Erased From Memory (22 page)

Rita wrote a paper on the ankh-sandal theory, which I read when I went through her computer files. She thought the ankh was originally based on a sandal-strap design. A sandal is basic and close to the earth, but I don’t really buy the idea that the sandal strap is the model. For one thing, sandals weren’t that universal in ancient Egypt. Most people just went barefoot. Sandals were restricted to the upper classes, and the ancient Egyptians were too practical to think that eternal life belonged to the rich alone.

“How very nice,” my father says, “of someone to imprint an ankh on this railroad car. It shows up well, doesn’t it? And some of the other designs, which appear at first to be mostly writing, well, when you stare at them long enough, you can see that they also contain ankhs.

“It seems very fitting to have the ankh on a railroad car.

“The railroad gives one a wonderful feeling of freedom and escape, don’t you agree? And the ankh—eternal life—what is more emblematic of escape?

“The ankh is so important, daughter. But of course, it must be approached cautiously, like any universal symbol.

“I told that friend of mine. But he didn’t listen. Not much. Not usually. Not very often. I am so very sorry.”

“Daddy,” I say, “are you talking about Mr. Broussard?”

“Who? What are you saying, dear?”

“Mr. Broussard, the trustee. He died with the ankh in his mouth.”

“Ah.”

“You told him something?”

“Ah.”

“You told him he couldn’t do something?”

“Many people talk to many people, dear.”

“But you did talk to him.”

“Talk to him, dear? Why, of course I talked to him.
A strange bird who bred in the Delta marsh / Having made its nest beside the people / what-will-be being hidden according as one says
. . .”

My father is quoting poetry now and that usually means he’s gone off into a world of his own, one that I can’t get him back from for ordinary conversation. When I ask what he told Mr. Broussard, he says he is tired and would like to go back to his hotel.

And when I mention the Manor, he says “What-will-be is hidden. But the freedom is there. The freedom to escape is there.

“O, freedom,” he says, surprising me. That has got to be a refrain from a song.

Chapter 17

The next morning I’m rehearsing arguments to get Daddy back to the Manor.
I need you. Belle is counting on you. You can help me with check-in at night. Mrs. La Salle will be visiting; she’ll be heartbroken if
. . .

Et cetera, et cetera.

I’m still rehashing this when a low-voiced commotion outside gets me to the door. It’s Rob. Oh, great. Rob, and also my dad. Rob, I do not need you right now.

Rob is holding my father by the arm. He looks at me defensively. “I came to see him. Ed is a good friend. Of long standing. Carla, I have every right to visit my good friend.” He pushes his jaw forward.

Daddy smiles. He doesn’t look defensive, but he looks peculiar. His hands and part of his suit and face are dusted with bright blue powder. He is extending what appears to be a pizza box. That, also, has blue powder on it.

“Carla,” he says in a tone of discovery. “There you are. We couldn’t find you.”

His pizza box rattles.

“Someone has given me some attractive artifacts.”

He marches into the room and plops the container down on my bed. He lifts the cover, emitting a spray of blue. The box does appear to have held pizza in its previous incarnation.

Inside some little doodads are kicking around. I bend over and stare and finally identify these. A string of Egyptian beads, a carved fish, a carved ibis, a smaller unidentifiable bird (very blocky), and a representation of a seated figure, probably a monkey or baboon, chopped out of some kind of vivid blue stone. The stone has started to deteriorate and that’s what is making the blue dust storm. The clay beads have picked it up. The bead string ends in a clay cat; he is now an indigo cat.

“Your father needs more supervision,” Rob says. “You should be watching him.”

I’m struck with the awful thought that these are the items missing from the museum collection. Once again, here’s my dad in the middle. Being set up. I indulge in an imaginary plot where he’s accused of theft; the sheriff arrests him and he’s off to Innocente, this time with no reprieve.

Daddy punctures this scenario by saying, “I wonder. I do not think I understand. Because, you know, I have looked at these objects. Carefully. And I do not think they are really ancient Egyptian. Except possibly some of the beads. It’s hard to tell with beads. Reproductions have their place, of course, but these aren’t even very good ones. I wonder what someone was trying to say?”

He turns over the cat pendant in a gingerly fashion. “This cat, now, might be a real Egyptian artifact. Of course he’s very small. He is hard to see because he is covered with the blue dust.

“And, well, I find it hard to believe.” He looks at his finger and thumb, which are now bright blue.

“You see,” Rob says. “He needs supervision. That”—Rob seems to be pointing at the cat, but apparently it’s the blue dust he’s targeting—“that substance, Carla, is poison. This is serious.”

My father speaks here. “Carla, I really think that this baboon, which is very badly carved, by the way—I really think . . . Well, there was a case where a Roman courtier . . . no, it was a papal emissary . . . there was a case, a famous case of poisoning that involved something. Something sent in a letter. This substance. Which is so beautiful. A striking and emphatic blue. But very bad for carving. And so prone to disintegration.” He wiggles his thumb and forefinger together and stares at them.

“I do not understand,” he says. “The figure seems to be carved from a lump of copper sulfate. That is a very strong poison. Already, from touching these things my fingers have started to hurt . . .

“There was a case once, sometime,” he finishes solemnly, looking down into the pizza box and then up at me.

Rob, who has been jeeping around beside him, gets into action. “Ed, we must wash your hands, very carefully; come along now; careful, don’t touch anything else . . .” After that I hear his voice from my bathroom above the running water, “Did you touch your eyes? Your mouth? Did you lean over the box and inhale?”

“In
hale
?” My father’s little voice makes this sound like a questionable activity.

“Did you breathe in?”

“Of course I breathed in.”

Rob turns off the water. His voice rises. “Did you breathe in hard?”

“Yes, I did. That’s what you do when you’re surprised. I was surprised.”

Now Rob’s voice sounds clipped. “Ed, did you touch your hands to your mouth?”

“Yes.”

“You did?”

“Yes.” By this time I am in the bathroom, staring at my father. He looks—I think I’m interpreting his expression accurately—pleased with himself. “I touched the baboon to my mouth. It is, you know, associated with Thoth, the scribe. But I didn’t taste it. Even though that’s what it said to do. It said, ‘O, taste, O, see!’ But I didn’t taste it. I started to, and then I didn’t.”

Rob says, “Damn.”

I ask, “
What
said, ‘O, taste’?” No one answers me.

“Of course I knew it was poison,” Daddy says. “And poison shouldn’t count if it is knowledge or understanding. Because those are paramount. I understood that.

“But still I decided not to. I just touched it to my lips, lightly. I felt that should do.”

Rob says to me, “We’re going to the hospital. Get your billfold, or whatever. Goddamn it, Carly, what the hell; you’re supposed to be
watching
him.”

I don’t waste any time protesting the unfairness of this. I find my billfold. I go down the hall and locate one of Daddy’s tweed jackets. And I’m the one who remembers to bring the pizza box along, wrapped in a plastic bag so as not to get more blue on anything.

In the car I’m also the person who thinks to ask again about the message, “O, taste.”

“Oh, that,” says my father. He sounds pleased. “It was on one of those strips. The kind you get in a cookie?

“Printed,” he adds.

A printed something like a Chinese cookie fortune. “Let me have it, dear.”

He sounds amazed. “Why, I threw it away. It was completely blue. No use to anyone. I could read it that one time, but after that it was no use; it was too blue.

“I threw it down the toilet,” he adds, squelching any ideas I have about reclaiming the slip and maybe learning something.

Rob says, “Shit,” but under his breath. He smashes some numbers into his cell phone and talks for a while to someone named Tallulah. “She’s there; she’s waiting,” he says as he hangs up. “It may not be too bad.”

 
 
North Coast Hospital is on the outskirts of the town of Conestoga, if you can talk about outskirts for a town that’s a block and a half long.

The hospital sits at the end of a cornfield in back of the far end of Main Street, on the opposite side of the street from the Best Western. There’s a nice stand of eucalyptus trees in front of the hospital.

Rob lives in a building owned by the hospital, one of the old Conestoga houses divided into apartments. I spent time in Rob’s apartment when he and I were together. He’s close enough to the hospital to be able to walk across the cornfield to work. This used to strike me as cheating; it should be harder than that to get to work; most hospital employees live in Half Moon Bay.

Of course, I don’t care about any of this now.

North Coast is a medium-big hospital. It’s large enough to serve all of Del Oro County with its wide spread of artichoke and lettuce and garlic farms; it serves the guys that work on these farms, the folks that own the farms, the ambitious people who sometimes live in the county and commute to San Francisco. “Sure,” Rob says, “they got a poison control center, with all the pesticides we’re using? You betcha.”

He steers us past the hospital reception desk, where he is greeted with, “Hey, Rob, can’t stay away, huh?” And down halls where people call out, “Rob, listen, I forgot to ask you . . .”

He has my dad by the arm and tells him, “We’re on our way to see a real nice lady. She’ll talk to you about that poison.”

“Copper sulfate,” my father says, “I knew not to eat it.”

“Right. She’ll maybe take your picture. Maybe take a blood sample.”

“I like having my picture taken.”

Tallulah’s parents must have been romantics, to give her a name like that. But they produced a straightforward, cheerful woman with short brown hair. A lot of women doctors are the straightforward type. “Well, hi, Dr. Day,” she greets Daddy, “we got into some blue powder, did we?”

“Copper sulfate,” Daddy clarifies.

“Yep, not such a great idea. Now listen . . .” And she tells him that she’s going to be doing a lot of things, but none of it will hurt, and the idea is to find out how much damage the blue powder did. “We hope it hasn’t made you sick, Dr. Day.”

“It could have,” Daddy tells her solemnly.

I like Tallulah, who treats my father respectfully. Obviously Rob has cued her in about the Alzheimer’s. While she is poking and photographing, Rob and I sit in the observers’ seats.

“Well, I don’t get it,” I say.

Rob’s still acting as if I ought to have prevented this.

“Why anybody should want to . . .” I’m silent for a minute. “Scare him, I guess.”

Rob says, “Uh.”

“Hurt him, d’you think?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But so far everybody at the museum has been hearts and flowers. Egon, Scott, the guard. They all act as if they love him. The sheriff ’s the only one who doesn’t.”

Rob says, “Uh,” again. “
Somebody really
dislikes him. You ought to have noticed something.”

“Quit blaming me, Rob. You’re doing it because you feel guilty.”

“Guilty? Why should I feel guilty?”

Good question. Guilty about Cherie, of course. Because as long as I’m sort of available, you’re not supposed to look at anybody else, didn’t I tell you?

“Damned if I know,” I say. I debate telling him the hypnotism story and decide against it.

He says, “Christ. What is going on at that place? It’s super weird. Whatever possessed you? I just don’t get it. And for now you’ve got to . . . absolutely got to . . . get him out of there. Yourself, too. Both of you. What in hell were you thinking?”

I save for later my lecture on how Rob is interfering and bossy and has no rights over either me or my dad.

Tallulah is helping Daddy sit upright. She pats him on the shoulder. “Don’t get upset, guys; I think it’ll be okay.”

“Just get him the hell out of there,” Rob tells me, between his teeth, under his breath.

 
 
Tallulah kicks us out with instructions to bring Daddy in again next week; she wants to watch his liver; she thinks he got hardly any of the copper sulfate and it will be okay. “I’ll try him on calcium. There’s an innovative treatment; we had good luck, believe it or not, using it on sheep. Shots of calcium. I just gave him one.”