Summertime Read online

  ‘Well…’ Her brown eyes swivel away from me, over the ill-fitting stove and the battered sink. ‘That’s not clear yet. His clothes were found, folded in a pile, at Big Brim beach. His car is missing and we can’t explain how he got to the coast. What we do know is that the killer attempted to make it seem like your father went for a swim and died in the water. We believe that this was a premeditated, carefully planned crime: only his lack of knowledge of forensic techniques let the killer down.’

  ‘But…’ I protest. ‘No one would have a reason to kill Daddy.’

  She is silent and her face does not move.

  I say: ‘It must have been some crazy person on the beach. The kind of maniac who stabs joggers for their radio and two dollars fifty hidden in their belt.’

  The woman is watching me. Her look is not unkind but she says: ‘No, Lucy. I don’t see it that way. Only a tiny percentage of homicides are carried out by total strangers and, frankly, this doesn’t look like that kind of death.’

  ‘What kind of death does it look like?’ I know my own voice is loud. I know this when I hear her quiet, even tone.

  ‘The kind where the victim knew his killer. In fact, we may have reason to believe he knew his killer well.’

  I wait for the reason but she doesn’t offer it.

  ‘You think it was someone close to him? A friend? Someone…’ I swallow. There is a layer of salt around the inside of my mouth and it feels dry and crusty. ‘Someone I might know?’

  ‘It was probably someone known to you or your sister. But maybe not. Because your father may have had parts of his life you were unaware of.’

  I shake my head. ‘Not Daddy,’ I say.

  She waits, watching me. I ask: ‘Isn’t there some other explanation for all this? I mean, maybe he had a heart attack on the beach and the tide washed him out to sea. Or, he hit his head on a rock and sort of fell into the water…’

  She is quiet but firm and she never takes her eyes off me. ‘I realize you must find those theories comforting. But nothing in the preliminary autopsy can confirm either of them.’

  I blink at her. There is fatigue standing between me and comprehension. I notice that there are stains on her dark clothes, just below the shoulder. That’s where babies leave their stains, when they press their faces up against you. So now I know why she changed shape, cut her hair.

  I ask: ‘When did he die?’

  ‘We’re waiting for more information on that. Probably he died early on Monday. Lucy, I have to ask you where you were on Sunday night.’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Monday morning?’

  ‘I got to work before eight… I had a big meeting which I needed to prepare for.’

  ‘I have to confirm that. Please give me the name, address and telephone number of your employer.’

  She writes down these details.

  ‘Now, your sister already explained that you were staying with friends on the weekend. Where was that?’

  I feel my cheeks begin to burn. ‘That’s what I told Jane…’

  She raises her eyebrows.

  ‘You weren’t staying with friends?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘So where were you?’

  ‘At home. In my apartment. I barely left it after I got home on Friday evening.’

  There is a silence before she speaks again. ‘Did you talk to anyone? Visit anyone? Call anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not all weekend?’

  ‘I was working. I had a lot of preparation for Monday…’

  ‘You can’t provide one single person to verify your whereabouts this weekend?’

  ‘No.’

  She is persistent but her even tone does not vary. ‘No one? Are you sure no one saw you? Not a doorman or a sales clerk or a neighbour?’

  I shake my head. ‘New York’s not that kind of place.’

  ‘So no one saw you all weekend,’ she states quietly. She looks away from me. She runs her eye over the battered sink, the ill-fitting stove, the lino.

  I say: ‘That doesn’t mean I wasn’t there.’

  Her eyes are back again, swift, shrewd.

  ‘Why did you lie to your sister, Lucy?’

  ‘Because I didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t want her to know that I wasn’t picking up on her. I didn’t want to hurt her.’

  ‘I see. When were you last in California?’

  ‘Almost three years ago.’

  ‘Was that the last time you saw Dr Schaffer?’

  ‘No, he visited me six, nine months later in New York.’

  ‘So you hadn’t seen him for more than two years?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t return to California at all in the last three years?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did you last speak with him?’

  I tell her about the messages Daddy left on my phone on Saturday.

  ‘Did your sister call also?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her eyes are large, dark. ‘But why didn’t you answer these calls? You were there all weekend…’

  ‘When I work at home I don’t pick up, it’s the only way to get anything done. Probably I would have if I’d known Daddy or Jane was calling.’

  She looks all over the room as though she’s following a fly.

  ‘Did you save the messages?’ she asks at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d like to hear them.’

  I falter. ‘I’ll have to find out the long distance access code…’

  ‘Let me know as soon as you have it. As soon as possible.’ She stands up. I jump up too as though she just unhandcuffed me.

  ‘You look tired, it’s extremely late now in New York. I certainly have further questions for you but they can wait until tomorrow morning. I assume you’re staying with your sister?’

  My cheeks were just cooling and now they’re hot again.

  ‘Now I’m here I figured I could maybe just stay…’

  ‘In this house?’ She hasn’t raised her voice but there is a note of alarm. ‘Forensic won’t finish for a while,’ she says. ‘But even when they do, you’d be unwise to stay here alone.’

  ‘But I’ll be fine…’

  ‘Lucy, until we know what happened to your father and why, we can’t be sure of your safety. His keys weren’t found on the beach. We don’t know who has them.’

  As she leads me down the hallway she pauses.

  ‘We’re having difficulty accessing some documents on your father’s computer. You don’t, by any chance, know his password?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Any guesses?’

  ‘Hmmmm. Probably a rock name… obsidian, jade, quartz, pyrites…’

  She smiles. ‘I’ll look in a rock book. Lucy, I’d like to see you back here tomorrow morning. Is nine-thirty okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Keep this in case you ever need to contact me.’ She hands me a card. Her name is Kirsty MacFarlane. She is a senior detective in the police department’s homicide division.

  I say: ‘You see homicide everywhere because it’s your job. It’s your life. But there are some places it just doesn’t occur. In an ordinary family like ours, for example.’

  The woman doesn’t reply. She opens the screen door. From the hallway I could hear the voices of Larry, Jane and Sasha chatting in cordial, late night tones. Now I see Larry on a porch seat and Jane, her coat wound tightly around her, on the swing. A smoke ring wafts between us. Sasha, on the steps, at the edge of the porch’s circle of light, watches me as he exhales.

  Jane turns to me. She looks cold and tired. ‘Are you okay?’

  I nod.

  Sasha says: ‘Come, Lucy, let me take you home at once. Mama will be waiting for you.’

  Jane and Larry exchange concerned looks and then Larry speaks. ‘There’s a bed ready in our apartment.’

  I think of Jane and Larry’s city apartment, of its white chairs and white surfaces and white rugs.


  ‘Mama has already prepared a bed for you,’ insists Sasha, ‘and she will be most disappointed if you don’t sleep in it tonight.’

  I look at Jane and she nods her permission but when she hugs me farewell she says, without confidence: ‘Will you come to the beach house tomorrow? Larry and I are going at lunchtime and Scott would sure like to see you. Or…’ She looks away, ready for rejection. ‘Or maybe you don’t want to go to Needle Bay? Or see Scott? Or any of us? I don’t understand what’s going on with you, Lucy. If you really don’t want to be with us, we’ll try to understand.’

  I am reproached by her kindness. I say: ‘Jane, I want to see you all more than anything.’ And as I say this I know it’s true.

  Her body relaxes and she smiles at me.

  ‘Including Scott?’

  Foolishly, secretly, in the dark city, I’ve imagined my reunion with Scott many times, and always as a joyful occasion at the beach house on a day warm enough to thicken the air with the scent of ocean and pines. In my dreams, we smile at one another. We notice the small insignias of ageing (a colourless hair, a deepening line). We welcome them for the wisdom which comes with them, because wisdom allows us to forgive.

  I say: ‘I’m looking forward to seeing Scott.’

  Sasha drives us back to the city. He offers me chocolate and, when I refuse, eats it himself. He tells me to try to sleep and then is silent but my eyes don’t want to close and I stare at the road ahead as it rolls ceaselessly under our headlights until it seems that we are still and only the road is moving.

  As we approach Aunt Zina’s dingy apartment building I am overtaken by emotions for which I am unprepared. Since Grandma’s death her apartment has been occupied by Aunt Zina and for years I visited here regularly with my mother. Now that part of my childhood, like a dog which has been waiting patiently all this time, leaps up to greet me, knocking me over with its weight. The squat, shabby building, its bare and underlit lobby, the elevator, daubed with graffiti in Russian, the smell of cabbage, the unexplained insistence that the stairs here are not negotiable although the building is just four storeys high: the unchanged patina of my relatives’ lives combines now with my grief to overwhelm me. As we wait for the juddering elevator I peer down the shaft, the way I peered down it on every childhood visit and, just for a moment before the car descends, believe that I have located the small, dirty shoe of a child almost buried beneath other garbage.

  When the elevator doors slide open on the third storey to reveal my aunts, I am too tearful to speak. Aunt Zoya, a large, thin broom of a woman, and the smaller, bustling Aunt Zina engulf me at once in a tide of love. They bear me across the hallway to the apartment where the air is dense with the smell of Russian cooking.

  ‘But your poor papa,’ they say as the door closes behind us. ‘Why did he drown? What do the police say about such a thing?’

  I tell them all I know and the aunts cluck and shake their heads, exchanging troubled looks.

  ‘Surely this is not possible,’ they say miserably. ‘Surely no one would harm your dear papa.’

  ‘He was a kind man,’ Aunt Zina informs me. ‘He was more than generous because he had an instinct to give. He would give his time, his attention, his money… many husbands would have turned their back on Tanya but Eric continued to give. Lucia, your papa was a man with a sense of right and wrong. He adhered to what was right.’

  I feel pleased. Yes, Daddy always tried to do the right thing.

  ‘As well as his heart I admired his mind,’ adds Aunt Zoya, whom I now remember, many years ago, in animated discussion on the beach with Daddy, fingers pulling the hair from their faces, the wind blowing it right back. What did Daddy talk about with his wife’s homely, clever, elder sister, a woman I had noticed others acknowledge then ignore? I wish now I had listened to their intelligent conversation instead of digging holes in the sand.

  ‘His mind,’ she continues, ‘was never quiet. He did not cease to gather information and inside his head he organized it, redirected it. And, of course, he shared his thoughts freely.’

  Their words warm me. The way the detective spoke about Daddy dehumanized him. He was reduced to a homicide case, renamed The Decedent, probably given a number. Now my aunts are giving me back the man.

  ‘No one could wish to kill such a one as your papa,’ they assure me. ‘It’s impossible and the police will find they have made a mistake.’

  I look to Sasha for agreement but he is busy pouring a pale liquid into small glasses to celebrate my arrival and does not catch my eye.

  ‘And your husband,’ they ask. ‘Is he still at the university?’

  ‘Yes. And his book’s been published.’ Scott didn’t tell me that. I know it because, late one night, I turned on the TV and the small, still New York apartment was suddenly filled by Scott’s voice. The men behind the transcontinental railroad: industrial heroes or just corrupt speculators? I crouched right in front of the TV, staring as Scott stroked his chin the way Larry strokes his beard sometimes, watching him thinking, hearing his voice without listening to his answer. When the programme finished I switched off but remained in front of the TV and the silence in the apartment was acute.

  ‘But,’ ask my aunts, ‘are you still married to him?’

  ‘We haven’t lived together for a few years. But we haven’t discussed divorce either…’

  They brush aside these formalities. ‘Does he love you?’ they cry. ‘Do you still love him?’

  ‘I think so. But…’ I flounder and Sasha rescues me.

  ‘Mama, Aunt Zoya, if you were so cruel to a dog you would be arrested. For heaven’s sake, let us toast Lucia instead of grilling her.’ And he clinks his glass against mine.

  I am purred over, stroked, fed and watered. Little contribution is demanded from me. I listen to stories of relatives until I am confused by the half-remembered names of the spouses of second cousins. Finally, inevitably, they speak of Mother.

  ‘We visit weekly,’ Aunt Zina assures me. ‘And even Sasha comes sometimes.’

  Sasha, relaxed now in an armchair, balancing a glass on his knee, raises it in confirmation.

  No dereliction of duty by me is implied but I am nevertheless stung. I telephoned Mother at the clinic a few times when I first left California but the conversations were at best difficult and I gradually allowed them to peter out. At Christmas or on her birthday and sometimes in between I send her small, colourful cards. I spend a long time selecting them. A picture of a brown dog like the one she used to own. Something abstract in which her colour, blue, is dominant. Cards from a Russian exhibition showing innumerable birch trees or peasants in felt boots pulling sledges through the snow. These small, thin colourful pieces of card are strong enough to bear our whole relationship these days.

  As if sensing my feelings, Aunt Zoya throws up her long arms. ‘Such beautiful pictures you send her!’

  Aunt Zina darts. ‘Yes, yes, she saves them all and speaks of you often. Your return will bring her great pleasure.’

  I know my face is crimson. I wish they wouldn’t talk about her as though she were sane.

  Sasha looks at Aunt Zina. ‘For God’s sake, Mama,’ he says. ‘Do you know what time it is in New York? It is five in the morning and Lucia only learned hours ago of her father’s death. Do you think it is fair to talk to her when she should certainly be sleeping?’ And he adds something in Russian.

  Aunts Zoya and Zina agree quickly and lead me to the room which was once Grandma’s and is now to be mine. It is little altered and it seems to me that even Grandma’s scents of candy and medicine linger here. The room is fleetingly half-lit each time a car passes. I lie cocooned in her bed, glimpsing by occasional carlight, as though in a series of photos, the accumulation of mementos, pictures and souvenirs which, at the close of each day, furnished Grandma’s world. In the living-room I can hear my relatives quietly murmuring the music of the Russian language, so that they seem to be half speaking and half singing. It is Daddy’s death, I reflect, which has
brought me, in the space of one day, from an eighty-third storey in New York back into the heart of my family’s past.

  8

  In my dreams I am terrified by the roar of a big truck. I hide until a telephone rings, then a doorbell. There are distant voices. I am finally awoken by a strange quality to the light. A yolky yellow bathing my eyelids, wrapping itself around me as though I’m inside an egg. Or maybe I’m at home and I left the lamp on all night. Then I remember that Daddy is dead and I’m back in California. Once again, shock, sadness and grief, all physical sensations, as violent as the cartoon books I read as a kid. Bang! Bif! Bam! Phoof! First my belly, then my chest, then more blows somewhere around my temples. I open my eyes and there is sun in them.

  I wander through the living-room. The walls are thick with shelves and each shelf sags beneath its contents. Books, boxes, bags, stacks of papers and letters, ornaments, some of them with pieces broken off but placed alongside. One, a long-necked swan, has, I’m sure, awaited repair since my childhood. There are also a few pretty rocks, certainly donated by Daddy.

  In the kitchen, Aunt Zina is busy. I watch her flitting from fridge to oven and back like a humming bird. Then she stands before the stove with a frying pan in her hand. As she twists her wrist to right and left the pan tilts and batter runs evenly across its hot surface. She frowns with concentration. I am struck by her similarity to my mother. So this is how Mother might have looked one day if she were sane. The movements swift and precise, the eyes bright, the hair sensibly bobbed and scarcely grey.

  ‘Aaaah,’ she cries when she sees me, a cry of pleasure. She produces coffee, toast, kasha, jelly, blinis, juice, and as soon as one sample is consumed, begs me to try another.

  ‘Sasha left early, too early, for work this morning. And he had a meeting so late last night that he was obliged to leave it directly to find his dear cousin at the airport. They work him like a slave at that place. A slave.’ She speaks with passion and shakes her head energetically.

  I smile. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ I tell her.

  She hands me a large photograph in a new frame.