Murder Never Forgets (24 page)

“Yes,” I agree. “Right.”

“Believe it, hard on me, too. Incidentally, dear, where’re your friends?”

“What?” It takes me a minute to catch on. At first, I think he means Rob, and then I remember that five minutes ago I told him Mrs. Cohen or Belle would be calling me. “Oh,” I say. “Mrs. Cohen? Forgets. You know.” Kittredge and I are comfortably silent around this lie. I give him back his bottle. “Tell me more about selling the Manor.”

“I don’t know any more. It’s been in the background for six months, maybe, but I never took it seriously, and then these accidents and lawsuits started piling up, and now I guess it
is
serious. I mean, the deal might go through. I feel bad, even though I, personally, got other possibilities for my future. Sisal, though, really wants to hang in. Not sell. Die on the barricades. Strong-minded lady.” The doctor’s voice holds a smile, reminiscent of happy office-couch afternoons with Mrs. Sisal.

“I wish we had something to eat,” I say. “Have you got a sandwich? Or crackers? Some cookies?”

“No, I don’t. I’m being unprecedentedly generous with this bottle.” He makes a noise by blowing into it. “An’ you do have to admit,” he goes on. “The whole thing with this buy-out proposal looks peculiar. We been having a kind of industrial sabotage, so to speak, for months now, accidents, lawsuits, dirty tricks all over the place, got everybody scared shitless—excuse me, dear—get the clients starting to leave and sue, and the Manor set up for bankruptcy, and then, bingo, enter the evil real estaters to buy it up for a song.”

“What about Mona?” I ask. “
That
wasn’t industrial sabotage?”

“Hey, Jesus, no. Have you asked around about that busy Mona bee? She was another, different story; dealt drugs, and profited big time, and screwed everybody. With a little blackmail for extras. Mona was not a nice lady. Careless, too. But she wasn’t part of this buy-out deal. Anybody coulda killed her.

“We are almost finished with this bottle, dear. One teeny hit left inside for each of us.”

“Thank you,” I reach out my hand. “Thanks for sharing, like we say.”

“We do, don’t we?”

For a minute I debate confiding in Dr. Kittredge about Aunt Crystal. Lying in the grass beside somebody you’re sharing a bottle with is a bonding experience, even if you halfway suspect the person of a major crime. The combination of grass and sea air and milk-bottle red dulls your perceptions. I think about this for half a second and then mentally shake myself and return to normal.

Tomorrow, I announce to myself, I’ll get serious about things. I have to rethink my whole position here.

I climb to my feet. “Thanks for the wine.”

He groans. “Honey, I’m stuck here. Flat on my back. You’re gonna have to give me a hand up.”

“Boy,” he says, when he’s halfway standing and my hand is in his, “boy, I sure yearn to see that Coffin Lid Text of your dad’s. Talkin’ to him an’ readin’ his book some. Fascinatin’ stuff. Around here some place, isn’t it?”

“It’s at Egypt Regained, a museum in a place called Homeland,” I say shortly. I don’t know what to make of Kittredge’s interest in Daddy’s Egyptian studies. I think it has to be phony. Everything else about the doctor screams phony, or at least half-phony.

And I tell myself again that I’ve never met anybody except another archaeologist who would read a book about fourteen obscure hieroglyphs.

Just the same, Dr. Kittredge and I walk companionably back to the Manor, with him being good and only making his hand stray into the small of my back twice or maybe three times, and me swatting at him and saying absentmindedly, “Cut it out, will you?”

 
 
I have just seen Dr. Kittredge to his back door. He pauses there—he has that apartment behind the hospital with a metal seabird on the door—and does another Kittredge-charm attempt. “Hey, come on in, Goldilocks darlin’, enter and schmooze some more. I promise total safe-conduct, and I got another bottle of the really good stuff this time.” And so on and so forth, at which I just laugh and start to wave good-bye, until he shrugs, “Okay, babe, next time,” and disappears inside,
clunk
.

So I am standing there, a little drunk, thinking about our grassy session and wondering if I’ve picked up any deer ticks, when the door across the steps from Kittredge’s opens to emit Mrs. Sisal.

“Well, now,” she says.

I say, “Hello, Mrs. Sisal.”

She repeats, “Well.” She is looking as she always does, high-end expensive, but casually so, for at-home living, in a simple, little wide-pants outfit with a simple, little, hand-woven silk shirt and some chunky beads. Her asymmetrical haircut glimmers, straight and shiny-black.

I’m waiting for a crack about me and Kittredge and about how I reek of red wine, and what am I doing here anyway in the better residential part of the Manor, but what she says is, “Has he been feeding you his fairy story about the takeover?”

I stare and make unintelligent noises, as in, “Huh?”

“I guess he really believes that,” she says. “But mostly he made it up. Patrick likes to invent.”

It occurs to me that Mrs. Sisal is drunker than I am.

“Patrick the giant killer,” she says. “Did you have a nice, nice walk?”

“It was okay.” I’m wondering how in hell I’m going to get out of here. A jealous Mrs. Sisal could be a major problem. Even the hair-pulling, assaultive kind.

But she doesn’t seem interested in that side of things. She wants to talk about the takeover. Or what she describes as the nontakeover. “Don’t believe him. All that garbage about somebody buying something. He made it up.” She tucks a strand of the straight, very black hair behind an ear and leans against her doorjamb. A little unsteady but handsome, like a
New York Times
fashion spread. “Makes him feel good. And he’s a liar. He’ll talk endlessly about what . . . oh, hell, who cares?” She fixes on me as if she has just noticed me. “So how are things for you, Miss Dutiful Daughter?”

Yes, Mrs. Sisal is pretty drunk.

“I’m okay.”

“Not enough dutiful daughters around here. You are a model. An absolute paragon. The morning stars will warble about you. Is that your own hair or a wig?”

I stare.

She analyzes, head on one side. “You’re young enough,” she decides. “Probably you just get up in the A.M. and shake it around, and all day your hair looks like that. Well . . . don’t believe anything Patrick tells you. Not a damn thing.

“And listen.” She wobbles against her doorjamb. “You and I have got to talk.” She raises a finger at me. “Because I know what you’ve been up to.

“No, no,” drunk as she is, I guess she can read my expression, “it’s all
right. Somebody
needs to poke and pry around here.

“But you and I should talk. I have something to tell you. Something important. Things aren’t always what they seem. Come see me tomorrow, you hear?

“And have a nice, nice day.

“It
is
important,” she adds, and she exits abruptly back behind her half-open door, which, instead of a bas-relief of seabirds like the doctor’s, has an elegant stained-glass panel.

Chapter 19

Rob comes by that night.

I discover that I am expecting a visit from Rob, that I’ve mentally set aside eleven P.M. as Rob Time. I wait for him on the settee down the hall from my dad’s door. He’s gone to sleep, but I’m keeping guard from here. I’m reading Alice Munro, which is okay for right now because she’s simple and straightforward and a marvelous writer and slightly depressing. I’m about to finish that great story where the woman leaves the kids to run off with the summer-theater director, and she tells us near the end that the children didn’t forget and didn’t forgive, and finally she lets slip at the very end that the romance didn’t last anyhow. It was several romances ago by this time.

“So what’s up?” Rob asks.

I tell him that I want to wait here outside my dad’s door. Just because I feel uneasy. So he kisses me and sits down on the couch and takes Alice Munro out of my lap. “Anything new?” he asks and I tell him about Dr. Kittredge’s buy-out story and then about Mrs. Sisal’s drunk act. I put in plenty of local color about Sisal and how unstable she was leaning against her doorjamb, about how, if I were feeling well enough to think some things were funny, that would be one of the funny ones. But I don’t tell him that I also was drunk, and Kittredge, too, was drunk along with me. I’m interested in myself for not saying this.

Robbie says he wouldn’t trust Kittredge and he wouldn’t trust Sisal, so where does that leave anybody?

“Sure he’s in my hospital, but I still don’t trust him,” Rob augments. “He projects
phony
.”

Rob and I usually agree about people. It’s on how to live our lives that we don’t reach accord.

“Listen,” he leans forward, looks at his knees, picks at something on his blue jeans, “you know, Carla . . . this isn’t your problem, it’s my problem entirely. I hate to dump on you, but . . . well, I’m feeling bad about Arlette.”

I exercise self-control. I don’t say, “Thanks a bundle.”

“I mean,” Robbie says, “there’s a kind of
understanding
between me and Arlie.”

Now I do say something. “Oh, shit.” And, “You’re right, it’s your problem.” And then, “Okay, verbalize, say more, how
do
you feel?”

Rob shrugs. “I dunno. I mean, like, you’re my
oldest
friend.”

I say, “Sure.” I settle back on the base of my spine.

I must have been expecting this statement for a while without knowing it, because now I only need to spend a few minutes of being surprised and jealous before I’m able to get mad and talk pretty fast. “Listen, everything on earth has happened to me this year: my father’s crazy and my aunt got murdered and I’m stuck in this weird place and I don’t have any money. You having a girlfriend is nothing, just a blip on the screen—everybody has a girlfriend, give me a break. I had a
philandering boyfriend
. . .” I’m about to go on with a
who also
about the Habitat guy, and then don’t.

Robbie says, “Yep.”

I think back over the list I just gave him. “You didn’t need to dump on me.”

“Yeah, I did. ’Cause otherwise it’s cheating.”

I think, cheating? If he’s worried about cheating on Arlette, how does talking to me help?

I guess he means it would be cheating on me not to remind me of Arlette. Noble-minded, a Robbie gesture. Revoltingly so. Really wrong and almost right. It helps to get mad at him; it’s good for my soul, cleans out the sludge. “Let me give you a Boy Scout badge,” I say. “Our new decoration, the nobleness merit badge; you do seven noble deeds . . .”

He says, “Hey, cut the crap.”

Suddenly I’m yelling, “Crap? What’s crap about it?” I realize that we’re in the hall of the Manor and will probably wake up half the aged populace. I take a breath. Then I begin a three-minute low-voiced squawk about how pious he is and back in my life now after almost three years and acting as if he has voting privileges, “Look at how you try to order me around, ideas for my future. Yes, I do think you’re bossy, and yes, poor Arlette, I do agree. You and I should totally stop seeing each other. Right away. Now. This minute. Good-bye. I’ll go one way, and you go the other.” I’m half-standing, prepared to dive for my room and leave him sitting here.

He reaches out and grabs my wrist. I don’t much want to sit back down, but I do.

“Listen, Carl . . . Oh, God, I guess I
was
pious. Sweetheart, let’s give it time.” After a while he adds, “It’s been a godawful week, just let it be. I know, everything’s awful. I’m sorry.”

I wait to stop ventilating. “I meant it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

We’re both breathing hard, and suddenly we just drop the subject.

The window’s open; outside it’s a nice night, not much wind, smell of salt and kelp.

“So, okay,” I tell him, “you’re my oldest friend.”

And somehow for the next ten minutes we get into a big discussion, trying to remember when was the first time we saw each other. A long time back. “You were about six,” Rob says, “sitting on the steps going up to your porch, and you had some kind of a book open on your knees. You were drawing in it. Not that I really paid attention. You were just this little kid.”

That’s not the way I remember it. What I remember is Rob out in front of Susie’s practicing his yo-yo and my dad coming over to watch, with me right beside him. After a minute Daddy asked to try it out; in about four minutes he got pretty good.

 
 
Finally, we stall into a moment of silence during which Rob looks toward my father’s door and says, “Y’know, maybe we better check on him.”

“Check on him? I’ve been
here
. Except for a few minutes, bathroom and stuff.” But meanwhile I’m up and halfway down the hall toward the door, thinking, well,
estupida
, your father’s a target, what’s the matter with you, and Rob likes to be directive, good quality, so let him.