Hotel Paradise

by Martha Grimes

  I myself have never wanted to be saved (unless the only alternative is being damned), because I do not know what it means. I have run into a few “saved” people here and there, like Helene Baum, who says she’s a devout Methodist (which sounds peculiar); and also some of those camp-meeting Christians over across the highway. These “saved” souls are too noisy for me. I’m sure that there must be some quietly “saved” people around town, but I wonder if one of the things about being “saved” is that you never know it. For instance: I bet the Sheriff is saved; but I bet if I asked him he’d just give me a peculiar look: Huh? One of the few times religion ever came up at the hotel, Ree-Jane told me that if I wasn’t baptized (which I wasn’t) I would be damned. That if I was to die right then (I’m sure she wished it) I would go to hell permanently. Forever. Ree-Jane, of course, had been baptized. She talked about it the same way she talked about having better clothes than I had, or more boyfriends. (Who didn’t?)

  When I was in St. Michael’s once and Father Freeman walked by, I asked him about this, about going to hell if you’re not baptized. Was it true? It was a good question, for it was merely a point of information and wouldn’t engage him (or us) in a long, weird conversation about God or Jesus. Father Freeman looked at me for quite a long time and then looked up at the figure in the window and then back at me. For a minute I thought I’d stumped him, which I certainly hadn’t meant to. Finally, though, after a lot of thought, he said “No.” And smiled and walked away. Although I hadn’t really been worried, still I was a little relieved, until I realized I wasn’t sure just how I had put the question. It had taken him, see, so long to answer, my precise words had got lost somewhere. Had I said “Does that mean I’m damned?” Or had I asked “Does that mean I won’t be saved?” If the first, then “No” was a clear answer. But “No” to the second question could have meant two different things. I thought of asking him again, but I figured that would be a poor thing to do, seeing how long he thought over his answer.

  I am of no religious persuasion (which is how adults talk about it), even though my mother and Mrs. Davidow say they are Episcopalians. Yet they hardly ever go to church. My mother never did, in my memory. But this is understandable, for Sunday is the busiest day for the dining room, and she’s trapped between hotcakes and sausage in the morning and roast beef and oven-browned potatoes at one o’clock. Once in a while, Mrs. Davidow puts on a small hat with a little veil and drives to town to church. But if I were God and had my choice between my mother in the kitchen and Lola Davidow in the front pew, I know which one I’d choose.

  I like St. Michael’s Catholic Church more than the others, probably for the same reason the Catholics do. It’s a lot fancier. There’s much more to look at than in the Methodist church right across the street. If you get bored, or if it’s a rainy, grim day, there’s much more in St. Michael’s to take your mind off things. Beginning with the stained-glass windows, which are truly beautiful. The other churches have them, too, but St. Michael’s are taller and more involved and deeply colored. I move from one window to another, move nearly all around the church, with my notebook and pencil or ballpoint pen, pretending to be taking notes. What I’m really doing is thinking, but I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m there to worship anything. If Father Freeman passes by, I tell him I’m doing research, which he finds extremely interesting—I think he’s pleased that my topic is the Virgin Mary or the Apostles (there are twelve of them) and does not press me for details.

  It would, of course, be easier to sit down in one of the pews to do my thinking, and once in a while I do, but try to avoid this, as it might give the impression I’m praying. I don’t have many friends my age, and if that ever got around town, I wouldn’t have any at all.

  Sometimes, Father Freeman is up there at the altar in his white robes doing something or other, even though there’s no real service going on. Or other times, he passes through the church in his black suit, smiles and says hello, and asks about my mother or Will. He never asks me what I’m doing in church, never, which I think is simply remarkable, as any other adult (except for my chosen few—the Sheriff, Miss Flyte, Maud, the Woods) would ask “Hello-what-are-you-doing-here?” and expect an answer. But Father Freeman just seems to accept me as easily as holy water. He’s like the Sheriff (though not as good-looking). And this makes me feel, really, very comfortable. Father Freeman acts as if we’re all part and parcel of the same one thing. I wonder sometimes what the one thing is.

  I got the idea that if I could concentrate long enough on one thing, whatever it was, I might figure it out, figure out its secret. Concentration is not as difficult for me as it is for most people; I spend a lot of time down in the Pink Elephant, concentrating. Usually, it’s on a page of my notebook or my diary or some short story I’m writing. I can stare at the damp, pink stucco wall before me only half-aware of the pattern of shadows made there as the wind that comes in under the badly fitted wooden door stirs the candle flames. Sometimes my mind seems to go blank, as if the draft is passing through it, too.

  For a long time, I carried a stone around in my pocket, this being the “one thing” I would concentrate on. I stared at it for minutes at a time, and it was true that my mind did empty out with the looking. It emptied out, but nothing came along to fill it up again. But I kept looking at that stone and nothing happened. Had I expected it to change shape? Or maybe glow? I would put it on the table and rest my chin on my folded hands—coming down to its level, you could say—and watch it. Sometimes I took it into St. Michael’s and sat down with it in a back pew. I think I hoped it might get a blessing in some roundabout way, just by being in church. Once, when I was standing before the stained-glass window of St. Francis feeding the birds, and staring down at the stone, Father Freeman saw it. He asked if he could look at it more closely. Naturally, I said yes.

  He said, after inspecting it carefully, “That’s a nice stone.”

  “Thank you,” I answered, taking it back.

  So it didn’t get a blessing; it got a compliment.

  A year ago, when I was in the library, I read a book, or parts of it—it was such a strange book I don’t think the writer really meant you to read it all if you didn’t want to—and I remember it now because of the stones in it. The reason I read it at all was because I happened to see it on the shelf, facedown, with the author’s face staring out from the photograph on the back. I looked at him. His face was thin and his hair stood up and he looked terrified. I figured this book was for me. As it turned out, it wasn’t. I hardly understood a word. It was strange, to say the least. The main character was pulling himself along the ground using crutches as hooks. The story was weird and also funny in parts, even though I had no idea what it was about. It was kind of like laughing at a funeral. What brought back the memory, though, was that at the end he had a pocketful of stones—pebbles, more—and he sucked them. But he made sure he sucked them in a pattern, not sloppily, like the way I eat popcorn. For some reason, this struck me as the last word in . . . concentration? No, it was the last word in whatever could be done with a stone. That’s as far as I got. It did not have any purpose, and that was what was important.

  Maybe that was my mistake: I was trying to get something out of my stone. It would have been nice to have been able to bat this idea around with somebody, and Father Freeman was probably the right person, but I didn’t know how to bring it up. I should have been thinking about other things than stones; I should have been thinking about every other thing, I guess.

  All of this, I think, had something to do with the Girl.

  After my walk into town, I was too tired to move along the windows and pretend to be taking notes, so I just sat down at the end of a pew. Sitting down could be dangerous, for I might relax too much. “Relax” is not exactly the word, either. It was more like folding into myself. Like slowly collapsing or shrinking, much like the Witch of the West in Oz when Dorothy tossed the bucket of water on her. I didn’t think I was a wicked witch,
but it did feel as if I were deflating in some way, as if the air was just whishing out of me, only it wasn’t air; it was more like everything I knew. At my age I didn’t know a lot, and couldn’t afford to lose a little.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Funny how my feet, which I had told to march me straight into the courthouse and down the hall to the Sheriff’s office, carried me right past it.

  My feet walked me across the street and past Candlewick, then slowed at the window of the Oak Tree Gift Shoppe so that I could admire a thin silver chain with a tiny heart suspended from it, then around the corner for the long block of parking meters and past Souder’s Drug Store, where again I stopped, this time to look at the thickening dust layer on the Aqua Velva advertisement, then to Second Street and past the dime store where Miss Isabelle Barnett does most of her shoplifting; then past Stemple’s dark and creaky British haberdashery. I carefully noted each and every one of these establishments, for at each I ordered my feet go back go back go back to the courthouse. But my feet went about their own sly business just like Miss Isabelle Barnett’s hands.

  Finally, they pulled up in front of the Rainbow Café. I realized that I had been horribly thirsty way back there in St. Michael’s, parched from the feeling of what it must be like to be dying of thirst and to be offered nothing but a wet rag tied on a stick. It made me feel ashamed that all I could think of was a large-sized cherry Coke. So I did not immediately go inside, but stood outside the window in a state that Father Freeman might call repentance. After a minute or so of repenting, I went in the door to get my Coke.

  But before I did, I looked through the steamed-over window, where I could make out Shirl sitting on her stool and working the cash register and probably her mouth, for it was open in a wide O and aimed towards somewhere in the restaurant. She turned and must have made me out through the dissolving moisture, for she rubbed a wider place in it and glared at me. I don’t take this really personally, for Shirl glares at anybody under twenty, including Ree-Jane. This is something Ree-Jane does take personally and one reason she never goes into the Rainbow to sit. The other reason is she’s a snob. She’d never sit at a counter with the Wood boys or Dodge Haines. Sometimes she goes in to buy doughnuts and Danish, which she takes right out again.

  I’d think Shirl would be a little pleasanter to me, because she wants my mother’s recipes, and when she can’t get them, she tries to imitate or even steal them. Now, if anybody on God’s green earth knows what’s in my mother’s dishes, it’s me, for I often watch closely as she cooks, not with any idea that I can later on be a cook like my mother, but wondering at what point the rabbit will pop out of the hat or the silver coin slide from behind an ear. So one of these days I was going to clue Shirl in about being nice to me. I was the one who knew my mother didn’t really add a cup of cold coffee grounds to her Chocolate Feather Cake; I was the one who knew that you shouldn’t toss bits of rum-soaked banana peel into the fabulous Banana Baba Pie. But Shirl went right along treating me as if I had no value. Too bad. Let her keep on tossing cold coffee grounds and banana peels in things and see how far she got.

  The Rainbow is most crowded at noon and six o’clock, but there are always customers from the moment it opens at seven a.m. until it closes around eight or nine. Even now, just a little after four, some of them were eating big meals. These were farmers, I supposed, from Paradise Valley, maybe. I couldn’t imagine eating my mother’s rare roast beef and oven-browned potatoes at such an off-hour. It was as if you wouldn’t be holding the roast beef in high enough regard if the moon hadn’t risen and the stars come out before you sat down to it. But then I reminded myself that I didn’t get up at four a.m. and go to bed at eight, either; and didn’t have to do a lot of hard labor in between out in the fields.

  When I entered, Shirl was calling down the counter, “Well, why’d she go to White’s Bridge for, then?” in that noisy, argumentative voice that irked people so much. “And you tell me how you go and shoot yourself in the chest? Huh? I never did hear of anybody shooting theirself in the chest.”

  At the end of the counter, a big-muscled man—probably one of the truck drivers who liked the place—flapped his hand at her, I guess shutting down her argument.

  Shirl just went on arguing with herself as people came with their bills and toothpicks in their mouths and she punched the cash-register keys like a crazed typist.

  I knew the Rainbow Café people would be talking about the dead woman, so it wasn’t as if I’d chosen it as a place to hide from the news. The wire basket that held the Rainbow’s supply of the Conservative was empty, and papers were spread on the counter or crinkling and rattling in people’s hands. I felt it was pretty daring of me even to walk in here (although not as daring as it would have been a few hours ago). If the counter stools had not been full of broad rear ends, I’d have taken one, though I prefer a booth. There were two empty booths, but, of course, Shirl was there overseeing things. Still, I noticed Miss Isabelle Barnett was permitted to take up a booth on her own. This didn’t mean that I could. So I stood there scratching my arm and being embarrassed I was alone and without a place to sit. Dodge Haines turned and gave me a sort of evil grin and Miss Isabelle offered me a little wave, fingers closing and opening on her palm.

  Thank heavens Maud was there and saw me and motioned for me to stay put. Charlene was behind the counter, standing with her plump arms folded over her big bosom and laughing; pretty clearly, the customers had been served. Chicken-fried steak was the special, and the truck driver and Dodge Haines were eating it with sides of green beans and mashed potatoes.

  Maud called down to Shirl that she was taking a break. In another minute she held up a tall glass of Coke and smiled and signed that I was to follow her. What she was doing was inviting me back to the Reserved booth to sit with her on her break. In fact, I guessed she was taking a break just for my sake. Shirl did not like this, but after all, if Charlene or Shirl herself wanted to share the Reserved booth with their friends, they were free to do it, and so was Maud. Shirl just didn’t like the idea that some kid was allowed to sit there.

  As we passed Miss Isabelle, she looked up and gave us both a glimmering smile and I noticed her earrings—cheap, bright blue, like chips of porcelain overlaid with a sprinkling of silver, something like the silver dust on some of Miss Flyte’s fancy candlesticks. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out where the earrings had come from.

  Maud and I sat down and I saw the Conservative lying on the table. Maud set her coffee cup on a corner of the front page, but she didn’t seem aware of the newspaper. She didn’t bring up Suzy Whitelaw’s account, either. After setting down her cup, she lit up a Camel and waved the match into the aluminum ashtray. I started in on my cherry Coke and she turned to peer around the corner of the booth and then turned back again. She asked, “You seen Sam today?”

  I sucked Coke through my straw and shook my head.

  She sighed and looked back towards the door again. “Usually he comes in after lunch, at least.”

  Maud looked peculiar—that is, sad. Because she’d been so nice about taking her break now, I felt compelled to say something that might cheer her up. Without realizing what I was doing, I said, “Probably he’s busy over at White’s Bridge.” Quickly, I dropped my head and sucked up Coke, afraid I’d really started something.

  But I hadn’t. She merely said, “I guess,” in a vague sort of way, and went on smoking.

  Maud was never a gossip, never one to make a juicy meal out of some tidbit that came her way. Still, this dead and maybe murdered woman was more than a “tidbit.” After turning the matchbook in her fingers awhile and continuing to look sad, she picked up the paper. It was bound to happen at some point, what with everybody in here probably talking about it. She appeared to be reading the article—I supposed that was what her eyes, traveling over newsprint, were taking in. Finally, she set the paper aside. She looked unhappy, but I don’t think this was because of the stranger lying in Mirror Pond. Maud tended to be m
oody—not mean, just moody. The Sheriff had pointed this out to me several times. She didn’t talk about what was in the paper, probably because I’d given the impression I’d already read it and knew all the details. Maybe I did; maybe there weren’t many.

  As much to break into her blue-devil mood as to hear myself talk, recklessly I said, “People are saying they know who she was.”

  Dismissively, she flicked her hand. “People are stupid, too.”

  “Well, in Britten’s store someone said it was this Louella Smitt.”

  Her eyebrows crowded together over her nose. “Who’s Louella Smitt?”

  “This man said she’s from Hebrides.” I didn’t go into what Jude had said about her being “Ben Queen’s girl,” I guess because I wanted to check that out somehow first.

  “Police don’t know who she is or where she’s from. So whoever said that’s just showing off. Unless, of course, Sheriff Dee-Geen has been running at the mouth.”

  When Maud was mad at the Sheriff, she started calling him by his last name, as if putting distance between them. It made me want to laugh, almost. But I said, “He never does. Maybe Donny does, though.” But she just started flicking through the paper again, uninterested in Donny. She was mad because the Sheriff hadn’t been in to the Rainbow to talk about what had happened.

  “She’s certainly not from Hebrides,” Maud went on, squinting down at the paper. “Somebody would have identified her by now.” She bent her head even closer. “And no one could tell anything from this picture—”

  Picture! My heart stepped up its beating to a wild kind of whirr.

  “—which the paper never should have printed anyway. You can’t even tell what color her hair is, it’s so wet and muddy. That Whitelaw woman never did have good taste.” She shook her head. “All they really have to describe her is her dress. It says, ‘a light cotton dress, with a flo—’ ”