Philly Stakes (20 page)

She sighed and mimed exaggeratedly wide-eyed interest. “Perhaps the medical director’s memory will be sharper. Perhaps he’ll remember the combination of Jacob, polio and cane. Perhaps you could request a computer search. Perhaps.”

“The other thing is, he’s been missing for five days. Couldn’t you check it that way?”

“This is the long lost Jacob?”

“Five days can seem pretty long when every breath could be your—he was here, in this building last Thursday. Walked out on his own and never came back. I need his name.”

“If he’s not in hospitalization, then he is an autonomous human being who has no reason to inform us of his whereabouts. And, may I remind you that half or more of our residents are away for the holidays, with family or on vacation. This is a retirement community, not a prison. Five thousand people live here. But hey—” she shoved the phone book toward me—“be my guest. Turn off the lights at 10:00 P.M. and give your grandma my regards.”

I left the directory and its surly guardian. I’ll find you, Jacob, I muttered all the way back to my car. Rest assured.

I may have convinced the corpse, but I had real trouble convincing myself.

Twelve

MACKENZIE NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT THE OLD MAN. THIS WAS NOT SOME crackedbrain theory of mine. This was not the girl-detective antics he made fun of. The city’s finest could gain access to Silverwood’s business office.

“Hungry?” I asked Laura as I slid in behind the wheel.

She shook her head. “Did you find out who he is?”

“Find who?” Was it possible my sleuthing was less than subtle?

“The man with the cane. The one Mrs. Levitt told you about. You wanted to know because of the man in the toolshed, didn’t you? Who was he, then?”

“I don’t know. Do you, Laura?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t remember ever seeing him before?” More side-to-sides.

“But your mother knew him, didn’t she?”

The child’s eyes were enormous and solemn in her small face. She said nothing, just tightened her jaw. “How would I know?”

“I’m only asking. Nobody else can until she’s feeling better. But wasn’t it when the police called this morning that she really lost control?”

“She’s been crying for two days.”

It wasn’t that Alice Clausen lacked sufficient cause for tears, it was only their timing that troubled me. “What about?”

“Everything.”

Laura looked out her window, and I became distracted, reading signs and negotiating traffic. The streets of the Greater Northeast were clogged with people returning disappointing gifts or seeking bargains, and in any case, I was not overly familiar with this part of the city. In my family it was exotic, unmarked territory known as “The Coulda-been.” Whenever, as children, we approached it, Daddy’s Dirge began. “This used to be farmland,” my father said and said again as that section of the city grew explosively. “Country. I could have bought it for nothing. For a few dollars an acre, and I didn’t. Who thought people would want to be way out here? I coulda been rich. We all coulda been rich.”

It never mattered when my mother answered, accurately, that he couldn’t have bought land back then because he hadn’t had the few extra dollars to buy even an acre. We could have been rich and weren’t. When I looked out at the condominium complexes and bustling businesses around me, I remembered my father’s farmlands and didn’t see anything familiar.

I finally reached the expressway and became bogged in a new jam, this one caused by traffic, potholes, and repair work designed to alleviate them both.

“I lied,” Laura said in a voice so tiny one could easily have missed it in the rush of tires and brakes over blacktop.

I let her set her own pace. Traffic bucked and crept and stalled even though we were nowhere near commuter hours. I tried to catch her eye, but her profile was set and she was looking at her penny loafers once again. The car, windows up and heater fighting the ice age, filled with silence and overheated secrets.

Laura took a deep breath. She kept her face forward. “She was there,” she said. “That night, she was downstairs.” She swallowed hard. “She came out of the kitchen. She had a glass—she was getting ice water, that’s all.” She began to tremble. “But she didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sure she didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sure all her crying has nothing to do with…anything wrong.”

I put my hand on hers. “Nobody’s saying it does. What are you so afraid of?”

She shook her head and sighed and we sank into silence again.

The traffic loosened, creeping forward and then moving in something like a normal flow. “What is it?” I felt forced to say.

“Why did that old man die? He didn’t look sick at the party. Why was he still there? It must have happened after everybody else left, mustn’t it? Why didn’t anybody call an ambulance instead of putting him…where you found him?”

“Those are good questions.”

“Could somebody…is it true somebody could make you so upset you’d have a stroke or a heart attack? Is that really possible?”

“What makes you ask?”

“I heard noises. Angry noises while I was upstairs. Low voices. Men quarreling. I thought later it was a dream, but Peter heard them, too. Maybe I shouldn’t say any of this, but he’s away and his mother blames me for everything and he hasn’t even called. He could have called once she wasn’t around, couldn’t he?”

“Maybe not. We don’t know.” I sifted through her words, but I was really bothered by what she hadn’t said. Something logical was missing. “If you heard a quarrel, and Peter heard it, too,” I finally said, “why didn’t you tell the police?”

“Because at the police station we were talking about my father, about what I did. That’s different. I didn’t know there was a man in the toolshed then. Neither did Peter. We never mentioned it because I pretty much forgot it, and I guess he did, too.”

I didn’t buy it. “But didn’t the noise wake you? Didn’t you say anything to each other about it? Wonder what to do, or just be annoyed? Or frightened? It’s hard to understand how you’d forget something like that in the light of what else happened that same night.”

She shrugged.

“Why didn’t it have more impact? Did you really just go back to sleep—then wake up, later, downstairs?”

She looked at me blankly, all knowledge and emotion erased from her eyes. I had hit something—but what? I kept imagining the two high-school students in the dark, upstairs, tense to begin with, fearful of a dramatic, wrenching confrontation later on, startled by a loud quarrel from below. And then remaining silent about it. Were they so hell-bent on confessing to Clausen’s murder that they dismissed evidence that might point elsewhere? It didn’t make any sense, and I said so. Laura didn’t contradict me. Nor did she deign to respond.

It took at least two more expressway tie-ups before I had it. Something had to be wrong upstairs, too. Something that frightened Laura more than the quarrel downstairs. And what could it be except that her protector and sole ally was in jeopardy, too? “Peter wasn’t in your room when you heard the men quarreling, was he?” I asked.

Her eyes widened and fixed on me before they fled to the safety of those scuffed loafers.

“Where was he?”

“I never said he wasn’t in my—”

“Come on, Laura, I’m on your side. Where was he?”

“In the bathroom. Down the hall. Near the stairwell.”

“You’re afraid his was one of the voices.”

“I knew you’d think that, but you’re wrong. Even if he was downstairs—and he wasn’t—he couldn’t have done anything. He didn’t even know that old man and he wouldn’t hurt anybody, anyway. But how could I tell that to the police? They’d jump to the wrong conclusion like you did. Because his hair is funny and he looks tough and three years ago he got into trouble.”

“He says he murdered your father, Laura.”

“He’s a good person. Clear all the way through, do you know what I mean? There’s nothing secret or messed up inside him. But he remembers how it was to be that way, and he’s really kind. No matter what he says, no matter what anybody believes, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t hurt somebody.”

We inched forward a few car lengths, two miles an hour. “All the same,” I said in a flat voice, “you’re worried that maybe, maybe something happened and he did?”

“He couldn’t! But if he did, it was because of me. I’m the guilty one. He was so angry. So angry! I told him about—I told him what you know so that he’d stay in my room. I never told anybody else, never, but I had to tell him, and he was so angry. He didn’t sleep at all. Couldn’t.”

What memories it must have evoked for a boy whose father had been a wife beater. I shook my head, unwilling to fully consider what it might mean.

“He didn’t do it,” Laura said. “He’s a good person.”

“I know that. And so are you.”

She shook her head. I thought her eyes were moist, but it might have been the light. “Not like Peter,” she said. “Not clear all the way through. Not very good. You don’t know me.”

Damn that father and mother for what they had done. We’d have to talk about therapy soon. Maybe tonight, when things were calm. I wanted to rush her directly into the arms of somebody supportive and wise. I wanted to have a parade, everybody carrying banners that shouted “Laura Is a Good Human Being” in crimson script.

“Because,” she said, sounding hypnotized, “I remember. I remember how sick seeing him be Santa made me. Santa’s about the best thing a kid has and…I remembered pushing the Christmas tree onto him. Not feeling sad. I’m not making it up. It flamed, and I didn’t feel anything. Not sad. It was like dreaming. Like not being responsible. It was something my hands did for me. Something that had to happen sooner or later. He started to burn—the beard did—right away.”

“Did you tell this to the police?”

“I don’t remember what I said.”

“What did your father say when he saw you push the tree, or when the tree crashed onto him?”

“He didn’t say anything. He was napping.”

“Napping?”

“On the sofa. Resting.” She shuddered. “Resting up. Seeing him that way, dressed like Santa, knowing, it made me…”

“Did you tell that to the police?”

“I can still feel the pine needles in my hand. Soft and sharp, all at once.”

“Laura, do the police know your father was asleep?”

She looked confused. “I don’t know. They asked me what I did, over and over, not so much what he was doing, I think, and I can’t remember a whole lot. Except grabbing at the tree and pushing it. The rest…” she squinted, looked confused and unhappy and shook her head. “So many things I don’t know if I really saw.”

“Did he wake up? Struggle?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t watching. My nightgown caught fire, and my mother came in from the kitchen and screamed and threw her glass of water on me—”

We were bogged down on an expressway, but I felt as if I were on a roller coaster.

“Had you seen her before then?”

“No.”

“Would you have seen her coming down the stairs? Or in the hall?”

“Maybe.” She slumped as far down onto her spine as the safety belt allowed. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong,” she said.

Maybe Alice had been in the kitchen for a long time. Maybe she had, indeed, killed her husband before Laura, for whatever reason, out of whichever dream, came downstairs.

Because I was sure the approach of Alice had something to do with the hiding of the old man. I still envisioned Alice at the top of the staircase, calling down, or staggering down and frightening Clausen because she could identify the old man.

“Why did Peter have to leave town?” It was a soft and timid wail.

“Did he convince you to lie?”

She looked like a frightened forest creature. “I didn’t lie. I really didn’t remember.” I sighed and patted her hand. “It’s better to remember, if you can. Better to deal with truth. There’ve been enough lies and secrets, don’t you think?”

It was not a question that needed an answer, so we sat in silence. Again and again, I went back and tried to arrange the players for that night.

Time to think the unthinkable—that someone I felt sorry for or liked a great deal might all the same have murdered Alexander Clausen. Because of course, if he was “asleep” when Laura found him, then someone—Alice? or Peter?—had already killed him. What if nobody was covering for anybody, if nobody was lying and all the confessions were true? What if, one by one, everyone had added to his destruction?

“I can’t remember enough,” Laura said. “It makes my head hurt, makes me feel as if I’m going crazy, these almost-memories.”

We rode along, both lost in confused speculation. I was too distracted to become infuriated with the traffic, barely saw it in fact. I kept trying to focus the swirl of amorphous shapes and shadows I had accumulated. The quarrel. The man with the cane. Minna’s story. The murder of one Etienne. Minna’s reaction to Laura’s last name. My mother’s memories of something nasty between Minna and Alexander Clausen. Alice Clausen’s being downstairs that night. Peter’s being out of the bedroom. The quarrel downstairs. Alexander Clausen “resting” by the time Laura pushed the tree over onto him. These could not be random events, but they were like dust motes now, jumping, floating, each piece disconnected from the whole.

“It makes me feel crazy,” Laura said again.

“Me, too.” Ah yes, me, too.

* * *

“There. Straight from the darkroom to you.” Sasha had entered my home fourteen minutes after Laura and I did. Now, while Laura established residency, unpacking in the room on the third floor, Sasha spread black-and-white prints over the coffee table. “Not even dry yet—be careful.” She leaned back in the chair. “I’ve been out of circulation. Just looked at my accumulated newspapers and realized what had happened.” She shook her head, black gypsy hair swirling, silver-and-jet earrings jingling.

“Atlantic City is sixty miles away, Sasha. Same native tongue, same newspapers for sale. It was the lead story.”

“Not in the bridal suite, honey.” I looked stunned, and she laughed. “No. I’m not ready for a third husband, but the hoteliers don’t check for a marriage license, and it’s a nifty room.” She put three more pictures out and cocked her head, studying them. “And what’s all this life-and-death message business about? Are you playing girl detective again?” Sasha rubbed her palm on the suede of the chair. “Thought you’d sworn off.”