I lay there thinking this over, trying to sort out the “common” from the rest, and began to wonder if it was simply that whoever my mother personally likes is not common and whoever she doesn’t is. But that doesn’t give my mother credit enough for making fine distinctions. She would never be so crude as that. What it really is, probably, is that my mother has as many rules for cooking and commonness as Aurora does for playing solitaire.
I turned this over for some time, sleepily, and thought I was dreaming when I heard the singing. I opened my eyes and pricked up my ears.
“When I first waaaan-ered down into tow-en . . .”
was wafting down the hall, coming down from the fourth floor. The Cold Turkey had really done its job.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Vera was still sick, so that I had to take over her regulars at breakfast, in addition to Miss Bertha, who is always at her worst at breakfast. There are too many things to choose from. Besides the usual ways of cooking eggs, my mother has dreamed up a lot of others. I always hate to have to list “shirred” among the egg dishes, for no one ever seems to know what that is. And they are always wanting an exact description of things like “Omelette Florentine” (not that I blamed them). It always makes me snigger to see “omelette” on any menu other than the Hotel Paradise’s, for in any other cook’s hands it’s not much more than scrambled eggs. My mother’s, on the other hand, is high and humpy and soft as clouds, for she whips the whites to a meringue gloss before adding the yolks. And when she fills the omelette with one of her mixtures, it’s a sight to behold. Why one of those food magazines isn’t beating a path to the Hotel Paradise to take pictures, I have never understood.
Anyway, I tried to imagine Vera actually being sick, but had a hard time doing it. I could not think what “disease” could take hold of that whiplash body and reduce it to sniffling or emitting little gasps of pain or shivering with fever. Ree-Jane, naturally, having waited on tables last night (after which she must have gone out on her mysterious date with the Unknown), could hardly be expected to do anything but sleep in this morning. So that left Anna Paugh and me to wait on the dozen tables.
It was especially difficult this morning to keep my attention on the choice between dropped biscuits and corn cakes and orange muffins, for I wanted to get down to the Pink Elephant and make my plans. I made some mistakes (which wasn’t unusual), most of them landing on Miss Bertha’s table (which also wasn’t unusual). I had brought her a California Omelette, lovely vegetables oozing out of its folds, which she swore she never ordered. When she banged her cane and yelled for attention, I disappeared into the kitchen and told Anna Paugh to take over. Fortunately, she was good and easygoing, not yet bent out of shape by the Hotel Paradise.
It used to be, when I was very young, we had a half-dozen live-in waitresses who occupied the rooms right above the laundry room in the wing where the kitchen was. To get to these back rooms, you had to walk up the darkest, narrowest stairs I’ve ever seen. At the top is a landing, and to the right, the six rooms, three on each side of a cramped hallway. Several feet beyond the head of the stairs the hallway dog-legs, making two separate sets of rooms along two different hallways. On this wider one to the left, there are more rooms, eight or ten, that other help used long ago. The way the rooms were arranged, it was as if the Waitresses occupied their own separate space.
I really loved the Waitresses. I have always spent more time with the hotel help than with the guests’ kids; most of them are uppity and expect they should always win at croquet and other games just because their fathers pay to stay here.
My mother must not have known how much time I spent with the Waitresses, up in their rooms, talking and laughing, for they would surely have been considered “common.” The Waitresses (for I thought of them as a unit, a group) were young, I guess, but when you’re only six or seven, a woman of twenty seems as old as Egypt, and just as romantic and unreachable. Unreachable only in the sense that I could never imagine myself growing to that height or age or prettiness, for they were all very pretty, with similar carved-ivory faces and gold or red or ebony hair. Saturday nights were especially fun, because sometimes they would put records on an old phonograph and dance around. They would dress me up in one or another of their “evening gowns” and dab a little lipstick on me. I remember especially a midnight-blue dress, tulle and sequins, that I thought was ‘the most glamorous dress imaginable. Or at least that’s what I think now; I don’t know what I thought then. But I do remember how I loved dressing up and dancing around. We would all dance around up there over the laundry room.
I say there were half a dozen waitresses, but I’m not really sure; there might have been four, or even eight. There might have been only three. It must have been because they all seemed to enjoy things so much, and were so gay, that they appeared in my mind as a “flock” of girls, like flamingos huddled together in one of the paintings-for-loan hanging in the Abigail Butte County Library. Or the ballet dancers in one of the other paintings—a very famous picture, I think—that shows the dancers in satin and tulle, limbering up, a couple of them with legs raised up on that bar thing. The Waitresses were as brilliant as flamingos and as limber as dancers.
And the Waitresses belonged to the days before our playhouse, way up behind the hotel, burned down, and I never knew why, or what Will or I had done (if anything) to cause it; to the days before my dog got killed just where the hotel’s gravel drive meets the highway, and I saw the car coming and started to run across the highway but was held back by someone or something; to the days before my father died.
It’s as if the Waitresses had a kind of magic to them, like an ability to pull flowers out of hats or endless lengths of brilliantly colored scarves out of sleeves. It was as if they protected me from something, maybe the way a magician protects you from seeing empty space. Away comes the screen and where there once was empty space, now there’s a vase of roses or a bluebird.
And though they probably left one by one, I think of them as disappearing all together. I see all of them or I see none of them.
When I’m sitting in the Pink Elephant (as I was doing on this morning after breakfast) with my notebook and my Whitman’s box of snapshots and stuff, I remember the Waitresses. Now, they’re a memory. My head feels heavy and I drop it on my arms. I think: If memory is this painful now, what will it be like when I’m twenty? or forty? Thirty more years of memories to weigh me down, more and more things to lose. For at some point they would all be memories: Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler, the Wood boys, Maud. The Sheriff. This seemed so unthinkable that my head jerked upwards, like a puppet head, worked by strings.
More and more things to lose. And what comes in their stead, what comes to replace the Waitresses, is Vera, like a steel rooster, long-necked, gray, and strutting into the dining room. And it seems impossible that things could have changed so much. Impossible the Waitresses were gone and the midnight-blue tulle dress gone with them.
TWENTY-NINE
After sitting in the Pink Elephant that morning, thinking unhappy thoughts, I finally got around to making my plans. I decided, first, to go into town to the courthouse. I didn’t want to take up the time with walking, for by now it was nearly ten o’clock and I was due back by noon to serve lunch. Waiting on tables broke up the day something awful.
I went to the back office and called Axel’s Taxis (first looking around to make sure Ree-Jane wasn’t within earshot), and the “dispatcher” (with only two cabs, I couldn’t think why Axel needed a dispatcher) said she’d send Delbert out as soon as he got back, which would only be a few minutes, as he’d just taken Miss Isabelle Barnett to the railroad station and she could hear the train coming now. (Everyone in town who ever called for a cab knew the business of every other passenger.)
I told her I’d rather have Axel himself, though it was nothing personal against Delbert. Naturally, I said this just to see.
“Oh, he’s out on a call, honey, won’t be back for a while.”
Well, I could wait. (I wouldn’t, but I just said this.)
“Axel’s all the way to Hebrides, hon, won’t be back for a good long time. Delbert can come get you real soon—well, speak of the devil, here he’s just pulled up.”
I sighed and thanked her and wondered why it was she never told the business of Axel’s fares, who they were, where they were going. Maybe because she never saw them, either.
• • •
Delbert let me out at the courthouse, and I went in and lurked around for a while in the hallway, there by the water cooler, prepared to squash myself back into its shadowy alcove should the door to the Sheriff’s office open.
I heard his voice, kind of a deep rumble. I also could see a dark outline, blurred, on the pebbled glass of the door. I figured he was coming out, so I shoved myself back in the alcove. For once (for once in my life) it wasn’t him I wanted to see, at least not now.
Finally he emerged, and from between wall and water cooler I watched him walk away through the courthouse entrance and down the stone walk until he’d become a black sunlit silhouette. Then I walked across the marble foyer (the courthouse was quite fancy) and into the office.
Donny and the other two deputies were looking busy, and both of the secretaries were typing away. One of the girls looked up and smiled around her chewing gum, which she cracked (as if that meant “Hi”) as she kept on typing.
Donny himself was sitting at the Sheriff’s big desk with his feet planted up on it, trying to look important. He was studying something, frowning over a batch of what to me looked like photographs. As I went up to him I could see that’s what they were, though I could only see the backs of them.
I went a little cold. Police pictures.
He looked up over the tops of half-glasses that made him seem much older than the Sheriff, although I knew he was younger. He eased a photo from the front to the back of the several in his hands and told me Sam was out.
“Oh.” I tried to sound disappointed. “Know where he is?”
“Rainbow, I guess. Said he wanted some chili.”
I’d just had, two hours or so ago, corn cakes, link sausages, and an egg over easy; still, my stomach heard it: “chili.” I ignored the call. “I guess you’re all really busy—I mean, since you found that woman’s body in Mirror Pond.”
“Uh-huh.” Now he was slapping a photo facedown on the blotter within my fingers’ reach. I pulled back my hand.
Donny is like most adults: he doesn’t believe in really having a conversation with a kid. So I’d have to weasel any information out of him. Which was what I seemed to like to do anyway. I frowned over that insight. “Okay.” I made a movement to go, purely fake, and then said—as if I’d just got this bright idea—“Say, you know a man in Spirit Lake named Jude? I don’t know his last name. But he knows you.” That was a lie; it was another one that said he knew Donny.
He looked as if he was rooting around for the name and then shook his head.
“I went to Britten’s store yesterday to get things for the hotel, and he was there.”
“How’s your mom, anyway?”
People never failed to ask after my mother, which I liked. Hardly ever did anyone ask after Mrs. Davidow. “She’s just fine, thank you. Anyway, this Jude person was saying he knows who this woman is. Was.”
Donny frowned. “Who?”
“He said . . .” I chewed my lip, hesitated, just as I had with Aurora, to say “Ben Queen’s girl.”
“I guess I didn’t actually hear the name he said. But what I wondered was, well, this Jude wasn’t there, was he? I mean, the only ones there were you all.” My eyes swept the room to take in the other deputies, who were talking to each other and not minding us. “So how would he know? That picture in the paper wasn’t good enough.”
Donny’s eyes strayed to the ones in his hand.
I had guessed correctly; they were photos of the dead woman.
“Nope.” He gathered them up, placed them carefully in a manila folder marked with a number, and then placed the folder in the deep file drawer of the desk. “You don’t recall who he said?”
“No. Just someone’s—‘girl.’ ”
He was leaning back, very much in an I’m-in-charge way, hands locked behind his head, one big shoe sole against the desk’s edge.
“Girl friend?”
“Well . . . maybe, you know, ‘daughter.’ Like ‘boy’ could mean ‘son.’ ”
He thought this over, frowning. “You saying you think maybe this Jude fellow is im-pli-ca-ted someways?”
I was shocked. I stumbled back, holding up my hands as if to ward off something awful. “No, no. I didn’t mean anything like that! That wasn’t the only person that said he knew who she was.” I dredged for the name. “Louella Smitt, one of them said. And he said he heard it at the courthouse.”
Donny got wide-eyed. “Well, whoever he was didn’t. We can’t talk about cases. People just like to make things up, makes them feel important.”
“That’s what I say. That’s what I thought.” I was glad we were off my “implicating” Jude.
“They were saying the description in the paper wasn’t all that good, too.” That was a lie, but the truth wasn’t getting me very far. “One of them said she was younger than the paper said. And blonder.” I held my breath.
Donny was unstripping a stick of gum. “Don’t know how they’d know that.”
“I don’t know, either. Only, I did sort of get the idea from somebody else she wasn’t young. And not all that blond.”
He shrugged. “Depends what you mean by ‘young.’ Or ‘blond.’ ”
I couldn’t win.
• • •
“Depends what you mean by ‘young’ or ‘blond.’ ” I was eyeing the Sheriff’s half-eaten bowl of chili when I said this.
He looked at me long enough to pry my eyes up from his bowl. “You want the rest of this chili?”
“No. It’s not even lunchtime,” I said disdainfully. I was irritated he was not responding to my comment. Maud and I had been discussing the article in the paper.
“Why would she want your cold, leftover chili?” Maud said this snappishly. She was in a mood.
“She likes chili,” was the Sheriff’s mild reply. He smiled.
Hardly ever did he rise to the bait of anyone’s bad temper. I don’t know how he managed this, for some of the things Maud and I said should have driven him to distraction. Well, Maud said.
Maud said, “Good Lord, I can get her some hot if she wants it.”
“I don’t want it. It’s not lunchtime. I don’t see how people can eat lunch so early.”
“I never had breakfast,” he explained.
“How can you eat chili for breakfast?”
“So are they working over there?” the Sheriff asked me, ignoring my criticism of his breakfast. “Or just pretending to?”
I had told him I’d come from the courthouse. I didn’t tell him Donny was sitting at his desk, big as you please. I did tell him that I had overheard “someone” talking about the newspaper account and saying it wasn’t accurate. But remembering Donny’s saying “implicated,” I said I couldn’t remember just who it was. That’s when I’d tossed in the young-and-blond comment.
“How young was she?” Maud asked. “You’re not saying.”
“I know.” The Sheriff rooted in his pack of Camels for a cigarette, found none, crushed it up.
Maud didn’t offer him one of hers, I noticed. Payback for being secretive. “Probably you can’t tell age.”
His mouth twitched the way it did when he was trying not to smile. “About your age, maybe. Hair about your color, I guess. How young and blond’s that?”
A wave of relief swept over me before I realized he’d just said this to kid Maud.
“The trouble is,” Maud said, looking at me, “Sam doesn’t know any more about her than he did two days, nearly three days, ago, and he doesn’t want to admit it, so he’s pretending everything’s a secret.” She pocketed he
r cigarettes, patted the pocket, and blew a little smoke ring.
“Uh-huh.” The Sheriff looked behind him, sort of levering up to see over the top of the wooden booth, as if things might be more interesting up there with Shirl and the regulars at the counter.
“Well, you don’t know any more, do you?” She was really irritated because he wouldn’t tell her.
“While the investigation is in progress, I can’t talk about things.” His smile was maddening to Maud.
I said, “What I wondered about this man who said he knew who she was, was: How would he know unless he saw pictures of the body?”
Maud rubbed her arms. “This is giving me the shivers.”
“Maybe he knew her, maybe he knew the person he thought it was.” He frowned. “And you can’t remember him or where you heard it?”
I shook my head as I stared at him. It was such a simple explanation. All the while I had been looking at it from one end, not realizing there was another end. It was not that he was identifying her from seeing either her or pictures of her, but that he was assuming it was someone he knew who fitted the vague description because this someone was gone or missing.
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