Murder Never Forgets (16 page)

I owe Dr. Kittredge one for protecting Daddy from the sheriff. Lunch in Conestoga is okay.

The Miata is a chunky little ostentatious tub with leather seats that cradle your behind and your back. It’s small enough that the bulky doctor has to squeeze himself in, inch by inch. “Like gettin’ a fat lady through a subway turnstile,” he winks at me. He manages to make the process look sexy.

Half-fake and half-not, that sums you up
, I think at him as we zip along the coast road with our hair flying.

“Ah,
darlin’
,” he yells at me, and I say, “Where did you get that accent?” and he hollers, “From me mum, my darlin’,” which doesn’t explain why he doesn’t lose at least a little bit of it, living and working in California. He sounds like an old movie about the Troubles.

In Bettie’s Beach Cafe he commandeers a back booth, red formica and red Naugahyde, and settles in proprietarily to stare at me. “Whatever yer heart desires, sweet one,” he says, and I tell him pancakes, and he says, “Good choice,” and he himself orders a hamburger and then leans back to sweet-talk Bettie, who arrives wide and blonde and tired. “Your hamburgers are the best on the whole north coast,” says he to her. “That’s a hamburger made with
love
,” at which Bettie comes to, giggling and with a spot of pink on each plump cheek. “A woman who knows what a man
wants
.” And so on and so forth. There’s nobody but me and Bettie here for him to flirt with, but he makes the two of us seem like a crowd.

“And now,” he stops to put ketchup, mustard, onion slice, and lettuce shred onto his hamburger patty, “now, Goldilocks, what news from Sally Jean?”

I ask, of course, “Who’s Sally Jean?” and he says, “Oh, sweetheart, did you not know?” and then fools around with enjoying knowing something I don’t. And finally elucidates, “That’s Sisal’s name. Sally Jean Sisal from Tulsa, Oklahoma. You’d not suspect it, would you?”

So we do the routine where I say, certainly he knows her better than I do, why ask
me
how she is? I must admit I’m surprised that the S. J. in front of Sisal’s name in the Manor catalogue means Sally Jean. I would have thought she’d change it: Serena Jocelyn, Samantha Joy.

“But,” I ask Dr. K., “why should I tell you what Mrs. Sisal is up to? Rumor has it you two are an item.”

He manages to preen and look pleased and at the same time deny that anything obtains between him and Sally Jean. And I guess it doesn’t, not right now at least, because he really wants to know what she and I were talking about. “Kind of a long conversation you had,” he says. (How did he know; was he watching the door?) Finally I repeat our boring interview for him, and he doesn’t want to believe it. “That’s all?” No, he really isn’t
in
with her these days. He wishes she’d been circumstantial and told me how she feels and is she scared and what does she plan next for the Manor.

“Ah, well, you’re in good with her, Goldilocks,” he says, “you played your cards just fine; you are some smart lady.”

And he offers more pancakes. Coffee. The coffee is awful. “Tell me about how you went to Egypt,” he says unexpectedly, without preamble. “You were just a kid, was it fun? You’re smart, you’re literate, are you going to write about it?”

Dr. Kittredge is not one of those people that you can feel straightforwardly one single way about. Here I was starting to get deeply bored with him, and now he asks this question which I’ve been dying for someone to ask: Can you talk about Egypt? Can you talk about a possible
you
after you leave the Manor? The old ladies are great on questions but they never come up with the right ones. Theirs are more like: Dear, are you getting enough sleep lately?

So I start to tell him about Egypt and then about what I would write about from that time if I were writing it. (And he was bright to mention that, because I guess I’d really like to do that some day.) “The last time we were there I was fourteen, and it seemed hopelessly romantic,” I say, “even when it was dusty and hot and we were right in the middle of it. And an experience that you’re in the middle of doesn’t usually seem that romantic. In Egypt I got to see my father in action. He was different; that was his world, and he even stood differently when he was there. Only a couple of years off from starting his forgetting, but he was still okay. He was fun. He was decisive.”

I begin to get excited talking to Dr. Kittredge about this and remembering that trip and thinking about Robbie being along and us at night around our fire and talking about everything with him: math, astronomy, poetry, death. “And Daddy was making notes for his last book,” I say. “The fourteen hieroglyphs one.”

Dr. Kittredge has ordered ice cream sundaes. He is slurping his and watching me emote. “Yes, dear one,” he says. “I read it.”

“You read what?”

“Your dad’s book.”

It’s a known fact that no one reads a book called
The Coffin Lid Texts: Fourteen Hieroglyphs Reclaimed
except another Egyptologist. Suddenly I’m cross; I’ve adjusted myself to too many people lately. I accuse the doctor of lying, and he laughs and says, “Ah. You look great when yer cross.”

But when I say, “Jee-sus,” he undercuts me by asking, “An’ why should ya assume that all a doctor has is his med degree? He’s got to think about other things, am I right?”

“Okay,” I tell him, not the least bit convinced.

Dr. Kittredge
, I am thinking,
you are under suspicion; I suspect you of everything, I suspect everybody of everything. But, come to think of it, where were you when Mona’s neck was broken? They had to go looking for you, and no one ever told me where you were found, and who would be better than a doctor at neck-snapping
?

“. . . back in med school,” Dr. Kittredge is saying. “A hobby of mine. I had a girlfriend who was crazy about that whole ancient Egyptian scene. I read about Ramesses III in between doing gall bladders. It’s interesting; there’s a characteristic odor that goes with . . .”

I tell him, “Okay,
okay
,” and he goes, “Sorry, baby,” with a special smile that means he did that on purpose, and then he tells me, “So I knew about your dad before he ever got here. He’s a very challenging man.

“Now, dear, you put that ice cream away all right, how about another one?”

This doctor is obnoxious; I’m right to be suspicious of him. And of everybody else in the Manor; Sisal, Daddy’s aides Belle and Kellee, Rebecca the secretary, even my darling cross and peculiar old ladies. I’m suspicious of every single one of them. I wish there were somebody here who was smart and funny, and I didn’t have to feel wary of them.

The doctor is back now into talking about Daddy, about just how daffy he is. (He uses the term
confused
.) Is it constant? Does it come and go? Affected by diet, temperature, phases of the moon? He pushes a bit on this. Have I seen signs that, if Dr. Day’s memory were tweaked a little, is there any chance that some memory would . . .

I get mad. “Don’t talk like that. That’s a human being, my father, not some damn computer that you can stick a paper clip into, don’t you even think about
tweaking
.”

And right away he’s apologetic, “I didn’t mean really . . . sweetheart, goddamn, no, I’m just interested in the mechanisms of memory, how it all works, speculating on what
you’ve
observed; you’re a damn good observer, y’know?”

“Quit speculating.”

“Oh, dear, we, that is we doctors, know so damn little.” Delivered with a big dose of aw-shucks charm.

Damn right, you know so little. And lay off it about my father, everybody in the world is interested in him. “Hey,” I say, “you’ve got
other
Alzheimer’s patients.”

All in all, Dr. Kittredge has proved to be an irritating lunch companion and has moved to first place in my list of people to feel edgy about. But just the same I have to stop myself, as we climb back into the Miata, from confiding in him about thinking Daddy’s at the center of all the action lately. I open my mouth to talk about this and, mouth half-open, think better of it, and don’t.

Chapter 13

Mrs. La Salle decides just from looking at me that I’m worrying too much. She stops me at the door to the dining room and caresses my wrist with a small manicured finger. “We’ve decided you need an escape. And so does Ed.”

“My father has an escape. He escapes into himself.”

She shakes her head, the one amethyst earring catching the light. “He needs to get away. We’ve discussed it.”

We
is the trio—Daddy’s fan club of herself, Mrs. Cohen, and Mrs. Dexter. “You shall have dinner out,” she proclaims. “Someplace away, far from all this.” A wave of her hand takes in the Manor scene—the sheriff’s interviewing team, still camped in the main lounge, the yellow tape scraps still dangling around the garden, the luggage in the main hall waiting for departing residents.

“Justine’s Restaurant,” she says. “On the highway. Very elegant. I can get a reservation. I know many of the people in restaurants. From my gossip column.”

I agree, “Yes,” remembering Mrs. La Salle’s glamorous past. But I tell her I’m not sure about this; I better think about it. Daddy’s and my last attempt at a party didn’t turn out too well, did it? Then I catch a wave of high-pitched sound from the lobby—irritated voices, luggage scrape, wheeled suitcase squeak—and after that another, different wave, this one of dining-room smell, not exactly bad, just starchy-bland, mashed potatoes and a whiff of that kind of gravy that stands up all by itself, and I think,
Gourmet restaurant—classic food, deft, assiduous waiters—it’s been a long, long time. All the way back to Egypt, maybe
. So I tell Mrs. La Salle yes, gourmet restaurant sounds great.

 
 
We set out toward Justine’s in a gray-and-yellow van. The ladies are excited by this ride, and so is my father. A little too excited. He clutches my hand and says, “Many wrongs will be righted.”

I just tell him okay. I don’t want to start a long conversation for the old ladies to listen to.

“I received another e-mail,” he says, and I agree, “Okay,” again, wondering,
E-mail, where did he even pick up the term
?

“No secrets in the back,” Mrs. Dexter snaps in our direction.

The cab belongs to someone named Henry, a potbellied gentleman in a checked shirt and beard, who tells us our outing is “A-OK. Good for you, get out and see the world,” although he thinks we should go to the Supersteak at the Conestoga Best Western. “This Justine’s has a real snooty reputation.” But he’s cheerful about pointing out sights: “Over there’s where the seals come.” “There’s where some English explorer discovered something. They left a sign, some kind of brass sign.”

My father is interested in the brass sign. He tries to stick his head out the too-small window to see.

Justine’s perches on a cliff out of sight of the highway and over an intensely blue Pacific; it’s a Neanderthal-Modern building with a white cement front spotted by oval portholes. Henry is astonished, “Jeez Louise, looks like the women’s facility at Santa Rita. You’d think a snooty place would do better about how it looks, huh?”

Inside, an austere lobby stretches out, green glass on two sides, a hall where fish swim irritatedly back and forth behind pebbled walls. My father moves close, muttering something that sounds like “The horns of water.”

“I have a duty,” he says. I’m alarmed and reach for his hand, but he’s okay. As we walk farther along, he stops to admire and tap and comment on a whiskered fish, “A scavenger, you know. Entirely necessary for the balance of their city, you know.”

Beyond the lobby, the restaurant opens in a long prospect of thick white plaster and recessed alcoves with occasional lights and clumps of people.

The whole thing looks like a spread from
Architectural Digest
—some Saudi Prince’s new scatter on an island off the coast of Africa, where, the caption says, “The integrity of the fabric resists the encroachment of the terrain,” meaning that the inside of the building is as different as possible from whatever is outside. At Justine’s the outside shows up only down at the far end of the room, where three large windows open onto a wild marine view: miles and acres of blue water and u-shaped huddles of cliffs, overwhelming, but hard to see because the windows are so deep.

Mrs. Dexter squints into the restaurant and says, “Good God.” Mrs. Cohen squeaks, “
Intriguing
.” Mrs. La Salle calmly offers that, “The architect is famous, you know,” and Mrs. Dexter thumps the walker, “They always try to
confuse
things.”

My father seems interested but maybe a little alarmed. He touches me on the arm. “It reminds me of something. What would that be?”

I don’t say that I know what it reminds him of, but I do know. The inside of this building reminds him of a tomb. An old empty one. The kind we used to joke about, back in the Valley of the Kings, joking especially loudly if the place was spooky or damp or funny-colored, maybe green or that wavery acid blue. Robbie and I were way too cool to say
haunted
, but I at least half-thought it.