Hotel Paradise

by Martha Grimes

  I was looking after Tammy Allbright’s fat rear end. “Who what?”

  “Aurora told you about somebody.”

  “Ben Queen, his name is. Or was. He was a real ladies’ man.” And I gave the Sheriff what I hoped was a look full of meaning, trying to hint that if he didn’t watch out, he might go the way of Ben Queen. Except I didn’t know what way that was. “Aurora—I mean my great-aunt Paradise—said that one of the Devereau sisters ran off with him.”

  “Hmm.” The Sheriff was hunkered down now, checking a tire on Bunny’s pickup truck.

  I chewed the inside of my mouth, wondering why I wasn’t telling him what I had told Dr. McComb about the Girl. Was it because Dr. McComb had actually had a part in the Mary-Evelyn story and the Sheriff hadn’t? Or was it more because I was disappointed that he wasn’t more interested in investigating her death himself? He was the policeman, after all.

  So I held on to my special bit of information.

  EIGHTEEN

  Before I could go to Britten’s store, I had to get the bread plates ready for lunch, which meant another round of the dining room at eleven-thirty. Lunch ran from noon until two. Sometimes, the Hotel Paradise seemed like an endless succession of meals. Not that I was criticizing the guests who ate all of these meals, considering my own interest in what was now coming out of the oven on a huge cookie sheet: ham pinwheels. I quickly moved over to the stove to check the pot simmering there and make sure it held cheese sauce, although I knew it did. I just wanted to lift the lid of the double boiler and dampen my nose with cheesy steam.

  When I was six, I had to memorize this poem about my heart leaping up when I saw a rainbow. No rainbow could make my heart leap as much as when I beheld those ham pinwheels and smelled that cheese sauce. It was an added piece of luck Ree-Jane didn’t like them, or it might have been another white-meat-of-chicken contest. Ree-Jane wouldn’t stoop to eating “leftovers”: leftover pastry and leftover baked ham. Leftovers! Couldn’t she see the shining brown glaze on that pastry, made by whisking a little brush dipped in egg white over it? And that cheese sauce so full of sunlight? Leftovers! I just told her “leftovers” should be good brain food for her. Ree-Jane didn’t understand this; she just looked at me out of her blank blue eyes. I never saw anyone with emptier eyes in my life.

  So with expectations of this tantalizing lunch, I perked up a little, zipped a little faster around the tables, and even had a pleasant smile for Miss Bertha, as I tried to sell the ham pinwheels. In her loud voice she kept asking What was I talking about? no matter how much I repeated or went into detail; and since “Spanish omelette” was the other thing on the menu, I had to hang around Miss Bertha’s table for a long time. Finally, she said she wanted eggs with cheese sauce, and I couldn’t get her mind off this track, and finally went into the kitchen to tell my mother. Vera gave me one of her starchy looks, as if I were trying to play a practical joke on Miss Bertha. Lola Davidow (who was hanging around the kitchen drinking Bloody Marys) thought it was howlingly funny and laughed until she was wiping away tears. My mother, though, simply shrugged and whipped up a cheese omelette for Miss Bertha. When I presented this pretty dish to her, Miss Bertha actually beamed. And Mrs. Fulbright, who never put my mother out, actually requested one too (if it wasn’t any trouble). Miss Bertha beamed even more, thinking she had brought about the discovery of a new dish.

  Full of a double order of ham pinwheels and cheese sauce, I lugged my groggy self up to Britten’s store. I had decided not to take the notebook, although I hated giving up what authority it seemed to lend me. Did I think that upon seeing the book, light would dawn in Ulub’s eyes? That all of that night would come back in a rush?

  They were sitting there on the bench in front of Britten’s, Ulub and Ubub and Mr. Root, too. They seemed to be looking out for something or someone, and upon my approach the three of them smiled and waved. So I was the thing they were all waiting for, and that brought me up short because I’m not used to having anyone waiting for me with that look of expectation, or delighting in my coming.

  Ubub and Ulub slid apart, making room for me to sit between them. This left Mr. Root on the far end of the bench, but this position appeared to suit him fine, for he could then lean forward, forearms on knees, and survey the three of us as if he had been appointed a sort of referee or deputy placed there to oversee our meeting and make sure each of us understood and was given a fair shake. In some way, I guessed this was true. He still wore his blue engineer’s cap, and he touched its brim in a little salute as I came up to the bench. He had put in his teeth today, perhaps indicating the grave importance of our gathering, although none of them had known I was coming to gather with them. And then it struck me that they had simply assumed, after the drama of two mornings ago, that that meeting was certainly not the end of it. I would be back. This really pleased me.

  During the few moments we were arranging ourselves on the bench, I wondered how to approach the subject of the tale in the notebook. As usual, I was not one to put the question directly. I told myself it was because directness scares people off or shuts them up. The real reason is probably that I like dragging things out because I don’t want them to end.

  Then came a surprising turn: Ubub had taken from his jacket pocket a little bunch of papers—newspaper clippings, as I soon saw. One of them was the very same triple column with picture that I had read in the Conservative office and had refrained from stealing. But Ubub had other clippings, too; it looked as if he had them all. And a couple were from the Star-Times in Cloverly, a thicker and more citified newspaper. He handed them to me, nodding hard.

  There was a difference between his front page and the one I had read: all around it, someone (one or both of the Woods, I guessed) had drawn little things, such as flowers and roundnesses which I took to be their versions of woodland creatures. Certain of the statements in the story were underlined in similar colors. I guessed this clipping must have been decorated with crayons. What surprised me more was that I had gone along thinking (probably with the rest of the town) that the Woods couldn’t read, couldn’t do anything that required a glimmer of intelligence. Now, I was ashamed of myself; I had simply assumed that the difficulty they had speaking must mean they couldn’t do anything else—read, or even think properly. I told them I had never seen most of these clippings.

  “Duh nu en oo eh um.” Ubub said, tapping the longer account.

  Mr. Root pursed his lips and looked at me to see if I understood. I scanned the first and last paragraphs and knew what he’d said. “Nothing new . . . in them.” Ulub and Ubub nodded. “It’s the same as what’s in the the Conservative.”

  Both of them smiled, nodding even harder. Mr. Root nodded too and gave a grunt in agreement. I liked the way Mr. Root interpreted; he did not butt in with his version. He waited to see if I was stumped. Of course, it did occur to me that Mr. Root himself could have sometimes been stumped and hoped I wasn’t. But, anyway.

  I read bits of the longer account just to make sure no clue appeared there; I read the whole of the three much shorter follow-up pieces. And then I realized: the clippings themselves weren’t as significant as the fact that the Woods had collected all of these pieces and had underlined certain parts. I fluttered the newspaper pieces before them. “I bet this isn’t really what happened, is it?”

  Both of them exclaimed at once, shaking their heads hard, Ulub pounding his fist against his knee. I was surprised at how small his hands were.

  “Is it these parts you’ve underlined that are wrong?”

  Said Ubub: “Um oh em.”

  “ ‘Some of them?’ ” But I was saved from interpretation, because Ubub was tapping his finger against one passage. “ ’Lonzo sah—”

  It was interesting he could say “Alonzo” so clearly. I thought maybe I could make it easier on all of us if I told them about Dr. McComb and the notebook and asked them if I had figured out some of the passages correctly. But then I thought that might make them shy, knowing I had their ha
lting account written down. And also that it was kind of insulting.

  This passage said that according to Miss Isabel Devereau, Mary-Evelyn had gone to bed around eight o’clock and that’s the last she (or her sisters) had seen of the girl.

  All the while I read this out, Ulub was shaking his head so hard I thought it would fall off. “What did happen, Ulub?” Too late, I remembered his real name was Alonzo, but he didn’t seem to mind the nickname at all and was used to it. Ulub looked at his brother and even at Mr. Root, as if asking permission to explain.

  Ubub, with a gracious little movement of his hands, gave place to Ulub, as it was the younger brother who had actually been there. Mr. Root nodded, too, even though he never knew a thing about all of this until the other day.

  Well, I was nearly holding my breath, waiting, despite the fact I knew it would be a long time between the utterance and the understanding. He said:

  “Ah uz eh uh oods. Ah, ah, ah—” He was wrenching his head to get the word out.

  I had worked out certain key sounds both from listening to them several days ago and from the notebook. I knew that “ah” was “I” and that most of the “eh” and “uh” sounds were like prepositions and articles. “Uh” was almost always “the.” So as he talked I translated what little I could. “Ah uz eh uh oods” must have been “I was in the woods.” That, after all, made sense.

  “You were in the woods,” I said.

  “Es!” He nodded. “Ah uz eh uh oods cuz ah neft aye irk un aye kippers un ent bah to geh um.”

  I frowned and scratched my head and looked at Mr. Root, who seemed frozen in place he was concentrating so hard. I could make out “cuz” as being “because” probably, but “neft aye irk”? I was stumped.

  Mr. Root suddenly looked up and said, “You was in the woods and went back to get something?”

  Ulub nodded furiously. “Ah neft aye irk. Uh irk un aye kippers!”

  I thought hard. So did Mr. Root, who had his eyes squinched shut and was maybe trying out different sounds with his tongue. Ulub and Ubub looked from one to the other of us, waiting.

  “You left work?” Mr. Root was so pleased he’d figured out something he ignored the fact Ulub was shaking his head. He snapped his fingers. “You was doin’ yard work. . . . Clippers! You went back to get your clippers!”

  Ulub nodded, but he still was waiting for Mr. Root to untangle the “irk.” It was the first time I’d ever realized Ulub could be willful. I thought it a good thing, being somewhat that way myself.

  Clippers and an irk . . . “Oh, for heaven’s sakes! A rake, is that what you left, Ulub?” Well, it really was like a quiz show, the way we applauded one another, though I thought Mr. Root looked kind of put upon because he hadn’t gotten to “rake” first.

  Something occurred to me then, and I asked, “You ever go back there, Ulub? Either of you?” Well, it wasn’t hard to tell by the quick glance at each other that they had. “Oh, don’t look so guilty. I’m the last person that would ever criticize going where you’re not sup—” It was just sinking in that they went there still.

  And then it came to me, my brilliant idea: We could all go to the Devereau house.

  The scene of the crime—assuming there’d been one. I guess I hadn’t thought of this before because I just assumed the way was impassable. That wasn’t quite true, not if that real estate agent managed to get there a while back. No, I’d been thinking it was impassable for me, that’s all.

  The Devereau house. In my mind I pictured it on the other side of the lake, a house by itself, the color of fog and drifting there, insubstantial as fog.

  “We could all go,” I said. “We could go to the Devereau house and—investigate!”

  They all stared at me.

  “Why not? You two”— here I looked at Ulub and Ubub—“you’ve done it; you know the way. And Mr. Root looks like somebody that’d be good in an emergency!” I’m not sure that he did, but he certainly perked up when I said it.

  The three of them were exchanging looks, giving little nods of the head, or scratching behind an ear, but it was clear they were all falling in with the idea.

  Without a thought for his speech difficulty, Ulub was the first to ask, “En?”

  “When?” I liked it that I was expected to give the go-ahead, or not give it. That made me, for once in my life, the leader. I chewed the corner of my mouth, thinking: it was mid-afternoon, and if we went now it would only give me two hours until dinnertime. That included the traveling time from Britten’s store, which was probably a mile from the lake, and then the half or three-quarters of a mile back to the hotel, where I had to be by six o’clock at the latest, and that didn’t include time to make the salads.

  I said this aloud, shaking my head. “I’ve got to make the salads and put the butter plates around.”

  They all looked at me in a wondering way. Well, it must have seemed like a strange barrier to adventure—salads and butter plates. I explained as how these were two of my waitressing duties and that I had to appear by five-thirty to carry them out.

  The thing was, of course, that after dinner it would be getting on to dark and I didn’t much want to be in the Devereau woods tangled up in trees and vines in the dark. But the days were lengthening now in May, so that it didn’t get dead dark until eight o’clock. I traded off the dark with the dinner deadline and thought I’d rather take a chance on spookiness than on the lethal looks of Vera and Lola Davidow if I showed up late.

  I stood there scratching my elbows and pondering. I said, “I could leave early; I might be able to get away around seven, and that would give us time, wouldn’t it? I mean, until nighttime? I could meet you down at the lake. Say, near the boathouse.” I knew at this point we had practically no reservations for dinner and that my tables, Miss Bertha and Mr. Gosling (a salesman and regular guest), would be in at six and six-fifteen or -twenty. I could be well away by seven. If I had to, I would just disappear.

  They all looked at me and nodded.

  We were a team.

  • • •

  Thus, I appeared in the kitchen that evening early for once, even before Vera. This really annoyed her, I could tell, when she finally breezed in through the kitchen screen door. I was at my salad station by five-fifteen, arranging little Bibb lettuces in individual salad bowls. I sprinkled them with chopped-up egg and black olives and striped each one with pimiento. I was in my artistic mode again.

  Salad art with the Bibb lettuces annoyed Mrs. Davidow. She took the position that a whole Bibb lettuce was a display of generosity and elegance on the part of the Hotel Paradise, and nothing more should be done with the Bibb lettuces except for adding French dressing. To spend more money (egg yolks, olives) on each portion was going overboard. She’d spoken to me about this before when she’d caught me making faces on the Bibb lettuces, with olive rings for eyes, pimiento mouths, and egg-yolk curls. This sort of thing just drove her to distraction, which is why I did it. But a lot of the time, she’d made so many trips to the martini pitcher, the Bibb lettuces could have talked back to her and she’d never have cared.

  I whistled as I worked, making an olive cross on Miss Bertha’s salad, hoping that might help to Christianize her. On Mr. Gosling’s lettuce I sprinkled another spoonful of egg yolk and partially hid it between two of the pale leaves, just in case Lola or Vera might come along and try to scoop it off again. He loved hardboiled eggs. Then I realized: if I was going to meet them at the lake, I would miss my own dinner! While my mother was out in the office I inspected every pot and pan on the big stove to see if I was missing any of my favorites. The big roasting pan was full of freshly fried chicken pieces, as usual (and as usual, short on white meat); two thick filet steaks were arranged on a plate, marinating in something winey; lobster tails were arranged on a cookie sheet, glazed with some exotic mixture. Only the chicken could possibly be aimed at my gullet, and not the white meat, so I’d only be missing a leg or a thigh. I sighed heavily, though, when I saw the steam rise from
a double boiler of mashed potatoes, buttery, mealy clouds of them. I took one of the tiny white porcelain dishes from the shelf, the small vegetable dishes in which the potatoes were often served, scooped out two big spoonsful, and then neatened up the surface in the steaming pot, adding a curl on top.

  After making a well for a butter patty, I transported my dish back through the small kitchen, where Paul was sitting. Paul was the dishwasher’s boy. She came some nights to help Walter out when there was a dinner party. She was washboard thin, with a broad, flat face. I guess you could say Paul resembled her, except her face was so nondescript, it was hard to see it duplicated anywhere else. Paul was slapping back pages of a comic book that was lying in front of him upside down on the table. It was understood, of course, that Paul (who was seven or eight) still could not read. But I thought it was really interesting that he could not look at pictures, either. He grinned a lot, but he hardly ever talked. This was probably because his mother boxed his ears nearly every time he opened his mouth. His mother had got the idea—not really surprising—that Paul was not to speak when in my mother’s kitchen. Actually, I thought this pretty smart of her.

  I guess just to be ornery, I reached over and turned the comic around, telling him (in a superior way) that it was upside down. He grinned. When Paul grinned, he looked exactly like the boy on the cover of Mad magazine, eyes dopily close together, face splattered with freckles. He grinned and turned the comic upside down again, and kept on slapping the pages back. I knew Paul wouldn’t tell about my dish of mashed potatoes.

  There was an extra party of six (the Baums) scheduled for seven o’clock, and my heart sank when my mother said I’d help serve. But Vera did not really want me to help and insisted she could “handle” the table by herself. She knew Dr. Baum was a good tipper and had no intention of sharing with me.