Slowly, he raised the rug.
The fathers were called in. Daisy heard her mother on the phone to Cambridge.
“Goddamn it, Hughes. She saw it.”
Her mother paused and Daisy could hear a faint buzz coming from the receiver, her father’s voice.
“Well, they’re not sure. There’s some talk that it may be somebody’s maid. Apparently, she’s one of the Portuguese girls.”
Her mother paused again.
“Well, I didn’t see it,” her mother said, running her ringed fingers through her hair. “No, I didn’t ask her. I don’t know what to do, honestly. You have to come here. And Hughes? You call Avery and you get him on the next goddamn flight out here. No excuses. That boy’s already way too much for his poor mother, and this certainly isn’t going to help.”
Daisy was put in a hot bath with Epsom salts. Her mother sat on the powder-blue toilet, drinking a cup of black coffee and watching her. Daisy wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for and it made her uncomfortable. Should she be crying? After all, a girl was dead. But she didn’t feel like crying. She wanted to talk to Ed about it, but she hadn’t seen him since she had run into the house, flushed and shaking with excitement, tearing through the rooms to find her mother and tell her to call the police.
“Where’s Ed?” Daisy finally asked.
“I don’t know,” her mother said, stirring from the seat and kneeling next to the tub. “We have to wash your hair, too, baby.”
Daisy couldn’t remember the last time her mother had called her that. Had she ever called her “baby”? She couldn’t be sure. But it sounded nice and Daisy surrendered willingly as her mother began to rub the shampoo into her hair, massaging her scalp and wiping back the suds that built up on her hairline.
Her mother turned on the tap and gently pushed Daisy’s head back under the stream of warm water, humming “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” under her breath.
“All done,” she said, holding out a towel to gather her in, like she sometimes did at the beach when Daisy came screaming out of the water, frigid with cold.
Daisy adjusted the towel. Her mother gripped her shoulder and stared at her, but said nothing.
“Let’s get your pajamas on,” she finally suggested, in a forced, cheerful tone.
“It’s only two o’clock, Mummy,” she said.
“Oh, yes.” Her mother laughed. “Well, put on whatever you like, I guess.”
Downstairs, Daisy found her mother in the summer kitchen, staring at a chicken on the counter. Sun streamed through the yellow polka-dotted curtains, making the room look like the inside of a bright lemon.
Her mother stood motionless, both hands gripping the polished wooden counter, peering at the uncooked bird like it might sit up and tell her something important.
“Mummy?” Daisy wondered if this was it. Her mother was finally cracking up like Vivien Leigh.
“Oh.” Her mother turned and smiled. “I was thinking we might have chicken for dinner. When your father gets here, I mean. But I don’t think I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
“No,” Daisy said. Actually, she was starving. She had missed lunch and now it looked like dinner might be off, too.
“Maybe just some sandwiches. Egg salad or cucumber?”
“Egg salad,” Daisy said.
“Darling, would you make Mummy one of those lovely gin and tonics you make so well for Daddy?”
She was in the green sitting room, carefully measuring the gin from the crystal decanter, when she heard the back door slam. She thought it might be Ed. But as she made her way down the hall, glass in hand, she realized it was her aunt who had returned. Daisy stopped where she was, and stood still, listening to the disembodied voices coming from the kitchen.
Little pitchers have big ears.
“Where was he?” Daisy heard her mother say.
“I found him at the sheriff’s office,” her aunt’s voice replied.
“What on earth was he doing there?”
“Apparently, he was there when the police arrived, with the … the body, the girl, I mean. Why he didn’t run away with Daisy, I don’t know. But then he went ahead and told the policemen he’d been going there for days. He hasn’t been at his tennis lessons, as it turns out.” Here Daisy heard her aunt pause to catch her breath. “And the police took him back to the station so that the sheriff could talk to him and find out if he’d seen anyone suspicious hanging around there.”
“Well, where is he now?” Her mother sounded exasperated.
“He’s still there,” her aunt said. “It was the strangest thing. He wasn’t upset, he wasn’t even happy to see me. He was just sitting in this chair in the sheriff’s office, calm as could be. Well, actually, he was almost smiling. And then he said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother, everything’s going to be fine.’ As if he’d just solved an arithmetic problem instead of finding some poor girl strangled. I’m embarrassed to say, Nick, it chilled me to the bone. My own son. Smiling about a dead girl.”
“Yes,” her mother said in a half whisper.
“And then the sheriff, he said he would be happy to drive him home when Ed had finished helping them. Helping them! How on earth could my twelve-year-old son help them? And then the sheriff winked at me, which I took to mean that this was a boy thing, or something. Is that what it means? I mean, is it a boy thing? Oh, heaven help me. I wish Avery were here.”
“I think we both need a drink,” Daisy’s mother said. “And when Hughes gets here, he’ll know what to do.”
Daisy took her cue to enter the kitchen.
“Here’s your drink, Mummy.”
“Thank you, darling,” her mother said. “Would you mind terribly making a scotch for your aunt, too?”
“Oh, Daisy,” her aunt said, advancing toward her. “Oh, dear girl. You poor, poor thing.”
“I’m all right, Aunt Helena,” Daisy said. Would her words chill them to the bone, too? Should she weep, or swoon like they did in the movies? “I’ll just go get your scotch.”
She did not get the scotch. Instead, she hotfooted it out the front door, with some vague notion of going to the sheriff’s office and demanding the release of her cousin. Although they weren’t really keeping him there, were they? She was working through this thought as she opened the front gate and turned toward Morse Street.
“Hello, Daisy.”
Daisy nearly fainted when she heard her cousin’s voice behind her. “Hell’s bells, Ed Lewis. You really scared me. Where did you come from?”
“I was hiding out here,” Ed said calmly, “waiting for you.”
Daisy held her hand over her heart, as if that would slow the beating. And yet, she had never been so glad to see anyone in her life. “Oh, Ed. Where did you go?”
“I didn’t go anywhere. You’re the one who ran away.”
“Yes,” she said. “It was that horrible tongue.” The tongue had looked like a melted grape Popsicle, twisting out of the girl’s surprised, waxy mouth. “But I thought you were behind me.”
“No, I wasn’t. I stayed.”
Something in the tone of his voice made Daisy stop listening to the sound of her own blood and look more closely at him. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“Nothing’s wrong with my eyes,” Ed said.
But there was something wrong. They were still silver fish, but now they were alive, like the little minnows that swam between her toes at low tide. She wondered when that had happened. She tried to think back to before they found the body, but she couldn’t remember.
“Look, we can’t talk here,” Daisy said. “They’re all going crazy inside. And my father’s coming and so is yours. And they know about the tennis.”
“I know.” Ed didn’t seem bothered.
“Well, we’re in a whole heap of trouble, thanks to you, Ed. Are you hungry?”
“Not really,” Ed said.
Daisy felt exasperated with everyone who wasn’t hungry. “Do you have any money?”
“The sheriff
gave me two dollars. For helping out.”
“Good. You can buy me a cheeseburger. But we should go by the harbor, so they won’t see us.”
Daisy stayed silent until she wolfed down the cheeseburger, careful not to let the grease pooling in the waxed paper drip on her green shorts. They were sitting on a bench by the ferry, away from the crowd at the Quarterdeck. Ed was still in his tennis clothes, but they had been soiled in patches, and his blond hair stood up in spikes. He was gently swinging his long legs, letting his tennis shoes scrape on the gravel under their feet.
“Did you tell them about the cigarettes?”
“No,” Ed said. “Don’t worry about the cigarettes. They didn’t see them. And if they do find them, they’ll think the murderer smoked them.”
The murderer. Daisy hadn’t really thought how the girl had gotten that way. Just that she was that way. When Ed had lifted the blanket, it had taken her a minute to really see anything. And when she did, it seemed to take ages before her feet would start moving. But, thinking back, Daisy understood that, of course, someone else had done that to the girl.
Half of the girl’s face looked like it had collapsed or something, with the man-of-war swimming out from her dark curly hair. The eyes were open and bulging like a frog’s, the fat tongue running between her teeth. And her breasts. Besides the tongue, that had scared Daisy the most. She had never seen naked breasts before, except her mother’s. But these weren’t like her mother’s; there was something wrong with them. There were bits missing, as if someone had taken a cookie cutter and stamped out her skin, leaving oval-shaped impressions that stared back at Daisy like sticky eyes. It was at that point that Daisy’s feet had begun to move.
“A murderer,” she said, slowly. “Do they know who?”
“No,” Ed said. “But her name is Elena Nunes. They found her identification card under her body. She’s the Wilcoxes’ maid.”
“What about the man-of-war?” Daisy still couldn’t figure how it had gotten there. Had Elena Nunes been swimming?
“What man-of-war?”
“The one on her head,” Daisy said. “You know, where it was squashed up.”
“That was her brain, and scalp,” Ed said.
“How do you know that?” Daisy whispered.
“I was with the deputy when he reported it to the sheriff,” Ed said. “He said, ‘That guy bashed her brains in so hard some of it popped out of her head.’ ”
“He said that? He said it popped out of her head?” Daisy felt butterflies in her stomach.
“But she was strangled, too. That’s why her neck was black.” Ed’s voice had a hush to it, like the way they spoke in church.
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we’ve seen a murdered person, Ed.”
“I know,” Ed said.
“Do you think the murderer will come after us now? Maybe we’ve been marked for death.” Daisy had read a story like that, where red crosses appeared like molten lava on the foreheads of the victims.
“No,” Ed said. “I think it makes us special.”
1959: JULY
II
When Daisy’s father arrived at Tiger House, order seemed to follow. Within twenty-four hours, he had pulled some strings with a friend from his club and gotten Ed enrolled in a summer Scouts program, while her mother had resumed cooking for the household, preparing for their annual summer party, and generally being less distracted. She even started working in her garden and packing beach picnics for her father, who himself had taken over managing all the phone calls and visits from concerned friends and nosy neighbors.
News travels fast. Bad news travels faster.
Only Aunt Helena seemed immune to his plan making. Uncle Avery wasn’t coming.
“He won’t do it, Nick,” Daisy’s father had said. “Something about that idiotic collection of his. Frankly, he didn’t seem all that concerned. He said something odd about it being character building. That fellow is a real piece of work.”
“Damn man,” her mother had said.
Aunt Helena, who had been standing by during the conversation, didn’t say a word.
* * *
Daisy’s mother had been skeptical when Daisy had told her, almost tearfully, that she needed to go back to her tennis lessons. Missing even one day, she explained, would put her behind.
“She’s almost hysterical about it,” she heard her mother tell her father through the closed bedroom door. “It worries me. I think it’s a bit unnatural. I mean, why would she want to go back there, after everything that’s happened?”
“She’s just determined,” Daisy’s father said. “She wants to win that tournament, that’s all.”
“I don’t think it’s healthy.” Daisy heard a rustling in the room, as if her mother was tidying the bedclothes. She had a habit of doing that when she was nervous or distracted.
“I think it will take her mind off it,” her father said. “Let’s not make more of it than is necessary. We don’t want her summer to be ruined because some lunatic chose to garrote a maid.”
“Aren’t you a cold one, Hughes Derringer.” Her mother’s voice had the quality of glass. “I’d say it’s ruined the summer for all of us. Some cut-up, bashed-in maid found by our daughter.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, I’m not sure I do. Then again, it’s always you two, and I’m the odd man out. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you agree with her.”
“Don’t start in on that again. You know that’s not true.”
Daisy heard more rustling.
“I hate it when you speak to me like that.” Her mother’s voice had dropped and Daisy had to press her ear against the door to catch it. “Like I’m tedious.”
“You’re not tedious. It’s just … you confuse me sometimes, Nick.”
“Oh, are we telling the truth now?”
“We could give it a try.”
“In that case, I could say the same thing about you.”
She heard her father sigh and the bedsprings creak, as if he had sunk heavily into the mattress.
“What do you want me to say?” he said after a while. “Do you want to keep her out of the program?”
“I don’t know. I just want us to agree, that’s all.” Then her mother said: “It’s this murder. It frightens me.”
“Come here.”
Daisy felt like eons passed before either one of them spoke again.
“It’s hot in here.” Her mother sounded breathless. The bedsprings creaked again.
“Wait. Don’t move.”
“I …”
“Your skin …” Her father’s voice trailed off. “Can I? I mean, do you want …”
“Yes.”
“Nick, I …”
“No, it’s all right. Don’t say anything.” Then: “Wait, Hughes, we haven’t made a decision yet. About Daisy, I mean.”
“All right, but you better decide quickly.”
“I suppose it’s all right,” her mother said, almost whispering. “You’re right, it shouldn’t ruin her summer. And she is so serious about that tournament.”
“She’s a winner,” her father said.
Flushed, Daisy went to her room and laid her tennis dress on the spare bed, smoothing out a wrinkle in the collar.
She had to admit that her mother had been right in some ways. At times, when she was pounding the ball back over the net, the image of what they’d seen, the smell of the rotting shelter, would suddenly come to her and she would feel dizzy and disoriented, like the time she got sunstroke and vomited in the Gilchrists’ swimming pool.
But on her first day back, she felt like a movie star. Everyone wanted to talk to her about the dead girl. They all crowded around her on the clubhouse porch, offering glasses of lemon water, penny candy, and promises of new racquet strings in return for the story.
“Did you know she was dead when you first saw her?”
“Was she all white, like a ghost?”
“Did you faint? I
would’ve fainted dead away.”
This last was from Peaches, which was typical given that Peaches always had to be at the center of everything. Of course she would imagine herself fainting dead away, to be carried off by some obliging boy in tennis whites. As if Peaches were light enough to be carried away by anyone. But this time, no one paid her any attention. Even Tyler seemed annoyed by her.
“Let Daisy tell the story,” he snapped back.
Daisy felt a strange glow and leaned in closer to Tyler. She could smell his particular odor, leather and sweat, but also clean. She gave him a look of gratitude.
“It was weird,” Daisy said. “She just didn’t look right. And her head was lopsided. Ed says it was bashed in with a rock. Or that’s what the deputy told him.”
A collective gasp rose from the group.
“Ed was very brave,” Daisy continued, feeling loyal and proud of her cousin. “He’s the one who lifted the blanket.”
“It’s just like a movie,” Anita said approvingly.
“I think you were brave, too,” Tyler said.
Daisy felt her breath catch in her chest in a small hiccup.
“If I had a little sister, I’d want her to be just like you.”
Peaches smirked, returned to her former glory.
Anita invited herself over after the lesson. Daisy, still thinking black thoughts about Tyler and Peaches, found herself agreeing, even though she wasn’t sure it was such a great idea. She just hoped her parents would be at the beach. And that Aunt Helena wasn’t acting too weird.
“I think it’s absolutely thrilling that you found the girl. It’s like a Nancy Drew story.”
“I thought you said it was like a movie,” Daisy said, feeling mean-spirited.
“It’s both, all rolled into one. And even better because it’s true.”
Daisy was silent.
“She was the Wilcoxes’ maid,” Anita said, throwing a glance at Daisy.
“I know that,” Daisy said, irritably.
“My grandmother says Mrs. Wilcox fired her last maid for stealing.”
Daisy stared at her. Anita’s lips were curled up a little at the corners.
Tigers in Red Weather Page 9
