Murder Never Forgets (21 page)

Chapter 16

Mrs. Goliard, the lady-out-the-window, the one with the birdcalls on her answering service whose brother doesn’t communicate, finally phones me back.

We have an entirely confusing conversation in which I am saying, “I wondered if you had heard from your brother,” and she is saying things about me being Dr. Day’s daughter. “Is that possible?” she asks. “Are you related to Dr. Day? In that case you’re related to . . .” and her voice starts trailing off into the atmosphere. She has one of those indistinct whines that gets more inaudible with confusion, but she seems now to be talking about my Aunt Crystal.

So at the same moment I’m saying, “Aunt Crystal?” and she’s saying, “My brother Kevin? Oh, yes, Kevin wrote to me, of course he did. I was so foolish; I worry too much . . . But your Aunt Crystal . . . I’m afraid I must have offended her.”

It seems she was working with Crystal on some kind of project.

I try to remember when Aunt Crystal was at the Manor last. About a week before I left Berkeley, that’s when I got the postcard with the mermaid statue and the spiky message: “Service fair; breakfast waffles leathery; yr fr. adjusting v. well.”

“So your brother is all right?” I’m asking, and Mrs. Goliard keeps talking about Aunt Crystal, “Your aunt, how wonderful. I was working with her.

“That is, I
thought
I was working with her,” Mrs. Goliard talks in a high bleat. “You simply must—oh, I would appreciate it if only—please
do
come to see me.”

She and I make a date for later that afternoon.

 
 
Mrs. Goliard is a skinny lady with dyed red hair who leans her body to one side and fidgets with her face, one hand pulling at a cheek, an ear, a chin sag. She hovers in her doorway, looking dazed.

“Oh, my goodness,” she says. “Oh, Crystal’s niece. She mentioned about you, but I had no idea until Belle told me. I mean, that you were
living
here . . .”

“Maybe we should go inside,” I say, since it looks as if she won’t be able to get out of her doorway unless I give her a shove, and she says, “Oh, my goodness, oh, yes,” and leads the way into a dark, overheated apartment full of brocade drapes and a lot of those little porcelain dancer figures up on one toe and with lace flounces baked into their porcelain.

I get seated on a red velvet couch with an impossibly hard back, and she sits facing me in a flowered chair and stares and says, “Oh,” and “Please,” and “Oh, my, do you have any idea—well, you wouldn’t have, would you? Anyway, why did Crystal never get back to me? Was she angry? I didn’t do the research, but I couldn’t, could I, not knowing what it was supposed to be?”

“I’d really like a cup of tea,” I prod, not because I really would (I wouldn’t; I’ve had enough tea since I joined the Manor to float myself all the way back to Berkeley), but in order to give her something specific to do, and at this she says, “Oh, dear,” and “Oh, of course,” and starts to fluster gratefully toward her small kitchen.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to put together my idea of Aunt Crystal, so organized and precise, and asking myself what on earth would she want with this chaotic little lady, just the kind Aunt C. can’t stand. She must have an extra-special reason.

Mrs. Goliard dithers out with apple-cinnamon tea and Pepperidge Farm cookie sandwiches that get displayed on a pink marble table, and while we sip and munch, her story slowly emerges.

Aunt Crystal had looked up Mrs. Goliard because she, like Aunt C., used to be a librarian.

“Not that I was in her class,” Mrs. Goliard dithers. “Oh, not at all. Your aunt, before she retired, was head of the main branch of the Ventura library, and she even taught a course at—where was it?”

“USC,” I say. “University of Southern California.”

“
So
prestigious. And I was just the weekend person at the downtown branch in The Dalles, Oregon.”

Her voice fades here; she’s losing track of her thought. I jump-start her, “Aunt Crystal came to you . . .”

“Oh, yes, yes. Though I must say for myself, I
am
trained in research; I do know about that. And your aunt had a research project.

“I was so excited to be asked, because, you know, here at the Manor, it’s all very, very nice, or at least it was before all these accidents started, but still . . . well, anyway, you do start to feel, even though it’s so nice . . .”

Here she begins a session of chin-pulling that makes me feel I’ll be doing it too unless I rescue her. “It’s nice here, but you were glad to have something to do.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. You’re so like your aunt. Such an incisive mind.”

Aunt Crystal,
I am saying in my head,
this will never work out
.

“But,” Mrs. Goliard continues, “I never found out what exactly your aunt was researching. She was coming back to tell me about it more fully. And then she didn’t.”
Tug, tug
on the chin. “And I wrote and got no answer. I blamed myself, of course. But it
is
confusing. What she wanted with me, here. Because we aren’t near a good library, now are we? Of course there is the little local library in Conestoga and then the historic mansion outside of town—maybe there’s a library there; I never asked . . .”

I’m starting to feel some sort of cold warning, a clutch of danger deep in my belly. I try for a minute to identify it and can’t, so I grab back into the conversation, “But she didn’t give you any idea at all?” Aunt Crystal likes to be busy; I know that. She’s a volunteer teacher of reading and math, she visits hospitals. Those are great things to be doing, though I can’t help feeling sorry for the people she helps, having Aunt Crystal leaning over their shoulder like a witch out of
Macbeth
, tracing their mistakes with a bony finger. Research, I never heard about that.

“Research on what?” I ask, stifling the cold feeling. Mrs. Goliard tugs and looks flustered.

“Something about California history,” she suggests. “I mean, she didn’t exactly say it. Only that it’s important. And it’s local. I got that California-history feeling.”

At the back of my mind somebody erects a large sign: WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MONA? WITH THE ACCIDENTS AT THE MANOR?

I am saying “Accidents” to my subconscious at the same moment that Mrs. Goliard is telling me, “And then I fell out of the window.”

Fell
, I go. More like
accident.
Not saying it aloud, just thinking. I had pretty much forgotten that this was the out-the-window lady.

“So very stupid,” Mrs. Goliard dithers on. “You know, I liked to go to the window and stand and look out; it gave me a feeling that I was getting out of my problems. Then, suddenly there wasn’t any glass, and I got dizzy. That’s one of my things, in a situation like that, if I’m up high and if the light comes from underneath, well, I get dizzy.”

“So very foolish,” she adds, looking to me as if I will agree, yes, foolish. “If the new chef hadn’t come by and caught me . . . And it’s really only these last few days . . . I mean, it’s taken me four whole weeks to get over being scared about it.”

“Four weeks?” I ask.

My subconscious has turned into an echoing mess. That word
accident
still clangs around there like a ball in a pinball machine that can’t find its pocket, but there’s also this new word making its own noise. About something else, something cold and really evil.

Mrs. Goliard is still talking, “I told myself that was what I got for being so pleased about your aunt. Something bad always happens right away if something good does. And then I just waited to hear from her and when I didn’t, well, that was all right at first, and I could tell myself not to be silly. But now that it has been almost a month . . .”

That’s it, that’s it, I think.
When
, that’s the cold word. A month. A month since
when
. I open my mouth, and I can’t speak. I close my mouth, and I try again. “Mrs. Goliard,” I say finally, “
when
was Aunt Crystal here?”

Mrs. Goliard thinks I am accusing her of something. She says, “When,” and “My goodness.” She drops a cookie. “It was . . . I can’t remember the date exactly. Just about a month ago. Just before I fell out the window.”

 
 
Somehow I get out of Mrs. Goliard’s apartment and home to my cubbyhole, where I call Aunt Crystal in Venice, California, and listen to her answering machine greeting: “This is Crystal Day. Please leave a message.” Then I rifle through my things to find my address book, and remember that, yes, I had it in my pocket when my room was trashed, otherwise I wouldn’t have it at all. And there under Aunt Crystal’s name and in her handwriting is her next-door neighbor’s name, address, and phone number; how like Aunt C., to worry about me some day needing that information.

The lady’s name is Mrs. Bascomb.

I reach her right away.

She’s the cheerful sort, at least at the beginning of our conversation. “Crystal’s niece? Yes, of course, you’re Carla, yes, I heard about you. So glad you called because I must say, I had begun to wonder . . . I mean, I’m glad to go on with the watering and all that, but the garden is getting out of hand and the mail is piling up and some of it looks like bills and . . .

“Well,” she asks, pausing for breath, “when is Crystal coming back, anyway?”

I find myself going breathless and oddly unwilling to tell Mrs. Bascomb that I have no idea where Aunt Crystal is. “When did she leave Venice?” I ask. And Mrs. B., sounding surprised, says, “Why, last month . . . yes, maybe in the middle of the month. She was going to stay at her brother’s place, a very nice place—oh, he would be your father, wouldn’t he? Then you know the place, that’s where she would be staying. Do you mean, are you telling me, you’re not in touch with her?”

Mrs. Bascomb hasn’t put it together that I live at the Manor and that I don’t know where Aunt Crystal is. And when at last we connect on this, she is quite horrified. She does the acting out for me. I am sitting holding the phone, feeling all kinds of heat changes and freezing changes as if a new temperature-altering substance has been invented and applied to me from head to toe, but especially in the gut area. My personal alarm system is going: Yes, I knew it, I could feel it; Aunt Crystal is missing, she’s the one, she was here at the Manor. She’s the woman who went away and didn’t write home.

Mrs. Bascomb of course doesn’t have all the history I have, and after her initial shock wants to believe various harmless things until finally I manage to say, sounding all right and in charge when I say it, “Thank you, you are so good to worry. I’ll take care of it; I’ll look into everything, and I’ll call you back. You’ll hear from me.”

Then I hang up and think I’m going to be sick. I waste about ten minutes in the employees’ bathroom down the hall, hanging on to the enamel toilet bowl and feeling dizzy and weak. I can’t throw up; all I can manage is staring at the white enamel and then fixing on the stainless steel handle and feeling awful. When I finally stagger out into the hall I meet Belle who says, “Hell’s bells kid, you look like shit.” I squeeze by her not answering and make it back into my little cell, where I lie down for a few minutes before I call Mrs. Sisal’s office.

 
 
Rebecca, the Sisal secretary, acts surprised. “Sure, Miss Day was here visiting her brother, just a while before you came. We thought you knew.”

She stayed a week, Rebecca says, and her bill was paid by Dr. Day’s account.

Skrrtch
,
skrrtch
over the telephone, it’s Rebecca turning pages. “Left something, I guess,” she adds. “We mailed it to her. Doesn’t say what.”

I hang up and make my way to the bathroom again. But I don’t throw up this time, either. Then I come back and call the sheriff.

Sheriff Hawthorne is downstairs and can see me right away.

He’s standing by his partially dismantled desk, surrounded by cardboard cartons and rolls of sticky tape. He, with his crew, is leaving us tomorrow. He’s only moderately happy to see me. “Came to confess, I guess,” he says, projecting irony. He’s not at all interested in my most recent wild story. “Your aunt? You have an
aunt
that doesn’t write to you?

“Tell me something useful for a change,” he suggests. “You remembered a fact. Your dad remembered a fact.

“And cut it out with this bullshit about a missing aunt who doesn’t send postcards. Lissen. We got a murder. The lady had your house number down her bra. Somebody tossed your room. You’re into this mess, in like Flynn.”

On the Aunt Crystal question he tells me I’m being a female overreacter. “You got a lot of things to think about lately, right?” After which he walks around, slapping Scotch tape onto packages. “Right in the middle of leaving here,” he mutters. “Kee-reep. . . . Just tell me, back to basics, why were you in the meadow that night, huh?”

When I don’t give up and keep trying to convince him that my aunt is
missing
, and it’s his responsibility to
do something,
he snorts his walrus snort, “She was an independent kind of lady, right? Traveled a lot? Librarian, you say, teacher. Yeah, your dad maybe hasn’t heard from her, but your dad forgets, correct? . . . Hey, on that, have you thought about it, how about . . . could we jump-start him? You realize, it looks pretty suspicious the way these pointers keep aiming at him.

“Okay, okay,” he says, in response to a semihysterical outburst from me. He sits down. “Of course if you insist, I’ll fill out a form, but listen, Miss Day, you’ll see, this’ll be one of those times when the lady shows up with a suitcase full of souvenirs from Yosemite and talks about the wonderful time she had and that impulse just to climb on a bus and explore . . .”

I am sitting in Sheriff Hawthorne’s temporary office, one of our Victorian type of Manor rooms with the whipped-cream ceiling molding. I am shifting back and forth in a cerise velvet Manor chair and looking at his collection of cartons containing details of the Mona murder, and I’m fighting down a tide of anxiety and going
Yes, no, yes, no
at myself; the question being, do I finally have to tell Sheriff Hawthorne about what Daddy saw from the cliff top? (“Listen, Sheriff Hawthorne, my father thinks he saw this murder where they rolled the woman in a net, but of course he’s not a very reliable witness, and I don’t want him questioned at all . . .”)