Murder Never Forgets (5 page)

We have arrived at my new room, which is entirely different from the surrounding hall; maybe it was reinvented out of a utility cupboard or guest closet; it’s lined mostly in white fiberboard and contains a sturdy little IKEA bed and cardboard dresser and one of those steel pipe arrangements with colored metal hangers dangling from it. A high window, half-open, lets in ocean noise.

Daddy looks troubled; he enters my new room; he bounces on the bed. “They can do better than this,” he announces.

And for a moment, he’s his old academic department-head self.

“You should speak to them, Carla, dear. I think it quite possible that . . .”

Here he stops, distressed. “This is quite a good hotel, isn’t it? Did you get the reservation? I think you did; you usually do, don’t you? And a good hotel. You always get good ones?”

He’s quiet for a minute, long enough for me to decide I don’t like his bent-over posture; then he says, “Daughter, I am worried about memory.”

Oh, Jesus, here it comes
, I think. The Alzheimer’s books all prepare you for the moment when he says, “I’m afraid I’m beginning to forget.” Then, and not before then, you say,
I’m terribly sorry, but we think you have a disease; the doctors are
working on a cure and the outlook is hopeful and so on and et cetera
. Don’t say this before he mentions something specific, some worry about his control of things. Only when he raises the subject himself. How would you like it if you were old and dependent and your young relative suddenly started lecturing you about how incurably forgetful you were going to be?

But the general subject of forgetting is not the one he wants to raise. I start out with “You know, memory is really complicated,” and he intervenes, “It was down there below. It was a gold net.” His Woman in the Net, that’s what he wants to talk about. “For a while I thought I knew her.”

“Something Egyptian,” I suggest. “You have so many Egyptian memories.” Maybe the way to reassure him about this net fantasy is to put it in a pleasant context. “Someone from Egyptian poetry,” I blather on. “Or connected with your Coffin Lid Text.”

The Coffin Lid Text was one of Daddy’s great moments. He found this coffin lid in the anteroom of a “dry” (already explored) tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and while Egyptian coffin lids aren’t usually important, this one was because written on it was a version of the account on the tomb wall, and by comparing the two texts he could deduce the meaning of a whole row of hieroglyphs that had baffled scholars before him.

The coffin lid is in a nearby museum now. It really belongs to the Luxor Museum, but the owner of Egypt Regained, a weird private California museum, wangled or charmed the Luxor Museum into an indefinite loan. Egypt Regained is run by an eccentric millionaire named Egon Rothskellar, and I’m afraid Egon is interested in the life-extension aspects of Egyptian artifacts. But, hey, my father’s eccentric, too.

“Coffin lid? Text?” he asks now. “No, dear, I don’t think so. She wiggled. She wiggled around in the net. And then dead. Dead, and I didn’t . . .” He looks up at me, and there seem to be tears on his cheeks. “And someone fell out of a window here,” he adds.

I don’t like it that his fantasy, his strange, persistent woman-in-the-net obsession has been added onto the lady-out-the-window. That’s just too eerie, I won’t explore it. I grab him by the arm and say, “Listen, let’s go back to your room. You can watch
M*A*S*H
; I’ll turn it on for you.”

Returned to his armchair with his quilt and his bay window and a snack package of his favorite peppermint Jelly Bellies, he’s feeling well enough to lecture me again about how my new room isn’t good enough; he will speak to Management. “They’re quite nice at this hotel.”

I kiss him and go back to my room and survey it some more. It seems all right to me. Sure, it’s a really tiny crabbed space, scraped and minimal, like Orphan Annie living in an piano box over a Manhattan subway grating. So it makes me feel like somebody out of a story.

I do some unpacking, four garments, two get hung on the pipe-hanger arrangement and two go into the cardboard dresser. I unpack Mrs. Dexter’s piece of glass and put it on the dresser in a plastic yogurt top I’ve had in my backpack. I stand back and look at this arrangement and think that the yogurt installation is an art object and the foundation of my new homestead. In my Santa Cruz esthetics course the teacher said the beginning of an individuated life was a personal esthetic; he meant you should do something artistic that was new and different and yours. Well, you can’t get much more personal than a maybe-murderous piece of oyster glass in a yogurt top, can you?

Chapter 3

I’m headed to the hospital to visit Mrs. Dexter.

Most of Green Beach Manor is Victorian and overdone. But the hospital was added later and simply looks like a standard hospital. I am familiar with the breed because of the one we built in Baker’s Landing; it was white and pink and chrome and looked a lot like this one.

The Manor Hospital also smells like our Baker’s Landing structure, a combination of lemon disinfectant and instant noodles-in-a-cup. There is an entrance desk and a lot of fluorescent lights, and then down a hall you can see three rooms with two beds apiece. Mrs. Sisal and Co. aren’t set up for a really big epidemic.

A short, skinny peroxide-haired person in blue whose name tag identifies her as “Hospital-Aide Mona” gushes up to me with the kind of gush you don’t expect in a hospital. “You’re Carla; you were so wonderful,” she emotes. “You were the one who saved her. So great. So quick-thinking. We’re just so, so proud.” She extends a scrawny birdlike be-ringed hand, which she latches on to my wrist to pull me down a pink hall. “So wonderful,” she says, presumably meaning me, not the hall.

Down at the end is a white room where Mrs. Dexter sits propped against pillows, her face scrunched into a vinegary, rubber grinch-mask, her body surrounded by a mountain of magazines, newspapers, and dangerously tilting glasses holding bent straws.

Mrs. Dexter stares for a while, glumly, and finally raises a hand, palm out, Indian fashion, and says, “How.” She winces, she’s hoarse; you can tell that even this one syllable hurts her throat.

Mona continues to hover, “What a shame. I was so upset when I got back from Provo, Utah; I’d been visiting my sister, and when I got back from Provo and heard—such a dreadful accident. But you were so wonderful.” Mrs. Dexter hides behind her sheet while Mona won’t stop. “Oh, that was so terrible. I nearly died when I heard about it. And now there’s this silly, silly rumor—something about glass? And your dear father, they say he’s been complaining?” She turns to me, her eyebrows raised. She has the kind of eyebrows that you paint on afterward.

When I don’t answer, she says, “Well, I’m really upset about this, but I’m really glad I was in Provo.”

She’s hitting that button about being in Provo pretty hard. She has her mouth open to babble some more, but I level a thousand-watt scowl and she backs away saying, “Oh, well. Oh, yes.” That scowl is the one I think of as my Aunt Crystal look. Aunt C. was very good at squelching people.

“Pretty weird,” I tell Mrs. Dexter, since that’s what I think she wants someone to say, sort of like supplying subtitles for a foreign film. She doesn’t react much. This experience has damped her down.

I sit on the bed and remark, “Well.” We stare at each other. “I guess you’re better than you were last night,” I venture.

She contorts her face. Of course it’s a dumb remark, but how do you make small talk with someone who can’t even say “uh-huh” without hurting? That, however, isn’t what she’s contorting about. She lifts her hand again in the Indian or traffic-stopping gesture, swallows, moves her head, and whispers, “Thank you. For saving. My life.”

I lean over and hug her, which I guess she hates; she makes her body uncooperatively stiff. But, I’m sorry, Mrs. Dexter, a person has to do something and “No problem,” or “You’re welcome,” is not a good response.

I like older people, I might interject here, especially older women. That was part of my success at Habitat—I got along with the seniors. Probably it’s because I’m looking for a mother. What a bore. I hate dragging all that ancient history around all the time.

When I emerge from the hug, I say, chaotically and too fast because I’m embarrassed, “I thought about you last night. About you and those questions you had. How you had suspicions and talked about them and were trying to listen in and maybe investigate. And then this awful thing happened to you.” I stop and take a good look at Mrs. Dexter.

She’s making pained, everything-hurts faces and giving me the palm-out gesture. She mouths, carefully, lips very controlled, “Accident.”

“Accident?” I repeat, not sure I’ve read the lips right. “Oh, but, hey. I mean . . .”

I’m about to go into an explanation of
That was a real piece of glass: I’ve got the little bit in my room now . . .
But she preempts me again, shakes her head vigorously, shapes the lips. “Accident. I was. Wrong.”

It’s a funny thing. Up until now I’ve felt tentative; yes, it is strange, suspicious even, that Mrs. Dexter should have noticed the accidents in the Manor and talked about how she was listening and spying and then should have had an accident herself. I wasn’t ready to say that all this necessarily added up, just that it gave me an
aware
feeling. Until now, when Mrs. Dexter protests, “Accident. Accident,” and I don’t believe her. Something clicks; I tell myself that there’s too much accident and denial around here, it adds up, damn right it does. That piece of glass is a real piece of glass. Mrs. Dexter has to have known that it was alien and sharp and didn’t belong in her oyster. And now she’s acting scared and paranoid. I don’t like this set of facts.

She and I regard each other. I debate arguing and decide against it. In the first place, she has an abraded throat and can’t argue back, and, second and more important, she’s feeling rebellious and frightened. She doesn’t want to be hassled.

 
 
I’m debating the various harmless nonthreatening subjects I can raise now: the weather (stable and occasionally sunny), the news of the world (stable, with war, disease, poverty, corruption), local news (my new job at the Manor could figure here—but I have a feeling Mrs. Dexter would be horrified). Then the day is saved by Mona, who bursts in announcing, joyfully and with hand-twitches, that “The doctor is here; so concerned, so interested. Such a caring doctor.”

I’m pleased. I really want to meet this Dr. Kittredge, who appears in the literature as “. . . our eminent resident physician, one of the three Resident Directors of the Manor.” As a resident director and as the Manor doctor, Dr. Kittredge will certainly have a say on whether my father continues living in Victorian luxury or gets exiled to Hope House, which I imagine as more pink formica. And my opinion on the rights and wrongs of this has gotten inexorable. The man has paid high for Victorian kitsch; he should have it. I turn to meet the doctor.

 
 
It’s funny how some names make you decide in advance what a person will be like. Dr. Kittredge, I knew this when I saw his name in the Manor literature, would be older, trim, neat, a version of my father except for a spade-shaped beard.

But the doctor who blusters through the door is handsome, bulky, and tousled-looking. Somewhere in his forties and with no beard of any kind. “Well, now,” he pushes past me without acknowledgment and heads for Mrs. Dexter, “So here you are. Louise, my old darlin’, what a scare you’ve been givin’ us. You’re better this morning, Mona says? Thanks be to God. Now, let’s see, can you open wide for me? There we go, old sweet.”

This doctor takes up a lot of room. And he has an Irish accent. I’m not sure how I feel about that combination. I want to lecture him about his treatment of Mrs. Dexter, “For God’s sake, quit calling her by her first name; give her some respect; she’s old enough to be your grandmother.”

“Hello,” I announce loudly to his back, “I am Carla Day.”

“I know all about you.” He’s still bent over Mrs. Dexter’s open mouth. “You’re the girl who does the Heimlich maneuver.”

Well, great, I decide. Now I’m
the girl who
. Here’s a man with no manners and no p.c. on top of that. Living in Berkeley gives you extra radar for negative p.c.

But the next minute he turns around and announces in a carrying baritone, “This is a tremendously brave lady,” and holds Mrs. Dexter’s hand up in that successful boxer’s gesture. He cocks his head and looks so silly and hopeful that I get a different set of messages, straight out of an old Bing Crosby movie. While the voice keeps on announcing he’s Irish. Or at least part Irish. Enough to lengthen the vowels and put a
J
in
tremenJously
. Irish voices do something basic to my sentiment glands; my Habitat boyfriend once put it that the Irish can make you nostalgic for something you never had. That boyfriend was perceptive and bright; his personality problem lay in his being also a neurotic mess.