Alien Crimes
Page 25
Silly, Momma called it, especially when it got really hot. But they learned how to wear things, and taught her about it, too.
The clothes she’d been wearing when she was running probably got absorbed into her skin as fuel when she became the sidewalk. She’d been so scared, she hadn’t noticed.
She’d most likely be sick later.
“If I put that on, how will you know if I get things right?” she asked.
“I’m sure no one’ll notice and you’ll do just fine,” he said, running the words together like he couldn’t breathe.
“I never got everything right before on the first try,” she said.
“You’ll do fine,” he repeated and eased out the door, leaving the sheet on one of the shelves.
It took her a long time to squinch to the edge of the box. By then, she’d formed fingers (probably because she’d been thinking of them) and they were the wrong lengths. But they were good for grabbing onto stuff, especially when she was squinching, so she didn’t pay attention to right or wrong.
When she reached the edge of the box, she either had to get all the way to the floor or she had to make legs. She couldn’t quite remember the details of legs. The knees she knew and the ankles—they were the bendy parts—and the feet, but there was other stuff she’d forgotten about and she knew they’d look funny.
And she also knew if she hooked the legs up wrong, they’d be impossible to move. So she made hips, too.
In fact, everything would be better if she did the bendy parts first. She’d just finished elbows when Jess Taylor leaned partway in the door, keeping his face averted.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” she said because she didn’t know how else to answer.
“Will you be a lot longer?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t know how long she’d already been. She didn’t really care. It took a lot of concentration to make herself all over again, and because she’d been so scared earlier, it was going to be harder.
Just him asking the question knocked her off for a little while. She put one of the elbows just above the hip, and she had to reform, trying to remember exactly how arms bend.
Finally, she had a guess at the human shape she used to wear—just that morning even though it seemed like forever ago. She grabbed the sheet and held it in front of her.
“Is this all right?” she asked.
Jess Taylor turned very slowly. And then he looked at her.
He was trying not to show how he felt, but she could see it in his eyes. Confused, sickened, surprised, all at the same time.
“Close,” he said after a minute. “You’re really close.”
But it took most of the night just to get the general shape right—collarbones, she always forgot about collarbones—and somewhere along the way, he forgot about the sheet, telling her to make a belly button—which she’d never heard of—and explaining dimples in the knees.
By the time they got done, she had a hunch she was more human-looking up close than any of her other people had ever been, and the thought made her sad.
But she didn’t have long for sad. Because Jess Taylor gave her some bread and some water and an apple that he’d kept in the root cellar since last fall, and told her he needed just a little sleep before going to work.
“You’re going to leave me?” she said.
“I have to,” he said. “You’ll be safe if you don’t let anybody see you. They can’t know you’re here. I’ll be back late afternoon. Maybe with some answers.”
Maybe. She wanted him to promise her. But he couldn’t promise her.
He couldn’t promise her anything. Anything at all.
NOW
If this were a normal investigation regarding a murder that involved the town’s history, Becca would go to the Blue Diamond Cafe. The Blue Diamond was in the exact center of town, in a building that had housed it since the 1930s. Tourists occasionally wandered into the Blue Diamond, saw the ripped booths and dirty windows, and wandered right out.
Becca looked at the Blue Diamond with longing as she walked past. Even though all the city old-timers would be long gone by now—it was the very late hour of nine a.m.—she’d still find someone to welcome her and give her a free omelet that, in her private moments, she called a heart attack on a plate.
But she had to go two buildings down, to the Hope Historical Society, housed rent-free in one of Chase’s renovations, the Hope Bankers Building and Trust.
The money people had long moved away from the Bankers Building, but they’d left behind one of the most solid brick buildings in all of Eastern Oregon. Chase had turned the lower floor into shops and restaurants, the second and third floors into offices, and the upper three floors into condos that sold for four times what Becca paid for her house just two years ago.
There was a diner in the Bankers Building, a 1950s wannabe called the Rock and Remember, and it was usually crammed with transplanted Californians or tourists or both. But the omelets, while large here, were made with egg whites only, and the chefs, if you could call them that, used only “the good oils”—no butter or lard—which gave the food a cardboard aftertaste. Even the coffee wasn’t coffee: it was a mochaccino or a cappuccino or an espresso, something that required a language all its own to order.
Still, she went inside, grabbed a double-tall latte with sprinkles and a “cuppa plain Joe,” and then went to the elevator.
The only way she could get Gladys Conyers to talk to her, after that last disastrous interview, was to ply her with her favorite beverage, while making the bribe seem entirely accidental.
Gladys Conyers was forty-five and earnest, a California transplant herself who desperately wanted to convince the entire town of Hope that she was a local. She had some claim. Her grandparents were born here, her parents were raised here, and she spent every summer here from the day she was born.
Her grandfather, Jack Conyers, started the Hope Historical Society as a labor of love in the 1950s, after he came back from the war. He thought every small American town should have its history engraved on its downtown so Americans knew what a wonderful place they came from.
In addition to keeping all of Hope’s newspapers, as well as any clippings that pertained to the city from any other periodical—even the flashy New York Times article forty years ago that put Hope’s ski resorts on the map—he also managed to acquire important items from Hope’s history.
He used to run a small museum from the back of the Historical Society, but lately, he’d been involved in a fund-raising drive to give Hope its own historical museum.
Becca knew she wouldn’t find Jack at the Historical Society. He had become understandably hard to reach these last few years, ever since his eighty-fifth birthday. He figured he only had a good ten years left, and he wanted to spend them preserving Hope’s history, not talking to people who had questions they could easily answer on their own.
So Gladys had taken over the society. She had a lot of knowledge about Hope—more than most longtime residents, but nothing like her grandfather. Still, anyone who wanted to see Jack had to go through Gladys. If she could answer the questions, then she would and Jack wouldn’t lose precious time talking about the past he supposedly loved.
The society had an office on the first floor because it sold items from various ski tournaments and rodeos as well as Hope memorabilia.
Becca tried to ignore the memorabilia, just as she tried to ignore the weird milky scent of the latte she carried in its cardboard holder. She headed to the back, past the teenager manning the sales desk, to the office where Gladys held court.
“Don’t think a latte’s gonna get me to do you any favors,” Gladys said from behind the slatted door. The woman had to have a nose like a Great Dane.
Becca pushed the door open, set the latte on Gladys’s specially made cup holder in the center of her desk, then grabbed her own cuppa plain Joe and sat in the easy chair.
“I’m not asking for a favor,” Becca said.
“Why’d you think I’d be here?” Becca asked.
“You always come here, even when you have a current case. Besides, there’s so much opposition to Chase’s project, I figured you’d want to know if there’s any historical reason for it.”
Becca hid her smile behind her paper coffee cup. Gladys would be useful after all.
“Is there any historical reason?” Becca asked.
Gladys made a pfumph sound that she had to have learned from her curmudgeonly grandfather. “Besides the rumors of ghosts, of hauntings, of strange sounds in the night?”
“I know about those,” Becca said.
“Wow,” Gladys said, peeling the lid off her latte and adding even more sugar. “You actually admit you know something.”
Becca sighed and bit back her response. She knew she’d be in for some of this. Twice she had bypassed Gladys and gone to Jack directly, and neither of them let her forget it. For nearly a year, she had to send another officer to ask historical questions. Just recently, Becca had heard through the grapevine that she was welcome at the Historical Society again, so long as she respected its director.
She did respect its director, but she respected its director’s grandfather more. Jack could answer her questions quickly and with a minimum of fuss. Gladys had to be babied, which Becca proceeded to do.
“I’m sorry about that,” Becca said.
Gladys waved a beringed right hand. “Water under the bridge.”
They continued that game until Gladys finished sugaring her latte and put the lid back on. Then she took a sip, eyed Becca, and said, “I hear there are some serious problems at the site.”
Becca nodded. One more game, but a quick one. “You know I can’t talk about the details, but there is a case.”
“Murder?” Gladys asked.
“Sure looks that way,” Becca said.
Gladys’s eyes glinted. She loved crime and punishment so long as it didn’t involve her family.
“Right now, I’m waiting for the crime lab,” Becca said, “and while I’m stalled, I thought I’d ask you about a few other things I saw at the nat.”
Gladys tapped the lid of her latte. “Chase already had us run the history of the place. Aside from the usual drownings and accidental deaths that any long-running sports facility would have, we found nothing.”
Becca nodded. She would take this one slow. “What about the ghost rumors?”
“Those are mostly from the hotel,” Gladys said. “Apparently quite a few shady characters stayed there, as well as some famous folk. President Coolidge was the most famous, I would say. He loved the fishing up here. There are rumors that Hoover stayed there, too, but I haven’t been able to track them down. People weren’t so proud of him, by the end.”
Becca didn’t need that kind of history lesson. “I’m more concerned with the nat. Do you know what kind of laborers built it?”
“Of course I do.” Gladys opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a thick file. In it were computer reprints of the society’s photos, articles on the construction of the End of the World, and the list that Gladys had mentioned right up front.
She put a lacquered nail on top of one of the photographs. A group of men stood on an empty patch of desert. Some leaned on shovels. Others held pickaxes. A few had rifles.
“These are the men who built the nat,” Gladys said. “We found all sorts of historical photographs for Chase. He loves the authenticity.”
Gladys lingered over Chase’s name. She’d had a crush on him for years, which bothered Chase a lot more than it bothered Becca.
“What’re the rifles for?” Becca asked.
“Chase asked the same thing.” Gladys spun the photograph so that she could look at it before spinning it back to Becca. “My grandfather says that the End of the World was so far out of town that the workers brought their guns, hoping that that night’s dinner would lope past while they were working. This was jack rabbit country, back in the day, and from what I hear, you could find—and shoot—a rabbit as easily as a fly. The men got their paycheck and that night’s supper.”
“Was there labor trouble then?”
“In the twenties? In Oregon?” Gladys raised her voice just enough so that the teenager manning the sales desk could hear how stupid Becca was. “I’m sure in Portland, but not in Hope. And the End of the World was built around 1910, not the twenties. It became the premiere resort in this part of the country by 1918, with war vets bringing their brides here for a honeymoon. And I hear rumors that there was quite a speakeasy run out of the hotel’s basement. The owners stocked up when it became clear that the dries were going to win.”
Becca set the idea of the speakeasy aside for the moment. “What about among the crew? Troubles? Firings?”
“Do they look troubled?” Gladys tapped that nail on the photo again. “Take a close look. What do you see?”
Becca repressed a sigh and leaned forward. Gladys always made these visits seem like an oral exam. “A group of very rough-looking men.”
“Well, they’d take any of our modern men and pound them into the ground, that’s for sure,” Gladys said, a trace of the Valley Girl she’d pretended to be still lingering in her speech. “But I mean their racial mix. Several black men standing side by side with several whites. Not even the Chinese are segregated in this photograph, and usually the old photographs kept all the minorities separate—or even more common, out of the picture altogether.”
Becca peered at it. The men were touching shoulders, which wasn’t something a racially mixed group did in those days.
“There are a few Native Americans as well,” Gladys said. “I learned that from their names. These men are so grimy, it’s hard to tell much else.”
Becca nodded, then frowned. “So the building of the nat went smoothly, then.”
“And the building of the hotel. The rumors about the End of the World started after it opened for business,” Gladys said. “You mean the haunting.”
“And the bad dreams. Those were the worst. People would stay at the End of the World, and wake up screaming. The interesting thing is that they all had the same complaint.”
Becca swirled the coffee in her cup. She’d have to listen to this even though it wasn’t what she had asked. She didn’t care about the hauntings. All old hotels had ghost stories. She wanted to hear about the nat.
“Which was?”
“That they’d had nightmares, and in the nightmares, they saw their long-dead relatives begging for help.” Gladys added a spooky tone to her voice, as if she actually believed this nonsense. “Wow,” Becca said, trying not to sound sarcastic. “Scary.” “No kidding. I’ve never heard of this kind of haunting.” “But nothing from the nat?”
“Why do you ask? What did you find?”
“Evidence that something awful happened there as the place was being built,” Becca said.
“What kind of awful?” Gladys asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
Gladys frowned at her, and Becca had to hide a smile again. For once Gladys had to be feeling as if she was taking a quiz.
“I’ve never heard a thing, and you’d think in this town, I would.” She slid the picture back and studied it as if it held the answers. Then she put it in the file, and closed it.
For a moment, Becca thought the interview was over, and then Gladys said, “Here’s what I know. I know the natatorium was initially supposed to be an indoor tennis court, which was, in its day, a revolutionary idea. That was about 1905 or so, when tennis was very popular, particularly out west.”
“You’re kidding,” Becca said.
Gladys actually smiled at her. “Think of all those photographs of women in their long gowns, holding tennis rackets. These women played, and some played very well, despite the handicap.”
Becca shook her head. “I thought it was an East Coast thing.” “Every small western town had courts, if they had respectable women. Most of the women were barred from the saloons and the clubs, so they had to have something to do or they might form a temperance society, or a ladies aide society, or do something to take away the men’s fun.”
“Aren’t we always that way?” Becca asked, and smiled. Gladys smiled back. “It didn’t work. They didn’t build the tennis court for some reason, I never could find out why. The pool came later. It used the tennis court’s foundation as part of the pool itself, and then it got built from there.”
“Isn’t that unusual?” Becca asked.
Gladys shrugged. “Construction in those days was haphazard. I don’t know what was usual and what wasn’t. I mean, a place could be as sturdy as the hotel or it could be some boards knocked together to be called a house. Really, though, they were just shanties.”
“I thought Hope didn’t have a shantytown.”
“Oh, we did, but it burned,” Gladys said. “No one bothered to rebuild it. Folks didn’t like to talk about that day. The entire city could’ve gone up in flames. Somehow it didn’t happen, though.”
This was one of the things Becca hated about seeing either Conyers about Hope history—their tendency to digress.
“But nothing else about the nat? Nothing unusual?”
“No, not even the nat was unusual. They had natatoriums all over Oregon. They started as playgrounds for the rich—mostly pools and tennis—and then as they fell apart, they became the community pools and playgrounds for the poorer kids. Most of them got shut down in the polio scares of the late forties and early fifties. I think ours is the last one standing, which makes it eligible for historical preservation.”
“Which Chase has begged you not to apply for until he’s done with the work, right?”