Murder Never Forgets (11 page)

The shoes are women’s—small, flat, and thin-soled. The uppers are silver kidskin. There are small, bony feet and legs projecting out of the shoes, but not side by side and neatly arranged; no, one shoe has been almost kicked off, one white-stockinged leg is twisted on top of the other.

“Father, stand back.”

My father doesn’t want to stand back. He pushes up right behind me. I kneel down and fight off some of the long grass blades that are bent across the out-flung shape. It lies on its back, arms stretched. Its dress, a blue one with spangles along the shoulder straps, is disheveled. The person in the dress is someone I recognize perfectly well in her patch of bright moonlight. The last time I saw her she was wearing her moon-and-stars cape.

“Ah,” says my father. I suppose he, like me, has recognized Hospital Aide Mona. Her peroxided hair is splashed around among the grass blades, but the parakeet clip still clings, a darker color in the bright hair. “She’s not wearing her scissors belt,” he says.

One of the things I didn’t like about working in the Santa Cruz lab was dealing with the dead animals.

I’ve never seen a dead person before, but people are animals, too, and dead is dead.

And this person, not-sleeping on her back, really looks dead. Although . . . well, I saw her just recently, didn’t I? Giggling and carrying on in her Mona way, part of a party, drinking a drink?

I touch the back of my hand to the pulse-place in her neck. Nothing. And then to her mouth. Again, nothing, no moisture.

But she feels perfectly warm. I bend closer and get my lips near hers. The eyes are half-open; there’s moonlight reflected back in them.

And now I understand it—the twist of the head. The neck kinked back in that impossible angle.

Hospital Aide Mona is truly dead. With her head at that peculiar slant, I’d guess she died of a broken neck.

I notice that one of my hands is shaking. Not my right hand, the left one, the hand that an Egyptian fortune teller once told me had the fate line in it.

“Daddy,” I say, “we should get back. Quickly.”

My father is the world’s biggest innocent, but he knows about death, not just because of dead pharaohs but also because of dead archaeology workers, people falling off ladders or getting rocks dropped on their heads or coming down with bilharzia. Sometimes, believe it or not, he had over a hundred workers asking him what to do. Right now, he looks down at Mona and seems to remember some earlier event. “The inspector will be here to investigate. Shouldn’t we do artificial . . .” He can’t think of the word. “This is alarming,” he says.

“It wouldn’t work. Let’s just get back fast.”

“I’m feeling dizzy.” And I guess he is. I almost have to drag him.

 
 
We’re approaching the Manor beauty parlor steps, Daddy being wobbly, and I inadequately attempting to support him, when a figure appears, fast, apparition-like, poised at the head of the stairs, and then swiftly down them to appraise the situation and reach out toward my stumbling father. It’s Mrs. La Salle. She wheels forward, stiff silk snapping and shimmering. “Carla . . . Ed. Something . . . I can tell . . . something has happened. Come here. Ed, now then, I’ve got you, this’ll be
all right
.”

Mrs. La Salle had seen us coming. She must have been watching through the glass-paneled door. I take a minute, in the middle of everything else I’m feeling, to think about that.

She’s using her grand-duchess voice and sounds very competent. I tell her there’s been a serious accident in the meadow. “Serious?” she asks. “In what way serious? Oh, my God. Poor Ed,” and at this point my father, whom she’s been supporting by the elbows, starts to topple.

And Mrs. La Salle, gray electric silk sticking out stiff, sits down on the brick step and scoops him onto her lap. He disappears into an enclosing cowl of gray silk. Noises like
all right
and
there, there
emerge from inside it. Mrs. La Salle’s narrow hand, embellished with an amethyst ring, rises to pat my father’s shoulder.

The lady rocks, she even hums. “Now,” she says. “It’ll be
fine
.” She cradles his head.

“Get somebody,” I say, a little weakly.

After a minute more of ministration, Mrs. La Salle responds by lifting her head and commanding upward, “Somebody
come,
” in a great volume of grand-duchess-yell.

Right away a little crowd arrives at the beauty parlor door, jostling down the steps to see what on earth can be happening.

“A very bad accident in the meadow,” I repeat, projecting up and out, emulating Mrs. La Salle.

“Get Dr. Kittredge,” I add.

There’s a lot of commotion and questions as we are pulled and pushed up the steps and into, presumably, safety: Daddy and I each are supplied with a chair while a group goes to find the doctor; people saying to me and to him, “What happened?” and “How did you . . .” and “How terrible!” And I’m finally starting to react. What I’m reacting to mainly is this thought:
Accident?
That was no accident. You don’t fall and break your neck in an accident, and then lie down on your back. You lie some other way, on your face, with your head pushed askew, or curled in a ball, head canted. Not stretched neatly, as if you’d been dragged there. Someone transported Mona to that spot, and then didn’t have the
chance
to fix her up like an accident. They heard us coming. Maybe part of the time we were stumbling around, they were there, too. Watching. Maybe they were watching us and wondering what they should do about
us
.

 
I’m fighting with these thoughts all the time I’m arranging to get Daddy back to his room. Mrs. La Salle volunteers to be his guide, and he totters along with her quite willingly, leaning into her protective furl of gray silk.

I watch them go, and then I flash back to that scene on the steps and have a dumb, inappropriate association. They looked like Michelangelo’s
Pieta
, the lady bent over a cradled prostrate man, like that statue of the crucified Jesus stretched out on Mary’s lap. Latch on to something like that in a moment of crisis, and your brain will go totally numb.

 
 
But three minutes later, after I’ve been supplied with a glass of the beauty parlor’s leftover wine and am waiting for the doctor and the sheriff, I’m back to wondering who was lurking in the underbrush and watching us fumble around.

Because now we really are Observers, major Observers. Also witnesses. Smack at the middle of a quivering spider web. I analyze each person in this room wanting to ask, “Were you out there while I was out there?”

The doctor arrives, breathless and for once, almost quiet. “Dead?” he asks me. “You could tell that? Do you know what
dead
looks like?”

Something in my face must convince him, because he says, “We’ll get you home to bed, baby.”

Then he has to Irish it up: “Yes, yes. We’ll scoot you past the sheriff. Bed and chicken soup, baby. Okay? That’ll be it, dear one. Bed and chicken soup fer ya.”

A shot of vodka in this chardonnay would be more to the point, Irish buddy,
is what I think at him, staring into his slightly bleary eyes.

 
 
The sheriff takes forever to get here. Finally he arrives, dripping fog off his yellow slicker and hat, and with rivulets running down his rimless glasses. He doesn’t even sit down; he leans over, gripping and dripping, holding both arms of my chair and saying, “Okay, okay,” meaning that he gets it how I’m half-asleep and canted sideways in my chair. Then he asks me where, when, how long we’d been out in the garden, why we went out there at all. He stares down and says, “Huh.” He makes me feel he’s disbelieving most of this. He says he’ll see me first thing tomorrow; I should not go away from the Manor, not any place at all; do I understand?

Yes, I tell him, I understand.

When I stand up, I find I’m stiff. I look down at Susie’s moon-and-stars shirt and decide that I won’t tell her I was wearing it tonight.

Chapter 10

Back in my father’s room Mrs. La Salle has him in bed, quilt up under his chin. She’s sitting beside him with a book open on her lap and is reading aloud.

 
she announces as I come in to the room. She wrinkles her nose at me. “Maybe not the best antidote for an evening of death and drama, but it was what he wanted to hear. And he does seem to be feeling better. He was worried, you know, about his
Dame sur la Plage
.”

“My father speaks very good French,” I tell her, somewhat crossly. I can’t figure out what this handsome old lady is up to. She’s not, absolutely not, one of those maternal, loving, nurturing Susie-type matrons. She’s more the hard, brittle, handsome society model. Smart and well-read. But not a big-time doer of good, not a cuddler and purveyor of chicken soup. Mainly out to advance number one, I’d guess. So what does she want with my poor Alzheimer’s impeded father? Does she, maybe, think he’s rich?

“Well, my dear,” she says, rising in one graceful gray silk motion, “I’ll leave you now. Good night, Edward. You look sweet, there.”

“Do I? How nice.” He smiles after her as she rustles out the door. “She helped me quite a bit,” he confides.

I’ll bet she did.

This is a lady with remarkable savoir faire. How many other people, projected into sudden intimacy, right in the middle of a brand-new murder case, could resist asking questions? Apparently Mrs. La S. could. She didn’t come up with a single one.

I sit down in the chair she’s just vacated. “I’ll stay in your room tonight.”

Don’t hover too much, I tell myself, and then issue a correction: Go ahead, hover. This frail old gentleman discovered a dead body tonight. He did a ninety-mile dash through the moonlight. And some time or other in the past he watched a woman die in a net.

He’s in the middle of the dangerous action.

So am I.

I get a blanket, a quilt, a pillow, and I curl up on the window seat. Tomorrow I have to talk to the sheriff. I better be careful; if I tell him too much he’ll be quizzing my father, who can’t take it.

But I, myself, have to quiz my father. The time has come for me to know a few things. Find out about that net-woman. I start framing questions, oblique ones, not scary-direct.

And after that, there’s what Mrs. Dexter is hiding. The lady’s silence is downright dangerous. Think up questions for her, too, I tell myself.

I’ll never get to sleep.

 
 
But my darling father seems to sleep perfectly all right, and eventually I guess I do, too, because Belle has to wake both of us when she comes by for the morning rounds. “Get up,” she says. “I want you, the sheriff wants you, everybody screamin’ for you. Come on, rouse.”

“Okay.” I have trouble orienting. Not the trouble where you can’t figure out where you are, but the other one where you can’t decide what you’re supposed to know this morning. Something different from yesterday, you’re sure, but what? “How is it down there?”

“Wild. Everybody talking at once.” Belle is helping Daddy out of bed, and he looks over her shoulder at me. “All of ’em wondering about you. You found her, huh?”

“We both did.”

“Umph.” I interpret this grunt as,
Boy, are you in major difficulty.
“Lady, get down there, now. That sheriff really wants you.”

 
 
I arrive downstairs for my sheriff-interview feeling dizzy. I’m starting to get a cold. I crumple a wad of Kleenex and press it against my upper lip.

The main sitting room of the Manor looks like an airport after an all-day plane-arrival embargo. People are huddled in clusters, half-asleep, where the sheriff’s deputies have set up interviewing centers—islands of tables, chairs, and foot-stools, each with a uniformed cop and a witness. A bosomy spike-haired woman sergeant greets me, “Hey, Miss Day, we been looking for you. Sheriff Hawthorne, he’s been looking. He’s back there in some office.”

The sheriff, whom I didn’t really see last night because he was hidden under his yellow slicker and hat, turns out to be a cadaverous man with gray hair and rimless glasses and stubble. He has liberated a tapestried cubicle down the hall from Mrs. Sisal’s office, where he scribbles at something for a few minutes. He tells me to sit and finally pronounces, “Okay.”

“So,” he says, “you found the decedent.”

I resist saying
huh
?
Decedent,
I translate, equals
dead person
equals
Mona
. I agree, “Yes.”

“How did that happen?”

“Well, we were walking . . .”

The sheriff tips his chair back to make it squeak. He runs his hand backward over some thin, defeated hair. He aims his glasses at me. And then proceeds into a barrage of official sheriff-type questions. Walking? Where? Why? Middle of the night, foggy, cold, you go for a walk? Your dad not so good? What kind of not so good? Why a walk? Why not back to his room?