Murder Never Forgets (27 page)

Daddy likes alleys. In Egypt it was always the back roads that attracted him.

But there’s no white-haired gentleman here, nobody sitting on the steps of the cottages.

Nothing except a handsome, uneven field of wavering silver-green April grass with, maybe, poppies. Staring at it, I remember what that silver-green is called: California ryegrass. Blue mountains in the distance. I stare some more and try to feel with the back of my neck if I’m being followed.

That’s always possible. Yes, I’m paranoid these days.

 
In the middle distance of the meadow is the oil derrick, a tipsy one, and closer in is the ryegrass, silver-and-green, with orange for the poppies. And then comes a dark splotch that could be nothing; grass comes in different types and colors, maybe it’s a patch of special growth with one of those other grass-names like Blue Fescue. But maybe something else. A place where somebody has mashed everything down by sitting or lying, and that person is still there stretched out or bent down below the grass heads.

If that splotch is made by my father, huddled up, he’s going to be feeling peculiar. Deserted, puzzled, lost.

I start out across the field. One of the Prayers in
The Book of the Dead
is about crossing a field of high metal wheat; that’s one of the dangers the poor departed
ka
has to go through.

In another section, the wandering
ka
gets a few minutes’ respite; it can lie down and get comfort for the rest of its journey.

This meadow has been baked by the afternoon sun; the rye seeds bob invitingly.

It takes me five minutes of wading; the stems are thigh-high and pull at my jeans. I am sort of seeing something ahead of me that looks like an old gentleman camped among the weeds. And sort of not. I’m thinking that I hope he’s here and is all right while part of me hopes he isn’t. That some miracle made him feel enterprising enough to go back to the bus station and climb on a bus (even without money, maybe somehow he’d find a way).

But nearer that dark place in the field I decide yes, okay, something is indeed there. The grass has been mashed down; around the edges it makes a wavering high wall.

And, yes, I reach the depressed place in the field and look down, and there he is. I think,
Oh you poor darling.
He’s curled on his side, buried in the tall stems, arms bent up beside his head. He’s in the fetal position again. I drop on my knees beside him.

“Father,” I say. No answer. I say, “It’s all right, dear, really it is, it’s Carla here.” No answer. I take one of his hands, which is clenched into a tight little fist, and undo it, and chafe it the way you would for cold or exposure. Although it’s warm in here, he’s been lying in partial sun. The hand finally relaxes some, so I pat it smooth and start on the other one.

Meanwhile saying over and over, “It’s all right.” Which doesn’t seem to be working.

I sit, simply holding and stroking. Watching for watchers. Saying an Egyptian prayer. Or a Susie prayer. The shadows across the field get longer. It’s beginning to get cold.

“Father.” A slight squeeze from his hand, but no answer.

It’s an accident that I start the humming. I’m not really aware that I’m doing it, but I hear myself making a drone to accompany the hand-chafing; it’s a tune that he likes: “Get up, Darling Corey.”

A bluegrass tune: “The revenue-officers are coming/ Gonna tear your still-house down.” My dad is a real Renaissance man; back in his glory days he had lots of interests, and folk music was a sweet one of those. He could even plunk a few notes on a banjo.

There’s a stirring at my feet. Grass squeaks and clicks. He moves an arm. “Why, Daughter . . .”

See. Like I was thinking. Sweet.

“Well,” I say, “hello.”

He rolls over and squints. The setting sun shines right across his nose. “I must have lain down for a little nap.”

“I guess you did.”

“I think I was scared. Do you think so?”

“Maybe.”

He sits up and bends over, resting his forehead on his cupped hands. “I do not enjoy being scared.”

“Me, neither, Daddy.”

“If I could figure out why . . .”

I tell him don’t worry. I put my arm around him. “Do you want to stand up? Okay, let’s try it.” When he’s on his feet, a little unsteady and complaining that the light dazzles him, I say, “Listen, there’s a nice hotel back there, let’s go in and get a room. Maybe they have the ones with the little refrigerators, and maybe we can get a Coke . . .”

“A cup of tea,” he interjects.

“Right.” I gesture toward the back of the Best Western. “Over there. Can you walk okay? All right, honey, a cup of tea . . . lean on me then, let’s go.”

We set off diagonally across the meadow, pushing through the grass.

I don’t think anybody else is in sight down at the end of Main Street.

 
 
The Best Western scarlet neon sign is on already and is blinking.

My father is shaky but can still be interested in this sign. “I wonder how they keep it going? Some kind of clockwork? Hydraulic power?” His attention is all on the sign; he doesn’t seem to understand the hotel.

Inside the lobby he concentrates on the clerk, a bored male in a wide-lapeled jacket with brass buttons, who pays no attention to us until my father comments on his cuff links. “Nice. Jade?” The guy warms up immediately, swipes my credit card, tells him, “Yeah. Right. Oriental jade, the good kind,” and blesses us upstairs, “Real good room. Terrace room.”

And upstairs I have the chance to see that Best Western rooms have two beds, two pictures of seacoast, one television, a cubbyhole with a hot pot, and outside of all this a fenced porch, which I guess is what the clerk meant when he said “terrace.” I get my father out of his jacket and bundled onto the bed, against a stack of pillows. He’s shaking slightly. I, when I look at my hand, am also shaking slightly. But he’s still himself. He says, “I was upset out there. But you came.” I hand him the TV remote, and he says, “You do usually. Come when I need you.” After which he gives me his Elvenfolk smile and settles in to watch a TV domestic dispute, where the guy says she nags, and she says he promised to buy her a Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue perfume set. “Dear, dear,” my father says to them, chidingly.

 
 
My cell phone rings.

Should I answer it? Of course I shouldn’t. I do.

It’s Rob, who is as close to hysterical as Rob can get. “Carly? Jesus. Have you any idea what’s been going on here? . . .”

Rob is at the Manor. I tell him about us. He’s horrified to hear how I discovered Mrs. Sisal, keeps interrupting with exclamations of “Carly, darling. Oh, Jesus.” But he’s not exactly surprised. He remembered that Sisal wanted to see me this morning. He says there are cops ten-deep around the Manor. Nobody connects me with anything yet. Their world is much too hectic; they’re not thinking about me.

“Stay put, honey; I’ll be right there. No, don’t try to tell me. I’m coming, don’t argue, this is nonnegotiable. I’ll be there in forty minutes; the Best Western in Conestoga. Is there anything you need? Hang in, chin up, oh my God. Good-bye.”

I don’t try to talk Robbie out of it. For once I’m pleased with his take-charge attitude.

Daddy has fallen asleep. His head is sideways on the pillow, mouth a tiny bit open, hair mussy and dandelion-fuzz-like across his forehead, a blade of grass in it from his meadow stay. He looks vulnerable and sweet. And surprisingly young.

I settle down to fumble through the Best Western’s guide to Del Oro County.

My father is still asleep when Rob arrives. We do a hasty kiss at the door and a whispered discussion that quickly escalates into almost normal volume because Daddy shows no signs of waking up. “He’s all right; he’s all right?” Rob keeps insisting/asking.

“It was bad at first,” I say. “He wouldn’t move, couldn’t talk. Like last night.”

“Catatonic,” Rob looks murderous.

“But then he woke up and talked some. I think he’s okay.” Rob surveys the rag-doll shape of Edward, slumped against the pillows. He turns and puts both hands on my shoulders. “And you, baby?”

I’m proud of Rob. He’s holding himself in, trying not to be too big-brother patronizing. Of course he shouldn’t call me “baby,” but old habits die hard.

“Not great.” My voice goes down into my gut at this point, and Rob says, “Okay, okay,” and massages my shoulders. He gives me a muffled hug. “Come on, let’s sit here,” and he positions some furniture to face the window.

I say, “Tea.” I’ve been too long at the Manor. If you’re going to sit and talk and cry and look at a view, you need tea. I establish myself in the alcove.

“Shit,” Rob pushes his tea bag around.

I say. “Yeah.”

I fish up and squeeze my tea bag and watch myself drop it carefully onto the Best Western’s wall-to-wall. The carpet is one of those indestructible fiber-constructs that invites this kind of treatment, and I’m not feeling like a good member of society. “I guess we’re in real danger, huh?”

“Sure.”

After a minute I say, “Mrs. Sisal looked as if she had been violently killed.”

Rob doesn’t answer this, so I go on, “Mona didn’t. Mona could have been asleep. But Mrs. Sisal looked as if her life had been stopped short in anger and upheaval and retribution. All that biblical stuff.”

We’re silent for a while, with Rob blowing his breath out and making a noise like “Who-ee.”

I pick my tea bag up off the floor and mash it from hand to hand for a while. “You ever think that everything, flowers and grass and sunsets, the whole gorgeous panoply of it all, is pretty damn pointless?”

“No. Cut it out. And you don’t, either. What you mean is—”

I interrupt, “Okay, I know what I mean. I want all this that we’re in now to stop. I want to be the one that stops it. I want to grab Dr. Kittredge by a tender spot. Get back at him. Do something major. This trailing around and waiting and lurking . . .”

Rob just says, “Yeah,” but something in the way he says it works, and I start shutting up. “You don’t really know it’s Kittredge,” Rob says.

“I do,” I come back. I talk for a while about why I think so.

There is a fairly long silence. I slurp cooling tea and can hear Rob doing likewise. “Carly,” he says finally.

“Uh-huh?”

“It’s funny what bad luck and life’s trials and all that will do.”

I hold out on saying “Yep.” I think I can feel where this is going. Not someplace I want to go right now.

“Well, I think you and I have been getting closer.”

I don’t respond.

“I feel as if we need each other. I mean . . .” Here Rob, usually so ebullient, able to grab any situation by its tail, has to fumble around. “I need you, and you need me,” he elaborates not very sparklingly. “I mean, we really
are
a couple. We were before, and we’ve been getting that way more and more again. I mean . . .”

I’ve lapsed into complete nonmovement, the lady congealed into a statue, so he goes, “Carly?”

Oh, what the bloody hell, I tell myself, a phrase borrowed from some British movie. Why does everything have to get so complicated?

Confess it, Carla. You wanted him to say that. Or something like it. But without any consequences, like a cartoon-strip comment floated in the air above his head. Not causing any repercussions in the real world, not needing an answer.

Now I feel as if I’ve swallowed a large, round intractable object. A tortoise, maybe, complete with claws.

What I say out loud, sort of desperately, is “Hey, Rob, you’re my
brother
!” Boy what a cop-out, but still fair, because he’s used it on me.

He doesn’t answer at all. His shoulders slump. I want to comfort him, and I absolutely want not to do that, and I want to be free of this mess and the other ones I’m neck-deep in. And someplace at the meanest cockroach level of my personality, I’m pleased that Arlette now seems to be out in the cold without her mittens.

After a very long wait I tell Rob that we should put this on the back burner. Then, slowly, I watch him get some of the starch back into his shoulders. After all, he’s a truly resilient type.

What he finally says is that we should send downstairs for some steak dinners, which seems a perfectly all-right idea.

 
 
“I know something,” I say. “Know it for certain, even if it’s not provable. That token Daddy has, the one he keeps talking about, is from Aunt Crystal.”

Rob agrees. “Yeah, I think so.”

“She gave it to him just before
it
happened; maybe in his room or maybe on her way down to the beach, she handed it to him and told him it was important. It was her last chance, she had to get through to him.” I wait a minute and add, “Maybe it’s what she had discovered, some special knowledge that she had and they wanted.”

“Sounds good.” Rob doesn’t seem quite as convinced this time.

“Hey,” he diverts, “they do pretty good steak here.”

I agree; the steak is fine. The paper plates aren’t the world’s most elegant, and these plastic knives . . . the sawing motion has to be terrific for the upper arms.

We’re sitting at the little round table that Best Western provides. The table rocks when you saw steak with a plastic knife.

Rob is cheerful, or at least moderately so. He doesn’t seem to need to brood about our anti-romantic conversation.

 
 
My father is starting to wake up. There’s a flurry over at the bed; he lifts his head, subsides, then tries it again, peers out, baby bird in its nest, covers up under his chin. “Why, hello, my dear, what a pleasant place you have found. What is the name of that object there?” He’s pointing at the round fire alarm unit in the ceiling over his head. “Sometimes when I sleep I dream that I am under a date palm. It is warm; it would be warm under there, wouldn’t it? And I am refulgently happy. I always liked that word.” He shifts himself more upright and spots Rob, gives him a nice, welcoming smile. “Hello, there. I dreamed you might be here; that was part of what I dreamed.” He’s up on one elbow now, feeling around with his feet.