Murder Never Forgets (34 page)

 
 
“It is only five minutes farther to the assay hole,” I tell Mrs. La Salle. “It’s shady there, and we can all can sit down.” I take some leaves out of her hair, “You look like that Botticelli painting.”

“Such a ridiculous idea,” Susie says. “Oil . . . in these beautiful woods. They should leave things alone. Oil never helped anyone.” She is panting hard.

That was pretty much Belle’s attitude when she first learned the story. At first, she seemed to blame me and to think I had caused all these complications. And then she did a complete about-face and decided I was the heroine of the hour who had saved everyone’s life. This was all happening when Rob was at his sickest, so it got very peculiar and tense.

“Come on, hup, two, three, four,” I say ridiculously at Susie. “
Avant
. Forward. Chin up. We’re almost there.”

When we arrive at the oil shaft we establish ourselves on the platform around it. Say what you will, the place still looks like a well, a well out of a Thomas Kinkade painting, one of those village wells with a hat-shaped structure over it. What’s missing is the village and the romantic smoke from the pollution-making green twig fires.

Daddy finally comes bouncing up with a newly discovered artifact: a computer ink cartridge. I don’t know why people have to abandon their junk among the redwood leaves.

Mrs. La Salle lies on her stomach and tries to peer into the assay hole. “So, there is oil down there?”

“There was some. And deep down. It’s not really a gusher.”

Susie pulls one of her scarves up around her. She has surprised me by getting self-conscious about her fat neck. “The goddess is with us and around us and will not like more digging.”

“What’s going to happen?” Mrs. La Salle asks.

Belle has been keeping me briefed on this. “They’re fighting. The Board is divided, and the ecology people have gotten into it. Mrs. Dexter wouldn’t have had an easy time.”

“She would have kept it quiet until later. She would have bought the Manor and waited and handed out some bribes. She was basically smart, but her craziness was growing and growing.”

Mrs. La Salle says she saw the craziness only once. She had knocked on Mrs. Dexter’s door and thought she heard someone tell her to come in. “Anyway, I just opened the door—it was hard for her to get to it with the walker. So I came in, and it took me a minute to understand. I just stood there.”

I tell her, “Yes?”

“She was all dressed up. In costume. I thought of that roadhouse in
The Sopranos.
”

“The go-go bar?”

“Except she was more—well, teenage beauty contest. A low-cut velvet top with spangles. Pleated gold miniskirt.

“No walker. And the miniskirt short enough to show her ass.” She delivers the word
ass
clearly, without undue emphasis. “Louise is an old lady. Older than me. She was bare under the mini, and half bent over with her flesh hanging down in folds.

“She’d been cutting something up. She had a big pair of scissors, and the floor was littered with scraps of paper.

“She turned around and looked at me, and then she went right back to what she was doing . . . cutting something up. Photographs, it looked like. And scattering the pieces. After a couple of minutes I just left.

“And, do you know, the next day when she saw me in the dining room, she didn’t seem embarrassed at all. She smiled and said, ‘So, you walked in on my ritual. Rituals are necessary, don’t you agree?’

“She was just like normal, leaning on her walker.”

I take a minute to think about this story, which I can see very clearly and still not see. I tell Mrs. La Salle that I’m still not used to the idea of the evil Mrs. Dexter.

“A lot of readjustment,” she agrees. “Roads going off over the horizon. What will you and Edward do now? Sooner or later I’ll move on. But maybe you should stay. Remain at the Manor.”

Mrs. La Salle means not just that my father should stay on, but that I should do so, also. Belle has offered me a job, an actual job, with actual pay, as her assistant.

One of the many things I hate about that idea is I would feel like I was here waiting for Aunt Crystal. Going by that beach and checking to see if she has surfaced, all wrapped up in her gold net.

Actually, I hope she never floats back to us, but remains out in the tide, free and uncatalogued, grinding herself into the ocean floor, one with coral, barnacles, lighted jellyfish.

 
 
“It would be
so
wonderful to have Carly working here,” Susie announces to the redwood trees. “Carly can be here, and Rob will work in his hospital, and Rob will be the resource doctor here, and Carly and Rob will get married—because I do think that young people should get married. Marriage is a true commitment and the most romantic condition of all, and it will all be the fulfillment of everybody’s dreams.”

Thank God Susie runs out of steam at this point in order to peer down into the assay hole and say, “Now who would think that was oil? That evil substance. It all looks so sweet.”

I haven’t told Susie and Mrs. La Salle of the latest development about Wayne Lee being a figure in my life lately, although Mrs. La S. has kind of guessed. Maybe Wayne will be an important figure, but I’m not sure.

I don’t want a sensible, feminist lecture from somebody the age of my grandmother, if I still had a grandmother, about thinking through my own needs and evaluating a man as calmly as I would evaluate a new car—it’s Mrs. La Salle who would talk that way. Nor speeches from Susie, sad regretful monologues about the goddess and Robbie’s love for me and Susie’s love for me and oh, Carly, I hate to criticize but how could you even think of somebody else after all you and Rob have meant to each other . . . When you and Rob could be set up so charmingly here . . .

I don’t want to tell Susie that the charmingness of that arrangement is part of what I find depressing.

Wayne is funny and sensible and very athletic. Maybe too athletic; he knocks on my door every morning at six for me to go on a three-mile run. That is, I run, and he runs ahead, saying, “Come on, Carl, you can do it, you know you can. Just pick up your feet, one after the other, forget about the pain. Look at me, this way.”

He has a very good smile and a lot of healthy Susie-type interests except that he likes a caffeine-enhanced fruit drink in the A.M., right after he gets up. He runs again in the evening and does exercises at night. He isn’t the slightest bit dependent on me.

The Habitat man was totally dependent and needy, and that’s what got me into trouble. Because part of me wants to be needed.

Rob needs me some, but he also likes to be the caretaker and to manage things. And Wayne, as far as I can tell . . . well, I haven’t entirely decided. I think maybe Wayne needs admiration, but I’m not sure.

I am still figuring him out. The healthy running is great, like an offshore breeze across your life. Especially when your life has been burdened with stagnant miasmas, to quote some poet or other. But when I confided to Belle about Wayne, she said, “The boy scout stuff is okay for about a week. Then it starts to drag.”

Belle has been around, and a person feels like listening to her.

My most recent opinion is that nothing lasts very long except for my affection for my father. And no jobs or boyfriends or murders or world events will get in the way of that.

But I’m also smart enough to know that my dad won’t last forever.

Lately, he’s taken to staring out his window and quoting scraps of Egyptian poetry at the scenery, or maybe to the mermaid, whom he can see beyond the bushes in the oval. “Don’t feel sadness,” he says. And, “Please love your life and live it now.”

Those seem like pretty good mottoes, and I think I’m adopting them.