Murder Never Forgets (10 page)

Chapter 8

Daddy has said, “A party, darling! How very, very nice!” He’s not exactly sure what a beauty parlor is. “A place of beauty, dear? Many places are beautiful.” When I say it’s where you have your hair washed and set, he looks completely lost. I don’t think Constancia ever did anything to her hair except to lather it up under the shower. After which it emerged looking great.

“My good suit,” my father says, sliding his closet door open, “the one we got for me in—where was it?”

“Alexandria.”

He agrees, “Yes, of course, just as I thought. And what will you wear?”

I get into the spirit of things. “My purple shirt.”

The purple shirt is one Susie gave me for her Beltane festival. Susie thought Beltane was a rebirth celebration; she didn’t listen to the rumors about blood and sacrifice. The shirt has sequins across the front in a moon-and-stars pattern.

Daddy is pleased by it. “Mythic,” and holds my hand as we walk across the courtyard to a door with a banner proclaiming: CELEBRATE! DRAWING FOR A FREE SHAMPOO!

The beauty parlor, like the hospital, is mostly pink formica, but someone has been sufficiently knowing to add bits of Victorian nonsense; there is a fluted white molding and some scalloping, and every so often an occasional angel or winged being pasted in bas relief against the pink wall. Sandwiches, soft drinks, and white wine are lined up on a long sterilely wrapped table in front of the dryers.

Mrs. La Salle is present, sheathed in gray satin so crisp it could stand up by itself; she’s stationed near a sandwich platter. “Olive and pimento,” she says. “I truly hate those angels. Tell me honestly. Did you ever go to a party in a beauty parlor?”

“Beauty, did you say that, Carla? Yes, you did.” Daddy looks pleased. “In Egypt, there were beauty procedures at parties. They put cones of fatty incense on their foreheads and allowed them to melt.” He eyes one of Mrs. La Salle’s sandwiches and moves his face close for a bite.

“You are an innocent man,” she holds the sandwich steady. “I wonder, were you always so innocent?”

“My dear, ripeness is all. That’s a line by Shakespeare . . .” He thinks about this for a minute. “Also, ‘That time of year thou mays’t in me . . . ’” he winds down, looking pleased.

I don’t like this quoting-and-smiling approach he’s adopting here, it demeans him. Also, he’s beginning to get it wrong. I change the subject: “How about a 7 Up?” He comes back firmly with, “White wine,” so I try a counter-offer, “Diet Coke,” and he goes, “White wine,” again, at which we seem to be stalemated until Mrs. La Salle intervenes, “Carla, now, think.
One
wine won’t make any difference.” She’s right, of course. Sometimes I can feel myself being bossy, as if Aunt Crystal has planted a Crystal-chip in my brain.

I have a wine, too.
Relax
, I advise my inner me, and sip, and remember how, in Santa Cruz, Robbie and I kept a cardboard container of industrial-grade Beaujolais under the kitchen table.

Those were good years, even if the drinks were terrible.

Daddy and I, he with his wineglass held high, start our progress through the room. He smiles, he sips, he starts an imitation of his old true-blue self, Dr. Day, archaeologist-scholar. “How nice of you to come,” this to a lady in pink, apparently a perfect stranger.

Hospital Aide Mona is here, her peroxided hair up to one side and fastened with a green parakeet clip; she’s wearing a purple cloak that must have been bought at the same moon-and-stars bazaar as my T-shirt. I point at the two moon designs, and she bats her eyes confusedly. “Oh, you mean my Astarte cape? Hey, sure. Isn’t this a
great
event.” She looks at me big-eyed and beseeching, as if saying
Please forget our conversation
, and then gives herself a minute to flutter at Daddy. “And the
dear
professor.”

Mona is pretty creepy. She’s like the little girl in your kindergarten class that tagged around after you, acting as if someone were going to hit her.

Daddy seems to kind of recognize her; he examines her carefully and then looks beyond, over her shoulder, maybe searching for something else. “My dear.”

“That woman,” he asks, as we are leaving her, “does she have a belt with scissors on it?”

A belt with scissors sounds like something a hospital aide might have.

I agree, “Probably.”

Mrs. Dexter is at the far end of the next room, propped beside the door and squinting up at Mrs. Sisal, who is skinny and New York-chic in a metallic sweater and orange scarf. Daddy and I start moving toward them, but there’s a traffic jam; some clients want out, some want in, and some just stand around, looking helpless.

“What are they waiting for?” my father asks. “Is a train coming?”

“It’s a party, Daddy. Remember?”

“A party in a train station. Did you get my ticket?”

He asks about the ticket twice as we maneuver and push and say, “Excuse me,” but when we reach Mrs. Dexter, he’s once again the cordial greeter. “My dear. So good. Thank you for the cookies.”

Mrs. Sisal has disappeared.

“I remembered you liked chocolate chip.” Mrs. Dexter has decided to be marginally polite to me again. “How are you, Carla?”

I say I’m fine. “Did you really bake cookies?”

She’s defensive. “You can cook perfectly well with a walker, you just line the ingredients up on that little shelf in front . . . Hello, Sally,” this is to Mrs. Cohen, who has come up behind me. “Isn’t this
ridiculous
?”

Tonight Mrs. Cohen has a camellia in her hair. “Why, Louise, here we are, all my favorite people. Edward, how are you?”

“I forget. Carla, may I have my . . .” He pauses and clears his throat, “my
drink
back?”

He’s lost it somewhere on our journey through the room. I’d give him mine, except that I’ve just finished it. One look at his face tells me this will be an issue. Sometimes, especially when something’s lost, he needs to talk about it for twenty minutes. “
I’ll
get it,” I say, and head back toward the drinks table. If I fetch the glass myself, I can control how much goes into it. Or even add some water.

I think,
Please don’t start talking about fishing nets. Another wine could start you up
.

When I get back, the group has been joined by Dr. Kittredge, shoulders straight in a navy blue cashmere jacket with brass buttons.

My father is singing. “‘Oh, yes, I’m sick, I’m very sick. And I never will be better.’” He has found another wine glass, a mostly empty one, and is keeping time with it. He doesn’t sing loudly; his voice is sweet and not obnoxious, and the whole display is only slightly disturbing and slightly embarrassing. He seems to be aiming his song at Dr. Kittredge.

“Ah, sure,” Kittredge says. “I haven’t heard that one for a while.”

“‘Until I have . . .’” my father sings. His face crumples; he hands the empty glass to Mrs. Dexter and says, “I have forgotten the rest.”

“You’re tired,” Dr. Kittredge says. “That’s what it is. Tired. Totally expected.”

“Poor man.” The painting teacher, Ms. Deirdre Chaundy, has arrived beside the doctor, and she thrusts out her marvelous bosom under a festoon of amber beads. “Too much on your mind. Such a talented man,” in an aside to everybody; “His history . . . so interesting.”

Daddy looks at the doctor and smiles uncertainly. Maybe he’s afraid of Dr. Kittredge, which makes sense. I’m afraid of him right now, since he’s a doctor and probably can decide on whether my father goes to Hope House with the other loonies or remains here in coddled comfort. And now Daddy is acting irrational. “The rest of that song?” he asks. “Until I something . . . something?” His voice is getting louder. “
Carla?
”

Surprise, Dr. Kittredge is the one who supplies the missing line: “‘Until I have the love of one,’ Dr. Day.” He hums a bar or so. “Ah, the songs of our youth.” Daddy’s song is “Barbry Allen,” a folk piece that got revived in the sixties; I guess the doctor’s youth happened around that time, too. He beams at me, glass in his hand, stomach out, feet apart, handsome Irish head cocked. Maybe he’s trying to figure out just how goofy Edward Day really is.

“‘Until I have the love of one,’” Daddy tries this in a sweet tenor. Then his face crumples, and his voice begins to rise, “How can that be? It doesn’t seem possible.”

“Oh.” He stares at me. “There was a time when I knew everything, everything I needed to know. Carla, remember, in Egypt, in the City of the Dead, when we found the coffin lid. It was like a window into another world. I’d been up for three nights, waiting to get the container opened. And the desert around us, and the stars, and down at the silent dead city just a few flickers of torches from people camped, and the white fronts of the small buildings . . .

“Oh, I used to be able to understand, but now I do not . . . I do not . . .”

Of course, he’s about to say
understand
again, but he doesn’t get the chance. I move forward, a new drink extended like a lure, and put my arm around him and get him turned toward the door. “It’s hot,” I call back to our friends, “we need to get outside,” and then we’re through the passageway and into the evening garden and safe out of there at least for this minute.

Chapter 9

Once in the garden, silence and peace reign. There is a thousand-watt moon and several traveling rivers of fog. Palm trees dazzle in the mixture of fog and moonlight, showing off their feathery arched boughs. The path ahead glimmers between its rows of white rocks, showing the road like paint-by-numbers.

My father stands still for a couple of minutes to look at this heady mixture of nature and art. He takes several deep, ostentatious breaths. Then he heads off, lickety-split, across the savannah. Running full speed into the lunar-splashed fog.

Rob and I used to have a cat that did that on moonlit nights. Dashed madly away, in a declaration for feline freedom. But it’s one thing when it’s your cat and you can laugh and bless him with, “Run, Tiger, run,” and another thing entirely if it’s your aged, dotty father.

You wouldn’t think an eighty-five-year-old gentleman could outrun his twenty-five-year-old daughter, but he can if he gets a head start and she’s asleep on her feet. Daddy and I cover a lot of fog-splashed garden territory, with me trailing along behind, calling, “Daddy! Watch out! Go slow!” And so on and so forth. I even have a moment to think that this would be funny if I had a sense of humor.

He has reached the far edge of the Manor property down by the highway before I catch up with him. He’s sitting against a manzanita bush. He has lost his wineglass and one shoe. He stares up at me, moonglow highlighting his rebellious old face.

I ask, “Are you hurt?”

He’s not even breathing hard. “Not at all. Are you?”

“You fell. Here, hold up your foot. Flex, flex.”

He doesn’t want to flex for me. “I’m fine. Aren’tIagood runner?”

“I’m taking you by the hospital.” Belle told me that last January he broke a finger, and no one knew about it for almost a week. “Doesn’t complain,” Belle said, admiringly. “Phenomenal.”

I scramble around behind him, next to him, and find the shoe. “But I can tie my own shoes,” he says, incensed.

“Come on. Up we get. Hup.”

He doesn’t want to hup. He wants to sit in his manzanita bush and look at the celestial orb, which is coming and going behind its fog cover.

“Up we get. What did you do with your wineglass?”

“I have had a very interesting e-mail.”

You aren’t supposed to attempt logical argument with an Alzheimer’s patient; the person isn’t logical and will just get confused. I immediately breach this sensible rule. “You don’t
have
a computer.”

“Of course not. This e-mail saluted me as ‘O, Powerful King.’ Don’t you think that’s nice?”

“You are limping,” I accuse. “Where did you lose that wineglass?”

We are walking, moderately steadily, following the paint-by-numbers.

A field ahead is the place where, he says, the wineglass got dropped.

“Here? You remember?”

He gestures at an anonymous-looking plant. “I noticed. By the aloe bush.”

So I start feeling around by the aloe bush. Maybe he noticed it especially because the Egyptians used aloe face creams. And me? Probably I’m being so compulsive because I want to teach him a lesson.

No question, I’m mad at him. Why does he have to pick tonight for a full demonstration of his Aged Adorable Delinquent Parent act? “Stand still,” I command. “Don’t get any more ideas. Stay exactly where you are.”

“Carly,” he says. He’s standing on the path behind me a little to the left; there’s a curious alert note in his voice.

“Yes?”

“Someone is
sleeping
here.”

Sleeping? I get up. I start to put an arm around him, but he doesn’t seem to need that. His voice is tight in what I think of as his “archaeology-discovery” tone, the one used for: “This is the entrance to a tomb.” “Shoes,” he says. “Nice ones.”