Hotel Paradise (13 page)

“Do you know Dr. McComb?” I asked the Sheriff.

“Some. Why?”

I was still turning it over in my mind, that he might have been the doctor who had to pronounce Mary-Evelyn dead. “I guess he must be really old. He must be sixty-five, at least.”

“More like eighty, I’d guess.” Behind his impenetrable sunglasses,
I couldn’t see his eyes. But his mouth smiled. “It may surprise you, but there are people that don’t think sixty-five’s really old.”

“Is eighty?” I thought I should check, in case I was stepping on toes here. The Sheriff might have had an eighty-year-old relation.

“Yeah, I’d say eighty’s old.”

“Where does he live?”

The Sheriff looked somewhere off beyond me and nodded. “Up there on Valley Road. He’s got an old house, a big Victorian house, at the top. It’s not exactly woods, but his house is in the middle of a lot of trees and undergrowth. Pretty isolated place. Why? You thinking of visiting him?”

Sometimes the Sheriff annoyed me with his mind-reading. So I didn’t tell him. I just shrugged the question off and said I was going to the library, and thanked him very much for offering to buy me a Coke.

•   •   •

The Abigail Butte County Library was a place even more necessary to my sense of well-being than Souder’s Drug Store. I have no idea who Abigail Butte was, nor why the library was named after her.

It was not that I was “bookish” or a great reader; I read, but not widely (as my lack of knowledge about nearly everything should show). I just loved the quiet of the library, the fact that people spoke in whispers as if someone were ill or dying. Why I liked that kind of atmosphere, I don’t know.

Except for the children’s room, which was off to one side, everything else was in one big room: the counter where the head librarian checked the books out, the several tables where people could sit and read, a number of easy chairs for the same purpose, and, of course, the shelves. I loved to amble through the shelves, feeling entombed, hidden, thinking myself invisible and impossible to find.

Today I visited the section on gardening and then realized that was too general. I could have asked the librarian, Miss Babbit, who had never changed in all of the years I’d observed her (though it’s true my actual observing years weren’t more than seven or eight), but I would ask for information only as a last resort. It was my belief that libraries, being stuffed as they were with encyclopedias, dictionaries, card catalogs, and a hundred ways of looking things up and a thousand books to do it with—that it was really giving in just to ask.

I checked the card catalog for “butterflies,” then went back to the
shelves and pulled down several books. I checked the pocket cards for Dr. McComb’s name and found “L. W. McComb” written in three of them. Now, I didn’t know if “L. W.” was the McComb I was interested in, but I could, of course, ask Miss Babbit if he was old Dr. McComb. I thought he must be; I didn’t think there would be two McCombs that interested in butterflies, not unless it ran in the family. And also, the dates that L. W. had checked them out were years ago, not last week, which would also suggest Dr. McComb, since I imagine he would long ago have exhausted the resources of the Abigail Butte Library.

So I settled down to read. I understood very little of all of the technical description, but I did enjoy the pictures in full color. I simply had no idea there were all of these species of butterfly, my mind having formed only a vague notion of them as fluttering wings, pale yellows or orangeish, or speckled and dark-banded. That shows how observant I was. But here were butterflies to be displayed on black velvet, like jewels: emeralds, aquamarines, rubies. They were really quite breathtaking.

For some moments I sat, frowning into space and trying to call up one subject I really knew a lot about. I knew nothing. My mind wandered over every conceivable category but came up blank. I certainly knew how to eat my mother’s cooking, but not how to
cook
it. I looked at my hands, since my mind was a total loss. Did they have any knowledge? They couldn’t cook, sew, play the piano, plant seedlings, carve wood. . . .

I was wasting my life. And I certainly wasn’t going to get by on my looks. For a while, I sat there gluming away and searching my mental dictionary of “dis” words. “Dis-consolate.” I guess it meant “dis-consoled.” That was me. I sighed.

Then, continuing to turn the colored plates, I suddenly remembered there was a section on local points of interest, like the lake (the big one) and woods and parks, and any events that might be coming up. This La Porte shelf also housed books and articles by local people, especially local poets, or people who thought they were poets. (Even I, whose reading matter never extended very far beyond Nancy Drew and the local paper, could tell the poetry was awful.) And then I found what I wanted: a thin book about rare species of butterflies made up of several essays or articles by various men—teachers, professors, or men with advanced degrees—and one of them was Dr. McComb.

His particular article was a description of unusual butterflies that he knew about in our county, ones that he and his net had gone investigating, seeking out specimens in different areas. He wrote about the woods over by Cloverly, about seventy or eighty miles away; Paradise Valley, right across the railroad tracks beyond Spirit Lake; and Spirit Lake itself. This was better than I had ever expected to find, for already there appeared to be a bond between Dr. McComb and me, both of us searching out things connected with Spirit Lake. I had taken the little book back to my table, and as I sat there with my chin in my fisted hands, reading with heavy concentration, I had the queer feeling that Dr. McComb and I were supposed to meet. If I were a more dramatic-type person, I might even say
destined
to meet.

I really liked the way that Dr. McComb wrote: it wasn’t at all like the writing in the books I had just been trying to read, dry as twigs and kind of superior, as if the scientists expected everyone must know Latin, and as if they disliked even to use the common term “butterfly.” No, Dr. McComb wrote about his search for the “White Lace” (which is what he had named this butterfly) as if it were a story. He wrote:

It is the most elusive butterfly I have ever come across in my nearly fifty years of observation. I took up my position some distance back from the road, settled in my canvas chair for upwards of two hours and, although I saw many specimens of the West Virginia White and one variety of the Eastern Tailed Blue, I saw nothing of the White Lace, so named because it reminded me of the Queen Anne’s lace that lined the road, for its wings were edged just on the inside by tiny apertures, bare pinpricks through which light shone and gave this particular butterfly its luminous, gossamer appearance.

Recollecting I had seen it before nearer the lake, lighting on a dandelion stalk, I inferred that water must attract it and moved my “camp” (my gumboots and glass) in amongst the peaty grasses and stood in the shallow waters there for upwards of an hour. . . .

In water for an hour! I can’t even stand still for five minutes without scratching.

. . . I was at last rewarded by the White Lace appearing suddenly, settling again on the milkweed. I am sure it lit there for a full two minutes, slowly beating its wings. . . .

Why, I wondered, didn’t he net it? But he didn’t. It sounded almost as if he had some kind of respect for this butterfly that he didn’t have for the other kinds.

That very afternoon when I got back to the hotel, just before I had to get the salads ready for dinner, I set about finding something to use for a net. I would have borrowed Bunny’s net, but she wasn’t around. Then it struck me as strange that Bunny Caruso, the outcast, was the only other person I could think of who had this strange sort of connection with Dr. McComb, for she was the only one I could think of who ever bothered about butterflies around La Porte.

I’m not sure why I chose the early morning for my search for the White Lace; the butterflies around Spirit Lake might not even be up yet. I suppose I had some vague idea that all excursions like this one should be undertaken at inconvenient and difficult hours, self-sacrifice being necessary for success (as it usually is, I’ve noticed).

In line with Dr. McComb’s description of his own outing here, I stood watch near the edge of the lake, but not
in
it, as he had done, for I had no gumboots, only rubbers. I hated these rubbers; I hated being forced to wear them on rainy days to school. But I was glad for them that morning. I shivered in the knee-high grass, cold and dew-clammy, gripping my pool skimmer and a flat vegetable drainer I’d taken from the kitchen as I squinted through the white mist rising from the water. The butterfly box I had made with holes and with a window of plastic wrap sat a little ways away, by the roadside.

I figured I had a good hour before I had to be in the dining room setting syrup pitchers and jelly dishes on the tables. Vera, the hotel head-waitress, would be surprised to see me there before she was, for I think she prided herself on being up before anyone except my mother, who was always up at dawn and down in the kitchen making biscuits and rolls. It was best not to think too long about those biscuits (hot, small, the color of early-morning sunlight) as I stood with goosebumps covering my arms and legs, for thinking about the biscuits only led my mind wandering through the highways and byways of breakfast in general. Clouds of omelettes, corn cakes soaked in syrup, sausage, eggs over easy. I’ve eaten in restaurants where “eggs over easy” came to
the table like they’d really lived a hard life, shriveled and brown-edged. Not only would my mother never
serve
such an egg, she would not allow an egg with a broken yolk to leave the kitchen. They had to be perfect, which also meant nongreasy. I’ve seen her apply a hanky to the barest trace of grease, and considering she cooked them in butter, the grease itself was pretty high-class. Those eggs absolutely glowed on the white china plate. Just about everything my mother cooked had its equivalent in cloth: silk (scrambled eggs); satin (fried eggs and cheese sauce); chiffon (omelettes and lemon pie). Even the pancakes felt like cashmere; I know this because I held one against my cheek once and it was soft and comforting.

Light began to penetrate the trees and the grasses and steal across the ivory carpet of water lilies at the far end of the lake. Soon the boathouse, midway, rose up from its comforter of fog. The four small boats that the summer people loved to row around in were tied to the dock pilings and floated there, motionless. It wasn’t a large lake, probably no more than a mile or so of shoreline—although I thought “line” possibly the wrong word, for there didn’t seem to be a clear break. Land stopped; water started. Nothing resembling a beach or a rocky shore existed. The peaty land became marsh, became water.

There was something in the half-light and half-dark that made me stop thinking of eggs over easy and corn cakes and how delicious and durable they were, and instead I began to wonder about my surroundings. In the light that was mostly shadows and a silence filled with faint twitterings I began to feel as if the world were coming awake for the first time—as if the dawn were not a repetition of the one yesterday or the day before, but something totally different. Of course, this was ridiculous; what would I know about previous dawns, not being an “early riser”? (Vera could certainly testify to this.) I sighed and stopped trying to philosophize and looked across the lake.

There sat the old Devereau house in its thicket of trees and shrubs. It was a way back from the lake and only two of its gabled windows, a chimney, and part of the high peaked roof were visible, in addition to patches of lattice-like porch railing visible through the pines and oaks. In a little stand of pines and largely hidden by them was a weathered gray statue that looked like the figure of a woman. It was hard to see from this distance. I thought the little statue strange, for it seemed a romantic thing for the Devereau sisters to have standing there, looking out over the lake that way.

One reason the house was difficult to make out was that it was not painted white like most of the summer houses, but gray. Neither dark nor light, but a strange woodland gray, like the trunks of trees around it, which caused it to melt into its surroundings. Even I, who knew it was there, would have had a hard time picking it out had it not been for the sun making silver scabs of the gable windows.

The Devereau side of the lake was so overgrown, had suffered the crash of so many storm-struck trees, that the narrow dirt road that circled the lake, and which was fairly walkable two-thirds of the way around in each direction from where I stood now—this road disappeared into undergrowth, all but impassable on the far side. I know because I tried it several times. Each time I got a little bit closer and then was turned back, either by boggy, marshy land which I was afraid might be quicksand (too much time spent with Nancy Drew), or by strange noises—howlings or slitherings of imagined coyotes and rattlesnakes (too much time on Saturdays with Clint).

What I needed was for somebody to go with me, but there was no one. Even had a dozen people been dying to make the trip, there were very few I would want to share it with. I had asked my brother, Will, who had said he would, “sometime.” But “sometime” hadn’t rolled around yet, and I wondered why, as it would have been a real opportunity for him to make up all sorts of lies about snakes and so forth and scare the pants off me. I had even thought of asking the Sheriff (who, in addition to being smart and able-bodied, also had the advantage of being able to shoot, if it became necessary). But I was much too embarrassed to ask him; he thinks I’m too taken up in the death of Mary-Evelyn, anyway.

As I allowed myself to reflect pleasantly on the Sheriff hacking our way through hanging vines and branches, an object flickered just out of my line of vision. I turned to see a butterfly lighting on the tip of a pussy willow. It wasn’t a White Lace, but it was quite pretty, large and brilliantly blue. Slowly, I drew the little library book from my pocket and turned the pages to see if I could find its picture. It sat there, swaying and waiting, giving me a chance to identify it. I found a picture which looked very similar, one of a species of blue butterflies called a Spring Azure. It shone in the pale sunlight. My gaze lifted ever so slightly from the page and roamed the lake water, where light was spinning in tiny waves stirred up by a fresh morning breeze.
Across the lake’s surface, insects skimmed the water in little furrows—dragonflies, I guessed, and water beetles.