I turned and looked across the room at the banks of file cabinets.
Did Donny realize he’d left me alone with all of their reports?
The drawers were arranged first according to the violation; second, alphabetically. There were a lot of drawers, the cabinets stacked with a row on the bottom and one on top. Two of the bottom drawers, the ones at the end, were devoted to old cases. They went decades back, back to the 1920s. These files were pretty scruffy and stuffed in without much care taken and little arrangement. On the tabs were written what I guessed was the key word in each case, or the key name. I went through them quickly. Towards the back was a file marked “Devereau.” I yanked it out.
I was not prepared for the pictures; it hadn’t occurred to me there would be any, but of course it was logical that there would be. Two of Mary-Evelyn’s face, two of her face and torso, one of her whole waterlogged body.
And then I realized that I had never seen her except in the snapshot taken of the sisters in the shadowy vicinity of the porte cochere. I had made her up in my mind, building on what I could see of her in the snapshot. In some ways I had caught her, in other ways, missed her completely. But then the girl in these pictures was dead.
I took the doll out of my gym bag, smoothed its dress and held it next to the picture that showed Mary-Evelyn’s dress most clearly. Though the wetness of it had turned it dark in places, there was no mistaking the clothes were the same. The same dark little handsewn flowers marched down the front.
Statements made by the Devereau sisters: that’s what I wanted to read. Elizabeth, the oldest, told the sheriff (a man named Win Whittle, back then): “We dined at the usual time—seven—after which Mary-Evelyn went to her room and, we supposed, to bed.”
I frowned over the “we supposed.” Was Mary-Evelyn allowed to drift around like a little pile of leaves, with no one knowing what she did or where she blew? And besides, how could she have gone to bed so early? For they couldn’t have spent more than a half hour or forty-five minutes eating dinner. (With me, ten minutes would do it.)
I set aside Elizabeth’s statement temporarily and went to Isabel’s. Her statement matched Elizabeth’s, and added a little more. Neither did she know how Mary-Evelyn had slipped out at some point in the night. “After dinner, Elizabeth played the piano and I sang; we often do this in the evening. Iris was in her room, sewing. We have no idea why the child walked to the other side of the lake and took out that rowboat. Why on earth would she do that? She never liked to swim or have much to do with water sports. But she did, and that was that,” Isabel’s statement read. “Iris woke us sometime much later, around midnight, I think. She told us Mary-Evelyn wasn’t in her bed.”
I turned to Iris’s statement: “I sleep poorly. That night I was up late sewing. I’m a dressmaker. I found I needed some material that I’d shown to Mary-Evelyn for a new dress I was making her, and remembered I’d left it with her. So I went across to her room.”
If she went “across” that meant the room exactly opposite was Iris’s. I remembered the rooms, how the second floor was laid out.
“That’s when I discovered she was gone,” Iris continued. “Her bedspread wasn’t turned down and her pajamas were under her pillow. She was gone.”
Elizabeth: “We dressed and we went looking for her. We searched the grounds around the house and when we didn’t find her, we searched the woods. It was a black night and we had only hurricane lamps and a flashlight.”
Isabel: “When we went up to bed, about nine it was, Mary-Evelyn was in her room, lying on the bed, reading. The door was open; we always insisted she keep the door open.”
(Imagine. Imagine. Never to have any privacy, always to have to be public. That might have killed her if the water hadn’t. It certainly would kill me.)
What I wondered was, if Mary-Evelyn’s room was across the hall from Iris’s and both doors were open, then how could Mary-Evelyn have sneaked out without being seen? I remembered the room that was Iris’s; I closed my eyes and pictured the furniture. Besides a bed and dresser, hadn’t there been an easy chair near the door of the room? And a sewing machine? I had concentrated on Mary-Evelyn’s room and hadn’t paid much attention to the other bedrooms, other than to just give them a quick look. The easy chair, I thought, could be seen through the open door, which must mean Iris would be able to look into Mary-Evelyn’s room. I would have to go back there and look. For if this were true, there is no way Iris would have failed to see Mary-Evelyn leaving her room.
I was disgusted with this Sheriff Whittle. You could only believe the sisters’ accounts if it was too much trouble not to believe them. The Sheriff—my Sheriff, that is—would have punched the living daylights out of the Devereau sisters’ statements. Their story made me wonder, too, why they hadn’t gone to more trouble over the details of Mary-Evelyn leaving the house. And why hadn’t they questioned Mary-Evelyn’s getting in that boat, if she was afraid of water? After all, she wouldn’t be around to contradict them. She wouldn’t be around for anything anymore.
The answer, I guess, is that they didn’t think their version of events would be questioned, no matter how fickle it sounded, and they were right. They were right. It all made me feel like crying.
I looked at the photographs again, wishing I could see Mary-Evelyn’s eyes, the eyes that were lost in shadow on the snapshot. But the eyes were closed. Her face was kind of heart-shaped, a valentine face. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose, not going wild over her whole face, as if even the freckling had been kept within strict boundaries. I rolled up the photograph and walked over to Maureen’s desk to get a rubber band to hold it. It fit into my gym bag easily. That I shouldn’t be stealing police documents was perfectly clear to me and perfectly meaningless. I stopped short of taking the entire file, settling for using the copy-maker in the room. I copied the sisters’ statements and also the doctor’s report, Dr. McComb’s. There wasn’t anything in it that would throw light on the case; he had already told me pretty much what was in his report. But I thought I would show it to him and see if it jogged something loose in his memory. I stared at the copier as it whicked away. It was very slow. When I had all of the sheets I wanted, I put the originals back into the folder and the folder back into the tile cabinet, where it had been before.
Where was Donny? I’d had the tile open for forty-five minutes or so. Not that I wanted to see him; I wondered if the Sheriff knew he left the office for long periods of time. Or that he left the office in the hands of someone who might want to go over police reports.
I sat down again to wait for the Sheriff. The office was strange with no one in it. Hanging on the opposite wall were framed pictures of the police forces in neighboring towns. These consisted of two policeman in Hebrides, eight in Cloverly (where the Davidows went for their clothes). The pictures must have been turn-of-the-century, for the unsmiling men were dressed in heavy, old-fashioned uniforms and several of them had handlebar moustaches. (This was a fad I was very glad had gone out of fashion.) The Sam Brown belts across the dark, heavy material seemed wider than the ones today.
In the room were four desks, the fourth minus anyone to sit at it. I guessed this desk was for the extra deputy that the Sheriff hadn’t acquired because the mayor wouldn’t allocate the money.
My head felt leaden. I must have dozed off. Was it dusk already? The light at the window had turned as gray as granite, and seemed heavy, too. Then I must have slept a second time, but surely not for more than a minute. What dragged me awake was the advancing voices. What time was it? I looked wildly around. Was it dinnertime?
48
Inadmissible evidence
The door to the office opened and the Sheriff walked in, followed by Donny, who was in the middle of bragging about how he’d “cuffed” the Snavely boys that morning.
“Emma?” The Sheriff was taken aback. It was hard to take him by surprise, but my being there certainly did.
“You still here, for God’s sake?” Donny said.
A look from the Sheriff cut him short. “She’s been here all afternoon. I told her you were over White’s Bridge way.”
“I was just waiting. There’s something important I need to talk to you about,” I said, holding up my gym bag.
The Sheriff turned on Donny. “You left her alone? Now, listen up, Donny: you don’t leave this office when somebody’s in it, and for God’s sake, you don’t leave Emma alone in it.”
I considered. There were two ways of taking what the Sheriff just said: one way was that he was concerned for my safety. I might be here alone when there was a jail break (the jail being on the opposite side of the building) and the escaping prisoners would find me here and hold me hostage. The other way of taking the Sheriff’s order was that he didn’t trust me around the filing cabinets. I guess I’d have to go for the second interpretation, since he was right.
He had by now removed his cap and uniform jacket and had sat down. He motioned me over to the chair beside his desk. “Must be really important if you waited all this time.”
I looked over to see what Donny was doing. He was at his own much smaller desk and was pretending to be busy pulling out drawers and taking files out. What he was really doing was listening. I shifted around so my back was to him and whispered to the Sheriff, “In here”—I unzipped my gym bag—“is evidence.” I pulled out the letter, the photo, the doll.
Frowning, the Sheriff picked up each in turn. “I’ve seen these things before, haven’t I? In that old Calhoun cottage?”
“Brokedown House,” I said, nodding.
Donny just couldn’t resist getting in on things. “You talking about that old falling-down place near Butternut’s?” Now he was out of his chair, moving toward the Sheriff. “Ain’t nobody lived there for years, not since old man Calhoun moved out. You recall him, Sam—”
“Donny. You were supposed to check out that fracas at the Red Barn. And that complaint from Asa Ledbetter about someone messing with his stock. Have you done it?”
“Well, I was just about to when—”
The Sheriff tossed him the keys to the cruiser. “Good. So do it.”
“It’s almost six—”
“We don’t keep regular hours, Donny. You want a nine-to-five, get a job at the Second National.”
It was so much a point for my side, I didn’t even bother gloating.
“I’ll say one thing,” said Donny. “She tells you anything that trans-pired here before I left, you better take it with a grain of salt, hear?”
How stupid of him. He’d just let the Sheriff know, just with that comment, that something had “trans-pired” which would put Donny in a bad light.
“See you later, Donny.”
Donny, unhappy, left.
“Okay. Now what were you doing in that Calhoun house? You aren’t going over there alone?”
“No, of course not. I was with—Mr. Butternut.” Something kept me from saying Dwayne Hayden.
“Same thing. What about these things?”
“The doll is wearing a dress like Mary-Evelyn Devereau’s the night she drowned. I mean—what’s that word the police and papers use when they can’t come right out and accuse someone?”
“‘Allegedly’?”
“That’s right. Allegedly drowned.”
The Sheriff looked surprised. “You’re saying she didn‘t’?” “I’ m saying she didn’t.” I weighted the words.
“A doctor has to sign a death certificate,” said the Sheriff,
“and drowning is pretty easy to identify. Especially when you take the body out of a lake.”
I wasn’t in the mood for his smile (for once). “It shows she drowned, but not where.”
Puzzled, he said, “You’re saying she drowned somewhere else?” He leaned forward, as if getting closer to me might explain me.
“If somebody held your head under water, it could look like you drowned, couldn’t it?”
Leaning back in his swivel chair, he nodded, but his eyes widened.
“When they put her in that boat she was already dead.” Never had I seen the Sheriff appear so astonished. His chair crashed forward. “What? You think the Devereau women killed that little girl?”
Since I had just said it, I sat there.
“Why? Why would they do such a thing?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, yet. I know they hated her, is all. I know from what Ulub said. He used to do odd jobs for them.” From his expression, I could tell the Sheriff might be just as suspicious of Ulub’s brainpower as most other people around here. “Ulub said he was looking through a window one night when he’d been raking leaves and saw Mary-Evelyn playing the piano and crying. The sisters were eating dinner. She wasn’t allowed to eat dinner with them that night. She was being punished. If nothing else, I think playing the piano is a funny way to punish somebody, don’t you?” But I could tell the Sheriff wasn’t putting much stock in what Ulub might say, and that made me angry. But I tried not to let it show. I tried not to get emotional, since emotions weren’t convincing.
“You probably don’t think you can believe what Ulub and Ubub say; but I know them better than you. They’re perfectly sensible and sane. Then there’s Imogene Calhoun.”
The Sheriff sat back. I must be switching topics too fast for him. He said, “You mean the ones who lived in that cottage?”
I nodded. “Imogene lives in Cold Flat Junction. When she was ten or eleven, she’d go with her sister Rebecca to the Devereau house. She told me how they mistreated Mary-Evelyn. Things like they wouldn’t let her feed her kitten. And other things.”
Instead of being shocked, he pondered. “But if this Imogene was only a little girl then, could she have misunderstood—?”
I shot out of my chair. “You don’t know anything about all of this and you’re already arguing against it! Why? It’s not as if you’d given Mary-Evelyn Devereau any thought because you haven’t.” I pointed at the filing cabinets. “There’s old cases in there. I’ll bet, I’ll bet one of them’s Mary-Evelyn’s. You don’t have any history. For you, they were just born yesterday. They came and went in an eye blink. But you’re wrong. They’ll be around forever. You’re wrong about Ben Queen, too. He never killed his daughter Fern.”
As if he’d only been waiting for this topic to arise, the Sheriff said, “What do you know about Ben Queen? What haven’t you told me?”
I was still standing. “You haven’t heard a thing I’ve said. All you want to know is stuff that you think will be more evidence for what you believe. As for my evidence, I’m taking it with me.” I picked up what I’d brought and shoved it back in my gym bag and walked to the door. But before leaving, I said, “You’re wrong about Ben Queen; you’re wrong about him killing Rose. And you’re dead wrong about him murdering Fern Queen. I know who killed her.” I yanked the door open.
The Sheriff had risen when I left his desk. “Who did, then?”
I turned. “Her daughter.” I added, “If you ever read a Greek play, you’d understand. Good-bye.”
49
Hell-bent
Her daughter.
Saying it out loud made me shiver in the icy light that looked more moon than sun. But who else could she be but Fern’s daughter? The Girl looked exactly like Rose Devereau, to go by Jude Stemple’s description of Rose. Fern, the mother, was a plain woman, and this was a case of what I guess is called beauty skipping a generation. It had skipped out on Fern altogether.
And Ben Queen was protecting the Girl, just as he’d protected Fern and kept her from the jail sentence he then had to serve. I remembered what he’d said when I told him that night I’d seen this Girl:Maybe this girl you saw, or thought you saw, maybe she was just a figment of your imagination.
He was pretending not to believe the Girl was his own granddaughter; I was pretending to believe he was right, when both of us knew who she was or, at least, that she was. He knew either that she’d shot Fern Queen or that she could be blamed for it. But why the Girl had shot Fem—it must’ve been
revenge for being abandoned.
I thought all of this as I was making for the Rainbow Café, for I wanted to talk to a sympathetic person. My anger at the Sheriff had not lessened one whit, but what added to it, or was maybe a feeling riding sidesaddle with it, was the misery at being let down. He had really let me down. Ben Queen had made me feel just the opposite when he’d said, If it goes too hard on you, turn me in.
The Sheriff, I thought, as I walked through the door of the Rainbow, had done just that—had ratted on me, had told the enemy where I was, had broken faith, had let me down. Had turned me in.
I sat down in the back booth. In a couple of minutes, Maud came hack carrying a cherry Coke to where I sat with my head in my hands. She sat down and placed her cigarettes on the table, as usual. When I said nothing but a mumble she tapped the pack and slid out a cigarette, lit it, and gave me time.
When the squall of tears started I dug the heels of my palms into my eyes to stop their flow, but of course, I couldn’t. Tears have a life of their own and pay no attention to whether you want them or not, or whether they’d embarrass you or not.
Maud went off; when she came back, she set something before me. I looked through my fingers to see if it was a bowl of chili, but it was only a glass of water, so I dug my hands into my eyes again. Finally, I raised my head and shook and shook it and the tears weren’t so much falling as flying off my face.
Maud handed me a handkerchief that looked so fresh and new I didn’t want to dirty it, though I did dab at my eyes with it; for nose-blowing I yanked a paper napkin from the stainless-steel holder on the table.
Cold Flat Junction Page 33
