Murder Never Forgets Read Free Page B

goes along fine for a while and then crashes for a while.”
    She makes an explosive noise, “Poo,” or some similar sound; I had never heard anyone actually say, poo . “Books. You don’t need books, Carla. It’s this place .”
    I had been thinking something like this, but now I argue. “Hey. It’s a silly place. Pretentious. Overstuffed and phony. But not that bad.”
    “The place is weird .” Mrs. Dexter relishes this word as if she’s just thought it up. “There’s a tense atmosphere. People go around looking pursued.”
    “Pursued?”
    “Afraid to look behind them.”
    I resist asking her if she’d been watching X Files .
    “Someone fell out of a window,” she says.
    That’s a stopper. I gawk. “You’re kidding.”
    “I am not, as you put it, kidding. She is all right, but she might not have been. She might have died. It was a floor-to-ceiling window, one with a door; those doors are supposed to be nailed shut, but someone got the door open and left it that way.”
    I think of practical questions that I’ll pose later: Was the maintenance crew painting? Repairing something? Putting in a new TV line? “And she just fell out?” I ask.
    “We don’t know exactly. She has a bad sense of balance. The new chef caught her.”
    Down the path my father is bent over, reading the sign on the mermaid’s pedestal. I start walking toward him. “Daddy has a very good sense of balance,” I say.
    Mrs. Dexter clunks along behind me. “There have been other things. Also fairly serious. A fire in the beauty parlor. And a gas fireplace unit that leaked. Management says these are accidents, but we residents know they aren’t.”
    “Of course they’re investigating,” I say.
    “ I am investigating,” Mrs. Dexter’s voice, normally a nice contralto, grows sharper. “I have been listening. If you’re old, they don’t pay attention to you, and you can listen. You’d be surprised. You can come up behind, and no one notices you. You’re a cipher, a nonentity. You can learn things.”
    We’ve almost reached Daddy now. I have a silly impulse to hold on to him when Mrs. Dexter talks like this. What a shame, I think, Mrs. D. is starting to go, too, and I was counting on her to be sensible. If she and the other residents are sensible and the Manor itself stays stable in spite of being pretentious and overdone, then maybe my father can quiet down. For a while, anyway.
    That’s what you ask for with Alzheimer’s. A while.
    “Do you know,” he says, “the modeling on the scales of this tail is quite good.” He seems perfectly okay for the moment. Early-stage Alzheimer’s is like that, one minute you’re vague about your own last name and an hour later you’re delivering lectures on the Chaos Theory.
    “Perhaps we should start off toward dinner,” Mrs. Dexter gets cheerful at this thought. “Dinner is one of the better things here. Did you know that we will have oysters tonight? Many older people do not like oysters. I, personally, love them.”
    The dining hall has an arched oak entryway and a circular front lawn where the management is always running the sprinkler. You can hear the sea; it seems to be inside your skull. Sometimes, with an extra-long breaker, you can feel it there, too. The ocean surges back and forth just beyond our reach, a quarter mile away.
    We go through the beveled doors and stand in the lobby, which is high-ceilinged and has a dark red carpet. The wall is also dark red with a pattern of braided gold rope crisscrossing against the scarlet background. There are lots of heavy gold-framed pictures stationed in relays up to the ceiling. Some of these contain Renoir-type women in blue tunics, and some show sad Victorian dogs beseeching up at an invisible master. The double doors to the inner eating area are closed.
    Mrs. Dexter wants to talk some more about Green Beach Manor. “The atmosphere in this place—” she stops her sentence to gesture menacingly at the art gallery with her