Fadeaway Girl

by Martha Grimes

  In the back office, I looked over the bottles that sat double deep on the shelf. There was a bottle of Southern Comfort that I checked for fullness: half full, which made it safe to use.

  I hadn’t made a Cold Comfort in some time and wasn’t sure of the recipe. Recipe? Who was I kidding? Who cared, least of all Aurora? I poured an inch of the Southern Comfort into the glass and added a little crème de menthe, then a little brandy. It really needed some juice or something light, such as club soda, but I couldn’t go back to the kitchen. Then I remembered that Will liked to keep a bottle or two of Orange Crush in the bottom drawer of the typewriter table in the outer office.

  I moved to the outer office, staying out of Ree-Jane’s line of vision, and looked in the drawer. I uncapped a bottle and poured until the glass was full. I recapped it, put the bottle back in the drawer, returned to the inner office, and finished the drink with a maraschino cherry on a plastic swizzle stick.

  I had no tray, so I had to hand-carry the glass, a practice strictly forbidden in the dining room. Any item of food or drink had to be transported to the diner on a tray. That was probably why I had become so adept at carrying trays. Vera wasn’t the only one who could hoist a tray on five fingers.

  Ree-Jane had her back to the staircase and was so engrossed in what she was saying to herself that she didn’t hear me. It was another opportunity. You’d think she’d have learned by now.

  I stood on the wide stairs for half a minute, watching her. She could have been talking to herself, talking to an invisible companion, rehearsing a part for a play—though not Murder in the Sky, for I knew Will and Mill wouldn’t let her within a country mile of that. But there were other possibilities: she could have been rehearsing a speech to be given to the United Nations; rehearsing her acceptance of the Duke of Oxford when he proposed; making her screen test for Cecil B. DeMille; or throwing kisses to the people on both sides of the runway as she pivoted down it at the Paris fashion show.

  Aurora’s drink was warming in my hand, but I just had to say something. “There’s only one female in the play and she’s dead and she’s me.”

  Ree-Jane twirled like a drum majorette (which she also could be rehearsing) and the pleats in her skirt made a pretty fan. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here.”

  “You’re spying on me!”

  I shrugged.

  With a toss of her head she had learned from Veronica Lake (her future costar) she said, “Oh, that play? I found out about the female lead and turned it down.”

  I was stunned. Ree-Jane was actually thinking on her feet! I almost applauded. Of course, so did she. I marveled at this shred of thought coming from Ree-Jane (as if I’d been rooting for her all along), and continued my trek up the stairs.

  “About time, miss! The yardarm’s way over the bow.”

  That didn’t sound exactly right but I knew what Aurora meant. “I do have other things to do,” I said. “There’s a dinner party tonight. Ten people.”

  She was agitating her Cold Comfort, prior to drinking. “Whose?”

  Aurora was as interested in gossip as a normal person. “The Baums.”

  She made some lip-smacking sound of disapproval. “They’re just throwing themselves around, trying to buy their way up the social ladder.” She held her red goblet up to the window, and the setting sun made it look like blood splashed on her silver crocheted mitten.

  “Into what?” I was truly curious.

  “High society, of course.” She took a long swig of the drink.

  “In La Porte? There’s no society in La Porte, much less a high one.”

  Aurora put down her drink long enough to waggle her finger at me. “That’s where you’re wrong, miss: there certainly is and I was once its leader!”

  If she had been talking about a pack of sled dogs I could have believed her. But high society? “There isn’t one now, is there?”

  “Oh, one or another of them thinks she’s got the toehold and then Wham!” Down came her empty glass on the chair arm. “She’s on the ground, flat on her ass, pardon my French. What’s wrong? I could plant beans in the lines on your forehead.” She emptied her glass in a couple of long swigs.

  I guess I had on my stupefied frown. “This is a little town on the tag end of Maryland, nearly in West Virginia—”

  “Where they got liquor stores, as I recall—” She jiggled her glass in a meaningful way.

  I did not attend to it. “Maybe we’ve got the poor and the well-off, but we have not got high society.”

  She looked as if she could spit bullets. “My lord, girl, that’s how much you know? After all your talk about the Devereaus and Woodruffs and the Belle Ruin?”

  “The Devereaus? They were society people?” And here I thought they were just killers.

  “Well, of course. Look at Iris. Look at Elizabeth.”

  “I can’t look. They’re dead.” I was suddenly overcome with a sense of dread that there were too many people I couldn’t look at. I had to depend on the likes of Aurora Paradise and Isabel Barnett, which brought me out of my mood, remembering the reason I’d come up here: to check on the snapshots. Aurora held out her glass.

  “In a minute. First, I want to see those pictures again, the ones of the Slades and the Woodruffs.”

  “Lost them. So get downstairs and make me another Cold Comfort.”

  “You didn’t lose them. They’re in a blue satin box that you keep in your steamer trunk.” I pointed to the trunk, draped with beautiful dresses.

  Heavily, she sighed and set down her glass. And wearing her put-upon face, wheeled her swivel chair over to the trunk and opened one of its drawers and pulled out the blue box. Sighing again, she wheeled back. Then she rooted in the box and drew out the snapshots. But then she said, “There’s one of Morris Slade that’s gone missing. Last time I had it was when you were looking at these.” She fanned several of them out. “So where is he?”

  “I have no idea.” Yes, I had. The snapshot was lying in my drawer under my socks.

  “I bet you don’t. Here, what about them?” She held several snapshots out.

  I took the picture of Imogen Slade holding her baby, tightly wrapped in a blanket. You couldn’t see its face. “This one with the baby in it. You said they were at the Belle Ruin. Now if they were, that means Miss Isabel isn’t lying about seeing the baby.”

  Aurora gave a fake sigh. “She’s a liar, all right. But I guess the poor soul can’t help herself.”

  Aurora calling her a “poor soul” really said Aurora didn’t care. There was no care in her. I kept to it: “I’m talking about this baby being taken from the hotel. Kidnapped, snatched, whatever. The only person who actually saw the baby and who’s around now is Miss Isabel—”

  “Well, there’s whoever took that picture.”

  “Yes, but all you see here is the blanket, not the baby.”

  Aurora looked absolutely pained. “Girl, you got more ways to explain away what you don’t want to believe than a politician. Why can’t you just go for the simplest thing? A mother holding a blanket like it had a baby in it does have a baby in it.”

  I said, “Just listen: It’s natural that anyone might have taken for granted that if there was a carriage, there was a baby in it, or in its mother’s arms. But remember, not even the babysitter actually saw the baby.”

  Aurora waved that away. “Oh, that Spiker girl. You can’t depend on what she—”

  I stepped on her words. “Imogen Slade told her not to bother the baby. Now, if this snapshot was taken that weekend when they were at the Belle Ruin—” Then I recalled that before, Aurora had said the Slade baby was only a few weeks old. Not months. “You said the baby was weeks old. But it was four months old according to the police report.”

  Aurora squeezed her eyes shut and motioned with her fidgety fingers. “God’s sakes, girl, don’t you ever stop thinking? What in the tarnation difference does it make? Could’ve been weeks, could’ve been months. No wonder people dri
nk.” She thrust her glass toward me.

  I ignored it. “Because if the parents went to so much trouble to make out the baby was there, then maybe something happened that they wanted kept secret. So look again: was that snapshot done on the occasion of the Belle Ruin ball?” To get her closer to saying, I took the glass from her fingers.

  She perked up a little. “Hell’s bells, give me my specs. They’re in that little top drawer.” She motioned to the steamer trunk.

  I opened the drawer. Small as it was, I had to rummage through it. My fingers lit on something steely and cold and I pulled it out. “What are you doing with a gun?” I held it away from me as if it were a dead rat. It was small, with a short barrel.

  “That? I’ve always had that. Woman alone has to protect herself. Well, for goodness’ sakes, it ain’t loaded. It’s just a thirty-two, little revolver is all.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “One of my men friends gave it to me. A gift.” She looked off, dreamily.

  When I saw her eyes were lighting up with the past, I shoved the gun back in the drawer and handed her her glasses. “The snapshot.”

  “Now, hand over my spyglass.”

  By this, I supposed she meant the magnifying glass atop one of the trunks. I gave that to her also. Stems of her glasses hooked around her small ears, she studied the snapshots with the magnifying glass, which I bet she didn’t need. After a moment she said, “No. Couldn’t have been that weekend.” She tapped one of the pictures with her fingernail.

  I looked. It was the one of old Mr. Woodruff.

  “See there, he’s got that mustache. Well, he never had it that weekend, not at that ball. I should know, as he danced with me all night.”

  I should have felt relieved to know that Miss Isabel could have been wrong, but it was then I realized the snapshot would settle nothing, whether it was taken that weekend, or the one before, or the one before that; the picture would be nothing more than a little chink of possibility—a possibility that Miss Isabel had seen the baby, a possibility that the baby had been there. Or on the other hand, the possibility that she hadn’t seen the baby. But that proved nothing.

  At that point, I was so keen to get away I grabbed the glass and nearly ran out of the room. Behind me Aurora called, “Just why are you so all-fired interested in this?”

  I turned back. “It’s because the baby disappeared. I’m interested in disappearances.”

  Fadeaways, I could have said.

  7

  It was to Mrs. Louderback’s I went whenever things got complicated or when whatever I saw in my mind’s eye looked like another one of the devil’s details.

  This part of Spirit Lake sat across the highway from the hotel. It was quite pretty, for the streets were tree-lined and the houses almost all white clapboard with green trim and wide porches. It was as if everyone had banded together and decided to make the houses look alike, which was probably true.

  We were in the very bottom of Maryland, where we could fall on our faces into West Virginia. But West Virginia’s okay. My mother always said you could build a fence around West Virginia and you’d have everything you needed. It would certainly have everything Lola Davidow needed: a state liquor store was right over the line. It’s about twenty miles from La Porte, an easy drive (especially if you stay in the ruts worn by Mrs. Davidow’s station wagon).

  My mother was from there and so was my grandfather, not a Paradise but a Dunn. My mother’s father. My grandfather had owned a hotel there too, so maybe the hotel business was in my mother’s blood.

  Yet, close as it was, my mother never wanted to visit it. If it were me, and my old home was practically next door, I’d be over there all the time, nosing around. But maybe their left-behind homes are too painful for some people.

  I would knock on the door of my old house, and when the person who lived there now came to the door (an elderly woman in a flowered apron) I would say, “I’m sorry to bother you but I used to live here, I mean my family did, but they were all killed in a train wreck and my mother, as she was dying, pleaded with me to go back home—Emma, go back and find those photographs!” By now, of course, I’d be inside and saying something about a photo album buried upstairs, perhaps in a window seat . . . and so forth. I would certainly want to see my old room.

  I had sat myself down on the curb outside of the Moomas’ house (although I didn’t know which Moomas, as there were so many of them). Baskets of petunias and pansies hung along the porch roof, looking thirsty. Then I got up and walked on, kicking pebbles.

  Mrs. Louderback’s house was called “Traveler’s Rest,” which I thought especially appropriate for a fortune-teller. As if finally you could stop trying to fix your own messed-up life and let something else take control. Of course, it didn’t actually work that way for me, but then I thought (being philosophical), just look at my life; how could it?

  The woman who opened the door to me lived here with Mrs. Louderback and was always silent and grim. I thought she was bad-natured and wondered why Mrs. Louderback let her be the door greeter. Maybe she thought that if one of her clients could be discouraged from coming because of this woman’s peevishness, well, maybe that person’s fortune was already set in stone and no turning over of cards would change things.

  Inside, the house was very cool and shadowy. I was led through the living room full of dark lion-footed furniture to a small room off the kitchen. It was in the kitchen that fortunes got told, and this small room was a parlor, a waiting room.

  There were two other people there who looked to be mother and daughter. The young one might have been my age, and was dumb-looking. Say what you will about me, I am not dumb-looking. This girl sat with her head against her mother’s shoulder and stared at me. I was never a person to hide from a stare; I stared back. She did not move an inch, and her eyelids did not flutter. She stared and stared.

  The mother just flipped the pages of a Ladies’ Home Journal, flipping, not reading, as if she were mad at the magazine for its uselessness. She was unaware of her staring girl, certainly. I was about to get up and go over and ask the mother if she knew her daughter was dead, when the door opened and a middle-aged woman walked out and crossed the room woodenly and left without looking at anybody or anything. I wondered if Mrs. Louderback hypnotized people and left them to find their own way home.

  “Emma, hello.”

  Seeing I was next, I got up from my chair. But I felt some reluctance to go on. I didn’t know what it was I wanted.

  The kitchen smelled of recently baked bread. It was a very neat and clean kitchen. There wasn’t a mark on the white counters, and the white enamel stove looked as if it had just come from the new Sears outlet.

  Mrs. Louderback started placing cards in a row and the first was (yes, there he was) the Hanged Man.

  “This does not mean bad news,” said Mrs. Louderback.

  It would to me if I were hanging upside down. I nodded and waited for the next card.

  Orphans in a Storm. “Here they are again. Don’t tell me they’re okay.”

  She laughed, briefly. “It depends on what you think is ‘okay.’ ”

  “For one thing, not having to tramp through snow and rain in ragged clothes.”

  Mrs. Louderback grew thoughtful. “But they may be moving toward something brilliant.”

  I hoped this was not a cue for God to walk onstage. I changed the subject. “Last time we were talking about the Slades’ baby being kidnapped. You know, from the Belle Ruin.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what I think? I think maybe the baby wasn’t even there. At the Belle Ruin, I mean. They just wanted people to believe it was.”

  Mrs. Louderback looked astonished. “But why would parents do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. To make sure people thought baby Fay was alive at that time. And remember, the baby’s nurse wasn’t with them. They said she was sick. They said their baby was sick too, maybe to keep people from insisting on seeing her. Wh
at if the parents had to account for the baby’s absence for some reason? Now if Fay was allegedly kidnapped, well, that would sure account for it.”

  Mrs. Louderback was looking at the cards but I don’t think she was seeing them. Then she said, “This Spiker girl, the babysitter. She said she left the room and was gone for twenty minutes talking on the phone. When she returned, the baby was gone and Morris Slade was in the room.”

  I nodded. I thought Mrs. Louderback was doing awfully well in remembering details for a person her age.

  She continued: “There’s a problem there, isn’t there? How would the kidnappers know she’d leave? And be gone long enough to get up that ladder and out again? You’d almost have to say it was arranged beforehand.”

  I slumped in my chair, hardly knowing what to say. I’d never thought the phone call was planned. “But how could it have been arranged beforehand unless Gloria Spiker was in on it? And not just Gloria, but her friend. For she did talk to a friend for twenty minutes. The operator confirmed it.” A conspiracy? That was even more exciting.

  “Could the kidnappers have been watching the room? Perhaps with binoculars? And see her leave?”

  “Maybe. But she might have just turned around and come back.” It looked as if I should go to Cold Flat Junction and talk to Gloria Spiker Calhoun again to try and see if she was telling the truth.

  “Now, Emma, we really should get back to you.”

  I frankly thought we were back to me.

  “This Orphan card keeps coming up. This is the third time.”

  Actually, it was the fourth, but I wasn’t going to dwell on that. “Well, there are ten orphans that Miss Landis—that’s Miss Louise Landis—do you know her? She’s from Cold Flat Junction.”

  Mrs. Louderback pursed her lips, thinking. She was never one to toss out answers without thinking about them. “No, I don’t believe I do.”