Murder Never Forgets (2 page)

He tried to send her another spell:
I am one who passes by, pure and
. . . Pure and what? Once again, he couldn’t remember. There must be a spell against forgetting.

Chapter 1

I am working in Susie’s health food store when the call comes from Green Beach Manor.

Susie’s Health Food Store is on the first floor of a small teetering Berkeley building, one of those wooden Victorians that survived the 1923 fire; the inside of the store is either calcined green splintery pine or beat-up oak cabinets with brass pulls. Berkeley health stores aren’t supposed to look glossy or enameled because health, Berkeley-style, is organic; it has crumbs. Susie is the nicest person in the world.

I am standing there holding the phone receiver away from me; it’s one of those movie-era phones with a dial, and I’m going, “Yes, yes, I see,” while at the other end an officious voice recites the ways my father is causing trouble. “He creates diversions. He calls out in the hall. He wanders out into the woods. He is disturbed, Miss Day; I’m sorry to say it, disturbed. He has inappropriate responses. We are considering the quieter auxiliary facility.” And so on for a while, during which I nod, as if the person on the other end can see me, and sigh and make faces at Susie and fiddle with a protein-booster candy wrapper.

Finally I hang up and ask Susie, “What are inappropriate responses? This woman told me, ‘Green Beach Manor is a colony for independently functioning adults.’”

Susie flips a page. She’s a beautiful old hippie with scraggly hair and peasant skirts; she looks up now from scowling nearsightedly into an advertising brochure,
Mother Nature’s Baked Organic Lovies
. “People that say that stuff want to put your ass in a vise.”

“
Auxiliary facility
is not good,” I suggest.

Actually I know about
auxiliary facility
. At Green Beach Manor it means Hope House, which the aides call No Hope House. “For when you forget,” Daddy’s aide told me, tapping the side of her tight gray wiry hairdo. Daddy was afraid of that auxiliary facility. “They make your heart heavy. I think I won’t go there.”

Susie stares at me. “Carla, I’m really, really sorry about Ed.”

Sue knows my dad well; she’s what you might call a good, a very good friend.

All that morning I think, all the time I’m dishing up Rice Dreams and unsticking the chai machine and rearranging the milk cartons to get the oldest ones in the front, and by lunchtime I’ve made up my mind. “I have to go down there. Maybe I can calm him down. Maybe get them to keep him.” Susie, who is packing ice cream using the back of a pancake turner, says, “I was thinking that, too.”

Neither of us talks about how it will be for her if I quit in the middle of the week, because we both know it will be good. Susie doesn’t really need me working mornings in her store. She offered me the job out of purest chivalry and because she thought I needed something to do in a time of crisis, but she can’t really afford to pay me. The store is a hobby, an organic pure-foods missionary enterprise. She’s proud of it, and she loses money on it.

I go home to my basement apartment, which is just down at the shopping center, and when I come back, Susie loads me up with nutritional-advantage health bars and walks me out to the street where I can catch a bus to the Greyhound station.

“Listen,” she says, and then goes, “Oh, hell, Carla,” and kisses me pretty hard and shoves some twenties into my pocket for my this-week’s wages.

We have a little tussle with me saying it’s too much and her saying not enough.

I’ve known Susie all my life; she’s been a neighbor and a kind of aunt, and for a really long time I was in love with her son. That makes a bond, unless it does just the opposite. “Do you know what kind of stuff Ed was doing?” she asks now, “I mean, he
said
something?”

“Something about Egypt.” I’m not going to repeat the exact quote to her; these old hippies tend to be mystical about body parts. What he said, and the Green Beach Manor woman told me unwillingly, “He yelled it out in the hall, Miss Day. Very loud. He said, ‘You whose eye is eaten, you with your heads on backwards, you will not entrap me in your net.’”

Those heads on backwards and eaten eyes really bothered the Green Beach Manor administration.

“Don’t worry about us, Susie; I’ll do something.” I feel pretty sure of myself. I like helping people, and this is a specific job: help your father get calmer, help Green Beach Manor feel less jumpy. Clearly defined tasks, not like the nebulous ones Fate has been throwing at me lately.

Susie and I kiss again and she accepts the key to my apartment. She looks at me doubtfully for a moment, and I’m afraid she’s going to say something about her son Robbie, but she doesn’t. She grins, “Hey, let the goddess shine down on you, darling, okay?” And she adds that she’ll water my two geranium plants.

 
 
I like riding on Greyhound buses; it reminds me of our life before everything got so very complicated, of coming up to Berkeley from Santa Cruz and wondering what my father had been doing while we were playing house. The
we
in this case was me and Susie’s son Robbie; he and I shared a redwood-lined attic and a tin shower above Mrs. Stein’s garage on Ocean Avenue. I was twenty-one years old, Robbie was twenty-four. This happened four years ago, but it seems like more, with everything that has gone on since.

My parents were old when I was born; my father was sixty and my mother, Constancia, pushing forty. (I don’t usually think of her as
my mother
. Constancia was her name, and it suited her, a cold name, esthetic and people-unfriendly.) Constancia was a world-class expert on Phrygian bronze bowls, handsome symmetrical artifacts from the mythical country of Phrygia, someplace in what is now Turkey. When I was ten years old, Constancia went off with a Turkish archaeologist named Dr. Hakim Kasapligl. As far as we know she is still in Turkey with him, tending to an archaeological dig east of Istanbul, dusting off her Phrygian bronzes.

So my father, who is eighty-five by now, has inappropriate responses. And I have gotten to be twenty-five years old. That’s an age at which a lot of people have already started doing
it
, whatever their particular brand of karma is, climbing mountains or selling real estate or writing books on South American Surrealism. I remind myself that I have taken care of my father and gotten A’s in disparate subjects like English Literature and Urban Reorganization and worked for the college animal lab and, most recently, worked for Habitat for Humanity in Baker’s Landing, Tennessee. For now, I should settle back on this bus and think about what to say to the people at Green Beach Manor.

The bus rolls down Highway One, through Pacifica, a damp suburb hanging on to the side of a hill, then along a cliff above the ocean. Electric-red ice plant shines on one side of the road; on the other side surges the slate-blue ocean, as alien and removed as anything can be. I think, there it is; knockout beautiful and it doesn’t know anything about me nor care anything, and that’s a good thing, too. I like that indifference of Nature’s; it makes you feel stronger.

 
 
Daddy is asleep when I arrive in his rooms. He lies on his back in bed with his hands crossed over his chest and his nose pointed at the ceiling. He looks like a crusader on a tomb, perfectly calm, the way the crusader always looks, but with those lines down beside his mouth and horizontally above his nose that might become worry marks when he wakes up. He’s fully dressed in a sweater and vest, with a green chintz quilt tucked in around his legs. I sit on the bed beside him and slip my hand between his two clasped ones. “Hello, darling,” I say, not expecting any answer.

I’m very fond of my father. He did a terrible job of raising me, but he tried. He was vague and affectionate and every so often he would come to and look at me and realize he ought to do something fatherly, and then he would take me along to Egypt for a while.

Right now he opens his eyes. “Why, there you are.” He sounds absolutely all right. But then he sits up and isn’t all right.

“Oh,” he says, bent over, still holding my hand. “You came. I thought, I
hoped
, you’d come.”

“Of course, Daddy. Listen, you look fine.” He doesn’t, but it helps, with him, to pretend.

“We have to go,” he says, “you’ll come with me; of course you will. We need to look for . . .” He lets go of my hand. “We need to find . . . There was a fishing net. And I didn’t help. I didn’t help at all. I did nothing.”

The Alzheimer’s books give you conflicting instructions. “Go with his fantasy.” “Ignore his imaginings; change the subject.” “Get him to
elaborate
on the fantasy.” The books may tell you different things to do, but they’re unanimous in calling the patient
him
, even though most old people are women. Sometimes I do it one way, sometimes another.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I suggest now.

And I put my arms around him, trying to straighten him up. He feels funny, like my father but different, skinny and wiry, a pipe-cleaner man with little ribs poking out from beneath his vest.

“So,” I ask again, “a walk?” He says yes and feels along the edge of the bed for his shoes.

 
 
Green Beach Manor sits on the grounds of a former lumber baron’s estate. After the lumber baron died, his children sold the property to be a model retirement colony, all beams and Norman roofs and views. It’s kept beautifully washed and mowed and trimmed; even the fog shines controlled and glistening. “I will live here myself someday,” my aunt Crystal announced, in the triumphant voice that meant she knew she wouldn’t, and she took Daddy’s money, only a medium amount, and gave it to Green Beach Manor to buy a set of rooms for him. The money was not refundable, and the Manor pledged to take care of him for the rest of his life. But they did not pledge, if he started to go peculiar, to keep him in the elegant part of their establishment.

Of course, Aunt Crystal consulted me about Daddy’s money, but I was busy at Habitat for Humanity doing good for people who weren’t related to me, and I just told her, “Go ahead, spend it, put him in that place. Who cares about money?”

I used to imagine Daddy would come live with me some day, but I didn’t think he’d crumble so suddenly, and I wasn’t counting on my own life getting that confused.

 
 
My father and I pass through a set of double oak doors into a bright blue afternoon where the Manor garden is showing itself off. This garden is lush, green, wet, and both tropical and seacoast. It has palm trees and ice plant, ferns, seacoast rocket and moss. Yes, believe it or not, moss on the ocean side of the palm trees. Someone, a long time ago, worked very hard at the overblown surreal effect; God and the Pacific climate have done the rest. The garden has flourished, flowing down the hill in profusion, up the hill in triumph, as far as the base of the Manor where an assortment of spires and stained glass windows and awkward Manor towers finishes the effect. It looks like Harry Potter’s school, which my father wouldn’t know anything about. Or like Jack-and-the-Beanstalk’s castle.