“Not last night; there weren’t more than six or eight people. . . .” He mused. “We ran out of pheasant, I recall.”
My mother would probably remember in this way, running out of something. I said, “I’d better be going.”
“How did you get here?”
“Taxi.”
Gaby turned. “I’ll call you one.”
“Not right now, please. I’m going to walk over to Mr. Butternut’s.”
They raised quizzical brows. They looked enough alike to be twins.
“The old man,” I said. “That’s his name.” They’d been here for years and didn’t know that? That was the restaurant business.
They shook their heads. Ron said, “My, but you are intrepid!”
I smiled at whatever that meant and left the Lobster Thermidor and pheasant-scented room.
I crossed the short expanse of White’s Bridge, barely a dozen yards, curved around Mirror Pond, where the shooting of Fern Queen had occurred, and walked the dirt road as far as Mr. Butternut’s small house, a cabin really, one great big room and a kitchen and a bedroom.
The place was lit up like a wildfire, even though it was broad day outside. A big bulbous porch light hung directly over the doorway, moth-shrouded like the ones at the hotel. He did not come directly to my knocking, so I called out, “Mr. Butternut! It’s me, Emma Graham!” I heard him reply, but distantly, and there was a shuffling about before he pulled open the door.
“Well, what in tarnation?” He sounded pleased.
I was sure for anyone to visit him was an occasion. I don’t think he had any family left at all, and being stuck out here with no one around must have been hard on him.
“Hi, Mr. Butternut. May I come in?”
“Yeah, sure. You want some cocoa?”
We’d had it when I was here before, right after Fern Queen’s murder. “Okay. I see you’ve got a good fire going in your stove.”
It was an ancient cast-iron one and the fire was so hot the air felt blistered.
“Come on, come on, set yourself down.”
There were two armchairs drawn up before the stove and I perched on one, then sat back as far as I could to get away from the heat. I think old people tend to be colder. “Listen, did you happen to notice a red sports car around here last night?”
“Sure did.” He was rattling pans around.
I straightened, surprised I’d hit pay dirt again. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t; he just plunked down a small pan and now was getting milk out of his little icebox.
“Well . . . where? I mean, did it go by here?”
“You bet. My Lord, why any fool would want to drive a fancy roadster like that down this good-for-nothing road’s beyond me. I ain’t got no marshmallows.” He was looking into an almost-empty plastic Jet-Puffed bag that I could see held a couple of marshmallows stuck in a corner. He just didn’t want to share them, was all.
He poured milk into the pan and added cocoa and sugar and stirred this into a paste before adding more milk. He made pretty good cocoa.
“Then what happened?”
“Nothin’. Things ain’t always goin’ on around here like in town.”
He said this with his back turned, and I could tell from the crinkle sound and his arm moving that he was sticking the marshmallows into his cup on the sly.
“I mean, where do you suppose it was going?”
“No place to go except Brokedown House and nobody don’t live there except ghosts.” He laughed silently, shaking like a custard. “Just Calhoun spooks. Now it used to be a lot of Randalls lived down this road, Bud Randall was one, and then there was . . .”
He went on with the same history about past families he’d done before. It must be that old people had to check up on the past to see if it really had been there.
“But you’d have heard the car coming back.”
“Yeah.”
I waited. “Did you?”
“It never come back.”
“Well, didn’t you wonder about it?”
He was pouring out the cocoa, evening it up between the two cups. “Yeah.” He carried the cups to the chairs, placing his on a little table kind of hidden by the arm of his chair so I wouldn’t see the white swirl of marshmallow; they were melting.
I sighed. “Well—?”
“Well, nothin’. Wonderin’ never caught no raccoons.”
“Then the car must’ve gone to Brokedown House and maybe is still there.” The idea of someone like Morris Slade spending any time at all in that house, much less a whole night in it, was laughable, except it didn’t make me want to laugh.
“Mebbe.” I could tell he was sucking the marshmallow off the surface of his cocoa.
“Come on.” I wanted him to think I was simply assuming he’d go with me. I wasn’t going to Spook Hall all by myself.
“I ain’t drunk my cocoa!”
He sat firm until the last drop. I felt like taking him by the ear.
He said, “Anyways, I can’t see why you want to hotfoot it down there. Last time you got lost, if my memory serves.”
“It doesn’t. You got lost.”
We argued for a couple of minutes while he put down his empty cup and got up and creaked over to a table and picked up his briar stick.
“Don’t forget the flashlights,” I said.
“Why? It’s broad daylight.”
I wouldn’t be going to Brokedown House if it weren’t. “You know how thick those woods are. It’s pitch-black around there.” I wouldn’t be going if it were. “Come on.”
As we banged out through his screen door he was asking why some people couldn’t leave a body in peace.
52
We stopped, both together coming to a standstill. I think both of us knew that car’s being there was not good. I don’t want to think of Brokedown House as a dead end, although it appeared to have been for some people, liks Iris Devereau and her fiancé, Jamie Makepiece.
My memory was searching for a road, any road, that led out on the other side, and I remembered the old one that led from here to Spirit Lake, the lake itself. “Mr. Butternut, isn’t there an old road that goes between here and Spirit Lake?”
“The one we’re standin’ on. But half a mile past here it’s mostly growed over.”
I don’t know why I wanted there to be one; the red sports car hadn’t taken it.
“Well, we best go look.”
For once it was him and not me taking the initiative. Me, I didn’t want to look. I was afraid to. But after all my jawing and cajoling, I knew I had to go in.
Mr. Butternut was already by the car when I caught up. There was nothing in it but water pooled beneath the dashboard, I guessed from an early-morning shower we’d had, and crisp brown leaves fanned out over the tan leather seat. The top was down, so the car was open to whatever chose to inhabit it; it gave me a chill.
I didn’t think he’d meant to be here long.
Some tartness had returned to me and stiffened my spine and I turned toward the house. It was more a cottage than a house, and I’d been in it several times. Its roof was partly gone; everything—car, cottage, landscape—looked as if overcome by the elements or by gravity and sinking slowly into the sod. “Under the sod.” I thought of the Robert Frost poem, and Ulub saying it.
I meant to go inside, but I still didn’t. Instead I walked around the house, or, rather, beat my way around, for the ground cover was so thick, simply walking was impossible. There were trees so old and heavily branched they seemed to want to twine together.
Something scampered, things fell—acorns, small branches, twigs of clustered leaves, as if dropping down from the sky. Elsewhere, it was summer, but not here. Here it was always autumn.
You would think, knowing me, I’d be excited by all this happening. But I was sick of this. I was really sick of it. I heard a noise, a shout. It was Mr. Butternut yelling. I had to turn and go to the house then. I didn’t want to: I knew there’d be something wrong. And I was afrai
d I knew what.
I crunched through the undergrowth, the shavings of bark and the saw grass and grape hyacinths, and considered how they had survived all of this bad news.
Mr. Butternut was at the back door, propping himself up, arm outstretched against the doorjamb.
As I got closer he called, “They’s somebody inside—” He hitched his thumb back over his shoulder.
I stopped. “And he’s dead.”
“ ’N a doornail.” He put a hand on his chest. “My heart’s a-weakenin’ as I stand here.”
I moved through the door, Mr. Butternut’s heart buoying me up. He came behind.
At first I thought my eyes must surely be deceiving me; certainly my eyes had done a lot of that.
He was in the parlor, lying on his back with his arms splayed out as if he’d been making snow angels. Which was a stupid thing to think because there was no whiteness around him, only blood, the blood he was lying in, the blood that was part of the mess that had been his chest.
It was stupid, but then I thought of snow angels because that’s what I wished he’d been doing, doing something like a little kid. For I wondered if he’d ever really had the chance to be one.
Mr. Butternut, breath raspy, said, “That’s him, ain’t it? That Slade fella?” He was gasping for air as if what was left of the living, he and I, didn’t have enough to go around.
I shook my head. “No. His name’s Ralph Diggs.”
53
“Anyplace there’s trouble,” said Donny, thumbs hooked in his belt as he swaggered around Brokedown House, “you sure manage to be there.” His look said he was 100 percent right.
“Get out there and check on that car,” said the Sheriff, who was hunkered down beside Dr. McComb.
Donny hitched up his pants as he passed me, looking at me as if this were all my fault. He walked out mumbling something about a “granny gun.”
I didn’t care anymore about what Donny said. I didn’t even bother to look at him. I only cared about Ralph Diggs and Morris Slade. I meant to pick up my feet and move but they were welded to the floor.
Mr. Butternut had discovered he had feet and he’d walked them as fast as he could back to his house to call the Sheriff. I had stayed.
Amazingly, I hadn’t been afraid to stay, for I thought someone ought to keep Ralph company, ridiculous as it sounded. I think fear had been knocked right out of me by the shock that a person could lose so much blood, that there could be so much blood in anybody. It was as I was looking at the blood that I decided to be scared and hightailed it out of there, fast.
I met up with Mr. Butternut just coming out of his house, hurrying back.
State police had come next, three cars of them nosed up behind the red sports car, eight or nine policemen inside and outside the house. I don’t know how they’d gotten here so fast.
The Sheriff seemed to have forgotten I was standing there, me, Emma Graham, looking at this dead body of Ralph Diggs, lying in a pool of blood that had trickled into the cracks of the old floorboards.
He looked over his shoulder. “Emma?”
I just shook my head.
Dr. McComb, who had arrived ten minutes after the Sheriff, levered himself off the floor with some difficulty. “That’s all for now. Autopsy will tell us more. But not much, probably. Hell of a blast. It wasn’t done with that thirty-two, that’s for sure.” He nodded toward one of the troopers, who was on the floor beside the body, retrieving a small gun that Butternut and I hadn’t seen.
I turned then and went out the front door and sat down on a bench beside Mr. Butternut, who just stared straight ahead. I saw Donny looking the car over, making notes in a little spiral book.
The Sheriff walked out, looked over at Donny, then at us. “What happened about Ralph Diggs?”
Mr. Butternut looked up. “We done told you.”
I liked his waspish tone. I think I’d been misjudging Mr. Butternut. He had a lot more grit than most.
“Yes. Sorry. I guess I’m asking what you think.” He was looking at me. “Ralph Diggs worked at the hotel. What do you know about him?”
I didn’t feel like this. “He called himself Rafe; I think that’s short for Raphael.”
“I know. You told me that.”
“You didn’t seem to hear it. Raphael. ‘Fey’ for short.” I looked up into the Sheriff’s glacier blue eyes. “The kidnapped baby. It was a boy, not a girl.”
The Sheriff rose and looked as if I’d just handed him part of the darkening sky, as if he’d run out of daylight. “What do you mean? How do you know that?’
“Raphael. After Mr. Woodruff, old Mr. Woodruff, the grandfather.”
“Did he—Ralph or Rafe—tell you this?”
“Of course not. I’m just putting it together. Remember? Raphael was that baby’s grandfather’s name. So they called him Fey. The Diggses must have been the people in Pennsylvania that bellboy took him to. I guess they shortened Raphael to Ralph.” I glared, as if for some reason this was the Sheriff’s fault. “You’ve seen his face. How much he looks like Morris Slade.” I frowned, not at the Sheriff this time, but at myself. I’d said something like this before. What was I missing? I was missing something pitifully obvious, and I knew it.
The Sheriff shook his head, musing. “Why in hell did Slade leave his car? Where did he go? Did they come here together?”
I knew he wasn’t really asking us, me and Mr. Butternut, but I answered, “No. You can ask Gaby and Ron at the Silver Pear.” I thought about it for a moment. “Morris Slade could have walked back to the highway, back across White’s Bridge there.” I tilted my head.
The Sheriff shook his head. “It doesn’t make much sense he’d leave his car for the police to find.”
“No, it don’t,” said Mr. Butternut, who’d been silent through this questioning. Now he slapped his knees and got up. “I’m goin’ home if you don’t need me anymore.”
The Sheriff nodded. “I appreciate your help. It was a pretty bad experience for you, sir. You thought quickly. Thanks.”
Mr. Butternut just nodded and walked off the small porch, back to the road.
Dr. McComb had come out and was standing beside the Sheriff, his black bag shut. “Nothing more I can do here, Sam. I been talking to the trooper in there. There’s no sign of the shotgun. Shooter would’ve taken it with him.”
The Sheriff nodded. “If you’re leaving, take Emma home, won’t you?”
I did not protest. My old self would have. My old self would have made up some good reason why I should stay. But my new self felt distant; maybe I was in shock. “If you’re in shock, don’t you act strange?” I asked Dr. McComb.
He nodded. “All kinds of strange. Affects people in different ways.”
I stood up, ready to leave. “Well, maybe Morris Slade’s in shock. Maybe he left and he’s in the woods. Lost. You never went deep enough.” I said this to the Sheriff.
Dr. McComb held the door for me to get into his old jalopy. When he tried to get it going, it choked up a lot. But finally we were bumping back over the road.
We passed Mr. Butternut, who raised his hand to me in a kind of salute, and I saluted back. I had to say about Mr. Butternut that he operated pretty well under pressure.
Dr. McComb slowed as he went around Mirror Pond, then over White’s Bridge. “Well,” he said, shifting gears about twenty times. “Sam’ll sort it out.”
I looked dully at the Silver Pear as we rumbled by. “Sure. He’ll go after the wrong man.”
54
I could have been a celebrity again, I thought, but somehow celebrity wasn’t as appealing as it was a week ago.
I thought this as I walked heavily up the back stairs to my room. I’d asked Dr. McComb to please go around to the back driveway and let me off so I could go inside without having to talk to people. But I realized, stopping on the landing between floors, that tonight there really weren’t any people to talk to.
There had been no guests for dinner, not even Miss Bertha
and Mrs. Fulbright, for some friend or relation of Mrs. Fulbright’s had come to take them both out. And my mother and Mrs. Davidow had gone to a party at the Custis house across the highway.
By the next morning the Hotel Paradise had gotten the news. Mrs. Davidow, Ree-Jane, and my mother were gathered in the kitchen waiting for me to come foggily down to breakfast. If Ree-Jane was up before 8 A.M., ever, the possibility for drama was increased by a hundred.
Ree-Jane was “prostrate” at the news about “Rafe, poor Rafe.” I told her she’d better lie down then, as she couldn’t be prostrate and still walk around with her arm flung over her eyes.
Mrs. Davidow wanted to know every detail and was about to offer me a Bloody Mary until she remembered I was twelve. “Who shot him? Did Morris Slade shoot him?”
“Oh, my God! my God!” wailed Ree-Jane.
My mother was tying on her kitchen apron and said that if I didn’t feel like waiting tables, Walter could help. “Maybe it was suicide,” she said in a puzzled way.
“It definitely wasn’t,” I said. She shrugged and told Mrs. Davidow she’d run out of spice for her pumpkin chiffon pie.
Here I had just found a dead body, and one belonging to someone they knew, and it might as well have been a dead beetle for all the effect it had: they were just exaggerated versions of their same selves.
My mother turned to the stove; Mrs. Davidow smoked and talked six to the dozen, probably rehearsing for the reporters sure to come; Ree-Jane walked and wailed.
I asked Mrs. Davidow if she’d make one of her Bloody Marys for Great-Aunt Aurora, and she said she’d be happy to. She was always happy to make a drink, no matter whose.
Here we were at 11:00 A.M. on the front porch with two reporters. Or rather here I was, but Mrs. Davidow and Ree-Jane and my mother couldn’t yet get the hang of it, me being famous.
When Ree-Jane had heard reporters were coming from Cloverly and even Pittsburgh, she right away changed out of her walking shorts into a Heather Gay Struther dress, this one a cheery Good Morning Yellow, which might not have been good for a death in the family, but was certainly good for photographers.
Fadeaway Girl Page 24
