Hotel Paradise

by Martha Grimes

  The wooden-bead curtain back in the shadows clicked and clattered as old Mrs. Souder came through it, twitching like always. I never have known what’s wrong with her; whatever it is affects her head, which jerks to the side as if someone is pulling a string fastened to her chin. Mrs. Souder doesn’t seem to like young people (like me); probably we make her even more nervous.

  But if anyone should be nervous, it should be her husband’s customers. He’s the pharmacist, and his hands suffer from the same nervous disease as her neck. When Mr. Souder measures out liquids in slender vials, the beaker stutters against the glass. I always think the colors of these medicines are amazing: the globelike bottles standing along the wooden shelf in front of him range from springwater-clear to purple, aquamarine, and chartreuse. When the old B & O train charges through town, it sets the shimmery liquids jittering, just like the Coca-Cola glasses and ice cream dishes shiver on the tier of glass shelves.

  I always have a chocolate soda with chocolate ice cream. I try to make myself order something else, but never do. The chocolate ice cream tub, just about everybody’s favorite, is usually half-empty, bits of cream crystallizing around its sides. On this day, I inspected the various tubs, heaving my chest across the marble counter to do this, thinking I would choose something else—maple perhaps, its surface undisturbed, so that my scoop would make the first creamy dent—but no, I was a slave to that chocolate.

  I ordered chocolate-on-chocolate as Mrs. Souder stood there with the ice cream scoop already raised and ready to fall. She was surprisingly generous with her scoops, putting two into the ribbed glass rather than the one you got at Frazee’s. I watched the composition of my soda with the concentration of an addict.

  A tiny, long-handled ladle deposited a ribbon of chocolate into the bottom of the tall glass, and this Mrs. Souder topped off with a dollop of milk. This was followed with the first scoop of ice cream, then a brief fizz of water, a lot more chocolate sauce, more water frothing up, and then the second scoop of ice cream, followed by another brief fizz of water that bubbled across the surface. Then Mrs. Souder drew artful circles with the whipped cream spoon, forming a small iceberg of topping. A maraschino cherry was the last ingredient, and Mrs. Souder let it drop down into the whipped cream. The cherry juice bled into the white cloud, the same way Mrs. Souder’s bright lipstick bled over the edges of her thin mouth.

  I always thought this lipstick rather brave of her, for she was quite old, with tissue-papery skin, delicate and very white, but that was probably from lathering on the Pond’s powder that they sold in the store.

  Mrs. Souder is a silent and unfriendly old woman, but I think she is rather proud of her ice cream artistry. She looks as if she enjoys holding the chocolate-sauce ladle high over the glass so that the sauce forms swirls and dribbles ribbons; she enjoys making those high white peaks with the whipped cream and then displacing the peak by the drop of a cherry. As she comes to the end of these maneuvers, her grumpy silence gives way to the hint of a painstaking smile, the barest raising of the corners of the mouth. In her tea-colored eyes is an expression almost of delight, quickly extinguished if she sees me watching her. And it makes me wonder if Mrs. Souder, who seems as far removed from people my age as anyone can be, and who is sharp with us when she isn’t silent—if during the ice-cream-soda composition, she is remembering her own childhood, maybe spent right here in Souder’s Drug Store, maybe even sitting on one of these very same stools, for I believe she has lived in La Porte all of her life. This makes me feel some sort of kinship with Mrs. Souder, and feel I should be able to picture myself as old as she is, but I can’t. It’s too difficult to see that far into the future. Beyond my own imagined wedding day to various people (the bridegroom changes a lot, depending on my mood), my future is a blur.

  So I drank my soda slowly while I turned on the wooden stool, looking over the familiar interior, and the gray backs of the items in the window—a cardboard cutout of Vitalis hair cream, another of Pond’s cold cream, two deep blue bottles of Evening in Paris toilet water, a sunburst of various styles of hairbrush. As if it were an artwork hung for years in some museum, the window never changed, and I could see the thin coating of dust on the blue bottles and the dust mouse caught behind the Vitalis cutout. The only sound in the silence was the ticking of the regulator clock on the wall. The interior of the pharmacy was dark and cool in the way that only marble and mahogany are dark and cool.

  The quiet was shattered by the talky entrance of Helene Baum, the doctor’s wife, followed up by two other women, the mayor’s wife and Mrs. Dodge Haines. They’re some of Helene Baum’s followers, for she always seems to be trailing women in her wake, talking back to them over her shoulder. She has deep-dyed red hair and always wears yellow, that day’s yellow being a sweater over a tweed skirt. She also wears harlequin-framed eyeglasses with a dusting of rhinestones across the top that are really awful. The three women went chattily to one of the little ice cream tables, Helene Baum pausing long enough for me to acknowledge her. She never says hello first. With her raspy, nasal voice, I always feel she’s going to file me down like a fingernail. I think she’s a mean-minded person, going around town cutting people apart so that Dr. Baum can sew them up again. And she thinks that being the wife of La Porte’s chief doctor gives her social standing.

  To have a social standing in La Porte isn’t easy, since no one’s really rich or well connected or a member of some swank family like the Rockefellers. When it comes to sheer staying power, probably the Paradises have been around longer than anyone else. Even the Grahams (of which I’m one) have been around a lot longer than Helene Baum. I know it just kills her she never gets asked up on the balcony on those days when Aurora is feeling sociable. And it must be especially maddening to her that Mrs. Davidow gets invited, since Lola is, in Mrs. Baum’s mind, a Johnny-come-lately.

  As I was scraping the last of the chocolate from my glass (and trying to ignore the nasal ordering-around of Mrs. Souder by Helene Baum), I wondered how long Dr. Baum had practiced in La Porte, for he must be in his fifties or even sixties. Could he have been a doctor here at the time of Mary-Evelyn’s death? No. That was forty years ago, and he’d hardly have been out of school, even if he was in his sixties now. Then I suddenly remembered Dr. McComb, who was quite elderly and who had been around La Porte for fifty or even sixty years.

  I let the long-handled spoon clatter into my glass and wondered why I hadn’t considered this before: that some doctor or other had to sign a death certificate, or something like that. I had heard my mother talk about Dr. McComb; he collected things—flowers, or butterflies, things like that. I frowned. “Horticulturist.” That was the word. He had written articles for magazines on the flowers and wildlife around this area. He probably knew a lot about weeds, too.

  I took another couple of turns on the wooden stool, pushing myself with the toe of my shoe. And while I did this, I considered what I knew of flowers and butterflies. Not much. What I was turning over in my mind was how I might come by a butterfly (or a flower) that Dr. McComb would like to add to his collection. That would get him to talk to me. If I could talk to Dr. McComb, I might be able to ask him about Mary-Evelyn. Why had I never thought of this before in my search for information? Probably because Dr. McComb is no longer seen much around town, for he gave over his practice to a younger doctor, the one Helene Baum was always warning people against.

  It was she whose voice cut through my mental butterfly-catching, ordering me to stop turning because the stool squeaked and it was very annoying. The other two women looked at me with crimped, disapproving lips, and though I didn’t have the nerve to keep the exercise up, I did manage to push off just once more with my foot and sail around, taking in the plate glass window. As I whizzed around, I got a glimpse of a person outside studying the window display. I had the impression of a face all shadows; then as I sailed around again, the sun struck her back and fuzzed her hair and her body. It was as if she were wrapped in a gold cocoon. Perhaps it was al
l that thinking about butterflies that put this into my mind.

  When I finally slammed to a stop, she was turning away, but I was almost certain it was her, the one on the railroad platform in Cold Flat Junction. And then I saw her profile.

  It was definitely the Girl.

  THIRTEEN

  She disappeared from the window.

  I would have run for the door, but I had always been taught to restrain myself. Never jump from your chair but rise and walk slowly to wherever you’re going. I remembered years before sitting at one of the small, scarred tables in the children’s room of the library and reading in a book of poems about a girl named Jenny who always jumped up out of her chair to kiss the person who wrote the poem. I remembered my eyes filling up, my whole body filling up with tears, it felt like, and not being able to keep them back. My head was carefully bent over my book and the tears dripped down on the pages. I wanted to be Jenny.

  Since I had already paid for my soda, I could have run lickety-split for the door. In fantasy, I jumped from the stool and rushed outside and grabbed her and asked, “Who are you? Who are you?” Inside of my cool exterior, I’m pretty much a Fourth of July fireworks person: feelings flaring, shooting, wheeling, sizzling, or just popping; or, on the down side, falling, sinking, plummeting with almost equal energy. Outwardly, though, I’m exceedingly careful to remain cool and even dry, like a person without body fluids—no spit, no sweat, no tears. What I’ve picked up is that it’s important in this life not to appear too enthusiastic about anything, as if in that way you can avoid disappointment. It was superstitious thinking. And it doesn’t work, either; the disappointment is always just as bad.

  So by the time I strolled outside, she had vanished.

  Desperate now, I did run. I ran in the direction she’d been aiming, down to the corner, looked one way towards the railroad tracks, then quickly turned the other way and collided with the Sheriff.

  “Did you see her?” I was breathless.

  “See who?”

  I was searching the sidewalk beyond him. Empty—at least empty of her. “You must have passed her. She couldn’t have gone across the tracks, because the barrier’s down. That freight train’s coming. So she must have gone up the street there, the way you just walked. . . .” The Sheriff just stood there like a wedge. “Maybe she went into the five-and-dime—”

  “Who?”

  “She’s blond and really pretty. I don’t know how old she is. Around twenty, maybe.” I was dancing up and down on the balls of my feet now, trying to look past him, right side, left side.

  “Hold on, for Lord’s sake!” He brought his hands down on my shoulders, stilling me. “Now, what’s so important about this girl?”

  I didn’t know, only that she was important. I dodged down under his arms and made a beeline for the five-and-dime. She could have gone in any of the stores along this street, into the dime store, the haberdashery, the hardware store on the corner, or any of the others. I figured a stranger would most likely want a dime-store item, perhaps a toothbrush or maybe a lipstick.

  There were four aisles and I walked them all; she wasn’t among the two dozen people in the store. Unfortunately, the dime store had a lot of distractions. I stopped to leaf through one of the comic books hung in the metal racks; I stopped to review the latest in lipstick shades, deciding on a pale, peachy color—that is, if I wore lipstick, which, naturally, I don’t. Deflated and disappointed, I walked out into the cold sunlight and the Sheriff was still there, leaning against a parking meter. He was talking to Bunny Caruso.

  Now, Bunny Caruso belongs to that mysterious band of local people I had strict orders to stay away from. Like Toya Tidewater. And there were others: there was Gummy John; there was a tall old man with silver hair whose name I could never remember; and a few others. In other words, all of the weird or fascinating people. Bunny Caruso, though, was absolutely to be avoided, whereas some of the others, like the Woods, got tossed in for no particular reason (and when they worked on the hotel grounds, it was all right to talk to them). It seemed to me that anyone who was different was also thought of as dangerous. It was the boring people, the nasty people, like Helene Baum, that I was supposed to bow and scrape to. Naturally, I balked.

  I wasn’t told why I was to stay away from Bunny, and because of this I of course assumed it had something to do with sex, that subject I knew even less about than I did God and puffballs. My notion of “sexy” was pretty foggy, but Bunny never did strike me that way, for she’s kind of thin in build, though her face is extremely pretty. I heard that there were always men hanging around her little place on Swain’s Point, and I was never, never to go near her house. This was a commandment I broke at the first available opportunity, which was one day when I helped her carry her groceries from Miller’s to her beat-up pickup truck and she invited me home to have lunch with her. I had seen the little delicatessen cartons sticking out of the bag, and I was only too happy to accept. Miller’s cole slaw is almost as good as my mother’s.

  We bumped along in the pickup for several miles with Bunny chattering away amiably, and for the life of me I just couldn’t imagine what was supposed to be so dangerous about her. She had an innocent-looking face, completely absent of makeup, and goldish russet hair cut boy-short, except in back, where it curled over her collar in a little switch. If anything, Bunny struck me as being a farm girl, someone I could easily picture out in the fields in a broad-brimmed hat, picking something—corn, maybe. But then I preferred the vision of acres of waving wheat and the sound of threshing, and so she threshed.

  Bunny has a strange accent—strange, that is, because I can’t place it. It isn’t southern, nor is it mountain. The a’s draw out and the u’s disappear, so that “I can’t figure” becomes “I cain’t figger.” The harshness of the accent is softened by her voice. She has the softest and most musical voice I think I’ve ever heard. Her voice makes me think of the low winds rippling the sea of wheat, a sowing sound, a threshing sound.

  That day was the first time I’d ever seen her house, and it was really interesting. It was full of mirrors; whole walls were mirrors. And there were a lot of candles; there must have been more than two dozen bunched around. I asked her if the house had been done by Miss Flyte, and she said no, she couldn’t afford Miss Flyte, but she’d gotten some ideas from the candle shop. The mirrors, she’d said, were to make the room look bigger, since the house was quite tiny. We ate all of the cole slaw and tuna fish and stuff and then went down to sit on a rock that was only slightly above one of the lake inlets and stuck our feet in the water. Bunny liked to talk and I liked to listen, mostly to the sound of her voice. She also had a butterfly net and sometimes we chased butterflies, or, rather, because we were too lazy to move from the rock, we’d just sweep the net in the air if one happened to fly by. I visited several times after that.

  One of my fantasies after my visit was to have, one day, a farm where Bunny and I would live. Perhaps this farm would be in the miles of fertile land called Paradise Valley (a name that I think had to do with God and Heaven, and not Aurora Paradise). I pictured Bunny out there in our fields in her big straw hat and blue gingham, picking whatever needed picking, and, of course, threshing. (My knowledge of crops and livestock went the way of God, puffballs, and sex.) In my fantasy, Bunny and I would spend a lot of time with our feet in the stream, skipping stones and watching dragonflies and swooping down on butterflies.

  And out in the fields, I would wander through the stalks—of corn, perhaps—followed by farm dogs. Occasionally, cats would leap up out of the tall grass and bat at butterflies. Bunny worked the wide fields, but I do not know what I contributed to the farm running. Not much, apparently. After all, I was in the hotel business.

  “You scoured that place pretty well,” said the Sheriff, nodding towards the dime store.

  I didn’t answer him; I said hello to Bunny and included her in our search for the Girl. “You must’ve passed her,” I said to the Sheriff, letting him know that he
was, after all, the Sheriff and should know about strangers in town and what they might be up to.

  “Who?” asked Bunny, looking from me to the Sheriff. I think she really likes the Sheriff, but then who doesn’t? I felt a twinge of jealousy.

  I told her about the Girl, but not everything, not about me being in Cold Flat Junction. She frowned a bit, shook her head slowly. “I cain’t remember seein’ no’un like that.”

  In this way, she’s like the Sheriff, and like Maud Chadwick, too. She gives things her deep consideration and doesn’t brush you off or ignore you. I ponder this sometimes: how three people who are so different can be so much alike. And then I ponder: but are they so different? Are we all so different from one another? For I naturally include myself in this little band of my favorite people.

  When the Sheriff suggested stopping in the Rainbow, Bunny took a step backward, as if it weren’t for her to be included in the likes of such festivities. I told her come on, but that only made her more anxious, clutching her tiny shoulder bag to her waist.

  I asked the Sheriff, after she’d walked off to her pickup truck, why people seemed to object to Bunny Caruso.

  “They don’t like the way she lives, I guess.”

  We were doubling back towards the Rainbow Café. “But she just lives with her cat in a little house on Swain’s Point. It’s neat and perfectly respectable.” (“Perfectly respectable” was a favorite phrase of my mother’s, usually meaning the person didn’t have much else going for him.) “It’s just like other houses, except for the mirrors—”

  The Sheriff suddenly stooped to tie his shoelace, so I couldn’t read his expression when he said, “Sounds like you’ve been there.”