Hotel Paradise (16 page)

And then I thought of Ree-Jane’s bright lipstick, her crayon-colored clothes (faded colors by the time I got them), and that party dress my mother had made for her, yards of tulle with rainbows of sequins tossed all over it. And I wonder now, does life really need all of that cheap, bright adornment? Or is it better to have the plain, spare room with its ghostly Wonder bread?

I heard thunder gathering in the distance, and in a moment drops of rain slapped the roof. At the window, light drew down like a blind and nearly vanished altogether, leaving the kitchen in greater gloom, and yet increasing my feeling of well-being. I did not quite understand why, rain and shadows generally being associated with sadness and misery. So to think better, I looked down at the floor. I’d have closed my eyes, only Dr. McComb would have asked me, “Why’ve you got your eyes closed?”

I let him move about the kitchen, whistling under his breath, as I thought of the henhouse, the chickens ganged up inside, pecking, ruffling feathers, or sitting fatly on straw, maybe laying an egg or two (however they did this), despite the rain now belting the rooftops and the thunder really bellowing. Weather didn’t give them cause for comment. Rain, sunlight, ice, spring. I guessed the chickens noted it and acted accordingly. I bet they didn’t even bother to leave the dirt yard and go in. Without even thinking how stupid the question was, I asked Dr. McComb.

“Some do, some don’t,” he answered, setting down empty mugs and a plate of brownies. Then he moved off again to the stove.

This struck me as both a sensible answer and a sensible mode of behavior. You got in out of the rain or you didn’t, depending on how you felt about rain. Dr. McComb had apparently taken my question as matter-of-fact and answered in kind.

I turned to the window, squinting rather than looking straight, for in that way I could project better what was in my mind, which was filling up with weather. The old store, the kitchen gloom, Spirit Lake: they all shared something. There was a secret hidden in them, some secret of lostness. I saw the Girl. I thought of her that way: the Girl. Through my half-shut eyes, I saw Spirit Lake, the rain pocking its gray surface, the wind ruffling its edges, rocking the carpet of water-lilies.

The Girl.

I saw her standing there on the opposite shore, just standing, arms straight down at her sides, her hair that strange color of the moon. Her dress was very light, glimmering like the enamel stove here in the corner, or the Wonder bread in the bare store. She had been sitting on that railroad platform, too, empty-handed, except for the small purse clutched in her fist. And then again on the sidewalk in La Porte, in her flower-sprigged cotton dress: nothing but what she held in one hand. It was as if she had no possessions at all; and far from seeming sad to me, it struck me that nothing held her down to any time or place. She seemed weightless.

“Are you in a trance or having a fit or what?”

I jumped at Dr. McComb’s voice. “Huh?”

“Your eyes are squinted shut and your lips are moving. Here, have a brownie.”

He shoved the brownies toward me. They were very rich-looking,
dark dollops of icing in their centers. “I was just thinking,” I said coolly, looking for the brownie with the most icing. But Dr. McComb grabbed it first.

“Huh!” The grunt sounded as if he didn’t believe me. He poured coffee into the thick white mugs. I would have liked the Blue Willow cups better, but probably they saved that china for special occasions. Yet, I doubted that there were many “special occasions” celebrated in the McComb house. That brought back to mind the strange woman in the living room. Where had she gone? Who was she? I did not ask, because I didn’t want to leave the Devereau business, but even more because I figured if Dr. McComb wanted her noticed or mentioned, he’d do the mentioning himself. Maybe she was an embarrassment to him. Maybe he didn’t even know she was around. That sounds crazy, but I’ve come more and more to suspect people just wander around and into your life (or your house) without prior notice, that they just pop up on the walk or in your doorway. A face at the window—whose? Life is just so disorganized and crazy it hardly bears saying.

I didn’t really want to mention the Girl, but I remembered his reply to the chicken question and decided he could probably be trusted not to ask me the usual one million questions that grown-ups generally reserve—“What makes you ask that?” “Why do you want to know?” “Who told you that? Did anyone tell you that?”—for any kid asking anything the least bit unexpected.

“Did you ever see anyone over at the Devereau house on Spirit Lake?”

He shook his head. He was eating around the edges of his brownie, saving the icing for last.

“Well, I did.”

“You did?” His old forehead pleated neatly in surprise. “But how’d they get around to that house? Must have had to cut through all of that undergrowth.”

I sipped my coffee and added another two spoonsful of sugar. “Well, someone did.”

“What was he doing?”

“She. Nothing. Just standing there.”

“Maybe it’s one of the real estate agents.” He frowned.

“I don’t think so.”

But he wouldn’t let the idea go. “Maybe it’s that bum Henderson. Only, you said ‘she.’ ”

The nice thing about Dr. McComb was that he didn’t tell me I hadn’t seen anyone. Nearly any other adult (except for the Sheriff and Maud) would have told me that I probably saw something else and just
thought
it was a person. A cow, maybe?

Dr. McComb was still talking about the real estate agent. “That bum Henderson got back there a couple years ago in his goddamned Cherokee Chief and hacked out a kind of path because he was looking to sell it. What a shyster, what a slime bucket! Ought to lock up people like that. You know him?”

I shook my head and sort of flowered in the light of his assumption that I was capable enough to have had dealings with La Porte slime buckets. And to listen to swear words without flinching.

He polished off the icing-middle of his brownie, licked his fingers, slurped some coffee. Then he went searching around the kitchen and came back with a dish and a half-smoked, shredded cigar. He started to light up, stopped, said, “Mind if I smoke?”

As if I were used to people asking me if I minded—no one ever had in my living memory—I casually waved my hand in a “go right ahead” gesture. I was interested in the last brownie on the plate, but didn’t want to be a pig. He pushed the plate toward me. I took it and munched.

Thoughtfully, watching the smoke eddy around him, he said, “Wonder who it was. This woman, you said?”

“Yes.”

“What did she look like?”

For some reason, I didn’t want to say. I frowned. Why didn’t I want to tell him? “She was too far off to see—I mean, enough to tell her features.”

He smoked. I ate the rest of my brownie. The silence was pleasant, like the little silences in Miss Flagler’s kitchen. The clock ticked. There was no cat, though. Then I said, “Maybe she’s a Devereau.”

Dr. McComb said, “Haven’t been any around here since that inquest. Sisters all left. And they must be dead by now.”

“Rose wouldn’t be. She was young then.”

He frowned as if he didn’t much credit that idea. “Rose Devereau. Yes, I do vaguely remember her. Rose Souder, her name used to be.” His frown deepened. “So how do you know about her?”

“My great-aunt Paradise was telling me about her.”

Dr. McComb gave a sort of sighing laugh. “Aurora Paradise.”

The way he said it and shook his head you would have thought “Aurora Paradise” was cause for all of the world’s confusion. He said it again, laughing again.

I said, “When the Tragedy struck”—the capital still sent a pleasant little chill down my back—“I’d have thought she’d have been around.” I put my brownie down.

“Yes, you’d have thought. I wasn’t their doctor and I hardly had anything to do with the Devereaus. No one ever mentioned any relations living other places.”

“Who was the doctor?”

“Well, there was Dr. Jenks back then.”

“Was he doctor to most people?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I guess he had all the patients. I bet it’s hard to get people to switch doctors.” I remembered Aurora yelling around about some “new sawbones” who came to see her once.

“Certainly is.”

“How come you had to go when they found her instead of Dr. Jenks? Wasn’t he the police doctor?” I couldn’t remember what the Sheriff had called that kind of doctor.

“Well, he wasn’t in town that night. Had to go see to some sick family over in Hebrides, as I recall.”

“So she drowned.”

His cigar had gone out and he was trying to puff it alive again as he nodded his head. It looked pretty shredded and awful.

I slid down in my chair and tinkered around with my coffee cup and hoped I sounded casual. “It’s kind of funny. I mean, her being twelve and being out in a boat
alone
and
at night.”
I looked at him.

“Who said it was at night?”

“You did. You just did.”

“Oh.” He picked bits of tobacco from his lip.

Into the silence, blue shadows fell and moved, graceful as sheer curtains, across the window behind him. How long had I been here? “It’s kind of, well, funny. Strange.” The clock ticked; I looked over at it. Five-thirty! I would have jumped out of my chair if Dr. McComb hadn’t said just then:

“I thought so too.” He cleared his throat. From his voice and his expression I could tell he felt really uncomfortable.

So I kept fast to my chair, and I didn’t say anything, for he had
drawn into one of those quiet inward-looking silences that grown-ups sometimes do when they’re sizing up the past. I did not speak.

He cleared his throat again. “Yes. I thought so, too. Thing was, just like you say,
why
would that little girl be in that boat? It didn’t make any sense. No sense at all.” He shook his head. “But what could I say? What could I do?” Dr. McComb was not really asking me these questions; maybe he’d even forgot I was there. I did not speak. “Well, the three of them—the older sisters, Rose being gone—they just . . .
hung
over me. I mean, they just stood there, by the lake, all wrapped in those dark shawls and capes and . . . hung over me. You didn’t know the Devereau girls.” His chin fell slowly, nearly to his chest. And for a moment he seemed to be more my age than his own. Slowly his pale eyes fastened on me and then blinked as if he were bringing my face into focus.

I shook my head. I did not speak.

“It was a long time ago.” He turned over the spoon by his cup, turned it again and again. “The only other person who said he’d been around that night, near the house, was Alonzo Wood. Do you know him?”

My eyes widened. The clock struck off another quarter-hour like it knew I was going to catch it, for I would not be back to get the salads ready for dinner. But even if that B&O freight train had been rushing right through the kitchen wall, with Vera engineering, you couldn’t have pried me away from my seat. Not for anything.
“Who?”

“Alonzo. Call him something really silly, like Ulab, or something.”

“Ulub. Ulub and Ubub. The Wood boys?
I know them!”
I had seldom been so excited in my whole life.

“Well, Alonzo said he was there. I mean, that’s what I
think
he said. He’d’ve been, oh, maybe in his early teens back then. And his brother, the tall one—”

“Ubub, they call him. I’m not sure about his name. Bob, it might be.”

“Where’d they ever get those ridiculous nicknames?”

I was fidgeting so much, with the anxiety of waiting for information, you would have thought I had to pee. I didn’t want to waste time on nicknames. “From their license plates.”

“
License
plates?”

“It was a joke, sort of. The letters were all but the same. But go on with your story.” He was looking now at his wristwatch and I was
afraid he was going to tell me to get out, to go back to the hotel and do my waitress work. That was silly.

“Well, Alonzo, or
U
-lub”— he shook his head to let me know how he disapproved of the nickname—“came around to see me. They both did. I guess the brother—Robert?—was older and he was sort of backing him up. You know, lending him encouragement. It seems Alonzo was near the lake, or near the house, that night, and he told a different story.”

I was still as stone. But when he stopped talking I was afraid he’d stopped forever. “Go on. What’d he say?”

Dr. McComb looked at me and smiled slightly, as if this was some kind of checker game and he’d just run roughshod over my reds or blacks. “Well, I don’t know. I couldn’t understand him.”

“What?”
I nearly shouted it at him. How could he smile over missing such important news? I just couldn’t believe it.

“If you ever talked to him, you’d know what I mean. I was patient enough, and his brother kept trying to interpret for him, but that’s a case of blind leading blind, you know.”

Then he must have sensed my disappointment. Really, I thought I could cry to think that someone knew and yet it was locked inside of him. Dr. McComb said, “But I did write down some of it. In a notebook. Do you want to see it?”

I was astounded. Did I!

Dr. McComb left the kitchen and I heard him in the living room and it sounded as if he were frenziedly tossing things around. In a few moments he was back. “You’re the only person who’s ever seemed at all interested. Maybe you can make something of it.”

Speechlessly, I nodded as he put the notebook down on the table. It was a plain school notebook, one of those with a mottled black-and-white cardboard cover and a white square for putting in your name. “You mean I can take it with me?”

“Uh-huh, if you want. Thing is—what difference could it make now? That’s forty years ago. Hardly anyone around now who was there then. Aurora Paradise, maybe.”

“Ulub and Ubub,” I said, as I stroked the notebook, cool and smooth under my hand.

When the leaves fall, you can see—

The notebook wedged inside my thin jacket, I made it back to the hotel in record time, because Dr. McComb very kindly drove me. I thought he drove very well for a man of his years; his hands didn’t even shake on the steering wheel. I asked him please to drop me off at the end of the drive, as I really didn’t want to answer a lot of questions about where I’d been, and so forth. Not that there was anything wrong with where I’d been, or that my mother wouldn’t approve, but I just didn’t feel like answering a lot of questions. He understood.