Murder Never Forgets (19 page)

My old ladies telephone, even though they’re just a few feet away and could yell their greetings if they wanted to. All of them love telephoning. “Hello, Carly, how are you today? You know, I heard, and it may not amount to anything, that there’s a woman over in South Building hasn’t heard from her cousin . . .”

Mrs. Cohen has met a lady whose brother visited a month ago. But since then he hasn’t written and hasn’t called; the lady is very worried. “Now I know Ed thought it was a woman,
however
, we hear so much about false memory and altered perceptions, and I just think it would be so very interesting if it turned out to be a man instead of, as far as Ed’s memory of it went . . .” The lady with the brother is named Mrs. Goliard; I take her phone number.

“Oh,” Mrs. Cohen adds, “she’s the one that went out the window. I don’t think that figures, do you?”

Mrs. Dexter has been talking to Rebecca, Mrs. Sisal’s secretary, who tells her that someone named Idora left the office a month ago and hasn’t been heard from since. “Not that I’d be heard from, either, if I’d worked for that Sisal woman,” Mrs. Dexter says. “But she
is
a Disappeared, and they seem to have hired her without any records. I think you should check.”

Also, Arlette telephones. Robbie’s girlfriend, Arlette. She has a message for Robbie and thinks maybe he’s here with me. The fact that Arlette looks for Robbie at my new phone number cheers me up a lot. I am, I tell myself, really mean.

Daddy wonders if I can call Cairo on my new telephone, so I do. He asks the operator, in Arabic, what time it is, and gets told, in English, that it’s two o’clock in the morning. Then he holds the phone against my ear and tells me, “Carly, this is absolutely wonderful, isn’t it?”

He plays with the phone for a minute, flipping and un-flipping it. “It reminds me of something. What would that be?”

I think my father is a little better these last few weeks. Asking me what something reminds him of is a sign of this; the buried messages are crowding closer, trying to poke their snouts out.

I settle down into some new detective work, which gets me nowhere. First, I try some chasing and tracing with the secretarial agency that sent Idora. I call her former employer, the Portland Chamber of Commerce, after that I move on to Pacific Bell’s World Wide Information Service, and finally I’m calling Idora’s sister, who says, yes, of course she’s heard from Idora, Idora is having a great time with her new boyfriend. They are in Bermuda now, why am I asking?

Mrs. Goliard is the lady with the missing brother. She lives at the far end of the Manor, so I call her but to no avail; she has birdcalls from three different birds tweeting at you for her answering message. Her own voice comes on the tape afterwards to say what kinds of birds they are, but they all sound alike to me. I leave her a message.

All this time people are packing up and leaving the Manor. The hall is full of their stacked-up luggage.

Mr. Rice on my corridor is going. “But it’s not your fault,” he says, “you really tried.” I’m touched by Mr. Rice’s compliment, since he’s been the most complaining of my clients. “You helped,” Mr. Rice says, “you and Belle. You two were responsible. You listened to my concerns.”

None of my trio of special old ladies is leaving. “It’s much too interesting here,” Mrs. Cohen says. Mrs. Dexter tells her it’s damn boring, if you must know, but she’ll leave only when she feels like it. Mrs. La Salle just shrugs and says, “What for?” She has come around to take Daddy for a walk. “I’m not afraid of falling out a window,” she says, and pulls her fur hat down over one ear. Her white hair fluffs out on the other side. “I’m not troubled much by fear.”

 
 
It’s funny how, in a time of tension, you can have periods of feeling good, thinking life is almost normal. So I’m not prepared when I discover that my room has been trashed.

It takes me a minute to get it, to understand. I stand at the half-open door.

I do a double, then triple take. This doesn’t make sense. What happened?

The place is a mess.

Clothes on the floor.

Hand-lotion bottle on the floor, uncapped, big puddle, perfume smell, other smells.

Broken mirror shards, glinting and reflecting, bits of china, mascara, lipstick, ripped-up underpants, unfurled rolls of toilet paper.

Upside-down dresser drawers, rug in a heap, books, pages ripped out.

Scattered papers, letters, newspaper, magazines.

Something’s on the bed, lodged high in a hill of bedclothes.

A heaped-up bundle, red stains on it.

I don’t want to see this.

I’m going to back out of here, close the door.

I don’t back out, I cross the room to the bed and the heap of blanket and sheet.

The sheets are red-smeared, like butcher paper. I pull them down.

There’s more red; it smears my hands. Inside is something. A red slimy object.

It’s not meat exactly. It’s an object. An animal.

I have trouble thinking. You saw a lot of animals when you worked in the animal lab, Carla. Never one like this.

But you know what it is. You’ve seen something like it. At the butcher shop. Something red and bare. With the skin pulled off. This is an animal that has been skinned. All the natural, expected covering peeled away except at the head and the paws.

The head is how I know what it is. Was. It’s one of our hares, those long-legged guys, scared eyes and upstanding ears. The ones that hung out in the meadow or near the mermaid statue.

I pull the sheet completely off. Here it is. A body: red, oozing, muscles outlined. When the sheet moves over it a muscle twitches.

That can happen after death. I know that’s true. A latent reaction. It doesn’t mean the animal’s still alive.

I tell myself this several times.

But that doesn’t work, and finally I have to do it. I don’t want to. But I have to. If there’s a chance this creature is still alive. I act fast. I put a hand at the back of its neck, grip firmly around flesh, bone, bloody fur collar, bend the head back, firmly, sudden, hard. And snap.

Clouded brown eyes are staring at the wall. Surely you were dead anyway. You were dead, and you couldn’t feel. There’s a prayer for this. I can’t say the prayer. Something about
Go in beauty
, or some crap like that.

I sit down on the floor. I’m crying hard, but I manage to pull my phone out of my pants pocket and call Rob. I leave sticky smears all over the push buttons.

 
 
“I can’t stand it,” I tell Rob. “I don’t want any lunch.” He and I are sitting in the weeds at the far border of the Manor grounds, right next to the highway, which is a quiet thoroughfare, with a car only every ten minutes.

Rob says. “You need lunch.”

I pick up a sandwich and pry it open and look at the filling. “What do they want? For me to get scared and get out of here?”

“Maybe.”

“For me to stop poking my nose into things?”

“Very likely.”

“Why should they care? I haven’t found out a single thing. Just . . . nothing.”

“Carla, you have to leave the Manor.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“You’ve got to.”

“I’m not. They can’t make me.”

“The person who did that is crazy. Deranged. Dangerous.”

“And wants to scare me.”

“Yeah. You better be scared.”

“I won’t be scared. I’m not going.”

“Be sensible.”

“No.” I can hear myself being unreasonable. I can feel my inner me doing a weird set of parallels: My mother went away. She got scared off. She was a quitter. Now my father’s going off someplace. A place very far away and unreachable. He’s scared; he’s backing off, afraid of life. He’s quitting. Not me.

“They can’t force me,” I tell Rob. “I’m staying.”

“And subjecting your dad?”

“He’d want to stay . . . if he could understand.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I’m just starting to get some answers. All kinds of little pointers. One of them will pan out. That’s what they’re afraid of, one of the things I’m turning up being real.”

Rob says, “Oh, for God’s sake,” again.

“I have to stay. You can understand.”

“I understand you’re being stupidly stubborn.”

There’s a pause. I say, “I keep hoping it wasn’t still alive.”

Rob says, “Huh?” and I say, “The rabbit.”

And he corrects me, “Hare.”

A car comes along the road and pauses. Children in the backseat are waving.

 
 
Rob has called the sheriff, who is waiting for me at the door to my room when I get back.

“Well,” says Sheriff Hawthorne. “Big mess. Don’t touch anything. We’ll fingerprint.”

He surveys me. I can’t decide whether his gaze is accusing, inquiring, or maybe triumphant. (You got into more trouble, like I knew you would. You had to come to me.) He’s chewing gum. “Come on down to my office.”

He is still in his tapestry-paneled hidey-hole down the hall from Mrs. Sisal. It’s clearly his office now, with stacks of papers, green-and-tan boxes. A bosomy lady cop clutching a notebook shares it with him.

The sheriff tips back his desk chair and stares at me some more. “So why’d they do this to you?”

I debate being smart-alecky.
They don’t like me.
Or just dumb:
I don’t know.
I debate confiding my father’s net-woman story. Then I think again about having my father questioned. This sheriff has been okay so far, but with those slit eyes and those midwestern-dentist practical glasses and that set to his chin, I don’t trust him much. I imagine him grilling Daddy. Insisting on drugs, hypnosis. I picture a whole lineup of bosomy lady cops with notebooks.

So I try to answer reasonably and humbly. “I must have done something. I’m not sure what.”

The sheriff scoots his chair farther back. “Let’s think, sweet cakes.”

Bosomy is poking away at her notes. Maybe drawing pictures.

I make several efforts. “I did do a couple of things. I checked up on Mrs. Dexter and the oyster. I discovered Mona. Maybe I noticed something then. Before that. Afterward. My father fell in the garden. I was confused. I have trouble remembering.”

Sheriff H. and I keep this up for a while, with me working hard to stress the two H’s—humble and helpful. I don’t think the sheriff trusts me for a minute, but he finally lets me go and says some of his guys will watch out for me until he leaves the Manor—“Just a coupla more days, sweet cakes. You better rilly watch it. That’s a mean summabitch did that there.” He chews gum and gestures upward in the direction of my room.

I’m glad to have Sheriff H. say he’ll watch out for me. My father and I can use all the watching that’s offered.

Chapter 15

I sit staring at the mermaid and thinking—a peculiar mixture of
Why am I here
and
What have I done with my life so far
and
How very odd, to be my age and have had such disparate adventures
.

Disparate
is a good word. I think my life would be different if I’d had a mother. Even when Constancia was around she wasn’t there, and then when I was ten years old, she left for good.

I don’t miss her, although there are times I think I ought to. I mean, I remember how handsome she was, straight back and calm perfect profile, and how she stood shoulders-erect, better than most people’s mothers. And how she wasn’t at all, not a bit, interested in clothes. She’d go into whatever store was nearby, Ross Dress-for-Less or Neiman Marcus or whatever, and buy anything they had; it always looked fine. I had a struggle with myself about the way she looked because I would feel proud of her and not want to. But then she’d stare at me when I came near, an expression like deafness across her face, as if I were a homeless person asking for a dollar, and she didn’t want to shut me up, so she’d wait to be polite and listen, then eventually maybe give me that dollar.

Anyway, she was away eighty percent of the time. Well, seventy-five percent. Conferences in Jeddah, Haifa, Tehran, Istanbul. Teaching positions in London. Even in Vancouver. You wouldn’t think they’d want to know about Phrygian bowls in Vancouver.

Susie says there was a lovely lady named Mrs. Esposito who got me through my infancy, and although I don’t remember Mrs. Esposito at all, I do understand some Spanish—that comes when I’m not expecting it, all of a sudden I’ll understand what the guys behind the counter in Subway Pizza are telling each other. And one of my lifetime projects is to go to Oaxaca, where Mrs. Esposito is living now, and get to know her again. Maybe she can tell me about myself when I was a baby.

Susie was the other person who helped me through. And of course Daddy. Though I have to admit it, my father is vague. But I do love him.

Oh. And Aunt Crystal. Much as the idea of Aunt Crystal makes me cross, I have to state that, yes, she cared about my life, too. Aunt C. would come up from Southern California and march into our house and exclaim about how peculiar it all was, with my mother gone and my father never answering the mail. He liked getting mail and liked reading it. He just thought answering was too much trouble and took energy away from his archaeological studies.