Murder Never Forgets (26 page)

I’m not helped by meeting Ms. Deirdre Chaundy in the hall, poking through the bottles on the prescription shelf of my cart. I say, “Hey, good morning Ms. Chaundy, what’s up?” and she says, not turning a hair, of which she has plenty (and this big fat teutonic braid down the middle of her back), “Good morning, my dear, I was simply wondering what exactly got onto these carts. I am a director of the Manor, you know, and I thought I should be more informed about what goes on every day; the daily experience is so important, isn’t it? Such a responsibility for
you,
the aides, having serious medications for the patients out here in the hall. Unsupervised.”

“Yes, indeed,” I say heartily, as if she’s just given me a compliment, although what she has done is to adroitly turn a situation where she’s been caught snooping into one where she accuses me of laxity.

“Great that you should want to investigate,” I say, recouping some control of the conversation. And she comes back, “You know, I think about that strange, strange picture of your father’s. Such an example of, well, disturbance, don’t you think? How is he now? Is he better?”

Ms. Chaundy and I smile at each other, lips stretched and lots of teeth, and I tell her, “Oh, my goodness, I have to get back to my rounds.”

 
 
Finally I’m done and on my way down to Mrs. Sisal’s office where I’ll find out what she thought she wanted yesterday. She was pretty insistent. She needed to see me. A lot has happened since then, so the tense tone in her voice has faded from my memory, but now it comes back. Insistent: “You and I should talk . . . It is important.” Amazing, Sisal confiding in me. Everybody’s changing lately.

Well, one thing I’ll do; I’ll tell her I’m taking the afternoon off. Maybe the rest of my life off. I won’t ask her; I’ll tell her. My father is being persecuted and has episodes and needs me, but I won’t say that, either. I need me and I’m quitting and I won’t tell her that, too. If seeing her drunk yesterday doesn’t give me some extra perks, what does?

Mrs. Sisal’s door is partially open, and I push it in and enter, full of determination. Her office contains a wide official-looking desk which faces the door; behind it, with its back to the window, is her chair, also facing the door. There are various oriental rugs and books and pictures and mahogany bookcases. To the left is the cubicle where Rebecca does her typing; that’s empty now. A handsome bay window behind the desk throws too much light on everything and makes it hard to see. I stand for a minute, blinking.

But after my sight adjusts I still find it hard to see. Mrs. Sisal seems to be here. In her chair. She seems to be asleep, head on the desk. She’s turned to the left, cheek against the desktop, one hand beside it, fingers outspread against the desktop. She wears a spray of red geraniums in her hair. No, they’re red orchids. How peculiar, how un-Sisal-like. I give the image a minute to subside.

There’s a funny smell.

Orchids. Geraniums. Some red flower. Mrs. Sisal has a red rose over her ear. Some flower or other.

I step forward. Confirming what I knew all along, really. Not red orchids or geraniums. Mrs. Sisal lies with her head on her desk and a blossom of blood above her ear. More blood, a trail of it, is down her cheek. Her half-open mouth has oozed a path of silvery drool onto the desk surface, the eye that’s visible stares, wide open, canted up, a blue iris with red lines across the sclera, lashes stuck high, gaze aimed at the ceiling. There’s a big splash of blood and some other stuff behind her head, on the other side. And there’s a heavy, throat-clenching smell.

I know that smell; we had to get used to it in the animal lab. Sometimes the just-killed animal lets go the contents of its bowel and bladder. Poor Mrs. Sisal, so elegant and precise.

I start reciting a mantra.
No, no
. And,
You won’t
.

No, you won’t be sick. No, you won’t throw up. You won’t throw up, you won’t pass out. You won’t let the walls go black. You will stand here until your hands and ankles stop shaking. Your fingers will be okay. Move your fingers. Your head is starting to clear. You can stand okay. You can think. Try to think.

I can stand without starting to fall over.

I can think about what to do.

I am not going to call the sheriff.

I am not going to page Rebecca.

I am going to get out of here.

I reach to feel the pulse in Mrs. Sisal’s outstretched arm. There is no pulse.

Again, I repeat, I am getting out of here; I am not telling the sheriff I was here. I am in enough trouble already. If the sheriff knew I had discovered Mrs. Sisal, he would be suspicious. He would draw conclusions about me and my connection to the deaths at the Manor. He would put me and my father on a short leash, and he would keep us around forever as witnesses.

And my father and I are getting out of here. We’re leaving the Manor. We are going to do this now.

I concentrate on removing all traces of me from this room.

I’ve seen enough movies to know the usual things. I don’t think her wrist will show my fingerprints. Maybe I touched the desk; I wipe the edge of it with my shirt sleeve.

I pull the sleeve over my hand to open the door and use it to polish the doorknob. I back into the hall. There’s no one there. I polish the outside doorknob. Then I go away, fast but not too fast, toward my cubbyhole room.

I think I’ve just committed a crime, that of fleeing the scene of a crime.

I liked Mrs. Sisal. Well, sort of liked her. I had gotten used to her and admired her and thought she was a classy dresser.

Nothing about her made me think I was going to find her dead.

The sheriff and the murderer would both be interested.

The sheriff would be deeply interested if he knew that I’d found Mrs. Sisal’s lifeless body. Did I check on that thoroughly? Do I know for sure that no little spark of life lingered in her? No, I don’t. Refusing to give aid to a dying person. That may be my big crime, probably a worse one than fleeing the scene.

The murderer would like it that I fled the scene. He/she wants me to be scared. He/she wants to scare me first, so I’ll be ready to give up whatever information I’ve got that I don’t know I have. After that, he/she will kill me.

I start to do a little chorus in my head of “Oh, good God, good God,” and then stop myself. I don’t have time for that.

 
 
There are several halls and stairways before my room. I remember not to run. I move circumspectly, turn corners carefully. I’ve stopped shaking. I watch my feet; they’re moving okay. There’s a clot of something rancid stuck halfway up my gullet. I swallow hard. No. I’m not going to be sick.

The picture of Mrs. Sisal with her head on her desk and part of her scalp blotted by a red blood-flower and a trail of drool across the desk follows me. It’s traveling along with me.

 
 
My phone, which is stashed in my pocket, rings. It’s Mrs. Dexter. I have trouble figuring this out at first, and then I realize, yes, okay, Mrs. Dexter. Here, on my phone. She’s calling me about my dad. She said she’d do that. She probably has him back in the Manor now.

But she sounds upset, not at all like herself. “Well, I am sorry,” she’s saying, “I just can’t explain it. He wanted something or other. He’s so vague, you know. I couldn’t figure out what he wanted. Something about a cue? A koo? He wouldn’t explain, and I couldn’t persuade him. He insisted. He got quite frantic. So I stopped and let him out. And then when I’d reparked the car—we were on a blind curve—I don’t know how to say this . . . it’s hard to believe. After I got out he wasn’t there.”

I lean against a chunk of tapestried wall with a gold-framed picture on either side of me and try to understand.

“I went back and forth,” she says. “It was hard, of course, with the walker. I went down some lanes, as far as a couple of fences . . . all of that, several times. I don’t see how it’s possible, but he wasn’t there. He just disappeared.”

I’m beginning to get this.

Mrs. Dexter has lost my father.

She has lost him some place on the highway.

“About a mile from here,” she says. “I’ve looked and looked. I’ve been driving back and forth. I got out and scrambled around on the side of the road . . . with the walker . . . among the bushes . . . for a long time, and nothing. I shouldn’t have let him out, but he was so frantic. I don’t know how to explain it, how could he just vanish?”

To my surprise, my mind seems to be working. I tell Mrs. Dexter that I will handle it. I hang up. I lean against the wall.

I think I understand the situation.

It’s simple.

Two things have happened. Mrs. Sisal has been murdered and my father has disappeared.

The sheriff is going to be here in a few minutes, as soon as somebody else blunders in on Mrs. Sisal’s body with the blood-orchid across her scalp.

The sheriff is going to do a lockdown. No one will leave the Manor.

My jobs are simple. First I have to get out of here, and second I have to find my father. Those are direct and basic tasks.

I rest my shoulder against the wall for a while longer. Time is closing in.

Chapter 21

Henry the cabdriver and I are in Henry’s taxi; we are driving toward the Conestoga bus station. I haven’t told Henry that we’ll be going there slowly and looking for my father along the way, but that’s what we’re doing, and Henry seems to understand. “You think he got off and explored?” Henry asks. “Wonderful old gent. Loves to explore.”

We take two hours and twenty minutes for the half-hour trip. We make stops at Ms. Chaundy’s painting meadow, at the meadow with the picnic tables, at the meadow from which Daddy observed them slowly and quietly murder my aunt, at several other fields and lanes, at one abandoned farmhouse. And no trace of a lost old man. “Wants to be off on his own,” Henry surmises. “Independent old gent.”

I’m clutching a piece of paper that I found in Daddy’s room along with a Greyhound bus schedule. “The Eye has been broached,” it says. “The
khus
have fallen into darkness.” This is in his own handwriting, some of which is quite legible, almost normal. I guess he wrote it just before he went off with Mrs. Dexter.

In addition to the bus schedule and the note, there’s a map of the town of Conestoga. All of this makes me think that Conestoga, especially Conestoga’s bus station, is a good place to start looking for him.

I hold Daddy’s note in my hand and crumple it. I recite the facts: Mrs. Sisal is murdered. My father is lost. The
khus
are fallen. My father is in danger. I’m in danger.

Who did all this? Dr. Kittredge. He’s the one I should watch out for. Kittredge perfectly fits the profile of my murderer. Strong. Good eyesight. Good physical shape. In on everything at the Manor. Smarming up to me. He would have known when to shoot Mrs. Sisal, what it was she wanted to tell me. He knew how to break Mona’s neck.

After a lot of palaver, Henry agrees to let me off in front of the bus station. He doesn’t want to. He wants to go in with me, help me, offer advice: “Nice old gent. I understand.” I have a hard time dissuading Henry, but I finally succeed. Because he’s so anxious to help, I give him a note for the sheriff saying I’m in Conestoga. Suddenly, I’m developing some sense; I want the world to know where I am.

 
 
An hour later, where I am is down at the end of Conestoga’s main street, turning into an alley. I’ve been to the bus station, the diner, the library, the bakery, the drugstore.
Have you seen an old gentleman, very polite? He gets confused. He was
wearing a tweed suit and vest. He might ask
. . . Here I run into trouble, imagining what he might ask. (In the bus station, maybe: “Where do I catch the bus to Haifa? To Jeddah?”) But no one in the bus station remembers him at all. (In the library: “Have you a book on the
khus
?”) The librarian frowns, chomps the end of her pencil, thinks maybe she remembers an old gentleman who wandered quietly, touching the spines of books and murmuring; he didn’t ask questions. The bakery lady suddenly remembers him because he bought two currant scones. A neat-looking old gentleman who paid in dollar bills and asked about her mother. “Hey, that was real sweet.”

I have no idea where he got the dollar bills.

And the drugstore lady remembers him well because he wanted to buy the eyedrops display. “Big picture of an eye, it was. He got upset. And he said something about koos? Cues?

“He said something else weird, ‘I need to lie down under a date palm.’ An’ I told him, ‘I don’t think we got any date palms here. That’s farther down the coast.’ But he went off anyway. Maybe down the alley?

“You’ll find him, dear,” she adds. “My grandpa used to do that. Down that alley, that one there. I think I saw him turn.”

The alley has a couple of garages and two pink cottages, and it leads to the backside of Main Street. Across the street from the backside of Main Street stretches an open field with occasional orange splotches; those could be California poppies. There is no date palm, unless you think the oil derrick looks like one.