Hotel Paradise

by Martha Grimes

  Anyone would have said to me that I’d seen a ghost, and laughed. Would a ghost appear walking along Second Street in La Porte? There was just something so substantial about Second Street, where the Sheriff gave out parking tickets.

  If I hadn’t been so sleepy, I think, I would even have come down here to the lake, like I did tonight. I think I wanted to look across its flat blackness, wanted to see if the Girl would be there. Wanted to see her moonbright hair shining, like Wonder bread, in the dark.

  SEVENTEEN

  You would think that the very first thing I’d do the next morning would be to take the notebook straight up to Britten’s store and look for Ulub and Ubub. But I didn’t. First, I wanted to talk to the Sheriff, for I was uncertain about making Ulub relive all of this, as it might be painful to him.

  Anyway, the first thing I always did in the mornings was to get down to the kitchen at seven o’clock and see to putting the syrup pitchers on the tables. It was always cold in the dining room before my mother got the stoves going full blast, especially if you were carrying a bowl full of ice and butter around. Even Vera, although she would not stoop to such a chore, and who was always black-uniform-perfect, would sometimes wear a dark cardigan as she whisked around the dining room, checking the tables for syrup and meanly hoping I hadn’t done my job.

  The other girls, like Anna Paugh and Sheila, would come later, Sheila looking disheveled, like she didn’t know what struck her and like she’d just this moment risen from bed and yanked on whatever was lying around. It was hard to blame anybody for acting dislocated and wandering in with a “Where am I? Where am I? Is this hell?” expression. To have to deal with Miss Bertha’s hearing aid in the early-morning cold was not my idea of fun, either. Since the breakfast menu was much the same from one morning to another (except French toast sometimes replaced pancakes, as it did this morning)—eggs any which way, bacon or sausage, toast or biscuits—I thought sometimes Miss Bertha was just doing this to me on purpose, making me repeat and repeat items. But my humor would always improve when I remembered that I myself was soon to be the recipient of some of my mother’s powdered-sugar French toast and spicy sausage.

  This particular morning my mind was occupied by things more important even than French toast, and I raced through the serving and then polished off my allotment very quickly so that I could take a taxi into town. I called Axel’s Taxis to pick me up about halfway up the drive, because Ree-Jane was up early for once and would undoubtedly want a ride, with me paying, of course. The dispatcher told me Axel would be there right away, but of course it was Delbert, not Axel.

  The Sheriff wasn’t in his office, and Donny told me he thought Sam was over at the Rainbow Café. I found him there, standing near the pastry counter talking to (of all people) his wife. It was bad enough not to find him simply walking around town, patrolling things, occasions when I could speak to him quite privately; but that he would be with his wife was a blow. Though he wasn’t “with” her, they just happened to land up at the Rainbow’s pastry counter at the same time. I knew that she came in a lot to buy pies (I had heard she couldn’t cook) and that’s what she was apparently doing, for even as I watched through the window, she picked up one of Shirl’s big white boxes and left.

  I entered, thinking about her.

  She was dark and flashy-pretty (for her age). Someone had mentioned she was “of Mediterranean extraction,” whatever that meant. Some time before, upon hearing this, I had gone to the Abigail Butte County Library and opened their massive world atlas to look at the Mediterranean Sea and the countries around it. There were a lot. I decided Florence DeGheyn was Italian. Miss Flyte said no, she’s Greek. I wondered about this. Of course, I could simply have asked the Sheriff, but I didn’t want him to think I was all that interested. I don’t know why some casual question such as “Is your wife Greek?” would sound overly interested, but the Sheriff could sense things other people never noticed. So I study Florence (as if she were indeed another country) from afar.

  This morning, as I walked into the Rainbow, the Sheriff was moving back to the Reserved booth, where he stood now with his cup of coffee talking to Maud. I asked Charlene for a cherry Coke, and stood thinking about Maud and the Sheriff for a few moments. Far more than wondering about Florence, I wonder about the Sheriff and Maud. She is always bickering at him. This amazes me. And he seems, almost, to like it; as a matter of fact, I sometimes wonder if some of the things he says to her aren’t meant just to get her to bicker. Like the time, last winter, she made some passing comment about wanting to go ice skating on Spirit Lake. He told her some story about no one skating there, and everyone being afraid to go near the place. Because I had written down a lot of the conversation (as I often do so I can recall what they said to each other), I remembered this:

  He said, “Axel Spiker’s cousin went out there and disappeared. Nobody ever saw him again until one of the Spirit Lake people looked down and there was this shadow under the ice. Frozen over.”

  “Axel doesn’t have a cousin.”

  Given what had happened to the supposed cousin, I thought her answer not to the point.

  “Maud, you don’t know whether he’s got one or not; you’re just contradicting for the sake of it. Don’t you remember that ad in the Conservative about the Spiker reunion last year? There’re so many Spikers in these parts, they have to take out an ad to get the word out. Of course he’s got a cousin.”

  What was wrong with them? I wondered. I wanted to hear more about this shadow under ice and they were arguing about whether Axel had a cousin or not.

  “It was in dead winter,” the Sheriff had gone on, “and Axel’s cousin had gone all by himself, skated right out to the center, and fallen through. End of February they found him—perfectly preserved. Imagine.”

  I didn’t want to. The Sheriff was making it up, I knew; for I know how thick the ice gets on Spirit Lake. Everything around Spirit Lake gets thick in winter. Ice, snow, air, sky. When we were little, Will and I would skate out to the middle with only our heavy socks on. The whole lake was like milk; you couldn’t see anything beneath its surface. I bet it was frozen straight down to the bottom. Will would take a rock out there and hammer it on the surface (not the smartest thing to do) and nothing would happen. It would gash the ice a little, sending out hairline cracks, but it wouldn’t go through. (And I thought it was really decent of her not to mention that he sometimes gave me rides.)

  Whenever, in winter, I hear the Rainbow’s jukebox play scratchy winter songs, usually sung by Nat King Cole, I think of Spirit Lake. The words of these songs are pretty stupid, for it doesn’t look “wonderland”-ish. It looks unearthly, as if it doesn’t belong on this planet. Words cannot possibly fit the experience of Spirit Lake. But, then, words usually don’t fit any experience.

  I like to walk to Spirit Lake in my boots and my cap with ear flaps, heavily gloved and coated. Such a heaviness of snow lies here that I sometimes think it will collapse into itself, the whole scene. On days when it’s nearly dark at five o’clock, I stand here as the snow gets slowly deeper, thinking that snow falls at Spirit Lake as nowhere else. That’s what I imagine. Straight down it falls, thick and windless, burdening the smaller trees to what looks like breaking point and turning the hedges into round white walls. The stubble is so thick with hoar frost, I can nearly skate across this icy grass itself. Thin rails of ice lace the trees and coat the spindly branches in transparent bluish sleeves. I know there are colder places on earth—Alaska, for instance, and the Poles—snowier and icier, but I don’t think anyplace could have the wintry feel of Spirit Lake. Maybe because it is small and enclosed it feels completely shrouded. Winter’s home, I say to myself, standing here in the dreaming stillness, with my face so cold it must look finely crazed and cracked, and my white fur eyebrows, while the snow falls and falls straight down. If ever winter has a home, its home is Spirit Lake.

  • • •

  They were bickering now, or at least Maud was. The Sheriff was tel
ling her not to do something and that would make her want to do it all the more, or pretend to want to do it. They stopped in the middle of their argument to greet me, as if they were really happy to see me back here. It made me feel quite warm and welcome. Maud slid over in the booth so that I could sit beside her, even though the seat opposite was empty. The Sheriff remained standing with his cup of coffee.

  Maud said to me (excluding the Sheriff), “I’m going to walk to Hebrides.” She smoked her cigarette with a smug look.

  Before I could say something like “But it’s too far,” the Sheriff told me she’d been making a big deal about this since before I came in. What Maud wanted was for him to give her a ride in the police car.

  Maud said, with that put-on sweetness she used around the Sheriff, “You’d think, wouldn’t you, a friend might give you a lift that would only take maybe fifteen minutes to drive.” She did not look at him.

  “Take a cab. Axel can take you,” said the Sheriff.

  “Axel never takes anybody,” I said. “Delbert would, I guess.”

  Maud was too busy being annoyed with the Sheriff to note that. “What is so precious about your official vehicle? Don’t tell me you never use it for private purposes.”

  “I will tell you. I never use it for private purposes. I won’t loan you my gun to shoot at the moon with, either.”

  That the Sheriff walks around with a weapon on his hip gives him a gritty celebrity that no one else in the whole of La Porte has. In my mind, I could see myself with this gun, slowly drawing a bead on Ree-Jane. There’s a sheriff over in Hebrides, but he’s fat, with a beer belly and piggy little eyes. I would hate to have my life depend on being saved by him. The gun was at the Sheriff’s side now, its grip showing out of the dark brown leather holster. He was lethal as God.

  “Take the bus,” the Sheriff said.

  There’s this local bus that runs between La Porte and Hebrides and Lord knows how many house stops along the way. It’s dark green and rusted out. You’d have to be desperate. As I think he well knew.

  “You must be crazy,” Maud said, tapping ash into a metal tray. “It stops to deliver milk and eggs and to pick up people’s mail, for God’s sakes.” Then she turned to me. “Do you want to walk with me? We can stop at the Stoplight Diner near Hebrides and have lunch. Or dinner.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her.”

  Actually, crazy as walking all the way to Hebrides was, I would have liked to walk there with Maud. “I have to wait tables at lunch.”

  She sighed. “Doesn’t Lola Davidow ever give you a day off?”

  I noticed that she carefully didn’t include my mother in this complaint. “No.” It was true, too. Oh, they would, I guessed, if there were some kind of personality-improving emergency, like if I was taking posture lessons, or if some movie producer wanted me. Except for that, I work three meals a day, seven days a week. “What do you want to get in Hebrides?” I asked her.

  “Nothing.” The Sheriff answered for her, smiling ever so slightly in that way he does when he’s trying to keep a laugh back. It was strange: With everyone else (like me), both of them are kind as kind can be. They seem to know what you are feeling, and what will hurt or annoy, and are careful not to do so. But not with each other. It’s very puzzling, and that’s why I wonder about them.

  “Oh, yes, I do need things. I want to go to the Emporium. I need . . . something dressy.”

  I could tell from the way she paused that she hadn’t even thought about what she wanted to go to Hebrides for. The Sheriff was probably right. He usually is.

  “ ‘Dressy’ for what?”

  “I’m not sure that what I want a new dress for is actually your business.” She said this with great deliberation, slowly moving her hand over the Formica tabletop, as if wiping off crumbs and ashes.

  “Is it for Alma Stuck’s funeral?” He did not crack a smile.

  She stopped in her imaginary-crumb gathering and I could sense how it irritated her that what he meant was all she had was a kind of funeral popularity. Nobody was asking her to dinner or to a movie.

  Then she resumed her wiping motions. “Of course, I know you never go, but you do recall the Red Barn has dances sometimes?”

  “Yes, I do recall. Donny and I—and most of the state troopers—are usually over there trying to keep the peace.” I watched the Sheriff set down his cup and fold a stick of Teaberry gum into his mouth before he said, “So who’re you going with? Dodge Haines? Axel Spiker?”

  Maud smoothed down her dress. “You don’t know him, so don’t bother guessing. My break’s over. Goodbye.” With this she rose in her dignified way, patted my shoulder, and walked off. He watched her go, kept watching as she walked behind the counter and was taking Dodge Haines’s loudmouthed order, and then Carl Beddowes’s nasal whip of a voice—all the while the Sheriff was smiling one of those glorious smiles, the leftover part of which he turned on me. But even leftover, it gave me the kind of feeling I guess I should have when I look up at the new stained-glass window in church. The smile is more dazzling by far.

  “Come on. Let’s see if Helene Baum’s meter has a red flag up.”

  I gathered up my notebook and the two of us walked out of the Rainbow. I noticed how Maud’s eyes slewed around to watch him go.

  I was surprised how sad they looked.

  • • •

  At the last tally, the Sheriff told me as he wrote out another ticket for the yellow Cadillac, Helene Baum had twenty-three unpaid tickets, and he had warned her (in writing, to let her know he meant business) that if these tickets were not paid, the Cadillac would be towed. I can see her still, fingering her double strand of pearls, just fuming with anger, her red hair looking almost tipped with sparks (for I remember she’d just had it colored in the Prime Cut), and yelling “Harassment!” at him, following us for more than a block.

  Helene Baum had threatened many times to get Mayor Sims to fire the Sheriff, which was ridiculous, of course, because he was so popular, though not with the mayor himself (who I always thought was jealous, and who Maud told me was afraid of losing the mayorship to Sam one fine day). Maud said Sam DeGheyn was absolutely untouchable. She said this with the sort of pride that seemed all at odds with the bickering tone she adopted around him. Like I said, I wondered about them.

  Today, he calmly wrote the parking ticket and carefully affixed it under the windshield wiper, where it stayed glued against the glass still damp from the Cadillac’s weekly bath over at the Brush-Up (a name I always thought might have been better for the Prime Cut than for a car-wash).

  “Twenty-three,” I said, amazed.

  He nodded and stuck his ticket book in his back pocket. We walked on, with me sort of riffling the notebook, holding it out in front of me.

  Naturally, he asked me what it was I had there, and I told him, at first in what I hoped was a slightly bored tone (since I liked to be casual around him), but growing more and more excited as I went on.

  He stopped. “Are you saying that Ulub and Ubub were at Spirit Lake that night and saw something?”

  “Yes. Yes. See—” And I pointed out the passage I had worked so long on: “minnows swimming light.”

  He frowned, but not in disbelief, I thought; more in a study of the page.

  “The trouble is, I can’t figure it all out,” I said, and he nodded. “And what I was wondering, do you think it would be okay if I took the notebook and went and asked the Wood boys themselves?”

  Thoughtfully, he held it and looked up at the sky of that blameless blue you sometimes see in religious paintings. “Talking to the Woods isn’t the easiest thing in the world, you know.” He shook his head a little as he returned to studying the page. “ ‘Minnows swimming’?”

  I told him what it meant. I didn’t want to spend hours standing on Second Street and filling him in on every word I’d translated. “Well, Mr. Root can.”

  “Who?” He frowned.

  “Mr. Root. He’s good at figuring out what people
say.” But this wasn’t the point, was it? “What I’m wondering is whether Ulub will be—” What was the word? What was the word Dr. McComb had used?

  The Sheriff just stood there waiting for me to finish. I was really getting impatient with him. “You know . . . like in those movies where a doctor or someone makes the person remember something horrible and the person goes kind of crazy?” It occurred to me then that I might not be as concerned about Ulub’s welfare as I was about my own.

  The Sheriff unzipped a fresh pack of Teaberry gum and folded a stick into his mouth. He said, “Oh, I don’t think that really happens in life. If something in the past is that traumatic—”

  “Traumatic,” yes, that was the word everyone in town seemed to know but me.

  “—I think what happens is, the person just can’t remember. Refuses to remember.”

  “So even if I read to him from the notebook, if what happened is too traumatic then Ulub won’t even recall it?”

  “That’s what I think.” He still had his head bent over the notebook. Then he looked at me. “It happened so long ago, though. Everyone’s forgotten it, as far as I know.”

  Testily, I said, “Dr. McComb hasn’t.”

  “How’d you and Dr. McComb ever get on this subject?”

  It was my turn to look up at the blue sky. “Oh, it just came up.”

  “Uh-huh.” He handed the notebook back to me. We started walking again. “Mary-Evelyn Devereau.” He said the name almost under his breath as he stopped to check the parking meter before Miss Ruth Porte’s car. Only five minutes left, and she was probably in the Rainbow having her lunch. He slotted a dime in and turned the silver crank. “I wonder if Aurora Paradise knows anything. You ever ask her? She’d be easier to deal with than the Wood boys.”

  “Well, she isn’t. Anyway, she lies about stuff. It’s hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t. Like Ben Queen.”

  Tammy Allbright was sashaying towards us, lathered up in her usual ton of Pond’s lipstick and Maybelline eyeshadow. She smelled a fright, too, probably took a bath in Evening in Paris. She’d stopped us and was giggling all over the Sheriff, batting her Maybelline eyes and biffing him softly with her fist. It was really disgusting; I wonder he could stand it. But he just smiled and asked her about her family. He turned to me and said, “Who?”