A SUICIDE NOTE ADDRESSED TO A DEAD PERSON. Fantastic.
I left the diner more confused than ever with the case. What kind of sick person writes an apology to her murder victim? Only a mentally disturbed one. But she had asked the deceased to take care of ‘him like your own’, which meant she had expected a dead person to be able to keep her wish. So far, the only person to my knowledge who had done that was Lord Frederick, but Adora hadn’t murdered him. Frederick lived until his adopted son became a full grown man. This didn’t make sense. And I still hadn’t linked all this information to the main purpose of my search: to find out why Lord Hurlingthon couldn’t die. I had to keep that note aside until I was able to find the answer to such a riddle. Where was Oedipus when one needed him?
Spending an afternoon diving into piles of moldy newspaper records wasn’t my idea of a dynamic research but it had to be done. The missing article was essential to get a clearer picture of this puzzle. Life lesson: When you know someone wants to hide something, that’s the exact thing you need to find out. The tricky thing so far had been not knowing what fell into that category. Everything seemed so open and organized. So well put together…which is more often than not, a flaming signal that someone has wrapped-up a body with the dining room carpet and hid it inside the tumble dryer.
I decided to start with the obituaries section, checking for Adora and Frederick’s announcements while keeping an eye on any tall, faceless figure, with a black hooded cape holding a scythe. Irupé had instructed me to mingle with her, so this was me being meticulous. Not closing my mind to the insane notion of finding our final destiny walking among us to deliver the coup de grâce to whom she might find worthy of it. However, if I took into consideration the women in charge of running that section of the library…Let’s just say it might not be so difficult to find Death rolling up and down those aisles. Retirement was not part of any dictionaries there.
As expected, Lady Adora’s obituary had the date of the article I held in my possession, not Hugh’s date of birth. A reassuring confirmation, but nothing else there. Then, I checked for her husband in the same section. And there he was, in consonance with the records delivered to me by the family. So that part was right. Lady Adora had not killed him before she died. Lord Frederick had passed away many years after his wife. I considered the possibility that she might have been mentally ill and that that was the reason why she had written the note. Which also helped me understand why someone would fall off that swing. It was a long stretch, but I was willing to give it a try.
No deadly visits during the obituary activities. Maybe I was not teasing her enough.
Next, I focused on the news section. I checked for the article about Lady Adora’s accident and found it in the exact shape I already had it. Therefore, my next move would be to ask for the records going ten years after and ten years before her death.
I got out of the building to get a cup of coffee with a large portion of fresh air, an endangered species inside the overly informed walls of that building. I needed a break from the past, from the perspective a reading afternoon like that gives you.
What qualifies as important and what doesn’t? And who decides that? I had read numerous articles about episodes that no longer mattered. But at the time they had occurred, they were in every mouth that had literate eyes. It is supposedly said that the word on the street becomes the news in the journal, but I have my doubts. Does a regular man get a piece for leading a responsible life? Is the everyday woman mentioned with a two-page spread for finding a way to raise her children and prevent them from developing into criminals? No. It’s the murderer who is mentioned in capital letters and discussed on every corner. And pay attention: the article is never about the victim. Instead, it goes on and on about the perpetrator. The victim is nothing but an object, a vessel for damaging actions. Yet, the glory of appearing in the news goes to the one who dared to break the law. He is the one rewarded with the attention of an entire nation for believing he had the right to take someone’s life.
The world is irrevocably rotten from its hot center to the coolest mountaintop. Putrid.
Once I had controlled my inflammatory desire to burn the entire library down, I went back inside and took my place behind the voluminous piles of history waiting to be unveiled. Taking Lady Adora’s death as the axis, I could either go to the time before or after she had died. But the trick was to make an educated guess and choose the option less likely to involve large amounts of reading. Since death is a state that prevents you from making headlines, I decided to revisit the past of the past. Life tends to be more eventful when you’re alive.
I sifted through the chosen pile. A whole year of nothing related to the family passed before my eyes. Then, I came across Hugh’s birth. It was the same article as the one I had already read. There was only one newspaper in town back then. Lucky me.
More months flew by me. And when I had reached the end of year number two, I came across the most perplexing piece yet. It was an article signed by the director of the newspaper himself. In it, he was apologizing to the Hurlingthon family and the rest of the readers for the unforgivable mistake of publishing an announcement in the obituaries about Lord Frederick’s death. He had learned from the family that it was a gruesome piece of erroneous information. He let the entire community know that Lord Frederick was in perfect health and he condemned anyone who had crafted such an evil prank to the family and to the journal staff by feeding them an untruthful fact.
I went back to the obituaries with the date mentioned in the public apology. There it was. Big. Loud. It dominated the page, announcing Frederick’s sudden death. It stated their grief for the early departure of a dear member of that close community. I had to give it to Tinker Bell, everything kept leading me back to Death’s household. The most striking difference with the rest of the announcements in that section was that this one had been crafted under the journal’s orders. It wasn’t on behalf of the Hurlingthon family. In fact, there was no statement on their part, besides the apologies from the newspaper that they had obviously requested when they found out about the misunderstanding.
Maybe it wasn’t a misunderstanding at all.
Maybe Lady Adora was a mentally unbalanced woman. Something about her husband had pushed her buttons and she ended up attacking him. Now, it was possible she believed she had murdered him but, in reality, she just injured him (severely or not, I couldn’t know). The point is, he recovered. Then, a valet, a maid, the gardener…whoever worked at the mansion at the time, let the cat out of the bag and the journalists caught it.
That scenario also fitted with the note. Adora was convinced she had killed Frederick. But when she was forced to confront the truth of him being alive, her mental condition got worse. After a period of almost two years and a baby, Adora could no longer live with the burden of being the murderer of her husband and living with his ghost, so she committed suicide. In that short note, she was saying goodbye.
This also explained the lack of a proper obituary from the Hurlingthons, the act of hiding the truth from Hugh, and the family’s request for a public apology. If they admitted that something had happened to Lord Frederick, Adora’s condition could have been the talk of the town. So they did what rich people do best. Play it cool. But who had saved this information? Frederick? Adora? What was the use? Burn it. Throw it out. Cross your fingers and hope your kid never finds out his mother had abandoned him, his father was not his real father and that, in reality, he was by himself in this world. All that careful planning and hiding and still, their child had remained isolated from life.
I stayed the rest of the afternoon reading the files I had requested, but I couldn’t find anything I hadn’t read before. Somehow, the full circle that those facts formed had turned into a dead-end. Yes, I had discovered the darkest secrets of those people, but I was still looking for an explanation that would allow me to understand Hugh’s condition. I was beginning to doubt the hunch I had followed to get there. There was nothing else to go on, an
d yet, the question remained. Should I tell the man paying for my coffee about the distorted relationship his parents held? Even if I never found another way to help him? I had found truth, but so far, not the kind that helped. I needed to find a way to link it all to Hugh’s condition.
When I left the library, a thin, sticky rain was falling on the pavement. I didn’t want to go back to Grumpy Al’s after everything that had happened at lunch. All the information seemed to linger there, compressed in the dark ambiance Grumpy Al provided. And the grayness of the world around me didn’t help. The streets were colder than the day before. I had to go home and burn some steak for supper. That was definitely the worst day for me to find out about the dysfunctional family I had been hired to dismember.
I had one last chore to get done. Then, I could open a beer and let the alcohol numb the memory cells in my brain. I picked up the phone. Some final arrangements needed to be made.
“Hello?”
“Joe, it’s Saussure.”
“Hey, Ricky, what’s up?”
“Don’t call me that. I have five bills here with your name on it, saying I’ll pick you up tomorrow at eight for a little job. You say nothing. You know nothing. You see nothing.”
“See what?”
“Exactly. And don’t oversleep. You don’t want me waking you up again. You didn’t like it last time.”
“I remember.”
“Good.”
Luckily for me, the rest of the day didn’t last long.