Hotel Paradise (25 page)

For I had decided, listening to my mother and Mrs. Davidow, that I simply had to see it. It was the murder site. I didn’t think the Sheriff would see fit to give me a ride in an “official vehicle.” That’s what he called his police car when Maud asked for a lift to Hebrides or somewhere. “Sorry, I can’t ride you around in an official vehicle.” And she’d say, “Ride me around? Like I’m Miss La Porte or someone? I’m not asking to ‘ride around.’ ” Of course, the Sheriff only said it to get her goat.

Nor was Mrs. Davidow about to give me a ride, not unless she got so curious herself about the dead woman that she’d want to go there and would want me to go with her. For some reason I seemed to make her feel more secure, as if I were riding shotgun. I didn’t understand this.

Absentmindedly I had picked up a dishtowel. Wiping dishes could sometimes help my concentration. Now there was, of course, Ree-Jane’s white convertible. Only, Ree-Jane went with it, and although I could stand to humble myself and beg her, having to take her along would ruin the trip.

There was Axel’s Taxis. I had enough money to pay for one for all that distance; the trouble with that was that Delbert would broadcast all over La Porte that he’d driven me to Mirror Pond. Then I suddenly thought of the Wood boys and their old pickup trucks. I wondered if they were up at Britten’s right now.

I heard Mrs. Davidow saying: . . .
there was no identification on the body, there was nothing in the pockets of her cotton dress, Sam said . . .

The pockets of her cotton dress . . .

Painful as it was to smile, I returned Walter’s smile and picked up a salad plate while the word “pockets” . . . “pockets” . . . “pockets” wheeled in my mind. But then, I told myself, pockets in a dress were pretty common.

. . .
or in her handbag . . .

Like a freight train, those words rushed towards me! Her
handbag
! One of the things I had noticed about the Girl was that she didn’t carry a
handbag.
She was here, she was there, she was in places (such as the railway platform) where you would have thought a woman would have brought a handbag with her. But the Girl carried only a small purse not much bigger than her hand. Would such an article be called a “handbag”?

Was my argument kind of weak? I leaned against the dishwasher. Walter wondered, was I sick?

I wasn’t, I told him.

But then I thought: Mrs. Davidow is telling my mother what she says the Sheriff told her. Immediately, some of my fear returned, for the Sheriff would never have taken Mrs. Davidow into his confidence, and that’s the way she was making it sound. Probably, a lot of what she was reporting to my mother was her own invention, although she might even think these details were received from the Sheriff. So I could be pretty much back where I was before.

I tossed down the dishtowel and headed out the back screen door.

•   •   •

Neither the Woods nor even Mr. Root had taken up their positions yet on the bench outside of Britten’s. It was occupied by an old man, who sat with legs crossed and arms wrapped so closely around himself his hands nearly reached his back. He was bent over as if in pain, but all he was doing was leaning forward and squinting off across the highway at (I guessed) something interesting to him that I couldn’t see. He wore a black-and-white striped cap that gave the impression he’d either been a convict or borrowed the hat from one. I didn’t know him, but then there were a lot of people in Spirit Lake I didn’t know.

Just as I expected there would be, several old-timers had taken up their stations in Britten’s long narrow room, the canned goods shelved along one wall, the candy and cigarette counter along the other, where the cash register was and the large containers of loose cookies. The
men were talking to one another across the expanse of the room. I thought it would be simpler for them to stand together, but they only did that if there was something juicy to chew over.

Well, today there was, for not ten seconds after I’d walked in, one of them brought up the subject of Mirror Pond. Another of them replied, “That there woman the po-lice found, well, I never did hear nothin’ like that.”

Then they seemed to be pulled together, the four of them, as if by a magnet. They made a small circle near the meat counter at the rear, where Mr. Britten’s son, also the butcher, was leaning his chin on his folded arms and listening, so that he could put his two bits in.

I stood before the candy-display case looking at the lineup of Butterfingers and Necco wafers and keeping my own ears open. When I left the kitchen, I remembered I’d want some money, so I crossed the grass to the other wing and went up to my room to collect some of my tips. I took a dollar in change along, which I jiggled in my fist whenever Mr. Britten looked my way, just to let him know I was here on business and not to loiter like some other people I could mention.

“. . . stranger . . .”

I was tired of hearing that word; it was pretty settled in my mind that she was a stranger. But then came a contradiction.

“Ain’t what I heard. . . .
[mumble]
said she was from one of them ritzy places the lake people own. . . .”

My hopes soared. If that were the case, it couldn’t be the Girl.

“Hell
no
, that ain’t right. They toi’ me”— and here a stream of tobacco juice got aimed at one of the spittoons Mr. Britten kept around—“she be from over to [
mumble, mumble
]. . . .”

Strain as I did, I couldn’t hear. So my stomach churned again. Now they’d all lowered their voices, so I just went ahead and studied the candy display. The penny candy had gone up to two cents some time when I wasn’t looking. I especially liked the paper-wrapped hard ones with the melty centers and the fruit from which each took its flavor stamped on the white wrapping. Then I heard, much to my delight:

“. . . Hebrides. You hear that, Bryson? That that woman’s from Hebrides?”

He was addressing Mr. Britten, a fairly useless task, for the storekeeper didn’t seem to like talking much. Mr. Britten grunted and adjusted his specs, thick black-framed ones that went with his black
hair. I think he’s rich and owns a lot of property around. Mildly relieved—for the Girl, I would bet, was from Cold Flat Junction, if from anywhere around here—I went on looking at the Fireballs. I loved Fireballs. Some were dark red and some were a glowing orange color that I’d never seen anywhere on this earth except in a Fireball. The voices were rising and falling, too difficult to hear from the candy counter, so I moved back and to the left to take up a position nearer the meat counter by the shelves of canned goods. There was a single wooden rocker in the corner, and one of the men had sat down in it to shout his opinions up at the others. I pretended to be inspecting the baked beans, the Heinz and Campbell’s, knowing that Mr. Britten would be over to ask me what I wanted. I couldn’t walk in and just fool around like the adults did; I was expected to take care of my errand and move out quickly. The hotel being probably his best customer, I thought he should treat me with at least as much respect as he did these men. Well, here he came, making me lose out on some of their talk, and I told him I was trying to remember how many cans my mother told me to get. He just annoyed me to death by telling me the hotel always got the big ones, the “institution-sized” (as if anyone could tell me anything I didn’t know about my mother’s baked beans). I told him, not this time, this was something different. He moved away, suspicious. Mr. Britten always had that look, like someone was going to rob him blind.

“. . . you thinkin ’bout Louella?”

“Looks just like her, from what Donny said.”

Donny.
He was deputy sheriff!
Louella.
I stiffened and kept staring at the rows of canned beans, Heinz and Campbell’s.

“
Hell
it does. Why, I seen her not three days ago!”

“Well, you mighta see’d her, Bub, but three days ago ain’t two
nights
ago, and the way Donny said it, she looked just like Louella. You know—” this was directed to the others—“big girl, lives over to Hebrides.” He spat.

Big girl.
I was so still and breathless I could have turned into one of the cans of baked beans. That would never fit the Girl.

Another one they called “Jeepers,” who had a high, raspy voice, claimed not ever to have seen Louella, and who the shit was Louella?

Mr. Britten told them to mind their language.

They mumbled apologies and kept arguing.

“Lives over t’
Heb
rides. I
tol’
you. Louella Smitt.”

“You mean
Ella
?
Ella
Smitt?” said Bub, who spat more tobacco towards the spittoon with complete disdain. There was another of my “dis” words.

Bub went on, scoffing. “Now, that there’s completely crazy. Ella’s baby-sat for the Kramers next door going on three years. Now, why’d she be out to White’s Bridge middle of the night, I’d like to know?” He folded his arms hard across his chest and chewed away as if that settled things.

Knowing I couldn’t just look at the cans all day, I made a move and grabbed some Brick Oven beans off the shelf, all the while wondering how this Bub person was making a connection between babysitting for the neighbors and being out around White’s Bridge, as if the two things couldn’t possibly happen to the same person. I just shook my head over the Brick Oven jar (the best beans except for homemade) and wondered if I should bother with this source at all, that maybe it would be better to go out and look for aliens. Maybe Mr. Root was outside on the bench by now; he was kind of pig-headed, but at least he could add two and two.

They had hooked me with the so-called report of the deputy sheriff (and I knew Donny would gossip all over the place about a case, whereas the Sheriff would be forever tight-lipped); but everything else they said being pure guesswork (even more than Lola Davidow’s), I could hardly credit either “Hebrides” or “big girl” as reliable. So I was about to return the jar to the shelf and go buy some Fireballs when the door opened and brought in a pleasant gulp of cool air and a big man with a square jaw, wearing a quilted jacket too short in the arms. He marched in as if he meant to straighten things out, but I guessed he always looked that way. As they greeted him—“Hey, Jude,” “ ’Lo, Jude”—as if he were more or less their leader, he slapped a dollar bill by the register and told Mr. Britten he wanted a pack of Luckies. He stood tearing off the cellophane and Jeepers called over in his whiny voice what Bub and the other one were arguing about, and did he read the paper that morning?

“You mean that body in the pond out there at White’s Bridge?” He lit up his Lucky and snapped the match toward the spittoon and sauntered towards them. “Yeah, a course I read it.”

“Luke here says it’s Louella Smitt.”

He just snorted as he exhaled smoke from his nostrils. “Why in hell you think that?”

I stood there, quiet as could be, holding the Brick Oven jar. The one named Luke I could see wasn’t happy with this new addition, for he had up to then had an edge because he’d come up with a name.

“Heard it over to the courthouse,” replied Luke.

“Hear a lotta things at the courthouse that ain’t true,” and Jude laughed as if this were one of the funniest things. The others laughed, too. Then Jude asked
how
over at the courthouse.

Luke sort of mumbled around and then he finally said, “Sally.”

Sally was one of the secretaries. So he hadn’t heard it from Donny after all, and I knew I’d been right to doubt everything he’d said. This didn’t make me happy, though; I would rather have believed it was this big girl, Louella Smitt.

Again, Jude scoffed and yanked Jeepers’s cap down over his eyes, as if he were the one who’d said it was Sally. I hated people who messed about that way, yanking and pulling at other people. I bet this Jude was a grade-school bully.

“Well, it sure’s hell ain’t any Louella what’s-her-name. It’s Ben Queen’s girl.”

I froze.

Ben Queen.

Here was truth, sure as God made little green apples, and I knew it, and it just about took my breath away. I knew it because I had never heard the name “Ben Queen” in my entire life until Aurora Paradise said it only a few days ago and here it had come up again for the second time in my life. It was as if that name was coming at me from off a far horizon, like the twister coming across the Kansas plains to carry off Dorothy, or like the train bearing down on my father.

Ben Queen.
And besides, Aurora Paradise had brought up that name in relation to Mary-Evelyn Devereau, and I knew the Girl had something to do with that family. This was clear, else why would she have been over there, across Spirit Lake?

Looking my way.

•   •   •

I had to get out of the store when this Jude person started talking about the bullet wound, for it could quite possibly be what I didn’t want to hear. I was pretty scared by what I’d heard so far. Making my way to the door, I was stopped by the voice of Mr. Britten yelling
to me I should have brought that over to the register so he could put it on the Hotel Paradise account.

I was still holding the can of Brick Oven baked beans and saw nothing to do but just continue on out the door, calling back some vague apology.

Mr. Root was there, sitting on the other end of the bench from the old man in the convict’s cap. They weren’t talking, just staring off in the direction of the weathered wood-frame café up the incline on the other side of the highway, as if they were considering maybe going over and getting a burger or a soda. When I walked up and said hello to Mr. Root, who gave me a big grin, the old man in the cap slowly rose, as if he were plagued with terrible rheumatism or something, and I told him he didn’t have to give me his seat, but he didn’t pay any attention. Probably, he wasn’t doing anything of the kind; he probably didn’t want to hang around if some kid was going to be sitting down and yammering and disturbing his quiet staring. He didn’t pay any attention to me, didn’t even look at me, but walked off down the incline to the highway, and I supposed he was making for the tavern.