He was fingering a cigarette from the pack straining his shirt pocket and striking a match to light it. I guessed this was so he could feel important, knowing things I so much wanted to know. But I didn’t mind. Really, he deserved to be able to keep me in suspense for a minute. I hopped from one foot to another, unable to contain myself.
“Well. . .” He drew in on his cigarette and stared off down Schoolhouse Road. “Well. . .” He cleared his throat and finally said, “That’s some story.” He drew in on his cigarette again.
I gritted my teeth but refrained from saying anything.
“What happened was near twenty years ago. Rose Queen got killed.” He paused.
“Killed? How did she get killed?”
“Well, she got murdered. Now ain’t that something?”
My mouth dropped. Rose Devereau was murdered?
He went on. “Seems they found her one day out there in the backyard down by where they kept the layin’ hens, all bruised and bloody. Somebody’d took a knife to the woman . . .” He stopped, shook his head.
I took a step back, shaking mine, too. I couldn’t find my voice to say anything for a minute, and then I asked. “Well, but who . . . ?”
Still shaking his head, as if it’d happened in his own family, he answered, “They say it was Ben Queen done it. I don’t mean they—” he hooked his head back toward the Queen house—“believe it. No, they don’t believe Ben was the one. But he got jailed for it. Went to prison. Had a trial and all and went to prison.”
I just stared. My mind was so full of questions, I hardly knew what to ask.
Mr. Root went on. “What some people said was, it was another man, probably some trash Rose Devereau run around with behind Ben’s back.” Mr. Root held up his hands as if to ward off my questions. “That’s all she told me. I guess Sheba thought Rose just brought it on herself, whoever done it to her. Sheba must not’ve liked her much.”
Was that ever an understatement. I thought for a moment. “How come Fern Queen was over in La Porte? Did you ask Sheba that?”
Mr. Root nodded. “Said Fern said she was going there to meet somebody.” Mr. Root shrugged. “That’s all she knew.” He shook his head. “I guess she met somebody, all right.”
“Then it had to be somebody Fern knew.” I was stunned by this: two murders in one family. I turned all of this over in my mind while looking down Schoolhouse Road. How could Ben have ever killed Rose? How could Rose have been running around with “trash”? It didn’t make any sense. From what Mr. George Queen said, Rose was crazy about Ben and Ben was certainly crazy about her. I guess I could see why, too.
I could see in the distance down Schoolhouse Road the little swings in the schoolyard turning in the wind, the chains twining around each other the way they do, the way I used to make the swings do by shoving off with my toe so I could go dizzily around. I think I let this take up the slack in my mind so I wouldn’t have to let pictures in of Rose Devereau and all that blood.
But then my thoughts untwined and I asked, “And that’s everything she told you?”
He nodded and said nothing.
I groaned. It was almost worse than not knowing. How could all the people I knew have forgotten such a terrible thing? There must be somebody—
“Mr. Stemple!” I started pulling at Mr. Root’s shirt sleeve. “Come on!”
“Where? The Wood boys, what about them? And you said you had to be back at the hotel—”
I didn’t care if I was late to do the salads; it wasn’t important. “Mr. Jude Stemple—you said you knew him a little.” I pulled him along a step or two beside me. “He lives right down there in Flyback Hollow. He knows the Queens. He’d know what happened.”
• • •
Jude Stemple and his hound dog were there, sitting on his front porch, just like I left them. It was as if he might have been waiting for me to return and continue our talk. I was flattered, I must admit.
He looked up from the piece of wood he was whittling and called out, “Well, look who’s back!” And his dog even got up and swished its tail.
I pulled Mr. Root up the walk and introduced him to Jude Stemple and his dog.
Jude Stemple squinted. “Ain’t I seen you out there at Britten’s store? On that bench out front?” He snapped his whittling knife shut and invited us to sit.
“Mr. Root here wanted to visit the Queens because he knew Mrs. Queen a long time ago.” Why was I telling Mr. Stemple these half-truths? You get in the habit, I guess.
Jude Stemple nodded and opened his knife again to cut off a piece of tobacco, which he offered to Mr. Root. They both sat for a minute chewing away, talking about Mr. Stemple’s dog and about hunting. That could go on forever if I didn’t say something, which I did: “You remember we were talking about the Queens?”
Mr. Stemple nodded eagerly. Living here in Flyback Hollow by himself, I imagined, he was more interested in gossip than he was in dogs and hunting. I just told Mr. Root he should tell Mr. Stemple what Sheba Queen had said, which he did, but with a lot of pauses and offering his cigarettes around and asking for a drink of cool water and so forth. This was to draw out his telling of the story. But he told it, finally. Jude Stemple thought it over.
“It’s true what you heard. Ben Queen did go to prison for killing Rose. Jury said he was guilty, but the judge, he took into account it was one of them crimes of passion.”
Mr. Root nodded. “ ‘Cream passionals,’ that’s what they call ’em in France.”
“Whatever. I never believed it was that nor anything else to do with Ben Queen, though. Always thought there was something fishy there. And I’ll tell you two reasons why: one was that Ben Queen was absolutely crazy about Rose. Never have I seen any man so taken with a woman after being married nearly twenty years. And he still doted on her. They had some fights, yes. But it weren’t over no other man. That’s just dumb.” He waved this idea away. “For she loved him, too. I never saw Rose Queen flirting with another man long as I knew her. Not that I knew them all that well, but some. The fights they did have were about their girl, Fern. One that just got herself killed over by White’s Bridge. Fern went missing for a couple days and I was pretty sure that dead woman was her. Anyway, Fern was queer in the head. Just . . . I don’t know . . . just like she was blank, or something. Rose and Ben fought about what to do about Fern. Rose was more practical than Ben was; she said Fern’d be better off in an institution. Oh, Rose wasn’t hardhearted; it was just that I guess that girl was wearing them down. If anyone was runnin’ around with men it was her, and not more’n fourteen, fifteen years old. But then she hadn’t good sense, like I said. Day Rose got killed, I heard Ben and her had this bad fight, though of course Sheba Queen’d never allow Ben was mad at Rose, I’ll give her that, as that wouldn’t have looked good at his trial, would it? But can you blame Sheba? Okay, they said he killed Rose, and the really hard thing was he never took the stand. Nobody ever heard him say otherwise, not ‘I never done it,’ or ‘Not guilty,’ not nothin’. Any talkin’ done was lawyer talk.”
Jude Stemple stopped talking. He chewed his tobacco and rubbed his hand up and down the old dog’s back. I didn’t want to disturb his mind, so I said nothing. I don’t think he’d got to the second reason he’d mentioned. Then he did.
“Now, the other reason I don’t believe Ben ever could have done it was because of the way the whole thing looked. Rose was out in back, went back to the henhouse to collect eggs. They kept chickens for eggs that sometimes Rose used to sell, and for the pot, too—”
I couldn’t help thinking of my mother’s pot pie.
“—but Rose, she couldn’t ever kill them chickens, not even for their dinner. It had to be one of the others did that, mostly Sheba. Sheba could just take one of them old chickens by its scrawny neck and”— he twisted his fists, one atop the other—“or take the axe to them.” Then he raised a hand as if it held an axe and brought it down on the top step, making a scrunching noise in his throat.
I could have done without that. “But what about the way you said it looked?”
“There was blood all over, there was half a dozen dead chickens, a couple with their heads cut off. Blood all over, a lot of it Rose’s.”
He looked at Mr. Root and even included me in his silent asking.
Mr. Root said, after aiming a hard, thin stream of juice at the ground, “You’re saying that don’t look like Ben Queen done it?”
Jude Stemple nodded. “That’s right.”
Mr. Root said, “Sounds like somebody must’ve been awful mad. And you said he got real mad at her, didn’t you?”
“Mad at a person’s one thing. Killing everything in a country mile, that’s another.”
They both looked at me. I must say I was flattered they seemed to think my opinion was worth something. “Who else was there? I mean, did anyone else come under suspicion?”
Mr. Stemple chewed awhile, reflecting, then said, “I’ll tell you one got suspicioned, real bad. That was Lou Landis.”
I frowned. “The lady that used to be Ben Queen’s girlfriend? But that would have been years and years before!”
Mr. Root and Jude Stemple exchanged one of those I guess you call them worldly looks and Jude Stemple said, “There’s some women never get over a thing. Lou Landis never did marry.” He nodded up Flyback Hollow Road towards some distant object we none of us could see. “Lived here ever since and never left. She’s our teacher, maybe she’s principal now, though with only three teachers all told there’s not much to set one up over the others. Good with kids, though. Teaching, that just became her life. Never went with no one else, and, like I say, never did get married. Good looker, too, is Lou, even now.
I looked up the road towards a school ground I couldn’t see. Could that have been her—the dark lady who walked out of the door and stood and just looked straight ahead of her? Miss Lou Landis. It’s funny sometimes the way things all seem to be connected.
“And then what?” I asked.
“Well, there was this investigation, of course, and the sheriff—”
“Was it our sheriff?” I gasped.
He frowned a bit, puzzled. “Oh, you mean DeGheyn. No, Sam DeGheyn wasn’t sheriff then. Another one . . . can’t remember that fellow’s name. . . .”
I thought a moment and now I was puzzled. “Wait a minute. If there was this trial it must’ve been in La Porte! That’s the county seat. And I can’t imagine people wouldn’t remember it, like Mr. Root here—”
Jude Stemple was holding up his hand for me to stop. “But it weren’t in La Porte. There was a change of venue.”
I frowned. “Change of menu?” I guess my thoughts never strayed far from food.
“Not ‘menu.’ ‘Venue.’ That’s where they have a trial elsewhere when they think a jury’d be too prejudicial in the place where the crime was committed.” He spat tobacco juice. He seemed proud for being so knowledgeable about venues. “Trial was over in Meridian. Hundred miles away, that was. Didn’t last long, neither. But his lawyer got the other lawyer to agree to manslaughter, that Ben did it in a fit of temper. Something like that.” Jude Stemple sighed. Then he went on. “I think anybody’d really think twice before they hurt Rosie Queen. Yes, I think even the devil’d give Rose Queen a wide berth. There was just somethin’ about her, somethin’ that kept bad thoughts away.” He was looking up towards the tops of the trees now, up where the sun was going down and the leaves had trapped the red-gold light. “I recall one day seeing Rose walking along the Holler Road up there, a basket over her arm, for she was bringing eggs or something to sick old Mrs. Jessup. And she waved at me, halloo’d and waved, her arm up in the air, and I recall how—bright she was. Just bright. As if she was filled with the sun behind her back.” Here he raised his own arm, the fingers of his hand spread against the sunlight, and I could see the blood in it, looking red-gold. As if he were waving back at Rosie Queen. “Rose was so light you could almost look right through her—” He stopped suddenly, embarrassed. “Well, anyways. I’m not good with words, never was.”
“I think you are, Mr. Stemple. I think you’re real good with words.”
Mr. Root nodded, agreeing.
Mr. Stemple went on. “I just never in my life saw a girl as beautiful as Rose Devereau Queen. Never did. And she was still a girl, you know, even when she was near forty years old. I never seen her like again. I never have.”
I have, I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. I was quiet in honor of Mr. Stemple’s powers of description. But not for long. “What happened to Fern? Did she just go on living with Sheba and George?” My mother always told me to never call unfamiliar adults by their first names. But by this time I really felt I’d known the Queens all my life.
“Fern, she went away for a long time. Sheba Queen’s got kin out west someplace, and I think Fern went to stay with them.”
“Out west” was almost as romantic-sounding to me as “Ben Queen.” “So when she come—came—back, was she still touched?” I had no trouble at all falling into Cold Flat speech.
“Yeah, she still was. Fern got better when she got older; she got a little common sense in her. But she always did act queer.”
I looked up to the tops of the trees where the sun turned the dark leaves now to a glassy greenness you could see through. I imagined them staying like this until autumn, when they would drift down and blow against one another so that everywhere would be the sound of wind chimes. I listened so hard to this glassy leaf-tinkling I lost track of Jude Stemple’s talk. Until he said, “Now he’s out.”
I was puzzled. I stared at Jude Stemple. “What?”
“Ben Queen. He’s out of prison.”
FORTY
For someone who swore that we of the Hotel Paradise were trying to poison her, Miss Bertha certainly managed to get in for her meals quick enough so as to give us plenty of chances at it. She felt it her due to take up a lot of my time rehashing the sausage-breakfast calamity. Also, she felt that she was now entitled to refuse the set menu entirely, and insisted my mother cook her something special. This did not sound very logical, as it’s always those “special” dishes that have arsenic and so forth in them. She declined the pork chops and chicken. She wanted fish.
My mother was fit to be tied. She told me to go back and tell the old fool that she’d cook her a mushroom omelette, and if she wanted fish, give her one of Will’s fishing poles and tell her to go down to Spirit Lake. My mother banged the pots and pans around on the stove and Walter nearly killed himself laughing. I, of course, had to bear the bad tidings back and forth between them and was feeling put-upon until I remembered this was really my fault. So I accepted my punishment and offered Miss Bertha the mushroom omelette. She declined, saying there’d be a death’s cap mushroom in it, and toadstools for good measure. No thank you, miss. Poor Mrs. Fulbright, talcumed and pink-cheeked, was mortified that Miss Bertha could “blacken the good name of the Hotel Paradise.” Miss Bertha countered by pointing out nobody was trying to kill Serile Fulbright, were they? So naturally Serile would stick up for the hotel.
It was about this time that Will came in with his great big smile and great big lie. He told Miss Bertha how wonderful she looked and announced he’d caught a fresh rainbow trout just for her. Would she like it almondine?
I stood there getting nauseous listening to him. But Will can do no wrong. Everybody trusts Will, and this always amazes me, because I am far more to be trusted than he is. Well, maybe not more to be trusted. I mean, I lie too, but for important reasons. Will just does it for fun.
Naturally, all of this wheedling attention worked on Miss Bertha like a charm and she said the rainbow trout would do fine, with just some lemon.
I stood with my arms wrapped around my tray wishing for something to get me out of this dining room.
For once in my life, my prayer was answered.
The dumbwaiter wasn’t working again and Aurora was demanding I bring her up her before-dinner drink. When I took Mrs. Davidow’s d
inner out to the back office, she was shouting up the shaft Regina would take her up a drink and Aurora shouting back to keep that blond floozie off the fourth floor! I ran back to the kitchen to tell my mother. She could hardly contain her laughter, for I knew she couldn’t stand Ree-Jane either, in spite of always giving her white meat of chicken. Walter overheard me and laughed his hiccuppy laugh.
Mrs. Davidow shouted out of the office window for somebody to come. My mother went out and listened to her and came back and told me Great-Aunt Aurora wanted me to take her her cocktail up and her dinner too. My mother said further, to Vera’s astonished ears, that I could be excused from waiting tables any more that dinnertime, as I had to perform this chore. As a dinner party had canceled, that left only three tables of hotel guests, and Vera could easily handle them.
Vera would have to wait on Miss Bertha! She gave me a look that would have cut like my mother’s meat cleaver as she whisked around the kitchen, so starched and clean she looked varnished.
Lola Davidow fixed up a small pitcher of Davidow martinis and placed it on a tray together with a stemmed glass—probably no substitute for a Cold Turkey, but I couldn’t help that. As I went through the swinging door, Miss Bertha was refusing to have Vera wait on their table, said she’d trained me up to do it right, and she didn’t want Vera messing up Miss Bertha’s good schooling, that Vera wasn’t a good waitress, not like me. I was through the dining room and hearing all of this to my extreme delight. Vera’s colorless eyes blazed at me. With the small tray of martinis professionally balanced on one hand, I called to her, “Be sure to give Miss Bertha lots of hot rolls,” and then made a dash, as far as the laden tray would let me, through the dining room door.
Aurora cast her eagle eye on the pitcher as I set it down beside her game of solitaire. I noticed that the cards were put down properly, red on black and black on red.
“Is this that Davidow woman’s martinis? Where’s my Cold Comfort? I told her you were to make me a Cold Comfort!” She slapped a black eight on a black nine and added, “So go make me one!”
Hotel Paradise Page 37
