Missing Mom: A Novel Read online

  Now it would begin. Now was the start. Nothing could prevent it. Nothing could shield us from it.

  Gwen? Gwen Eaton?

  Not Gwen! No.

  It isn’t possible: Gwen Eaton?

  I don’t believe it. Can’t believe it. No.

  My God, no. Not Gwen.

  Of all people, not Gwen.

  Gwen Eaton! Gone.

  Murdered.

  I stood in the driveway, shivering. I was aware of the garage, the opened door, at my back. By now the sky was beginning to darken, in the west the sun had become a broken, bleeding red yolk. It was the kind of mottled-luminous twilit sky you might lose yourself staring into, in other circumstances.

  I wondered if I should move my car. There would be emergency vehicles, my car might be in the way. I peered through the window and there was my cell phone on the passenger’s seat. I retrieved it, and called Clare’s number. My fingers were clumsy, I punched out the wrong number and had to begin again. At the same time, I was aware of Mom in the garage, on the concrete floor where she’d fallen.

  It was difficult to resist thinking: Mom is going to be all right. I have called an ambulance, Mom will be taken to the hospital and will be all right. A part of my mind was urging me to believe and I was weakening yet I would not give in.

  As if she’d been waiting impatiently for my call, Clare answered immediately, like the 911 dispatcher. Clare answered before I was ready to speak with her. I’d hoped for more time. I’d hoped for Clare’s voice mail. I was saying, “Clare. I’m at the house. Mom has been hurt.” Clare cried, “Hurt! Oh, God! I knew it. What—” I could not speak, my mouth had gone dry. I saw a Mt. Ephraim Police patrol car turning onto Deer Creek Drive, moving swiftly. And another patrol car, close behind. They braked to a stop in front of our house, at angles to block the street. I was distracted by these maneuvers so deftly executed. Across the street at 44 Deer Creek Drive, Walter Higham was standing in his driveway, staring. I had not remembered Mr. Higham so white-haired, a stoop to his shoulders. Talking with Dad at their mailboxes, which were side by side as if companionable, on solid wooden posts on the Highams’ side of the street, Mr. Higham had been my father’s height which was at least six feet.

  Clare’s voice was sharp and fearful in my ear. I tried to explain: Mom was hurt. Mom was badly hurt. I could not utter the word dead, and speaking to Clare I could not utter the word murder. I did not want to break down! It was my responsibility not to break down now that I’d summoned police.

  One of the uniformed officers approached me to ask if I had called 911, if I’d reported a murder. “Do you mean, am I the one who made the call? Yes.” I was sounding excited, angry. Yet calmly the officer asked my name. “What does it matter, my name! My mother needs help.” Officers had entered the garage. I ran to join them but was prevented from entering. I pushed at arms, restraining hands.

  I could see where Mom was lying. Where she’d fallen. Strangers crouching over her.

  My cell phone was in my hand. I’d forgotten it. A small voice screamed out of it, “…Nikki? For God’s sake…” It was Clare. I told her that Mom was badly hurt, someone had hurt Mom and she must come immediately. “Mom is hurt? How—is Mom hurt?” I heard myself stammer that Mom was dead and the cell phone fell from my hand.

  The house at 43 Deer Creek Drive, Deer Creek Acres had been transformed. From a short distance, you would believe its occupants were being celebrated.

  The street was blocked by police vehicles. Residents of the neighborhood were being rerouted. When they asked what had happened they were politely told to move on.

  Vehicles, turned away, moved slowly and haltingly. Some stopped altogether. People were coming out of their houses to stand in the street, staring. Teenagers, younger children. There was a fearful wish to know: what was it? whose house? fire? ambulance? so many police cars—why?

  “Somebody has been hurt.”

  “Hurt—how?”

  “…Mrs. Eaton, in that house.”

  “Mrs. Eaton? Gwen?”

  A chill was lifting from the grass. The air smelled damply of lilac. Strangers were asking me questions. The same questions were repeated. Wildly I thought, If Dad was here—! Dad would be the one to speak to the officers.

  I was feeling light-headed, dazed. I was not feeling adequate to the situation. It seemed to me a terrible thing, I had told Clare Mom is dead. She would hate me now. Between us now there would be the unspeakable Mom is dead.

  Yet it seemed to me plausible that I’d been mistaken. I wanted to interrupt the police officers to ask: “But is my mother really…dead?” The more I considered it, the more I doubted my judgment. Emergency room physicians might see that Mom was still breathing, her heart was still beating, oh why hadn’t she been taken to the hospital, why were they leaving her broken and helpless in the garage…

  In the confusion Clare came running. Clare was frightened as I had never seen her. She saw my face, and stumbled past me without a word, toward the garage. For it was obvious, what had happened to Mom had happened in the garage. “I’m her daughter! I’m Gwen’s daughter! Let me see her! Let me see her!” Police officers prevented her entering the garage. I heard her sharp raised voice. I heard her scream.

  Later, we embraced. Like drowning women clutching helplessly at each other.

  My brother-in-law Rob Chisholm was trying to comfort us. My uncle Herman Eaton, Dad’s older brother. There was Lucille Kovach, my mother’s cousin. There was Fred Eaton. Other relatives, mostly men, I had not seen in a very long time. Gil Rowen, chief of Mt. Ephraim Police, who’d gone to school with “Johnny” Eaton and had known “Feather” Kovach in the old days when they’d all been young, newly married.

  Gil Rowen appeared deeply moved. Firmly he clasped my hand in his. He clasped Clare’s hand. He introduced us to one of the plainclothed officers, Detective Strabane, who would be heading the investigation into “your mother’s murder.”

  We were meant to shake hands with Detective Strabane. Oh but why!

  And then I was sitting down. I seemed to be sitting in the grass. Maybe I had fallen. Voices conferred over my head: “daughter”—“found the body.” It was suggested that I be taken to Mt. Ephraim Medical Center but I refused angrily.

  I saw that the knees of my jeans were stained with something dark. My hands were sticky. Vaguely I recalled, I had wanted to wash my hands. But I’d forgotten, and kept forgetting. There were things I meant to recall but had forgotten even as I told myself I must not forget. I thought I’ve had no practice at this! Nothing has prepared me for this.

  Clare was being questioned now. Clare had regained something of her schoolteacher poise. The detective was calling her “Mrs. Chisholm” and she was calling him “Detective.” A wave of childish relief came over me, Clare would shield me.

  I had been the one to discover Mom. I had been the last person to touch Mom. The last person Mom had seen.

  It seemed to me yes, Mom had seen me. Had Mom tried to speak to me? I didn’t want to make a mistake, I was in fear of saying the wrong thing.

  Had I said the words Mom is dead!

  And now the word murder was being uttered, as a statement of fact.

  Murder, dead. Multiple stab wounds. Caucasian female fifty-six years old. Resident of. Wife of. Mother of.

  The Pedersens next-door were offering us their house so that Detective Strabane could ask his crucial questions. The Highams offered their house. Clare was sitting beside me in the grass now, to comfort me. Clare was holding me as you’d hold a young child. Suddenly it was dark and everywhere there were lights. Police spotlights, blinding. Clare and I stared at our house, where every window blazed light. It did look like a celebration. Even the grimy basement windows emitted a faint warm glow.

  “Poor Dad. He’d be so embarrassed…”

  “The garage, you mean? All that junk…”

  “The basement windows. So dirty.”

  Clare laughed, suddenly. It was the first hint that Clare might
not be so composed as I’d thought. “He always took such care of the house, and the lawn. Now people are trampling the lawn. Mom’s flower beds. And all those lights on, Dad would rush around switching them off. ‘A penny saved is a penny earned.’”

  We laughed, shivering. We resisted being re-located to our neighbors’ house. Yes, Rob Chisholm was right, it was the sensible thing to do, to go inside, but Clare and I resisted. Detective Strabane squatted beside us, to speak with us. He meant to humor us for we were the daughters of the murdered woman. We were children, Gwen Eaton’s children. We had become childish, excitable. Strabane was an earnest man in his late thirties, not young. His features were swarthy and simian and his necktie was twisted. My impulse was to straighten the necktie. As Mom had straightened Dad’s neckties, or his shirt collars, with a sweet little apologetic murmur There! That’s better.

  Strabane was saying how sorry he was to disturb us at such a “tragic time”—“a time when you just want to be alone”—but it was crucial to ask us a few questions immediately: about our mother’s bank account, her credit cards, car; whom she’d been scheduled to see that day, who might have been scheduled to come to the house; who might have been at the house recently—plumber? carpenter? lawn crew?

  It was a surprise to me, in my confused state, to be made to know the simplest thing, obviously taken for granted by everyone else: my mother had been murdered, there was a murderer or murderers to be apprehended.

  I knew this, with a part of my mind. I’d known immediately, seeing my mother’s body. Yet somehow, I had not absorbed the knowledge.

  Mostly, Clare answered the detective’s questions. She knew names, even the correct spellings of names. She knew with certainty what I would have guessed: Mom’s bank was the Bank of Niagara. She knew that Mom had only a single credit card, a Visa. (Dad had not “believed in” credit cards. If he’d had his way, we would have had none.) In her clear brave voice Clare recited the names of workmen who’d been in the house in the past several months and this litany of names was provided to the detective, who took notes in an old-fashioned spiral notebook. When Clare failed to recall a name, Rob provided it. I was made to realize how much my sister and brother-in-law knew of my mother’s life, that I had not known! I was made to realize how irresponsible I had been, and how negligent. Suddenly it was clear, the detective would know, how I was the daughter who had abandoned her widowed mother while Clare was the good daughter who’d remained.

  Strabane glanced at me, brooding.

  “Ma’am? Ms. Eaton? Anything you can add, any name…?”

  My mind was blank. I could not think. I was tamping down my spiky hair, of which I’d become acutely ashamed. Like the Statue of Liberty, I must have looked. And my face dead-white, and my lips caked with an acid-vomit taste.

  I didn’t remember vomiting. Anxiously I wiped at my mouth, I saw that the front of my shirt was dappled with something whitish, sour-smelling.

  Clare said suddenly, “Oh. ‘Danto.’ He’s an exterminator, he came to the house a week or so ago, to exterminate red ants.”

  I said, “Clare, no! ‘Sonny’ Danto would never…”

  “Detective, his name is ‘D-a-n-t-o.’ ‘The Scourge of the Bugs’ he calls himself.” Clare was becoming fired-up, vindictive. “My mother was a lonely, vulnerable woman, a widow. She was so friendly to everyone, so trusting. I hated it how people took advantage of her!”

  But Danto was a joke, wasn’t he?—just one of Mom’s many eccentric acquaintances, not to be taken seriously.

  Strabane was saying, for my benefit, that “all names, any names” of persons who’d been in my mother’s house recently were urgently wanted for purposes of the investigation. “Ma’am, if there’s weeding-out to do, I will do it.”

  It was taken for granted that the person or persons who’d murdered our mother had also taken her Visa card and her car, her wallet, various household items we would be asked to identify in the morning. It was taken for granted that our mother had probably walked into a burglary in progress which had resulted in her death. (Dad had had a security system installed, but after his death, since Smoky was always tripping the alarm, Mom had asked Rob to dismantle it.) In my confused state I’d known that Mom’s car was missing but I had not seemed to grasp that it had been stolen, and might be the means of finding the murder or murderers.

  Rob asked Strabane if whoever had done this would be that stupid, to drive a stolen car, and Strabane said, “Yes, sir. They are all stupid.”

  I could have told the detective that my mother’s car was a metallic-green Honda, a fairly new model, four-door, but Rob Chisholm knew precisely that it was a 2001 Honda Accord for he’d been the one to accompany Gwen to the dealer and help her make the purchase. I could not remember anything of my mother’s license plate number but both Clare and Rob recalled the first three digits—SVI—and Rob also knew the name of the garage where she took the car to be serviced: the manager could give police more information.

  I saw how I was being left behind. How Mom was being left behind.

  I saw how the police investigation would move swiftly and professionally, as if I did not exist. I saw how others seemed already to know much more about what had happened to my mother than I knew.

  I was frightened by this realization, I think. I could not accept it. In the garishly lighted garage (so cluttered, so embarrassing, what will strangers think of us!) my mother’s small lifeless body was being examined and photographed by strangers who had not known Gwen Eaton and for whom she was but a body, a “victim.” Her designation was lurid: “murder victim.”

  Soon, the “murder victim” would be removed from the garage. It was to be transported to the Mt. Ephraim Township morgue. This was a place, you could say it was an institution, to which neither Clare nor I had given the slightest thought, ever. Yet, for many others, it was a known place. It would be a known place, for us.

  We would have liked to accompany our mother’s body to the morgue but we were not allowed this privilege. Nor could we approach our mother simply to touch her, in farewell.

  Our mother had passed beyond us, suddenly. We could not claim her.

  Strabane must have finished his questions, temporarily. For Clare was on her cell phone speaking with Lilja. In a shaky but careful voice explaining, “Something has happened to Grandma Eaton but…No, honey, your dad and I are all right…Yes, we’ll be home soon and in the meantime do me a favor honey, don’t turn on the TV? Promise?”

  As soon as Clare broke off the conversation, Lilja would rush to the TV. Obviously!

  Still more vehicles were arriving on our street. Radio voices squawked loudly. Seen from a distance we must have looked like a carnival. I thought This can’t be happening, it was meant for someone else.

  This long day: had it really begun with ninety-nine-year-old Jimmy Friday wisecracking and flirting through his interview with me that morning, inscribing my copy of Songs My Daddy Taught Me: The Mostly True Tales of Jimmy Friday in an extravagant old-fashioned handwriting TO BEAUTOUS NICOLE FROM “ONE & ONLY” JIMMY FRIDAY!

  I remembered now, I’d thought I would buy a second copy of the elderly musician’s memoir and ask him to inscribe it to Gwen Eaton, she’d been one of his admirers from long ago.

  A TV crew had arrived but was not allowed past the police blockade. Hastily Rob called their home again on the cell phone, to ask Lilja please not to turn on the TV.

  “Just don’t, honey. Daddy is asking you. Promise?”

  Now we were being fingerprinted. I was on my feet, I’d been able to wipe my hands clean with a cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol. Detective Strabane was explaining the procedure, why it was necessary, for our fingerprints, Clare’s, Rob’s, mine, would be everywhere in my mother’s house. His hair grew in odd stiff tufts like quills, slanting forward as in a brisk wind. I had a whiff of something like motor oil. “Ma’am? May I…” Strabane took my hand in his in a diffident gesture and pressed my fingertips against a black-inked pad, then he press
ed them against a sheet of stiff white paper, rolling them carefully onto the paper: each finger separately, then the four fingers together. Tears leaked from my eyes, Strabane made no comment. My fingers were icy, Strabane made no comment. We were almost the same height, but Strabane outweighed me by fifty pounds. He was stocky in the chest and shoulders, with a whistling sort of breath as if his sinus cavities were partly blocked. A fleeting thought came to me of Wally Szalla clasping my cold bare feet between his warm sprawling-big bare feet playfully shuddering Brrr! Cold toes, cold heart!

  I’d been supposed to meet my lover, the “evil” influence in my life, that evening at eight, at an inn on the Chautauqua River that was one of our places, a discreet distance from Chautauqua Falls where Wally’s family lived. I’d forgotten completely and would now forget again for my head was so empty you could hear wind whistling through its cavities, you could see scraps of litter and straw blown about.

  “Now, ma’am. The other hand…”

  Strange to be called ma’am for I certainly wasn’t the type. I was made to think that my social status had changed, as the daughter of a murdered woman.

  “My name is Nikki, officer. ‘Nicole.’”

  Strabane’s forehead was low, and deeply furrowed. One of those individuals who has been frowning—“making faces”—since childhood. He frowned now, repeating the ink-procedure with my left hand that was limp and unresisting. I heard myself say suddenly, “Officer, if you’d known my mother! She didn’t deserve…”

  “Nobody does, Nicole. None of it.”

  “…she was not a woman who, who could…”

  “Ma’am, I know. Please accept my condolences.”

  “But you don’t know. None of you, you can’t know.”

  Clare pulled me away. Smiling hard, and digging her nails into my shoulders. Whispering in my ear, “Don’t you become hysterical, Nikki! Just hold on.”

  Rob gave Strabane his telephone number but I stammered and stuttered trying to remember mine. The detective waited patiently. At the third or fourth try, I managed to remember. I was blushing deeply now, I was becoming angry.