

  Kittredge’s gun heat-seeks Rob. “Dumb?” he asks. “I was smart. Real smart to think of that sound system.”

  “Oh, you were, you were,” I say quickly. Inside of me the adrenaline has begun to kick in and is revving up my responses and telling me what to do. “Delay,” it says. “Engage him. Talk to him. He loves to talk. Get him going. If he’s talking he can’t think about shooting you. Get him started.”

  “Hello,” my father says. He sounds pleased. “Quite a few of us are here now. I think it is time to go home. Don’t you think so, too?”

  He asks this question of Kittredge, who ignores him and wavers his gun in Rob’s direction. Rob has been making minor gestures with his arms, which I can see flexing under his jacket sleeves, and with his hands, which he’s compressing into fists. He’s getting set for a kung fu leap. When we were in junior high, Rob took kung fu lessons. There was a big vogue in Berkeley for that kind of thing.

  I start to yell, “Rob, don’t,” because I think Kittredge will shoot him before he gets the leap finished, and then I decide not to yell but to take action of my own, verbal action, like my adrenaline has been advising. “There are two ways,” the adrenaline whispers into my mental ear, “insult him and get him talking. Or praise him and get him talking.” I start out with insults.

  “I don’t think you were smart,” I say. “If you’re so smart how come we’re here? We came because you were dumb. You let us know. You were obvious. All along, you were obvious. Right at the beginning, I said to Rob, you know, I bet all this stuff, all these accidents, is Kittredge.”

  Rob tries his own brand of diversion. “Patrick, for God’s sake, use some sense. Come on, you’re a doctor, you’ve got a good job, you’ve got a future, you’re going to have a name in Aging. Or in Retirement Management. People are recognizing you . . . and what you’re doing. You’re writing a paper; you’ll get it published . . .” Rob falters here. I remember that he once told me Kittredge had never published anything and that he was at the Manor because a place like that was the only hidey-hole for a fourth-rate doctor. “At the hospital,” Rob says. “Everyone respects you; everybody knows you.”

  Kittredge doesn’t pay any attention to Rob; he spits on the finger of his left hand and polishes the barrel of the gun while keeping it pointed at me.

  “You know,” my father tells him, “I think I know who you are; you’re the man who brings the New York Times on Sunday. Am I right? I really appreciate that New York Times.”

  The gun swivels. “You . . . silly . . . little man. You’re pretending . Don’t come at me with that adorable aged Alzheimer’s crap. Con man. I know an old con man when I see one.”

  Rob is clenching his fists at his sides some more.

  “Listen,” I tell Kittredge as forcefully as I can, “Doctor, I don’t know anything. My father doesn’t and I don’t. My father is a crazy old man that you’ve been feeding pills to. None of us understands a goddamn thing. Something about accidents and you searching our rooms. Nobody here knows any of it, and if you sober up and let us out of here, we’ll go away and not talk about it and never ask you another question.”

  Kittredge does some uncoordinated artillery gestures and says, “Ha, Ha.” The stagy kind, meaning, how dumb do you think I am.

  Rob is being obvious again with his flexing and unflexing.

  I return to my calculated insults.

  “We thought it was weird, Rob and I did. The first time we ever talked about the accidents, I said, ‘Hey, I bet it’s the doctor. There’s just something about him, too damn unctuous. He lays it on too thick, carries on about how he loves the Manor.’ ”

  I’m all set to continue with a description of Kittredge as a would-be lover; details about fat stomachs and panting middle-aged Don Juans, I could do that for five or ten minutes. “And the worst thing,” I start out, as preamble, then I take another look at him. His face is a darker and brighter red; the gun is shaking. This isn’t such a good idea.

  He’s trying to aim the gun right at me, at my heart or my lung or my gut.

  Can I be reassured by the fact that his aim is probably terrible?

  I didn’t think Dr. K. would get this far this fast.

  I’ve been halfway counting on the fact that I know him. But maybe I don’t. The Kittredge I thought I knew would have to—slowly—work his way up to . . . shooting somebody.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay.” I stop here and swallow convulsively. That adrenaline hormone has begun to fade. Now we’ll try praise.

  “Hey, wait, I have to hand it to you, Doctor. You did some things right, a lot of things; everybody at the Manor thought so. I did, too. I looked at you and went, ‘Hey, that doctor atmosphere. Good. He’s got that great manner, makes everybody calm down, the ladies all notice it. Every single one of those ladies . . . ’” Here I steal a side glance at Kittredge. Am I going too fast? Is even one bit of this guff connecting? Yes, the gun is hanging lower and his color has calmed down. “The ladies all had crushes on you; you knew that, I guess. You had a big lineup for your evening office hours. And then there was the trust. Everybody trusted you. Yes, real, heavy-duty trust. ‘Our doctor,’ they said. Everybody said it. Smooth. Whatever you were doing, you thought about it and you did it right. It was easy for you. You’ve got that smooth manner. That bedside thing. People go for it; everybody at the Manor went for it.”

  Holy God, I think, this is too much. But of course it really isn’t.

  Rob is still planning something ridiculous. But Kittredge is a lot more relaxed. I try to babble extra-interestingly so he’ll watch me instead of Rob.

  “And believe it or not,” I say. “Yeah, I thought you were connected with the accidents somehow, but we’ve gotten this far, a whole month into the history of this thing, and I simply don’t know what was really happening. Something about buying the Manor, first the accidents and then buying the Manor, is that right? But why? You were smooth; you covered your motives, and I never could really figure it out. Buying the Manor, that was it, right? Why on earth buy the Manor?”

  I don’t want him to know that I understand about Aunt Crystal. How she died, that scene on the beach.

  So far, that hasn’t come u
p. Without it he doesn’t have any real reason to butcher me and Rob and Daddy.

  Does he?

  Rob, to the side of Kittredge, flexes into a half-crouch, arms loose at his sides, hands clenched.

  But Kittredge is more aware than I’d realized. He turns and with a sideswipe of his gun clunks Rob on the forehead and knocks him down. Rob tumbles dramatically and lies perfectly still, but after a panic-stricken moment I decide he’s not really hurt. On his way down he turned his face in my direction and winked. That fall was pretty theatrical.

  “Ha!” Kittredge says, just like the villain in a Japanese movie.

  “Pretty good, that, huh?” I guess he’s addressing me while staring down at a prostrate Rob. And I guess I have to send a thank-you up to the Goddess of Combat that Kittredge felt like showing off his martial arts skill instead of his gun readiness.

  “Ah, baby,” he says, turning back to me, “you’re askin’ why buy the Manor? Baby, you don’t know a thing, not a thing. You don’t know what the Manor is worth.”

  Kittredge has his mouth open, ready to give me his lecture on the value of the Manor, when there’s a small commotion with some diffuse unidentifiable noises at the door and then the squeak of the handle being turned. Apparently Kittredge didn’t lock it.

  I think, Oh, thank God, thank God; here’s some Marines to the rescue. Rothskellar got free, the kids called the local cops, whatever, I don’t care who it is, come in, whoever you are.

  Kittredge raises his gun.

  Who comes in is Mrs. Dexter. Mrs. Dexter from the Manor, my old friend, Daddy’s old friend, complete in her purple suit and Red Queen face, but not looking exactly the same, because she doesn’t have her walker.

  I do all this recognition in the first couple of seconds, while my mouth is open and I’m starting to yell, “Mrs. Dexter, get back, get out of here. He’s dangerous, he’s got a gun. Go call the . . .”

  The lady cuts me off. “Oh, shut up.” It’s her usual crisp no-nonsense voice, maybe a little higher than usual.