Calamity (Captain Grande Angil Mysteries)

by Robert G. Bernstein

  “Sure, go ahead. I’ll wake you in an hour. Shit, I can’t believe I missed a six foot six inch three hundred pound black man. Pathetic.”

  Zeke closed his eyes and cocked his head sideways against the passenger window. He slid his barn door sized ass on the seat and the whole car shifted as if it had been buffeted by a gust of wind.

  “I guess you ain’t the Captain of Keen Observation you thought you was,” he said, his eyes shut tight against the bright sun. “For the record, I’m six seven and just over three-ten.”

  Zeke slept all the way up Route-495 and Route-93 and didn’t wake until I made the turn onto the group home driveway. The digital clock on the rental flicked to 2:45 p.m. as I pulled into the circle by the main entrance. Dinner usually came early to the home and my arrival couldn’t have been more perfect. At this time of day, I had about an hour to visit before the staff got the residents duly motivated for their meal. I liked this hour because I could leave without much fanfare or questions and because the dinner activity distracted my mother from the sad reality of my visit, namely that she couldn’t remember who I was or why I was important to her.

  “This the place?” Zeke said, looking over the building and porch.

  “My mother’s home,” I said. “You can wait in the car, sleep in the library or take a walk, whatever. I’ll be about an hour.”

  “I can’t come in?” Zeke said. “Your mother ain’t got a color thing, does she?”

  I smiled and almost broke into laughter at the suggestion. My mother was the real deal. She didn’t rationalize or program her life according to the moral or ethical standards set by society. Political correctness was a joke to her. Activism as a hobby or a project, or as a means to compensate for feelings of social or ecumenical guilt, these were not her inspirations. Doing what was right conveyed from her essence, her core. Color, race, religion, they had no bearing on the way she lived her life. She was a knee-jerk kind of person, reflex oriented.

  “What the hell,” I said. “Come on in. My mother’s gonna love you.”

  Zeke pried himself out of the Chevy and stretched. “I got a mother, you know,” he said, and started for the front door ahead of me.

  I signed in and introduced Zeke to Charlotte at the front desk. Charlotte hadn’t seemed to age since her sixtieth birthday. Always dressed to the nines and made-up with what some might consider a tad too much eyeliner and lipstick, as if she had just stepped out of a French cabaret. Quite sexy and cosmopolitan for an older woman. Today she wore her hair up in a bun and had on a blue chiffon dress with burgundy accents. She offered Zeke a broad, somewhat confused smile.

  “He’s a friend of mine, Charlotte,” I said.

  “Oh.” She almost sang the word.

  We headed down the hall to the door of the Alzheimer’s Care Unit, the two of us having difficulty walking side-by-side without our shoulders touching. Zeke seemed oblivious to the situation, as if he were accustomed to constantly brushing-up against his surroundings. I had no choice but to stagger my step and let him walk a little bit ahead of me. I also had to consider the possibility that, in a hall designed to allow two wheelchairs to pass each other, I was no petunia, either.

  I signed in a second time at the door to the unit and rang the bell. Shirley, a young nurse practitioner originally from Southern California, let us in. She gave us a warm hello, offered Zeke a wink and a wide smile, and then told me she had just put my mother down for a nap. A complex aroma of laundry detergent, carpet cleaner, fresh baked chocolate brownies and the smell of elderly people living in confinement filled the air. I could hear a Baroque concerto, a performance of one of the Vienna Masters, playing on the CD in the recreation room. Around the corner of the nurses’ station, in the main dining room, the other two staff members sat with a group of residents and filled out logbooks. Most of the residents seemed to be asleep in their chairs or in a state of semi-wakefulness.

  A strange and uncomfortable scene assaulted us when we entered my mother’s room. She was awake and fully dressed, lying on the floor, surrounded by a mess of crayons and water colors. I told Zeke to get Shirley or one of the other aides to come in and help me and asked him to wait outside. He nodded thoughtfully and disappeared out the door.

  I put on my usual happy face and enthusiastically said, “Hey, Ma, how are you?” as if it were the most natural thing to do. I asked her if she wanted some help and casually moved her lengthwise onto a clean section of the floor. She had paint and crayon all over her face and in and around her mouth, and she seemed confused and agitated.

  “Oh my,” Shirley said as she came through the door. “Grande, I got this. You go sit with your friend. I’ll call you when I have everything cleaned up.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. I’ll help.” I opened the windows and the cool December air filled the room. My mother let out a surprised yelp. “Oohh, cold,” she said as we got her off the floor and into the bathroom. It was the first words I had heard her speak in weeks.

  I collected the items off the floor, closed the door to the room and joined Zeke in the dining room. The other staff members that were here just moments before had left to handle the needs of other residents. Zeke was by himself with Caroline, a sweet lady in a blond wig who had been living in the unit for five years. She smiled at me when I approached and reached out to touch me. I kissed her on the cheek and said: “Hi, Mom.”

  Zeke looked at me askance. “I’m confused,” he said squinting, his massive brow creased like the folds in a lava canyon.

  “Caroline thinks every man who comes here is her son,” I said and smiled at her. “Don’t worry,” I added. “She can’t hear.”

  “Should I…?” Zeke was motioning with his hand, asking if he should kiss her hello.

  “Nah,” I said. “It’s covered.”

  We sat quiet for a long while and then Shirley came out to say my Mom was cleaned up and feeling chipper. She patted me on the shoulder and said I could go back in and shut the windows and have a visit. “Don’t worry,” she said. “She won’t remember it.”

  “I know,” I said, as if it would make me feel better.

  Back in the room I turned the TV on so Zeke would have something to occupy him while I sat with my mother. He pretended to watch and every so often would glance at me stroking her hair or holding her hand. I could tell it bothered him to see her staring back at me, unable to answer my questions, unable to communicate in any fashion whatsoever, her eyes moist – with what? Partial recognition. Knowing I was somebody she should love but not knowing who or why. Just enough memory to make it hurt.

  At four-thirty Shirley came back in to get my mother for dinner. I kissed Mom goodbye and Zeke took her hand gently and said, “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Angil.” She looked at her minuscule, frail hand in his giant, brown, powerful catcher’s mitt of a hand and smiled. She peered into his eyes and reached to touch his face. He had to bend his knees and lean over sixty degrees for her to make contact. She cupped his chin slightly and then patted his cheek.

  Outside, on the walk back to the rental, Zeke turned to me and put his heavy arm across my shoulders. “You know that talk you wanted to have about trust?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. I was in kind of a haze, unaware of my own steps.

  “Forget it.”

  25

  On the way home I treated Zeke to a steak dinner and a few beers at Max’s Pub in Brunswick. Leather upholstery, green wallpaper and wood paneling give the place a big city, men’s club atmosphere, and the food isn’t half-bad. I knew Zeke would like it because they have oversize chairs and generous portions. Sticking with my seafood theme for the trip, and because I had my visit cut short in Annapolis, I ordered oysters Rockefeller for an appetizer and a plate of shrimp scampi. I thought Zeke was going to gag when he saw me slam down the first oyster.

  He wouldn’t tell me much about Jenny Bowers, who he usually referred to as “The Lady.” He said he never asked her about her personal life and I believed him. I’
m sure he had observations he could have shared, but I gathered that to talk about her to me in a speculative or conversational manner was not Zeke’s way. He called his relationship with her “private” and “special” and added that she never, ever asked him to do anything for her. He made all the decisions and handled all her material and other needs, including the management of her portfolio. The only thing I learned of interest was that the two of them had been on the move ever since the accident, living out of hotels in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, their financial resources backed by Allen’s IRA and a substantial insurance settlement.

  Zeke never asked about Tanner or the Annapolis trip and I didn’t offer to tell him. When I mentioned that I needed to talk to Mrs. Bowers about the accident and her family, he got sullen, stared into his plate and said: “I know.”

  We stayed at my house that night, held onto the Chevy rental and drove it to Bar Harbor the next morning. I wanted to take my Rover but there was no way in hell Zeke would fit, not unless I laid him out in the back like a pile of sheet rock. Besides, he took one look at the passenger seat and laughed.

  “We’ll take the rental or go in two cars,” he said. “It’s nonnegotiable. After I pick up the stretch you can keep the rental for as long as you like. You workin’ for The Lady now, you should have something sensible.”

  I didn’t see the point of explaining the virtues of a Land Rover’s narrow wheelbase and low-geared transfer case in a state like Maine so I nodded my agreement and accepted Zeke’s offer. I figured I would keep the rental a few days and return it before Christmas.

  Jenny Bowers had a suite at the Harborside Hotel and Marina in Bar Harbor. Standing at the picture window in her room, looking across Frenchman’s Bay, you could see the Porcupines, Jordan and Ironbound Islands and the Schoodic Peninsula. Hardy spruce and pine clung tenaciously to distant shores of gray and pink granite conveying a sense of rustic and wild tranquility, daring you with its boldness and at the same time supplanting any dread and disquiet with a sense of peace and calm. At the moment, light westerly breezes worked ripples on top of the long, easterly swells that remained from the most recent storm. The chop pushed against the remnant seas of the storm like wave after wave of army ants attacking a horde of beetles of lesser numbers and superior size.

  Zeke had escorted me to Jenny Bowers suite but never entered. He said he had some errands to run in Ellsworth, apologized to Mrs. Bowers, and left. I knew he was lying. He had already informed me that he didn’t want to be around when I questioned her about the accident and her family.

  She had just finished a breakfast of blueberry muffin, orange juice and coffee and was still in her silk pajamas and robe. In the bright morning sun, streaming unfiltered through the large picture window, her extraordinary beauty and lithe, handsome figure again struck me. She had the robe pulled tight around her narrow waste, covering her neck and shirt collar, and wore insulated deerskin slippers. When she sat in the chair opposite me the pant cuff of her right leg momentarily flopped over the top of her slipper, exposing a few inches of the scarred and heavily grafted skin just above her ankle. She self-consciously readjusted her pajama bottom to cover it. I tried to avert my eyes. I’m not sure I succeeded.

  “Would you like some privacy to get dressed?” I said. “I can wait downstairs and we can do this a little later. There’s no hurry.”

  She smiled.

  “No, It’s fine,” she said. “I like to be in soft clothes sometimes.”

  I sat in a wing back chair next to the table. I had taken off my leather jacket and placed it in the closet when I walked in, but now I felt warm and flushed. I had on a plaid Pendleton shirt, jeans and Vasque hiking boots. The shirt was thick Scottish wool. I wanted to take it off.

  “Did Zeke tell you what I wanted to talk to you about?” I said.

  “Not specifically, no,” she said. “But I know when Zeke is uncomfortable, and I can usually guess why. You want to ask me about the fire and my son?”

  “Are you going to be all right with this?” I said.

  “What would you like to know?” she said, stiffening slightly.

  “Well, Mrs. Bowers—”

  “If you wish for me to call you Grande it’s only fair you call me Jenny.”

  “Jenny,” I said. “Be my pleasure.” I took a deep breath and ventured forth. “You hired me to do a job and to do it right I have to find out a few things that only you know. Please believe me, I don’t want to ask these questions any more than you want to hear them. I can tell you there’s more to Captain Pete Tanner and the place where Aaron died than meets the eye. What I can’t tell you is whether it has anything at all to do with Aaron’s death. Do you understand?”

  I waited for a response from Jenny Bowers. She sighed and nodded her head and I continued.

  “Did you suspect Aaron for the fire in your house?”

  A tear formed in her right eye. She sat perfectly still, perfectly erect, staring at me but looking through me and through the chair and the wall behind me to a place way off in the distance only a grief-stricken mother can find. The sixty-fathom stare. I had seen the look before, more than a few times, in the eyes of mothers who had lost their sons in war, in my own mother’s eyes, as she tried and failed to separate the joy of every one of my birthdays from the memory of my father’s death.

  “The fire department sent a man to investigate the fire,” she said. “He believed Aaron had something to do with it. They could never prove anything.”

  “That’s not what I asked, Jenny?” I said.

  The tear in Jenny’s eye had gained enough mass to pull free of its mooring. She allowed it to slide down her cheek. It fell off and disappeared into the white roll of terry cloth at the top of her robe. After a second or two, she wiped the residue from her cheek with the palm of her hand. She did this with a hint of anger, in one motion from front to back, as if anger was the only way to force herself back from the place she had gone.

  “That night, when I grabbed him at the top of the stairs, he kept crying, ‘I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry, Mommy.’ I told him to be quiet, to never apologize. Never ever apologize. I told him it wasn’t his fault.”

  She broke down. Her chest spasmed and her arms shook but she kept looking at me. I wanted desperately to go to her, hold her in my arms and tell her everything was all right. Instead, I just let her be and turned away to look out the window. There was a mirror against the far wall, behind her. In the reflection I could see her shoulders heaving up and down. She was still sobbing, still staring straight ahead. I waited, and then she calmed down and I heard her say softly that she had never admitted any of this to anyone.

  “Is this the reason the two of you became estranged?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, wiping her tears and pulling herself together. “I was in the hospital for almost a year, and then in and out of rehab for years after. I had multiple surgeries, and then drug issues with the painkillers they had me on. I was unable to be a mother. We had no immediate family and as a result Aaron was placed in foster care. The police and that fire marshal had been interviewing him without my permission. Child Services should have protected him but they didn’t do a damn thing for him. They all thought he was guilty. I can remember being in and out of consciousness, in a drug coma, in so much pain, and they would bring him to me in the hospital and I could hear them say, ‘This is your fault, Aaron. Tell us what happened. It’ll make you feel better. ‘You need to confess,’ they’d say. The bastards. They would tell him it was OK, that maybe he didn’t mean to start the fire. They were so cruel. Right in front of me in the hospital room. I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t protect him.”

  She was angry now, shaking her head, scowling with her lips pressed tight.

  “He remembered what you said. About not apologizing.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He never said a word.”

  “No. He just cried. Day in and day out. He cried for weeks on end. He was only nine years old.” />
  “Which made him seem guilty, like he was hiding something.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What happened after you were well enough to see him again?”

  “I was never well enough to be his mother again. I left him in foster care and visited him as often as I could. He had withdrawn into himself. Stopped talking to people. Wouldn’t communicate with anyone, not me, the police, his psychologists. He ran away constantly and got into trouble with the police. When he turned eighteen, he left the foster home for good, disappeared. I never heard from him again. I hired a private detective agency to find him and they finally did three years ago, up here in Maine, working with Pete Tanner. I had gotten better by then. With Zeke’s help I kicked the drug dependence and adjusted to the chronic weakness and pain. I tried to see Aaron. He showed no interest in me. Wouldn’t even give me the time of day.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out. I wanted to go out into the frigid December air and scream at the azure sky or jump in the icy waters of Frenchman’s Bay. It felt like I needed to purge myself of her story. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite finished.

  “Do you think it was because he couldn’t face you after what he had done,” I said, “or do you think he was unable to understand you for abandoning him in foster care?”

  “It doesn’t matter which,” she said. “It’s all the same.”

  “I just want to know if you think he did it.”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “I don’t believe he did it. He did something. He felt guilty about something. Not the fire. No. He did not set that fire.”

  I couldn’t tell if she truly believed what she was saying or if she thought saying it over and over in her head would make it true. Whichever, I had a monkey’s fist in my throat that wouldn’t go away. I needed to change the course of the conversation or I would fall prey to my own emotions and go to her and take her in my arms and try to carry her off to a place of peace and tranquility, a quiet mountain pond or an exotic island retreat somewhere. Suddenly I understood what she and Zeke were doing wandering from place to place, adrift, unsettled, always on the move.