Bellweather Rhapsody (33 page)

The elevator opens on four. Auggie is rumbling from the lowest point of his belly before Minnie has even turned her key in the lock and heard the tumblers click. He darts into Minnie’s room the second the door opens, tags jangling merrily, and attacks the intruder with both barrels of puppy kisses. If Minnie were using her best friend as a guard dog, she would be terribly disappointed.

The young woman sitting in the desk chair looks very familiar, but Minnie doesn’t place her until she sees a threadbare maroon blazer tossed across the desk, the same maroon blazer that all the staff at the front desk wear.

“You,” the woman says over the bright music of Auggie’s tags, “had better explain yourselves.”

“You’re from the front desk, right?” Alice says as she shuts the door. She holds out her hand. “My name is Alice Hatmaker. This is Minnie—”

“Graves, yes, I know who you are. That’s how I found your room. What I don’t understand is why you’re hurting a sweet old man.” She gives Auggie one final, gentle push away and crosses her arms over her chest. “Mr. Hastings is like a grandfather to me. What is your
deal?
”

Minnie stands up tall, having just realized she’s probably the oldest person in the room. The front-desk girl looks much, much younger without the maroon blazer. She has sloppy highlights, and her feet, out from behind the desk, are stuffed into bright green sneakers. Her ponytail is held back with a purple scrunchie. She might be even younger than Alice.

“I can’t tell you how awful I feel,” Minnie says, “for distressing him. We honestly had no idea he was going to get that upset. We were just trying to get a handle on.” No, that wasn’t right. “I wasn’t trying to do anything this weekend but—”

“Survive.” Alice juts her chin defiantly. “Solve the murder of Jill and the mystery of the Bellweather Bride.”

The girl pauses, then looks from Alice to Minnie and back again, and says, “You’re kidding.”

“Minnie here
saw
it, you know. Minnie was just a kid when it happened, but she saw it and she came back for answers. Who was the bride? Why is she still here in the hotel, claiming more victims?” Alice works the room, playing to the cheap seats. “Or, if it isn’t the bride, who’s celebrating the anniversary of her death with murder? Could it be—”

The girl holds up both her hands. She looks at the carpet and purses her lips and suddenly looks much older than either Alice or Minnie. “My Aunt Lily used to work here. In housekeeping, before she moved to Buffalo. Sometimes I’d come with her when she picked up her paycheck, and Mr. Hastings always had a little something for me. Piece of candy. A new postcard from the gift shop.” She lowers her voice. “‘Good afternoon, Miss Czeckley—checking in?’ He was nicer to me than either of my actual grandfathers ever were, both of them combined. He treated me, my Aunt Lily, he treated everyone like we were special.

“She
knew
the bride, my aunt. They were friends. Lily was there the night everything happened. She saw what you saw, Minnie. Unless you’re lying about that too.”

Minnie’s knees dip and she sits heavily on the bed. It squeaks.

“It’s not a ghost story,” the girl says. “It’s not a movie or a mystery or this big crime to be solved. It’s just a sad thing that happened. The bride, who I guess had never been all that normal, found out during her wedding reception that her husband was, you know,
with
another girl, was planning to run away with her, that he’d gone through with the wedding because he didn’t feel he could stop it. So she stopped him with a shotgun and hung herself from the sprinkler pipe in room seven-twelve. My aunt was one of the first to find the bodies, my aunt and Mr. Hastings. Only Mr. Hastings wasn’t just the concierge that night.”

“What do you mean?” asks Alice.

“He was the father of the bride.”

“The father,” whispers Alice, “of the
bride
.”

The girl nods. “They used to live in a big old house in town—Hastings and his wife and daughter. He’s still on the payroll, but it’s not like we really need a concierge in this dump anymore; we usually have about five guests in the whole freaking place. But he was friends with the manager back then, and everyone felt so awful about what happened that they let him move in for a while, and he just kind of . . . never left. He still goes to his old house sometimes. I can always tell when he’s been, because he comes back all dirty, like he’s been dumpster diving. I’m afraid to see what the place looks like. He’s so—” She rolls her eyes and taps her forehead with her fingertips in a gesture that can only mean cracked. Broken.

“My aunt told me his story when I started working here. She wanted me to know—she wanted someone to know, to understand Mr. Hastings. To look out for him. He doesn’t have any friends. Aunt Lily told me he used to be tight with this old librarian geezer, but then
he
died and left Hastings all his junk. He isn’t dangerous crazy, just sad crazy. You’d think he’d want to be as far away from here as he could get, but I don’t think he has anywhere else to go. He’s totally alone with a house full of someone else’s garbage. Sometimes I—” She swallows. “I probably shouldn’t, but sometimes he calls the front desk just to, like, chat. I can tell he thinks I’m someone else—he calls me Jess —and I kind of just go along with it. He’s lonely. He’s always been so nice to me, and Aunt Lily asked me to take care of him, and it’s so freaking boring at the front desk otherwise. That’s not so awful, right?”

She looks from Alice to Minnie and back to Alice, as though someone closer to her own age will be more understanding. Will forgive her for an act that, admitted to others, suddenly seems the exact opposite of her stated intent.

Minnie’s chest is so tight she can barely fill her lungs.

She remembers a butterscotch candy in a crinkly wrapper. A tour of the hotel that was offered but never taken (squash courts—what were
squash
courts?). A bow tie.
Save me a dance,
he called across the lobby. All her other memories from that first weekend at the Bellweather—all this time she thought the home horror movie she could never stop screening in her mind was a perfect recording. The whole picture.

This is why she came back. This is why she’s here at the Bellweather. When the bride killed her brand-new husband and herself, she took more than Minnie Graves’s childhood. She took most of her own father’s heart and mind.

Minnie was never the only survivor.

III

Rabbit presses Play. His Discman purrs to life in his hand, and he sets it down on the carpet. It hums beside his leg, a happy bee. A second later, Weezer fuzzes and buzzes angrily in his ears, moaning that they’re tired of having sex (so tired). Rabbit stretches his neck. He isn’t tired of having sex (you’d have to be having sex to be tired of it), but he is tired of
thinking
about sex. He is exhausted of thinking about sex, thinking about how he wants to have sex with other guys and feeling as though he has to
explain
this to people. He closes his eyes.

He’s been over all of this a thousand times in his mind. He doesn’t know why he’s going over it again now, especially since there are way more important things to be worrying about, like: his still-missing sister and the fact that she has his room key. He’s waiting outside his own door, hoping Dan doesn’t decide to go straight from rehearsal to dinner. He should be looking for Alice, canvassing the Bellweather for her, but he has Beatrice to consider. He can’t leave her alone; he doesn’t have the money—or more important, the heart—to replace her if she’s stolen. So all he can do is sit here and wait, and hope, and listen to the CDs tucked in the pouch of his sweatshirt.

And relive that rehearsal. There simply isn’t any room for fear in his heart or his head after that. It was the best rehearsal of Rabbit’s life. There wasn’t much to compare it with—when he thinks of performative bests, they seldom occurred during rehearsals—but Rabbit has never felt so wholly connected to other people, to sound, hell, to a long-dead composer, as he did onstage that afternoon. They were all floating on that tremendous sound they made, floating and then flying, and they’d played it again and again, like kids getting off and on and off and on a rollercoaster until they were dizzy and pukey with joy.

And Fisher Brodie—Rabbit loves him. He’s cruel and temperamental, disrespectful to both the music and the players, and whenever he really gets talking, all Rabbit can hear is Groundskeeper Willie. But he can’t deny that Brodie has squeezed something unexpected from him this weekend, something rebellious and alive, just as he can’t deny that sometimes Brodie sounds more like Sean Connery than Groundskeeper Willie, and that every low-slung vowel and purring
r
ignites a tickle in the bottom of Rabbit’s stomach as if he’s swallowed a cricket.

So yes: fine. It’s true. Rabbit’s crushing heart has revealed a talent for multiplicity.

But what he feels for Brodie is deeper than what he thought he’d felt for that maddening, terrifying Tenor. It’s truer. It’s closer. After they played the
maestoso
middle of “Jupiter” for the first time, from twenty feet away, over the heads of the flutes and the second-chair violas, Rabbit watched a light come on behind Fisher’s eyes, a light Rabbit hadn’t seen all weekend, a light that probably hadn’t been on in years. The light came on and Brodie remembered himself, and Rabbit loved him for not caring that it happened in full view of the orchestra. He let them see him, all of him. Let them see that he was lonely and frightened, barely more mature than the teenagers he was conducting, with no more idea what he was going to do with himself for the next fifty years. He was humbled. Grateful. He couldn’t have been more naked if he’d stripped down to his pale hide right there on the podium. Rabbit felt naked too—felt that they were all naked—but he didn’t feel any shame. He felt a warm kinship with all of his fellow players, and a loving awe for the man who brought them together.

Pinkerton
isn’t cutting it, isn’t speaking to him, isn’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know. He flips through his travel CD wallet and snaps the first disc of
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
into his Discman instead. A hallway is the essence of limbo, he thinks; it isn’t where you came from or where you want to go, but rather the place you’re stuck if you don’t have the key to the right door. (Or to any door.) He feels left back, left nowhere, and all he wants is to act. He wants to
change,
he wants to change his life. He wants to be brave, wants to climb up on a chair and let the truth rain down the way Mrs. Wilson did. He wants to be as naked and unashamed as Fisher Brodie. His Discman beeps cheerfully as he skips to the second track.

A wave of violins crashes into his ears and Rabbit grins wide between them. The song pours into him, pounding over guitars and a military drum—through his head, down his neck, roaring into the cavern of his body and pushing all the way out to his toes before pulling back to crash into the next swell. He has liked “Tonight, Tonight” since he first heard it, but now, vibrating with love and possibility, Rabbit takes the song into himself and hears it as his very own. It sounds like the edge of something new, something strange and beautiful and happening now in his life.
His life
. Rabbit, tonight, believes the impossible is possible.

He listens to it four more times before Dan finally shows up. In those few minutes, he notices tiny but definite changes. His heart is beating faster. His neck is looser, his shoulder, elbow propped on his bassoon case, feels softer. Even his clothes seem different. It’s as if before they were wearing him, and now he is wearing them. What the
hell
happened today? Was it just the great rehearsal? This new bloom of affection for Fisher Brodie?

Rabbit watches his roommate walk slowly toward him up the hall. He doesn’t know what’s coming, but he isn’t afraid. The future is going to be his.

IV

Natalie’s in love with the bartender. As soon as she entered the ballroom, she saw what looked like a rugby scrum in the far left corner—mostly college-age kids flashing licenses and stuffing them in their back pockets, surrounding a man in a black vest. Still bleary from a nap that had turned into four hours of the best sleep she’s ever had, at first she thought the bartender was a mirage.

He may as well be; he’s magic. He had a glass of red wine waiting for her the first time she pressed through the crowd, and he has continued to have glasses of red wine waiting for her every time she drains one and requires another. She feels like a jerk because she doesn’t have money to tip him, but the bartender doesn’t seem to care. He’s younger than she is, with a burnt-orange widow’s peak and sleepy brown eyes, and he can flip two bottles of booze, one in each hand, like a Hollywood gunslinger. When she approaches he says, “Hello, dear,” and when she leaves he says, “’Til we meet again,” and this is how Natalie finds herself hammered by the end of dinner.

And why not? What
isn’t
worth celebrating? Fisher listened, he knows everything, and he’s still here! She stood up to Viola! She threw that monster’s words right back in her face! Fisher’s hand on her leg holds her down, teasing, but not really. He peers at her between slitted lids as if he’s lost a contact lens or she’s become too hazy to see. He’s been looking at her like this ever since he came to collect her for dinner. She’d been half awake, still dreamy, when he knocked violently on her door.

“Hi,” he said, and kissed her, pushing her back into the room. She lost her balance but he caught her in both arms. “Feeling better? Did you eat lunch?”

She propped her chin on his shoulder. “No. I mean, yes, feeling better. No to lunch. So tired.”

Fisher set her firmly on her own feet. He held her face in his hand and a half and tugged playfully on the flesh beneath her eyes with his thumbs. “Look a little peaky still.” His own eyes were twitching, laughing, dancing. He had something to tell her. She could feel a tremendous confidence pressing itself against his throat, his tongue.