Fadeaway Girl

by Martha Grimes

  I went out after him, letting the screen door bang. It was dark by now and I stood looking at him below, seeing his light shirt moving across the dark grass. He was cutting something with the kitchen shears, but it was almost as if he were scything, the way his arms moved back and forth. It put me in mind of a painting in the library of men with scythes, rising or falling, cutting wheat. It was painted by a famous artist. He painted a lot of other pictures too, a lot of boats and seas, but I liked the one on the farm. I couldn’t remember the artist, even though he was famous. It depressed me, to think fame was so fleeting. Of course, if he had only people like me to remember him, no wonder it was fleeting.

  So I watched Walter bending and moving, bending again, and heard the occasional snip of the shears, and it suddenly struck me that this was more real than anything else that had happened that day. The rest of it now seemed weightless as cornsilk, words and events blown about like the seeds of puff balls, colors that were as filmy as the way sun reflected on water.

  I might have said, as people do, “It really opened my eyes.” Or as Father Freeman liked to talk about “seeing through a glass darkly,” though he didn’t say it again to me after I told him to get a window washer. There’s a word for things coming together, but I don’t know what. It was a little like the rush of colored splinters you see when you turn a kaleidoscope and then the splinters rush to form a pattern.

  What was the pattern here?

  Then pretty soon Walter was clumping up the stairs holding nothing more than a big bunch of mint.

  “Walter, you were out there long enough to cut an acre of corn.”

  He laughed his slow laugh. “I was tryin’ to find the good-leafed ones. Anyways, don’t bother yourself no more; I’ll get it.”

  With that peculiar message, Walter swept by me and in through the screen door. I watched him walk over to the door on the other side of the kitchen and go out.

  I went down the stairs and along the gravel to the Pink Elephant. I needed a place to think. The hotel cat materialized out of the darkness and pushed in after me. His smoky fur was damp from maneuvering through the same grass and mint Walter had been moving through, but the cat would have been searching out field mice. In a way they were alike; they had an object; they had a purpose. They just went and did. They didn’t have a story.

  The cat enjoyed lying on the table beside the hurricane lamp after I lit the candle. His pale eyes would flicker like the flame. He settled down now, paws battened to his chest, eyes slowly blinking, looking as if he’d come in for the purpose of sending me a message: “Your thinking is murky.”

  I was so downcast because I just couldn’t take on the burden of this new complication—that Morris Slade could have had other children. Why would he? I frowned. And was it to do with his being a “playboy”? I had to admit I wasn’t completely clear on the whole subject of sex, but whether I was or not, babies were still being born.

  But then I told myself that Aurora just tossed this out about Morris Slade the way she tossed the comment out about Miss Isabel Barnett being completely undependable. For Aurora, it was just something to say.

  The story had already gone down four different paths, none of them, apparently, right. First, the Girl was Ben Queen’s granddaughter, meaning Fern’s daughter; next, she was the Slade baby, Fay; next, Baby Fay wasn’t even at the Belle Ruin that night—or any night—and so hadn’t been kidnapped; next, the baby was there and there’d been this bogus kidnapping.

  And now there was a fifth possibility: Fay hadn’t grown up to become this girl at all.

  The Girl I saw was somebody else.

  And the awful question: Was she there at all? Or was I seeing things?

  I just didn’t know anyone to ask because I didn’t know any crazy person, except Ree-Jane, and she probably wasn’t really, but then what was all of her talking and laughing when no one was around—what was that about? She acted as if she were talking to some invisible person, smiling and sometimes outright laughing. Well, it made no difference. I could imagine asking Ree-Jane’s advice; it would delight her no end that I thought I might be seeing things and she would certainly assure me that I was.

  So it was better to go back to thinking that the Girl was not the person I’d thought she was, that she was just a girl, a visitor, a person who came and went, who appeared and disappeared, a pretty girl in a milky blue dress; or in red velvet, mailing a letter; or in black cotton, kneeling at a keyhole. A girl who melted into the canvas, a Fadeaway Girl.

  28

  The hand holding the hat was fine and manicured, the nails smooth and squared off; the hat was straw. I don’t think I’d ever seen a man with a straw hat before. This one was as fine as the hand holding it.

  The suit was white and seemed to go with summer. That’s what he made me think of, summer and the sea.

  He was leaning against the first of the dark wood booths in the Rainbow, his back to me, so that I could study him for many minutes without seeing his face. He was talking to someone sitting in the booth; I couldn’t see who. I wondered why he didn’t sit down. Well, no, I didn’t; he didn’t seem like a Rainbow Café kind of person.

  He was tall, about the Sheriff’s height, and probably handsome. I wondered if my life was to be filled with only handsome men, but then my eye fell on the regulars at the counter, Bubby Dubois and the Mayor, and I stopped wondering.

  I was drinking a chocolate soda and trying to write the next installment of my Conservative piece. But I kept looking at the man with the straw hat. His arm was up and resting along the edge of the high-backed booth; his other hand turned the hat slightly, this way and that. The hat had a dark blue band around its crown. His ears lay flat against his head and his hair was different shades of light. His clothes and his whole back looked elegant.

  I hadn’t written a sentence and was pulling not much more than air up through my straw when Maud slid into the booth.

  She whispered, “You know who that is?”

  I stopped blowing through my straw and shook my head. “No, but I’m guessing it’s Morris Slade.”

  She nodded. “Mayor Sims told me it was.” She gave a little nod of her head, backward as if toward the counter.

  “Who’s he talking to?” I still was having a hard time believing he was here, in La Porte.

  “Isabel Barnett.” She scrunched over to the end of the table so that she could take a look at him, or his back.

  He’d been standing there a good ten minutes, so it was more than a “Hi, nice day” kind of talk. What could she have to say of interest to Morris Slade?

  “Why do you suppose he’s back?” said Maud. “He hasn’t been here since their baby was kidnapped.”

  “Or at least that’s the last time we knew of.”

  “Don’t complicate things,” she said.

  Why not? I wondered, watching her tapping a cigarette out of her pack of Camels.

  “Lord, but he’s handsome.”

  “I’m going to the courthouse. Excuse me.” I slid across the seat and pushed out. He was two booths ahead, and as I passed—making sure I crowded him a little—I dropped my change purse, bent down to get it, then up and said excuse me to him and hello to Miss Isabel. But I still didn’t look at him because I was sure he’d know how hard I was trying to.

  I trotted on and out, not failing to notice that most of the men at the counter and Wanda Waylans were snatching looks at him. Shirl didn’t even give me her usual glum look as I walked out.

  “He ain’t here,” said Donny Mooma, shifting his feet off his desk and standing up for the express purpose of sticking his thumbs in his big belt and thrusting out his chest as if he had one. “Sheriff’s out on police business.”

  Maureen finger-waved a hello to me and I waved back. You would have thought we were worlds away instead of just across the room. It was a big room. She went back to her rat-a-tat typing.

  Donny said, his tone sly, “Someone new in town we’re all interested in.”

  K
nowing he wanted me to ask, I didn’t.

  “Yeah, someone I ain’t seen around these parts for a good twenty years. Back when my uncle was sheriff. Yeah, sheriffing talent runs in the family, I guess.” He gave me a smile that was supposed to look know-it-all. “Caused a sensation, this fella did.”

  Maureen more or less sang out, “Morris Slade’s who it is,” and hit the typewriter carriage—zzzzzzing.

  Donny turned on her. “Now, Maureen, you’re not to go givin’ out police details.”

  “Sorry.” Zzzzzing! “I thought maybe you forgot his name.”

  “Ain’t forgot nothin’. I just don’t tell every Tom, Dick, and Harry walks in here po-lice business, that’s all.”

  I said, “What’s Morris Slade doing in town?”

  The smirk. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Yes. So would you.

  Knowing there was no point in asking Donny where the Sheriff was or when he’d be back, I left the courthouse. It was only after leaving Donny that I thought of Dr. McComb.

  Dr. McComb was retired and lived out on Valley Road. He was one of my favorite people and made the best brownies except for my mother’s. The thing was, he’d been around back when Baby Fay had been kidnapped and must have known the Slades and the Woodruffs. The hotel might even have called a doctor when it happened in case the parents were hysterical or something.

  “Valley Road.” Delbert said this in a puzzled way. Tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel.

  “Delbert, you drove me there a couple of weeks ago and another time before that. You know perfectly well where it is. Dr. McComb lives out Valley Road.”

  “Yeah, I know, I was just thinking, what’s the best route?” He started up the cab, finally.

  “There’s only one route. You go to Red Bird Road and that leads to Valley Road.”

  He drove along Second Street so slowly you’d have thought there was a series of red lights down the block. “There’s more’n one route I could take, like out around the country club—”

  I should’ve walked; it would have taken me over an hour, but so what? “Just go as you did last time.”

  “Now, last time . . .”

  I slid down in my seat and stayed there until we were passing Country Club Road. I wondered what La Porte and the area around were doing with a country club.

  29

  Instead of Dr. McComb, a strange woman I’d seen here before came to the door. She was even stranger than Mrs. Louderback’s friend, or at least the experience was. She asked me what I wanted in a voice that sounded rusty, as if she didn’t use it much. I know the first time I’d been here, we just sat and she didn’t say a thing.

  She did not answer my question about Dr. McComb’s whereabouts, but just waved me in and sat down. She sat in a slipper chair and indicated I should sit across from her on the sofa. I did not know why.

  But then I thought this might be my opportunity to find out about craziness. So I made my face look thoughtful. After a few moments of thoughtfulness, I said, “Did you ever know anyone who saw things that weren’t there?”

  She gave the merest inkling of a smile, as if she knew how but chose not to. It was worse than no smile at all. It was kind of eerie. “Things that weren’t there,” she repeated, as if it were a lesson.

  I had the uncomfortable feeling that the things were there and maybe hanging around behind me, so I turned and looked. Then I turned back and said, “I have a friend, and she sees people that I don’t think are really there.”

  She nodded, the ghost of a smile still in place, as if she knew the same people as my “friend.” If she did, that was very bad news to me. I twisted a strand of my mousy brown hair around my finger and drew it through my mouth. This wasn’t a habit of mine; I somehow felt I was keeping some distance between us, some space.

  We stayed like that for some moments, so that I jumped when I heard a voice behind me. “Emma Graham!”

  Dr. McComb came into the room with his butterfly net. His smile was the sort that knows it’s a smile and means it. “Didn’t know you were coming.” He said this as if it were his fault.

  “Hi, Dr. McComb.” I jumped up and breathed easier.

  “Talking to Betsy, are you?” He turned to her. “Betsy, how about you putting the kettle on?”

  Betsy nodded and rose, giving me another memory of a smile on her way out. I’d never seen Betsy in the kitchen when Dr. McComb and I were in there having brownies and coffee.

  “Come on, Emma. I’ve got my eye on a clouded yellow out back.”

  “Okay!” I wanted to sound really interested in butterflies, which I wasn’t. Not that I disliked them, of course not; I just thought that hunkering down in tall grass and waiting for an hour wasn’t time best spent.

  But butterflies were Dr. McComb’s first love. He had even written at least one book, which I had taken the trouble to read in the library. Also, I’d skimmed over other butterfly books and was grateful there were a lot of pictures. Studying up on someone else’s hobbies is the best way to getting them to help you. You make it look like what they do is what you would have done too, had your life not taken a wrong turn.

  We were out and around the corner of the house when he pulled up. “Wait. Kitchen. I was just about to put in the brownies. Lucky thing, you turning up.”

  Lucky is right. He was in and out of the kitchen in two winks and we proceeded along the path through the junglelike acres behind the house. The grass in some places was as tall as I was. I plowed after him down a path beaten from many years of his footsteps.

  “I was just wondering—who’s Betsy?”

  “Sister-in-law.” His eyeglasses slipped down his nose as he bent to inspect something. “My brother died ten years back and Betsy came to live with me. She’s no trouble at all.”

  “Oh, I can see that. She’s very quiet.”

  “As more people should be.”

  I didn’t know about that. “She’s quiet like someone who misses somebody a lot. Now, I have a friend like that and she makes up people, you know, the way kids do.”

  “Betsy’s spent time in a mental institution. Broke down after Joe’s death—that’s my brother—and was in one for a year. You’re pretty smart, figuring that out.”

  “Oh well, you know. If a person’s grieving, it shows.” Maybe it did, but not in Betsy’s case.

  We moved farther along the path and I swatted away a couple of butterflies. There was a school of pale yellow ones banking around Dr. McComb’s head, and he looked as if he were bathed in light. “I wonder, did Betsy ever come across patients there who, well, saw people who weren’t there?”

  Dr. McComb swooped with his net and a dozen butterflies took off. “You mean hallucinating? Imagining you see something that’s not there? Damn but I think that’s a clouded yellow. Look.”

  I sighed and bent down and saw a butterfly that looked like all the other butterflies. “Hm. I don’t think so.”

  He gave me a comical glance, surprised.

  No wonder. “Because a clouded yellow’s color isn’t as bright as this one’s.” Clouded, in other words. A rule I tried to live by was that if you’re going to pretend to know something you’ve really got to sound sure you know it. If you’re wrong, at least it isn’t a wishy-washy wrongness and you’ve given the impression you must know a lot more about the field. “Now, that one”—I was looking at the empty air—“too bad, you missed it. That one I think was your true clouded yellow.”

  He still turned to look back, but saw nothing.

  “Of course,” I said with a shrug, “I might be hallucinating.”

  He grinned and shoved back his cap and scrubbed at his head. “I doubt it. You’re the last person on earth to start hallucinating.”

  What? “I am?”

  “You got too much good sense; you got your feet so firmly on the ground they’re practically in it. You’re a tree.” He pulled his cap straight.

  I wasn’t sure that last bit was a compliment, but I felt hugely reli
eved that he didn’t think I was seeing things. “What if I saw someone several times, saw her more than once, see, that maybe wasn’t there.”

  He frowned. “What makes you think she wasn’t? Come on, time for brownies.”

  We moved fast along the path, followed by deep breaths of clouded yellows. Or some kind.

  Brownies could turn a bad day around very fast, as if a day had two doors and I could walk through the bad one and out the good one with a brownie in hand. What I liked about Dr. McComb was that he would sift confectioners’ sugar on them; it would fall soft as snow. My mother did this too, on cakes, using paper doilies to make designs. The cake would have a snowflake pattern on top. They were beautiful cakes, layers and layers of light sponge held together by a chocolate or vanilla cream filling.

  Dr. McComb and I sat at the kitchen table eating brownies and drinking coffee. My coffee was mostly milk, but being offered any coffee at all was a new experience. There was no sign at all of Betsy. I wondered if she ever ate brownies.

  As usual, we kept an eye on the brownie pan, “reserving,” you could say, our second brownies. Almost always, our eyes went to the same one, but we were always polite about not taking it. I should say Dr. McComb was polite. As I was the guest, I naturally got the pick of the second brownie. But I gave him the pick of the third.

  Just now we were on our first brownies. I continued talking about the Girl and hallucinations. “The thing is, she always looks the same. I mean, she always wears exactly the same clothes.”

  His forehead furrowed. “I been wearing the same clothes for a decade or more. The same clothes doesn’t signify.”

  I had almost forgotten about Morris Slade. I hadn’t come to talk about the Girl—indeed, I was surprised I’d talked about her at all. “Do you remember the Slades? Especially Morris Slade?”

  “The one that married the Woodruff girl; of course I remember. They were the parents of that baby who was kidnapped out of the Belle Ruin hotel. Couldn’t forget that, hardly. They went back to New York and we’ve not seen them since. Stands to reason they just wanted to put this place behind them.” He paused. “What happened to that poor little child to this day remains a deep mystery.”