Hotel Paradise

by Martha Grimes

  Ordinarily, the two of them just chirruped away about everyday affairs. But Miss Flagler seemed to be off on something deeper. Miss Flyte must have thought so, too, for she nodded and said, “That’s deep. That’s very deep.”

  “I’m not saying it well. It’s what I mean by getting stuck. Or trapped.”

  It was making me uncomfortable, this “attractor” business, and I said, “Well, but it’s not the moth’s fault if it gets trapped.” I felt I should make this clear, in case there was any blame to be handed out. I studied the bottom of my mug and felt anxious. “Anyway, how does a person get unstuck, then?”

  Miss Flagler shook her head slightly. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  That wasn’t much of an answer. Impatiently, I asked, “But what kinds of problems are you talking about?”

  She thought for a moment. “I guess inner problems. Yes, inner.” She tapped at her chest with a fisted hand.

  Inner problems. I relaxed a little bit.

  Except for how to get rid of Ree-Jane, I didn’t have any of those.

  • • •

  “ ‘I’m not at lib-er-ty to tell you,’ ” Maud said, mimicking the Sheriff.

  After the difficult ideas Miss Flagler had been trying to express (and making me nervous in the bargain), it was a relief to hear Maud not searching for words at all.

  She went on. “Do policemen really say that? ‘I’m not at liberty’? I think he’s just putting on he’s a TV cop, just to annoy me.” She lit a cigarette and waved out the match.

  She had been talking about the Sheriff’s response to her question. He’d come in a little before ten, about fifteen minutes before me (worse luck), downed a cup of coffee, and taken off “like a bat out of hell,” or so Maud described it, as she struck one palm against another and slid the hand straight out to indicate, I guessed, bats screeching out of hell.

  “You want some chili?” she asked. “They just made some fresh.”

  I told her I’d just had sticky buns and cocoa over at Miss Flagler’s, with her and Miss Flyte.

  “You have more of a social life than I do.”

  I was studying my fingers, splayed on the table as if it were piano keys, pondering over what Miss Flagler had said. I asked Maud: “Do you think people can get stuck in their problems?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Oh, it was just something Miss Flagler was saying. Something about a person can get so attracted to a problem that they can get stuck in it and can’t get out.”

  “Miss Flagler said that? I’m surprised. She’s so quiet.” Maud was thinking about this and peeling a bit of pink nail polish from her thumb.

  “Miss Flyte said she must mean ‘obsessed,’ but Miss Flagler said no, she meant the problem was an ‘attractor.’ That’s what she called it. An ‘at-trac-tor.’ ”

  Maud debated, frowning. “I guess we all know people can get totally immersed in their problems. But that doesn’t sound exactly like what she means . . .” and she raised her eyes and her hand much as Miss Flagler had done, palm upward, as if maybe God would help out. But we both knew he wouldn’t, of course. “Maybe it’s that you could get ‘stuck’ in a problem if it had especially serious consequences for you, personally.”

  What I liked about Maud was that she didn’t just dismiss a question and didn’t ask why you were asking. For all of her sarcasm (mostly around the Sheriff) she took things seriously.

  “What were you talking about when she said this?”

  “The dead woman.” I cleared my throat. I didn’t want to talk about Miss Flagler’s comment anymore, as it was getting my nerves up again. “Where did the Sheriff go, if he was so excited?”

  “Excited? I didn’t say he was excited. Just as stony-faced as ever.” She blew a smoke ring.

  Surely Ree-Jane couldn’t have told him anything important, could she? Maud answered that tormenting question without my asking it. “All he said was it was regarding a missing person.”

  My head snapped up; I sat rigid. “What?”

  “A missing person.”

  “Well, but who?”

  “ ‘I am not at lib-er-ty,’ et cetera, et cetera.” She shrugged. “I don’t know who or where.” She inclined her head toward the jukebox. “That sounds like something Jo Stafford would sing. ‘But I can’t remem-ber where or when,’ ” she sang. Maud had a really pretty voice. Then she started in again on her thumbnail, peeling off another scrap of polish. “Donny came running in to get coffee and doughnuts from Shirl and then ran out again and jumped in the squad car.”

  That was interesting. Donny was a blabbermouth. So was Shirl. I raised myself up to look down towards the cash register. Shirl was there as usual, sitting on her high stool. It was a little after eleven o’clock now, and I said in a rush that I’d have to get back to the hotel and wait tables for lunch and I asked Maud for a check. She didn’t want to give me one, but I insisted. I said I was afraid someday she’d get in trouble giving me free Cokes. No, I insisted. Maud just shrugged a little, smiled, and wrote up a check. I took it up to the front, said hello to Shirl, and placed the check with my money on the rubber mat. After gazing in the glass case at the rows of doughnuts, I said, “My mother says you make the best doughnuts in a hundred miles.” Actually, my mother made the best doughnuts and she knew it.

  But Shirl was all smiles. “Well, tell her thanks.”

  “Okay, I will. I think maybe I’ll get a couple doughnuts and take them across to the Sheriff and Donny. I have to talk to the Sheriff.”

  As she plunged her fingers onto the register keys, Shirl said, “Ain’t no use doing it now, hon. Donny was in here less’n an hour ago and took off like he was greased. With Sam.”

  “No kidding?” I frowned hugely. “But I was supposed to see him. Where’d they go?”

  “Cold Flat Junction.” Shirl plopped some change on the rubber mat.

  I knew it. Jude Stemple was right. I just knew it.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  If it hadn’t been for having Miss Bertha and her three meals a day, I’d have taken my bag of doughnuts straight to the courthouse and just sat there until they came back. But as it was, I headed instead for Axel’s taxi stand. Between there and the Rainbow Café I had to pass the Prime Cut, and I saw, through their big plate glass window, Ree-Jane sitting in one of the three beauticians’ chairs, getting her hair combed out. I had totally forgotten about Ree-Jane and her courthouse errand, and for a minute I considered going in and asking her, but that would only have told her I was really wanting to know something, which would be, of course, a good reason for not telling me. She only enjoyed telling me what she thought I didn’t want to know.

  There she sat, chattering a mile a minute to Alma Duke, Beautician (written in chalk-white letters down in the right-hand corner of the window). Alma Duke owns the Prime Cut. Alma Duke is without doubt the biggest gossip in La Porte, bigger even than Helene Baum or Mabel Haines (which is really saying something); and Alma Duke, like most gossips, gets it wrong most of the time, because it would slow their tongues down if they ever took the time to get it right. Getting it right meant at least hesitating long enough to check your story out or get your facts straight.

  I thought how horrible it would be, being a beautician and all day long catering to women’s vanities. I noticed Helene Baum was in there, too, almost hidden under the big globe of a hair dryer. She was sitting next to Mayor Sims’s wife, and their mouths were also moving a mile a minute, their magazines forgotten in their laps. How they could hear one another with all of the noise of those hair dryers whirring, I couldn’t imagine.

  I moved off and plodded along Second Street (in what Ree-Jane called my duck-footed walk) and was lucky enough to find a taxi sitting outside Axel’s.

  But not lucky enough to find Axel, of course.

  • • •

  And I was also lucky to find only Miss Bertha wanting lunch; not even Mrs. Fulbright was there, for she had gone off with her nephew (to be with human bein
gs for a change, I guessed). The dining room was completely empty except for Miss Bertha, which was just the way she liked it. She could order me around; she could yell across its vast space as if it were a canyon; she could thump her cane. She could do all of this over nothing but a club sandwich, which she said she never ate and didn’t want; she wanted something hot. My mother said, “Take her a bucket of boiling water, the damned old fool!” Walter just thought that was a scream, and his shoulders shook in soundless laughter as he wiped his dishtowel around and around on a big serving platter.

  So Miss Bertha, in protest, took her club sandwich all apart, one layer after another, and made me listen to her complaints about the wretched ingredients in it, until toast, chicken, lettuce, ham, tomato all lay in a mayonnaise shambles on her plate. I just stood sucking back yawns until she released me to the kitchen for her chocolate sundae. “And none of that damned thin Hershey’s syrup, either! I want fudge sauce!”

  Well, I couldn’t say I blamed her when I thought about my mother’s hot fudge sauce.

  Several times after lunch I tried screwing up my nerve to call the Sheriff’s office, but I found it too hard to be casual in a phone call. It’s not like appearing in person, where you can pretend you’ve just met by accident, just “bumped into” someone in the Rainbow or out doing meter checking.

  I was rocking in one of the slat-backed chairs on the side porch, thinking of my problem, when I spied a white car way down on the highway turning into the drive. I remembered that Ree-Jane was picking up her car from the garage. I didn’t want to put up with her preening over her convertible, so I left the rocker rocking just as the white convertible was bumping halfway up the potholed drive. I walked from the front down the hall to the back door and up the flagstone path.

  My immediate problem was getting someone to go along with me to the Devereau house. I didn’t think the Woods and Mr. Root would be up to a second trip, but you never knew, so I decided to go along to Britten’s and see if any of them were around. This route took me up behind the big garage where Will and Mill were messing around getting their summer production ready and in which once again I would not star. There was always competition coming from a cousin or two who, being rich, thought that meant they must be really talented, too. But the only one with real talent is Brownmiller, who is the most incredibly talented person I’ve ever met. He can play anything from a comb to a piano concerto; he can write songs and even the plays that he and Will produce in the summer. It was Will who solved the name problem by shortening “Brownmiller” first to “Miller” and then to “Mill,” so they could be known as “Mill” and “Will.” (I personally think that “Miller Conroy” sounds like a writer, or artist, or musician. And he is all of those.)

  So Mill and Will were in there, planning whatever the next lavish production would be, Mill pounding an ancient upright piano and the two of them singing some song he had written (on the spot, probably) and both of them hardly able to get through it for laughing so hard.

  I stood outside the big garage, picking at the peeling gray paint around the door. No, I thought. There must have been a reason why I hadn’t asked them to accompany me before when I went to the Devereau house, and now was no different. They would play tricks on me all the way there—not really unfriendly, but tricks still: things like hiding in the woods or pretending they saw things that they hadn’t. And in the Devereau house it would be worse. I’d been around the two of them long enough to know they loved practical jokes. Sometimes they were funny; sometimes they were plain silly. One of their favorite things to do was to get the hose and hide behind bushes and turn the hose on Paul when he went by. Paul was so dumb he thought it was a game.

  I did not continue on my way to Britten’s store, either. Instead, I went back and around to the Pink Elephant and collected my homemade butterfly net and box and set off for the lake.

  What was in my mind was a hazy notion that this time I should go alone.

  • • •

  So I stood in the exact same spot in the marshy grass with my butterfly net and the empty box at my feet, staring across the sheer surface of the lake. It was very calm today, gray like slate. I suppose I thought if I looked hard enough and long enough, everything would come again, it would all repeat itself. I would see the Girl standing over there in her white dress, stock-still and looking right at me. But I didn’t see her, though I waited for a very long time, until it felt almost as if the muddy water I stood in was seeping through my old rubber boots to my sneakers.

  I left the net and the box beside it to pick up again on my way back. I guess I had brought them only as props, the sort of thing Will and Mill use to set a stage. I walked here to the spring and sat on this same stone wall for a few moments, collecting spring water in the tin cup that was always weirdly there, for it was a wonder to me that someone, some boys, didn’t steal it just for the sake of taking something. But then I realized that this wasn’t a place people would be likely to come to; it was too overgrown, too out-of-the-way, too much trouble just for an idle hour or two of playing. It just wasn’t interesting enough. Unless you were like me.

  It was that way into the woods, the dark and tunnellike recess that I studied over for some minutes until I worked up my nerve. If I hadn’t gone through those trees once with the Woods and Mr. Root, I’d never have been able to do it on my own. I still might not be able to go the whole way to the house.

  You would never have known it was broad daylight in among those trees. Light barely filtered through the overhanging branches, as thick in winter as in summer, for most of them were conifers with limbs spread wide as tents. It was the sort of silence that people call “unearthly.” It wasn’t like the silence of the hotel lobby midday, or the side porch, or the Pink Elephant. It was a different silence, as if the last layer of disturbance in the air had been removed, peeled away; the last rustlings of leaves, the last faint birdcalls gone. I walked steadily, without looking back or even around very much, until I reached the edge—the clearing and the house.

  I breathed easier and headed around behind the house to the kitchen door.

  It was all the same in the kitchen—the candles, the porcelain table, the musty sour smell still clinging to the empty refrigerator with its listing door. The dry, moldy smell of dead leaves gathered on window-and doorsills seemed stronger than before, probably only because I had had the Woods and Mr. Root to distract my senses then. I walked through to the living room or front parlor or whatever the Devereaus would have called it and looked around in the twilit gloom. The piano, the heavy armchairs—all the same. Perhaps I thought my mental picture of the room had been defective somehow.

  I moved over to the wall on which hung the single photograph, the one of the Devereau sisters as girls—teenagers, maybe. That I now knew this, that I could now attach a name to this face, for some reason made me feel choked. Now she had a name. Not only that but I knew things about her. Yet, Rose hadn’t figured in Ulub’s story—or at least I didn’t think she had figured in it, since with Ulub it’s hard to tell. In his playacting, there had been only three sisters sitting around the kitchen table, three sisters on their awful midnight errand through the wood. The events Ulub had recounted to us in his story (if Ulub was to be believed) had happened the night before Mary-Evelyn was found in the lake. So Rose must not have been here then.

  “Run off with Ben Queen,” Aurora had said. Rose must have already been gone.

  The photograph hung beside a huge sideboard, wood so dark it was nearly black. It was from the “Empire” period; I knew this because there was one almost exactly like it in the hotel dining room. We kept silver, placemats, and odds and ends in it for setting up tables. I started opening drawers. Mostly, I was looking for pictures. There had to be some, I thought—another old photograph, snapshots such as the one given to my mother. That showed they took pictures, at least. I started with the biggest drawer in the center. It held linen napkins, not starched to a slickness like the hotel’s linen service did t
hem, but soft and limp, almost silky, and creased yellow where they’d been folded for so long. There were tablecloths too, probably to cover the round table in the center of the room that they might have used on Sundays for dinner, or sometimes for tea, when they didn’t eat in the kitchen. I pulled out all of the drawers; there were more napkins, tarnished napkin rings, silvery pads to place under hot dishes to keep from marring the wood. These were all that I found. Carefully, I rearranged what I had removed and closed the drawers. Then I went over to the desk, which also had the chunky look of “Empire” about it, and checked out all of its drawers. There was nothing but some old empty envelopes, scraps of receipts, old advertisements, even a menu on which “Hotel Paradise” was written in spidery letters. It was quite old and I saw that food was a lot cheaper then. I refolded it and put it in my pocket. On my way upstairs, I passed the phonograph standing beside the porch door and stopped to look through a stack of records. Someone named Lauritz Melchior I thought I recognized, for I think my mother had listed him as one of the well-known singers to join the Chautauqua in those far-off summers. A lot of the records were French, songs whose titles I couldn’t read by singers I had never heard of. I guessed the Devereau sisters were well-educated.

  Upstairs, I began my search of the bedrooms. Three of them were much the same, double beds, one with a fourposter covered with a quilt and lumpy with mothballs. I imagined these were the three sisters’ bedrooms. The beds had their mattresses rolled up and mothballs stuffed in them. It was more the way that summer people close down their houses for the season than it was the way for people who leave forever. It made me wonder: did they intend to come back? The sisters were in their forties then; by now they must be dead, or else in their eighties or even nineties. I opened the bureau drawers, empty but for a few newspaper linings. The newspapers were interesting; they were the same old Conservative, except that here the name was printed differently, written in the sort of curly letters I sometimes saw on chocolate boxes, such as my Whitman’s box. Another room at the end of the hall was not much bigger than Mary-Evelyn’s. Its long narrow window overlooked the woods, and if I stood a certain way, I could glimpse the lake and, on its far side, the stone bridge. It must have been Rose Fern Devereau’s room.