“It’s signed, ‘Your, J.”’
He handed it to me, that and the photograph. “Now here’s a guy more interested in saving his own skin than being true to her.”
I studied the man in the photograph. There were differences between this picture and the snapshot Aurora had shown me—the color of his hair and the shape of his eyes. The snapshot had been taken in bright sunlight, the hair lighter, the eyes squinting against the sun. In Aurora’s picture, he had a hand raised, covering his eyes. But I still was sure that this was Jamie Makepiece, this was he. I think I had found out more than I expected, more even than I wanted to know.
My dear I Have faith that we will be together again and soon.
I didn’t make the mistake Dwayne did, only because the “I” meant something to me.
“Dwayne, it’s not ‘I have faith.’ The ‘H’ is a capital. He’s saying to her, ‘Have faith.’ See?” I handed it back.
Dwayne looked at the script, frowning. “Who’s ‘I’?”
“Iris or Isabel, and I’d say Iris because I don’t think he felt that way about Isabel.”
“Who the hell are Iris and Isabel?”
“They were sisters. They were both in love with the same man, him.” I held out the picture.
He took it and sat down in the rose slipcovered rocker. His gun was leaning against the side of the chest of drawers.
“Which one did he take to?”
“Both.”
“Well, hell, there’s trouble right there comin’ down the road.”
“First he was engaged to Isabel, then Iris came along.”
He smiled a little. “That sounds romantic: the real thing came along. There’s a song goes like that. So he broke off with Isabel and got engaged to Iris.”
This butting in annoyed me. “Dwayne, will you let me tell it? This is my story.” With that momentary irritation I was once again overcome with that feeling of woe. The woe, the sorrow I know was part of the fear. What was coming to an end was my story.
“Sounds like something out of Faulkner.” He fingered another cigarette from his pack.
I thought about Light in August. “Maybe it does, except they hadn’t got in this Lena’s, you know, condition.”
“What?”
I shrugged. “Her ‘condition.’ ”
“Oh, you mean she was fixing to have a baby. Sometimes I think every woman Faulkner writes about is in that condition.” He struck a match, inhaled. “How do you know?”
I frowned. “Huh?”
“How do you know they weren’t—or one of them wasn’t—in that ‘condition’? This Jamie would have to be a hell of a fella if they both were.” Dwayne got up. “I’m going out to have a look-see round the house.” He picked up the rifle. “I’ll be right outside, don’t worry.”
He left. I followed, all the time thinking.
Was that what it was? Was it only a story?
For what did I really have—as the Sheriff would say—as evidence that they had killed Mary-Evelyn? She drowned in strange circumstances. Things were left unexplained, such as the party dress and her not wearing shoes. But all of Mary-Evelyn’s dresses were beautiful; any one of them could have been a dress for a party. As for the shoes, she could simply have removed them because it seemed the natural thing to do if she was going out on the lake in a boat.
It all might be just as Elizabeth Devereau had told the police : they didn’t realize until late that Mary-Evelyn wasn’t in her bed and had then gone looking for her. It could have happened that way. And did they actually hate her so much? Could Ulub and Imogene have misunderstood what they saw?
And then there was Rose. As beautiful as people say she was, there must’ve been more than one man to make Ben Queen jealous. But that didn’t make any sense if Ben Queen was innocent of her murder. And he was; I was sure of that. It was Fern who had the motive. In this light it made sense: Rose was going to send Fern off to an institution and Fern got in a rage and stabbed her. Over and over, if the accounts were true. Stabbed her the way someone worked up into a crazy frenzy might have done. It made horrible sense. I would have to go back and talk to Louise Landis, who struck me as the person with the most sense in Cold Flat Junction. Only it was tiring, making up reasons for talking to people. Oh, of course I could tell the truth about what I was doing. But imagine how they’d react: Hello, I’m inquiring into a forty-year-old murder of a little girl. And two other murders besides. Yes, I can just imagine the folks in the Windy Run Diner hearing that.
About Fern’s murder. I asked myself if she couldn’t just’ve been going to the Silver Pear; she was all dressed up. Maybe going to the restaurant to meet someone. But there was nothing to show that; the Sheriff had asked everyone in the area around White’s Bridge (not that there were many to ask) and no one had seen her. So what made another kind of awful sense was that she was going to meet her daughter and wanted to look her best. After twenty years, her daughter might not have been too impressed. I mean, if Fern just left her child somewhere twenty or so years ago. If she just abandoned her, left her in an orphanage, or worse. I didn’t want to think too much about worse. Of course, there were a lot of orphans around and they didn’t end up killing their natural parent, if they could even find the parent. There were a lot of blind places in this theory, but all I know is Ben Queen didn’t do it, and if he didn’t who did? No, it all made awful sense if I was watching a Greek tragedy.
As for the beginning of this, as for Mary-Evelyn Devereau’s death: there was this doll, this letter, this photograph—and all in a house where there was no reason for them to be. Unless Mary-Evelyn had given Imogene the doll. I didn’t think so, but I could always go back and ask Imogene. That still didn’t account for the photograph of Jamie Makepiece, or the letter.
What were they doing in Brokedown House?
Dwayne came back. “Ain’t nothing around I could see. You find anything else? You’re good at finding things, that’s for sure.”
“No.”
“It’s about time I took you home.”
“Oh.” I was surprised at myself that it hadn’t occurred to me Dwayne would have to do this. “You don’t have to, Dwayne. I can just get a taxi to come to the Silver Pear.”
He shook his head. “I’ll take you. I figure you been at large enough in the world for one night.”
“I’m going to take these things.” I picked up the doll, the letter, the picture. “I’m taking these to the Sheriff. It’s evidence.”
Dwayne considered this as he folded a stick of Doublemint in his mouth and offered a stick to me. “It’s some interesting story you cooked up, that’s sure.”
I felt complimented until I reminded myself I only just told it; I didn’t “cook it up.” But it is my story. I looked at the letter again. “I guess you wouldn’t do that, I mean save your own skin instead of being true to a girl?”
“I should hope not. ’Course, it’d depend pretty much on the girl, wouldn’t it?”
“Now, that doesn’t make any sense, Dwayne.” He could be so irritating. “If you were already involved with this girl.”
He picked up his gun. “Boy, you sure are a stickler. Sometimes you’re worse than Billy Faulkner, I’d say.”
I took that as a compliment, though I didn’t know what he was getting at.
I didn’t mind the walk through the woods going back as much, but then I guess you wouldn’t mind having danger behind you instead of before you. On the ride back I said, “What if it was true?”
“What if what was?”
“About Jamie and Iris having a baby.”
“You thinking of that little girl that drowned being theirs?”
I nodded. “Maybe.”
“For one thing, it’d be one of the most awful things I ever heard of outside of Faulkner.”
“I wonder if his stories were true.”
“Depends what’s meant by ‘truth’ I guess.”
Irritated again, I slid down in my seat. Why did adults have to ma
ke so much of a simple question. “You know what I mean. Whether it actually happened to Lena.”
He thought this over, then said, “Do you read much?”
“Well, of course. I’m reading Light in August, aren’t I?” Actually, I wasn’t, not after those first ten or a dozen pages.
“Haven’t you come across characters in books so real they just wander off the page and around town, so to speak?”
I had saved my stick of gum and now unwrapped it. I had to admit Lena seemed to have stepped off the page and onto that dusty country road she meandered along, not unlike the road to Spirit Lake. I could walk along with her, hoping she didn’t have that baby then and there with only me around.
“Yes. I guess,” I answered Dwayne. I thought of what Father Freeman told me about trips in the mind being better, maybe, than trips actually taken. They must have been talking about the same thing. I didn’t know whether I believed it, though.
I looked at the doll and imagined Mary-Evelyn holding it while she stared out of her window at the rain-pocked lake and the boat dock on the other shore and imagined escaping. I wondered if Maud, sitting out there on the end of the pier, watching the boats and the water, imagined escaping, too.
I could ask Maud. Mary-Evelyn, I couldn’t.
46
Out of the clouds
It did not help my state of mind much to find a note pushed under my door from Will and Mill telling me to come to the Big Garage right after breakfast the next morning. They were like that—or at least Will was—issuing orders when one of their productions was in process (“in rehearsal,” Will liked to say). Despite the annoyance of being ordered around and maybe delaying my trip into town, I had to admit I was curious to know what they’d been doing in the garage.
Did they know this note read like a blackmail demand? Like, COME TO BIG GARAGE WITH $10,000 IN SMALL BILLS OR YOU WILL NEVER SEE REE-JANE AGAIN.
Oh, if only it had said that! To think I wouldn’t have to hand over the ten thousand and get what I’ve always wanted! So I might as well do it, and quick, so I could take my evidence—photo. letter, doll—in to the Sheriff. Not that I expected him to actually do anything; I just wanted some clear thinking brought to bear. I wanted to know if someone agreed with me or thought I was plain crazy.
Walter was at the stove “aproned up” (as he liked to say) when I walked into the kitchen yawning at seven-thirty. He was frying himself eggs and offered to drop one or two in the pan for me.
“But I guess you’ll want them buckwheat cakes.”
I frowned. “It can’t be buckwheat cakes, Walter, as it’s too early in the year. You can’t get the flour till the fall.”
“Don’t ask me; someone must’ve, for there she sets.” He pointed his spatula at one of my mother’s mixing bowls. It was covered with a damp cloth, which meant the flour was rising, or had already.
I removed the tea towel, and I’d say my eyes lit up, but it was really my stomach that did.
“Miss Jen showed me what to do before she left. It’s easy.” Walter transferred his eggs to a plate, scooped three pieces of Wonder Bread from the wrapper, and sat down at the serving counter to butter his bread. “I greased up that skillet for you. It’s heatin’.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. The cast-iron pancake skillet sat atop two burners, it was so big.
I looked at the risen dough as if it were Christ himself (and quickly told myself not to make that comparison when Father Freeman was around). When I try to draw up a list of my favorite foods, it never runs up and down, but kind of travels across the page:Buckwheat cakes Ham pinwheels and cheese sauce Angel Pie Chocolate Feather Cake
and so on.
Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright completely forgotten (I heard the cane doggedly tap tap tapping across the dining room floor), I shook droplets of water on the skillet and watched them dance as if they were happy about the buckwheat cakes too; I then dropped a large dollop of batter in the center and watched it slowly spread. Even in that movement there was something delicious. In a moment the outer edges crisped and shrank and tiny bubbles erupted on the surface of the batter. I waited while more bubbles appeared, until the surface was coated with them before I turned the cake over. The cooked side had that fine-line crazing that you get only on buckwheat cakes, a honey-brown crackle that always reminds me of pottery glaze.
As I slid this cake onto a plate, Walter said, “I warmed up the maple syrup.”
The little pan sat on the ledge above the stove, staying warm. I thanked Walter and poured syrup in thin ribbons across the cake. It was real maple syrup, caught in a bucket tied to a tree (or however they caught it), just as this was real buckwheat. Whenever I took my first taste of a buckwheat cake—that incredible mix of sour-sweet—I could almost hear them in the Tabernacle way over across the highway shouting “Hallelujah!” I could also understand why Mrs. Davidow had to have her pitcher of martinis every evening. There are certain things that make you crave more of what you’ve just had, as if your taste buds suddenly woke up and said, “Gimme!”
By this time, Miss Bertha’s non-Hallelujah shouts were coming from the dining room, but I went right on eating. Nothing could get between me and a buckwheat cake.
Walter got up from his stool, said “I’ll take the old fool her orange juice,” and went on in the dining room with the juice pitcher and two small glasses.
Even though I had been told to appear at the Big Garage, I still had to wait through three knockings until the door opened its usual two or three inches, enough for Will’s eye to appear at the crack.
“It’s me,” I said.
“What?” Will’s tone was, as usual, suspicious.
“What do you mean, ‘what’? You’re the one who ordered me to come here.” This was really irritating. “You wrote that note.”
He still hesitated before closing the door enough to remove the chain, then opened it so that I could pass through. I still thought the space he allowed was very stingy. Who in heaven’s name were they afraid would see what they were doing?
The Big Garage was like a huge cave with artificial lighting. They loved to fool around with lighting and they had managed to get their hands on some lights from the playhouse on Lake Noir. It was some dumb summer theater with a lot of bad acting. They covered the lights with different colors of crepe paper, today’s being blue and green. The effect was eerie and it almost made some of the rafters look like stalactites. At one end of this huge cave was a stage, part of it hidden by several tarpaulins, tented across it. A piano sat near the stage. Mill came out from the tarpaulin tent, hauling a thick rope behind him. I couldn’t tell what it was, or what for, which wasn’t unusual. He uncoiled it as he walked.
“What’s under there?” I asked.
“You don’t have to know,” said Will. “All you have to do is rehearse your part.”
It was my turn to be suspicious. “What part?”
“You know what part. We’ve already discussed it.”
I started to reply when a high voice came from somewhere around the rafters: “Hi, missus!” It was Paul’s voice. (Paul called all females “missus,” from my mother on down, except for his own mother.)
Paul seemed to be straddling the rafters twenty feet above us. It was hard to see exactly what he was doing, but what dif ference did that make since I couldn’t imagine him up there in the first place. “What’s Paul doing up there?”
“He’s going to work the clouds.”
“The what? For God’s sakes, are you crazy? He could fall and break his neck! Look how high up that is!”
Will—who had never had any particular interest in Paul’s welfare—just shrugged. “We tied him.”
“You tied him up there?”
“Well, we had to. Otherwise he’d fall off, probably.”
Why bother objecting? I shaded my eyes with my hand—as if that would do any good. I could see the pale skin of Paul’s legs, the legs swinging away as if he were on a hobby horse. But the rest of him was bathed in
this weird green light and his towhead disappeared into the dark shadows. I could also see a few white objects. These, I guessed, must be the “clouds.” For a moment, Paul looked like pictures I remembered from an old book about ships. He was the sailor up in the crow’s nest. “Clouds,” I said. “Clouds.”
Mill sniggered and ran down the few steps from the stage and plopped down at the piano. He thumped off a bunch of chords that sounded like an accompaniment through the gates of Hell, which I guessed was appropriate.
Will said, “What he does is, he lets out the string the clouds are attached to so they move along, down in front of you, so when you appear it’s just like you came out of the clouds. Pretty neat.”
It was not a question. Will was not asking me to attest to the “neatness” of this harebrained idea. If Will said it was neat, it was neat. Then, as my eyes got a little more used to the dark green-blueness of this cave, I repeated, “When I appear? When I appear where?”
“See up there? Near Paul?”
I made out a swing—an old-fashioned board-notched-in-rope swing, the sort you see tied to a high tree branch. It was dangling near Paul, up where he was. “So what’s that?” As if I had to ask.
“It’s the ‘machine,’ you know, the one God comes down in. Or Zeus, or whoever.”
Mill had stopped playing his death march and come over to stand beside us. He said, “The deus ex machina.”
Of course he pronounced it wrong—“Do-X-machine”—as we all had been doing. “You mean ‘DAY-us ex MACK-in-ah.’ ” I must admit I simpered a little when they both looked at me, and repeated the phrase in the labored way one must do with fools and babies. “DAY-us ex MACK-in-ah.”
They were both chewing gum, Will slowly, Mill, fast, and they stopped. “Nah,” said Will.
I continued laboriously, “Well, go look it up in a Greek dictionary.” I did wonder why the proper pronunciation of this seemed to be more important to me than what the deus did. “If you think I’m getting on that swing, you’re crazy.”
Cold Flat Junction Page 31
