Murder Never Forgets (18 page)

The hostess is worried that something happened in the restaurant—a rat or a bat or a cockroach—to make my father behave like that. I let her think this.

Daddy tries to tell her that he had an e-mail. He says, “E-mail,” and she says, “Oh, don’t do that.”

Rob and I have had a six-sentence conversation in the lobby. Now he tells my father, “Ed, I certainly would like to take you back and examine you.”

I stare. I’d sort of forgotten that Rob is a doctor.

Daddy says, “That is so good of you. But not at all.”

Rob’s girlfriend sticks her hand out. “Hi. I’m Arlette.”

Henry says, “Hey, everybody almost ready?” Unlikely as it seems, our outing is going to end as it began, with a quiet taxi ride. Henry will probably point out some new shoreline sights.

Rob asks am I sure? And I say, yes, yes, and he says, “I’ll come with you,” and I say, “It’s all right now,” and he tells me he’ll see me tomorrow. Meanwhile, the ladies start piling up into the cab. My father shakes his head. “Carla, I must have left something in that restaurant.” That’s the way he looks, a little troubled, the way you are when you think you’ve lost that ad you were saving for the shopping expedition tomorrow.

I tell him, “No, Father, I’m sure you haven’t,” and he says, “Well, now, if you’re sure, my dear, you always seem to know, and I will once again sit all the way in the back,” and he’s up the van steps and has started wiggling past the middle seats.

I say, “Robbie, thank you.” I remember to tell Arlette it is good to meet her. I look up into the cab after my father who seems okay, just a little bit, I suppose you’d say, quenched. I thank Rob one time more and climb up the van steps after my dad.

Chapter 14

“Carly, if you’ve been here for a month, why didn’t you call me a month ago?”

It’s the day after the Justine’s Restaurant evening, and Robbie and I are in the Manor garden, bench-sitting near the mermaid statue.

“I don’t know,” I say sullenly, staring down at my hands as if I’m eight years old.

Actually, I do know pretty well why I didn’t call him.

“Carla,” he says, “we’re friends. Good friends. You’re my
oldest
friend.”

The Manor old ladies are very excited about the lovely young man who appeared out of nowhere to help me last night. Mrs. Cohen says, “I recognized him, dear, did you know that? He was our doctor last summer when Dr. Kittredge was away. So young and energetic, I thought then. Just what you’ve been needing. And you can tell, that little person with him, she doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Maybe,” I tell Robbie now, “I expected Susie to tell you. About my being here.”

“Well, she didn’t.”

Rob is just the same, hardly any older, still sturdy and energetic, with slightly broader shoulders and lots of wavy brown hair. He’s a little taller than me. He doesn’t like to sit still. Right now he’s scuffing a foot back and forth, tracing patterns in the pink dust of the mermaid path. “How long has Ed been like this?”

“It’s worse lately.”

“Well, listen, I’m really, really sorry, and it’s awful to see him this way, and I’ll go do a lot of research. Maybe there’s something they haven’t been trying.” Rob’s field isn’t Aging or Alzheimer’s or anything even remotely like that; he’s an intern in tropical medicine because he wants to return to Egypt and do good for the populace. You wouldn’t think they’d have a tropical medicine clinic at North Coast Hospital, but they do because of the workers who come up from Central America to pick artichokes and lettuce and asparagus in our farm fields.

“None of that medicine will help,” I say. “I know because I’ve been researching, too. Come on, Rob, let’s go for a walk.” I take his hand and think, sixteen hours he’s back into my life and he’s already revising it.

Daddy is fine today; right now he’s taking a nap. He doesn’t seem to remember anything bad about last night. This morning he was cheerful, welcoming Robbie. “Hello there. We really know you’re one of us when we see you looking like that, don’t we? Now, the name’s on the tip of my tongue.” He was okay about letting Rob listen to his chest and thump his back, and during lunch he was so relaxed and funny that I think if Rob hadn’t seen him last night he would have been telling me, “Carly, nothing much is wrong with him; that’s just normal fatigue, not Alzheimer’s. All old people are like that.”

Rob and I start walking, hand in hand like the good friends we’re supposed to be; I’m leading him along the nonscenic route, past the Manor garbage cans. I want to show him the net-woman beach. I’ve told him the story about that; I’ve told him most of our stories, and he’s been horrified and says we’ve got to move. And doesn’t remember about the lifetime clause and the full lifetime payment to the Manor and says, forget about that, you have to move anyway. Rob likes to take charge.

We approach Daddy’s beach by walking along the top of the culvert; I’ve decided Rob is too broad to squeeze through the inside. So we scramble precariously over the top and then through the weeds and bushes and finally down into Daddy’s viewing place where we’re in a standing position, not lying on our bellies the way Daddy and I were.

Rob says, “Wow,” and “Uh-huh,” and “Yeah, I see, yeah, I get it.”

The beach looks the same except that the tide is halfway out and the pile of nets is smaller. “It’s funny,” I say, “I’m getting used to thinking he saw something here, and now I can start asking questions, like,
why
was he here at all? How did he know there would be anything
to
see? There are the steps where he says the people came down.” I point to the north end of the beach and the ragged seacoast structure of sagging steps and rickety balustrades. “He knew they were coming; he’d been observing for a while.

“And, Rob, he keeps repeating about secrecy. Or not talking. Except that last night he thought he had to talk. He said he got an e-mail.”

“E-mail?” Rob asks. Both of us are silent for a minute, chasing the idea
e-mail
. What does Edward think that is?

“Existential-mail,” I suggest, and, “Evaporating mail,” Rob counters.

We waste some time giggling and telling each other how funny we are.

One of our local long-legged hares pops out of the bushes and looks at us, standing on his rear legs like a kangaroo. Rob knows the scientific name of the breed:
Lepus townsendii
.

He then offers the opinion, which irks me, that most of my dad’s vagueness is Alzheimer’s. Of course I knew that. I act cross. Rob says, “And furthermore . . . furthermore . . . well, you know that, too.”

So I have to persuade him. “What, already?”

After a minute’s silence he says, “Know what the big question is, Carly, the big, big question?”

I tell him no.

Robbie’s single-mindedness seems conceited sometimes, but that’s not accurate. It’s more that he jumps on his horse and rides enthusiastically off in whatever direction he sees at the moment.

He waves an arm around. “If they wrapped somebody in a net until she stopped wriggling, where is she? Where’s the body?”

I point. “In the ocean. They dumped her.”

“Okay, right, sometime she’ll wash up. But meanwhile, somebody is missing. Her relatives are looking. She’s on a list someplace.”

I say, “Ye-ah,” trying not to sound too contemplative.
Estupida
, I tell myself. Not believing Daddy’s story kept me from getting this far in thinking about it.

We’re silent for a couple of heartbeats, and then I say, “Probably someone from around here.”

“Most likely.”

“Daddy does seem to sort of know her. He saw her, and he watched them going through the Manor grounds, and he sort of followed—he’s good at that little boy stuff, hiding and peering . . .” This fantasy begins to trickle away, and I say, “Or something,” and sit in the weeds where Rob has already hunkered down and is unwrapping a protein bar, which he hands me half of. “Apricot flavor,” he explains.

“Who’s Arlette?” I ask. It’s Arlette from last night that I’m asking about, and I mean, of course, what sort of a person is she; does she like Yo-Yo Ma and
The Sopranos
; where did you get her? He tells me, all enthusiasm, that Arlette is a great girl, smart and, well,
simpatico
, “You’re going to love her.” I look sideways to see if he’s being ironic, and he isn’t; his square face is flushed with pleasure.

There’s a brief pause, after which he changes the subject, “I came by here to see Ed three times since your aunt moved him in. Did he say anything?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.” After a minute I add, “That shows how he’s not such a great witness; a couple of times when he talked about a nice young man who went to Egypt. I guess maybe he was telling me he’d seen you and I didn’t catch on.”

“Lately, he has a new one,” I add. “He’s started talking about his token. ‘I have my token. Through all this I kept my token.’ What’s a token?”

Rob says a token is whatever you want it to be. Like a sign. Or a word. Something that stands in for something else. “A bus token is a stand-in for money.”

I want to tell him he sounds like my philosophy book, but I know he’s trying to be helpful. Instead I say, “I’ll get my old ladies on about the missing woman; they’ll love snooping around,” and right away feel guilty calling the trio the old ladies and talking about them snooping; they’re my good friends whom I like and who’ve helped me ever since I arrived here. So I make up for being mean about them by being mean to Robbie. “We’ve wasted all afternoon, let’s get going.”

Yes, he and I are back to normal; each of us wants to pilot the plane. I take his hand and squeeze it for apology and think,
Oh, hell
.

 
The rest of the week has various ups and downs.

I start inquiries about the net-woman. Here I run into a brick wall at first. Everyone knows my father’s beach-murder story and thinks it’s Alzheimer’s. Even Mrs. Dexter, whom I tried to persuade that it was real. “Oh, but we can’t take that tale of his seriously?”

And then, after pressure from me, they do begin to take it seriously. “You mean it was
real
? That scene he painted? How awful. Dear, what makes you think so?”

“Just because his picture was so specific? Oh, you’ve seen the place? And he’s been talking about it, too? A lot? Oh, poor Ed. Poor you. How awful. So gruesome. Wrapped in gold cord. Yes, strange, terrible.”

“But, darling, do you
really
think so?”

I partly—or maybe mostly—convince them.

Mrs. La Salle is the only one who continues unpersuaded. “It’s such a standard fantasy. Legendary. All those Greek stories with the woman tied up at the water’s edge, an offering for the sea god.” She touches her feathered white hair.

For some reason I ask her about e-mails. “What’s an e-mail?” I ask.

“E-mail.” She seems to welcome the question. “E-mail is magic. The air must be warm with those things.” She makes a flapping motion, as if she’s swatting flies.

“Is that what my father thinks?”

“Ed? Does he think about e-mail?” She stares at my face for a minute. “Ed’s probably afraid of them. I understand your father very well, you know.”

“Did you send him an e-mail?”

Her tone so far has been bantering, but she now sounds cross. “Why, Carla, of course not.”

 
 
Daddy’s net-woman problem becomes something for the ladies to do. A topic to check back and forth on. Has anyone left the Manor suddenly? Gone for a trip and not written? Even Mrs. La Salle, who is extra dubious, starts searching. “Truly, I think that story is Alzheimer’s. But yes, I’ll ask around.” Mrs. Dexter is great; she’s like a little terrier, ears up, nose down. She chases down staff members who’ve quit or been fired, and she racks up a nice fat phone bill, which she won’t discuss with me. “It’s interesting, and what else can you do parked in front of a walker?”

 
 
Rob buys me a cell phone, with six months’ of calls paid up in advance. At first I tell him, “No, absolutely not, too expensive,” and he says, “You got to,” and I say, “I haven’t got to anything.” We carry on this way for a while with me emoting into the standup public phone in the hall until I realize that several entranced old ladies are listening. Robbie tells me, “Carla, honey, it’s a gift of love.”

So I accept. Actually I like the phone a lot. It’s a black clamshell-type and feels good when you hold it.

Of course, the first person who calls is Rob himself. “Hi, how are you? How’s Ed? Listen, I’ve been reading up some more on Alzheimer’s and about that excitation he had in the restaurant, the way he carried on and tried to get out the window. I think his problem is two different things, one is memory and the other is chemistry, but interdependent, you understand, interlocked and related. Did you know there are plateaus, times when the patient just stays the same for months? Then sometimes he goes back, gets better. And in Germany, they’ve been using special drugs that jack you up—make you a
lot
better for a while. But these may be dangerous. Fascinating stuff. Wow, what a lot of info, more than three thousand items; my mouse-hand went numb.”