Peony Street Page 4

  “When will Dad be home?” she asked her mother, who was now holding Mackie Pea upside down on her lap, rubbing the little dog’s belly while she murmured with pleasure.

  “This is your father’s schedule,” Delia said, “he gets up at 5:00, watches the twenty-four hour news and weather channels for a half hour, and then he gets his bath and shaves. I take him to the bakery with me at 6:00, and then Scott picks him up there and takes him to breakfast. After that Scott takes him to the service station, where your Uncle Curtis watches him until the bar opens at noon. Then your cousin Patrick looks after him until I pick him up at 5:00, after I get off work at the Inn. We come home, have dinner, and then he watches television until he falls asleep in his recliner.”

  “I didn’t know he needed babysitting like that.”

  “He falls,” her mother said. “Someone has to be with him in case he loses his balance.”

  “Why doesn’t he use a walker?”

  “He says they’re for old men.”

  “He’s still stubborn; that much hasn’t changed.”

  “Ava says he’s like a huge, cranky toddler.”

  Ava was the widow of Claire’s cousin Brian.

  “You just said you were working at the Inn. I thought you were working for Ava at the B&B in the afternoons.”

  “That’s a long story for another day, after you’ve had a bath and a good long sleep.”

  “I’m all for that,” Claire said, “but I’d like to wait until I’ve seen Dad.”

  Delia was quiet, and Claire said, “What?”

  “I want to prepare you for how your father’s changed,” her mother said, “but I don’t know how.”

  “His memory’s bad, you said, but he isn’t paralyzed or anything, is he?”

  “No,” Delia said. “He’s had a series of small strokes, not any big one. He’ll know who you are, but he may not remember as much as you’d like. He gets confused easily.”

  “I can handle that,” Claire said. “Poor Dad.”

  Delia was quiet again.

  “There’s more,” Claire said. “Just tell me.”

  “No,” Delia said. “I’ll let you see for yourself. Just remember, he’s still your father, but he’s different. He can’t handle problems anymore; he can’t tolerate tension of any kind. It agitates him when things change. Try not to worry him about anything.”

  “Like what happened last night.”

  “Let’s not mention it,” Delia said. “He can’t help and it will only upset him.”

  Claire reflected that her dad had always been the first one she’d gone to for advice when she was in trouble. She couldn’t imagine that he wasn’t still that strong, protective, invincible man who took the sensible long view in any situation.

  “I don’t want to worry him,” Claire said, “but it would take a miracle to keep a secret that big in this town.”

  “Your father’s very well thought of. People around here know his condition and they protect him.”

  “Let’s hope that protection extends to his daughter.”

  Her mother left to pick up her father at the bar. When she brought him back Claire was surprised at how bedraggled he looked. His shirttail was hanging out and his undershirt was stained. He did recognize her and seemed glad to see her. She hugged him tightly, and when she kissed his cheek she noticed his shaving had been more miss than hit.

  “What a nice surprise,” he said, and Delia steadied him over to his recliner, where he sat down heavily.

  He took a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and wiped his face, which was red and sweating. His jowls sagged and his eyes were bloodshot.

  “Where’s Pip?” he asked her.

  Claire looked at her mother. Delia shook her head.

  “Still in California, I guess,” Claire said.

  “The heck he is!” her father said. “He was in the Thorn last week. He’s grown his hair out long, looked like a hippie. I told him he needed a haircut. He thought that was funny but I was dead serious. What’s the point in being married to a beautician if it’s not the free haircuts?”

  Claire looked at her mother.

  “Claire’s had a long trip getting home,” Delia said. “Let’s let her lie down and get some rest.”

  “You go on and get a nap,” her father said. “When Pip gets here we’ll feed him some supper.”

  Mackie Pea ran into the room and jumped up on her father’s lap. Claire was relieved and amazed when her father just laughed.

  “Well, who is this little doggie?” he said.

  She made introductions and her father tucked Mackie into the crook of his arm and rubbed the furrow between her eyes. She could hardly believe this was the same man who used to say you couldn’t trust any dog and he couldn’t see why people kept them.

  “You wait ‘til old Chesterfield gets a look at you,” he told the little dog.

  “I can’t believe Chester’s still alive,” Claire said. “Where is he?”

  “He’s around here somewhere,” Delia said. “You might want to be careful with him and Mackie. Chester can be vicious.”

  “Now, Delia, don’t you talk that way about my cat,” her father said. “Ole Chester’s a good cat.”

  Claire took Mackie Pea from her father and went down the hall. Her mother followed her back to her old bedroom. Claire could tell her mother had cleared a hasty path to the bed. It looked as if they had been using the room for storage.

  “If I’d known you were coming I would’ve cleaned,” Delia said. “I’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  “I can clean my own room,” Claire said, and kissed her mother on the cheek. “We’ll get caught up good and proper at dinner.”

  “I have to go back to the Inn after I feed your father his lunch,” Delia said. “I’ll drop your father off at the bar as I go. You need your rest.”

  “Wake me up when you get home, then,” Claire said.

  “We’ll see,” Delia said.

  Claire walked down to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The three-bedroom, one-bath house seemed even smaller than she remembered. The bathroom was tiled in the original 1950’s jade green. Some of the tiles were cracked now; all of them were dingy. Claire’s mother had always been so house-proud, it concerned her how shabby and untidy everything seemed to be.

  While she took a long hot bath Claire mentally renovated and redecorated the bathroom. Afterward she rooted around in the towel cupboard until she found a new toothbrush, and then brushed her teeth.

  ‘I could spend some money updating the house, maybe get some help in to clean it a couple days a week,’ she thought. ‘Dad could probably use some physical therapy and a nutritionist.’

  When she went back to her room Mackie Pea was not there, and she found the little dog curled up in her father’s arms as he reclined and watched the local midday news. She stood in the hallway, reluctant to disturb them.

  On the television the female news anchor had big eighties hair and heavy, dramatic makeup. Dark burgundy blush had been applied like war paint up each cheek and smoke-colored eye shadow extended up from her lash line to a slash of white beneath her two narrow, penciled-on eyebrows. Her lips were outlined four shades darker than her frosted lipstick.

  The weatherman was the same one she remembered from childhood, only now his hair was snow white. The newsroom set was dated and the lighting was all wrong, throwing shadows at odd angles and flattering no one. There were awkward pauses between segments and the anchors couldn’t seem to get through one sentence without stumbling over a word.

  The commercial that aired on the break was for a local car dealer dressed up in a gorilla suit.

  “We don’t monkey around with our prices!” he claimed.

  Claire sighed. It was like going back in time.

  She noticed her father was holding his mouth in an exaggerated frown, and was subtly nodding his head. It looked as if he was keeping time to music she couldn’t hear. Her mother came up behind her and touched her arm.

&nbs
p; “He does that thing with his head when he’s agitated. If you touch him or talk to him he stops. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it.”

  “What’s wrong with his mouth?” Claire asked.

  “That started after the last fall,” Delia said.

  “Isn’t there anything they can do?”

  Delia led Claire back into her bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the edge of her bed. Claire got undressed, put on the nightgown her mother had placed on the bed, crawled in and pulled the covers up. She felt 30 years younger in doing so. This was what she and her mother had done every night when she was a child.

  “Tell me more about what’s going on with him,” Claire said.

  “He fell a few weeks ago and then couldn’t get up. Hannah’s little boy Sammy was here with him and went to get help. We haven’t left him alone since then.”

  “When did all this start? You just told me about it at Christmas.”

  “We first realized something was wrong about a year ago. Your Uncle Curtis and I both noticed he couldn’t seem to remember anything, and sometimes struggled to find the right word, but Ian got angry if we mentioned it. One morning last October I found him sitting in the car in the driveway, crying. He couldn’t remember how to start the car.

  “Doc Machalvie examined him and he failed a short-term memory test, so we went to Morgantown and they did more tests. An MRI showed he’s had multiple little strokes, probably over the past couple years.”

  “What are they doing for him?”

  “He’s on blood thinners, blood pressure medicine, and he has a medicinal patch for the dementia.”

  “Dementia?” Claire said, wrinkling up her nose. “That’s an awful word.”

  “It used to be called hardening of the arteries but now they call it vascular dementia. Every time he has a little stroke it deprives his brain of oxygen and more cells die. One of the side effects is loss of memory function. The patch is supposed to keep it from getting worse.”

  “Is it working?”

  “How can I tell?” Delia said. “His memory keeps getting worse, but maybe without the patch it would decline even faster.”

  “What do you do when he has these little strokes?”

  “The doctor said there’s no point in bringing him to the emergency room when they happen; they can’t really do anything to help him. It’s just poor circulation, age, genetics.”

  “But people recover from strokes all the time. They get therapy and reverse the effects.”

  “This is different,” Delia said. “I’m sorry, Claire, but he’s not going to get any better.”

  “How long does he have?”

  “Who knows?” Delia said. “It could be years or it could be tomorrow. We just have to make the best of what time he has left.”

  “Does he realize what’s happening?”

  “Oh, yes,” Delia said. “He got so down about it Doc put him on an antidepressant.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “I got great advice from a social worker at the hospital. She said, ‘make his world as structured and drama-free as possible and try not to take anything he says personally.’ We keep to a schedule, we don’t worry him about anything, and we don’t argue with him when he insists something’s true when it’s not.”

  “There has to be more we can do, better doctors somewhere.”

  “I know it’s your instinct to jump in and fix this,” Delia said. “But do you really want what time he has left to be spent going to places he’s not familiar with and having people do things that scare him?”

  “No,” Claire said, “of course not.”

  “Spend a few days with us and see how it is.”

  “I can’t just sit still and do nothing,” Claire said.

  “I know,” Delia said.

  “I can’t just accept there’s no hope.”

  “I know,” Delia said.

  “How can you?”

  “Have a talk with Doc Machalvie,” Delia said. “He can explain it much better than I can.”

  “I had planned to stay two weeks, but this thing with Tuppy may mean I’m here awhile.”

  “We’ll love having you as long as you can stay,” Delia said. “Were you and Tuppy very close?”

  “More like fellow hostages,” Claire said. “We had a common enemy.”

  “It must have been a shock to find him. Why do you think he was here?”

  “He knew I was coming here and I missed my plane. He must have planned to travel with me or meet me here for some reason, but I don’t know why. If I had my phone I could check my messages and then I would know.”

  “Did they find a phone with his body?”

  “No, which is weird. That man may have loved his phone even more than I do mine.”

  “I’m sure Scott will figure it out,” Delia said.

  “I always thought Scott and Maggie would get together. What happened there?”

  “You know how contrary your cousin Maggie is. I think he just got tired of waiting for her to make up her mind.”

  “Should I pretend to still be with Pip? If Dad’s hallucinating conversations with him how do I not upset him?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s worry about that when it comes up again.”

  “Will you bring Mackie Pea in before you go?”

  “If I can pry her out of your father’s arms,” Delia said. “He’s taken a shine to her. He fed her some cheese while you were in the bathroom.”

  “That dog’s gonna have a colon blow-out before the day is through,” Claire said.

  “I’ll take her out before I go,” Delia said.

  “I love you, Mom,” Claire said.

  “I love you, Claire Bear,” Delia said, and she turned out the light and closed the door.

  Claire’s last thought before she fell asleep was that the sheets, laundered in the same detergent and fabric softener that her mother had always used, smelled like home.

  It was three in the morning before Scott got to talk to someone in authority at the airline. The difference in time zones had been an issue, but not as bad as the cultural barrier. As Scott was thinking the British were just as snotty as he expected them to be, he was sure the man on the other end of the line was thinking Scott was just as obnoxious as he expected an American to be. Scott was getting nowhere until he remembered Ian used to advise him that when he needed cooperation he should look for common ground.

  “What do you think United’s chances are against Liverpool?” he asked.

  “You follow football?” the man asked, not bothering to hide his surprise.

  The UN diplomatic corps would have applauded the improvement in international relations that ensued. By the time Scott terminated the most expensive long distance phone call he’d ever made, he had received a fax of the information needed to corroborate Claire’s alibi and a deeper appreciation of an Englishman’s devotion to soccer. All those late nights he’d spent watching soccer on satellite television had paid off in an unexpected way.

  He scanned and emailed the documents to Sarah’s office and locked up the station. Rose Hill was quiet, cold, and drippy, which was not unusual for early spring. There were actually only three seasons: snow, rain, and eight weeks of what passed for summer.

  As he crossed Peony Street he noticed a car with a Maryland license plate parked in front of the Rose and Thorn. He backtracked to the station and retrieved Tuppy’s keys from the safe. Sarah had tasked him with finding Tuppy’s car and in his single-minded devotion to clearing Claire he had neglected to look. Scott’s intention was to find the man’s phone, see whom he called, and listen to his messages.

  The trunk was empty. The man’s suitcase and carry-on bag were on the back seat. The driver’s side cup holder held an empty coffee cup from an expensive gourmet coffee retailer Scott had heard of but had never visited. There was a cell phone charging cord plugged into the cigarette lighter but no phone. Scott looked under and in between the seats, and cleaned out the glove box. He found nothin
g more exotic than the cellophane from a cigarette pack.

  He locked the car, carried the luggage back to the station and put it on the break room table. He put on latex gloves and took out a form on which to catalog the contents. By the time he was through he knew what time the man’s plane had been scheduled to take off from Heathrow and land in DC, what time he rented his car, and the exorbitant price he paid for the famous coffee. He was also envious of the man’s wardrobe and baffled by his toiletry collection.

  ‘What is clarifying lotion?’ he asked himself after he read the label on one bottle.

  Scott secured the evidence and locked up the station once again. This time he walked down Peony Street, which was no longer blocked off with saw horses and yellow tape at its junction with Iris Avenue. The lack of broken glass was a puzzle. The force with which Tuppy must have been hit would surely have broken the windshield. Scott imagined a wide circle with the spot where Tuppy had landed as the epicenter. Using a flashlight, he started at the center and spiraled his way out as he went, looking for something, anything that might be a clue as to what had happened. Sarah’s team had been thorough; he found nothing.

  Scott walked down Iris Avenue and noticed Ian was still up, either watching TV or more likely dozing in his recliner. He wouldn’t disturb him; it wouldn’t be kind to Delia and it wouldn’t help. He missed talking to Ian about cases, bouncing ideas off him and hearing his opinions. There was no one else who could see things from the chief’s perspective or give him advice based on thirty years of experience policing Rose Hill.

  Ian knew the past history of every Rose Hillian, along with all their secrets, quirky or dark as they might be. He had been an invaluable resource, a great mentor, a trusted friend. Now he was just a sweet old man Scott took to breakfast every morning, someone who shocked Scott with what he said out loud. Ian Fitzpatrick had been the closest Scott had come to having a father after his own died, and Scott was determined to never let him know he pitied him or was embarrassed by him.

  Scott thought about Claire. He had grown up with her, and had witnessed the pain it caused her parents when she left home and then rarely visited. He hoped she would stay even after she was free to leave. Her parents needed her. The thought ‘I need her’ followed and he shook his head. Where had that come from?