I had found out nothing more except for that “possible” suicide business. No details about where she’d come from, no physical description at all. Except she was blond, and blond could mean anything.
Just look at Ree-Jane.
TWENTY-TWO
It was a small victory, shutting up Ree-Jane, but that still left me with the problem of finding out just who had died in Mirror Pond.
The Conservative was lying there near my feet, a corner lifting and fluttering in a gust of wind. What I wanted was to find out in easy stages, a little here and a little there—a shred of truth, a pack of lies, a jumble of information I could choose bits and pieces from and put them together and see the answer to my question when I was ready to see it. Suzy Whitelaw’s drippy story should have satisfied this need; but no, any newspaper account would still have too much truth in it for comfort. But not nearly as much as the blare of truth that would come from the Sheriff’s mouth—and I was amazed by my foolhardy visit to the courthouse yesterday morning. True, I’d rather have heard it from him, but the “it” I wanted to hear might not be the “it” he was going to tell. And the trouble was, I could not let on by so much as the flicker of an eyelash that I would be devastated if he said something like “a young girl, real young, pale blond hair, wearing a sprigged cotton dress.” I would actually turn into the pillar of ice I was coolly pretending to be.
Then came the question Why? Why would I turn into a pillar of ice at the discovery?
I couldn’t answer that.
What I wanted, then, was a kind of slanted truth, and I turned over possible sources of undependable information. There was Ulub and Ubub, not because they were undependable but because I couldn’t understand them. Probably, they hadn’t heard about the dead lady. I got the impression they didn’t keep up with the news in the Conservative, and since most people didn’t talk to them, they’d have no way of knowing. Unless from Mr. Root. Then there was Britten’s store, where a lot of old-timers gathered, so each one could prove he knew more than the others. There was Miss Flagler, too. She was much more fearful than Miss Flyte, I’d noticed, and certainly would be of dead bodies. She always tried to pretend they didn’t really happen, or that there was a happier explanation, and so made such details out to be better than they were. She might even bring the dead lady back to life again by saying, “Well, she was probably just concussed after all that, and they must have taken her to County General.” “But the paper said ‘dead,’ Miss Flagler!” “Oh, pshaw, you know you can never believe anything that Whitelaw woman tells you.”
The easiest of all of these at the moment would be Britten’s store as it would take only five minutes to get there. I was about to set out when a car came crunching along the drive, and I figured it was Mrs. Davidow’s station wagon, bringing her back from town. The wagon bumped along, spewing up gravel bits, horn honking as she rounded the corner (as I eased down in my chair so she wouldn’t see me) and coming to rest under the porte cochere. She always tapped on the horn to let people know she was back so we could start up the marching band and throw confetti, but it was mostly a signal for Walter to come and get the groceries. I always thought that was pretty funny; she could have waited on the wind as soon as Walter to carry the grocery bags. Eventually, Walter would get there, but no use honking.
Steps on the porch stairs, and the screen door banged. I heard her calling out for Walter.
Her first stop would be the kitchen, for she would be buzzing with news for my mother. Mrs. Davidow loved her role of Messenger. Sometimes, I pictured the hotel as one of those out-of-the-way castles back in the Middle Ages, where huge beamed doors were flung open and a messenger nearly fell off his horse to rush in with news for the king. In many ways I like this fantasy, for it makes me feel the hotel is its own place, surrounded by water, connected to the rest of the world only by a drawbridge which can be lowered or raised when we see fit. So what I realized was that with the paper out today, she’d come back absolutely full of all the news about this dead woman. There is no better source of questionable information than Mrs. Davidow; she loves her role as the person coming from a distant country so much that she can’t help making a bad thing worse or a good thing better with a lot of little odds and ends either left out or put in just to make her story better. Thus, if I heard some detail that confirmed my worst suspicions (“pretty,” “young,” “a stranger”), I might be able to ignore it.
After these trips to town, Lola Davidow always heads for the kitchen, where she sits on the salad table and smokes cigarettes while she shares with my mother that day’s takings of gossip, and my mother would be standing as always between the long work table and the cast-iron stove, cutting up vegetables or cutting circles in biscuit dough, smoking too, and listening. It’s a familiar scene. When I am not busy criticizing them for a hundred different heartfelt sins, I almost admire them. For they are making the best of things. They certainly aren’t making money.
Knowing where she was going, I followed her. When I banged through one of the swinging doors between dining room and kitchen, Mrs. Davidow was perched as always on the big white porcelain table where at dinnertime I put up the salad bowls. The table was blessedly clear now of everything—a clean slate—except for the crock of French dressing that always sits at one end, aging and being added to when it gets low. Half an onion steeps in the crock; a red swirl of paprika floats on top. It is, of course, the best French dressing in the universe. The kitchen was blessedly free of Vera, who always butts into their conversations, correcting them for truth. The only other person was Walter, standing in the shadows at the far end of the room with the big industrial dishwasher. Mrs. Davidow was telling him to go out and bring in the groceries, and Walter nodded, but just kept wiping at a cookie sheet. Naturally, I didn’t want anyone to think I’d come to listen, so I purposefully moved to the French dressing crock, lifted the lid, and peeked in. As it was my responsibility to keep an eye on the dressing level, no one paid any attention to me. Anyway, I put on a busy frown, twirled the ladle around, and made patterns with the paprika. Then I added some oil. I wanted to think it was a compliment to my skill that no one questioned what I was doing, but I knew that wasn’t so, since it would be hard to ruin the French dressing, there being no exact ratios of one thing to another. This is another thing that amazes me about my mother’s cooking: there seldom are. And one day it struck me that this was real ART-EAT, in the full Arturo sense—that an artist simply knows. It might appear that the person was haphazard, tossing a little paint here, a little paprika there; but no. The artist has such a feeling for what he is doing that little measurements are built into his mind and eye and hand. That’s the way I explained it, and with this thought I lightly tossed a sprinkling of paprika and a teaspoon of sugar into the dressing.
I was also lightly listening. Lightly, because what I wanted to do was partly remove my eardrums from unpleasant news and partly open them up to what I wanted to hear. If I’d had Miss Bertha’s hearing aid I could have fiddled it around. What I did was to enter a kind of dream world where I could raise and lower a sort of theaterlike curtain between Mrs. Davidow’s words and my hearing. Like a filter.
Mrs. Davidow was perched in her usual way on the salad table, her stocky legs crossed at the ankles and swinging slightly. She smoked and talked. My mother smoked and listened. I added salt to the crock and stirred and heard her words muted as in a dream or in memory.
. . . a stranger, probably not even one of the lake people.
Well, I already knew that no one had identified her. I decided to go to the icebox and look in. Now she was talking about actually having bumped into “Sam” in the Rainbow Café. That stopped me in my intention of making a Black Cow with Coke and vanilla ice cream, as it would be too complicated a procedure. Instead, I quietly slipped out a small pitcher of iced tea and went to the cupboard for a glass.
. . . said it was really strange, she must have walked across White’s Bridge. Where was she going?
&nbs
p; Lola Davidow, lady dick. My mother said something about she didn’t see why that was important either and then told me to put back the pitcher of tea. As I did this, Mrs. Davidow was answering:
To meet someone? She might not have gone there on her own.
Dreamily, I carried my iced tea glass towards the dish drain, walking between Mrs. Davidow’s swinging feet and my mother’s dicing knife, too close to their voices to blunt the hard edges of their words.
By the time I got to the drain table, where we waitresses dump trayloads of dishes for Walter to stack up, I was out of waking danger, back into semidreaming. The state was helped along by Walter, whose motions were always dreamlike, and who was wiping a big platter, cradling it like a baby and slowly dragging the dishtowel around it. He told me “Hello,” a nasal, sort of tongue-stuck sound, as he gave me his wide, rubber-band smile. Walter was always in a good humor, always working at his many jobs, always in shadow, as if he carried a bag of shadows to take out and put on.
“Sam said there were tire tracks. A pickup truck, probably. Four-wheel drive.”
My mother said, “Mirror Pond. I wonder why anyone would get killed there. Or kill herself. It’s miles from anywhere.”
That was true enough. But then I suppose if you’re going to kill somebody, you’d want a miles-from-anywhere sort of place. The map in my mind of the local geography was about as dependable as directions from a blind man. I knew Mirror Pond and White’s Bridge were somewhere north of Spirit Lake; that is, if you went as the crow flies from the Devereau place, you’d come to White’s Bridge and Mirror Pond, near it. But this was miles I was talking about; it was too far to walk.
For I had decided, listening to my mother and Mrs. Davidow, that I simply had to see it. It was the murder site. I didn’t think the Sheriff would see fit to give me a ride in an “official vehicle.” That’s what he called his police car when Maud asked for a lift to Hebrides or somewhere. “Sorry, I can’t ride you around in an official vehicle.” And she’d say, “Ride me around? Like I’m Miss La Porte or someone? I’m not asking to ‘ride around.’ ” Of course, the Sheriff only said it to get her goat.
Nor was Mrs. Davidow about to give me a ride, not unless she got so curious herself about the dead woman that she’d want to go there and would want me to go with her. For some reason I seemed to make her feel more secure, as if I were riding shotgun. I didn’t understand this.
Absentmindedly I had picked up a dishtowel. Wiping dishes could sometimes help my concentration. Now there was, of course, Ree-Jane’s white convertible. Only, Ree-Jane went with it, and although I could stand to humble myself and beg her, having to take her along would ruin the trip.
There was Axel’s Taxis. I had enough money to pay for one for all that distance; the trouble with that was that Delbert would broadcast all over La Porte that he’d driven me to Mirror Pond. Then I suddenly thought of the Wood boys and their old pickup trucks. I wondered if they were up at Britten’s right now.
I heard Mrs. Davidow saying: . . . there was no identification on the body, there was nothing in the pockets of her cotton dress, Sam said . . .
The pockets of her cotton dress . . .
Painful as it was to smile, I returned Walter’s smile and picked up a salad plate while the word “pockets” . . . “pockets” . . . “pockets” wheeled in my mind. But then, I told myself, pockets in a dress were pretty common.
. . . or in her handbag . . .
Like a freight train, those words rushed towards me! Her handbag! One of the things I had noticed about the Girl was that she didn’t carry a handbag. She was here, she was there, she was in places (such as the railway platform) where you would have thought a woman would have brought a handbag with her. But the Girl carried only a small purse not much bigger than her hand. Would such an article be called a “handbag”?
Was my argument kind of weak? I leaned against the dishwasher. Walter wondered, was I sick?
I wasn’t, I told him.
But then I thought: Mrs. Davidow is telling my mother what she says the Sheriff told her. Immediately, some of my fear returned, for the Sheriff would never have taken Mrs. Davidow into his confidence, and that’s the way she was making it sound. Probably, a lot of what she was reporting to my mother was her own invention, although she might even think these details were received from the Sheriff. So I could be pretty much back where I was before.
I tossed down the dishtowel and headed out the back screen door.
• • •
Neither the Woods nor even Mr. Root had taken up their positions yet on the bench outside of Britten’s. It was occupied by an old man, who sat with legs crossed and arms wrapped so closely around himself his hands nearly reached his back. He was bent over as if in pain, but all he was doing was leaning forward and squinting off across the highway at (I guessed) something interesting to him that I couldn’t see. He wore a black-and-white striped cap that gave the impression he’d either been a convict or borrowed the hat from one. I didn’t know him, but then there were a lot of people in Spirit Lake I didn’t know.
Just as I expected there would be, several old-timers had taken up their stations in Britten’s long narrow room, the canned goods shelved along one wall, the candy and cigarette counter along the other, where the cash register was and the large containers of loose cookies. The men were talking to one another across the expanse of the room. I thought it would be simpler for them to stand together, but they only did that if there was something juicy to chew over.
Well, today there was, for not ten seconds after I’d walked in, one of them brought up the subject of Mirror Pond. Another of them replied, “That there woman the po-lice found, well, I never did hear nothin’ like that.”
Then they seemed to be pulled together, the four of them, as if by a magnet. They made a small circle near the meat counter at the rear, where Mr. Britten’s son, also the butcher, was leaning his chin on his folded arms and listening, so that he could put his two bits in.
I stood before the candy-display case looking at the lineup of Butterfingers and Necco wafers and keeping my own ears open. When I left the kitchen, I remembered I’d want some money, so I crossed the grass to the other wing and went up to my room to collect some of my tips. I took a dollar in change along, which I jiggled in my fist whenever Mr. Britten looked my way, just to let him know I was here on business and not to loiter like some other people I could mention.
“. . . stranger . . .”
I was tired of hearing that word; it was pretty settled in my mind that she was a stranger. But then came a contradiction.
“Ain’t what I heard. . . . [mumble] said she was from one of them ritzy places the lake people own. . . .”
My hopes soared. If that were the case, it couldn’t be the Girl.
“Hell no, that ain’t right. They toi’ me”— and here a stream of tobacco juice got aimed at one of the spittoons Mr. Britten kept around—“she be from over to [mumble, mumble]. . . .”
Strain as I did, I couldn’t hear. So my stomach churned again. Now they’d all lowered their voices, so I just went ahead and studied the candy display. The penny candy had gone up to two cents some time when I wasn’t looking. I especially liked the paper-wrapped hard ones with the melty centers and the fruit from which each took its flavor stamped on the white wrapping. Then I heard, much to my delight:
“. . . Hebrides. You hear that, Bryson? That that woman’s from Hebrides?”
He was addressing Mr. Britten, a fairly useless task, for the storekeeper didn’t seem to like talking much. Mr. Britten grunted and adjusted his specs, thick black-framed ones that went with his black hair. I think he’s rich and owns a lot of property around. Mildly relieved—for the Girl, I would bet, was from Cold Flat Junction, if from anywhere around here—I went on looking at the Fireballs. I loved Fireballs. Some were dark red and some were a glowing orange color that I’d never seen anywhere on this earth except in a Fireball. The voices were rising and falling, too difficult
to hear from the candy counter, so I moved back and to the left to take up a position nearer the meat counter by the shelves of canned goods. There was a single wooden rocker in the corner, and one of the men had sat down in it to shout his opinions up at the others. I pretended to be inspecting the baked beans, the Heinz and Campbell’s, knowing that Mr. Britten would be over to ask me what I wanted. I couldn’t walk in and just fool around like the adults did; I was expected to take care of my errand and move out quickly. The hotel being probably his best customer, I thought he should treat me with at least as much respect as he did these men. Well, here he came, making me lose out on some of their talk, and I told him I was trying to remember how many cans my mother told me to get. He just annoyed me to death by telling me the hotel always got the big ones, the “institution-sized” (as if anyone could tell me anything I didn’t know about my mother’s baked beans). I told him, not this time, this was something different. He moved away, suspicious. Mr. Britten always had that look, like someone was going to rob him blind.
“. . . you thinkin ’bout Louella?”
“Looks just like her, from what Donny said.”
Donny. He was deputy sheriff! Louella. I stiffened and kept staring at the rows of canned beans, Heinz and Campbell’s.
“Hell it does. Why, I seen her not three days ago!”
“Well, you mighta see’d her, Bub, but three days ago ain’t two nights ago, and the way Donny said it, she looked just like Louella. You know—” this was directed to the others—“big girl, lives over to Hebrides.” He spat.
Big girl. I was so still and breathless I could have turned into one of the cans of baked beans. That would never fit the Girl.
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