Murder Never Forgets Read Free

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