Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  Sasha raises his eyebrows.

  ‘But why did you do this thing with this man?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sash.’

  Once, when Kent had fallen asleep and my isolation threatened to engulf me, I went to the bathroom, picked up Kent’s razor and drew it across my thigh. I watched a thin, red line open immediately behind it like the vapour trail which follows a jet. A moment later, the pain came. It was so intense that it absorbed my loneliness like a sponge.

  ‘Do you care for him?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t come back here with him on the third anniversary of my baby’s death if I did. And, I mean, it’s an unprofessional relationship. It shouldn’t have happened because we’re negotiating a deal and my clients are called the Hifelds and their interests, not my sexual needs, are supposed to come first. That’s why I was wrong. Kent was wrong because Mittex fosters a clean, family image and expects its executives to behave that way. Especially its soon-to-be chief executive. Kent’s paranoid about someone finding out, first his wife, then his colleagues. End of marriage, end of job. That’s why I told the police I was home all weekend.’

  The whisky is heating my whole body now. It warms my mouth, my head, my toes, my fingers. It insulates me from the night’s falling temperature. ‘But it wasn’t the only reason.’

  Late on Sunday morning Kent left to spend the day with a regional manager visiting stores. As soon as he had gone I hired a car and drove to the cemetery. I trod cautiously, scanning the faces of the living who haunted the place for any who might know me, barely noticing the mighty trees or the monuments. Then I reached Stevie’s plain little grave. In life Stevie was surrounded by complication: the elaborate crib, the changing table, the ergonomic buggy, the breast pump, the bottle-warmer. Now I sobbed and sobbed at the stone’s simplicity and its smooth perfection. There were small bouquets arranged lovingly around it. I sobbed as I placed one pink rose at the base of the stone, little more than a bud with a promise of beauty to follow. I sobbed as I walked back to the parking lot. I sobbed as I drove to Daddy’s house.

  I could have called him. I wish now I had called him and visited in the normal way, except nothing was normal that day. Daddy would have asked about Kent, expected to meet him, begged me to stay. He might have called Jane and Larry and Scott and invited them over. After three years my return would have been an event.

  ‘Your reluctance to see Uncle Eric is understandable, Lucia. Please stop trying to justify it.’

  ‘But, Sash, I had to see him. Whenever I spoke to him or to Jane I felt as though there was something they weren’t telling me. Or maybe, I knew I wouldn’t let them tell me, that I hadn’t listened to them. Occasionally they’d mention his hip. Or Jane would say casually that he was getting forgetful. Or I’d think his voice was rasping or notice that his handwriting was sort of shaky. And then I wouldn’t think about it any more because it was too painful, because Daddy was supposed to be a rock, not an old man. So when I drove out to the house on Sunday, I just wanted to look at him. I just wanted to reassure myself that he was still okay.’

  ‘You planned to see him without him seeing you?’

  ‘Does it sound crazy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I parked my car way down in the valley in case any neighbours were about and I walked up an old trail we used when we were kids, around people’s lots, up through the Holler orchard. It was pretty damp and dirty and overgrown and by the time I decided to give up I was almost there so I carried right on. I sneaked around to the back of the house and flipped through the rails on to the deck just the way I used to flip through them when I was a kid.’

  ‘Lucia, Lucia, you are so very smart that you take me aback. What seemed like the whim of a bereaved daughter on Monday night – to stare across the valley from her father’s deck – was an act calculated to mislead the police fingerprint expert.’

  I blush.

  ‘You have impressed Sasha. While Sasha was steadfastly refusing to provide his fingerprints you were taking pains to litter the place with yours. But why, on visiting your father, did you choose to climb, flip, on to the deck?’

  ‘Because I figured that early on Sunday afternoon Daddy might be in the living-room, reading or listening to music or something.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘He was in the living-room. But he wasn’t alone. There was someone with him and they were having a fight. I mean, Daddy wasn’t fighting. The other guy was. His voice was raised and he was standing right over Daddy in a threatening way.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was tall, a little younger than me, but not much. He had jeans, dark hair, a dark face because he didn’t look like he’d shaved in a while.’ Sasha smiles and runs a hand across his own stubbly chin. ‘I didn’t get much chance to look at him because this guy saw me within a few seconds. He leapt towards me, came right after me without one moment’s hesitation. I jumped down from the deck and then ran around the barn. I could hear him looking for me. He was shouting. God, Sash, it was terrifying. I thought my heart was going to burst. I ran the heel off my shoe. He went around the other way and that meant I could slip along the bushes by the drive and down by the Holler orchard while he was still running around the sunken garden yelling for me as though he wanted to kill me. It wasn’t until I got back to the car that I realized I wasn’t a criminal and didn’t have to behave like one. I mean, it’s my father’s house for heaven’s sake. But I felt like a hunted animal.’

  ‘And, your papa?’

  Daddy, a moving figure half-glimpsed through the big sliding doors from the deck. The last Daddy before the cold, stitched effigy of him at the mortuary.

  ‘I hardly saw him. Mostly he looked shocked.’

  ‘Perhaps by the intrusion?’

  ‘Or by this guy, yelling at him, standing right over him. Oh Sash, if I’d called him and visited in the usual way, I would have seen him before he died. I might have saved his life.’

  Sasha reaches out and covers my hand with his.

  ‘If your supposition is correct that this young man’s anger threatened Uncle Eric’s life. Is there no way of identifying him?’

  ‘When I was running away through Daddy’s yard I saw something out of the corner of my eye parked right outside the barn. I didn’t get a second look but I’m almost certain it was a tow truck, an old, chrome one. It must have been his. That didn’t give me much to go on, until the woman detective arrived talking about a tow truck…’

  I tell him about Officer Howie and he strokes his chin the way Larry strokes his beard. Then I tell him how I discovered the old tow truck at Big Brim, how its driver, a man, tall, dark-haired, knew himself to be followed, and escaped.

  ‘He is at least running away from you now, rather than the other way around.’

  ‘I think he ran away twice today. The second time was at the house. He sneaked in, saw me there and took off. A little later, I saw a tow truck driving away through the valley.’

  ‘I wonder why he flees. Still, he cannot escape much longer. At Big Brim you took the number of the tow truck and a few letters of the garage’s name? Fetch that, Lucia, and with the help of the Yellow Pages we shall see if the letters fit the names of any garages. It will be like a crossword puzzle and I may say, without false modesty, that I excel at crosswords.’

  I stand up and my legs surprise me when they almost buckle under me.

  ‘It’s in the car.’

  ‘Two blocks away!’

  ‘Well, no. I was so tired that I parked downstairs tonight. I planned to leave in the morning before Dimitri Sergeyevich wakes up.’

  ‘He never sleeps, that one. He maintains a twenty-four-hour vigil over his small domain. However, I will accompany you, we will collect our information swiftly and return before he has even found his slippers.’

  We let ourselves out of the apartment and summon the rumbling elevator. The coolness of the night air shocks me and I stumble a little when I first inhale it. Sasha steadie
s me.

  ‘I wrote it on the back of the map the hirecar company supplies. It’s just on the passenger seat,’ I say, lifting the papers and files which I left there. But beneath them is no map. Sasha waits, stamping a little in the night’s coolness the way he stamped on Monday outside Daddy’s house. I search through the papers, assuming the map is entangled with them. But it is not. It is neither on, under or behind the seat and it is not in the glove compartment.

  ‘Think, Lucia, think. Could you have left it at your father’s house?’

  ‘No, I haven’t taken it out of the car…’

  I sit sideways in the car, my feet hanging out. I remember parking right by the tow truck, walking all around it, writing down the number, examining the faded letters which remained on the door, copying them on to the back of the map. Then I thrust the map on to the passenger seat, ran across the road, and at last there were the sand dunes, strewn at the roadside with old, dry litter, and sand was trickling through the crevices in my toes and I was running hard uphill at the speed of a slow walk.

  I close my eyes. There is a brief silence between throwing the map in the car and crossing the road and I try to fill it now with the click of a lock closing. I massage my memory, I pummel at it, I punch it, I kick it. But it cannot supply the click. I recall my return to the car, hot, dishevelled, breathless, staring up and down the blacktop as though it might give me some clue to the direction the tow truck turned. I search for, but cannot find, the click of the lock opening.

  ‘Perhaps it was removed from your car outside your father’s house? The tow truck driver was there today.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I expect it is upstairs in your purse,’ Sasha suggests, leading me back into the building. ‘In our house, most things which went missing could eventually be found in my wife’s purse, even, on one occasion, the cat.’

  In the kitchen, our glasses full again, we search my purse.

  ‘No cat?’ asks Sasha.

  ‘No cat. That guy. The tow truck driver. He stole it. He saw it lying on the passenger seat and he stole it.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘It wasn’t too difficult. Because I think I forgot to lock the car.’

  ‘And did you park next to the tow truck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the driver’s side?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So this man walked past your car and saw details about his truck prominently displayed inside it and the door unlocked. Naturally, he decided to confiscate them. Well, he obviously isn’t stupid. Now, if you had the number of this truck then I would suggest that you handed it over at once to the police for tracing. But since you do not…’

  ‘I couldn’t hand it over without telling them about last weekend. Except now, one of them has found out.’

  I tell Sasha about Rougemont. How he confronted me with my own shoes.

  ‘You lied to them not just to protect Kent but to protect your family from the knowledge that you visited San Francisco without seeing them. Your untruth looks suspicious but, apart from allowing yourself to be seduced by an unfeeling brute, you have done nothing wrong.’

  I look at him and he seems to be dancing. I realize that Sasha is still but my eyes are losing and regaining focus.

  ‘Sasha, when someone dies, should you keep their secrets?’

  ‘Most certainly every attempt should be made to maintain privacy. But this is seldom the case. Lucia, do you suspect that your papa had secrets?’

  ‘The tow truck driver was sort of a secret. Daddy knew him but he didn’t tell me about him. He didn’t tell Jane.’

  ‘You think he had some significance in Uncle Eric’s life?’

  ‘I don’t know. But if I set the police on to him, Daddy’s secrets could come spilling right out.’

  Sasha sips his whisky and rolls it over his teeth with pleasure before swallowing it.

  ‘So, you prefer to clarify the situation yourself. Well, Lucia, proceed if you must. But I advise you to proceed with caution.’

  25

  Jane calls me early on Saturday to say that the police want to see us at Daddy’s house. My mouth is dry and my head parched and rattling like a bone which has been left to bleach in the sun.

  ‘Kirsty wants to see all of us, Scott too.’

  ‘But weren’t we going there anyway?’

  ‘They asked to meet us at ten.’

  I sigh. ‘Don’t they even rest on the weekend?’

  ‘God knows when Kirsty rests. She has small kids.’

  ‘What about Rougemont?’

  She pauses. ‘I don’t know about Rougemont. I get the feeling he lives alone. And apparently he’s away so he won’t be there today.’

  When I go down to the car there is an altercation with Dimitri Sergeyevich in two languages although we each understand only one. His furious cadences ringing in my ears, I drive away. I stop before I reach the bridge to pick up another coffee.

  When I arrive, Scott’s car and Larry’s are already there, side by side. Scott’s car is nondescript because Scott doesn’t much like cars or driving. Larry’s is long and low and sleek. He not only likes cars but he enjoys buying them, poring over product details and accessories, comparing models, arguing with salesmen over the price. Daddy loved teasing Larry about his expensive cars. Once they pulled up alongside each other at stop lights and Daddy claims the Oldsmobile burned Larry right off.

  Scott is pleased to see me. He has already thumbed through the letters I left on Daddy’s desk for him to sign.

  Jane puts an arm around me and kisses me lightly on the cheek. ‘Sorry I couldn’t get here yesterday. I hope everything was okay.’

  If I tell her that there might have been an intruder who might have driven a tow truck then she’ll get that thin, worried look. She’ll ask questions and make calls and lift the whole situation right out of my hands. I say: ‘Everything was fine.’

  ‘What’s cooking?’ I ask Larry, sniffing the warm, spicy air, knowing that if someone’s already been at work in the kitchen then it must be Larry.

  ‘Paella,’ says Larry modestly. ‘This recipe is supposed to take twenty-four hours and I’m doing it in three so don’t expect too much.’

  But the paella will, of course, be good. Mostly Larry and Jane eat out with friends but, when they’re at home, Larry usually cooks. He says it helps him to unwind. If Jane gets back late from the hospital there’s invariably a fine meal waiting for her. She eats it by herself while Larry works or watches TV. Then she reads the newspaper. When she’s had about an hour alone, Larry comes in and they talk. It’s hard to imagine how their lives would have been if Jane had been able to have children, how she would have coped without that hour, whether it would have been hard to give up expensive vacations, a busy social life, scores of friends. Maybe they couldn’t imagine it either because when children didn’t happen they decided not to seek help and they didn’t consider adoption. And when I saw Jane with Stevie, I understood that maybe she never was meant to be a mother. She loved him a lot but their relationship was limited by her professionalism.

  ‘What’s this?’ asks Scott, picking up a yellowing newspaper cutting from the desk.

  I try to pull it away from him. ‘Nothing really, I found it in Daddy’s drawer…’

  But Scott has opened it out and is already reading: Wedding News. Marriage of Dr R. D. Joseph and Miss K. K. Sylvester.

  Jane shoots me a rapid, penetrating look.

  ‘Did you know?’ she asks.

  I shrug. ‘No, but why should I care? I haven’t spoken to him for years and years.’

  By now Scott has recognized the groom’s name as one he doesn’t like. I see his jaw clench and his body stiffen.

  Jane gestures at Wedding News. ‘We thought it was better not to tell you,’ she says, and while I’m still deciding whether my reply should be aggressive or defensive, Larry asks: ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Robert Joseph, Lucy’s teenage heart-throb,’ Jane explains.

 
‘The one she always wished she’d married,’ adds Scott bitterly. I made the mistake once of telling him how much Robert had meant to me. It was soon after I met Scott, when we both knew we were embarking on an important relationship and thought we should tell about all the other important relationships.

  ‘I wish I could take up the space Robert Joseph takes up in your heart,’ Scott said then. ‘But I never will.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I told him.

  He made the same observation several more times, even after we married, and, although I always denied it, a small part of me agreed with him and Scott somehow knew that.

  He has turned away from me now and is heading out of the den saying something about coffee. I want to ask Jane how old the newspaper cutting is and whether she has ever encountered Robert at the hospital, or if she heard his father died, but I cannot now betray an interest.

  Larry has been watching us all keenly, stroking his beard, possibly enjoying himself. He seems about to comment when there is a voice at the door. Kirsty is here.

  We lead her to the kitchen and she pauses for a moment.

  ‘Wow, something smells good,’ she says.

  Larry is apologetic. ‘It won’t be ready until lunchtime. But if you’re still here, then please join us.’

  ‘I sure wish I could,’ she says and she means it. She’s thinking about the dried-up sandwich she’s likely to eat for lunch. Probably she was home late last night, and probably she doesn’t have a cooking husband like Larry, so it was another dried-up sandwich then too.

  Kirsty is about to tell us why she’s here when Larry says: ‘Kirsty, there’s something I’m still worried about…’ and Kirsty looks at him evenly, without any sense of anticipation as though she’s going to hear his worry but not share it.

  Jane groans. ‘Larry, you’re wasting Kirsty’s time.’

  ‘No,’ insists Larry, ‘I think this is important. The guy I told you about. He was there again last night. I think he’s hanging around outside our apartment. He could be following Jane.’