Remember Me, Irene

4

HE’S HURT!” Claire cried, but even as we hurriedly opened our car doors, I wondered how he had managed to lope across the lawn if he was badly injured.

Finn wasn’t waiting for sympathy. He ran away from us, barking his deep-throated bark. We were both wearing heels, so we couldn’t follow very fast. He turned, came partway back, ran from us again.

“Finn, stay!” Claire called. He seemed to consider this option for a moment, gave a big “woof” of dissent, and took off once again.

I kicked off my shoes and closed some of the distance. He rounded the corner of the house and headed for the backyard.

There weren’t any exterior lights here, so it was dark along that side of the house, causing me to slow a little. The ground was cold and uneven beneath my stockinged feet. I stumbled once, but didn’t fall, and glanced back to see Claire taking off her shoes.

I wondered if we should change tactics. Maybe it wasn’t blood on his paws. Maybe he was just making mischief, playing a game of chase. He came back into view, his tousled fur backlighted as he stood in silhouette at the far corner of the house. The bark changed to a baying sound. I ran faster.

A large patio came into view, and as I rounded the corner I saw a swimming pool; I stopped cold when I saw a series of crazy-eight patterns of red paw prints along its deck. The dog’s baying put me in motion again. He stood outside what appeared to be a cabana; it was small compared to the house, but I guessed it to be about as large as my first apartment. It was white. One of a pair of French doors facing the pool was open. A light was on inside the building, spilling out through the open door. As I came closer, Finn quit baying and started watching me intently. It made me slow to a walk, then stop-about twenty feet away from him.

I heard Claire coming up behind me. I reached out and motioned for her to wait next to me.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Call the dog, Claire,” I said. “Just let me go in while you hold him.”

For a moment I thought she would protest, but her face went pale as she looked down and noticed the bloody prints on the deck.

“Come here, Finn,” she said in a shaky voice.

He twisted his head to one side in canine concern, but stayed put.

She took a deep breath and said in a commanding tone, “Finn!” He trotted over and sat prettily in front of her.

“Check to see if his feet are hurt,” I said. “I’m going to take a look in the cabana.”

I walked toward it before she could object.

“Ben?” I called from the open door. There was no answer.

I stepped inside and found myself in a small sitting room decorated in soft hues of rose and gray. A small white refrigerator hummed in one corner. To either side of the sitting room, there were changing rooms, two on each side; their open doors showed them to be empty. A short hallway led to another door, also open. Over the gray tiles which led to it, I saw a trail of bloody paw prints.

“Ben?” I called again.

Nothing but the hum of the refrigerator.

With wide, awkward strides, as if stepping on stones across a stream, I crept along, careful to avoid the blood on the cold tiles.

“Ben?” I said, a little louder.

Nothing.

But there was a smell, I realized, a smell that grew much stronger as I neared the door.

My palms started sweating, my heart drumming. I wanted nothing so much as to turn around and run out of that hallway, out to where there might be sweet, cold air-big gulps of air-air that didn’t reek of blood.

I braced my palms on either side of the doorjamb and made myself peer around the corner, look inside the room. It was a bathroom. The shower stall door had been pushed open. On the floor, lying half out of the shower stall, was a man, fully clothed. Ben Watterson. He held a gun. The back of his head was missing. It might have been in the big mess in the shower. I didn’t stick around to find out.

As I came running out of the cabana, I saw Claire, staring at me.

“Don’t go in there,” I said.

She immediately let go of the dog and started to do what I just told her not to do. She had a wild look on her face. I grabbed on to her. “Claire, don’t-”

The dog barked at me, scared me enough to make me let go of her. I don’t know if she heard me or if she heard the dog, but she didn’t move.

Finn barked at me again.

“What-?” She left it at that. I don’t think she wanted to ask the question. I might answer it.

“Let’s go into the house,” I said.

She looked at the cabana again, didn’t budge.

“It’s Ben,” I said. “I’m sorry, Claire.”

“No.”

I waited.

She just shook her head. “No. Not Ben. Not Ben. No, you’re wrong. It’s not Ben.”

“Yes, it is.”

She bit her lip, then said, “Let me see him. He might need help.”

“Claire-it’s too late. I’m sorry.”

“You weren’t in there very long. You don’t know that he’s-you don’t know! I want to see him.” She hurried toward the cabana.

“No!” I shouted. “For Godsakes, Claire, don’t-”

She stopped moving, turned toward me.

“Please don’t,” I said. “Please, please don’t go in there.”

She hesitated a moment longer, then came stumbling back to me.

“We need to go into the house,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice steady. “We need to call the police.”

“No,” she said, but let me put an arm around her shoulders.

She leaned against me, and let me guide her away from the cabana. She just stared at me when I asked for the key to the house. I finally took her purse from her, found the keys, then tried a couple until I found one that would unlock the back door, which led into the kitchen. She stood nearby, petting the dog. “Good boy, Finn,” she said, at least half a dozen times.

As I opened the door and fumbled for a light switch, the air was suddenly pierced with an obnoxious whooping noise, quickly followed by horns and bells.

“You set off the alarm,” she said dully, and pushed past me to enter a code on a keypad. Blessed silence returned.

She turned on the kitchen lights and went to a wall phone, pushed an auto-dial button, and said, “This is Mrs. Watterson, that was a false alarm.” She gave them a code word, then hung up.

“Do you need to use the phone?” she asked, as if she hadn’t just missed a perfect opportunity to contact the police.

“Yes,” I said, and dialed Robbery-Homicide.

“FRANK’S NOT HERE,” Detective Jake Matsuda said when I identified myself. “He got called out on a case.”

“This is about something else, Jake.” Aware that Claire was listening to every word I said, I tried to give him as much information as I could without being cruel to her. He told me he would send someone right out.

“You want me to page Frank?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks. Could you let him know that it may be a while before I’m home?”

As I hung up, I noticed that Claire had started shaking. Her face was colorless.

“Sit down,” I said, afraid that she might faint. She took a seat at the kitchen table, and Finn immediately sprawled out at her feet, head between his paws. “Can I get you something?” I asked her.

She looked out toward the backyard. “It might not be Ben,” she said.

“How about a glass of water?” I went to get it without waiting for an answer.

I’ll confess that I thought about calling the paper-a reporter’s impulse when the town’s leading banker kills himself. Already, I was wondering what had led Ben to pull the trigger. But looking at Claire as she took the glass of water, I couldn’t bring myself to make the call.

“Why?” she said.

“What?”

“I heard what you told the police. Why would Ben want to kill himself?”

“I don’t know, Claire. I was just wondering about that myself.”

“Everyone will wonder, won’t they?”

“Yes.”

Once again, she stared toward the backyard. She reached for the glass of water but knocked it over, breaking the glass. “Now look what I’ve done,” she said, and started crying.

IFELT A LITTLE UNEASY with the detectives who had drawn this case. I didn’t have any problem with David Cardenas. But Frank had once knocked Cardenas’s partner, Bob Thompson, flat on his rump. Why? For making a remark about me. Not the kind of thing that will make a guy sign your dance card at the Policemen’s Ball.

Things seemed to be going okay at first. Cardenas took my statement while Thompson talked to Claire in the living room. I told Cardenas about the dog, and he had me show him the car window, and from there, to retrace most of my steps as I told him what had happened. He didn’t force me to go inside the cabana again; a photographer and other technicians were at work in there. When they first arrived, Claire had been forced to calm Finn, who grew upset as other strangers came near the cabana. A uniformed officer was petting and cooing to him now, as a technician took a sample of hair from the dog’s paw.

“The dog stayed outside, with Mrs. Watterson, when you went in to look?” Cardenas asked me.

“Yes.”

“About where was she standing then?”

I showed him. “About here.”

“Was there a reason you asked her to wait?”

I shrugged.

He waited.

“I’m not sure I thought about it at the time. There was blood, the lights were out everywhere else, and Ben hadn’t come to the hotel to pick her up, as planned. He hadn’t answered the phone when she called. Given all of that, by the time we were standing here, I had a bad feeling about what might be in the cabana.”

“Did you open the door to the cabana, Mrs. Harriman?”

“No, it was already open.”

“There are two doors. Were they both open?”

“No, just one. The one on the right.”

“As we face the cabana, the one on our right?”

“Yes.”

“All the way open?”

“No, but nearly wide open.”

“Did you reach out as you approached it?”

“No.”

“Touch the doorknob?”

“No…”

The questions went on. Cardenas was good at his job. He helped me to concentrate on remembering a sequence of events and details that my mind was already trying to lock away from me. As we finished at the cabana, he paused to ask the technicians to check out the blood on the car window, then continued to go over the details of our entry into the house.

He thanked me for my help, asked me to wait in the kitchen, went into the living room for a few minutes. When he came back he said, “I think Mrs. Watterson would like to talk to you for a moment.”

I nodded and went into the living room.

Somewhere along the line, Claire must have gathered her wits; she told me that she had called her sister, Alana, and told Thompson that she’d wait until Alana arrived before she’d answer any other questions. Then she explained that Alana was an attorney. Thompson apparently took that in stride.

Claire asked me to wait with her until her sister arrived. I sat next to her on the couch. It seemed to me that she was more herself; perhaps not completely cool and self-possessed, but getting there. Her face was swollen from crying, her eyes red and puffy, but there was defiance there. It occurred to me that somehow, Thompson had made her angry.

He was sitting in a chair, swinging his foot back and forth, watching her.

“Why couldn’t they send your husband?” she asked me.

“He isn’t allowed to work any case that his friends or relatives are involved in,” I said. “But even if I hadn’t been here, Detectives Thompson and Cardenas would have been the next ones called. Frank was already on another case.”

“Mrs. Watterson,” Thompson said, “youdo understand that this woman is a newspaper reporter?”

Claire lifted a brow. “Why, Detective Thompson! I had forgotten all about that.”

She reached over to the end table nearest her side of the couch and picked up the phone, then handed the receiver to me. “You probably need to call the paper about what has happened here,” she said. “What’s the number of the newsroom at theExpress?”

For a moment, I was too stunned to give it to her.

“Go ahead,” she said, then added quietly, “It’s not as if this is something I can hide from the world.”

I gave her the number, and she repeated it as she punched each digit. She gave Thompson a look that saidWhat are you going to do about it?

He just kept swinging his foot, but his neck turned red.

ALANA ARRIVED JUST BEFOREthe police showed Claire the note. Alana was slightly taller than Claire, but it was clear that they were sisters.

The note had been found on a desk in the study, beneath a small desk lamp. Apparently, when we arrived, that was the only lamp that was on inside the house. We hadn’t seen the light from outside-the drapes in the study were closed.

Cardenas showed the note to Claire. She had to read it through a plastic cover. It said:

Claire-

Forgive me for not telling you. There is no cure. This has nothing to do with you, my love. I simply choose to avoid days of pain.

Ben

Claire broke down when she read it. “I thought he might be ill,” she said, “but not so ill that he…why didn’t he tell me?” Her sister embraced her and asked the detectives if they could have a moment alone.

I reached for my purse, thinking that I should probably leave, too. It was at about that time that I looked up to see Frank walking into the room. It was an awkward moment to give an introduction, but he managed without me. He nodded to Thompson and Cardenas, then walked toward us. He’s tall, but he lowered his big frame so that he was eye level with us. He took my hand, gave it a quick squeeze, then said to Claire, “Mrs. Watterson? I’m Frank Harriman. I’m Irene’s husband. I’m so sorry we had to meet under these circumstances.”

The words themselves weren’t extraordinary, but something in his manner or his tone must have soothed her. She stopped sobbing. Tears still ran down her face, but she quieted.

“Thank you,” she said. “Irene has been very good to me tonight, but I think she should probably go home now. It’s been-it’s been a long night. Alana will stay with me.” She looked at me and said, “I won’t ever forget all you’ve done for me, Irene.”

I wished her good night, and we left.

“You okay to drive home?” Frank asked when we reached the driveway.

I nodded.

“I’ll see you there, then.” He gave me a hug. He looked tired.

I had a bad moment when I first got into my car and saw the blood on my car window. I looked up into the rearview mirror and saw the headlights of Frank’s car, and calmed myself. I don’t always appreciate his protectiveness, but there are times when it feels good to have him watching over me. This was one of those times.

When we were on the road near the golf course, I saw Mark Baker, a friend and fellow reporter, drive past me going the other way. He gave me a puzzled look and honked, but I kept on going. I spent most of the trip home praying that Claire would be all right, and that she would forget every smart-alecky remark I had made about Frank’s job.