Fadeaway Girl (3 page)

Ree-Jane liked to point out at least once a day that I was only a “cub reporter, not a real one,” but given Ree-Jane's notion of reality, I was justified in not paying much attention to her opinion.

I walked on to the Rainbow.

 

Donny Mooma, the Sheriff's deputy, was in the Rainbow, standing in front of the bakery case with a doughnut in his hand, talking to Wanda Wayans, the new waitress. We didn't like each other, Donny and I. He was too dumb to be doing police work, and I never understood why the Sheriff kept him. Maybe Donny was what's called a “political appointment.” The Moomas had been involved in police work in the county for several generations. There was a Mooma who'd been sheriff when the Slade baby had been kidnapped, but I guessed he must be dead now, or maybe the Moomas never died, just walked the earth forever. Donny walked around kind of dead.

I should say
alleged
kidnapping and for that matter even alleged baby, for, as I said, I wasn't even sure there'd
been
a baby. One of the reasons I wanted to go to the Rainbow Café was to see if Miss Isabel Barnett was there. I wanted to ask her again if she'd really seen Baby Fay in that carriage. I would put it, of course, in a more polite way, not meaning to suggest that Miss Isabel's word was unreliable. Just because she was a kleptomaniac didn't mean you couldn't count on her to know the difference between an empty carriage and one with a baby in it.

I said hello to Wanda and she said hi back. Donny grunted. He was still smarting over the time I got him out of the office (so that I could inspect police files) by telling him he'd won the doughnut competition across the street, that is, in the Rainbow Café. Of course, there wasn't any competition, but he fell for it and left without locking the office, telling me I wasn't to go in it. Well.

Donny was waving his doughnut with chocolate sprinkles around and talking six to the dozen about some “crazy guy” walking around town yelling at people.

“I says to Sam we should take him in for disturbing the peace is what he's doing—”

“Who's doing?” I asked.

Donny treated me as if I were invisible. “I said, ‘Sam, the man's a menace, a m-e-n-a-s-e—' ”

“C-e,” I said, looking at the doughnut display.

He glared at me and ate some of his doughnut while he thought up an insult. “You think you know it all, don't you?”

“No. I just know how to spell ‘menace.' ”I decided on a doughnut with different-colored sprinkles. I would've preferred chocolate, but I wasn't going to eat the same kind Donny was eating.

But Donny couldn't think of any retort so he went on about the crazy person. As he munched the rest of his doughnut, he said, “ ‘The guy's out there scarin' little kids,' I says to Sam—”

“Not me,” I said, going to the unusual extreme of allowing myself to be lumped with little kids.

“Oh,
you-u-u-u,
” he said, snarling and picking up his mug of coffee from the counter, which was next to the glass cases. There were stools lining the soda fountain counter, but the idea was that Donny was just too busy, too much in demand, to take the time to sit at the counter.

“I don't think he's crazy,” I said, wondering who it was I was defending.

“You? What do you know about it? You don't even know what that sign he's carrying means. Ha!”

I could have just asked what he was talking about, but why do that when I could squeeze it out of him without his knowing. I'd already found out the “crazy” was carrying a sign. I asked Wanda for the doughnut I wanted. As she got it out of the case, I said to Donny, “It's pretty obvious what it means, isn't it?” I thanked Wanda and took my doughnut and looked at Donny as I munched on it.

“Obvious?
Obvious?
” He was standing over me with a mean look in his lizard eyes and one thumb hooked in his belt while the other hand waved his coffee cup around. “Well, supposing you just tell us what the expression ‘end of days' means, then?”

I licked a few sprinkles from my doughnut and looked thoughtful. “One thing is, it's not an ‘expression.' ” That was good, I thought. That made it sound more like I knew what was going on than if I'd just waded in explaining “end of days,” which I didn't know what it meant either. And it was always safer to say what something wasn't, rather than say what it was. Since I had no idea what “end of days” meant. If I knew the context, now . . . Was Rudy's or the haberdashery having a sale? Was the county trying to get liquor legal again and now some old prune that didn't believe in drinking was going around shouting “It's the end of days” about it? Having a liquor store right here in La Porte would save Lola Davidow the trouble of having to go into the next state to get hers. For her, it would be the beginning of days.

“What d'ya mean not an expression?”

Donny should watch more
Perry Mason.
Perry was always telling greenhorn lawyers you should never ask a question of a witness if you don't already know the answer. “I mean ‘end of days' means what it says. It's literal.” Before he could ask me again what it meant, I said, “I don't see why you think this person is scary.”

“Oh, you don't? Well, a course, what with all your exploits lately, I guess the end of the world coming wouldn't bother you at all!”

“Not especially.” So there I was: end of the world. I wanted a Coke and climbed up on a stool, my end of days set aside for the moment. I hoped Will and Mill never got wind of “end of days.”
Murder in the Sky
was putting us at enough peril.

I
needed to see Mr. Gumbrel at the
Conservative
office, so I went back the way I'd come. The newspaper was beside Sincell's, in another narrow building.

The window of Souder's Pharmacy stopped me again, as I looked at the Evening in Paris toilet water and the pale gloves and a photo I hadn't noticed before, down in the corner of the window, that showed a sad-looking dog with HAVE YOU SEEN ME? beneath his face. He seemed so woeful, I wondered if when the picture was taken he'd known he'd go missing.

I picked up my pace and walked around the corner on Second Street, but nearly stopped as I was going past McCrory's Five-and-Dime. When I glanced through the glass door, I saw Miss Isabel Barnett at the makeup counter. I debated going in and striking up a conversation, but I didn't want to interrupt a kleptomaniacal fit, and anyway, it would have been too hard for her to keep her mind on the Slade baby if she was considering the Tangee lipstick colors.

When I got to the
Conservative
's building I took the old oak stairs two at a time.

“Emma!” Mr. Gumbrel was standing beside Suzie Whitelaw's desk, reading some pages.

“Hello, Mr. Gumbrel.”

He slid his glasses up on his forehead and said, “Hope you've brought me that last installment.”

He was, of course, referring to “The Spirit Lake Tragedy,” the story that had been selling a lot of newspapers lately, the last installment of which featured me.

I put on my woebegone look and sadly said, “I'm really sorry. I've nearly finished”—I hadn't even nearly begun—“but I just can't get that final bit about the shooting and then I thought, ‘This isn't exactly right.' ”I frowned earnestly.

“What's not right?”

I hitched myself up on the copy editor's desk, trying to think up an answer to what might not be right. “Well. Well . . .”

And then it came to me, and it wasn't just an excuse for not doing my job. “Maybe what happened that night, maybe that's only part of the story; maybe that's not the end of it.”

Mr. Gumbrel put down the pages he'd been reading. “Enlighten me.”

You can imagine how many times anyone ever asked me to enlighten them. “Look: what happened to me is just part of something bigger.” It was unheard of for me to suggest, when given the opportunity for myself to be big, that there was anything bigger, but I managed to do it. “There's Ben Queen, don't forget.”

“I haven't. He's in your story. He saved your life.”

I nodded. “But Ben Queen's story amounts to more than that. His story is also Rose Queen's story, and that old murder. Now, that was twenty or more years ago, and that was around the time of the Belle Rouen—” I tried to pronounce it the French way but then thought of the way Ree-Jane sounded and gave that up. “Belle Ruin. Remember the disappearance of the Morris Slades' baby?”

“Of course I do, Emma. I had my theory about that, you recall?”

I did, but I was more interested in my own theory. “I bet it's all connected.” There were jumping jacks in my mind.

Mr. Gumbrel frowned, thinking. “So what you mean is, all this is something else than the Spirit Lake tragedy—”

I was shaking my head hard. “No. I mean it's still the Spirit Lake tragedy. It's just more of it. It goes on and on. Like the Greeks did. You know, like Medea.”

Mr. Gumbrel laughed. “
Medea, the Musical
! That was some production! Your brother is some kind of genius—”

“Yes, but he's not part of the tragedy.” I certainly didn't want the conversation to get sidetracked onto my brother's “genius.” “I mean, Medea and her revenge. With the Greeks it's all about revenge; all they ever think of is revenge.” With my mind lighting momentarily on Ree-Jane, I could understand why. “The police are finally convinced that Ben Queen didn't murder Rose.” (I didn't add, though I could have, thanks to me.) “I'm almost sure it was their daughter Fern—”

“You got any evidence for this?”

I sighed. “I'm a reporter, not a policeman. No. But it just seems logical. Anyway, my point is, somebody murders Fern out of revenge for her murdering her mother, Rose.”

My mind was frantic with possibilities. It felt like one of the pinball machines up at Greg's that Will and Mill played. Each little steel ball aimed and rolling into a hole. I pulled back the plunger and
whicssssh
went one thought after another,
clack, click, clack
into its hole.

“We wrote that up about Fern Queen. But we don't know who did it.”

I wished he'd stop interrupting the sinking of the pinballs. “Then, don't forget, there's the murder of Mary-Evelyn Devereau before all of this, and I just know she was drowned because they thought she was their sister Iris's child. Bastard child is what Isabel called her.”

Mr. Gumbrel sat down in front of Suzie's old Royal typewriter and tapped a few keys as if words should come out the tips of his fingers. “You're saying the Devereau sisters killed that poor child?”

“Yes, I am.” I shouldn't have had to remind him that one of those sisters almost killed this poor child, me. “You remember she tried to kill me? She was crazy, of course. She thought I was Mary-Evelyn. So I guess she had to finish killing me.”

He slapped his hand against the carriage return. “Now, maybe we should get the dates of all these things right.”

Oh, how boring. It was the atmosphere I wanted to get right, the feelings, the looks of things. . . .

“Because you just might have something here, Emma.”

I knew I did. My mind was loaded down with pinballs, so that I could hardly move. “What I came to do today was search around in the archives”—I liked this word; it was weighty, like my mind at the moment—“for more details. You said before you thought Morris and Imogen themselves might have taken the baby somehow.”

“I wouldn't've put it past Morris Slade.” He narrowed his eyes against the smoke from his cigarette and looked grim. “That boy was a gambler. He was forever at that poker club, ‘club' being what they called it. He'd bet anything just to stay in the game, anything. Had a lot of debts, I'd guess.”

“But no ransom was ever asked for.”

“None we know of.” He shook his head. “I should've spent more time on this, but we were short on reporters then.”

I tried to think of what could have been more important back then than a disappeared baby from a grand hotel. You could have written books about it. My mind sparked at the mere idea. I slid off the desk. “I want to search around the archives and see if I can figure out the connection.”

“You got a head full of ideas, Emma.”

Since I didn't have a face full of prettiness, I thought it just as well.

 

The back room was as musty as ever, perhaps even mustier in my eyes because it contained the past, and nothing could compare with the past. The comforting words of William Faulkner came back to me, that the past wasn't dead; it wasn't even past. I had typed out his exact words and put the slip of paper on my mirror. It was Dwayne, over at Slaw's Garage, who was the big William Faulkner reader. He called him “Billy.” A mechanic, even a master mechanic, reading William Faulkner was something to note.

Not that I'd actually read Faulkner, except for a few story beginnings (so I could impress Dwayne), or words rooted out here and there. I wasn't actually going down the mines myself as much as I was panning his words for gold.

Faulkner's words were delaying the last episode of the “tragedy.” I was trying to look at things the way he did, trying to find words like “bugswirled” and “stumppocked.” Trying to think up words like that was holding up the writing, but I couldn't help myself.

From one of the shelves stacked high with old papers, I dragged out the edition with the story of the Slade baby's kidnapping. The paper was so old I thought it might crumble in my hands. No, I didn't think that; I just wanted to make up a word like “crumbcracked.” I would have to stop doing this, making up things to fit words.