Cold Flat Junction

by Martha Grimes

  Her information does not come easy. She blackmails me into being an audience for her “magical tricks,” which consist of pick-a-card or find-the-pea, both of them unbelievably dumb and both of which she cheats at, making it impossible for me to win.

  Aurora always sits in the same ancient rocking chair, wearing black or dark blue wool or a shiny gray stuff that looks like thin armor when the light hits it at certain angles. Her lace net gloves have the fingers cut back to the knuckle. She needs her fingers free so she can cheat at find-the-pea. She argues that she never cheats, but of course she does. Up here, she is surrounded by her things—a big old steamer trunk full of really beautiful clothes that she never wears, pictures of horses and grazing sheep, a big 1939 calendar hung on a nail. She writes things in the squares in her stingy little hand. I looked back at April once and there was stuff written there about FDR and other people I didn’t know. She told me to get away, get away! and not to sully her calendar.

  “How can I sully it? I’m not even touching it.”

  “With your eyes.” Then she cackled. The cackle is put-on. “I’ll have another drink, Miss!”

  I took the glass and said, as sarcastically as I could, “Aren’t you worried I’ll sully the Southern Comfort?” Then I went downstairs, the glass in my hand preventing me from giving in to the temptation to slide down the bannister as I used to do when I was little.

  As I said, I can entertain Aurora with what happened over near White’s Bridge. I know more details than our weekly newspaper does and even more than the police. That should give me a sense of power, but instead, it makes me uneasy. I’ve talked to different people, ones that the Sheriff hasn’t because he doesn’t know there’s a connection.

  One of these people is Jude Stemple, who claimed the anonymous victim was “Ben Queen’s girl” (and he was right). Jude Stemple is from Cold Flat Junction; so was Fern Queen. She was missing for several days but that didn’t worry Bathsheba and George, the relatives she lived with, because Fern had always been touched in the head. There was no reason to connect her to a body found miles outside of La Porte. It was Aurora who’d told me about Ben Queen, and it was Jude Stemple who told me about Rose. But what Jude Stemple says is it couldn’t possibly have been Ben who killed Rose, for he loved her too much.

  So when I met Ben Queen at the Devereau house across the lake and we walked to Crystal Spring, I must admit I agreed with Jude Stemple. Not that I wasn’t scared running into a man just out of prison, in an empty house in deep woods by a forgotten lake. I was plenty scared. But it only lasted until Ben Queen began to talk.

  Someone had murdered his daughter Fern, but it wasn’t him.

  There are some people born to take the blame for others, he said, and he was one of them. Then he looked at me for a while as if to say, And you’re another.

  It was then I began to tell him about the Girl, the one I had seen in Cold Flat Junction and across the lake at the Devereau house. I had seen her four times, I told him.

  She looks, I had told him, like your wife Rose. Like she was, I mean.

  Well, Ben Queen thought about this for a moment, and then said I must be mistaken, for there was no such person. That this Girl must be a figment of my imagination.

  But I think he knew.

  I have made a list of Sorrowful Places, and the little kitchen ranks number ten on the list. This surprises me because I wasn’t that aware I had feelings for the little kitchen. Then I remembered that we use it in the winter when we stay at the hotel all year round, which is seldom. So from the little kitchen’s windows I see blue mornings and deep snow, rime on the windowsills and, inside, the smell of biscuits baking and buckwheat cakes just beginning to bubble up before they’re turned by my mother’s magical hand. Now, I’ve never had occasion to handle a rosary, being non-Catholic, but from what I’ve seen, you go over and over its little beads, repeating Hail Marys or Mary, Mother of Gods, and thus you get absolution or get cleansed or something along that order. Me, if I want to do my soul a good turn, I just say buckwheatcakes-buckwheatcakesbuckwheat and my soul is immediately comforted and cleansed.

  So the little kitchen is number ten on my list of places I would most miss if I were never to see them again. I rank them from one to ten. I only know which goes where by testing: I have to close my eyes and picture the place vanishing and tell myself I’ll never see it again. Then something wells up in me and my eyes spring open and I’m too cold or too warm. What wells up in me is fear, and I wonder if losing something is also the fear of losing something.

  Sorrowful Places 1. The big kitchen

  2. Spirit Lake

  3. The Pink Elephant

  4. The Rainbow Café

  5. The Devereau house

  6. The land across the railroad tracks in Cold Flat Junction

  7. The bench in front of Britten’s store

  8. The Windy Run Diner

  9. The Abigail Butte County Library

  10. The little kitchen

  I had to limit myself to ten items, otherwise I could go on nearly forever. To make sure I wasn’t looking at every place I knew as a Sorrowful Place, I had to choose five places that were opposite, places that could disappear in an eyeblink and I’d be glad to see them go:1. Ree-Jane’s room

  2. The part of the porch railing where Ree-Jane likes to pose

  3. Miss Bertha’s half of the dining room table

  4. The salad table

  5. “Europa,” the expensive store where Ree-Jane buys her clothes

  I have to review the first list every week to see if anything’s changed in the ranking; usually something has.

  It sounds like a strange thing to do, ranking places I’d miss. The way I know when I come upon such a place is that I’m gripped by this awful sadness. And it makes me think this sadness is always right there below the surface, and the surface is easily scratched.

  I have to do this, but I’m not sure why. I have to do it in the same way of swallows flighting from cold places to warm ones. It’s instinct to do this, it’s as if there’s a rite I have to perform; then if it comes on that one of these places vanishes, like the little kitchen catching fire and burning into black ash, I will not be wholly unprepared.

  8

  Pink thinking

  The Pink Elephant is where I do most of my thinking. It’s underneath the dining room and was once used for cocktail parties, mostly for the tennis players who went along with anything that meant more drinking. I’ve decorated it with candle stubs stuck in wine bottles with melted wax built up around the necks. There are large pictures which I have checked out of the Abigail Butte County Library and which I can return for new ones whenever I’m in my artistic mood.

  No one comes here at all unless it’s someone looking for me, which is seldom. Mice, cobwebs, darkness, the thick creaking door, the tall grass and weeds beyond it that always feel wet, even in sunshine. It isn’t a place most people want to visit. If they can’t find me for some reason, they send Walter. Walter gets the jobs nobody else wants. My mother is, of course, too busy to look for me; my brother Will is up in the Big Garage with Mill; Ree-Jane wouldn’t be caught dead looking for me unless she knew it would result in something very unpleasant; Vera is too starched and stuck-up to walk down the gravel road and through the wet grass. So this leaves Walter.

  Now, they would never in a million years send Walter to the front desk to check in guests. Anyone but Walter, including Vera and Anna Paugh, would be acceptable. But Walter, as always, doesn’t mind he’s being discriminated against and goes happily about the task of finding things, including me. Walter can find things. He’s like one of those divining rods that locates underground springs.

  When he comes to the Pink Elephant, I always offer him a Coke and a bench to sit on. He really likes the socializing, though we don’t talk much. I find it soothing to talk to someone who’s as slow in his speech as Walter. He can say ummhum as if it had fifteen syllables in it. Words seem to stick in his mouth like burrs, and he
peels off one and then another until he gets a statement out. But his trouble is nothing compared to the Wood boys’.

  The hotel cat does slip in sometimes to see if there are any mice around. I’m not afraid of mice, but I enjoy the cat’s company. He curls up under the table by my feet. He does not have a name, and I’m always reminding myself to think one up. It’s possible he’s happier without one.

  I keep my journal here hidden in a crevice in the pink stucco wall behind a tin sign that advertises Mexican beer. It’s decorated with a bull and a matador holding out his red cape. Besides the journal I have a Whitman’s Sampler box which I like to go through each time I come here, not because I’m afraid someone has taken something, but just because I like to see the things in it. There’s the snapshot of the Devereaus beneath the hotel porte cochere, the three sisters, and Mary-Evelyn. She’s standing by herself in front. Now, whenever someone takes a picture of, say, Will and me, Will does something like put his two fingers over my head as if I’m a donkey. Or if it’s Ree-Jane posing, I do the same thing to her; it’s more to take away the curse of being permanently linked with her in a picture than to give her the donkey ears.

  In the Devereau snapshot, though, no hand lies on Mary-Evelyn’s shoulder; she’s more than an arm’s length away from them and no one’s called her closer.

  Other items in the box: two green marbles I found on the boardwalk that goes down to the Spirit Lake post office. It’s a pleasant, leafy walk and I love to pick up the mail, to work the combination on the metal box, and to be the first to see what’s there. Then there’s a gold locket my mother told me I could have, as she doesn’t know where she got it or who the man and woman in the picture inside are. (My mother’s memory is not that good; maybe because she has her head so crammed full of recipes, there’s no room for strangers.) The man and woman look like turn-of-the-century people; he has long sideburns and she has to hold her chin above a stiff column of collar.

  Another thing I keep in the box is the red-and-black neckerchief Ben Queen handed me when I was in a squall of tears over Mary-Evelyn. I unfolded it now and wondered if tears smelled and gave it a whiff, but it just smelled cotton-y, nothing left over from me or Ben Queen. It bothers me that traces of people can so easily fade, that the red neckerchief held no scent of the person who’d worn it against his skin, and that no one who ever happened across my box sometime could look at the items there and unfold this square of cloth and think, Oh, yes, Ben Queen. It smells just like him, and Emma Graham, see, here is the stain of her tears.

  It occurs to me that that’s what police dogs and mediums with their sixth sense do; you give them a bit of material or a glove or a shoe and just by the smell (I think it’s the smell) they go off through brush and brambles and eventually lead you to the person.

  But I suppose the whole natural world forgets; the tall grass I plow through beyond the door does not hold onto the imprint of my shoe; the water she drowned in and the lily pads that bore her up have lost all trace of Mary-Evelyn Devereau. We don’t leave anything of us behind except in others’ memories. And if they forget us, we’re finally gone at last.

  I folded the square carefully and set it on the table beside the marbles.

  What worries me, I think, is that Mary-Evelyn will be forgotten once I’m gone. Her hard little life, and then to be forgotten. She might as well have sunk like a stone to the bottom of Spirit Lake for all the remembering of her there was or will be. It’s as if she’d been let go, as if the hand that reached to her from the bank had opened and she had sunk.

  The worst of it must have been the knowing she’d been let go. As if the hardship of holding on to her wasn’t worth the trouble.

  In the Whitman’s Sampler box is one other thing of importance. It’s a piece from Mary-Evelyn’s game of “Mr. Ree.” It’s a hollow tube about as big around as a nickel with a plastic head formed to look like the face in the Artist George playing card. He’s one of the characters, along with Aunt Cora, Butler Higgens, and Niece Rhoda. There are seven altogether.

  If a player gets a murder card he can put one of the four tiny weapons inside his tube and later on kill one of the others. It’s quite complicated. The detective is Mr. Ree. This is my favorite game. (I told Aurora about it and she said she wanted to play. She made quite a scene—which pleased me—when I told her it takes more than two players, otherwise each of us would know exactly who has the murder card.)

  When I found the game of Mr. Ree in Mary-Evelyn’s toy chest, Artist George was missing. I didn’t think much of that at the time, not until a few days ago, days after Ben Queen had been at Crystal Spring. I found the Artist George playing piece in the little alcove at the spring where the tin cup is kept. George was slightly damp from lying on wet stone. But he had not lain there long, I knew that, for the night the four of us—that’s Mr. Root and me and Ulub and Ubub—had gathered at the spring, we’d all drunk from the cup, and there was no playing piece in that stone alcove.

  It’s possible that Ben Queen put it there, but that’s not likely for it was missing before he came to the house that night. Anyway, Ben Queen wouldn’t have any reason for doing it.

  But this was another roundabout way. What was the reason for doing it?

  I pondered this question for some time. Except for me, no one comes to the spring anymore since the path has gotten so overgrown. No one except for the Wood boys and Mr. Root and Ben Queen that one night.

  And the Girl. I had seen her twice around here, once on the other side of Spirit Lake, on the Devereau side; once just outside the house when I was inside.

  I figure she left it for me to discover, left it as a clue. Or if not a clue, a message.

  Why be so roundabout? That day I saw her when I was inside the Devereau house and she was outside, over by the stand of pine trees, why didn’t she come up to the door and say: This is what happened. I killed FernQueen because ...

  For it had to be her, didn’t it? Ben Queen as much as said he would be taking the blame for that murder. Who else would he take the blame for except someone really important to him, such as his grandaughter? She had to be, for how else could she look so much like Rose? Even though Jude Stemple said Fern Queen never had children, well, he was only guessing. No, Fern must have had a girl, as I can’t see any other way to explain it all. That would mean the Girl shot her own mother, which sends chills down my spine.

  Unless she is a ghost—a ghost, or a Do-X-machine.

  9

  A short history of Do-X-machines

  A “Do-X-machine,” as I told you, is somebody who suddenly appears in the middle of things-going-wrong to bring order, to right wrongs, to save the day. In Greek plays, it’s a god; in The Wizard of Oz, it’s the Good Witch Glinda. And in a play it’s an actor playing God who gets lowered to the stage on a chair or swing controlled by ropes and pulleys.

  I learned this from my brother Will and his best friend Brownmiller. They’re always in the Big Garage, rehearsing one of their “productions,” usually musical, as Mill is such a fabulous musician. They did me a favor recently, but in return they said I’d have to play a part in this production. I agreed. Little did I suspect they wanted me to be the Do-X-machine, sitting in a chair lowered from the rafters. I told them they were crazy and I wouldn’t play their damned machine, not me.

  My brother stared at me for a while as he slowly chewed gum. Will can look straight at a person, his dark eyes like ten-penny nails, but usually he’s looking right through you. It’s his “thinking” mode.

  “You get to wear tulle,” he said.

  I was a little taken aback. I liked the picture of me in a tulle gown. But where would they ever get one? I said this.

  Will and Mill flicked a conspirator’s glance at each other; they do this like they’re playing tiddledywinks with their eyes. They were artful in communicating this way. You could see they didn’t want anyone in on the details of their precious production.

  We’d had an argument before about Glinda, when the
y’d had her coming up through a trapdoor in the stage, instead of down, on pulleys. They had Paul, the dishwasher’s boy, tossing a cloud of flour up to make it look like Glinda appeared out of nowhere. But they decided against that way of doing it in their present production because “it didn’t look real.”

  “Real?” I said. “Whenever did you two bother with things looking real? Did it look real when you made Paul sit way up in that tree”—I pointed (we were in what we call the “cocktail garden” behind the hotel, surrounded by pines)—“eating a banana and trying to sound like a monkey?”

  “He sounds like a monkey anyway,” said Mill, pushing his glasses back on his thin nose.

  I ignored that. “Did it look real when you did that Ku Klux Klan play and tied him to a pole with a lot of newspapers and kindling underneath?”

  (I should say that there are no colored people in Spirit Lake or La Porte—or for miles and miles around. I think maybe the entire county steered clear of the Civil War.)

  “That production,” said Will, “was very educational.”

  “And we never lit the newspapers, ”added Mill.

  I heaved a huge, trying-my-patience sigh. “Look, I refuse to endanger my life being lowered from the Big Garage rafters! How do I know you can work this pulley?”

  “We’re trying it out on Paul first to see,” said Will.

  Paul was everybody’s guinea pig, including my mother’s. If there was something in the refrigerator that had possibly been sitting awhile and you couldn’t be sure from just sniffing it whether it was okay, she’d call for Paul to taste it. Then if he didn’t fall over in a dead heap, she’d use it.

  Paul’s mother is the second dishwasher. She’s tall and bony and bland looking, like vanilla junket. She has a deep voice like a man’s but hardly ever says anything except to threaten Paul. So I see why Paul’s strange; he gets it from his mother, unless he learned it from Walter. When the three of them are doing dishes, I like to hang around and listen to the talk, what little there is of it.