The Paragon Hotel

by Lyndsay Faye

  Evelina Vaughan.

  Rigid with the force of my discovery, I think back upon several small clues. Others less smallish than they are perfectly gargantuan. It’s another twenty minutes before Maximilian arrives back, boots crunching through the fallen debris, and by then I’ve calmed. He greets me with his slumped shoulders already rising in apology, and I can see he has nothing to tell.

  He can see that I do, however, and his steps quicken.

  “What’s the story?”

  I pass him the note. As he reads it, he exclaims, “For Christ’s sake, Alice—you done found this in my cabin? Where?”

  I deliver.

  “But what’s it mean?”

  “It means,” I say grimly as I stub out my cigarette, “that—although I don’t know quite what—I’m afraid that something perfectly ghastly is going on.”

  * * *

  —

  As we navigate winding roads in the car, I tell Max everything else. About Wednesday Joe’s spilling to me that Davy didn’t get on with Rooster, about reading Miss Christina’s letters and being given a firm friendship court-martial by Blossom Fontaine. Max is sore that I broke in too, and treats me to the range of Brooklyn vocabulary. But in light of our new discovery, he peters out, up tapping his thumb against the steering wheel.

  “It just don’t figure that either of them dames woulda hurt Davy,” he insists. “Blossom found the tyke behind a garbage bin, and Miss Christina practically raised him.”

  “Your biographical details are ever so fine.”

  “Well, then what the hell?” he bursts out. “Whadda we do?”

  “Again, I don’t know,” I admit. “But I’m in a tearing grand hurry to speak to Miss Christina privately.”

  Max splutters, and it is, dare I confess this, adorable. “Why not me? Why you, a broad what she barely knows?”

  “Because I am a broad what she barely knows.” Wearied and anxious, I lean an elbow against the automobile’s window. “And it is sometimes easier to tell a fellow broad something—especially a strange broad—than your honorable gentleman friends.”

  After arguing for ten minutes, as we reach the city proper in the diffuse morning sun, Max caves. Because he knows I’m right.

  This early, it’s as easy to slip off timber as to tell whereabouts Miss Christina will be: the kitchen. So after Max drops me in front of the Paragon like the chauffer he’s pretending to be, I hightail it thence. Rooster stands at the front desk, looking bone-tired.

  He studies his watch, and I carry on.

  The kitchen basks in the smells of butter and garlic and tomatoes, and the reason must be that Miss Christina’s cioppino is a featured luncheon today. She is alone. Her lithe arms make the smallest strain, and then pop. The oyster is shucked. She doesn’t look up, but that’s no surprise when I enter a room. Her lean face is tense under the folds of her kerchief.

  “Miss Christina?”

  The oyster spasms out of her fingers.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” I walk to the other side of the wide worktable.

  “No, you’re fine, Miss James,” she says hoarsely. “Hearing about all that business last night, crosses and lynch mobs? It’s got me spooked. Are you after a cup of—”

  “You know what happened to Davy Lee, I think?”

  Miss Christina slowly rises from where she retrieved the fallen oyster and leans to throw it away. It’s terrible how her already taut frame petrifies. She doesn’t turn around.

  “Can’t guess at what you’re talking about, Miss James. If you’ll excuse—”

  “You searched for Davy the first night. You made a terribly good show of it, but you never went back. And it certainly isn’t as if you have more duties than Mavereen Meader. Either you were in on it from the start, or you learned something. And—”

  Miss Christina has me by the forearm. Panicked people, yours truly ought to have reminded herself, are dreadfully quick. These are chef’s hands—I can feel my veins splitting.

  “Not here,” she hisses.

  “But—”

  “Hush you.”

  That one does the trick.

  Miss Christina drags me off. I follow, because yes, I’m desperately curious, but also because no, I have never sensed a murderess in her. If survival is your business, you grow ever so apt at recognizing when someone is about to kill you. I frankly don’t think Miss Christina capable, for all her prancing around rooms full of knives.

  Blossom could, though, I think. I learned that when Officer Overton tried to force himself on me. If Blossom loved you, she could fillet anybody who hurt you like the veriest mud-sucking catfish.

  Our destination turns out to be dry storage—potato sacks, hanging braids of peppers, bags of flour. Dust motes glint in the faint electric light. As my shoes scuff against a gritty cement floor, Miss Christina whirls me around to face her, and I barely keep from squealing.

  “All right, Miss James. You go on now and say what you want from me.”

  A small tug suggests she set my arm free. She complies.

  “I only want a general line on the Davy Lee situation. I’m on your side, as long as it’s a reasonable angle.”

  “What’s reasonable to the likes of you, Miss James?”

  “Well, yes, that’s fair.” I rub at my arm. “I can promise that if you pour out to me, I’ll never tattle any of it, supposing that’s possible.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “Then that would be because a child’s life is at stake, wouldn’t it?”

  Miss Christina starts crying. She grips the support of the nearest pantry shelf, and it’s about all I can do to continue.

  “Do you know where Davy is?”

  She shakes her head, flinching.

  “But you do know where he was taken?”

  “No!” Hearing how loud she was, she pushes her wrist against her teeth and unnecessarily hushes me with her other trembling hand. “I wish to holy Lord I did.”

  “You were there!” I urge. “The day he went missing, you were there, surely you have some ink—”

  “Miss James, I was there sure enough. But I don’t know what other cause you got to frighten me like this. I only want Davy back, I swear.”

  The heat in her tone makes me hesitate. I settle on delivering the least informative, most alarming words.

  “You stopped searching for him after one night. And I’ve accidentally—forgive the horrific bluntness—watched you slip letters in your pocket too quickly to suppose they were circulars for beef shanks. We live on the same floor. Again quite by accident, I happened upon you arguing with Rooster, and—”

  “God save me,” she gasps. “I’ll never live in a hotel again, never as long as I live. Only where there’s land. Space enough to keep people away.”

  “Away from your secrets?”

  She nods.

  “Is yours to do with Maximilian’s cabin?” I risk, betting on her connection to Rooster and his access to keys.

  She stares in shock. “How could you know anything about that?”

  “Max went up and searched the place. Turns out sometime in the awfully recent past, Davy was staying there. After he was . . . taken.”

  “No.” Her voice is low with horror.

  “Ask Max if you admire to. Or would you rather I tell him that you arranged to have Davy Lee kidnapped? I’ll just see if I can call for—”

  “It was Blossom,” she sobs, clutching at her own throat as if to bottle up the words.

  I can’t unhear it, can’t even be surprised.

  I wish I could be both, though. More than anything I’ve wanted since leaving New York.

  “She made me. No, that’s not . . . it was Blossom, though. Only please say that Davy’s all right. You’ve all been trying to track him, and me in my kitchen chopping lettuc
e while at the end of my wits. If what you say is true about the cabin, then it’s for certain—Blossom’s your woman. She loves him, though. I don’t understand.”

  Whatever scanty material remains in my stomach turns black, simmering with dread. I liked Blossom. Even loved her, probably, in the headlong way new friends sometimes have. I probably still do.

  “Tell me,” I request.

  She nods. Miss Christina and I take seats on a pair of sweet potato sacks, and she yarns me a tale.

  “First off, I’m not Miss Christina. I’m Mrs. Christina Charles of Washington, DC.”

  Once, far from Oregon in a land called Florida, a girl dreamed of the culinary arts. From stew to steak, she proved herself, studying under master chefs, and ending up cooking at a very fine house, serving a very fine family, under a very fine head butler by the name of Anton Charles.

  “Anton was . . .” Miss Christina’s frame seems, impossibly, to shrink. “He was handsome, no mistake, and always kind when he wanted something. Giving out a half day off, bottles of wine. I was younger then, prettier.”

  “He took notice of your charms, and you took the bait?”

  “Never figured it for bait—I thought it was love. And he was already working for the same folks as me, so that neither of us would have to up and quit and get hired someplace as a pair. When he bought a ring and I said yes, our boss agreed quick as anything.”

  This portion of the account contains no tears. Only blinks about as grainy as the Sahara must be.

  “Anton was better downstairs than upstairs.” She twists her apron between her fingers. “There was all the usual, mind. Long sleeves in high summer. Noses I had to go about explaining, yes, bloody again, yes, I’ve tried poultices. The time when I finally ran away, though, I’d been putting up a real fight, and he said if I didn’t settle down and let him whup me, then he’d whup my closest friend Sarah belowstairs for stealing spoons. It wasn’t common anymore to whup servants back then, but if the butler was powerful enough, he could get away with it. Who’d the boss believe, anyway?”

  “What a horrid circumstance.”

  “The devil was in me that time, and I kept scratching and biting and carrying on.” Now the tears come, hot and fast. “I couldn’t believe he’d really do it. But he did, he whupped her awful, and on top of that, he fired her without a reference to get back at me. I never saw her again.”

  It proves impossible not to reach out a tentative hand. She takes it, takes several seconds, and wipes her eyes with her sleeve.

  “I got as far away as I could,” she continues.

  “That has a familiar ring.”

  “When I first applied here, I used my real name. And when I explained what happened, I asked Mavereen if I could be Miss Christina hereabouts, no last name, since anything that called Anton to mind was a powerful woe, even the “Mrs.” She said yes, and made a fuss over me. But then about five years ago, Rooster got hired, and I . . . I fell for him. He fell right back. I been yearning to marry that man for so long, it’s put years on me.”

  “Well, whyever don’t you, then? Surely—”

  “She won’t let us!” Miss Christina stifles another sob. “Says in God’s eyes, I’m yet married, Miss James. Unless I get a divorce, or find out Anton’s dead. Says if we were caught fornicating, we’d be cut loose.”

  I’m about to ask how she could ever know such a thing when I think back—to Blossom’s cautions about debauches, to real warnings I half took for jokes.

  The maids.

  Mavereen’s eyes. Everywhere, throughout the Paragon Hotel. Who knew when one would be walking down a hallway, starched and alert? Who knew what they could hear from outside a thin door?

  How does a body dare to dirty bedsheets when you know exactly who’ll be washing them?

  “But that’s cruel. And absurd,” I say slowly.

  “She’s not cruel. But the Bible’s real important to her. More important than me and Rooster, that’s certain. Maybe . . . maybe more important than anything.”

  Still holding her hand, I rub at the back lightly. This puts Blossom’s aversion to discussing the Rose’s Thorn in a different, dare I say blinding, light.

  Mavereen Meader approves of many things, I hear her saying. She does not approve of others.

  “All right,” I continue. “Mavereen won’t allow any of the marital whoopee; meanwhile you’re dangling in each other’s sight like carrots every day. I take it the problem is money?”

  Staring at a garden she never expects to have, she nods. “Took me eight months scrubbing floors before I found this place. Rooster was lifting crates at the docks. And we want a farm so I can cook for us, sell produce and milk and eggs, maybe even start a grocery. He sends a little every month to an older couple keen to go live with their daughter. They’ve arranged he’ll get the money back if another buyer comes along. We’ll never pay them in time.”

  “You might. So I take it Blossom approached you with some sort of offer?”

  Miss Christina shuts her eyes in despair. “She wanted Rooster to let her into Max’s room so she could copy his cabin key, about six months back. Said she needed it so she could leave a present there for him and gave us twenty whole dollars to keep quiet. Twenty dollars for practically nothing. We thought it queer, but were glad of the extra savings. And we trust her. She said she knew we needed it. When Davy went missing, I recollected that she’d asked me to dress him in his hiking boots—which that walk didn’t warrant, but I didn’t fuss about. Then I remembered it was funny she’d paid us so much when we’d have done it for free. So I asked Max if he’d gotten any surprise gifts in the last six months and he didn’t know what I was on about. Then I went to see Blossom, and.”

  “What did she say?”

  She grimaces. “You know how she is. Said how dare I ask, and that I was crazy. That she just lost the key and forgot the notion. And that anyhow, we were paid plenty handsome to do it, so anybody we blabbed to would blame us.”

  “And?” I question, hearing worse stuck at the back of her throat.

  Miss Christina now stares numbly ahead, chewing her knuckle. “And that if we ratted, she’d tell Mavereen that Rooster and I were having an affair. We aren’t. We write letters.”

  I recall how frantic Blossom was when Max announced he was staying to search for Davy Lee. She’d timed the whole thing perfectly except for underestimating him. She’d wanted that cabin for her own purposes.

  It’s really ever so simple once it’s explained to you, here, I’ll do it gratis. You have to get on one of the trains before noon tomorrow or you’ll lose your job.

  Miss Christina and I sit there in the barely lit quiet. I was queasy enough before—but if Blossom paid Rooster and Miss Christina twenty entire dollars to copy a friend’s key, she’s about as guilty as Judas with a puckered kissy face and a jingling pocket. I feel like I’m about to be ill.

  “By the by, did Davy and Rooster have a quarrel? Wednesday Joe confided something of the kind to me.”

  Miss Christina huffs a humorless chuckle. “I was fool enough to tell Davy that Rooster wanted to marry me and that we were saving to buy some land and till it. That boy’s all heart, the precious critter. Cried for days at the thought of me leaving, since he rightly supposed he’d be staying put. Blamed the whole thing on Rooster. I been working on him slow, but . . .”

  I fall mute. This is a disaster of Noachian proportions.

  “What you going to do?” Miss Christina asks tremulously.

  “Might I ask you one more question?”

  “If it’ll help.”

  “You’ve worked her wedding, rolled up your sleeves at many a soup kitchen with her, taken Davy to her Weekly Betterment classes. Do you know where Miss Evelina Starr went to college?”

  She frowns. “No, I reckon I don’t. But it was around San Francisco. Why?”

  A strik
e for the bowler, and the pins clatter to the floor.

  And all thanks to the French language, no less.

  Blossom informed me that she met Evelina Vaughan here in Portland shortly after her arrival. Evelina, when asked about cutting a rug with her bosom mate, mentioned that Blossom used to sing French heartbreakers in cabarets, and that she missed hearing them.

  But my new dancing pal Gregory, at the Rose’s Thorn, said he saw Blossom in San Francisco performing the same numbers—and that here, she never sang any more French love songs. Which goes right in line with why Blossom claimed to have quit San Francisco in the first place.

  My true love left. My heart was broken. And what in the wide world was I to do?

  There was even the picture of a younger Davy I found in Blossom’s backstage vanity—a fine young sprout, standing before a pastel city that seemed fairy-tale lovely and oddly familiar. It was San Francisco exactly as Blossom described it to me. God knows where she had the picture taken. But quelque sentimentality.

  So. The way the deck stacks to my eye, Blossom and Evelina met when the latter was in school and cutting every caper her pretty head could dream up. She was fraternizing with blacks for the first time, did the horizontal number with some fine fellow. Maybe a dancer, maybe a jazz hound, a painter, God knows, point is that the session had staying power. She was pregnant and alone, but with a friend. A friend who loved her. Unrequitedly, but none the less madly for lack of reward.

  What could Evelina do? She couldn’t very well return to Portland with a mulatto baby, or stay at college with her belly button making swift tracks from her spine. Clever, madcap Evelina and lovesick, fierce-hearted Blossom hatched a doozy of a scheme, though in its way a classic: take the show on the road. They went to Seattle together. Evelina popped out a wee one, delivered him to Blossom, very likely not behind a trash bin, and they reunited in Portland because Evelina’s family and Blossom’s uncle resided there. And in a final stroke of genius, the veriest coup of the gras, the friends invented Mrs. Evelina Vaughan’s Weekly Betterment program. Davy was safe with Blossom, Evelina could see her son, Blossom could see Evelina, and no one the wiser.