Hotel Paradise (27 page)

I just kept on pounding. Finally, one of the doors opened about an inch and I could see one of my brother’s eyes. “What?” was all he said.

“I want to talk to you. Both of you.”

The one eye stared for some time and then the door closed again and I heard what sounded like chains and big pieces of furniture being shifted around. There was no real lock on the doors, so who knew
what they’d rigged up. The door opened wide enough for me to walk in. I was right about Paul. He was down there on the stage hopping around.

“Why’s he all covered in flour?”

Will and Mill exchanged looks. “He’s in the production,” said Will. “It’s part of his role.”

I just bet it wasn’t. I knew Paul always wanted to be in their productions, and would beg and beg, but they never let him. “He’s probably only here for you to drive him crazy.”

Brownmiller shoved his thick glasses up his sharp nose and tittered. He had one of the most tittery laughs I’d ever heard.

Will simply smiled as they exchanged another look. “No, this time he’s got a real role. Come on, we’re busy.”

I told the two of them my plan. In addition to working a scheme on Ree-Jane, another aspect of it that would tempt them dearly was that it involved the recent murder. “I thought we should all go and take a look at the murder site. The cops can’t seem to get anywhere, or at least they’re not saying . . .”

Will was chewing his gum in a ruminative way, the way he always did. He said, “Sam DeGheyn’s pretty smart.”

But I could tell he was considering. It was no use my trying to work my flirty ways on them, because I didn’t have any. And they hated pleading, I knew, and that was fine with me, because I hated it too. I watched Will slowly chew and I watched the light from a spot they’d rigged up high on the roof bounce off Mill’s glasses. They were interested, all right, even if it did mean carting me around. Mill really loved that white convertible of Ree-Jane’s.

They exchanged another look and Will nodded. “Okay. But don’t come with us when we ask her.”

Not that I wanted to, but still I asked, “How come?”

“Just don’t.” He shouted to Paul that he could go back to the kitchen.

It worked like magic, and I was really sorry I hadn’t watched them in operation. I sometimes thought Ree-Jane had a crush on Will, even though he was two years younger. He was quite handsome (having got whatever looks there were in the family), and he was a completely accomplished liar. Or it might be nicer to say “fabricator.” But it all went along with his being able to enter and exit his other world whenever he wanted.

So there we were with the top down and Ree-Jane’s convertible guzzling gas. That of course was one understanding; they’d have to replace the gas they used. I hoped she didn’t check the mileage, for I’d heard the Sheriff telling Maud once or twice that a check of the mileage showed someone had driven farther than he’d said. Donny probably. I had a notion Donny made more use of the “official ve
hic
le” than was absolutely police business.

It was truly enjoyable flying down Highway 231, Mill and Will in the front singing one of Mill’s made-up songs, or rather made-up words to one of the Tabernacle hymns. And I hummed along as we finally bumped the car over White’s Bridge, beyond which lay Mirror Pond.

Mirror Pond. When I’d been contradicting Suzy Whitelaw’s description, the pond had seemed pretty ordinary. But looking at it now, after all of the working over it in my mind, it took on quite a different aspect. Lonely, creepy, even dangerous. It was bigger than what I’d call a pond, for it was probably sixty or seventy feet across. It was edged with goldenrod and black-eyed Susans in addition to the tall grasses and was prettier than I remembered it being. The water,
though, was sludgy in its stillness, nothing like Spirit Lake, where the water always seems to be moving, lapping around the lily carpet, light and almost breathy.

There was a darkness here that seemed to collect in the shadows like rain before a storm. Or it might just have been my imagination. But it was certainly colder in these woods than it had been when we were driving. I shivered and tried to figure out just where the woman’s body had been found.

We’d stopped the car under the rotted overhang of a falling-down gas station with an old bubble pump. I thought it a peculiar place for one, although twenty or even ten years ago the pond might have been some sort of junction. Besides a continuation of the road we’d come on, there was another, a dirt road that showed signs of once having been graded and that ran off into the trees. On one of the pines, wooden arrows with names and numbers painted on them by different people pointed inwards. It was a common way for families to give directions to their houses or summer places, but I was surprised all the same to find out the place was even this populated: “Vichy” was one name. Then there was “Butternut” and “Randall” or “Randolph”—it was hard to tell because the paint was worn. Anyway, there must once have been enough people living here to keep a gas station in business. What I was mostly interested in was whether this old road could possibly lead all the way to Spirit Lake or join up with another, narrower one—something that made a path to the house. I decided to walk it a little way just to see.

Will and Mill were crouched at the pond’s edge, talking. I called to them I was going to walk for a few minutes into the woods here, and did they want to come along? I wasn’t surprised when they declined, for I supposed they would want to use my absence to cook up some way of scaring me to death.

As I walked the road, the day did not so much get darker as
grayer
, gray light like a solid wall, and really cold. I saw another arrow, this one pointing off to the left with one of the names painted on it, and through the thick trees I could make out a house, or a cabin, ramshackle. I wondered if people still lived there, for I neither saw nor heard anyone.

That is, until a voice right behind me asked, “You the
po
-lice?”

I whirled around and stared into the clouded eyes of a man so old
and wispy he looked like someone had stopped in the middle of making him. I was too surprised to be scared. No one in his right mind could take me for police. “Me? No. Who’re you?”

“I kept tellin’ that fella, that lawman, to listen to me, but he wouldn’t. Little weasel-faced fella not much bigger’n you. Hell”—here he swiveled his head nearly in a half-circle to spit some tobacco—“hell, you ain’t nothin’ but a kid.”

I nodded. My mind was clicking over. The “weasel-faced” man must be Donny, and this was a surprisingly good accounting of him. I would file this away for when I needed it. Donny could be so high-and-mighty when the Sheriff wasn’t around. “You mean he never came back to talk to you?”

“I’m a Butternut. We been around these parts since time began.”

Looking at him, I could believe it. But he was going to get off the subject, I could tell. People who’d been around that long always wanted to begin at the beginning in the way of the book of Genesis, which I’d once heard the Methodist minister start up about from the pulpit once. “Oh, you’re one of the Butternuts! I heard my parents talk about you.”

If eyes so clouded could light, I think his did. “Asa Butternut, that’s me.”

“What was it you wanted to tell the deputy sheriff?” I hoped that would lend me a bit of authority, even though I wasn’t the police.

“It’s that there woman they found at the pond.” He raised the black briar stick he’d been leaning on and jabbed it in the direction of Mirror Pond.

Eagerly, I asked, “What about her?” But he wasn’t telling me anything. I said, “Look, I can go get the po—
po
-lice for you if you’d just wait right here.” He looked like he might dissolve away, so I said it again. “Will you wait?” When he nodded, I ran back up the road.

Will and Mill were so eager to be law-enforcement officers it was downright shameless. I danced around like I had to pee, telling them to be sure to put their sunglasses back on; that way, they might get away with looking old enough. Brownmiller, with his stingy, narrow face and sharp nose, might even get away with being the deputy. I couldn’t imagine the old man’s memory was all that good. We all marched down the road.

“You ain’t in uniform,” said Mr. Butternut.

“Plainclothes,” snapped Will.

Mr. Butternut squinted up his eyes and pecked his neck closer to them. “Where’s your i-den-ti-fi-ca-tion?”

I had to hand it to Mill: he whipped out his wallet and shoved his driver’s permit right into Mr. Butternut’s face, which was probably why the old man couldn’t tell what it was. You’d have thought Mill had been banging on witnesses’ doors most of his life from all his forwardness.

Will, unfortunately, didn’t have one. But he always carried a little notebook, and he slowly removed that from his rear pocket, and stood there chewing his gum and looking deadly in those black sunglasses. He asked Mr. Butternut for his name and address (though we were standing right in it, so to speak), and Mr. Butternut told him carefully, spelling the name out.

“There’s Butternuts lived here for a hunnert years.” He reflected. “Two, mebbe three hunnert.” He spat tobacco again. “My daddy’s name was Lionel. And his daddy before him was named—”

“Mr. Butternut!” Will slammed into the middle of these memories like a truck colliding with a train. “Did you know this woman?”

“What? No, I never knowed her—well, I ain’t seen her, so how’d I be able to tell? I just thought the
po
-lice, they’d like t’know about these here cars, or maybe it was trucks, out here that night.”

“What about them?” Mill asked. He looked unhappy because his voice cracked. It often did.

Mr. Butternut was looking and sounding pretty aggravated. “Ain’t nothin’
about
them, just they was here. Drivin’ down this here road, one of them, and ain’t no one lives down here now but me.”

I started doing my one-legged dance again, excited as I was, and forgetful that I probably shouldn’t be sticking my non-po-lice nose into the conversation. “Where’s this road go, anyway? Does it go as far as Spirit Lake?”

Mr. Butternut squinted up at the sky. “Well, I expect maybe it does. Or nearly. For Elmer Randall, he used to live down it, and that was a couple miles away, at least.”

Will glared at me, or at least I assumed there was a glare behind the glasses. I was not to stick my nose in. “Did you see these vehicles?” Good Lord, he sounded just like the Sheriff. “Did you get their license numbers?” What a stupid question. If Mr. Butternut couldn’t even tell
these two were kids like me, how would he ever read a license plate? Even if he’d a mind to, and I doubt he had.

“Hell,
no
, I ain’t seen no license plate! And it was pitch black, too, and I was inside my house”— he swung the briar stick off to his right and jigged it around like a fencer being careless with his sword—“and I
heard
this here engine sounded loud enough it was a truck, and then I come out on my porch and saw these lights. And before that I thought I heard noises like more’n one car up by Mirror Pond. Thought maybe it was some of them kids with them dirt bikes, you know.”

“A dirt bike doesn’t have an engine.” Will hesitated. “Depending,” he added, obviously uncertain of his facts.

“Well . . .” Mr. Butternut shrugged and started humming a tune.

“That’s all?” asked my brother.

Mr. Butternut just kept humming.

That was all, we supposed. At least I’d found out there might be another way to Spirit Lake. And that Mirror Pond and the White’s Bridge road had once been a crossroads for a lot of people. The lay of the land, so to speak.

Will and Mill thanked him and said they’d be in touch.

Mr. Butternut kept humming. I didn’t think he’d be much in touch with anything.

We all piled back into the white convertible, for we’d been gone longer than it would ever have taken us to get to Hebrides.

“What about the present? We’ve already been gone nearly an hour more than it would have taken to shop in Hebrides.”

Will said, “There’s a bait-and-tackle shop up the highway here.”

Mill gave one of his sneezy, blubbery laughs and Will joined in, pounding on the glove compartment and choking with laughter.

We stopped at the bait shop—I could hardly believe it—and the two of them piled out and went in. They were still laughing. I lay down in the backseat, smelling the new leather smell of the buttoned back and thinking about Mr. Butternut. Within less than five minutes they were coming out of the shop, carrying a small bucket and a glass bowl. They were still laughing.

“What’s that?” I looked at the bucket.

They didn’t bother answering. They often didn’t; it was as if I were invisible. “I
said
, what’s that?”

Brownmiller swung the bucket over the seat and I looked in; there were five or six tiny fish. “These aren’t anything but guppies!” I said.

“They’re Starfire fish,” said Will.

Mill said, “Angelfire.”

“Angel’s Teeth.”

I said, “Oh, for heaven’s sakes. You’re going to just make up some story about them, aren’t you?”

My brother turned and smiled. He did not answer my question, though, for he said, “You’ve got to play this part in our production.” His smile was pinched and mean-looking.

I had promised I would just to get out to Mirror Pond. “What part?”

“We need a deus ex machina.”

“A
what
?” I tilted forward from the backseat, propped my chin on the front one. “What in God’s name’s a ‘Do-X machine’?”

Mill explained. “It’s someone in a play, mostly in Greek, and usually a god, that just suddenly appears out of nowhere and comes down in a cloud to save the hero or whoever’s there. Usually he’s on a swing. Or a chair on pulleys. He—or she—rights the wrongs, ties up the loose ends, saves the day, you could say.”

I tried to act as if this were absolutely impossible. “Stop being silly. I’m not coming down on any chair on pulleys.”

“You said you’d act a part. Well, that’s the part.”

I sniffed, crossed my arms tight across my chest, and said, “Coming down out of a cloud. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.” And then I recollected Paul and sat up so hard I nearly fell over the side of the car. “A cloud! A
cloud
! You’re not throwing flour all over
me
! Paul can be your damned Do-X machine!”