Fadeaway Girl

by Martha Grimes

  Billy’s hand slapped down on the counter and made the cups jump, as well as Don Joe and Evren. He wheeled around on his stool again. “Now, there you are wrong, Mervin. That wishing-well house belongs to Earl Midge. It’s his wife had that well put in.”

  “That may be so, but that’s another house. Don’t Earl Midge live out the end of Sweetwater Road?”

  “No, he does not!” said Billy.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” said Louise Snell as she pulled out the Hebrides and area phone book. She flipped through it, ran her finger down a column, and said, “There’s six Rices, mostly in Hebrides, but two in the Junction. One lives in Red Coon Rock and the name’s ‘P. Rice.’ So Mervin’s right.”

  I snuck a smile. I wanted to say, “Again.”

  “That there’s an old phone book,” said Billy, lighting himself another cigarette.

  Louise Snell rolled her eyes. “That is so ridiculous. When does anything change in Cold Flat Junction? How many people ever move? When dinosaurs roamed here, there was still a P. Rice”—here she put the open telephone directory straight against Billy’s eyes—“living on Red Coon Road.” Then she slapped it shut.

  Billy sat and smoked, trying to think up a reply.

  Evren said, “Hell, we still got the dinosaurs. You seen them Wicker sisters lately? Must be carrying six hundred pounds between’em!”

  They all managed a laugh at that, even Mervin, and so I decided to leave before the Wicker sisters showed.

  18

  Dubois Road, where the Queens lived, ended up at Flyback Hollow, or “the Holler” as they called it in the Windy Run. Jude Stemple lived back there. It was Jude Stemple who’d made the comment that Fern Queen had never had any kids. If he was right, then the Girl could not have been Fern’s daughter. But the people at the Windy Run Diner hinted at another view of Fern.

  The last time I was here, there was a girl sitting behind a stand, selling Kool-Aid, even though her sign read LEMONADE 5¢. She wasn’t there, but the table and chair and sign were, along with a pitcher of green-colored Kool-Aid. There was also a box that had once held kitchen matches, and that was where she kept her money. It was empty.

  I guessed the Kool-Aid must be lime, not my favorite flavor in anything, and certainly not Kool-Aid, which I didn’t much like in any flavor. I thought she wasn’t being completely honest, selling Kool-Aid for lemonade, but she had said it was a lemonade stand, not that she was selling lemonade, nor did she have to.

  I pulled a plastic cup from a small tower of them, poured an inch of Kool-Aid into it, and dropped a nickel into the matchbox. Then I poured the drink out and mashed the edge of the cup a little so it would look as if a customer had indeed gone and taken a drink. I thought it was important; she was making an effort and this was really a bad spot for a lemonade stand. How many people had I ever seen walking about here?

  The bent plastic cup I had set back on the table made me think of the dented metal cup in the stone alcove at Spirit Lake. I looked down at the little puddle I’d made, throwing away the Kool-Aid, and felt bad. So I put another nickel in the box and pulled another cup from the tower. Then I poured in a little Kool-Aid. This time I drank it; it tasted awful, but I got it down in one gulp.

  Now she had two used cups and ten cents. This was more business, I guessed, than she’d had all day. I imagined her returning and seeing all this activity and being pleased.

  It was a nice thought to take with me.

  As I tramped from Flyback Hollow to Red Coon Rock, I imagined myself setting up a vodka, gin, and whiskey stand at the bottom of the Hotel Paradise’s driveway. I could get real fancy and list a menu of Aurora’s favorite drinks: Cold Comfort, Appledew, Rumba, Bombay Breakfast, the Count of Monte Cristo at Miami Beach. Probably I’d have to have bottled beer cooling in a galvanized tub full of ice, for most people around here, like Dwayne, would want beer.

  It was fun thinking of this, but as whiskey and gin weren’t as cheap as Kool-Aid, I told myself I’d better rethink it.

  I turned in to Red Coon Rock. The hard-surfaced road got narrower here, and didn’t so much end as dwindle into dirt, hard packed, looking almost as if it had been swept down with a broom.

  The Calhoun house was the blue one on my left. There was an old pickup truck pulled up to the curb, and I dawdled, scuffing up dirt with my shoe, hoping I might catch a look at Gloria’s husband, Cary Grant Calhoun. The diner people said he didn’t look a thing like Cary Grant, but I wanted to see for myself. I might find it necessary to talk to Gloria again. Maybe she remembered something else about Baby Fay Slade being snatched from her crib.

  If she had been snatched, I had to keep reminding myself. Had she been at the Belle Ruin at all? Or somewhere else? Or maybe dead? That chilled me.

  Gloria said the Slades had told her the baby was sick and asleep and not to bother her. It was hard to imagine a babysitter not even taking a peek at her charge. It was my theory that the baby hadn’t been with the Slades, but then Miss Isabel Barnett claimed to have seen Baby Fay and that the poor thing had something called Down disease, which knocked my theory into a cocked hat.

  Then, then (you can see how hard it is being me) Aurora Paradise said Isabel Barnett was the biggest liar in three counties besides being a kleptomaniac, and I shouldn’t pay attention to anything she said.

  So I was back with my theory again that the baby hadn’t been at the Belle Ruin at all.

  I was thinking so hard I’d walked right past the wishing well, which had fortunately registered on some part of my mind, and I stopped and retraced my steps. The house was brown (as Mervin had said), plain brown clapboard with white trim and a white fence. The gate creaked a little and the small bucket above the well swayed in the fresh wind. The sky was darkening. I took all of this as a sign that I ought to pause and think. Signs are sometimes worth ignoring.

  The screen door squeaked just as the gate had. I opened it in order to knock on the door. It was less than a minute before a woman came.

  “Yes? Oh, hello.” She’d expected a grown person to be there and was a little surprised. Most are, seeing a twelve-year-old on their doorstep.

  “Miss Rice? Prunella Rice?” I looked wide-eyed.

  She nodded. Her plainness was emphasized by her clothes. She wore a brown dress, the color of the house. And it had a small collar at the neck, with white piping like the trim. Her hair was almost exactly the brown of the dress and the house. It was pulled back into an old-fashioned bun. Her face had what my mother called “good bones.” But they weren’t good enough for prettiness.

  “Did you want something?”

  Now, it was true that as a reporter—or, more precisely, “features writer,” according to Mr. Gumbrel—I was permitted to ask questions. Still, some kinds of questions might get a person riled. For instance, “Were you and Gloria Spiker telling the truth about that telephone call?” Obviously, she wasn’t going to say, “No, we weren’t.” So I’d have to make up something, which was okay with me.

  I wished I’d brought a copy of the newspaper with my story, just to prove who I was. “My name’s Emma Graham. I don’t know if you’ve been reading the La Porte paper—the Conservative?—but I’ve been writing up what happened in Spirit Lake—”

  Her frown relaxed a bit. “Yes, I did hear about that. Oh, you’re that poor girl!”

  My expression adjusted to poorness and I asked, “Could I come in?”

  She held the door open wider. I walked into a parlor (“living room,” I heard my mother correct me) neat as a pin; it looked as if nobody lived there. It wasn’t very inviting, actually.

  Prunella Rice held out a hand, to indicate which of the heavy, dark chairs I was welcome to, and I sat down. She sat on one opposite.

  “Like I said, I’ve been writing about events in Spirit Lake, but now I’m interested in this other story that took place in the Belle Ruin Hotel years ago.” It was discomfiting to be speaking the unvarnished truth, so I varnished it up a little. “You see”—I settled b
ack in my uncomfortable chair—“when I was talking to Gloria Calhoun, she mentioned you and what a great friend you were—”

  Far from looking pleased, Prunella Rice looked anxious.

  I went on: “—and how nice it was living on the same road so close to each other.”

  Her nervous hand fluttered up to the bun at the nape of her neck. “Well, I don’t know as I’d say that. I mean, we hardly see each other, even living so close. We went to school together in La Porte. . . .” She wound down.

  “Well, part of my story involves that hotel that burned down.”

  Faintly, she nodded. It looked to me like she’d rather un-nod.

  “And, of course, the kidnapping. Now I just want to make sure I get the details straight.”

  As if I were bad medicine, her lips pressed together and nothing would pry them open. Why hadn’t I brought at least a notebook and a pencil so I’d look like a person writing up something for a newspaper? Which is exactly what I was. I decided making stuff up was a lot easier than telling the bald-faced truth.

  “I understand Mrs. Calhoun—Gloria Spiker back then—had to leave the baby for a few minutes in order to call you.” I thought I put this in a forgiving way: she “had to” instead of just wanting to make a phone call because she was bored.

  The prim mouth unclamped. “That’s right. We was to go to a show at the old Limerick movie house that used to be in Hebrides the next night. Veronica Lake was in it and Gloria was just then reading Photoplay. There was an article in it about Veronica Lake. That’s what reminded her and that’s why she called.” She sat back in the heavy chair, looking kind of pleased with herself.

  Something about what she’d said bothered me, and I found I was frowning. I immediately stopped and put my hand on my temple. “Oh, sorry. I get this headachelike pain. . . .”

  “Well, you’re a little young for headaches, I’d say.”

  “It’s inherited. My great-aunt Aurora Paradise gets fierce headaches. It’s so bad she really can’t stand being around people at all.” I sat forward to emphasize the seriousness of this. “So she lives up on the top floor of our hotel. I take her food on trays.”

  That was the trick, you see. When you make things up, there has to be enough truth in it so if the person ever decides to check up, well there’d be Aurora on the fourth floor. It was all true, except the headaches.

  Prunella looked sympathetic, but only to be polite. “That’s awful. And does she get lonely?”

  “Oh, no.” I wanted to say she got drunk. “No, she’s got a lot to keep her occupied, like solitaire and things.”

  Prunella smoothed down her dress and reclasped her hands and looked, as I said, self-satisfied, as if she thought she’d gotten over the rough part, that telephone call.

  No, she hadn’t.

  “Then, she—Gloria Spiker, I mean—spoke to you a few minutes—”

  “Twenty minutes. We just talked a lot of girl stuff.” She simpered a bit.

  “Then she went back to find the baby missing and the father in an awful state.” I chewed the inside of my lip as if I were thinking hard. I wasn’t; I knew what I was going to say: “Now, it was she called you, and not the other way around?”

  Her eyes opened a little wider, the look of something dawning—or darkening. Quickly she said, “Why, yes, of course. I couldn’t hardly call her, could I? She was at that hotel and had to go down the hall to phone.”

  I cocked my head. “Did you know she was going to call?”

  That drew her up even straighter than she was before. It was a while before she answered.

  There was a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling. That would annoy her; she must spend every waking minute keeping this house clean.

  “Well, now, what do you mean?”

  Was it hard to understand did you know she was going to call? “Oh, I just wondered about the movie you were going to see.” Which made no sense at all: I was just trying to tiptoe around my question so she’d bend a little. I tried to make some connection: “I mean that you both liked Veronica Lake and maybe were excited about this movie.”

  “Oh. Now, you mention it, yes, I guess we had said something about telephoning.” Her nod was uncertain. She still wasn’t sure about my question.

  I slid down in my chair and looked off with what I hoped was a dreamy expression. “It was just all so strange, wasn’t it? You would have thought there’d be a big ransom demand, but there wasn’t.”

  “Didn’t seem to be.”

  “You never heard anything else about the baby?”

  “No indeed.” Her head shake was curt.

  “The Slades lived in New York City. That’s where they went.” As if New York City were the place to go for vanishing. I decided I would get nothing else from Prunella Rice, and said, “It’s really nice of you to give me your time, Miss Rice.”

  “Prunella.” She almost smiled. “That’s with two l’s.”

  It was that old rule: Just be sure you spell my name right in the paper, whatever else you do or say about me.

  I smiled. “I’ll remember.”

  She showed me to the door as if she were turning away trouble.

  It was a little past 3:00 and I wanted to get the 3:32 train back, which would be easy to make.

  I scuffed my way back down the road, once again passing the Calhoun house. The pickup truck was still there, but no sign of Cary Grant Calhoun.

  As I got to Flyback Hollow and Dubois Road, I saw that the lemonade stand was still set up, but the pitcher had changed from lime to orange. And the money was gone. Maybe this was to be her new way of conducting business, the honor system, just letting people help themselves. It saved sitting around being bored.

  As I walked on down to the train station, I thought about that phone call and tried to bring up what had bothered me when Prunella Rice said she’d been talking about going to the old Limerick Theater. I thought about Veronica and Ree-Jane and the “peekaboo” hair-style. After I reached the station, I stood on the platform puzzling out what Prunella had said and thinking about Baby Fay and getting nowhere.

  I paid again to a different conductor, glad it wasn’t the first one in case he asked questions about the long story I’d told him about Grandmother Simple.

  Maybe the library, where I was going, had old copies of Photoplay, and I could look up the article Gloria had been reading—

  Suddenly, I sat up straight. That was it! That’s what had been bothering me. While she was babysitting, Gloria had been reading a copy of Photoplay, and she’d said, “I was sitting, reading it. There was an article in it about Veronica Lake.” Those were almost her exact words. Then she’d said she and Prunella were going to “the old Limerick movie house that used to be in Hebrides.”

  That’s also what Prunella said. The same thing. The exact same thing. She hadn’t said just “the Limerick Theater,” but the “old Limerick movie house that used to be in Hebrides.” Twenty years had gone by and they were saying the exact same things.

  I knew what Perry Mason would make of that.

  The phone call had been arranged. It had been arranged that Gloria would leave the room. She’d been paid to do it, was my guess. Prunella had been paid to bear out Gloria’s story. As they’d both said, there were no phones except for the one in the hall. “Had to.” I had thought that was just an excuse: “Had to.” But what if—?

  The conductor was collecting tickets. Absently, I handed mine up to him.

  “That’s quite a frown you’re wearing, young lady.” He punched my ticket and handed it back. “Must not be having a very good trip.” He stood there, smiling and swaying, swaying just as the other conductor had.

  I guessed he would just stand over me all the way home if I didn’t explain my frown. “My dog died.”

  “Oh. Oh, I’m real sorry.” He moved off.

  Death had a way of moving people off.

  19

  “I want to see the Sheriff.”

  Donny Mooma was talking to Maureen K
neff, the secretary, who I seemed to recall had once been a Stuck. There were as many Stucks around as there were Moomas and Calhouns.

  He looked over his shoulder at me. “Then get in line, girl. You see them people out there sitting? You ain’t the only pebble on the beach.”

  Donny knew more clichés than anyone. “Where is he?” I tried to keep from sounding too demanding.

  Donny opened his mouth, but it was Maureen Stuck who spoke.

  “He’s gone over to Cold Flat Junction, hon.”

  Donny raised his head to look at the ceiling as if seeking God’s guidance. “Now, what’d you go and tell her for, Maureen? He’s on po-lice business. You don’t give out the whys and wherefores of what goes on in the sheriff’s office!”

  Maureen just waved the words away. “It’s no ‘why’ nor ‘wherefore’; he’s just gone to Cold Flat Junction, for goodness’ sakes.”

  I liked Maureen. I always had. She didn’t try to blow up her job the way Donny blew up his, as being the most important one in the county. Except, of course, the Sheriff’s.

  I asked her, “Maureen, are you related to Reuben Stuck?”

  Donny rolled his eyes. “Excuse me for livin’.”

  “Yes, I am. He’s my cousin. Do you know Reuben?”

  Donny threw up his arms. “Well, pardon me for wanting to do po-lice business.”

  Reuben Stuck was the man who had come in for lots of questions regarding the kidnapping of the Slade baby, as it was his ladder that had been leaning against the Belle Ruin beneath the Slades’ window. Reuben was a housepainter and had been one of several hired to paint the hotel.

  “Yes,” I said. “I interviewed him about what happened at the Belle Ruin.”

  Maureen slowly nodded. “That old, sad business.” She shut her eyes against it.

  “Don’t mind me, girls, you just go on socializin’.” Donny plopped himself down behind his desk and parked his boots on top of it. “I bet Sam’d like to know how much work gets done around here.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  Donny said, “Well, don’t ask me, ask your friend here.” He pushed his thumb in Maureen’s direction. Then he rose and hitched up his wide brown belt. “Me, I’m goin’ across the street for a coffee.”