Murder Never Forgets (7 page)

We trundle farther on down the hall. Halfway through our pill delivery, I have my mouth open to ask Belle about the Manor accidents—“Hey, what do you think about the woman who fell out the window? What about Mrs. Dexter and the oyster?” And then I decide not to ask these questions. Those are just the sort of questions an observer (or a company spy, or whatever else it is Belle thinks I might be) would be asking. I’m flattered by Belle thinking that of me, but I don’t want her to fix on that opinion and never have any other.

Instead, I ask her about my father. “Mrs. Sisal says he yells around in the hall.”

Belle shrugs. “So. A little
vocal
ization don’t hurt anybody.”

I smile, acknowledging the big word, but keep right on. “And that he wanders up into the forest. What’s that about?”

“Dunno. Don’t hassle it.” She looks at my face and says, “Some kinda favorite place he’s got up there. I think it’s a well or something. He calls it ‘Dark Lake.’ ”

“Dark Lake,” I repeat. I don’t much like the sound.

I start to ask her about my father’s visits to the beach and then decide not to. I don’t want to investigate that beach too much with Belle. Instead, I try some ordinary character-assassination gossip. “What do you think of the doctor?”

“Kittredge? Old mega-testosterone?”

“That’s the one.”

“Big blowhard,” she adds.

I think,
Yeah, that, too
. “He took me for a walk,” I volunteer.

“Excitement.” Belle looks cynical.

I stress, “Not
especially
.”

“How about him and Mrs. Sisal?” I ask. “Do they get along?”

“Maybe just great when they’re in bed together.” She stalls and examines me. “Hey, you
are
an Observer.”

“No, I’m not. Just ordinary curiosity.”

She makes a face and reminds me what happened to the cat. “Pussycat hamburger. Don’t get too damn curious.”

“Okay,” she tells me at the end of the corridor. “You gottit, I guess, the routine. You pick up quick. The rest is just common sense, and don’t scream if you find somebody passed out on the floor. They’re old, and they do that. There’s a string with a red button . . .”

“Yes, I know about the red button.”

“Okay, then. That’s what you do
in extremis
. You push that red button.” She looks pretty pleased with herself for that Latin phrase,
in extremis
. “Now when you get finished, you check everything off on this clip sheet an’ take it down to the desk. Gottit?”

I tell her, yes, I’ve got it. I say, “Thank you, Belle,” and she says, “No charge, babe.”

I’ve taken the cart handle and am trundling down the hall when she calls after me, “Hey, come see me when you feel like talking.”

Which I take it is her way of saying she’s keeping her lines open. She thinks I’m an Observer. She just hopes that I’m a friendly Observer, or maybe a stupid one.

The whole thing adds to the general tenseness here. Any situation that needs an observer is not a great situation.

Chapter 5

Finally, I telephone Susie at the grocery store to tell her I’ve taken a job here. “They call it joining the Manor family,” I say. She’s at first amazed and then supportive. “Working in that place,” she says, “what a blast, where do you get these ideas? Listen, it might be
okay
.”

She agrees to close up my apartment and adopt my two geranium plants. That apartment is just a one-room deal with a couch and microwave.

“So how is it? Working there?” she asks, and I tell her, “Okay. Not bad, actually.”

“It’s
okay
,” I repeat, “the old ladies are nice to me.”

“Tell me, tell me,” she infuses enthusiasm into the telephone.

I try to remember if I’ve ever had one of those “Carla, now seriously, you can do better; you’re not living up to your full potential” lectures from her in all our life together, and I decide I haven’t. She’s always total support and interest and enthusiasm. She sends these over the airwaves now. “What do you
do
? What happens, like, first off in the morning?”

I describe wheeling the cart down the hall, half-admiring and half-hating the misty, moist pictures—“Listen, Sue, they put their gold frames
inside
of gold frames”—and knocking on each old lady’s door and saying, “Here’s your morning stuff, one calcium, one Tylenol, and we got a prescription for Cipro today, and how are you feeling?”

I don’t say anything about Belle thinking I’m an “observer,” whatever that is.

“And the ladies—or, there are two old guys, too—always announce how they’re feeling, in a lot of detail, and then they have to talk about the accidents. There was one where somebody fell out of a window, and one where the beauty parlor burned down, and then something else about a gas heater—really a lot of weird things, Sue, and now this latest one, with Mrs. Dexter and the oyster.”

Susie is all ears about the accidents, which I describe pretty thoroughly, including the glass in the oyster. I don’t tell her about Daddy’s woman in the net. I pretend to myself I omit this because Sue is so fond of my father, and why worry her unduly? But maybe I just don’t want to think about it.

 
 
When we’re back to discussing the clients, she asks, “How old is
old
, Carly? And who’s your favorite?”

It’s like her to want to know which one I like best instead of who makes the most trouble. I tell her
old
is like Daddy, and my favorites are the ones that love Daddy: that’s Mrs. Cohen and Mrs. La Salle and Mrs. Dexter. They call themselves the trio because they’re his fan club; Mrs. Dexter is bent and smart and cross at me right now, and Mrs. Cohen is small and chirpy. And Mrs. La Salle looks like the news-reels of royalty, maybe Monacan royalty; there’s a duchess or princess or something who looks just like Mrs. La Salle, with a straight back and modernist jewelry and a bright blue superior gaze.

“And, Sue, there are the two old men; they hide behind their doors and say, ‘Who is it? Who is it?’; they’re the only ones that give me grief . . .”

She cuts in here with, “Listen, Carly, when you see my boy, be nice to him, will you?” and I decide it’s time to end the conversation, because when she talks about me and Robbie, it is the only time Sue almost criticizes me. “I love you, Sue; lots of kisses.” She always tells me to be good to Robbie, when the actual truth was that nobody was good to anybody between me and Rob; we were too much alike. He’s a can-do type from having taken care of Susie, who is loving but scattered, and I’m the same way from tending to Daddy, so that between Rob and me, we could never figure out who should do what to whom.

But it still hurts—the fact that he and I aren’t together anymore. When you’ve spent your whole life with someone—living next door to them, and then sharing parents. Susie was for a long time the only mother I had. And my father, who mostly couldn’t remember that he was a father, would sometimes pull himself together and decide he should take me with him to Egypt. And then he would take Rob, too, who didn’t have a father. Daddy really liked Rob, and Rob truly admired my dad. And Rob got into Egyptian archaeology. He and I wanted to go back to Egypt and do good for the populace; Rob would be a doctor, and I would be a social worker or maybe Peace Corps. We were very heavy about those plans. I like remembering them.

 
 
I go back to my corridor. I still haven’t dispensed vitamins and Tylenol and antacids to Mr. Rice and Mr. Taylor, the two who hide behind their barricades. “Hi,” I call out cheerily, “it’s just me.” Mr. Rice begins making echoing noises, as if he’s dropping a box full of nails into a tin wastebasket, but I’m not worried, I know what’s happening; he’s undoing the four bolts on the inside of his door.

I finish off my morning duties by writing a postcard to Aunt Crystal. I’m careful not to be too specific about Daddy’s condition because I don’t want her up here on the next plane; she’ll be irritated enough learning that I’ve taken a job at the Manor. I can hear her voice now: “Carla, that is ridiculous, when I was your age . . .” When Aunt Crystal was my age she was halfway through her graduate librarian’s degree, but I guess even she would admit that’s not the right career for me.

Aunt Crystal lives in Venice, California. That seems a peculiar place for Aunt Crystal to live, but that’s where the old family cottage is, the one she and Daddy knew as kids. Back in Daddy’s and Crystal’s childhood, Venice was a sleepy resort town, and my grandparents had their summer cottage there and their “big house” in Berkeley. Crystal and Daddy were co-owners of both houses until she sold the Berkeley place to get Daddy into the Manor.

I emerge from my room with the postcard in my hand; I’m on my way to the brass-enclosed mailbox in the main sitting room when I run head-on into Mona from the hospital. She’s draped against the wall outside my door, and I get the impression she’s been waiting there for a while.
Lurking
would be the word I’d use, I guess. She looks at me with big, mascara-ringed, watery blue eyes. Her face is thin, and her hair scraggly bleached-blonde. She looks, in spite of being quite young, like a seasoned barfly. Like the woman in the movie who sits down at the end of the bar and hopefully greets every guy that comes in.

“Hi,” she says to me now, not sounding very hopeful.

I say, “Hello.” I add, “It’s Mona, right?” to let her know I hardly remember her, which isn’t really true. I noticed her especially in the hospital because she was so effusively jittery.

“Can I come in?”

If Mona comes in, we’ll have to sit side by side on the bed, since there isn’t any chair. I suggest the downstairs living room, and she says, “No. Ohmigaw, no,” as if doing that would be life-threatening, so I give in and throw wide the door of my broom closet, motioning at the bed. I sit on the floor, cross-legged.

There’s a silence while she pulls at her skirt, a flowered something, quite short. Then finally she bursts out, “Oh, gaw, I’ve done so many things wrong.”

I resist saying, “We all have.” I wait. “I mean,” she goes on, “I wanted to talk to you because you’re younger, you know? I mean, nobody around here is younger.”

Again, I don’t answer. What am I supposed to say—“Mona, you sure got that right”?

“And then, you look like you know so much. And you understood about what to do when Mrs. Dexter had that thing in the dining room. That was so great! How’d you learn to do that stuff?”

There are a lot of women that got told when they were little that they are absolutely adorable when they’re enthusiastic. “Oh, she’s Daddy’s little darling. I just love little Tootsie when she gets all thrilled.” I’m willing to bet Mona heard that from some Daddy-type back in prehistory.

“And,” she’s continuing, not waiting to see if I’ll answer, “you’re so smart. I could tell from the way you were talking to Mrs. Dexter how smart you were.”

“Mona,” I intrude, “what
exactly
are we talking about?”

This pulls her up short. “Talking? About? Ohmigaw, well, I guess
you
know. I mean, I made so many mistakes. Around here. Got in trouble all down the line. Did it all wrong. Everybody hates me.”

I stare up at her. She might have been a pretty little girl once, when that relative was telling her how darling she was. “I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re saying.”

“You haven’t?”

It dawns on me that Mona, too, thinks I’m the Observer. Somebody from the outside world sent to take notes. To figure it all out. Learn about secrets, love affairs, stealing from the clients, pilfering from the Manor, whatever they’ve been up to. And about the accidents. And any other dirt.

“The dumbest things I ever did,” Mona is saying, “the real bottom-line dumbest—but you know about that, I guess, don’t you? And now I can’t do anything about it. It’s just there and—oh, gaw, I get so worried. Tell them, will you, I wasn’t thinking, and I didn’t at all mean it. And I was just trying to help. People get in a lot of trouble, don’t you think, over trying to help? I figure helping is one of the things you can do. But this time, ohmigaw, was it dumb.”

I probably look pretty blank about this, so she stumbles on. “But that’s not the only dumb thing. I did another dumb thing, and I don’t guess you know about that. I mean, it’s a secret, but I thought you might have found out.”

I stare at her. This situation is weird.

Mona certainly has me cast in this observer role.

Is it better to convince her that, no, I don’t know a damn thing? Dr. Kittredge knows more than me. Mrs. Sisal knows more. Belle, too. I don’t know enough to know what it is I don’t know. If you follow me. Or is it better to pretend and get some power out of that?

“Like with this other dumb thing,” Mona is stumbling on, “it was really dumb, jeez I can’t believe that was me; I wasn’t exactly thinking straight, know what I mean? You do know what I mean, don’t you?”

I avoid this slippery slope.