“No.”
“Emma, what are you so angry about?” He rested his chin on the tips of his fingers, prayerfully.
I was amazed that he wondered. “I just told you.”
He frowned. “Ben Queen?”
“He has to keep being blamed and punished and coming back again. Nobody helps; nobody helps either one of them. Morris Slade didn’t do anything either.”
His chin, which had lifted for a moment, came back down on his fingertips, putting him in praying territory again. “You think you should be able to do something about it?”
I stared at him. Of course I should be able to do something about it. But so should he, so should a lot of people. I unfolded the paper and read:I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard’s ar-bor—
Just as Ulub had, I stumbled—-bor-e-al plight,
I raised my eyes and drilled them into his, and came down hard on the line:When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
I drilled another hole into him with my eyes.
“You believe that, Emma? That something has to be left to God?”
I got up from the pew. “Something. But not much.”
I walked out.
64
Why I then took refuge in the back room of the Conservative offices among the old newspapers and dusty magazines, I don’t know, but I felt somehow comforted, looking at ancient ads for BB Bats and Campbell’s soups; for Jell-O in fancy molds; and for Morton’s salt with its picture of a girl holding an umbrella, unaware of the salt leaking out behind her. There was Tangee lipstick in little tubes just waiting for Miss Isabel Barnett to shoplift them. And I knew that for some reason, that was what gave comfort to Miss Isabel: shoplifting.
Some of these papers went way back to the 1910s and ’20s. And all of these things were still around, and would still be around in another forty years. I marveled at that: these things would last longer than we would, and I found that very strange. Here was a 1930s stove that only my mother would love. We had one in the small back kitchen that burned wood and had black iron plates you lifted with a handlelike device. It sounded more like something Aurora’s mother (if time went back that far) would use.
I lined up all the magazine covers I could find that pictured the Fadeaway Girls: Good Housekeeping, Life, the Saturday Evening Post. I studied each one, thinking the pictures might tell me something about how to write the story that I was having trouble with; that is, the pictures might reveal something of the understory. For there was more to the story than the facts of the Devereau sisters’ drowning of Mary-Evelyn; more than the facts of the murder of Rose Queen; of Fern’s murder; of Morris Slade and Ralph Fey Diggs. And of me.
The Life cover reminded me of Vera, except for the girl’s being young and pretty: the maid in a black uniform kneeling and looking through a keyhole. I had to admit I didn’t think Vera would do that. Her black uniform faded into the black wall behind her.
Here was the Christmas issue that I liked so much, the red-coated girl in front of a wrought-iron fence, slipping a Christmas card into a mailbox. The background was red and part of her coat faded into it.
Here was the amber-haired girl, in the amber woods, walking with an amber and white collie. If you wanted to see the whole of her, you had to imagine her out of the background.
Maybe a person never knew the whole of a thing because it kept coming and going, never wanting to meet the eye dead-on. A shoe here, an arm there. But, no, not even an arm, for the sleeve that covered it faded into the background.
Is that what I was trying to do? To imagine people into their background so deeply they’d disappear?
Maybe that was the understory.
65
The big papers would take the first part of “Tragedy Town” away from me, as the shooting at Brokedown House and the arrests of Morris Slade and Ben Queen were too big to be confined just to the Conservative. That news would make it to much bigger papers and maybe even to the New York ones, given that Morris Slade and Imogen Woodruff were part of it.
That Imogen Woodruff was the cause of it all—that would not be reported. Imogen and her awful father, Lucien Woodruff. The only ones who knew all of the story were Morris Slade and Ben Queen. The Sheriff might have known all of it, but I kind of doubt it. From the way Morris Slade was talking in our interview, I wouldn’t think so. Ben Queen might have been more willing to talk to the Sheriff, but I doubt he’d tell all of it either.
I knew some of it, but I hadn’t worked out the rest.
“Fern never had no kids.”
Jude Stemple had said this, some weeks ago, when he’d been one of the first people I’d talked to.
“Fern never had no kids.”
In my mind I sat down again in the Windy Run Diner watching that look move around the counter sitters, Billy and the rest.
“Fern went off with her mother for several months.”
“His sainted wife.” Donny’s voice.
A woman with a newborn wants to put it up for adoption: that had been one of my theories.
“He said he owed me.” For saving his life? “Not just that.”
Jude Stemple had described Rose in perfect detail that first time I talked to him. He had described the Girl. And that’s why I thought she was Fern’s daughter.
And that was also how I came to realize what had been so painfully obvious all along. How much Ralph Diggs looked like Morris, forgetting that he looked exactly like Rose.
“Rose.” The Sheriff had said the name, but nothing more.
“His sainted wife,” Donny had said, with his usual leer.
If I were Imogen Slade and discovered that the baby I thought was adopted was actually my husband’s by another woman, what would I do? If, mind you, my own mind worked in the mean way of Imogen’s and her father’s.
I’d have him kidnapped.
What greater punishment for Morris Slade could there be than what was done?
Morris Slade was freed, of course.
I don’t know what will happen to Ben Queen, but the Sheriff said “mitigating circumstances,” which I think means being in such a bad spot that you didn’t have any choice but to do what you did.
I was going over all of this on the train to Cold Flat Junction.
As the train pulled into the station, I thought about maybe asking Morris Slade if this story I’d come up with was true.
When I stepped down from the train, I did not go right away to the Windy Run Diner or any of the other places I seemed to make myself welcome at: the Queens’ house, or Louise Landis’s, or Jude Stemple’s, or Gloria Spiker Calhoun’s. I was surprised I could call up half a dozen others, but I could.
Instead, I sat down on one of the old benches placed on the platform for passengers to use. Here is where I’d first seen the Girl; I thought I might see her again. But why? For it was just as likely I’d see her in Spirit Lake or on the grounds of the Devereau house or at the Belle Ruin.
The train began to move, and between the cars I caught glimpses of that flat and empty landscape across the track. When the last car had passed, I could see that line of dark trees, standing in a regimental way, solid as soldiers. Then they seemed to sway a little as I looked, the way things appear to move if you stare at them long enough.
I wondered if the trees stood there at the edge of the dark, guarding a great mystery.
Or was all of this just my riotous imagination?
OTHER WORKS BY MARTHA GRIMES
The End of the Pier
Hotel Paradise
Biting the Moon
The Train Now Departing
Cold Flat Junction
Foul Matter
Belle Ruin
Dakota
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Fadeaway Girl Page 29
