Murder Never Forgets Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  “O’Hehir sketches out characters in swift strokes, and the old people in this book are fully realized characters, both quirky and dignified. Best of all, the narrator’s acerbic, funny, insightful voice makes what might have been just another cozy unforgettable.” —The Boston Globe

  —Booklist (starred review)

  —Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments

  —James W. Hall, author of Forests of the Night

  —Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Belongings

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Diana O’Hehir

  MURDER NEVER FORGETS

  ERASED FROM MEMORY

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  MURDER NEVER FORGETS

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2005 by Diana O’Hehir.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-0-425-20903-5

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Thanks

  To Carol, Cyra, B. K., and Allison, who read the manuscript, some of you more than once.

  To the rest of you who listened and responded, month after month: Whitney, Carol, Mary, Annegret, Diana.

  Disclaimer

  Many books about Egypt and Egyptology and several translations of Egyptian poetry and of The Book of the Dead have supplied background knowledge for this tale.

  Among these are translations by E. A. Wallis Budge, Miriam Lichtheim, and R. O. Faulkner, and accounts of ancient Egyptian life, language, and culture by Miriam Stead, Maria Carmelo Betro, Bridget McDermott, and George Hart.

  These very interesting sources do not always agree. Nevertheless, mistakes in this book should be ascribed to my own inadequate transcription and not to any fault of these helpful scholars.

  Prologue

  It was difficult from the cliff above to tell what the people on the beach were doing, although they were very clearly presented, as if on a stage lit by the last rays of a low-lying sun that shone flat out across the water. Orange sun-glare highlighted their figures and threw exaggerated shadows across the sand, until finally, just before sunset, just before the people finished whatever they were doing and the tableau below ended, the shadows grew and stretched, active finally, merging with each other, to spread halfway up the cliff.

  At first there was just the woman and her companion; then those two were joined by two others.

  They talked, but what they said wasn’t audible to the person who watched from the cliff. At one point the woman gestured and looked up. The other person, a man probably, it was hard to be sure from this distance, also gestured and looked up. Perhaps they were worrying about whether someone was up there.

  The person who waited above and watched didn’t care. These days the things he cared about came and went quite fast. And furthermore he knew, with an inner physical knowledge he’d picked up in some other existence, that he was safe. There was no path here from his place, only a route down a drainage pipe which he had squeezed through with pleasure because it seemed like an adventure from his earlier life. The cliff was like that, too. He knew that the beach cliff projected out far enough to hide the outline of a head.

  The people moved back and forth; they leaned forward and back; they gestured. The woman gestured more than the others; her arms came up, her head went back; he could see that she had short white hair; she looked in some way familiar. Finally someone took her elbow and they started walking.

  It was a tiny beach, bounded north and south by rock outcrop-pings and by three conical rocks, east and west by ocean and cliff. The pair below proceeded arm in arm, slowly, steps coordinated; it seemed almost as if she were being marched by him, left, right, left, right.

  The watcher was interested. Also troubled. But the troubled feeling, the sense that something wasn’t quite right, this meant nothing new to him; he had that feeling often lately.

  When the walkers reached the south cliff they turned abruptly and began retracing their steps. The two extra people were there by now and fell into step behind; it made a curious four-person parade.

  Their observer was an old gentleman in a tweed suit who lay on his stomach on the cliff-grass above. During the quieter portions of the beach tableau he hummed softly to himself. Apparently he liked country and western tunes.

  The woman now, he said to himself, perhaps she looks familiar. But then, many things, many people these days look familiar. This beach below reminded him of another beach, the one at Sharm el Naga in Egypt. He had been younger at Sharm el Naga and the climb had been easier, but the people were surely the same people. That was it, he understood it perfectly now; they were the ones from The Book of the Dead; the woman was on trial; the others were judges; she was being tried for her sins in this life.

>   All of us have committed sins in this life.

  I will say a prayer for her: Oh, you judges who gather around me, I will become perfect, perfect . . .

  He felt sorry for her with her familiar straight carriage: the soul and her three judges. This must be one of the Trials further along in the Journey, perhaps a trial of the soul’s ability to cross water.

  He tried again for the right spell: Oh, you who bring the ferry boat of the Abyss to this difficult bank . . .

  Sometimes he knew he was forgetting and didn’t care because it was all part of the Process. And other times, like now, when he couldn’t remember a spell, those times a heavy, gray helplessness welled up in him. He put his face down on the grass, which prickled, wiry and damp.

  When he looked up again, the scene below had changed. The people were moving in what seemed ritualized measures back and forth. And circling around. Strange. They made shapes he seemed to recognize; perhaps they were playing a game—a children’s game—Blind man’s bluff? Musical chairs? One of those exercises where one person is in the middle and the others move up to that person cautiously and dodge and then move in again. The person in the middle has to outwit the others by moving, by running.

  The woman wasn’t very agile; it was hard to watch her.

  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.

  When he looked again at the beach, the woman had started trying to climb the rocks. She wasn’t very good at it; the rock crumbled, someone started pulling. It took only one of her pursuers to drag her down. But then maybe the gods helped her; she seemed to get stronger, knocked on her back and flailing. Two of them now had to fight hard to hold her down. Down on the sand, on her back.

  The third person had been behind the rocks, now this person came out holding something that unfolded and unkinked, cumbersomely. The watcher recognized the object finally as it undid itself across the sand: it was a net. A net shining golden in the final sun-rays. Together they flung it over the recumbent figure, now all of them together, everyone helping, they climbed on her and around her like ants on a captured caterpillar. She was bound and netted; they rolled her over and over.

  The man on the cliff couldn’t watch any more. He put his head down. The grass came up and wet his cheek. Briefly, he fell asleep. When he got up finally to go back to his place, it was quite dark.

  He still had good eyesight, fortunately.

  “My goodness, that was a long walk,” they said to him back at his place. “Should you go for such long walks? Watch out you don’t fall. Did you have a lovely walk?”

  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.

  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.

  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.”