Murder Never Forgets (8 page)

Something tells me that knowledge is dangerous around here.

“Listen, Mona, I
don’t
understand you. I don’t get it. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

It’s obvious she doesn’t believe me. She stares in disappointment. She says, “Boy, I thought you’d be more upfront than this.” She broods for a while. “Listen,” she says finally, “when you hear . . . ’cause I know you’re gonna hear . . . bound to . . . well . . . tell them I didn’t mean it. You know how that is. Didn’t mean it at all.”

“Mona,” I say; I’m going to grab her with a question while she’s here and obviously upset—strike while the iron is hot, so to speak—“Mona, do you know something about Mrs. Dexter and that oyster? And what about—” she’s halfway out the door now, so I have to raise my voice, “what about my dad? Someone’s been getting him upset; who’s been doing that?”

Mona leans against the door and says, “Oh, my gaw, my gaw.” She adds, “Things are kinda different from what they look. I guess you know all that, though. Oh, geez, is this gonna be a
mess
!” Then she exits, head turned, arm flapping vaguely. Out in the hall, she stares back at me with mascara-smeared eyes, making me want to reach out firmly and shake her. But also partly making me wish there were something reassuring I could say.

Chapter 6

I’ve decided I’ll take advantage of some of the stuff described in the Manor’s enthusiastic brochure
Your Way to a New Life
and go with Daddy to a watercolor class. Maybe I’ll learn something. And maybe keep my father from any more descriptions of the eye of Horus. I have a suspicion that aides aren’t encouraged to take landscape painting classes, but until someone specifically tells me I can’t, I’m going to try.

“Landscape painting,” Belle says, “yeah, sure, why not? Sisal more or less lets you do anything you want, right?”

Belle still thinks I’m an Observer.

 
 
The painting class gets assembled on a bright, green breezy field, seven of us lined up on folding metal chairs among the scatters of poppy and dandelion and wild blue iris. Everybody receives some watercolor cubes and an easel plus a handful of pastel chalk crayons. Paint jars are strategically positioned.

“They come off on your hands,” Daddy says of the pastels; he looks at his blue-streaked palm, then presses it against his blank paper to make a handprint. “Arabic,” he announces pleasedly, “for good luck.”

“Our job,” the painting teacher is saying, “is to capture into ourselves the essence of this beautiful scene, the spirit of sea. And sun. And coast.” The teacher is Ms. Deirdre Chaundy who, along with Mrs. Sisal and Dr. Kittredge, makes up the Resident Manor Directors. Ms. Chaundy is a pop-eyed Norse-goddess type with an admirable bust and a sheaf of blonde hair; she looks as if she came off the prow of a ship.

She half-turns her metal chair in order to lecture us. “Please,” she advises, “sit back. Do not stress, don’t strain. Surrender yourselves to the scene.” Everyone does this,
plop
,
plop
of shoulders against chair backs. People that tell you what to do with your body often get obeyed. “You have the powers,” she broadcasts. “You can do it. Get in touch. And do not,
do not
attempt to paint yet.” She scowls at Daddy’s handprint.

There are a lot of ladies like Ms. Chaundy in Berkeley. They are always coming around to your house or your school and wanting to teach you something you can do with string or clay or autumn leaves. Susie knows all of them and is tolerant: “They provide good energy,” is how she puts it.

Ms. Chaundy wears a chiffon scarf around her neck and projects her words distinctly: “Lean
for
ward. Lean
back
. Life force. Coursing. Joining with the roots of trees, the pathways of rivers.”

She asks us to close our eyes and reach down into those tree roots toward our hidden inner powers.

It’s difficult to do this leaning back in a metal chair balanced on meadow grass. The chair legs are uncertain; your balance gets loused up. Also, I have a perverse need to look at the other people from under my half-closed eyes and figure out how they’re doing.

Daddy sits beside me, his head on his chest; he looks as if he’s fallen asleep. Next to him is Mrs. Dexter, released from the hospital, healthy and irritated, with her walker balanced against the side of her chair. She, like me, is being bad; her eyes are open, and she’s watching some black-and-white ducklike birds on the tufted meadow edge.

The meadow edge is fenced and (I ascertain all this by continuing to peek) directly overhangs a big slice of ocean.

“Now,” Ms. Chaundy says. “Open your eyes. Slowly. Return to this beautiful world. You have your powers; you are ready. Paint!” Her scarf flips back in the breeze; she spreads her arms wide. I’m waiting for her to tip her chair over, but she doesn’t; she has a good sense of balance.

Daddy hasn’t been asleep. He sits up and says, “Interesting. Did you think so?” and starts arranging his pastels on the easel tray. Pastels, in spite of their soft-sounding name, come in brilliant colors, and my father marches them along his tray in a brisk sequential rainbow.

Mrs. Dexter squints at the teacher. “Utterly ridiculous.” She makes a ritual of wearily unwrapping her paintbrush. “Would you fill my paint jar, please,” she asks generally of our circle; she’s still mad at me and won’t ask me to do this. And her stiffness prevents her getting down there with the water pitcher.

Daddy rips off his handprint page and draws a blue line across the middle of a fresh sheet.

On my left is Mrs. Cohen, the lady with the elf on her door, bubbly as always; she’s having a good day with easier breathing; she has a red scarf tied around her black-and-gray hair.

“This teacher is enthusiastic,” Mrs. Cohen tells me now. “Enthusiasm is half the battle, don’t you think? And creation is a battle, don’t you think?” She sloshes her paintbrush in her water jar.

The other person here from my corridor is Mrs. La Salle, the third of my father’s fans, who looks especially elegant today with a gold Hermès scarf carelessly knotted at her throat. “I simply close my ears,” she whispers. “Pretend it’s bees or birds. I do that with half the things people say.” She examines her page. “I would like a pencil so I could outline shapes, neatly, the way I like, and then color in the middle of them, also the way I like, but I know this teacher would disapprove; she’d give me an intolerable speech about how a pencil stifles your hidden powers.”

“You bet,” Mrs. Dexter agrees. She’s using yellow paint to sketch in a recognizable bluff-edge with silhouetted tufts of yellow grass.

I have decided to go abstract. Abstract, if I do it right, with just a hint of shape behind the colors, might capture some of the strangeness of this bright scene and our peculiar little class.

There are several moments of silence while we all dip and dribble. Daddy is using both pastel and watercolor; he’s the only one trying this, a tricky process, because pastels smear when they get wet. But my father is actually an accomplished artist; all archaeologists have to learn to record their finds by drawing them.

“I wonder,” Mrs. La Salle says to Mrs. Dexter, “this moment seems so peaceful that it’s hard to imagine bad things, but do you remember my theory? That our accidents are caused by a mad old lady?”

“No,” Mrs. Dexter is applying paint in heavy blobs. “It was just accidents.”

I’ve been wondering if Mrs. Dexter has talked frankly to her friends since she got out of the hospital, but I guess not.

“I don’t understand you, Louise,” Mrs. La Salle says. “I hope you’re getting a lawyer.” Mrs. Cohen joins the discussion with “Lawyers, my goodness. And lawsuits. The Manor is in for
trouble
. Everyone is talking lawyers. And leaving. Because of the accidents. You know, the Manor’d be better off offering cash settlements—some of those suits are going to be big-time. Did you hear about Mrs. Goliard? Carla, this Mrs. Goliard—you don’t know her, she’s the lady that went out the window—Mrs. Goliard has one of the lawyers from the O.J. case.”

We’re briefly silent in tribute to this.

“Lawsuits all over the place,” Mrs. Cohen says, with her usual enthusiasm. “Big time. All the way back to the beauty parlor fire.”

Everyone wants to tell me about the beauty parlor fire. “Seven months ago,” Mrs. La Salle says, “and in retrospect, yes, it was the first of the series of unusual events. But when something’s the first of a series, you don’t know that then, do you? What about it, Louise?”

Mrs. Dexter just grunts.

The other ladies apparently haven’t noticed that Mrs. Dexter falls silent during these accident discussions.

“I
do
think it was a mad old lady,” Mrs. La Salle says. “So easy to lose your bearings around here.
You’ve
noticed that, Carla.”

Our next moment of quiet is broken by Mrs. Cohen, who suddenly points at my father’s easel and cries out, “Why, my goodness. Why, look. Edward, your painting, that is
amazing
, it’s so real, so imaginative. Look, everybody, come see what he’s done!” She’s half out of her chair, her gray-black hair ruffled by the breeze, and pointing at Daddy’s now-filled page, a scramble of bright chalk colors, all the right yellows and blues for this vivid day. It’s a recognizable picture of our landscape; here’s the meadow with its clumps of wildflower and grass. But there’s more than our landscape in his picture; by a miracle of extended perspective he’s made his view stretch over the bluff edge, which is unfenced in his picture, and down to a beach below, bounded by three conical rocks. Of course there isn’t any beach below and also no rocks like that, as I’ve just determined by squinting at the view during our meditation session, but in Daddy’s picture there is a beach and conical rocks, and on it is laid, arms wrapped against its sides, a mummylike figure, trussed and crisscrossed with yellow stripes. My father has used a bright yellow crayon for the stripes. I know right away who the figure is; I recognize her. It’s his woman in the net.

I think,
Oh, Jesus Christ
.

In the corner, where the artist’s signature might be, Daddy has drawn the Eye of Horus, wide-open, staring, and with marks below that look like running feet.

I didn’t, I tell myself, want him to do something like that.

He sees it so clearly that he draws a picture of it. The bluff, here in his picture, was another bluff, and a different prospect below, but he still sees it bright and true; doesn’t that mean it really happened? I don’t think your imagination works like that, to supply all those physical details . . . Especially if you’re an old gentleman with Alzheimer’s . . .

The Manor ladies are standing up now, exclaiming. My father is a favorite; they want to give him praise. “My goodness.” “So interesting.” “So odd.” “It suggests something. Edward, do you want to explain?”

Daddy says, “I’ve painted a lot, you know.” He says, “I saw her.” He seems a little troubled by the praise.

Ms. Chaundy is coming over to see; she picks her way regally between the grass clumps; she stops, she looks down at Daddy’s picture, she says, “My word.”

There’s a pause while she pulls on the trailing end of her scarf, then she remarks, “
Quite
surprising.”

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Mrs. Cohen asks. “I mean, really, really good.”

“Yes,” agrees Ms. Chaundy. And after a minute she elaborates, “Absolutely. A work of . . . of the imagination? Tell me, Dr. Day, of the inner spirit?”

“I’ve painted a good deal,” my father says. “I like these crayons,” he adds in a confidential tone. “They’re good for difficult subjects.”

Ms. Chaundy starts to say, “A welling up of the . . .” and then stops. She asks, “Your inner powers sent you this scene?”

Daddy shakes his head. “The yellow’s not exactly right.”

“Such an
original
scene,” she says. She levels her shoulders and adjusts the scarf; she moves away to examine Mrs. Cohen’s shakily indicated bluff and wildflowers; she says they show “the beginning of the life force.”

“But not,” Mrs. Cohen intervenes, “as good as Edward’s. Nowhere near. That picture is
remarkable
.”

I’ve been fighting a revelation in my chest that’s like one of our upsurges of ocean waves. This idea lodges behind my lungs and is cramping my breathing; I’m thinking thoughts at Daddy that all have behind them the idea
danger
, and all start with the word
please
. Please be careful. Please forget about your net-woman. Please stop, stop. This is going to turn out dangerous. Please, darling, no more pictures, no more talk about a woman in a net; try to give it up now, oh, will you?

 
 
On the way back to the Manor, I fall into step beside Mrs. Cohen. Maybe what I need right now is frank publicity for some of what I know. I don’t know anything as dangerous as my father maybe does, not as bad as what he has, if all those ramblings about the woman in the net are fact-based. But any secret information is dangerous. It can trip you up, or somebody can decide they’ve got to have it. I want to make my information about the piece of glass un-secret.