Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Teaser chapter
Erased From Memory
“Diana O’Hehir is a talented poet and novelist.”
—Chicago Tribune
—Publishers Weekly
Murder Never Forgets
“Suspenseful and heart-breakingly timely.” —Chicago Tibune
Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
Fierce Attachments
“O’Hehir sketches out characters in swift strokes, and the old people in this book are fully realized characters, both quirky and dignified. Best of all, the narrator’s acerbic, funny, insightful voice makes what might have been just another cozy unforgetable.” —The Boston Globe
Magic City: A Novel
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ERASED FROM MEMORY
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2006 by Diana O’Hehir.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-4406-2206-9
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks
belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
http://us.penguingroup.com
Once again
For Mel, with love
In writing this book, I have consulted a number of helpful texts on archaeology and Egyptology, including ones by E. Wallis Budge, R. O. Faulkner, Miriam Lichtheim, Bridget McDermott, R. E. Parkinson, and Miriam Stead.
Any mistakes in this text are my own doing, not theirs.
Chapter 1
My father has been accused of murder.
At least, I think he has.
The scene is extremely confused.
It involves a man outstretched on a floor in the attitude of those chalk outlines the traffic police draw at accident scenes—head back, arms extended, legs splayed. This man wears a tan cashmere sweater, blue jeans, a Rolex watch. I think he’s looking at the ceiling, but his face is hidden by my father, who kneels over him. And my father himself is half hidden by a spiky-haired woman wearing a striped T-shirt and blue warm-up pants; she clutches Daddy’s back and screams, “Help! Stop him! Help!”
“Murder!” she screams, turning a streaked, contorted little face at me. I have just arrived in the room, panting, dropping my notebook, pencils, a book about Queen Hatshepshut, a tin museum pass.
Because all of this is happening in a museum. In the Egypt Regained Museum. In a room named after my father, the Edward Day Room. This is the resting place of his great discovery, Coffin Lid #267, the artifact about which he wrote his books. My father has Alzheimer’s now, but he didn’t used to. He used to be mildly famous in archaeology circles.
He is a gentle, sweet man who is not murderous. I know he isn’t murdering anyone now. I try to pile into the scrimmage on the floor.
The final note of confusion is supplied by the museum guard, a hefty lady in a tan uniform.
She drags everybody aside, yelling, “Cudditout!” and bends her face to the prone man’s face; she thrusts a finger in his mouth; after a minute she begins the breath-of-life procedure. I hold on to my dad and watch her bottom move up and down.
“Don’t cry, dear,” I say into his hair. “It’s getting better.”
He subsides enough that I can look around us and try to understand the situation.
I can’t see the collapsed guy’s face, but his body looks completely finished. Boneless and flattened. For the first time I think that maybe he’s really dead. I haven’t been taking this hysterical accuser seriously.
“Okay, honey,” I say into the back of my dad’s head. And I quote a piece of Egyptian poetry, “Don’t be sad; the road is ending.”
Egyptian archaeology is still the most important force in my father’s life.
The spiky-haired accuser is standing up now. She has square glasses in front of brown eyes and a necklace of those blue clay beads they try to sell you in the Valley of the Kings. Her eyes lock into mine. “He was,” she says. “I saw.”
My father lifts his head from my shoulder and stares at her. “Why, hello,” he says, “Rita.”
She tilts her chin; light flashes off her glasses. “You thought you could get away with it.”
Daddy stares at her for a minute more and offers an opinion: “He was trying to eat life.”
Beside me, my father has recovered and is unsuitably cheerful. The museum staff is handing out sodas; he attempts to drink his directly from the bottle; he finds this amusing.
I have tried unsuccessfully to get him out of here. “He’s old,” I’ve said, “very old; he’s sick; he has Alzheimer’s disease; the sheriff knows where we are; he can talk to us later.”
The guard grunts, “No way, ma’am.”
The spiky-haired woman, glasses flashing, offers to perform a citizen’s arrest.
“Nine-one-one is comin’ in,” the guard says. “A rescue squad, a doctor. An’
the sheriff. I sent for them. They’ll all be here. Because that gentleman is dead. I had an aunt that died an’ I know dead when I see it.”
I don’t say so but I agree. I worked in the animal lab at school and later I witnessed some fatal events at Daddy’s retirement home; I know about death, too.
The director of the museum, a man named Egon Rothskellar, arrives at this point. Under normal circumstances Egon is jumpy and fluttery; now he is close to incoherent. “Oh, good heavens. Oh, I cannot imagine.” He tries to embrace my father, but can’t figure out which cheek to kiss first. He approaches the furious, static Rita and tells her, “Dr. Claus, Dr. Claus.” She stares at him so stonily that he mutters a few incomprehensible conciliatory noises and backs away into the hall toward a door labeled ADMINISTRATION.
I ask the guard if I can take my father to the bathroom.
She says, “Sure, but somebody goes with you,” and she delegates a scared-looking blond youth in a turban who accompanies us as far as the door of the men’s room.
I go right on into the men’s room. The hell with sexual restrictions.
This restroom is made of marble and brass and has Egyptian-type fixtures, including a fountain serving as a urinal. I face my dad. “You knew that woman?”
“What woman, dear?”
“You called her Rita.”
He sighs. “Names. Lots of names.”
Most of the time he doesn’t remember names at all. “And who was the man? The one on the floor? Is that somebody that . . . Somebody from Egypt?”
Daddy stares at me intently. “The son of Isis is injured.”
“How do you know him? Or her?”
“Know her? Did I say that?” He reaches for a soap dispenser that looks like an Egyptian canopic jar. “Why do you suppose they put metal on this?”
“Daddy, come on. Phase in. Please. What was happening there?” I debate telling him we’ll camp in this restroom until he comes up with an explanation.
He squirts soap onto his hand. “This jar was supposed to have intestines in it. Part of the burial process. Interesting.”
Back in the Great Hall we sit for a while and then we sit for a while longer.
Conversation is restricted. Our group consists of my father, me, Daddy’s accuser, and three female visitors who got caught in this event. We stare at each other.
And finally the sheriff arrives, bumping across the marble, trailed by a following of one doctor with a black bag and two deputies with collapsible platforms and tool kits.
Director Rothskellar returns to bob up and down and make hand motions. “Sheriff. Yes. Oh, my goodness. Can’t understand.”
This sheriff stares at him and says, “Where?”
This sheriff is someone I know. He’s been in office only two months but has already become my enemy, having arrested me for speeding. He said I was doing eighty; I said sixty. His name is Sheriff Munro; he is small and wiry and perhaps handsome, if you like the quick suspicious type with eyes too close together. The old sheriff, who left to go live in Alaska, had dandruff and brains, and didn’t care how fast I drove. He and I were friends; I miss him.
Sheriff Munro scans the room and fixes on me. “Don’t try to leave.” After that he includes everyone. “Don’t anyone leave.” And he and his entourage go off toward the Edward Day Room, shutting a pair of nine-foot-high folding cedar doors behind them.
The Edward Day Room is a small exhibit room, which normally contains nothing except a display case with Daddy’s coffin lid and some explanatory literature. No sprawled bodies.
We in the big room shift and wiggle and listen to muffled sounds from next door. A thump (something has hit the floor?), a mechanical squeal (maybe the stretcher is being dragged). I picture events from television programs. The body is probed, turned over, listened to. Its jacket is removed, shirt removed. Belt undone, shoes, socks. Maybe they cut the rest of the clothes off. Oh, nuts.
“Are you all right, Daddy?”
“Why, fine, dear.”
Maybe they’re zipping the body up in a black plastic bag.
“I think I knew her,” my father says.
“Rita,” I prompt.
“Danielle. There was a Danielle.”
The sheriff addresses me; he says he doesn’t care whether my father has Alzheimer’s or not; he is going to interview him. “You sit here and he will sit there.” He indicates a chair several feet away from me. “He can answer questions; I’ve seen him do it.”
Daddy takes a small white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabs at his mouth. “You need me to sit there?” He does so. “This chair, you know, is not a real Egyptian chair, only an inaccurate copy; the real one would not have had—”
“Dr. Day, listen.” Sheriff Munro clears his throat and tries to pitch his voice low; he’s not totally successful. “What was your relationship with the victim?”
“The victim?” Daddy looks troubled. “It would probably have had animal feet.”
“Huh?”
“But not always. Are you on your way to Egypt, young man?”
The sheriff has tilted forward. He fusses with the pages of a green-bound notebook. His firmly ironed tan pants stick out as if they’re made of metal. “Please pay attention. The guy . . . man. On the floor. Lying on the floor. You knew him.”
“Were you one of my students, then?” Daddy sounds pleased at this idea.
“You are pretending. Faking incompre . . . faking not understanding.”
“Tired, yes. A little tired.”
Sheriff Munro turns to me. “Impeding justice. Obstructing an investigation.” He squints. His little, too-close-together eyes waver and get unfocussed. “I have a reliable witness. She saw him. He was assaulting that man.”
I try to be mild. “I think he was trying to help.”
“Help? He had him by the throat.”
“No, no. He was loosening his collar . . .”
“He had his hands around his neck. This witness is highly reliable. She’s sure what she saw.” He turns back to my father. “You got to pay attention. I can arrest you. Insanity’s not an excuse.”
Daddy reaches toward me. “We can leave now, I think.”
“You’re accused of a serious crime.” The sheriff offers this flatly. Maybe I’m just imagining a coating of pleasure on the statement.
Daddy sits poised, arm out.
“You understand me,” Sheriff Munro pursues. “Dr. Day, listen. The man. The one that you . . . The one on the floor.”
“There is no million years.”
“You knew him.”
“The cavern is opened for those in the abyss.” My father offers this neutrally, his only sign of disturbance a tremor in his outstretched hand.
The sheriff compresses his lips. He leans forward and his pants creak. “I can put you in jail. Do you understand?”
Daddy sighs. “That’s difficult, isn’t it? Understanding. There have been arguments about the nature of understanding. When I was at the university—”
“You’re not at the university now.” The sheriff is half off his chair. He reaches out and snaps his fingers in front of my father’s face, the way you do to get an animal to behave. “Are you listening? Are you letting it get through? Jail. That’ll stop this garbage. Jeezchrist, what’s the matter with you? Jail. That’ll give you something to quote poetry about.”
The reporter accepts this.
“Look at him,” I say. “He’s famous. Learned. A well-known archaeologist. And gentle. He couldn’t strike anybody.”
The Chronicle reporter regards my gentle, quiet father, who is picking his way through a bag of peppermint Jelly Bellies. He agrees. Obviously I speak truth.
Which I do not. My father did strike Sheriff Munro. He raised his arm above his head and brought it down fast and tapped him with the side of his stiffened hand. He said, “I cleanse this area of evil influences.”
I don’t think it was the hand-tap that Sheriff Munro reacted to so violently. That couldn’t
have hurt much. It must have been what my father said.
“Cleanse? Evil influences?” Sheriff Munro yelps. “Old man, what in hell is the matter with you? What the fuck do you mean?”
Some people go all rigid when you recite at them like an incantation. I guess the sheriff is one of those people.
“I mean what I mean,” Daddy expounds.
That’s it for the sheriff, who pulls out his cell phone. “Jerry,” he tells somebody on the receiving end, “get back here and get into it, this old idiot has gone completely off his fucking rocker,” and then he clicks off the phone and grabs one of Daddy’s wrists and wrenches it behind his back.
Right then is when I lose it.
But I do try to free my father’s arms, and that’s a no-go. Jerry arrives with a sidekick and they get into the action. They are strong guys, one big one and one small one, each with muscles and biceps and a tan uniform; the big one pries me loose from my dad; the other helps Sheriff M. get both Daddy’s hands high up and backward behind his shoulder blades; after that they screw his wrists together with a plastic handcuff.
I begin squawking and jabbering. “Let go of him, you bastards. Let him loose. Undo his hands. You’re hurting him. I’ll call Elder Abuse. I’ll call the ACLU. I’ll call my lawyer. I’ll call the newspapers. I’ll get you demoted.”
Meanwhile I’m trying to wrench myself free.
“Dad, Dad, don’t let them take you. Go limp. Flop down. Sag on the floor.”
Of course, he has no idea what I’m talking about. “That hurts a little,” I think he’s saying.
“He’s sick; he has a heart condition”—as far as I know this isn’t true—“he needs medication; I’ll sue.” The goon holds me tighter each time I speak.
My father somehow manages to look brave, shoulders back, turning his head inquiringly, like a little bird.
The main move in Rape Defense, in which I took a one-day Santa Cruz course, is the knee in the groin. I apply this move now, up and hard, and the goon precipitately lets go of me to bend over saying, “Jesus Christ, you fucking bitch,” and grab his testicles.
Erased From Memory Page 1