I was glad these were frozen because the sight of a live lobster dropping into a pot of boiling water just for Ree-Jane’s dinner would have made me cry. I never got to eat lobster or filet mignon, as they were too expensive. On the other hand, Ree-Jane turned her nose up at Ham Pinwheels, calling them leftovers. So who was the loser here? I asked the Bibbs and they all cheered for pinwheels.
“Why are you staring at those stupid salads?”
She hadn’t impressed me yet, not with the dress, with Ralph, or with the lobster, and it really got her down. Then she smirked. “I’m going to the Double Down after dinner, but don’t tell anybody!” This was spoken in a raised voice that told everybody.
The Double Down was a club outside of Hebrides, run by a man named Perry Vines. He must have been twenty or thirty years older than Ree-Jane and had been married a zillion times. Ree-Jane said he was crazy about her.
“If he’s so crazy about you, why doesn’t he put himself out and come here?”
That was an unwelcome question. “Because he’s too busy with the club, of course.”
“You’re a minor. Or didn’t you know?”
Haughtily, she smiled as she flipped her Veronica Lake locks out of her eyes. “Well, Rafe isn’t.”
“I never knew that the person you were with changed your age.”
I don’t know whether she just ignored that or didn’t understand it. She said, “I hope Perry isn’t too jealous.”
“Ralph just got here and already he’s moving on the heiress. That’s quick work.”
It was clear she didn’t know whether to take this as a compliment. Her mouth worked it over, but came up with nothing.
“I wouldn’t worry about Perry. He’ll never go hungry. There’s always Scarlett Bittinger.” I think I must have been mixing up images from Gone with the Wind. I hummed and picked up my tray of salads.
That brought her almost into this life. “What? What about Scarlett?”
“Hm? Oh, you know, in that yellow convertible of hers? I saw it whizzing down Alder Street.”
Ree-Jane was so fast on my heels she nearly fell through the swinging door into the dining room. “Perry was with her? Perry was?”
“Did I say that?” I asked in just that tone that said I said it.
16
I had no idea how Ree-Jane’s big night at the Double Down went, if it went at all. The last thing I recall is seeing her climb into Ralph Diggs’s black Chevy and the two of them go fizzing off down the drive. Since she wasn’t bragging the next morning about Perry’s undying devotion to her, indeed she was pretty grumpy, I assumed they’d never gotten into the back room and the gambling. Probably they’d never gotten very far into the front room.
After what I referred to as my double down stack of Silver Dollar Pancakes and maple syrup, I decided to walk along the highway to the Belle Ruin. I needed, I guess, some taste of faded glory.
The Belle Ruin sat on several acres of wooded land once called Soldiers Park. I had no idea where that name came from. Probably it had something to do with World War Two, or even the Civil War. I wasn’t sure what side we were on, South or North. Hadn’t this state taken some kind of cantankerous view of the war back then? Some for South and some for North? Wasn’t anything black or white? Did I have to reside in a state that probably couldn’t choose up a volleyball team?
I wondered if Soldiers Park could have been some kind of army cemetery, and I looked as I walked for signs of grave markers, but saw none. Of course, they could have been toppled or buried when the ground was torn up to build the Belle Ruin. But then I thought, probably not, because there would have been some kind of survey, something that told the lay of the land, and I doubted they’d have gone on to build over a Civil War graveyard of dead servicemen. That was called desecrating the land or the graves or something like that. I didn’t like the idea I was stepping on a soldier’s grave. It gets you thinking, though, if not about the Civil War (about which I knew nothing), then about dying.
I was sitting on a log from a fallen tree, most of which had rotted. I was looking at the part of the Belle Ruin that had not burned down—the huge ballroom. A lot of the walls had burned, but oddly enough, not the floor, not the bandstand. There had been a big dance on the night of the Slade baby’s alleged kidnapping. The thing was, I was coming more and more to believe that she hadn’t been and that it had been made to look like a kidnapping.
Why? To collect a ransom from the rich grandfather, Mr. Woodruff. At least that would be the obvious reason. Only there had been no ransom demand, at least as far as we knew around La Porte. For after the Slades and Mr. Woodruff had gone back to New York City, nothing more appeared about the kidnapping. Its similarities to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping had been noted, like the ladder up against the wall outside the hotel and, of course, the baby’s being snatched from its crib. The ladder belonged to Reuben Stuck, who’d been one of the men painting the hotel at the time. I’d interviewed him and listened to his woeful account of being under suspicion.
Here was a kidnapping very like the Lindbergh case, and then nothing further had been reported. It was as if nothing had happened at all, and I was thinking that maybe nothing had, and that Mr. Woodruff had paid off the police because he had discovered it was his daughter Imogen and Morris Slade who’d set up the whole thing.
But what—as both Dwayne and Mrs. Louderback had pointed out—about the phone call? Gloria Calhoun, who used to be a Spiker, and that friend of hers, Prunella-somebody, had been on the phone at the time. I thought it was worth talking to Gloria again. She would hardly want to admit she’d had anything to do with the kidnapping, but I might be able to get something useful out of her.
I got up and walked over to the ballroom, where my phonograph sat. I didn’t want it out in bad weather, and I could always bring it back if I felt like dancing. I had brought only three records. The last one we had played a few nights ago, when the Sheriff and Maud and Dwayne had been out here. That was “Moonlight Serenade.” The one that was now on the turntable was “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
How could that be? I looked around almost as if I expected to find a roomful of dancers. Who had put on “I’ll be Seeing You”? I imagined a hundred uniformed World War Two soldiers dancing with stage-door-canteen hostesses in print dresses. The ghosts of them, the soldiers and their partners, floated across the dark hardwood floor. And I imagined one of them was the Girl, who fit in perfectly with her pale hair and mild blue dress.
I snapped the lid shut and stuck the records under my arm and left the Belle Ruin and Soldiers Park.
As I trudged along back to the Hotel Paradise, I thought of the Waitresses, for this had really been their phonograph, an old Victrola with a crank handle, left forgotten in one of the storage rooms on the second floor for six or seven years. It was hard to believe they’d been gone that long. When I see a picture of exotic birds, I think of the Waitresses. They were as bright and free as flamingos.
I asked Abel Slaw if he would mind my leaving the phonograph in the garage so that I could get the next train to Cold Flat Junction. Slaw’s Garage was just across the highway from the railroad station.
“Just as long as you come back and get it, hear?” He was always crotchety when he talked to me.
No, Mr. Slaw, I wanted to say, I will never be back. I am flying off into the long gone and the sweet hereafter. But I didn’t want to hear him complain about my backtalk.
I guess it was the Waitresses that made me think of flying away. I wondered what the sweet hereafter actually was. Was it heaven? Was it paradise? I wondered if that’s where they’d gone.
17
I had money with me and decided for a change to actually buy a ticket to Cold Flat Junction. It was only twelve miles from Spirit Lake and didn’t cost much, and it was easier than being a stowaway.
I smiled and handed my money up to the conductor after the train started moving. It was the same conductor who was always on this train, although he didn’t seem to remem
ber my stowaway status.
He punched the ticket and said, “Well, little lady, what are you going there for today?” He handed back my ticket.
“To see my gran.” I looked up at him through squinty eyes, as if I might need glasses but was too poor to buy any. “She’s awful sick.”
He swayed a little with the movement of the train. “Sorry to hear that. She lives in the Junction? I know folks there.”
Then she can’t live there. I thought of the Simples, whom I had told the Windy Run Diner people about. The Simples didn’t exist, of course, but I’d had need of them one day for some reason. I sorted through the family names, seeing if I’d mentioned a grandmother. I didn’t remember anybody in the family except the son who was retarded. “Her name’s Alberta Simple. They live a distance outside Cold Flat Junction, on a farm. You probably don’t know them. Anyway, Granny Alberta fell down and hit her head. Bad.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said again, with a sway and looking down the aisle, obviously wanting to move on.
I wouldn’t let him. “Yes, it is. The Simples have got enough trouble in their lives without her getting hurt. She’s the one who takes care of Miller Simple. He’s retarded and kind of dangerous.”
“You don’t say? Well, now I got to be—”
“Once, Miller—” Was that his name? “Once, he hit his daddy over the head with a chair leg, just ripped the leg right off the chair to do it, and now he’s got to be watched closely.”
The conductor tipped his hat, like a wave good-bye. “Got to see to my tickets.”
I turned and watched him move quickly along the aisle. “Good-bye!” I called.
Well, he’d asked me, hadn’t he?
When the train pulled into Cold Flat Junction, I stepped down to the station platform and stood while it pulled back out, then looked across the track at the dark line of trees in the distance. I always looked at them for a longer while than a person would ordinarily spend on trees. They looked, from this distance, sometimes dark gray-green, and sometimes navy blue, and the line was as straight as an arrow. They almost stood at attention, like ranks of soldiers. I thought of Soldiers Park. I supposed that behind them lay only the same wasted land that ran between them and the railroad tracks, yet I couldn’t be sure. I think they hid a mystery that drew me.
I had started out thinking I’d go to see Gloria Spiker Calhoun again, but then I thought, no, it’s her friend, this Prunella-someone, I should talk to. It was Prunella whom Gloria had called. It was just too much of a coincidence: the telephone call and the baby being kidnapped during that twenty-minute call.
Prunella. The reason I remembered that name was because I had never liked it. I wouldn’t like to be a Prunella. Ree-Jane would call me Prune-face.
So once again, I needed to stop in the Windy Run Diner to find out about Prunella and where she lived. The best thing to do was think about this over a slice of pie. So it was to the diner that the sandy path from the station led me.
It was pleasant, I might even say a comfort, to find the same old faces in the Windy Run, three at the counter, one in a booth.
“Well, look’t what the cat dragged in,” said Don Joe, with a snuffly laugh.
“Lo and be-hold,” Billy added, not wanting to be shown up in the greetings department. Evren, sitting on the other side of Don Joe, just smiled.
Louise Snell was wiping down the counter. “Hello, hon. How’re you today?”
“Okay.” I climbed up on my usual stool, the one near the pie and cake glass shelves. There was a new one among the pies, a pale pink chiffon.
Louise Snell saw me looking and smiled and said, “We got Strawberry Chiffon today. It’s real good.”
“It surely does look it,” I said, trying to get a little Junction twang into my speech.
Mervin, who usually sat with his wife in one of the maroon-colored leatherette booths, asked me how I was coming along with my story for the paper. Mervin was probably the only customer who didn’t feel he had to make fun of other people just to prove he was alive.
He went on: “Sure is the best thing I’ve read in the papers in a long time.”
Irritated that he hadn’t thought to say that, Billy said (as if it were my fault), “Haven’t them police over to La Porte found out who killed Fern Queen yet? My lord, how long’s it been since she got shot? Six weeks, like?”
“It’s been three,” I said.
Don Joe said, “They don’t still think it was Ben, surely?”
I could hardly tell them what I knew about the murder of Fern, mostly because it wasn’t official and partly because I’d be in for so much questioning, I’d be here all day. I did have a life to lead, after all.
But I did answer, as Louise Snell had set my pie before me. It had little flecks of red in it, bits of strawberry. “Well, Ben Queen is a suspect still, but there’s nothing to point to him, I mean no physical evidence, nothing to say he was at White’s Bridge that night.” He wasn’t. I knew because the same person that killed Fern had been the one to nearly murder me: Isabel Devereau. She had told me, since she didn’t think I’d be telling anyone else. Ever. Yet, the Sheriff called this “hearsay evidence.” Imagine. It made my blood boil.
I was glad Mervin’s wife was absent, for he was much freer to speak. She was a devil, always jabbing at him and telling him to be quiet. He said, “What about that crazy woman that attacked you? I’d think she’d be more of a suspect than Ben Queen. Wasn’t she a relation of Rose Queen?”
I looked at Mervin, amazed that he seemed to have read my mind. But it was just that Mervin gave thought to things, and sometimes seemed to be the only one in here who did. Besides Louise Snell, that is. She was pretty smart and not always talking just to hear herself talk like the others.
“Yes. Rose was a Devereau, as you know.”
“Then it could’ve been revenge, couldn’t it?” said Mervin.
Billy, who usually sat with his back to Mervin, turned around on his stool to face him. “Now, Mervin, you never knowed Rose Queen, nor Rose Queen’s family. But you sure are tossin’ words around as if you did.”
Billy was so jealous of Mervin that it hardly bore thinking about. I furrowed my brow as if I were considering the Rose Queen business, but I was really just enjoying my pie. I could think up something when I finished.
“I been here many years, Billy. And I heard stuff. Like Fern went off with her mother for several months. That sounds likely, I’d say.”
“Likely what?”
“Girl goes off for a few months. It’s the usual story, I’d bet.”
Billy, and now Don Joe, wanted to argue against that. You could just tell, the way they sat with their arms folded tight across their chests.
Louise Snell said, “Well, all I know is that girl was trouble growing up.”
Don Joe snorted. “Trouble, yes, you could say. Stabbed her mom twenty times with that knife.”
Except that never was proved,” said Louise Snell. “Ben had an alibi all along and he never used it, probably because he knew it was her that did it.”
He had an alibi, and I was the one who’d uncovered it, in Smitty’s Feed Store, where Ben Queen had been when the murder of his wife had been committed.
Louise was wiping down the counter. She seemed to enjoy doing this. “The pity is they couldn’t have another kid.”
I frowned. “You mean Rose and Ben Queen? Why not?”
There was a quick look that seemed to go up and down the counter like Saint Elmo’s fire. I figured adults do that only when it’s something to do with sex. I sighed. “You mean Rose had to have”—I could not remember the word—“whatever removed?”
Don Joe snorted again. “You’d think someone knew all about Alaska and Hawa-yah, she’d know ‘whatever.’”
“Oh, shut up, Don Joe,” said Louise. “No, hon. Trouble was with her husband. You know, sometimes when a couple can’t have kids, trouble’s with the wife, but sometimes with the husband.”
“Oh.” I di
dn’t know, so I changed the subject to the reason I’d come in the first place. “Any of you know a woman around here named Prunella?” It had suddenly occurred to me that now I was a reporter for the Conservative and I didn’t have to make up reasons for wanting to find or talk to people. Which was not to say I wouldn’t make up reasons, only I didn’t have to.
Evren, on the other side of Don Joe, said, “Yeah. There’s one named Prunella Rice. Don’t she live in the Holler, Billy?” Evren almost always deferred to Billy, even though Billy was wrong 99 percent of the time.
“Well, now let me just think on that while Louise fills up this coffee cup.” He grinned as if he’d said something really clever. He got his coffee and opened his mouth to say something but not soon enough.
Mervin said, “Red Coon Rock’s where she lives.”
That really got Billy’s goat. “Now, how is it you, that’s hardly been here ten years—”
“Fifteen,” Mervin corrected him, and drank his coffee.
“Well, I been here forty-five years, Mervin. How is it you know every goddamned thing about the Junction in only ten or fifteen?”
Evenly, Mervin said, “Don’t know everything, just that Prunella Rice lives in Red Coon Rock.”
That made me grin. Mervin, if he was ever called as witness in a murder case, would be a dream of a witness for whichever side, defense or prosecution. For the other side would never be able to shake him, or make him contradict himself or back down. Mervin was solid as a rock. More than that, he let nothing get him off the point. No one could shy a stone and skip it around him, not even Perry Mason.
I said, “Which house does she live in, do you know, Mr. Mervin?”
Naturally, that caused an argument.
“It’s the one a little ways up from Cary Grant Calhoun’s. I think it’s painted brown,” said Mervin, “but I’m not sure. I do know there’s a little wishing well in the yard.”
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