Hotel Paradise (37 page)

I felt really uncomfortable thinking I might be walking around with this parcel of knowledge that I couldn’t deliver. Especially knowledge the Sheriff—of all people—would want. I consoled myself by thinking that surely he’d know by now who the dead woman was.

Jude Stemple seemed able to read my mind, the doubts in it, the uncertainty, and he was looking at me long and hard. He gave me a sharp little nod, in answer to my own nod, as if we were sealing a pact.

I started off and then turned back just for a moment. “What did she look like? Rose Devereau, I mean.”

For a few heartbeats, he bowed his head, then looked up, as if thinking deeply. “Like I said, she was beautiful. Real pale blond hair she had—it looked like that light up there on those little leaves.” He nodded upward toward the light filtering through the branches. “And kind of lakewater-gray eyes that was always changing color. She was tall and slim and so pale and blond, why, she was almost transparent.” He had risen from the porch and was dusting off his pants and shrugged. “Well, I ain’t much of a describer.”

Yes, he was. He had just described the Girl.

I think I had known he would. From Rose to Fern to the Girl. She had to be Fern’s daughter. Sure of the answer now, I asked: “What about Fern Queen’s own kids? Where are they?”

He shrugged. “Fern never had no kids.” Then, giving a smile and a little wave, he turned and walked back through the door.

I stood there, staring after him, rooted.
Fern never had no kids.
Probably I’d be standing there still, I was so surprised, except I had to get to that train.

•   •   •

Since I wasn’t dawdling, twenty-five minutes was time enough, but not to stop and make a survey of the white house with the yellow shutters. I noticed the seedlings were gone from the porch. I also noticed that no one appeared to be behind the curtains.

When I finally reached the railroad station I had five minutes to spare and sat down on the same bench. I went back to gazing off across the empty land where nothing moved and nothing changed. Time had stuck in my throat like one of those popcorn kernels that drive you crazy when you’re watching a movie. You can’t reach it with your fingers; you can’t swallow it. It just sticks and then you forget about it and then it disappears.

I was so sure I had made the connection and had been able to trace the Girl back to a beginning. Now to find I hadn’t was a bitter disappointment.

Or was it?

What had kept me from asking someone—the Sheriff, at least—about her? What had kept me from describing her to someone like Dr. McComb after I’d seen her across the lake? And what had kept me from asking Jude Stemple if he knew such a person?

Even when I heard the train coming from a long way away, I still sat there, staring off at the horizon, where the late afternoon light fretted the blue line of woods. Cold Flat Junction seemed to me not so much a place as the memory of a place. This upset me no end. For now she seemed like the memory of a Girl.

The train rounded the bend way down the track, sounding at that distance as mournful as the whippoorwill in Flyback Hollow. I got up, creaky as an old lady, and crossed over the wooden planks to the other side, where there was another bench.

Louder and closer, the train seemed to be picking up speed, but was actually slowing down, still some distance away.

I looked across the tracks now to the bench where I’d been sitting just a moment ago. In my mind’s eye I saw myself sitting there; it was very strange, like an afterimage left on your eyeballs when you glance away from a blinding light.

I sat there until the train roared in and cut me in two.

I was back again among the salads. I could hardly remember the train ride, or getting on and getting off, or my walk along the boardwalk back to the hotel. I remember stopping a minute or so to sit on one of the covered benches in cold shadow where the boardwalk crosses over the rocky stream. I think it might have been built there so that people could take shelter from the rain.

I sat on the boardwalk for so long that it was nearly six when I appeared in the kitchen, where there was a lot of noise and activity, the sort that always went with a dinner party. I could never understand why a dinner party of perhaps ten or twelve people caused more excitement and anxiety than having fifty guests all sitting apart and at separate tables. The salad bowls were filled with chunks of iceberg lettuce and the plates of onion and pepper rings and tomato wedges were sitting on plates ready for arrangement. These had already been sliced by Anna Paugh, who, I sometimes feel, thinks it very unfair that I always get stuck with the salads. Anna Paugh is truly nice and nothing like Vera, although she’s probably just as good a waitress. Anna is small and wispy, where Vera is tall and (I think the word is) “imperious.” Special salad plates had been set aside for the Helene Baum party. These were deep green glass and each now held a Bibb lettuce. Lola Davidow was handling the French dressing ladle and talking about the Bibb lettuces as she always did, as if they were emeralds, or had been rooted out of the ground by a pig’s snout, as my mother said truffles were. I’ve never seen a truffle in my life and wish I’d never
see another Bibb lettuce. It was all right with me, though, for nothing had to be done to the precious little things, nothing added except for French dressing from the crock. And this task was not to be entrusted to me, but was, as I said, given over to Mrs. Davidow herself, as if she were the only one with the talent. The real reason she undertook this was because she had to feel she was necessary to the success of a dinner party, which, of course, she wasn’t. My mother was all geared up for the dinner party, smoking more cigarettes than usual, and calling orders out, and lecturing us to remember: if the food didn’t get in there hot, it would be the cook (meaning her) who got the blame, not the waitresses (a lot
she
knew). On these occasions, part-time help was called in. Mrs. Ikleberger acted as “undercook”—why, I couldn’t imagine. All Mrs. Ikleberger does is churn around and get in my mother’s way, so that my mother is always shoving her out of it. Mrs. Ikleberger opens her lunchroom beside Greg’s tavern in dead winter and serves lunches to school kids. Will and I would eat there on those rare occasions that we stayed here through the winter and went to the Spirit Lake grammar school. She was a cheery woman to have around on those cold, cold winter days when the snow was so deep it sucked our feet down into deep pockets and the frigid air seemed to turn all we saw in the distance to a smoky blue.

Right now Mrs. Ikleberger was making her usual noise with clattering pots and pans and shouting to Walter to bring over washed ones, which of course he did, though it seemed to take him an hour to remove himself and the pot or pan from the roving shadows and cross the dozen feet between dishwasher and stove. Dinner parties meant too that even Walter had temporary help. This was Paul’s mother. It was interesting listening to Walter and her talk; I would hang around the dishwasher sometimes, just for that. No words ever seemed to get beyond her tonsils; it was as if they didn’t travel up to her teeth and tongue. Walter, because his words came molasses-slow, sounded a little like her. They were a perfect match and got along well together in spite of their troubled talk, or maybe because of it.

Sometimes she brings Paul with her, much to my mother’s dismay. He calls my mother “missus” and every ten minutes is standing with his chin just reaching the serving counter, plunking a big plate down and asking, “Missus, can I have dinner?” Every once in a while his mother yanks him away and boxes his ears and threatens him with
awful punishments, but Paul doesn’t appear to mind. He doesn’t pay any attention, either. So a lot of his time is spent tied to a wooden chair out on the back porch, where he likes to pick the threads out of his brown shoes until the shoes fall apart.

This evening I stood there in a spell of noises, seeming to be hypnotized by the salad makings. Actually, I barely saw them, for my mind was back in Cold Flat Junction, moving between the station and the Windy Run Diner and Flyback Hollow. In one way, I felt I had found out an awful lot; in another way, not much. For I still couldn’t be
sure
that the dead woman was this Fern Queen (although it sounded extremely likely). No one at the hotel had as much as mentioned the woman, so I assumed that her identity was still unknown around La Porte. It amazed me that this dead woman hadn’t yet been identified in a place as small as La Porte and a place even smaller like Cold Flat Junction. People must not have the sense they were born with. Here was a woman who left Cold Flat not to be seen again for four or five days, and here was a woman turned up dead outside of La Porte nearly four days ago. They both answer to the same description. My Lord, how smart do you have to
be
to put two and two together?

The only answer to that was that the Sheriff (who is certainly smart enough) simply didn’t know anyone was missing and that the Queens had never reported it. Maybe they thought Fern had just gone off on her own. Maybe the Queens did not read newspapers. I told myself that I wouldn’t be breaking my promise if all I did was to tell the Sheriff I’d heard that a lady over in Cold Flat Junction was missing and not tell him
how
I’d heard it. And then I realized that I really
had
heard it in Britten’s that day when I’d first seen Jude Stemple.

I felt relieved, thinking about this. I started slapping onion rings on the iceberg lettuce for the “ordinary” salads and felt just as glad that my role tonight would be merely as Vera’s “helper.” And Miss Bertha, who I had to wait on as usual, for she demanded it. You’d almost think she liked me, but I knew that wasn’t the case; she just didn’t want to have to get used to yelling at somebody else. Anna Paugh would be serving all of the other guests; there were four other reservations, which would mean about ten or fifteen people.

Naturally, I had already looked over the preparations to work out the menu—meaning what I would get to eat at the end of it all. Roast lamb, oven-browned potatoes, and green peas. To put it that way, though, is something like saying a sunset is red, blue, and yellow. It
does nothing by way of describing exactly how the three things appear individually (the crusty edge of the browned potatoes, for instance), and certainly not how the colors mingle and melt into one another. To my mother, a meal must be “composed.” Broccoli never is to be eaten with lamb or roast beef. Nor browned potatoes with chicken. Tomatoes must never appear with pimiento. Things like that. It is, as I’ve said, an ART. That was the evening’s menu, and the only choice I would have to make (as would the diners) would be between brown gravy and mint sauce. That sounds easy, but then so did that Solomon-and-the-baby business, until the details were revealed. The brown gravy was as smooth and glowing as the newel post at the bottom of the lobby steps; the mint was fresh and picked from a huge wild acre of it out behind the icehouse. (Since Mrs. Davidow came to the Hotel Paradise, there is considerably less of it around. She is extremely fond of mint juleps in the summertime.) My mother told me once that all she does to make her mint sauce is to crush a handful of mint and add water, vinegar, and sugar. Anyone can do it, she says. Oh, wrong, wrong, wrong. For some reason, if my mother fills up a cup with water and pours the cup into a glass or a jug, something happens to the water. It is like a woman passing through a room in a long gown of silk and chiffon wearing some ethereal perfume. Even after she passes, a bit of the silk train can be glimpsed on the doorsill, and the scent floats back.

She is like a sorcerer. Unfortunately, I am not the sorcerer’s apprentice.

While I thought about Cold Flat Junction and mint sauce, the salads somehow got composed and removed to the dining room. One couple had turned up and Anna Paugh was moving back and forth serving them. Where Miss Bertha was, I didn’t know. Maybe she’d had a stroke. I tried to banish this hope. And the dinner party was late. My mother fumed; Vera regally smoked a cigarette and adjusted her high starched cuffs. To my mother, a dinner party being late was some kind of heresy. Food, she said, dried out. I never saw any evidence of this, but to her immaculate eye I’m sure it was the case.

Miss Bertha, who most of the time was completely unconscious of what went on around her, always seemed to know when she was least wanted and would be the most trouble for people and came into the dining room right before the Baum party. They were so close on her heels she might have been the Baum flag bearer.

“That old fool!” exclaimed my mother, banging a pan of hot rolls down on the counter. Then she said, “Find out what she wants, quick! And then just slap it down in front of her!”

I sighed. “Quick” and “Miss Bertha” never did go together, but I could understand my mother’s desperation. Now I would be drawn away from the Baum dinner and helping out Vera. Vera (of course) announced that she “could manage,” as if it made absolutely no difference whether I was around or not. Then Anna Paugh bustled through the swing door and said that she would wait on Miss Bertha, whether Miss Bertha liked it or not, because I was absolutely necessary to the smooth running of the Baum party. She didn’t use those words, but she certainly conveyed that idea. Well, I thought that was wonderful, and Vera could have killed Anna Paugh.

Vera shouldered her way into the dining room through the swing door with her tray of consommé bowls held high on one palm. I followed with the Bibb lettuce salads. Helene Baum was trying to rearrange her guests and no one was paying any attention to her. They were all drunk, naturally, and none drunker than Lola Davidow, who had seen to it that the rest of them followed her jovial lead. Mrs. Davidow was right there, grabbing another dinner service for herself off a nearby table, and starting to squeeze herself in between the mayor’s wife and Ken King, the pharmacist, who was laughing and yelling at the top of his lungs down the table to the doctor. It amazes me how Lola Davidow can get away with inviting herself to people’s dinner parties, but she’s done it more than once. No one seems to care. It’s true that Mrs. Davidow can actually be good company, and I suppose that people like to appear to be open-minded and cheery and up for an adventure.