Fadeaway Girl (18 page)

There was a light on inside. Several cars were parked along the street and one of them I'd never seen before. It was a red convertible with a black top and looked like one of those snappy foreign models. With all the time I spent in Slaw's Garage, I should have been able to name it, but I couldn't.

“Okay, go to the hotel.”

I thought I'd never hear the end of this detour. It even overshadowed Creon for five minutes.

I handed over the fare plus the “detour charge” and a twenty-five-cent tip.

“Thanks, only I wish you'd've told me about that play. I definitely would've gone.”

“That's too bad. Well, don't worry, you'll probably be in the next one, too.”

With Delbert excitedly hurling questions at my back, I was up on the porch and through the door. I knew I'd set myself up for years of questions by making up that story and taking that “detour,” but some stories are, well, irresistible. And so are some detours.

 

Mrs. Davidow was back in our kitchen, martini in one hand, ladle in the other, stirring the salad dressing. The ash of her cigarette was dangerously positioned over the brown crock. When I saw the iceberg lettuce quarters arranged on nine salad plates, I assumed there was a dinner party and asked whose.

“Was. They just canceled. It's the Browns. I told Bruce Brown it was too near dinner to cancel, that your mother had spent hours over the dinner and that our cancellation fee was thirty percent.”

“What cancellation fee? We've never had one.”

She tapped the ladle against the stone crock as if she were calling up spirits. Her face was red, half from martinis and half from anger. “We do now.”

“What did they order?”

“Surf 'n' Turf. The lobster tails were half defrosted when he called.”

“Then who gets the salads?”

“There's a party of four coming at seven. Bringing their own wine. Vera's waiting on them.”

Seven. That meant they'd be sticking around until eight-thirty or nine—if they were drinking. The hotel didn't have a liquor license; we weren't allowed to sell it, but guests were perfectly free to bring their own. But that way, the hotel didn't make any money on drinks. So Lola Davidow got around that by charging for setups—ice, soda, ginger ale, and so forth. I could see she was trying to think of a way to charge for wine.

“Who else?”

“Only a couple staying the night. They'll be in around seven-thirty. Vera will be waiting on them too.”

I wasn't good enough for the new people, but that was okay with me; it meant all I had to do was take care of Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright and Mr. Muggs, who was staying overnight.

Mrs. Davidow said she was going to the office, which meant I wouldn't be able to get at the liquor supply.

I would have to use my emergency drink. I'd started hiding an extra drink behind the block of ice in the icebox. It was called a Jack Frost, made from Jack Daniel's and brandy and orange juice, and as it wouldn't have time to defrost completely, that explained the “Frost” part. I took it out now, making sure no one was looking, and set it behind the Waring blender.

Of course, there was a chance my mother would find it back there if the ice melted, but Walter and I were ready to say it was Lola Davidow's. She'd say she hadn't put it there, but we'd say she just forgot, which wasn't true, but it sounded that way.

Dinner was Roast Lamb with Brown Gravy or Mint Sauce. Miss Bertha always wanted her lamb very rare; my mother always refused to serve rare lamb. Tonight the same request was made, the same refusal given. “If she likes, Walter could go out and kill a rabbit for her. I could serve that with a nice tularemia confit.”

Walter hee-hawed. Miss Bertha refused to eat. That was fine with me.

While this noise went on, I served Mr. Muggs his dessert. We both looked at it with respect. It was Neapolitan Tart, one of my mother's masterpieces, half of it a caramel-ribboned ice cream, half flaky pastry, all in a crushed almond shell with hot caramel sauce.

I went to the kitchen and collected my Jack Frost and hurried it up to Aurora's room.

“W
hat if she died that very day?” said Aurora, eyes glittering.

“You mean died, or was killed?”

“Either. Both.” Her hand waved my question away. “I don't know what I mean, tryin' to fly on one wing. Here—” She held out the glass.

I didn't have another Jack Frost on ice. “I can't get at the whiskey if Mrs. Davidow is in the office.”

This had no effect on the outstretched hand. She said, “More likely she's out at her still. Go on. You'll think of something.”

“I'll think of something later.” I wasn't moving. “You're saying you think maybe the baby died or was killed and Mr. Woodruff and maybe Imogen thought up the kidnapping as an excuse? But staging a kidnapping wouldn't be easy.”

“Well, it'd be a lot more trouble to explain a dead baby, wouldn't it?”

“She's not dead.”

Aurora was now pretending not to hear, since I wasn't running to get her refill. She started humming tunelessly and fiddling with the pearl button of her crocheted glove.

“I've told you about a girl I keep seeing who's the very spit of Morris Slade. She has to be related.”

She stopped then and looked at me. “You mean just because you saw someone who looked like him you're saying it has to be that baby? Don't be daft. What makes you think she was the only one?”

I looked blank. I felt blank.

Aurora took my silence as an opportunity to hold out her glass again. I was in such a blank state, I took it.

Lola Davidow was in the back office, and I heard ice cubes clinking against glass, so I guessed she had her ice bucket there. There was no chance of getting to the liquor supply, and I walked on back to the kitchen.

Walter was by himself, back in the shadows, drying a big platter. I sighed and set down Aurora's glass. “Mrs. Davidow's in the office, so I can't get Aurora another drink.” Not that I cared much; I was too tired to care.

Walter dried his hands and said, “I'll be back.” He took the kitchen shears off a nail and went out the side door and the porch and stairs that led down to the gravel road that circled the hotel.

I went out after him, letting the screen door bang. It was dark by now and I stood looking at him below, seeing his light shirt moving across the dark grass. He was cutting something with the kitchen shears, but it was almost as if he were scything, the way his arms moved back and forth. It put me in mind of a painting in the library of men with scythes, rising or falling, cutting wheat. It was painted by a famous artist. He painted a lot of other pictures too, a lot of boats and seas, but I liked the one on the farm. I couldn't remember the artist, even though he was famous. It depressed me, to think fame was so fleeting. Of course, if he had only people like me to remember him, no wonder it was fleeting.

So I watched Walter bending and moving, bending again, and heard the occasional snip of the shears, and it suddenly struck me that this was more real than anything else that had happened that day. The rest of it now seemed weightless as cornsilk, words and events blown about like the seeds of puff balls, colors that were as filmy as the way sun reflected on water.

I might have said, as people do, “It really opened my eyes.” Or as Father Freeman liked to talk about “seeing through a glass darkly,” though he didn't say it again to me after I told him to get a window washer. There's a word for things coming together, but I don't know what. It was a little like the rush of colored splinters you see when you turn a kaleidoscope and then the splinters rush to form a pattern.

What was the pattern here?

Then pretty soon Walter was clumping up the stairs holding nothing more than a big bunch of mint.

“Walter, you were out there long enough to cut an acre of corn.”

He laughed his slow laugh. “I was tryin' to find the good-leafed ones. Anyways, don't bother yourself no more; I'll get it.”

With that peculiar message, Walter swept by me and in through the screen door. I watched him walk over to the door on the other side of the kitchen and go out.

I went down the stairs and along the gravel to the Pink Elephant. I needed a place to think. The hotel cat materialized out of the darkness and pushed in after me. His smoky fur was damp from maneuvering through the same grass and mint Walter had been moving through, but the cat would have been searching out field mice. In a way they were alike; they had an object; they had a purpose. They just went and did. They didn't have a story.

The cat enjoyed lying on the table beside the hurricane lamp after I lit the candle. His pale eyes would flicker like the flame. He settled down now, paws battened to his chest, eyes slowly blinking, looking as if he'd come in for the purpose of sending me a message:
“Your thinking is murky.”

I was so downcast because I just couldn't take on the burden of this new complication—that Morris Slade could have had other children. Why would he? I frowned. And was it to do with his being a “playboy”? I had to admit I wasn't completely clear on the whole subject of sex, but whether I was or not, babies were still being born.

But then I told myself that Aurora just tossed this out about Morris Slade the way she tossed the comment out about Miss Isabel Barnett being completely undependable. For Aurora, it was just something to say.

The story had already gone down four different paths, none of them, apparently, right. First, the Girl was Ben Queen's granddaughter, meaning Fern's daughter; next, she was the Slade baby, Fay; next, Baby Fay wasn't even
at
the Belle Ruin that night—or any night—and so hadn't been kidnapped; next, the baby was there and there'd been this bogus kidnapping.

And now there was a fifth possibility: Fay hadn't grown up to become this girl at all.

The Girl I saw was somebody else.

And the awful question: Was she there at all? Or was I seeing things?

I just didn't know anyone to ask because I didn't know any crazy person, except Ree-Jane, and she probably wasn't really, but then what was all of her talking and laughing when no one was around—what was that about? She acted as if she were talking to some invisible person, smiling and sometimes outright laughing. Well, it made no difference. I could imagine asking Ree-Jane's advice; it would delight her no end that I thought I might be seeing things and she would certainly assure me that I was.

So it was better to go back to thinking that the Girl was not the person I'd thought she was, that she was just a girl, a visitor, a person who came and went, who appeared and disappeared, a pretty girl in a milky blue dress; or in red velvet, mailing a letter; or in black cotton, kneeling at a keyhole. A girl who melted into the canvas, a Fadeaway Girl.

T
he hand holding the hat was fine and manicured, the nails smooth and squared off; the hat was straw. I don't think I'd ever seen a man with a straw hat before. This one was as fine as the hand holding it.

The suit was white and seemed to go with summer. That's what he made me think of, summer and the sea.

He was leaning against the first of the dark wood booths in the Rainbow, his back to me, so that I could study him for many minutes without seeing his face. He was talking to someone sitting in the booth; I couldn't see who. I wondered why he didn't sit down. Well, no, I didn't; he didn't seem like a Rainbow Café kind of person.

He was tall, about the Sheriff's height, and probably handsome. I wondered if my life was to be filled with only handsome men, but then my eye fell on the regulars at the counter, Bubby Dubois and the Mayor, and I stopped wondering.

I was drinking a chocolate soda and trying to write the next installment of my
Conservative
piece. But I kept looking at the man with the straw hat. His arm was up and resting along the edge of the high-backed booth; his other hand turned the hat slightly, this way and that. The hat had a dark blue band around its crown. His ears lay flat against his head and his hair was different shades of light. His clothes and his whole back looked elegant.

I hadn't written a sentence and was pulling not much more than air up through my straw when Maud slid into the booth.

She whispered, “You know who that is?”

I stopped blowing through my straw and shook my head. “No, but I'm guessing it's Morris Slade.”

She nodded. “Mayor Sims told me it was.” She gave a little nod of her head, backward as if toward the counter.

“Who's he talking to?” I still was having a hard time believing he was here, in La Porte.

“Isabel Barnett.” She scrunched over to the end of the table so that she could take a look at him, or his back.

He'd been standing there a good ten minutes, so it was more than a “Hi, nice day” kind of talk. What could she have to say of interest to Morris Slade?

“Why do you suppose he's back?” said Maud. “He hasn't been here since their baby was kidnapped.”

“Or at least that's the last time we knew of.”

“Don't complicate things,” she said.

Why not? I wondered, watching her tapping a cigarette out of her pack of Camels.

“Lord, but he's handsome.”

“I'm going to the courthouse. Excuse me.” I slid across the seat and pushed out. He was two booths ahead, and as I passed—making sure I crowded him a little—I dropped my change purse, bent down to get it, then up and said excuse me to him and hello to Miss Isabel. But I still didn't look at him because I was sure he'd know how hard I was trying to.