Hotel Paradise

by Martha Grimes

  On egg-buying days, I never get to go to Cold Flat. I sometimes hint around to Lola Davidow, saying I’d be happy to help with carrying the eggs, or anything else. But Lola (usually delighted to say I could do what my mother said I couldn’t) never takes me up on it. Ree-Jane gets to go, however. And the only reason Ree-Jane wants to go is because she knows it sticks in my craw. She knows how interested I am in the station and the Tidewaters and comes back talking about both (though I know she doesn’t give a damn about the station and wouldn’t know a Tidewater if she fell over one). And she leaves the car and walks in that careful way she has of showing herself off, up the front steps of the hotel, and there’s never an egg in sight. Her mother has to carry the eggs.

  What I did, then—and this was extremely daring—was to go to La Porte one day and hop on the 1:53, whose final destination was so exotic I didn’t even bother longing to go there. I only wanted the next stop. “Hop on” was the right phrase because I had to make a quick jump while the conductor’s back was turned and he was looking down the line of cars. For the fifteen-minute ride, I walked the aisles, moving from one car to the next, searching intently for my seat beside the adult who had paid my fare. That’s what the conductor must have thought, for he didn’t question my expense-paid trip. There are advantages sometimes to being really young. People ignore you.

  The Junction was the next stop, and there I hopped down. No one got on and no one except for me got off.

  I stood for a moment in the rush of wind stirred up by the train rumbling off down the track and looked around at the depot. It was huge and constructed of winey-colored brick with a cupola-like tower. Despite the years of exposure to coal dust and cinders, it seemed incredibly clean, and so did the platform. And I could see its dark and cool interior was also unblemished, or appeared to be. A lot of polished mahogany and maybe oak or pine benches, all unlittered.

  As I was debating entering the station to inspect it more closely, a girl—a young woman, really—came out. Her look slid right off me as if we met like silk and satin, and was perfectly indifferent in a place where there’s probably so little going on you’d think a stranger might cause a look to snag, at least. It either goes to show how uninteresting my presence is, or that she was mightily preoccupied with her own mission. I wondered what it was. She had no suitcase and was not dressed for travel, at least not for far. She wore a cotton dress, sleeveless, except for the small wings of material that hung off the shoulders in little gathers. The dress was a washed-out blue, so pale it was almost white, the color of dawn. It had a heart-shaped neck and ties at the side that pulled the waist in when tied in the back. I guessed she was twenty, or nearly, but not more than that. After standing awhile, looking up and down the track as if she were wondering where the train was, she turned and sat down on one of the platform’s benches. She was carrying nothing except what looked to be a small purse.

  I didn’t want her to see I was staring at her, so I pretended to be studying the train schedules with some fascination where they were tacked up under glass. I knew the La Porte-Cold Flat Junction run, and knew there wouldn’t be another train until late afternoon (4:32, to be exact) for I naturally had to plan my return trip. So what was she doing here? After a few moments of schedule reading, I just looked at her quite openly, for she obviously didn’t care that I was there. I didn’t exist for her; she didn’t care about anything but what was out there along the horizon.

  The reason I noticed all of this was because she was so pretty. Beautiful, I guess, with hair so fine and pale blond it looked like milkweed in the sun and eyes the color of Spirit Lake itself, dark gray that I knew would shift around depending on the slant of the light.

  I wondered what such a girl was doing in Cold Flat Junction. In type, she resembled none of the people I’d seen getting off the First Union Tabernacle bus, for they all seemed heavy in the face—“coarse” is what my mother would say—as if some potter had stopped the wheel too soon and left the features a little rough and lumpy, unfinished and unrefined. They all looked, no matter what the age or sex, as if they were in need of a potter to finish the job—even the kids. But maybe they weren’t really representative of Cold Flat; maybe that’s just what the First Union Tabernacle does to you after a while. Anyway, this girl with the milkwood-colored hair sat quite still, her feet flat on the platform, her head turned and looking down the line, down the tracks, off to that horizon from which I had just come.

  I remember the sky. It was especially, well, white, a thick, milky kind of whiteness with nothing at all suspended in it. It was like a giant page from which the print had faded, unreadable and opaque. I am not a very observant person; I do not note the barks of trees or patterns of leaves or wings—stuff like that. My mother knows every flower that ever bloomed, and Marge every bird that ever warbled. I myself am flower-blind and bird-deaf and it’s a good thing Nature doesn’t depend on me to write it down. Yet, I will never forget that sky. Nothing moved up there in that vast whiteness, no shred of cloud, no drifts of swallows, no sickly stillborn moon left over from the night before. The horizon was a blurred gray line and that was where she looked. The sky was like a judgment, but I could not think upon whom.

  In the other direction off to the right there looked to be a few businesses. I made out a big red-and-white Esso sign, what looked like a general store, and another I thought that said “Diner.” It was there that I made for. It wasn’t as short a walk as it looked, because the emptiness of the landscape played tricks on the eyes. I was inside the Windy Run Diner within another ten minutes and letting the metal and glass-louvered door suck shut behind me on its tight spring.

  Here I did excite a little bit of interest, for the row of heads at the counter turned and there were a couple of nods, a few vague little smiles. Probably they assumed my parents were getting the car filled up over at the Esso.

  When the waitress slapped down her book of checks on the counter (a signal for me to order, I guessed), I said I’d have a Coke, really wishing like anything that I could order coffee instead with some authority, even though I didn’t much like coffee.

  If I had any plan at all in mind, it was vague. I must have thought that if I sat amongst the townfolk, they’d all be jabbering away about the people who lived there and I’d surely overhear something about the Tidewaters. But they didn’t and I didn’t. Sitting to my right were two old men as silent as the grave; the only sound coming from there was the click of glass against china as they shook enormous amounts of sugar into their cups. The woman on my other side was chewing gum with short breaks to puff in on her cigarette and push her thick glasses up her short nose.

  The waitress (who wore a little badge like Maud’s, only hers said “Louise Snell” and “Prop.”) was pleasant and asked me, “Where you from, sugar?” and I lied I was from over in Comus, another thirty or forty miles beyond. I figured Comus was big enough that she wouldn’t be surprised she’d never seen me. Besides the Tidewaters, I really wanted to know who that girl at the railroad station was, but had no idea how to set about finding out. It was fairly easy to introduce the Tidewaters into the talk, though, since I knew their name. So I said I had a friend who lived in Cold Flat and that her name was Toya Tidewater.

  Now, given my mother’s fearsome look and compressed lips whenever she mentions the Tidewaters, I was prepared for wild eyes and sharp, intaken breaths all along the counter. Nothing like this happened. The old man at my right brought up some phlegm in a disgusting way, but just kept right on looking at his mirror reflection as if he found himself tantalizing.

  Louise Snell called down the counter to a truck-driver type named Billy and asked where Toya lived, and was it that little gone-to-ruin place along Swansdown Road, and Billy answered back, nah, that was the Simpsons’ place, and the Tidewaters lived out Lonemeadow way. Well, this was immediately contradicted by the woman on my left, who said there wasn’t no Tidewater lived there, least not now, and Billy must be thinking about old Joe and he was dead. Billy
got kind of surly, probably because this woman was telling him he was wrong, and yelled up the counter that maybe old Joe was dead, but that don’t mean none of his folks didn’t live at the end of Lonemeadow. At one of the chrome-and-Formica tables marching in a row down the length of the place a man and woman were sitting and they jumped right into this argument, telling both Billy and the woman they were wrong, that the Tidewaters moved last year over to Dubois—or at least some of them did (the man said to the woman, rather timidly). The argument over where the Tidewaters lived pretty soon expanded into guesses about all of the Tidewaters themselves, and who was whose kid, and which one went off to work in Comus, and which girl married someone named Mervin. Names broke and crested atop the waves of conversation (“Mattie Mae” . . . “Abraham” . . . “Joleen”) and on and on, so that the original question about Toya got completely forgotten and so did I. I just picked up my check and walked over to the cashier, a thin boy reading a comic book and muscling his nose around a bad cold, and obviously not a Tidewater fan, for he barely looked at the money, and at me not at all.

  Outside on the narrow walk beside the highway, I wondered what to do. I could, I supposed, take a look at this Lonemeadow Road (if I could find it), but I still wouldn’t know if the people living in the end house were Tidewaters, since no one in the Windy Run Diner had agreed upon that point.

  The diner, as I said, is one of the few businesses at the Junction; the train tracks ran at an angle a little farther past, cutting across one of the two “highways” (not much wider than wide roads), and as I stood there, looking off in the direction away from the station, I could see and hear the next train (probably a freight train) coming along. I walked up the road a bit, a little closer to the tracks, for I have always loved trains, the mournful sound of them, and guess everybody does. As it clattered on by, the conductor looked out, saw me and waved. I waved back. I felt strange, for I would imagine he took me for a resident of Cold Flat Junction, assigning to me a new place, a new identity.

  I walked back up the road, aimlessly, seeing no one except a woman coming out of the door of a house set quite far back from the road, coming out and tossing dirty water from a pail and going back in.

  A short distance later I came to a small schoolhouse of white clapboard. It was the sort you see represented in paintings in the same way village churches are—bell tower, steeple. School didn’t seem to be in session, which was peculiar, as it was only May. I never pay much attention to school holidays, as I usually have to leave school wherever we are most winters to return to open up the hotel in spring. There were still a few kids at the other end of the schoolyard shoving a ball through a basket and dribbling away. And there was one girl standing behind a chainlink fence, doing nothing but staring out, one hand locked in the fence and the other holding a sort of tube against her face which I recognized, as I got closer, as pick-up-sticks. She was simply staring out. I mistook her attitude as interest in me, but I was wrong, for she was looking right past me. Everything about her looked washed out: her jeans were faded; her eyes were a queer clear gray, without depth; her skin was pale; her hair looked rinsed in Clorox. There was this disturbing colorlessness to her, as if she were a piece of the Judgment sky.

  Knowing pretty much I wouldn’t get an answer, I went up close to the fence and asked her if she knew where the Tidewaters lived. Her fingers moved, curling and uncurling in the webbing of the fence, but she did not reply. I leaned against the fence and put my hand up there too, curling my fingers in and around the metal as she was doing. I don’t know why I did this. But it worked almost like a secret sign, and she asked me if I wanted to play pick-up-sticks in a voice as small as any I’ve ever heard. I said sure, even though I think I am a little old for pick-up-sticks. (I have always had a secret liking for the game.)

  So I walked to the end of the fence and through a gate, and we both sat down on a grassy verge and let the colored sticks fall on the concrete. She held them in a bundle and released them, letting them lie where they fell. She was very good at this game, better than I was. It’s not a hard game, but it takes concentration and patience and coordination, for you have to be careful when lifting one stick with another that you don’t touch a third. She was able to lift, without touching, half the sticks in one turn. I managed about a half a dozen, and then she picked up the rest. After a game, she put the sticks back in the tube. I left. She never did tell me her name; for all I knew, she could have been a Tidewater.

  Beyond the school sat a post office. It was a gray cinderblock building with an American flag drooping high on its flagpole. I thought how stupid I’d been not to come here first off: the post office would clearly know the whereabouts of the Tidewater family. Or families, for there appeared to be more than one.

  The light inside was fluorescent, unshadowed and kind of unearthly. Facing me was a wall of those metal boxes you can rent so that any mail you receive is completely secret and private. Our post office in Spirit Lake (much cozier than the Cold Flat one) has these boxes, only ours, instead of having a metal door, are half metal and half glass; they are very old, antique probably.

  My brother, Will, and I used to have the heady job of picking up the mail. We would walk the long boardwalk that started at the tennis club building and ran parallel to the highway, through trees and shrubbery, all the way down to the railroad station and the post office. We would take our time about the mail route. After we left the post office, or before we went there, we would sometimes go to Greg’s and get an Orange Crush and a Moon Pie (his friend Brownmiller’s favorite combination, and I often think we ate this in honor of him, as if he were a war hero or something, when actually he only lives a hundred miles away). Then we would set our pop on the pinball machine and Will would just about tilt it nearly to death and was good at winning free games (though not as good as Brownmiller).

  But that was years ago and time past, and Lola Davidow started driving down to the post office; sometimes Ree-Jane does it, especially since she got that new convertible car. Ree-Jane, God knows, isn’t about to walk. So the mail route became one more Davidow takeover. It means that on the rare occasions when someone writes to me, Mrs. Davidow or Ree-Jane gets to see the letter first; worse, they get to tell me who it is that’s writing. It’s discouraging, for by the time I get my letter, it seems used; it is drained of that bewitching power unopened mail has. And, of course, if Ree-Jane picks up my mail, she is totally unmerciful. She would never just leave it at the desk or hand it over. No, there has to be a big production staged about the sender and my relationship to her or him (if “him” it’s always worse); that, or she might open it “by mistake,” thinking it’s from a prospective guest who wants to make a reservation; or sometimes she even “forgets” to give me my letter and it doesn’t turn up for days or even a week. By the time Ree-Jane gets finished with my poor letter, it’s almost as if the ink is worn away. Certainly, the excitement of receiving it is.

  So I have always wanted to rent one of those little metal boxes; that way I could receive my mail in total privacy, for my eyes only. It was always a high point in Will’s and my day when we could look through the glass and see the white envelopes slotted in there, along with the occasional blue or official-looking tan one. My brother and I would take turns spinning the combination.

  Sometimes we would be given money to buy stamps, and I thoroughly enjoyed that, for it allowed me to talk to the postmistress, Miss Crosby, through the arched window opening, which is the only vantage point for seeing into the “back” room and the great swell of letters and parcels on the table. Through this window, which has a flat wooden door she can slide down, Miss Crosby dispenses stamps and change and, up to a point, information. When she is “off” for lunch (tea and a tuna sandwich and some selection of Hostess cake) or has to go out on an errand, she can shut the window—bang the window, sometimes, when I was asking too many questions. Actually, Miss Crosby will sometimes keep the window shut if she does not feel like exposing herself to the outside
world; no one has any way of knowing if she’s back there with her cup of tea and Hostess cupcake, hiding. I think hers must be the most enviable job in the world, back there with tea and Twinkies and all of that mail.

  But here in Cold Flat Junction, the post office was a more efficient-looking and businesslike affair. The counter that ran half the length of the small room would leave whoever was behind totally exposed. Except there was, this day, no one behind it. No sounds came from the inner room, and nothing moved except the ceiling fan, making its slow, faintly whistling rounds.

  I supposed the person could be using the toilet, so I waited. I read the Most Wanted posters and mused about the lives of the two men pictured there. One of them was named Drinkwater, which definitely caught my eye. The other was named Waters. But they must have been related, probably brothers, for they looked so much alike, and one or the other of them had simply shorn a syllable off or added a syllable in some infantile attempt to change the name. They really did look alike. Then I dimly remembered having seen other posters and they all looked pretty much alike, too. I made a mental note to ask the Sheriff why this should be. Why did all Most Wanteds seem to have dark hair and spidery little mustaches that slanted down to the corners of their mouths? And small, beady eyes. I stood with my hands clasped behind me, rolling on the balls of my feet, reading about these men. Armed robbery, both of them. Robbery was pretty boring, except if you went armed, which I guess made it more interesting. I shot both of them with my thumb and finger.

  Still, no one appeared to take my order. There was a rack of postcards of places like La Porte and Cloverly and the Cold Flat station and the church. I selected the station and the Tabernacle ones. My plan was to buy two stamps to make my presence here reasonable and then to ask casually about the Tidewaters. The Drinkwaters (I was sure they were brothers) made this even easier, for I could laughingly tell the postmistress (or -master) that I had nearly died looking at the poster, thinking the name was Tidewater. This wasn’t, but could easily have been, true. But clever as this story was (cleverer, I was sure, than the Drinkwaters would be when they got caught), I was unable to put it into action, for no one appeared, even though I hung around for another ten minutes. It was no way to run a country. I put two dimes on the counter and pocketed my postcards and left.