Tigers in Red Weather (11 page)

Ed handed her a cigarette and pulled out a pack of matches embossed with the words TH
E
HI
DEAWAY
. She put the cigarette to her mouth and felt the dry tobacco stick to her lips. Ed carefully lit the match and moved it slowly toward the end of the cigarette. It wouldn’t light.

“You have to breathe in at the same time I put the match up,” he said.

Daisy did as she was told, watching the end hiss, and then glow brightly.

“It hurts,” she said. She tried to inhale, like she’d seen girls do in Harvard Square, quick hiccups of breath, followed by gray-blue streams flowing evenly between their red lips. But she couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. Anyway, it was bitter and made her feel slightly sick, like when she drank too much coffee. “I don’t think I can finish it.”

Ed was staring down the path.

Daisy tamped the cigarette out against the root, and sat, feeling strange, and a little sad about Tyler. Maybe she could pretend to like it if he asked her. She started kicking at the meadow grass growing up around the tree until she realized it was staining her shoe. Beyond the grass was what looked like a small clearing.

“So where’s this shelter?”

“Over there,” Ed said. “Do you want to see it?”

“Yeah, but then I want to go home and eat deviled eggs.”

Ed led the way past the oak tree, beyond a thicket of honeysuckle, toward the clearing. Off to the side was a wooden shack, buckling under the weight of the humid air and its own decaying wood. It looked like a bus shelter, with a slanting roof and open front, partially obscured from their view.

“Creepy,” Daisy said. “Is this where you hang out all morning?”

“Sometimes.” Ed’s tone was noncommittal.

Daisy walked around the shelter to get a look at it head-on. It was fairly deep, with brambles and some old trash—beer bottles and candy wrappers—peeking out of the recesses.

Along the back, Daisy spotted what looked like a plaid travel rug.

“There’s a picnic blanket, or something, over there,” she said, kicking some dirt in its direction.

Ed came up alongside her and squinted into the shelter.

“Somebody’s been having a picnic in your secret place.”

Ed was silent.

Daisy moved toward the shack until she stood under the roof, peering at the blanket. It was lumpy and stained with something that looked like chocolate sauce. Then she saw the man-of-war, its tentacles oozing out of a moth-eaten corner and squishing up against the back wall. “There’s something under it,” she said, her heart beginning to beat fast. “Maybe somebody’s sleeping.”

Inexplicably, Daisy was suddenly reminded of the man with a face like Walt Disney who had rubbed his private parts when she passed him outside the ladies’ room at Bonwit Teller, his mouth making a perfect
O
, like a fish. She hadn’t mentioned the man to her mother, about how he had grunted and then wet his own pants right outside a bathroom, the small dark stain blooming on the front of his trousers. Instead, she spent five minutes fingering the red Mary Janes in the girls’ shoe section, until her mother relented and bought them for her.

“I don’t think anyone’s sleeping,” Ed said, walking into the shelter, as Daisy began to back away.

“Yes, I think so,” she said. “We should go. I don’t like it here.”

Ed caught her arm, his hand pushing her rope bracelet painfully into her wrist. Daisy stopped moving. Ed took a step toward the humped tartan blanket and, stooping over it, reached out.

“Don’t,” Daisy said, but she felt like she was trying to talk underwater.

Slowly, he raised the rug.

The fathers were called in. Daisy heard her mother on the phone to Cambridge.

“Goddamn it, Hughes. She saw it.”

Her mother paused and Daisy could hear a faint buzz coming from the receiver, her father’s voice.

“Well, they’re not sure. There’s some talk that it may be somebody’s maid. Apparently, she’s one of the Portuguese girls.”

Her mother paused again.

“Well, I didn’t see it,” her mother said, running her ringed fingers through her hair. “No, I didn’t ask her. I don’t know what to do, honestly. You have to come here. And Hughes? You call Avery and you get him on the next goddamn flight out here. No excuses. That boy’s already way too much for his poor mother, and this certainly isn’t going to help.”

Daisy was put in a hot bath with Epsom salts. Her mother sat on the powder-blue toilet, drinking a cup of black coffee and watching her. Daisy wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for and it made her uncomfortable. Should she be crying? After all, a girl was dead. But she didn’t feel like crying. She wanted to talk to Ed about it, but she hadn’t seen him since she had run into the house, flushed and shaking with excitement, tearing through the rooms to find her mother and tell her to call the police.

“Where’s Ed?” Daisy finally asked.

“I don’t know,” her mother said, stirring from the seat and kneeling next to the tub. “We have to wash your hair, too, baby.”

Daisy couldn’t remember the last time her mother had called her that. Had she ever called her “baby”? She couldn’t be sure. But it sounded nice and Daisy surrendered willingly as her mother began to rub the shampoo into her hair, massaging her scalp and wiping back the suds that built up on her hairline.

Her mother turned on the tap and gently pushed Daisy’s head back under the stream of warm water, humming “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” under her breath.

“All done,” she said, holding out a towel to gather her in, like she sometimes did at the beach when Daisy came screaming out of the water, frigid with cold.

Daisy adjusted the towel. Her mother gripped her shoulder and stared at her, but said nothing.

“Let’s get your pajamas on,” she finally suggested, in a forced, cheerful tone.

“It’s only two o’clock, Mummy,” she said.

“Oh, yes.” Her mother laughed. “Well, put on whatever you like, I guess.”

Downstairs, Daisy found her mother in the summer kitchen, staring at a chicken on the counter. Sun streamed through the yellow polka-dotted curtains, making the room look like the inside of a bright lemon.

Her mother stood motionless, both hands gripping the polished wooden counter, peering at the uncooked bird like it might sit up and tell her something important.

“Mummy?” Daisy wondered if this was it. Her mother was finally cracking up like Vivien Leigh.

“Oh.” Her mother turned and smiled. “I was thinking we might have chicken for dinner. When your father gets here, I mean. But I don’t think I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

“No,” Daisy said. Actually, she was starving. She had missed lunch and now it looked like dinner might be off, too.

“Maybe just some sandwiches. Egg salad or cucumber?”

“Egg salad,” Daisy said.

“Darling, would you make Mummy one of those lovely gin and tonics you make so well for Daddy?”

She was in the green sitting room, carefully measuring the gin from the crystal decanter, when she heard the back door slam. She thought it might be Ed. But as she made her way down the hall, glass in hand, she realized it was her aunt who had returned. Daisy stopped where she was, and stood still, listening to the disembodied voices coming from the kitchen.

Little pitchers have big ears
.

“Where was he?” Daisy heard her mother say.

“I found him at the sheriff’s office,” her aunt’s voice replied.

“What on earth was he doing there?”

“Apparently, he was there when the police arrived, with the … the body, the girl, I mean. Why he didn’t run away with Daisy, I don’t know. But then he went ahead and told the policemen he’d been going there for days. He hasn’t been at his tennis lessons, as it turns out.” Here Daisy heard her aunt pause to catch her breath. “And the police took him back to the station so that the sheriff could talk to him and find out if he’d seen anyone suspicious hanging around there.”

“Well, where is he now?” Her mother sounded exasperated.

“He’s still there,” her aunt said. “It was the strangest thing. He wasn’t upset, he wasn’t even happy to see me. He was just sitting in this chair in the sheriff’s office, calm as could be. Well, actually, he was almost smiling. And then he said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother, everything’s going to be fine.’ As if he’d just solved an arithmetic problem instead of finding some poor girl strangled. I’m embarrassed to say, Nick, it chilled me to the bone. My own son. Smiling about a dead girl.”

“Yes,” her mother said in a half whisper.

“And then the sheriff, he said he would be happy to drive him home when Ed had finished helping them. Helping them! How on earth could my twelve-year-old son help them? And then the sheriff winked at me, which I took to mean that this was a boy thing, or something. Is that what it means? I mean, is it a boy thing? Oh, heaven help me. I wish Avery were here.”

“I think we both need a drink,” Daisy’s mother said. “And when Hughes gets here, he’ll know what to do.”

Daisy took her cue to enter the kitchen.

“Here’s your drink, Mummy.”

“Thank you, darling,” her mother said. “Would you mind terribly making a scotch for your aunt, too?”

“Oh, Daisy,” her aunt said, advancing toward her. “Oh, dear girl. You poor, poor thing.”

“I’m all right, Aunt Helena,” Daisy said. Would her words chill them to the bone, too? Should she weep, or swoon like they did in the movies? “I’ll just go get your scotch.”

She did not get the scotch. Instead, she hotfooted it out the front door, with some vague notion of going to the sheriff’s office and demanding the release of her cousin. Although they weren’t really keeping him there, were they? She was working through this thought as she opened the front gate and turned toward Morse Street.

“Hello, Daisy.”

Daisy nearly fainted when she heard her cousin’s voice behind her. “Hell’s bells, Ed Lewis. You really scared me. Where did you come from?”

“I was hiding out here,” Ed said calmly, “waiting for you.”

Daisy held her hand over her heart, as if that would slow the beating. And yet, she had never been so glad to see anyone in her life. “Oh, Ed. Where did you go?”

“I didn’t go anywhere. You’re the one who ran away.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was that horrible tongue.” The tongue had looked like a melted grape Popsicle, twisting out of the girl’s surprised, waxy mouth. “But I thought you were behind me.”

“No, I wasn’t. I stayed.”

Something in the tone of his voice made Daisy stop listening to the sound of her own blood and look more closely at him. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my eyes,” Ed said.

But there was something wrong. They were still silver fish, but now they were alive, like the little minnows that swam between her toes at low tide. She wondered when that had happened. She tried to think back to before they found the body, but she couldn’t remember.

“Look, we can’t talk here,” Daisy said. “They’re all going crazy inside.
And my father’s coming and so is yours. And they know about the tennis.”

“I know.” Ed didn’t seem bothered.

“Well, we’re in a whole heap of trouble, thanks to you, Ed. Are you hungry?”

“Not really,” Ed said.

Daisy felt exasperated with everyone who wasn’t hungry. “Do you have any money?”

“The sheriff gave me two dollars. For helping out.”

“Good. You can buy me a cheeseburger. But we should go by the harbor, so they won’t see us.”

Daisy stayed silent until she wolfed down the cheeseburger, careful not to let the grease pooling in the waxed paper drip on her green shorts. They were sitting on a bench by the ferry, away from the crowd at the Quarterdeck. Ed was still in his tennis clothes, but they had been soiled in patches, and his blond hair stood up in spikes. He was gently swinging his long legs, letting his tennis shoes scrape on the gravel under their feet.

“Did you tell them about the cigarettes?”

“No,” Ed said. “Don’t worry about the cigarettes. They didn’t see them. And if they do find them, they’ll think the murderer smoked them.”

The murderer. Daisy hadn’t really thought how the girl had gotten that way. Just that she was that way. When Ed had lifted the blanket, it had taken her a minute to really see anything. And when she did, it seemed to take ages before her feet would start moving. But, thinking back, Daisy understood that, of course, someone else had done that to the girl.

Half of the girl’s face looked like it had collapsed or something, with the man-of-war swimming out from her dark curly hair. The eyes were open and bulging like a frog’s, the fat tongue running between her teeth. And her breasts. Besides the tongue, that had scared
Daisy the most. She had never seen naked breasts before, except her mother’s. But these weren’t like her mother’s; there was something wrong with them. There were bits missing, as if someone had taken a cookie cutter and stamped out her skin, leaving oval-shaped impressions that stared back at Daisy like sticky eyes. It was at that point that Daisy’s feet had begun to move.

“A murderer,” she said, slowly. “Do they know who?”

“No,” Ed said. “But her name is Elena Nunes. They found her identification card under her body. She’s the Wilcoxes’ maid.”

“What about the man-of-war?” Daisy still couldn’t figure how it had gotten there. Had Elena Nunes been swimming?

“What man-of-war?”

“The one on her head,” Daisy said. “You know, where it was squashed up.”

“That was her brain, and scalp,” Ed said.

“How do you know that?” Daisy whispered.

“I was with the deputy when he reported it to the sheriff,” Ed said. “He said, ‘That guy bashed her brains in so hard some of it popped out of her head.’ ”

“He said that? He said it popped out of her head?” Daisy felt butterflies in her stomach.

“But she was strangled, too. That’s why her neck was black.” Ed’s voice had a hush to it, like the way they spoke in church.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we’ve seen a murdered person, Ed.”

“I know,” Ed said.

“Do you think the murderer will come after us now? Maybe we’ve been marked for death.” Daisy had read a story like that, where red crosses appeared like molten lava on the foreheads of the victims.