All of this was merely distracting me from my real problem, about how not to tell the Sheriff about Fern Queen. And even Fern Queen was only part of a wider mystery. I sat at the green painted picnic table sleepily trying to figure it out.
“Fern didn’t have no kids.” That’s what Mr. Stemple had said. I reached for my Whitman’s box and removed the snapshot of the Devereau sisters taken out in front of the hotel with Mary-Evelyn in the foreground, standing slightly apart. Was Rose not there because she had run off with Ben Queen by then?
Why were people’s memories so bad? My mother hardly seemed able to recall anything about these important people of forty years ago, even though she could tell stories about her family and my father’s and long-ago guests at the Hotel Paradise and residents of Spirit Lake that stretched back practically to the beginning of time. I’d heard her tell these stories, sitting out on the front porch late summer evenings with her glass of tawny port and Mrs. Davidow with her highball, with the smoke from their cigarettes sifting upwards, blue in the dull gold of the porch light overhead where dead moths were imprisoned in the white globe. My mother would remember so very clearly those past times, while Mrs. Davidow would rest one arm along the porch railing and carelessly tap her cigarette over it, sending the ashes sifting down to dust the rhododendron bushes. They would both laugh gaily at these recollections, for they were indeed quite funny.
As crazy as Mrs. Davidow drove me most of the time, on these front-porch evenings when my presence did not seem so much a burden to them I honestly wished their pasts had joined further back, which sounds strange, coming from me. If five years of having Mrs. Davidow around was awful, why would I wish for fifty? Well, I don’t know. I mean to make it clear that I’m talking about Mrs. Davidow, not Mrs. Davidow and Somebody Else. The Somebody Else never hung around for these porch talks, anyway. The past bored her. This was probably because she wasn’t in it. But I was never bored. Such nights were as smooth as the tawny port in my mother’s glass, and the light was close to its color. I would sit there rocking and listening and wishing I had been part of this past.
For my mother was a great storyteller, in addition to being a great cook. Probably, she should have been a writer. At the very least she should have been a society hostess in some huge and fancy city, like New York or Paris. She should have hosted those gatherings (I forget what they’re called) where artistic people would all drop by of an afternoon or evening for drinks and talk and leave little white cards on silver trays. My own life would then have been much different, I guess, although it was difficult for me to picture myself living it: would I move through the crowd with plates of tiny sandwiches or hot crab puffs (assuming my mother would still be making them), listening to words and laughter tinkle like those little spoons on demitasse cups?
But then I wondered: if all evenings were to be brimful of “sparkling repartee” (as I believe it is called), then how much would I value those rare nights on the porch with the crickets droning into the summer silence?
Because of my mother’s storytelling abilities, I couldn’t figure out, sitting here now in the Pink Elephant, why she didn’t seem to remember clearly the details of Mary-Evelyn Devereau’s death. Maybe she just didn’t want to.
Sleepily, I stared at the snapshot, bringing it right up to my eyes to better make out the faces. And I remembered the photograph left hanging on the wall in the Devereau house. They had been much younger then, but easily identifiable as one or another face in this little snapshot.
I rested my chin on my arm and slowly turned the snapshot, my fingers on its edge, as if I were looking through a kaleidoscope. Perhaps I thought this action might rearrange the surface. Of course, it didn’t. Sideways or standing on their heads, the Devereau sisters looked out at me in their dark clothes and with their changeless expressions, silent as the tomb. Fern didn’t have no kids.
If the Girl wasn’t a blood relation of Rose and Fern, where in heaven had she sprung from?
My eyes mere slits of sleepiness, I could see down the table to my stack of books. With the hand not holding the picture, I pulled a Nancy Drew towards me and looked, sideways, at its torn cover. There was Nancy with her flashlight and her aghast look. Probably she’d stumbled on a clue as big as a giant’s footprint.
I closed my eyes. There were no clues.
THIRTY-THREE
I woke into eerie pink darkness, wondering where I was and what all the commotion was overhead. Up there was the dining room and part of the kitchen, and the noises, I realized, were breakfast (I hoped not lunch) preparations.
Groggily, I shook myself awake and saw one hand was still clutching the snapshot and the other had been lying atop the Nancy Drew book as if it were a holy missal and as if all through the night my sleeping mind had kept searching out clues. At the other end of the table, the hotel cat was curled in a doughnut, having managed to get into the Pink Elephant somehow. Cats could dissolve, I’d decided long ago, and re-form themselves on the other side of a wall.
The hammering sound continued off and on, and I had the fanciful notion that Miss Bertha was up there thumping her cane. Probably, even after I was buried, Miss Bertha’s table would sit on top of my grave, and she would pound her cane at me and yell, Get up, get up, and bring me hot rolls!
I was all cramped and had to shake myself and jump around to get some feeling back in one arm and a leg. Then I crept to the door (hoping the day wouldn’t hear me, I guess), pulled it open a crack, and looked out. Early morning, quite early. I relaxed and opened it all the way. Everywhere ground mist, like quilts and cobwebs, stretched and clung. It lay evenly over the tall wet grass, the acre of mint, and then vaporized upwards to drift in branches. Far off across the mint acre and up an incline, the line of woods was utterly shrouded in fog, making ghosts of trees.
I always thought it was beautiful, on those accidental occasions when I witnessed such morning scenes, and each time I vowed to get out of bed an hour before I had to in order to appreciate it. But sleep won out over nature (as most things do), so it was only by stumbling on it like this that I saw the mist-covered road and the fields and the muted gray shapes that would become the icehouse or the chicken coops when the fog dispersed.
The cat had woken behind me and apparently seeing me standing in the door of the Pink Elephant, slipped through it. As I said before, cats can get in and out of anyplace completely on their own, but just let a human show up and you can bet that person will have to hold the door. It walked on ahead of me. Since it was probably only a half-hour before I’d have to appear in the kitchen anyway, I didn’t want to bother going back to my room. I went directly to the kitchen. There were four ways into the kitchen, two doors on each side of the wing and two in back, one through the laundry and one all the way around by way of the enclosed porch (where I hoped Paul wasn’t still tied to his chair). That door was the least likely one to cause comment if Vera was there, or anyone question why I was early, so I walked around toward it. We (the cat and I) walked the dirt road up and around the laundry room. I liked looking down and seeing my feet lost in fog. It fascinated me, too, that all I could see of the cat was its big gray tail ahead of me, weaving through the ground mist, its body otherwise shrouded. On the flagstone walk that led to the kitchen door, the tail swerved off through the grass, taking its own early-morning route, maybe up to the big garage to chase mice.
Pushing through the door, I wondered why I had been so particular about which way I entered the kitchen, and why I thought I would be questioned. I could have fallen through the roof and no one would notice, invisible as I was, like feet in fog.
• • •
Breakfast was short, thank heavens, and would have been shorter if I hadn’t had to listen to Miss Bertha complaining about last night’s dinner. “The rolls were cold and that little wasp-waisted waitress didn’t know what in hell she was doing. . . .”
I stood there with my tray tucked under my arm and my eyelids heavy as lead. Then sweet old Mrs. Fulbrigh
t tried to calm Miss Bertha down and told me that they did prefer having me wait on them as I was so good and so familiar with their wants. I admired Mrs. Fulbright for turning the whole harangue into something complimentary. She was almost as diplomatic as the Sheriff.
And what I was going to say to the Sheriff was uppermost on my mind.
• • •
After my own waffle-and-sausage-patty breakfast (which did a lot to revive me) I was hanging around the front desk, debating walking into town. I was too tired for walking and decided to call Axel’s Taxis again. Right after I hung up, I discovered Ree-Jane had been sitting in one of the easy chairs hidden by the huge rhododendron pot, for she rose and came over to the desk, still flouncing through her fashion magazine, as if raising her eyes to look at me would be too boring. She said she wanted to go into La Porte, too, but her convertible was in the garage. She looked at me accusingly and added that something had been wrong with it ever since Brownmiller had driven it to Hebrides. As long as I’d called a taxi she’d go with me. Not asking, telling.
“What’re you doing up so early?” I was furious with myself for getting caught by her. Ree-Jane usually never got downstairs before ten.
It was only a quarter to nine, and she answered me by saying, “Sam wants to see me.” Then she sighed as if this were ever so tiresome, the police calling her in.
“The Sheriff does?” I was flabbergasted. Of course, she could have been lying. “Why? How come?”
That was her opportunity to give me a smirky, secret-keeping little smile, one corner of her bright-red-lipsticked mouth hooking up. “It’s confidential police business.”
Knowing how nobody’s confidence could ever rest easy with Ree-Jane, I prodded her by saying, “It’s about the dead woman.” I made an absolute statement of this, as if I were sure.
She dropped the magazine, clearly irritated. “How do you know?”
“How do I know?” I thought quickly. “Because the Sheriff wants to see me, too.”
Her red mouth tightened in anger. “He’s supposed to see me at nine o’clock.”
Casually, I looked up at the regulator clock, ticking uncaringly above us. “Well, you’re going to be late.”
Ree-Jane opened her mouth to say something she probably thought would be scathing, but just then we heard gravel spit and a horn honk, so the taxi had arrived.
We plucked up sweaters, jackets, money (I would of course be stuck with the fare: “But you were going in anyway . . .”) and we went out onto the porch. Delbert yelled a friendly greeting and we clambered in and I asked him where Axel was. I always asked that.
“Oh, Axel got a call from some of them lake people wanted to go to Meridian.”
“They must really be rich to hire a taxi for that long distance,” I said.
“I guess. Axel, he likes the long runs. Axel just loves to drive. It’s why he started his own taxis. He’s a real good driver.”
I would never know.
• • •
Ree-Jane stared straight ahead and didn’t speak to me, for she was still smarting with the knowledge that I too had been called in by the Sheriff. I wondered why she believed me. But I still had the problem of needing to think while Ree-Jane’s mere presence was sucking all of the brain oxygen out of the air. I decided to test out on Ree-Jane what I might say to the Sheriff. “Helene Baum and those people last night said the police didn’t know a bit more about the dead body. I mean, who she was.”
“Don’t ask me,” Ree-Jane said, bitterly.
I at least could tell from that she didn’t know any more than before, because it was a sure thing she’d have milked anything she did know to death. Delbert heard this and of course he had his own opinions, which he was pleased to share with anyone who’d listen.
I didn’t.
• • •
At the edge of town, I guess Ree-Jane’s curiosity got the better of her, and she asked me what Sam said he wanted to talk to me about. (I just hated the way she called him “Sam.”) “I don’t know. I’m supposed to meet him at the Rainbow Café.” I said this in case she mentioned to the Sheriff that I’d claimed I was supposed to see him at ten o’clock. That way, the Sheriff would just assume I probably meant we would run into each other at the Rainbow and maybe check the parking meters, as we often did.
Life needed too much quick thinking.
• • •
Delbert dropped Ree-Jane at the side of the courthouse, and I could just as easily have got out there too, but that would have suggested I didn’t have my own equally important destination. Which I didn’t. I just had Delbert drive down the hill and around the corner and drop me across the street from the courthouse.
I got out on the other side of the street in front of the Oak Tree Gift Shoppe, thinking that it would be nice to join Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler for their morning snack. Miss Flagler’s white kitchen was a cozy, restful place for thinking, as I often did while the two of them were talking. The cat helped my thinking, too.
One reason I loved the Oak Tree was because it was so small and shabby—“shabbily genteel” was what my mother called it—and because it always smelled of lavender and “eau de rose.” I looked into the pretty bay window, whose display always appeared much the same, though I know Miss Flagler changed it, for I’d seen her leaning in and arranging jewelry from time to time. But there were always the same sorts of things: silver hearts on narrow chains, gold lockets, silver rattles tied with ribbons, a tray of birthstone rings, little silver bears (which served no purpose I could see). The necklaces and pins sat in white boxes on cotton squares; bracelets and silver chains were draped on display tiers covered with a waterfall of dark blue velvet.
The sound of the tinkling bell died away completely before I heard shufflings in the room at the rear. It occurred to me that as I had several dollars in my change purse, it would be nice to buy a present for Anna Paugh, whose birthday was a few days away. My mother was going to make her a cake (something my mother did for all of the help), and there would probably be a little party in the kitchen. Anna Paugh always wore pins, I’d noticed, so that’s what I was looking for when Miss Flagler came through the curtain. She seemed glad to see me. I told her what I wanted and we both searched through all of the pins. There was a silver one of three cats in a row with tiny jewellike eyes, chips of some blue-green stone. Anna Paugh loved cats, including the hotel cat, and I knew she had several at home. So that’s the one I bought, and I watched Miss Flagler wrap it in silver gift-wrap paper with a lot of narrow silver ribbon. Miss Flagler really loved silver.
“Miss Flyte is coming for coffee,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like some cocoa?”
Since that’s what I’d come for, I quickly said yes, and we went back to the kitchen, where Albertine, the cat, was lying fat and furry before the cast-iron stove. She shivered herself awake and, seeing me sitting down in the buttercup-yellow chair, jumped up on the shelf behind and directly over my head and started sniffing my hair. A plate of fresh buns was sitting on the white table and Miss Flagler told me to help myself, but I said I would wait for Miss Flyte. I probably wouldn’t have been so polite if I hadn’t been full of waffles and sausage.
By the time Miss Flyte came in through the side door, with the scent of candle wax clinging to her cardigan, Miss Flagler was pouring the steaming cocoa into a mug. I stirred it quickly (to avoid the skin) and added two marshmallows. The three of us sat there peacefully drinking and eating buns while Albertine chewed the crown of my hair. Miss Flagler told Albertine to stop, but of course she didn’t.
I brought up the subject of the woman found in Mirror Pond, thinking that they might have heard some interesting rumor. “But the Sheriff doesn’t know any more about her, about her identity. Well, I think that’s really strange. It’s been nearly four days. Wouldn’t you think the police would at least know who she is?”
Miss Flyte agreed that yes, it was indeed strange.
But Miss Flagler, after a short silence, started talking
in an odd, roundabout way. “You know, I think sometimes we become . . . well, stuck inside a problem.” She said this and looked at me and looked away. “For some reason, we keep moving around it or inside of it. Or not really moving at all, but fluttering.” She frowned at her cup as if it were difficult to explain what she meant.
“Like moths, you mean,” said Miss Flyte. She was never far from thoughts of candle fire. And then she added, “Obsession.” Miss Flyte liked words like that. She was romantic. “The way moths circle around flames, or beat their wings against a lamp,” she went on.
Miss Flagler seemed to be thinking this over as she ran her fingers over the rim of her teacup in a way I had seen a tea-leaf fortune reader once do. “Obsession . . . no, not precisely. Attraction is more what I mean. Yes, attraction.”
I frowned. What was she talking about? I didn’t see how she could be talking about the Sheriff’s problem with the dead woman.
She said, “Certain problems just attract us. They’re attractors, they’re like magnets. And once drawn to them, you can’t quite . . . stay away.” She held her hand out as if she were trying to reach for words.
Hotel Paradise Page 30
