Murder Never Forgets (25 page)

When I look back he’s following, his wide flushed face screwed up into what I guess is a worried frown.

 
 
The door to Daddy’s apartment is locked, that is, locked to someone who might try to get in from the hall, but okay for him if he needs to get out. I fumble around with the key and throw the door open and then have to stand for a minute blinking, because the room is dark, with only a small glow from the night-light at the foot of the sleeping alcove.

It takes me a minute to discover that my father isn’t in his bed. The bed, nestled in the alcove, is a bit scrambled, covers disarranged, but there’s no old gentleman there. I dally in the entryway making amorphous questioning noises; Rob, from behind me, turns on the light.

The room isn’t particularly messy, but it looks, with the tumbled bedclothes and a displaced chair, as if someone has left it suddenly.

The bathroom door is open, and he’s not in there.

Rob is the one who finally notices. He points to the space under the window seat. This little cavern probably once had a cupboard door, but that door has been removed, leaving the molding that would fit around it and a space inside suitable for storing things like bedding.

Right now it contains a hunched-up figure, a round shape unidentifiable except for one sleeve of a tweed jacket, one pants leg, also of tweed, and the back of a head.

My father is curled up in there like a fetus, his head against his knees. His feet are side by side with their backs to us; one of his nice brown leather shoes has come untied, the lace dangles across the cupboard threshold.

Rob and I dash and kneel close. He’s breathing raggedly. I say, “Father, we’re here.” Rob says, “Hey, Ed. Hey, buddy.” I say, “Darling, it’s okay,” and Rob says, “Come on out and let me look at you.” And so on and so forth.

At first there’s no answer. Finally we get some twitching and a slight shoulder-muscle movement from inside the tweed jacket.

Rob says, “Attaboy,” and “Come on,” and “Let’s get out of here, shall we?”

Nothing more happens.

Rob mouths, “Catatonic,” at me, and I agree, “Shock.”

I murmur into the cupboard, “Daddy, did something scare you?”

Rob tells me, “Traumatic shock—they come out of that.”

“Who’s ‘they’? This is my father.”

Rob says, “It’s short-lived, usually.”

I say, “Oh God, how dumb I was.” I’ve started crying. The tears are mostly frustration and anger, all aimed by Carla at Carla. I’m thinking, I knew I had to get him out of this place. I was being stubborn, I wanted to disagree with Rob. It’s my fault this happened, I’m to blame.

Rob says, “Hey, Carla,” trying to make it sound comforting.

From inside the cupboard a voice emerges. It’s cracked and rusty-sounding, but recognizable, “
Carla
? Did somebody say ‘Carla’? You know, I had a
daughter
named Carla.”

“I’m here.” I put my hand in the cupboard with him and pat his knee.

It takes a while, but finally he turns enough to peer out. He says, “Oh, of course,” in a very ordinary voice. And in a minute he’s scrambling on his hands and knees over the closet sill and onto the rug.

He doesn’t look too bad. His hair is messed up, and he blinks at the light. He’s clutching a piece of paper that has gotten folded and spindled into a baton.

We descend on him with soothing useless chirps. Rob says, “Come on now,” and I say, “Now, now, just sit here.” Rob says at me, “Drugs, maybe.” I say, “He hid. Not drugs.”

My father gets positioned onto a chair. He is still holding his rolled-up scroll of paper. He seems insecure about sitting on the chair; he plants his feet flat and his back straight and angles his baton upright. He looks like one of the little Egyptian guardian tomb-figures, a
shabti
.

“Father, did something happen?”

“I got an e-mail.” He gestures with the rolled-up paper baton. He seems to want to hand it to me and to not want to. Finally, he extends it.

Straightened out, the baton becomes a big piece of paper, clearly labeled, “e-mail,” in red computer-printing. With a message, all in caps:

 
“An ugly message,” my father says.

I suppress an impulse to crunch the paper up and throw it away. To rip it into little bits. To tell my father it doesn’t matter. “Where did you get this, Daddy?”

“They usually just drop them through the transom.”

Rob and I exchange looks. My father’s apartment doesn’t have a transom. I don’t think any of the quarters at the Manor do.

“And then they come and get it.” Daddy looks at me and apparently decides he hasn’t answered our question. “She brought it. The lady with the scissors.”

I stare at him, completely stopped. I always thought the lady with the scissors was Mona.

“With the moon and stars.”

Mona again. I mouth at Rob, “Tell you later.” I’m still holding the e-mail. “This is evil.”

It’s evil, and it has truly upset Edward Day. I have to acknowledge the authenticity, the Egyptian-ness. All that stuff about wandering in darkness, drinking filth. Straight out of
The Book of the Dead
. Some parts may even be quotes. Guaranteed to abrade my poor Dad in the vulnerable parts of his psyche.

But in
The Book of the Dead
we have straightforward ways of dealing with evil.

“I’m going to destroy this now, Father. You watch, and I will completely destroy it.”

I set the paper afire by holding it against the element of the little electric kitchen stove. Rob supplies a saucer to catch the ashes, and together Rob and I, with my father witnessing, flush the ashes down the toilet.

“There now,” I say. I even add the childhood formula, “All, all gone.”

Daddy seems better after this exorcising ceremony. He talks about how upset he was. “I didn’t like that. It bothered me. That was a bad paper. I’m glad you came.”

Rob and I give him tea and put him back to bed. And he seems happy when I say I’ll spend the night here on his window seat. “Yes, wonderful, dear. Truly thoughtful. I would appreciate it.”

He still claims it was the moon-and-stars lady who brought his e-mail. “Oh, yes indeed. In a cape like yours, you know.

“They want my token. But they can’t have that, not the token, I’ve hidden it. Hidden where no one can find it.

“I think it possible that’s why they cursed me.”

I decide he’s right. Yes, that’s why they cursed him.

 
 
“Well, obviously not.” I scratch that message on a long yellow pad and shove it at Rob. He and I are in my father’s kitchen discussing, via whispers and notes, the Mona question.

“It wasn’t Mona. But Kittredge wrote the curse.”

It takes a lot of yellow notepad and ballpoint pen to explain why I think this, after which Rob nods, yes.

“Lock the doors. Lock the windows,” he scribbles.

I try to picture Dr. Kittredge disguised as Mona. And fail.

“But why Mona?” Rob writes.

I have an idea, but I don’t try to explain. It’s the sort of ridiculous, fanciful thing that practical Rob doesn’t go in for, but I can imagine that a certain kind of sick person would get a charge from dressing up, pretending to be Mona, dead Mona, Mona gone now for several days, Mona with her neck broken. I can also imagine that maybe Mona, in her original form (nurse, hospital worker) is someone my father thinks has a right to come into his apartment when she scratches on the window.

Because that’s how it must have happened—entry through the window, which is almost floor-to-ceiling height. I’ve bolted that window in two different places now and leaned a chair against it.

Chapter 20

“How are you this morning? Are you better? You slept well, I think? Does that make you feel okay now?”

My father, of course, can’t answer all these intrusive questions. He looks at me confusedly and drops his toothbrush.

Our tête-à-tête is broken up by Mrs. Dexter, who bangs on our door and nails me with an accusation: “What on earth are you doing in your father’s apartment so early in the morning, and in your pajamas, for goodness sake?”

Mrs. Dexter has been consistently cross with me lately. Perhaps it dates from my doing the Heimlich on her after the oyster-glass. Everyone says I saved her life then, and there’s a legend about how the saved person always resents the one who butted in and took over. Something about indebtedness.

I mutter a couple of words about Daddy not feeling well, which she ignores. “I came by to show him my new car.”

My father says, “New car!” and I say the wrong thing, “I didn’t know you could drive.”

Which totally riles Mrs. Dexter, who wants to know why I thought that; did I think she had always been an old lady with a walker? She’s only had the walker for ten years, she grew up on a ranch; how could she not know how to drive?

“I got the walker after I fell off a horse. And then the bastard kicked me.”

My face probably gives me away. I also didn’t imagine Mrs. Dexter on a horse. I didn’t imagine her using the word
bastard
. But my father, thank God, enters the conversation at this point. He has new-car questions. “I like new cars. What kind of new car?”

The new car is a Lincoln.

Daddy completely approves. He thinks that a Lincoln is the best kind of car. “Didn’t I see you recently? You didn’t tell me you had a Lincoln.”

Mrs. Dexter recomposes herself and smiles at him. She offers him a ride in her car. Now. After breakfast. As soon as Carla has gotten herself out of her pajamas.

I’m not the least bit sure about letting Daddy out for an excursion right now, what with e-mails and traumatic withdrawal episodes, but then I look at his face, washed with pleasure and seeming alive again, and listen to him saying, “Does it have leather seats?” and think that an hour’s drive with an old friend would be good recreation. And Mrs. Dexter, although crotchety, is reliable. I don’t question her motives, the way I do Mrs. La Salle’s.

“I’m going to eat breakfast with you,” Mrs. Dexter announces, obviously making a concession. “Go ahead now, Carla, get dressed.”

Over French toast Mrs. Dexter mellows into conversation and talks about the horse who kicked her. “Burly old brute. Just like my uncle, who owned his dam. My uncle lived here, you know.”

“You told me earlier.”

“In this house. He was rich. He lived
here
, in the Manor.” I look around me, at the high ceilings, chandeliers, redwood walls. “It seems so overwhelming. So institutional.”

“Always did. He was filthy, and he was filthy rich, and he owned the Manor. We were his poor relations. Used to come over here to play. And sometimes ride. It was a role we acted, poor relations. And he did the rich act . . . Pulled out all the stops . . . Lord of the Manor. Edward, are you almost ready?”

“Kicked by a horse,” my father says. “That would be hard on the
ka.
”

Mrs. Dexter asks, “But did they have horses in ancient Egypt?”

“Of course they did. I would like another piece of French toast.”

I’ve been wanting to congratulate Mrs. Dexter on her purple suit with the fur collar, which looks new, but she glares at me so peremptorily that I decide to stuff it.

 
 
“They have an exhibit on California history,” she says after breakfast; she’s speaking of the Conestoga Library. “That’ll interest you, won’t it, Edward? Things they dug up, like arrowheads, pots?”

“Perhaps.” He seems more interested in the car and its leather upholstery. He climbs in and leans his head back. “I need this drive. I have serious concerns. Things to travel to.”

I start to tell Mrs. Dexter to be careful with him, to watch him, and then don’t say it. I start to caution that he’s been feeling bad lately, and don’t do that, either. “Call me as soon as you get back?”

And she snaps, “Of course.” She backs up in a whirl of dust; she’s a decisive, if demonstrative, driver.

 
 
And I go off to work only about one-eighth there. I’m worried about us. I’ve decided, maybe during the night, maybe while I was asleep, the way you sometimes decide such things, that Rob has been right all along and that my father and I absolutely need to get out of here. Are we in danger now? Is my father in danger now? How much of a real threat is a mean, nasty note? Should we, today, pack up a little stuff and call Henry the cabdriver? “Yes, of course,” I tell Mrs. Cohen, “I’ll get a new inhaler for you. Coming right up.” Noble of me to come to work this morning, but I hate to leave the old people stranded before they even get out of their bathrobes.

Maybe I can borrow Mrs. Dexter’s Lincoln to exit the Manor. Maybe I can steal the doctor’s Miata. The point is, make a plan, a simple, step-by-step plan, and leave.