There was a Whitman’s candy box on a shelf in which I kept a few things I especially liked, things like an old photograph of the Devereau sisters and Mary-Evelyn. There was a neckerchief Ben Queen had given me when we were at Crystal Spring.
I pulled out a gold locket I had found in the room where my mother’s things were stored. She said I could have it. It wasn’t hers; she didn’t know where it had come from. Inside was a brown photograph of a man and a woman. My mother did not know who they were.
This set off a fresh wave of sadness in me, sadness for the unknown couple in the picture. She was wearing a straw hat between two dark wings of hair; he was unsmiling in little round glasses, with hair parted straight down the middle and damped down with tonic or rain.
I wondered, was there a family or friends somewhere who still remembered them? My mother had acquired the locket, yet they were total strangers. I could tell the picture was decades old from the hat and the hairdo and the high collar of her dress and also from the way they didn’t smile. Back then people did not smile at the camera. Now, you couldn’t bribe a person not to smile in that phony way reserved for picture taking.
Who were they? It made me feel almost guilty, having this locket that someone had taken care to slip a picture into behind the locket’s glass. It angered me that the locket had gotten mixed in with other pieces of jewelry, with scarves and gloves, with letters and documents, all scattered around the suitcases as if none of it mattered, as if my mother just hadn’t taken the time to care.
Yet she had to take care of this whole hotel: cook, seamstress, furniture restorer. I guess when you have all that to do, there’s not time to sit and be sorry about two people in a faded photo in a locket.
But it still made me mad that if I hadn’t found it, the locket would probably have been lost forever. I felt sorry for anything that had to depend on me to find it.
I should have been able to discard Aurora’s idea, but I couldn’t. I tried to imagine a scene in which a baby was lost. Forgetfulness? (“Where did I leave that carriage? Surely it was right here.”) A kind of amnesia? (“What baby carriage?”) But if the carriage had been left outside the grocery store (as often happens), and the baby was taken, that would again be kidnapping.
I heard Aurora’s insistent voice and its list of losses: a million dollars, a fish, the way home . . . A bet.
A bet.
That made me shiver. Surely, that would be impossible. It was the most shocking thing I could imagine. Then I heard Mr. Gumbrel’s voice: “That boy was a gambler. He was forever at that poker club—‘club’ being what they called it. He’d bet anything just to stay in the game, anything. Had a lot of debts, I’d guess.”
In the Western movies I’d seen on Saturday afternoons, men would play cards in a saloon and when they ran out of money, they’d bet crazy things like their horse, their house, their “spread”—anything. But I never saw a gambler bet a life.
I sat for a long time thinking about this wispy little life, this will-o’-the-wisp baby who floated between being there and not being there, like the deer emerging from the fog or mist that hung around the Belle Ruin and fading back into it. It was like having your life suspended between something solid and hard, like Miss Bertha at the dining room table, and something impossibly airy, like Will moving his lips and words only seeming to come out. A sound waiting for itself.
Then I remembered another word Aurora had used: changeling. That was where one person was exchanged for another, usually babies, I supposed, as it would be pretty hard to exchange one adult for another without people getting wise.
This led me to wondering, what if Fay Slade hadn’t actually been theirs? I sat up straight. What if in the hospital Imogen’s baby had been swapped for a different one and then the real parents found out and demanded their own baby’s return? Morris and Imogen didn’t want Mr. Woodruff to find out about the baby’s identity and so staged the kidnapping.
But I forgot: Mr. Woodruff had not wanted an investigation. That would not have been his reaction if my new idea was right. But maybe he would not want anybody to know either. Why? Embarrassment? Humiliation? “You old fool. There you were thinking all this time the baby was your granddaughter, buying her things, giving her money.” No, wait, I forgot Fay was only four months old when she disappeared.
I outlined the story to myself. Hospital: a mistake is made and two babies are given to the wrong parents. . . .
No. That would hardly have brought about a staged kidnapping.
Hospital: Imogen’s baby is stillborn (whatever that meant) or it dies and Imogen steals some other woman’s baby.
Stealing a baby is so bad that it would probably wind up with a violent happening, such as a kidnapping. How she took the other baby was a loose end I would tie up later.
Or: a woman with a newborn wants to put it up for adoption, so Imogen agrees to take the baby.
But there’d be nothing really wrong with that, so where did the humiliation come in for Mr. Woodruff?
Hospital: Imogen’s baby is stillborn (that must mean “born still,” dead), but they don’t want to tell Imogen because she’d get hysterical. So Mr. Woodruff pays a nurse a lot of money simply to show Imogen a baby from the rows of babies you always see in a room with fathers outside tapping the glass. The nurse tells Imogen it’s her baby, but that she can hold it for only a little bit, as it’s weak or underweight or something. I don’t know. That at least gives Mr. Woodruff time to track down a for-sale baby, or an orphan baby (although I really couldn’t see how a newborn could be an orphan—yet).
Mr. Woodruff and Morris would let Imogen think it’s her baby up until Fay is four months old, when something awful, something tragic, happens, and Morris and Mr. Woodruff are forced to think up some solution and hit upon this kidnapping scheme.
But what could have happened to make them stage a kidnapping?
The thing was this, and it was very important to me: Fay couldn’t have died. She must have lived or else there was someone else walking around who looked exactly like Rose Devereau Queen and Morris Slade.
I hunted in my Whitman’s Sampler box for the picture of Rose Queen and the one of Morris Slade. I set them side by side. Peas in a pod. I had found out that they were related as half brother and sister, that Rose’s mother, who’d been a Souder, had married a Slade before marrying old Mr. Devereau.
Rose was murdered by her daughter Fern; then Fern was murdered by crazy Isabel Devereau. I put my head in my hands. What a horrible family history. It was almost as bad as ours, although in ours, no one had been murdered. Yet.
Right then the hotel cat decided to squeeze through the opening in the door that never closed right unless you pushed or pulled. The cat was gray and had a thick coat, so it was hard to tell if he was thin or fat.
He jumped up on the bench without seeming to move a muscle. I could have said he thought himself up to the bench. Cats were like magicians; they could levitate; they could suspend themselves in air; they could hover in silence.
The cat sat and washed himself as if the jump had rearranged the lay of his fur. He went on with his washing, paw licked and then rubbed over his face, then all of a sudden stopped and looked at me straight in the eye and blinked slowly several times. Maybe he had lost me and was just trying to blink me up.
Like I was trying to blink up that baby.
22
I woke up the next morning and thought better of it and clamped a pillow over my head.
I needed to talk to someone who could do something, like the Sheriff. Or I needed to talk to someone with good sense, like Dwayne.
Or maybe I needed to talk to someone with a foot in both worlds, the real one and whatever else was out there, like Mrs. Louderback.
What I did not need was to carry breakfasts on a tray up to the Big Garage.
“Why should I have to wait on them? Why don’t they come to the kitchen like everybody else?”
My mother was grimly shaping Parker House rolls. “Becau
se they won’t. You know them.”
“Let them starve, then.”
“They would.”
I fumed. “Well, where’s Ralph Diggs? He should be doing things like this; he can certainly carry up a tray.”
“He’s driving to Alta Vista with Mrs. Davidow.”
“It’s not even nine o’clock; the state liquor store isn’t open yet. Which is where they’re going, of course.”
“By the time they get there, it will be.”
Plop! went another small folded roll onto the thin baking sheet. They looked like two dozen tiny smiles. I loved Parker House rolls and was distracted thinking of how they’d puff up soft and golden brown.
“Emma.”
“What?”
She pointed to the white-porcelain-topped island in the middle of the room, where I did the salads. “The tray is there. I just have to add some scrambled eggs.”
My mother always cooked scrambled eggs in the top of a double boiler instead of a frying pan. She whisked them over the simmering water, and in that way got a lot of air into them. Like the rolls, they came out puffy and soft and smooth. I scanned the tray: orange juice and buttermilk pancakes. The pancakes were on a plate under a dome to keep the heat in. Good grief. Sitting beside that plate was a pitcher of maple syrup so pure that Walter must have gone and tapped it out of a tree. I let the pancake smell waft around me.
“Put the cover back on or they’ll get cold. Here—” She handed me a large plate of eggs.
“You’ve even put parsley on them?”
“I always do on scrambled eggs.”
“This is Will and Mill we’re talking about.”
“And that’s parsley and parsley. Go.”
I heard noises in the dining room. It was nearly nine o’clock. “I hope that’s not Miss Bertha scratching around in there.”
“I’ll take care of Miss Bertha if you just stop whining and take that tray to the Big Garage.”
Not wait on Miss Bertha! I’d take the tray down to hell for that. I whisked it up on my palm and was out through the back door before my mother realized she was getting a raw deal.
I crunched along the gravel drive past the cocktail garden to the Big Garage. My hands being full, I had to knock at the door with my foot. As always happened, half of Will’s face materialized between door and doorjamb.
“What?”
“You know what.” I tapped the tray.
“Oh. Yeah.” He opened the door and then walked away, not offering to take the tray. “Breakfast, mate!” he yelled to Mill.
Mate? And it was said with a phony British accent. I set the tray on a red-spattered stump left over from Medea, the Musical. A lot of spray paint had been used in that production, especially red for blood. They loved the blood and speckled a lot of things with it. I came in once and saw Paul was a mist of red. Or, who knows? It could have been real blood, when it came to them and Paul.
Mill gave a blast on his trumpet. He played everything—horn, piano, clarinet, drums. He was the most talented person I’d ever met and probably ever would. He flung down the trumpet as if he had a hundred others and came over to join Will, who was pouring a ton of maple syrup over his pancakes.
“Where’s Paul?” I asked.
With his mouth full and his fork pointed upward, he said, “Rafters. Tying clouds.”
Tying clouds. “Paul!” I yelled.
“Hello, missus.” His white-blond head appeared for an instant and then vanished.
“Breakfast!” I wasn’t going to let them devour it all. “Come on down!”
“Hello, missus!”
“Have you got him tied down?”
Will was forking eggs into his mouth. He shook his head. “No, because he needs to let the clouds down. There’s a rope around him, though.”
Around his neck, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Mill folded a pancake and said, “I gotta get back.”
To what? To where? I watched a cardboard cloud being lowered to within a few feet of the plane’s cockpit. Then another cloud hung over the cabin.
There was a knock at the door and Will went to it. I noticed he opened it in a perfectly normal way and actually greeted whoever was outside.
A couple of mismatched girls walked in, one short, one tall, maybe around eight and ten years old. They both wore the same dopey expression, so they were probably related. There are looks that sisters and brothers pick up from one another just from being around each other.
Will told me these were “the Evans girls” (as if they’d come directly from a stint in a Broadway hit). Then he told them to follow him up to the stage. They climbed the three steps to the stage and stood looking at Will in a double-dopey way.
“Okay,” he said, pointing both to the girls and to Mill at the piano. “Hit it!!”
Mill did: his hands came down on the piano keys like a starburst and rippled away.
“Come on, girls, go!” Will clapped his hands, tapped his feet, then waved his pancake like a baton. They apparently didn’t know where to go. “Do what we practiced, legs up, legs kick, kick, kick.”
They kicked, but not together, and one was a lot higher than the other.
“Mill!” Will waved him over and the two gave the Evans girls a demonstration: “Left, right, left, right, kick, kick, kick.” Will & Mill were quite expert at it.
The Evans girls watched and learned nothing. Their next attempt had them kicking sideways, as they seemed to have no sense of direction.
“Okay, okay, take a break.”
A break from what?
The girls broke and sat down in a couple of the old Orion theater seats that had been discarded.
Will turned and threw his hands up in the air. “It’ll all come to tears.”
“Where’d you get that expression?”
“The Brits say it—you know.”
“No, and neither do you. What’s all the Britspeak for anyway?”
Will was making up his “book” some more. “The play’s set in England.”
“England?” I got my face right up to his. “It’s set in the sky. That’s half of a plane you’ve got up there.” I pointed to their half of an airplane. “It’s called Murder in the Sky, remember?”
Will was unperturbed by my attempt at reason, and he was joined by Mill; they were now equally unperturbed. They were always willing just to take any old partly hatched idea and hatch it all the way.
The Evans girls had now crawled into the cockpit as pilot and copilot and were pretending to fly the plane.
I said, “Did it ever occur to either of you there’s a lot really going on right around here, in Spirit Lake and Cold Flat Junction and Lake Noir, including murder, three murders to be exact, and one attempted, enough to keep you in material for the rest of your lives?”
Will looked up from the production book and they both stared at me, so I ticked the murders off: “Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Rose Devereau Queen, Fern Queen. And me, nearly.” It was truly mind-boggling when I thought of it.
But they looked mystified. Will said, “So?”
So? “Well, there’s your story. Call it Murder in Cold Flat Junction or Murder at Mirror Pond or Murder in Spirit Lake. As a matter of fact, you could do a . . . trinity. Three plays. You’d have the whole summer wrapped up.”
They both folded sticks of gum into their mouths in the same synchronized way they’d kicked their legs. Will said, “For one thing, why would we want to bother with something that really happened?”
What?
Mill said, “For another thing, who would we ever get to play you?”
23
Lunch wasn’t very interesting. I had managed only to put a tiny piece of garlic clove inside one of Miss Bertha’s strawberries. Of course, there was the usual fuss about poisoned food, but as she’d swallowed the evidence, the fuss soon gave way to raised eyebrows and head shakes.
Mrs. Louderback said she’d be glad to see me. She had only the one appointment at two o’clock and I was to c
ome afterward.
So after being admitted by Mrs. Louderback’s strange friend, I sat in the anteroom outside the kitchen waiting, along with a starer. A starer is a person who won’t look away until she has you bolted to the wall with her awful eyes. Even staring back does no good. I tried it with this woman, to no avail. I was tempted to pass my palm across the bridge of air between us, but didn’t.
It was truly unnerving. I was about to say something, when the kitchen door opened and a small woman, thin as a leaf, drifted out. Mrs. Louderback said good-bye to her and said hello to me, then turned to the starer and said, “Miss Jo, please come in.”
Then it was I saw the cane and observed this Miss Jo person kind of struggling up, eyes seeking nowhere and nothing. I was embarrassed by my earlier reaction. The poor woman was blind as a bat.
Since I was supposed to have been next after the two o’clock appointment, I figured Miss Jo’s visit was not scheduled. So there must have been an emergency. I wondered what it could be. Could she have just gone suddenly blind? Now, that would be interesting and even good for an interview. I thought for a while and decided that would be good for a series of interviews: how things look from the standpoint of the suddenly disabled: the suddenly deaf, the suddenly completely paralyzed, the suddenly speech-impaired (which I only thought of because of the Wood boys, but they’d been that way all their lives); the suddenly amputated. There was a really good movie where the hero was hated by an old doctor who revenged himself by amputating the hero’s legs—both of them. It was pretty horrible. His girlfriend kept telling him to buck up. How? I wondered. Should he learn to walk on his hands? The movie was good, though; it had Ronald Reagan in it.
I wondered if Miss Bertha had been suddenly humpbacked. If lightning had hit her, for instance. No, that posture took years of practice. I tried bending at the shoulders like Miss Bertha, but couldn’t do it. Then I stopped, for I should be thinking about what to ask Mrs. Louderback or her cards. I hoped I didn’t get the Orphans in a Storm card again. It was some kind of bad news. The Hanged Man, another card that followed me around, was supposed to mean good news. If you can imagine that. He hung from a branch by his ankle with the other leg bent across the first leg. (The Ronald Reagan character might have seen good news in that, but who else would?) Things are pretty bad if a hanged man is good news.
Fadeaway Girl Page 11
