Erased From Memory (18 page)

“And then she wouldn’t tell me what she meant. She said she hated to say and she wasn’t really sure and she’d been wrong about something else lately—something about you, Dr. Day . . .”

My father stops singing to turn a pink interested face in George’s direction. “I doubt that I can help.”

“And when I tried to push her, she just said, ‘This friend gave me a serious secret. It started back in Thebes. A deep, deep secret. I think I’ll try to check up on it.’ ”

George adds, “Not that it’s anything about an enemy. But it’s strange, don’t you think?”

“George,” I say, “if you think of anything else about that—any clue about who may have said something, or if Rita read something or noticed something somewhere—anything else she said that might tie in—please call me. It’s important.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He’s dubious. “I’m not real good at that kind of stuff.”

“Listen.” I try for a strength infusion. “It’s vital. It could tell us who killed her.”

He looks upset. He says he’ll try. He takes my phone number.

 
 
I want to get George to talk some more, but he has other ideas. “Wanna see my clay figures?”

The answer is no, but of course, we say yes.

George’s clay figures are the kind where you’re not sure whether it’s a dog or a tree or a model of your fist. I tell him they’re suggestive and he seems to like that.

 
 
On our way out of the Mission, Rob asks, “Have we been there, Carla? In Thebes?”

I’m disbelieving. “Are you kidding?”

He shakes his head no. “When he was talking, it kept sounding familiar. But I couldn’t picture it.”

“Robbie, we were in Thebes for six weeks. In a camp. We had a tent. We cooked stuff over a fire. We were there when Daddy found the coffin lid.”

“Oh,” he says, in a tone of discovery. “That place. Yeah. Okay.”

I don’t follow up with
what do you mean, that place,
and
what did you think the name of that place was,
and
what in the hell gives, Rob
, and all the other questions I could ask. I decide to be quiet and stare sullenly at the scenery.

Rob is so taken up with Cherie that he has completely abolished the part of his past that includes me.
Good-bye, Rob, good-bye, old playmate
. Everything passes, right, chum? Right.

My father fills the sound gap by singing. He finds a new appropriate song:
Where it all goes, the dear lord only knows.

 
 
Dinner tonight is one of Egon’s theme meals. The theme is Ethiopian; there are carved wooden platters in the middle of the table, which Egon announces are from Addis Ababa. And the food is roast lamb served with flabby hunks of pancake.

Egon makes an announcement about Daddy. Egon looks around proprietarily; he pauses; he is pleased. “He will be helping me recover some of our memories of earlier archaeology.”

“No, there won’t be Western silverware,” he asides to a complaining Bunny. “You pick the lamb up by wrapping the pancake around it. Anybody can do it.”

“Yeah? Well, not me.” Bunny turns toward my father. “What’s this about Pop?”

“He’ll be helping me with his memories.”

“Hey, Mr. Rothskellar, memories? Pop and memories? Come on.”

Egon levels a mild gaze her way. “Surely you agree that Dr. Day can be a help.”

Daddy looks up from his lamb. He is the only one who has kept on eating; he’s good at this hands-on method. “Dr. Day,” he says cheerfully, “that’s me; I’m Dr. Day.”

Bunny agrees. “Yep, you sure are.”

“I’ve been waiting,” Daddy says, “for further material. There’s a sign out front.”

The banners advertising Scott’s new discoveries have been augmented during the last week; Egon has had two new ones painted. One of these reads, THE SUN QUEEN’S SECRETS. Nefertiti is the sun queen. The other one says, WONDERFUL NEW DISCOVERIES. TICKETS NOW.

“New discoveries,” Daddy says now, apparently recalling this slogan. “I don’t know. There is a poem about the new; Perhaps I can quote it,
Now the shadow of the new comes across
. . . No,
now the threat of the new comes across
. . . Re may not be terribly happy.”

Scott says, “You’re remembering the poem right, Edward.”

My father says, “Ah. But the point is that when we are . . .” He founders here and quits trying to deal with his lamb. “There is an image of . . . what am I trying to say . . . perhaps of radical coherence . . .” He stops and sits with his head bent, staring at his dish.

Bunny is the one who states the obvious. “Dr. Rothskellar, listen, I mean, do you think that Pop . . .” (When did Bunny started calling my father Pop? This has snuck up on me.) “I mean, Pop’s memory isn’t all that great. Do you really think he can, well . . . How long ago archaeology is it you want?”

Scott says to my father, “That’s okay, Ed, you’re doing great.”

Egon agrees enthusiastically, “Scott, you are right. Absolutely.”

Bunny’s question of what period in archaeology my father is supposed to help with still hangs around unanswered. All of us return to our lamb. We seem to have gotten better at managing the pancakes.

Now, after dinner, I find Daddy in the museum office, sitting in front of a computer.

I stare at him with my mouth open. I don’t want to think about the collision between him and a computer.

But then I notice that there are pictures on this computer and that by hitting a button he’s able to get a new picture whenever he wants. The five-year-old grandchildren of my Manor residents can do this.

The pictures all seem to be ones of Egyptian scenes or Egyptian art.

I ask Daddy how he’s getting along with Mr. Rothskellar and he says, “My what?” and then says, “Mr.
Rothskellar
?” as if he’s never heard of such a person. After a minute at his Egyptian website he says, perfectly coherently, “I am rejoicing at feeling needed.”

“That’s wonderful,” I say. “I’m glad.”

He gestures at the computer screen. “Most of these were photographed in a museum. Where you can’t make a mistake on what it is. But they are good clear images.”

He looks okay, body erect, shoulders back. I ask myself if he could have followed a computer website this closely before he came here, punching the right button each time, and for a minute I’m not sure. Then I realize that of course he could; he used the TV remote at the Manor; he could summon up
This Old House
and
Antiques Roadshow
.

But still, it’s a nice sign of adjustment, I tell myself.

So it was okay about his coming here, I also assure the anxious me. It was an okay thing.

Stop feeling wary, I tell myself. Stop following him around. Quit worrying that he, or you, is riding for a fall.

It’s perfectly normal that Egon wants him to talk about the past.

The minute I state that to myself, I feel peculiar again. I have to come hang over Daddy’s shoulder and look at his website pictures. One flashes up now, an image of Hathor from the British Museum, stately, perfectly poised, balancing her unwieldy horned crown. Daddy greets her with enthusiasm. “A queen indeed.”

But then the next page has no picture, just the website’s address, and he asks me to go get Bunny. Bunny, he claims, will be able to get him a new set of pictures.

Chapter 14

“Hello, darlin’,” says Cherie’s voice over the phone.

Do not forget that Cherie is deeply Southern, and that the word
darling
comes across as
dahlin’
! A pronunciation that sometimes, when I remember that this lady is efficient and feisty and my father’s lawyer, I start to find appealing. At the moment I’m still smarting over my afternoon with Rob, and Cherie does not seem appealing.

I tell her
Hello, Cherie
and she says that that asshole (meaning the sheriff) has just gotten around to calling her because she told him she would sue the
cojones
off him if he didn’t keep her in the loop, and the asshole is going to question my dad this afternoon.

“And, darlin’, I don’t know what he was planning, maybe to send a squad car and drag your daddy in there by force; but that, believe me, is not going to be. So would you get him down into Conestoga at two today and dear, believe you me, I will be along with all my guns ready.”

The sheriff ’s office is on Conestoga’s Main Street. My friend the old sheriff had his office in his house, but Sheriff Munro has liberated a storefront. It says SHERIFF on its plate glass window in a curved arrangement that looks as if it belongs on
Deadwood
.

 
 
Daddy is thrilled that we are going into town to talk to the sheriff. He likes any outing. He thinks the sheriff is a peculiar man, but he’s not afraid of him. “Only a little,” he says. “And I will have you and that pretty woman with me. I am wearing my gray tweed jacket. And my dark blue shirt. This dark blue shirt is fashionable.”

He thinks the dark blue shirt is fashionable because there was a whole school full of men wearing dark blue shirts. And these men listened to a lecture by him, while he talked about Tutankhamen.

“Yes, you look great.” I bend over to kiss his cheek, at which he says, “My dear, how nice!”

 
 
When we arrive at the sheriff ’s office, Cherie also kisses him. She leaves a pink smudge on his cheek. “Oh, my goodness, darling Crocodile, I have branded you. It is so wonderful to see you, and you just wait, we will distribute this slimy creature in little pieces all over his floor.

“And darling Carla.” I get the full benefit of a wide-open, turquoise-eyed inspection. Only sometimes, when she looks at me in this assessing way, do I understand that Cherie, too, worries about the emotional triangle she and I are in. “Carla, dear, how are you, how is it going? Do not worry about a thing here with this creature; he is all threat and noise and nothin’. And that little
Chronicle
guy finally got his ass in gear and the story is going to run maybe tomorrow.”

While she fires all this at me, Cherie has a hand behind my shoulder and one behind my father’s, and she is shepherding us through the door of the sheriff ’s office.

It is an ordinary grocery store door that rings a bell when you enter.

Inside there are three desks, a Formica picnic table with a small plaster statue of a grizzly bear, some desk chairs, some folding chairs, and a file cabinet. The sheriff is behind one of the desks. He waits for a while, as if he’s deciding whether he has to do this, then finally stands up.

“Sheriff Munro,” Cherie says, “I do not know what you thought you were up to, getting us down here like this. But believe me, I have the full force of public opinion on my side and I am not about to take any nonsense.”

She zeroes in on two chairs into which she guides me and my father. “There, darling Crocodile, are you comfy? Not too hard on your old back; this is sort of a nasty chair? It is just too bad that a prominent gentleman of your age has to be dragged around . . .” She interrupts herself long enough to find a nasty chair of her own, into which she gracefully subsides. “Yes, sir, dragged down here with no more regard for legal process than if we lived in the old days in Nazi Germany.”

Cherie looks elegant today in a dark green pantsuit and gold shirt.

The sheriff sits down behind his desk. He stares glumly at her, as if he has seen the future and found it ugly.

“I do not like to think about Nazi Germany,” my father offers.

After a minute the sheriff reaches into a desk drawer and extracts a brightly colored plastic and cardboard package, one of the kind that is sealed tight in the store to prevent pilfering. He tries to insert a fingernail under its plastic edge. He tries to tear the cardboard. He attempts to pry a corner loose. He gets a pair of scissors and jabs. He produces a knife and jabs more forcefully.

Cherie leans forward, watching. “What a shame, Sheriff,” she says. “But if that there is a recording device, you are wasting your time. It was real forehanded of you to buy it at The Good Guys and be ready for our interview, but for recording, you need our permission and we aren’t giving that. So you can stop fighting with that recalcitrant little mean whatzit.”

She settles back in her chair, looking pleased. “Those packages are absolute hell, aren’t they?”

I suspect Cherie is editing the truth in saying the sheriff needs our permission. My understanding is that he’s the sheriff and can record if he informs us. But he, like me, isn’t sure about this. He watches Cherie, who sits back, smiling placidly. Then he puts his equipment away and rests his hands flat on the desk.

“The date is April 25, 2006,” he intones, staring at his west wall, “and the time is two-seventeen. I am about to start the interviewing of Edward Day.” He seems to be aiming this speech at an imaginary TV camera.

“
Professor
Edward Day,” I interject.

“I have been a professor since May 1966,” my father says. “It was a unanimous decision of the tenure committee.