Wearily, I sat myself down on the step beside the dog. He was really old and tired. I scratched his ears, knowing how he felt, though moments ago I’d been dancing crazy circles down the road. Again, I had that strange feeling of Time lying heavy and gathering itself together, as at a formal dance a woman might stop to scoop up the train of her gown. Time wasn’t passing, it was bunching. Bunching before me and this old hound.
What I really wanted to do was lie down on the porch and go to sleep, too. I can’t recall ever feeling so tired. Maybe once I did before in the Rainbow with the Sheriff sitting across from me, waiting for me to tell him what I knew. I saw again Ben Queen walking away that night from Crystal Spring and heard him say, If it goes too hard on you, turn me in. It wasn’t dog-tiredness I felt now, it was a tiredness all my own. I leaned over and put my chin on my knees and studied the gray porch step.
“I don’t have to do any more. I didn’t have to do all this,” I said to the dog, who beat his tail against the porch. I guess he understood.
I did not understand the reluctance I felt as I left Jude Stemple’s place and got farther back into Flyback Hollow. The road had come together again and continued on its way. Masses of trees divided this part of the Hollow from the part I’d just left. I thought of Brokedown House and that white light in my eyes, and I stopped dead amid the unfamiliar, glad it wasn’t night. Even so, the trees seemed to have drunk in last night’s darkness and were throwing it off in blue shadows along my path.
You got to go on a ways, the lady in the diner had said, and I wondered just how far. I looked back, anxious that the road might be closing up behind me. It was ridiculous. Still, I surely did wish Dwayne were here, even if it meant I’d have to carry a sack of rabbits.
Then I saw the house, up on the right; it had to be the Landis place, as there was no other, and it did—as they had said—melt in. Its dull olive-green paint and dark green roof separated themselves from their surroundings like the figures finally seen in one of those cloud puzzles. You have to look hard. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have passed the house right by.
Now there was another road, narrower than the one I was leaving, a driveway, I guessed, for I was sure an educated person like Louise Landis would drive a car. I did not take to this road very quickly. I stopped to pick some more black-eyed Susans and tiger lilies and thought as I did it (though this had not been my clear intention) that Louise Landis might appreciate a bouquet. Then I realized they were her flowers in the first place and dropped them by a tree.
I told myself to stop acting like I was the Gretel part of Hansel and Gretel and that Louise Landis was a perfectly normal person, not someone to stuff little kids in an oven, and that she wouldn’t have changed over the years, despite yearning after and maybe even waiting for the man she had always loved (except it hadn’t done the Phantom of the Opera any good, all that waiting around). With a firmer step I walked on, recalling I’d seen her three weeks ago, the woman in black who’d stepped out of the school to look off into the dense beige distance of Cold Flat Junction.
But wait: I stopped again, feeling I’d walked miles and the house was receding before me. How did I know that woman was Louise Landis? It could have been just another teacher. But I didn’t think so. The woman I saw standing on the top step and shading her eyes against the sun had an air of certainty about her that went along with being a school principal.
I still hadn’t decided what to say and thought I’d better hurry up about it. My brain paraded several choices before my eyes: one, I was lost, or two, I used to live here (which she’d know was a lie, since she’d lived here all her life). Three, I just moved here and was walking around—only, that would lead to being lost again; four, I was visiting—
The door opened before I’d settled on something and it was the lady in black I’d seen, just as I knew it must be, only now she was wearing blue. Her skin was like mine: no matter what color we put on, it looked good.
Five, I was selling subscriptions; six, I lost not me but my dog....
She looked down at me with one of the pleasantest smiles I’d ever seen and said, “Hello.” It might even have been her second hello, offered in a warm and friendly tone, but my mind was still busy: seven, I was collecting for the First Tabernacle Church; eight, I was helping the Humane Society and did she have a pet? She was a person you just knew you could put your trust in, and so I did: “Hello. Jude Stemple sent me.”
“He did? Well, you’d better come in then, and tell me all about it.”
My mouth was open to deliver whatever the next part of this lie was, but when she said that, I was completely stumped. I mean that she seemed to be so accepting in advance of the queer people who turned up on her porch. After I entered, she closed the door and I watched her back as she led me from the hallway, scented by furniture polish and roses, into the living room. Her hair was coiled into an elaborate scroll at her neck. It was shiny, pale brown, almost blond, maybe that color called ash-blond. I thought it was very nearly the color of mine, but hers certainly wasn’t mouse-brown or dishwater-blond, as Ree-Jay said mine was. Just before I sat down in the armchair she indicated, I pulled a lock of hair around and looked at it out of the corner of my eye and thought, yes, we did have similar hair. Skin and hair, two ways we were alike. I wondered if she ever had a hankering to go to Florida.
We were in her “parlor”—a word I preferred to “living room” but one which my mother thought to be “common.” “Parlor” suited this room better, as it was so comfortably old-fashioned, like the hotel music-parlor. (I would have to ask my mother why “music-parlor” was okay.) Hers contained a piano, upright against the far wall, and velvet upholstery on a settee and several side chairs in a red so deeply touched with blue it was almost purple. A fireplace with orange flames that seemed on the verge of going out, licking around and turning to ashes a few blue coals. There were pictures and portraits on one wall, and more books than I’d ever seen outside of a library on the other. They covered an entire wall and looked, as books always do to me, warm and colorful and inviting.
The whole room was that, really. The walls were papered with village scenes—little people walking in little streets past tiny houses on tiny squares. Wide mahogany moldings shone with that same polish that scented the hallway.
We were sitting in armchairs covered with a brown, flowered chintz that didn’t match but didn’t clash with the velvet and the wallpaper. There was a little ball of yarn between the cushion and the arm of my chair and I pulled it out. Maybe she had a cat. My eyes traveled back to the books. We sat in silence and listened to coals sifting and sputtering; somewhere, a clock chimed, and for once I didn’t have to count the chimes.
The silence surprised me. Here was an adult person who just sat, her elbow on the arm of her chair, chin supported by her hand, waiting for ... well, whatever I had to offer, I guess. All of this, you would think, would edge me closer to telling the truth of why I was here, but, strangely, it didn’t. Maybe the room seemed so overwrought with imagination—all of those writers hidden in all of those books, all of those villagers in the wallpaper—that I moved instead toward greater foolhardiness. That was the danger of imagination; you could so easily fall right on your face. But it was like, well, writing a play, the way Will and Mill were always doing. Writing it and performing it, so for once I had the lead.
I said, “I’ve got—kin around here.” This was not a good start on why Jude Stemple sent me. I frowned and picked at a loose thread on the chair arm.
Surprisingly, she picked up on this. “Are the Stemples—Jude—relations?”
“The Stemples?” Now I was looking up at the ceiling, thinking that I might not want to be related to Mr. Stemple, as he was definitely what my mother would call “common.” I didn’t want to be unkind to Mr. Stemple, but I didn’t want to be related to him, either. “No, not directly. He’s more by way of being a cousin of a cousin.” She had not asked me my name or where I’d trucked on in from, or wher
e I went to school, or how old I was.
In her just waiting there, seeming fully prepared to wait if she had to forever, and not making any judgments, I knew who she put me in mind of: Ben Queen.
“My name’s Emma,” I said, surprised at this little bit of truth escaping me, just as it had with Ben Queen.
23
Orphans
As I looked around, I felt mired in the past, lost in something old I couldn’t identify, other than in the photos on the wall, the stiffened collars imprisoning necks, the cameos pinned to shoulders, the hair skinned back. Her question hadn’t quite gotten through to me. “Pardon me?”
“Jude Stemple,” she said. “He sent you here?”
“Oh, I nearly forgot!” I scratched my head, thinking hard.
But Louise Landis rose and asked me if I’d like tea, that she was going to have a cup. Except Miss Flagler, who has the gift shop, and Mr. Butternut giving me cocoa in their kitchens, no one had ever offered me a cup of tea like that. “Do you want me to help?” I asked, remembering my training.
“No. You just sit there and relax. Or look at the books, if you want. I’ll only be ten minutes.”
After she left, I sat for a moment, my mind empty. Beside my chair was a knitting bag with some orange yarn lying loosely across it. I picked up a loose piece and wound it around my finger. I should have sat there and worked on my Jude Stemple story, but instead, I looked at the bookshelves. Besides, I had already managed to get inside the house. I was tired of thinking; it seemed to me I had to do so much of it. Not easy thinking, either, like what to have for breakfast—French toast with sifted maple sugar and fresh berry compote or walnut pancakes. (I’d had both that morning, so that wasn’t much of a decision.)
What was it about food? I liked it so much, mostly my mother’s, of course. But there were also Dr. McComb’s brownies, and there was the chili at the Rainbow Café, and the hot roast beef sandwich at the Windy Run Diner. So this liking must be connected to something else, or someone.
I had been standing before the wall of books, reading the spines. I had taken down and returned Huckleberry Finn to the shelf, promising Mark Twain that I would read his book one day soon. I bounced on the balls of my feet to get more eye level with the shelf above. My eye fell on the dark spine of a book by Wilkie Collins called The Woman in White. I remember trying to read this book when I was a child, but it was too hard for me. I do recall the woman, who appeared suddenly on the road, her face as white as her gown, frightening the hero (and me). ).
I took the book down and stood looking at the cover, which pictured the woman in white. Suddenly, I drew in breath and thought of the Girl. Her dress was such a pale color that it might as well have been white. I saw her again, standing in the rain at the edge of the woods just beyond the Devereau house. I’d just put a record on the old phonograph of a French song, the singer’s voice hollow and reedy, but the words soft and elegant. The Girl watched the house for a moment. Maybe the music had drawn her; more likely she had wanted to go into the house, but, seeing me, she stopped. She had this waiting air about her. Then she’d turned and walked away.
The only person I had ever told about the Girl was Ben Queen. I seemed to be keeping her to myself; I don’t know why. Except for that one excited time in La Porte, when I had seen her and followed her and fairly flown into the Sheriff, I had never mentioned her. And even with the Sheriff, I caught myself before I’d really told him much.
I was sure the Devereau family was cursed. If I ever told that to anyone I would be laughed at. I don’t care. Rose was murdered; her daughter Fern was murdered. And Rose’s little niece, Mary-Evelyn? In my mind’s eye I see the three Devereau sisters, moving through the woods by lantern light. The sisters had told the police they were looking for Mary-Evelyn. Were they? Only Ulub had seen this strange procession and he didn’t know what it meant. It is too heavy, too weighted, to have been an accident. It is—really—too mysterious.
A tray rattled and I shook myself, drawn back from that scene by the sound of clinking china. Miss Landis was carrying the tea tray in and setting it down on a small table. She said, “I was hungry and thought you might be, too.”
“I am, a little.” I didn’t see how I could possibly eat anything else—not after the walnut pancakes, French toast, ham pinwheels, and chocolate cream pie—but since she’d gone to the trouble, I couldn’t refuse. I said yes to both milk and sugar in my tea, since that was what she was taking, and I wanted to be thought accomplished at tea drinking, which I wasn’t. I took my cup and picked up a sandwich half. It was chicken, and all white meat. I almost expected Mrs. Davidow to come by and snatch it out of my hand. With my tea and sandwich, I sat down again.
“I like that book,” she said, nodding toward the chair where I’d left it. “Have you read it?”
I wanted to say a plain “yes.” But I didn’t want to be caught out if she asked me something about the ending. “Some of it I have.”
“Did you think she was a ghost?”
For one frightening moment, I thought she was talking about the Girl. But then I realized she meant the woman in the book.
“The woman in white,” she said, nodding toward the arm of the chair where the book lay.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I did. That white face.” She shook her head, as at something hard to accept.
During the brief silence that followed, I wondered again why she wasn’t asking me why I was here. She was certainly polite not to. But after all, it was her house. Perhaps, I thought, it was because she’d been a teacher for so many years and had gotten to know the ways of children pretty well and how they didn’t like being questioned. Adults did, nearly all the time, because they never seemed to know what else to do.
She sat, looking into the blue firelight, peacefully eating her sandwich. I couldn’t get over this October feeling, the fire, the glazed look of the windowpanes. Asking me nothing, she treated my visit as if it was what she’d planned to do for today. I studied her. She had the kind of smooth good face that makes you think either nothing had ever ruffled her or if it had she knew so well what to do that any disturbance left her face untouched. It put me in mind of lake water, the placid center of Spirit Lake.
And to think she must be sixty! I hoped I could be that way when I got older. She had a calming effect, like the Sheriff, like Maud. Even when people like that go against themselves and get angry or fearful, there’s still that part of them at their center which remains untouched.
Drowsily I watched the fire and almost forgot the second half of my sandwich, which was not like me at all, especially where the white meat of chicken was concerned. I wound the yarn, trying to make a cat’s cradle, and thought about Jude Stemple and came up with, “I didn’t mean Mr. Stemple actually sent me here; no, I should have said he gave me directions.”
Louise Landis nodded and waited.
“See, it’s really—” I stopped to pick up my tea cup and had this choking fit and spilled it. On myself, not on the chair or the rug. I was careful. I finished coughing and said I was really sorry. Miss Landis went to get a kitchen towel.
In her brief absence, I remembered Billy talking about the orphans. I wiped at my shirt and said, “It’s really my mother who sent me.” Since she was driving through the Carolinas about now, Louise Landis couldn’t very well check on what I said. “She wonders if you’d like to have your annual lunch—the one for the orphan children—at the Hotel Paradise.” Well, it must’ve seemed to Miss Landis an awfully roundabout way (which, of course, it was) of getting to this lunch business. My mother could easily have phoned her instead of sending me along. “We could even supply entertainment.”
She smiled. “What a wonderful suggestion. What kind of entertainment? Like a magic act?”
“More like part of a show that’s going to be put on. Or maybe music. Piano playing, maybe.”
“That’s a fine idea. How much would all of this cost?”
“Oh, don’t worr
y about that.” I waved cost away as I finished my sandwich.
“I’m sure they’d love that. They have, well, as you can imagine, not a very happy sort of life.”
Wide-eyed, I hoped with concern, I said, “It must be hard for them.” I wondered who they were, but that was only my general nebbiness. I was much more concerned about how hard things were for me. I was a little ashamed at this reaction; I felt I should be better able to identify with the less fortunate. My mother was always telling me this when I complained about things like having to eat the dark meat of chicken: “You should remember those less fortunate than you.” I pointed out to her that Ree-Jane wasn’t one of the “less fortunate,” and my mother said, “Oh, really?” I hate it when my mother is quicker than I am.
So whenever I see newspaper pictures of floods or hurricanes wrecking things and killing people, I sometimes bow my head and say a brief prayer, usually for the dog sailing atop some sinking building, moving downstream. I have a particular feeling for animals.
My mind had been so busy with false reasons for coming here that I nearly forgot the true one. Now I was trying to figure out how to work Ben Queen and White’s Bridge into the conversation. So I just plunged. “We had a murder not far from La Porte, I guess you know.”
“Yes. That must have been an awful shock to you. The woman who was murdered was from here.”
“It was really horrible,” I said enthusiastically. “Everybody’s still talking about it. She was somebody’s daughter from here. What was his name? ...” I pondered.
“Ben Queen.” She looked around the room, as if the name might call him up.
It was strange the way she said it, unadorned, you could say, the name without any other words around it explaining. It was as if the name itself had the power to acquit him.
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