Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  ‘Well… just twice,’ admits Larry.

  Jane smiles as she passes around the coffees.

  ‘We’re getting nervous and it’s making us imagine all sorts of things,’ she says.

  ‘Someone with a spare set of keys has been here,’ Kirsty says. ‘You didn’t imagine that.’

  ‘Hide a police officer here overnight,’ suggests Larry, ‘in case this guy tries to get in.’ He sounds authoritative, as though he’s running the investigation. Although the detectives show no sign of resentment, I flinch a little for them.

  ‘He’ll have what he wants by now,’ says Rougemont. ‘I doubt he’ll come back.’

  ‘He might,’ insists Larry.

  ‘Okay,’ says Kirsty pleasantly. ‘We’ll put a couple of officers in the yard tonight and see what happens.’

  Rougemont drinks some of his coffee in gulps, his Adam’s apple bouncing in his throat. Then he says he’d like to wander around the house.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I ask him.

  ‘I’m an old dog who likes to sniff around houses,’ he says, loping off. Mother had a brown dog when I was real small. He liked to sniff around. He liked to hide and then leap out, barking and scaring me.

  Kirsty asks if Scott’s here.

  ‘He’s teaching today,’ I explain. ‘Plus he doesn’t need to be here so often since I’m doing all his executor stuff.’

  ‘Why do you think your father didn’t appoint you in the first place?’ she asks and I recoil from the sharpness in her question.

  ‘That’s obvious,’ says Jane quietly.

  I look at her in surprise. She’s pouring more coffee now and, although she is distracted and the task mundane, her movements are graceful.

  ‘You’ve left California, right? Daddy respected that decision. He didn’t want to give you responsibilities here which would drag you back, even though he knew you’d be the best person. It was a generous, loving gesture.’

  I know at once that she is right. Jane has detected my pain and relieved it, the way she always does. I glimpse Larry, too, looking at her with admiration.

  She asks the detective: ‘Any news from the ME?’

  ‘We’re now sure the time of your father’s death was pretty close to eight in the morning. Death occurred very shortly before immersion. That’s all.’

  We consider the significance of this.

  ‘So,’ says Larry cautiously, ‘he didn’t die anywhere near the place his car was found.’

  ‘I guess not,’ agrees the woman. She speaks with the weariness of someone who has had this information for a while and already considered all possibilities. ‘Lowis is at least thirty, forty minutes from Big Brim.’

  Jane asks: ‘Did the ME get any closer to finding out how Daddy died?’

  ‘She’s consulting Charles Rossi. He’s a high-profile professor of forensic pathology.’

  Kirsty puts a hand into her bulging briefcase and pulls out her notebook. She flicks past pages thick with writing until she arrives at one half-filled. ‘I have an unusual question to ask you…’

  I wait for the unusual question, my body tense. I steal glances at Jane and Larry and they look tense too.

  She says: ‘It’s about a tow truck.’

  I stare at her.

  ‘I realize that it seems impossible. But could your father have been driving one the night before he died?’

  Jane and I look at one another and pull faces.

  ‘Well, no,’ we say.

  The detective rearranges the long hair she used to have. ‘We put out a request for any information which might help us locate your father on Sunday night/Monday morning and a highway patrolman contacted me. He says he spoke to the driver of a tow truck late on Sunday night on the big freeway into town about nine miles inland from Big Brim. He claims to have a good memory and he recalled your father’s name and described him accurately.’

  Jane sounds incredulous. ‘He thinks that Daddy was driving a tow truck?’

  ‘He’s adamant about it. Does that make any sense to you at all?’

  She looks at me.

  I shake my head. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  Larry points his beard at the detective in a way which means he’s about to speak. ‘Was it towing anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why did the patrolman pull it over?’

  ‘The truck had already stopped by some kind of a wreck at the side of the road. Officer Howie asked to see the driver’s licence and now he thinks it had your father’s name on and that the driver fitted the description we issued. Unfortunately, he didn’t write any of this down at the time, not even the number of the truck.’

  ‘Was the tow truck picking up the wreck?’

  ‘It was evidently trying to but there was something wrong with the winch and the driver said that he was waiting for someone to come over and sort it out. Officer Howie is real convincing. He says he doesn’t make mistakes.’

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ I say and the detective smiles at me in a way that reminds me of my mistakes.

  She says: ‘His real mistake was that he didn’t write anything down. If only he had taken a number or some other details about the driver or the tow truck. He thinks it was an old truck, that’s all he noticed.’

  ‘Was the driver alone?’

  ‘No. There was at least one other man with him, possibly two. Officer Howie admits he’s not sure about that. Of course, it may have helped us to explain how your father got to Big Brim or how his car got to Lowis. So you can see why I’m kind of attached to the idea.’

  Larry smiles at her. ‘Scientists do that kind of thing too. It’s so God-awful when the data doesn’t fit your hypothesis that it makes you want to doubt the data.’

  Rougemont comes in. I thought he’d been inside the house but he smells of eucalyptus. He sits down at the table, folding up his long legs, and picks up his coffee cup.

  ‘Is that cold? Can I make you a fresh cup?’ offers Jane. Her voice is kind. Probably a lot of people detect Rougemont’s sadness and it makes some of them cruel and others kind.

  He smiles. ‘No, no, coffee’s generally cold by the time I remember to drink it.’ The woman detective tells him that Jane and Larry and I don’t know of any reason Daddy should have been driving a tow truck on Sunday.

  Larry says: ‘He just wasn’t that kind of guy.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Rougemont, putting his big head on one side. ‘He sure used to be that kind of a guy.’

  We all stare at him while he sips cold coffee.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jane demands.

  ‘Well, I think I told you that, many years ago, I used to know your father a little. And he certainly had a tow truck back then.’

  ‘Daddy? Had a tow truck?’ echoes Jane. ‘No!’

  ‘No,’ I add. ‘Not Daddy.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Could you have made a mistake?’ says Jane.

  ‘No. He even kept his driver’s certificate updated. Although that doesn’t mean he drove one recently.’

  I ask: ‘When did he have this tow truck, Mr Rougemont?’

  He sucks in his lips and narrows his eyes.

  ‘Hmmmm… you were a small girl then, Lucy. You might not remember, I thought maybe Jane would.’

  ‘Why would a geologist need a tow truck?’ Larry asks sceptically. But I know the answer. The tow truck is already inside my head and it didn’t just drive there. It has always been there, I just had to draw back the drapes and find it, standing right behind them, sparkling in the sunlight.

  ‘He was fixing it,’ I say. ‘Like the tractor and the printing press and the Oldsmobile… He used to lie underneath it with spanners, fixing it. It seemed enormous. And it was chrome, I guess, because it was silver and shiny. In front there was a sort of face. I mean, headlamps for eyes and this big fender which looked like a monster mouth.’

  ‘You remember!’ says Rougemont with admiration. ‘You were only four, Lucy, and you remember! Of course, I don�
��t know when he got rid of it. You may have been five or six or seven by that time. However, since it sometimes seems no one in this family can remember anything, well, I’d say you’ve shown definite progress!’

  Kirsty agrees enthusiastically and they both look congratulatory, as though I just won a game show. I glance at Jane. Her pale skin is glowing pink.

  ‘Listen,’ she says. You have to know her very, very well to know that when she speaks in that icy calm voice then she’s real angry. Larry knows it and I know it and we both sit up a little straighter.

  ‘Listen. When people can’t remember, sometimes it’s because their memories are so unpleasant or painful that they don’t want to remember. You must be aware of that. You must have gathered that there are things in our childhood we decided long ago to forget.’

  She means Mother. Always present even when you haven’t seen her for three years. Flapping over our conversation now like a big white bird.

  But Rougemont ignores or is unaware of Jane’s anger. ‘Sure, sure,’ he agrees, nodding his head in his strange elastic way. He’s still grinning like a game show host, like a guy who thinks the contestants are having big fun being humiliated. ‘Oh, sure, but for heaven’s sake, how can remembering a tow truck be so painful?’

  His voice rises as though it’s about to be crowned by canned laughter. Instead there is silence and then into the silence comes the unhappy voice of a very small girl close to tears.

  She says: ‘Because that’s how they towed her away.’

  Everyone swings around to face the girl. They are looking at me.

  ‘When Mother wouldn’t get out of the car…’ I’m talking to Jane but now she’s staring down at the table top as though something’s written there but she’s decided not to read it. ‘You must remember when Mother wouldn’t get out of the car?’

  Jane says nothing. When she looks down that way it feels as though she’s closed her eyes and shut me right out. She thinks I’m acting Russian. She thinks this is a betrayal, but I can’t stop now.

  ‘When we got back from Arizona and Mother was psychotic but we didn’t know that’s what it was because it was the very first time, when we were still thinking this was some small temporary problem and normal service would be resumed… well, she wouldn’t get out of the car. She stayed there all day and all night and most of the next day until you could smell urine from ten feet away. When they came for her, two men and a woman still couldn’t get her out of the car. They just couldn’t do it, they couldn’t even restrain her. They tried to drive her away but she was too threatening for safety. She nearly defeated them. Except, there was a tow truck. It was parked right outside the barn, it must have been one of Daddy’s old wrecks. So they used it to tow her away. I mean, the car. With Mother in it, isn’t that right, Jane? Isn’t that what they did? I didn’t see but I sort of guessed when I saw they were gone and the car and the tow truck. I was hiding in the yard. I guess I heard it. I guess I remember it. The engine sounded like a big, ugly monster and the transmission made this grinding noise as they manoeuvred it which sounded like its teeth. The tow truck took Mother away. And, you know what? I think she found that unforgivable. She was just horrible when we visited her and I think that was because she was mad at us for having her towed away instead of leaving her to sit in the car the way she wanted.’

  The silence that follows is painful like needles. The two police officers watch me keenly. Larry is startled, his air of detached observation temporarily abandoned. Jane’s face is red and its shape has changed a little as though some of the muscles beneath it have rearranged themselves. When she speaks, her voice is very quiet, scarcely more than a whisper.

  ‘We couldn’t leave her sitting there in the car for ever, messing in it like a dog.’

  ‘We could have waited. Until she was ready to get out.’

  ‘Then we might have waited for ever.’

  I’m speaking softly too. In this kind of silence, which shouts every word, no more is necessary. ‘I think she would have come when she was ready.’

  Jane looks at me, her head thrown back a little as though I’m some very bright light which could dazzle her. ‘She wasn’t eating. And you were in tears the whole time. That’s what really got to Daddy. It wasn’t an easy decision for Daddy but he did it for you as well as Mother. Are you saying he did the wrong thing?’

  And at this I shake my head, rapidly as a dog which has just run out of the water, because I know that, among his many qualities, Daddy always tried to do the right thing.

  ‘No. I’m just saying it was horrible.’ I turn to Rougemont. ‘That’s probably why we neither of us wanted to remember the tow truck. Well, now we have. We’ve remembered it from way back, just like you asked us to. So maybe you can explain what relevance it can have to last Sunday night or anything Officer Howie said.’

  Rougemont sucks thoughtfully on his lower lip as though it’s a cigarette.

  ‘Oh,’ he says at last. ‘Probably none. I mean, I agree with Larry that Officer Howie must have made a mistake.’

  18

  I reach the highway patrol headquarters at Bellamy at eight-forty. When I called from Aunt Zina’s last night, they told me that Officer Howie begins his shift at nine.

  ‘Who wants him?’ added the voice suspiciously.

  ‘Well, it’s sort of personal.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said the voice knowingly. His tone indicated that Officer Howie has a lot of personal life. ‘Well, get here at fifteen minutes before nine and someone should be able to organize for you to see him.’

  I find a uniformed officer in the lobby and persuade him to intercept Officer Howie before he leaves the precinct. His joky but resigned manner suggests that I am not the first woman to have him do this. A few minutes later the immaculately uniformed patrolman appears. He walks cautiously but his caution barely masks the strut of a handsome man. He looks at me doubtfully, scanning my hand before he shakes it, as if he fears I might use the opportunity to press a paternity suit on him.

  ‘My name’s Lucy Schaffer. My father died recently and I understand that you may have been one of the last people to see him alive…’

  He stares at me.

  ‘On Sunday night you inspected a tow truck he was driving. On Monday morning he was dead, not so far from the place you saw him. He was a homicide victim and it’s possible he was killed by one of the other people who were in the truck with him.’

  He looks over my head, remembering Sunday night, Daddy, the tow truck.

  ‘Jeez. Oh jeez. I didn’t really see who was in the cab with him… A detective already asked me that. Detective MacFarlane.. She seemed real doubtful that it was the same guy but I recognized the picture. Plus I recalled the name. Yeah, Schaffer.’

  ‘How sure are you?’

  He has the unassailability of youth. ‘Completely sure. And there were certainly some other guys with him. Maybe one. Probably two. Certainly no more. You couldn’t get four in that cab, it wasn’t such a big truck, it was a real old one.’

  ‘Can you remember anything about them? Anything at all?’

  ‘I didn’t get a good look at them and they stayed quiet the whole time.’

  ‘Did my father get out of the tow truck?’

  ‘No, ma’am. He wound down the window and explained that he had a winch problem. See, he’d come to take this wreck away which was right by the side of the road, but he had a winch problem. He said someone was on their way to fix it.’

  ‘Officer… did my father appear distressed in any way? Or anxious? Or worried?’

  He smiles. His smile is white and symmetrical.

  ‘Ma’am, most people are anxious and worried when they get pulled over by the California Highway Patrol.’

  ‘I mean, was he especially unhappy? So ill at ease that it’s possible he was being held in the tow truck against his will?’

  The man pauses and thinks.

  ‘Nah. He was nervous but not that nervous. There’s nothing I could have ticketed him
for but he sort of looked as if he thought I was going to anyway.’

  ‘And the accident… what had happened?’

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘The wreck they were trying to tow away.’

  ‘Oh, now. Now we’re talking weird. I just came on duty and the wreck was right at one of our worst blackspots. I assumed there was a crash there earlier in the day. The car was completely burnt out. I mean, unidentifiable. But you know something? I just found out yesterday that there was no accident.’

  I stare at him. His eyebrows are raised, his features seem to jump out of his face with surprise. ‘Nothing. There were no reported incidents on that part of the coast road last Sunday.’

  I am thinking but my thoughts lead nowhere. ‘So…’ I say slowly. ‘So, how do you think the wreck got there?’

  ‘I guess what must have happened was, they were towing it from somewhere else and they stopped and unhooked it because they were having trouble with the winch.’

  ‘Did they get the winch fixed?’

  ‘No, ma’am, they did not. That wreck stayed by the side of the coastal highway causing big traffic problems on Monday morning. I sure wished I’d taken your father’s number.’

  ‘It blocked the highway?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to block the highway to cause problems. People slow down to rubberneck and that delays everyone for miles back.’

  He looks at his watch ostentatiously.

  ‘Just a couple more questions,’ I assure him. ‘Can you describe the tow truck?’

  He pulls a face. ‘Hmmmm. Well. The lighting isn’t great down there but I’d say it was real old, almost antique. I guess your father had it a long time.’

  His statement is half a question, which I ignore.

  ‘Did it have black numberplates?’

  Another white smile flashes briefly. ‘It was certainly old enough for that. But I didn’t see. I didn’t look too hard, I had no reason to.’

  ‘Can you remember anything else? Anything at all that was said, anything about the other people in the cab? Anything that didn’t seem to be right about it?’

  ‘No, ma’am. It was just a routine check for me.’ He has hardly looked at me all the time we’ve been talking but suddenly his eyes meet mine. ‘Ma’am, I understand your father was a homicide victim, but why are you asking these questions?’