Hotel Paradise (43 page)

The cards she drew from her apron pocket were worn from all of her years of telling fortunes. She split the deck in three and told me I must ask a question. Whatever question I wanted.

A
question?
One
question? Questions shot through my mind. Who was the Girl? What had happened to Mary-Evelyn, really? Had Fern
Queen really been murdered at Mirror Pond? Would Ree-Jane come to a horrible end? (That last question jumped in, unbidden, among the others. I certainly had no intention of wasting my question on Ree-Jane.) I just sat there, my eyes so hard shut they ached.

She told me that, for instance, I could ask if my life would be a happy one, or if I’d be rich, whether I’d succeed in my work or my profession, whether I was “headed in the right direction”—things like that.

I stared at her and frowned. What? Why should I waste my question on things like that? I wasn’t headed in any direction I knew of. I thought Mrs. Louderback’s examples were, to tell the truth, pretty dumb. But she wasn’t going to wait all day. And it popped into my mind that what was very important at this point was, Should I tell the Sheriff what Jude Stemple had told me? This surprised me, this question. I was mildly shocked that of all the possible ones, I found this to be the one I should ask.

Must I ask this question out loud? She said I could or not. Only if the cards got confused, then perhaps I’d say it out loud.

“If the cards got confused,” she’d said. It occurred to me that Mrs. Louderback was leaving herself a lot of leeway. She had a pretty good thing going, for she was not responsible for the outcome. It was the cards themselves. I did not think this was at all dishonest; I just wished that I could walk into the kitchen late for making salads and when my mother or Vera started in on me, I could say that the cards got confused.

Not wanting to involve the Sheriff, I told her I’d just ask the question in my head. She didn’t mind at all. She told me I was to restack the cards, which I did. Mrs. Louderback slowly turned up three cards: the Queen of Cups, the Hanged Man, and two orphans. Well, that’s what the card looked like to me: a boy and a girl walking in a bad snowstorm dressed in raggedy clothes. It was hard to believe anything good could come of this card. But it didn’t surprise me I got it.

Mrs. Louderback looked at my cards intently. Her lips moved ever so slightly, as if she were trying to put into soft words what she saw as the meaning of these three. She said, “Now, that’s very interesting.” Suddenly she asked, “Has something terrible happened to you? Have you had . . . have you put up with a lot of—”

I was in suspense about myself and leaned closer to the table. My
chest dug into its edge, for the chair I sat in was low for me. “A lot of what?” I prompted her, afraid maybe she was sailing off into a world where I could not follow.

Her brow creased with her hard thinking. “Difficulties. Pain. Blame.” She frowned as if she just couldn’t find the right word, so made do with “Having to do for yourself?”

Oh, boy! If she knew the Davidows she wouldn’t be asking that question. If she had to get back and fix salads (keeping my wrist below the table, I checked my watch) in a half-hour, she wouldn’t ask. I nodded. “Yes.”

Mrs. Louderback looked honestly concerned and I was fearful she might have stumbled on one of those bad-news interpretations she always kept to herself. Like death. I shivered in a rash of goose pimples. No, I decided, that really wasn’t it; it wasn’t that she didn’t want to scare me with what she’d seen in the cards. It was more a look of confusion. She really seemed to be overcome by some force.

This wasn’t any seance (she’d made clear), but she certainly seemed to be gripped by something. She was silent for a long time. Her eyes, looking over my shoulder, weren’t focusing on anything but empty air, yet she seemed to be
seeing
or
hearing.
She told people she wasn’t a medium, but I was beginning to wonder. Maybe she did have the power to invade the spirit world and didn’t even know it. That could be tough on a person. I turned around just to cast a glance behind me. Of course, I didn’t believe in spirits and so forth, but it never hurt to check. Over the sink was a window, and it was as if on the other side of the clear glass she’d seen a face or a figure or something; yet the clear glass, one pane burnished by sunlight, was empty of anything but the day. She made a sudden gesture with her hand as if to shut something out, or wipe it away.

But now she gave herself a little shake and went on. “This means hardship”—and she placed one finger on the orphans-in-the-storm card. I could have guessed that. “But it means that there are going to be things to overcome to get where you want to go. It won’t be easy, but you’ll be much, much better off for its not being. You’ll come to a state of greater clarity. You’ll learn a lot from things getting in your way, obstacles to overcome. You’ll be better off than someone who gets whatever she wants, and gets it without half trying.”

(I wondered if Ree-Jane had just been here.)

She was looking at me closely. “You’re very resolute.”

“Resolute.” Did that mean the same thing as “resolved”? I didn’t want to ask.

But then she explained. “You never give up.”

“Oh. Well, people tell me I’m really stubborn.” “People” being Mrs. Davidow, Ree-Jane, Vera, my mother.

She actually seemed irritated by these “people.” “
No
, you aren’t! That’s not what the card means at all. Not giving up is
not
the same as ‘stubborn,’ so whoever tells you that better go think again.”

I was enormously pleased by this, by her being so sure I wasn’t just “stubborn.” Did I never give up? I couldn’t think clearly of situations where I might have given up or not. But what about the Girl? It was true I wasn’t giving up on
her.
“Resolute.” I kind of squared my shoulders. I was glad I’d come.

But before Mrs. Louderback could start in on the Hanged Man—who looked really interesting—I saw I only had fifteen minutes to get back to the hotel. I told her I’d have to be leaving, thanked her, and took the two dollars out of my pocket and handed them across to her. She smiled and took one of the bills. “We didn’t do the whole reading, and I always do an hour. One dollar’s plenty.”

It was hard for me to believe Mrs. Louderback would do this for a whole hour, because it was clearly tough on her. I asked her about that.

“Oh, not always, no. Most people’s not got an hour’s worth of gumption in them. They’re boring. You’re not. You’re not one speck boring. Anyone says you are’s a damned fool!”

“I’m not?” These words were music to my ears.

She shook her head slowly, determinedly, eyes shut.

Again, I shoved the second dollar towards her, and she cocked her head. “I told you, one’s plenty.”

“No, it isn’t. And I’m
resolute.”

Mrs. Louderback put her head back, laughed, and pounded on the table. It was like I’d said the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “Okay, thank you very much.”

I picked up my cornstarch and we walked to the door. She told me she hoped I’d be back for the rest of my reading, and I said I would.

The woman who’d let me in had disappeared. I wondered if things did that around here.

•   •   •

Walking along under leafy branches that splashed coin-shadows on the pavement, I suddenly realized that Mrs. Louderback hadn’t once treated me like a child to be talked down to. It was as if I had as much right to ask my one question as anyone in Spirit Lake or La Porte. Mrs. Louderback then would be grouped with Maud and Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler, with Dr. McComb and Mr. Root and the Woods. And the Sheriff, of course, but he made up a group of his own.

I thought again about my question. I stopped there on the walk with the leaves over my head shivering a little in the light wind and wondered if that was the real reason, not wanting to tell what Jude Stemple had made me promise I wouldn’t. Refusing to betray a promise
sounded
good. It even sounded noble. Prissy-good, more like. It was the sort of reason you’d come up with to cover up the real reasons that you didn’t want to admit. Or, to do myself justice (something I did far more often than being “cruelly honest”), maybe it was correct to say it was part of the reason, but not all of it. I walked on slowly, then stopped again outside Marge’s cottage, for I had this cloudy notion—it was very dim—that the real reason I didn’t tell anyone what Jude Stemple had said, or what Ulub had said about the Devereaus, and especially about the Girl, was . . .

I shook my head and chewed my lip, looking towards Marge’s windows with the sun on them making them shine as if she’d pulled down blinds of radiant light. The reason I didn’t tell anybody what I’d seen or heard was that I didn’t really
want
anyone to know. Was all of this like having a huge secret? If you give away a secret, even if it’s your own to give away as you like, would it rob the secret of its power? Or should I say, its magic? So I wouldn’t want to tell anyone, not even the Sheriff—

Especially
the Sheriff, I should say. He was very smart. He’d investigate. He’d track down the Queens behind their yellow shutters. He could even find
Her.

She would be in peril.

That sounded like a fancy way of saying it, but I felt it was true, though, again, I wasn’t sure why. I felt she should be allowed to go on looking for whatever she was looking for.

Even when I was doing the salads, I could not keep my mind from going back and forth, back and forth, between telling and not telling. Keeping silent I had always thought a good rule of thumb, but I hardly ever practiced it. I guess I was too much of a busybody. I know
not
keeping silent was what got me in hot water with Lola Davidow. I could not help returning her tongue lashings with one or two of my own, which sent her into a whirlwind of rage.

But keeping this particular silence was different. Although I was running them together in my mind—Fern Queen and the Girl—so that telling about one meant telling about the other, I had to admit that they weren’t necessarily connected. Not
necessarily.
But I knew they were. They didn’t have to be in the telling. If that was so, then I was left with a much lesser problem: how to tell the Sheriff about the Queen house and about the dead woman and her relationship to the Cold Flat Junction Queens—how to do this
without
telling him about Jude Stemple saying it.

I stared down at the rows of salads—sliced tomatoes tonight—and tried to bring back exactly what Jude Stemple had said.
Exactly
what. I frowned. This could be the way to a solution. I pictured us both back there, me and Jude Stemple, back in Flyback Hollow, listening. I would change from being back in the Hollow to being here in the kitchen, studying the salads and debating whether to put a slice of black olive atop the crumbled egg or to finish the salad off with some chopped parsley.

Walter had stopped his broom to look at the salads and kind of
nod. Then he started sweeping again, unnecessary sweeping, since the floor was already as clean as a whistle, but since there were no dishes yet to wash, my mother had told him to sweep. Neither my mother nor Lola Davidow could stand it if Walter wasn’t working. It was like the end of everything, like their entire livelihood was being pulled out from under them, if Walter ever stopped to rest. It made me really mad.

I smiled at Walter and sprinkled one salad with parsley. I looked at another on which I’d put a slice of black olive on top of the crumbled egg. I was looking from one to the other when Vera turned up behind me like a black specter. Her high, thin voice made me jump. Walter jumped too, I noticed (and it was hard to make Walter react). Vera was holding her empty aluminum tray up on the tips of her fingers, trying, I guess, to make the point that all she had was an empty tray and why weren’t the salads fixed? She wanted to know, what did I think I was doing, putting that crumbled egg on them, anyway? I thought for a moment and then calmly told her that I’d read this whole article in an old
Ladies’ Home Journal
saying that hard-boiled egg, especially mixed with either olives or parsley, was wonderful for clearing out impurities of the blood. I added that Harold (he was her husband) should probably try it. I knew it irritated the life out of Vera for me to refer to Harold by his first name, which is why I always did that. It also irritated her that everybody knew Harold was just an old geezer of an alcoholic and a hypochondriac to boot, not really sick at all, except for whatever “impurities” got into his blood by way of Wild Turkey, and that he was not really sick at all. So while Vera had to go out and wait tables, Harold just stayed in bed complaining to the four walls. It was my guess he probably jumped out of bed and made straight for the Wild Turkey the minute Vera left.

Vera was trying to think up a good retort to this
Ladies’ Home Journal
article, but she couldn’t, so she settled for frosty looks and starchy movements as she clattered six salads onto her tray.

Walter was now leaning on his broom and laughing his weird laugh, like someone just rescued from smoke and fire or from near-drowning, sucking air into his lungs and letting it out in a
har-har-har
way. Walter never said anything mean about anyone, but you could tell he despised Vera, and told me he thought my salads were “purty,” and I rewarded him by asking which decoration he liked, olive or
parsley. “Both,” he said, so I sprinkled paprika on one and lay the olive on top of it. I agreed with him that the colors looked good.

•   •   •

After dinner and after dark, I was down in the Pink Elephant, still trying to call up just what Jude Stemple had made me promise. I thought hard. Had Jude said, “Don’t tell anybody about Fern Queen,” or had he said, “Don’t tell anybody
I told you
about Fern Queen”? Those were two entirely different things. I
thought
it was the second, but I wasn’t sure. I tried to work it out logically: it wouldn’t really make any difference to Jude if someone told the authorities that the dead woman was Fern Queen, would it? And someone must have finally reported the missing woman, or the Sheriff wouldn’t have gone hightailing it to Cold Flat Junction. Wasn’t what worried Jude that he’d be dragged into it? I fussed with the collection in my Whitman’s box as I thought this over. Surely, the important thing was to understand the
intent
of what a person said, rather than just his words. Being perfectly honest, I had to admit that Jude Stemple’s intent was for me to keep my mouth shut. Well, I didn’t see how I could. But I wondered why, if he felt so free to say that in public, he’d wanted me to promise not to tell where I heard it. It must be that he’d told me a lot of other stuff, too. All that about the Queens.