Jan Burke - Remember Me, Irene

“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, “you do 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 the Express?”

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 said What are you going to do about it?