Cold Flat Junction

by Martha Grimes

  The murder near White’s Bridge still took up a lot of space on the front page, which wasn’t surprising considering how little happens around here. The shooting must have been like the answer to a prayer for Suzie Whitelaw, who was reporting it in the Conservative; her slant was tragedy-bent, referring to “the tragic victim.” This column was headlined:MURDER VICTIM IDENTIFIED, FATHER SOUGHT

  It went on from there:The police have now been able to identify the tragic victim of the shooting occurring two weeks ago near White’s Bridge. Fern Queen, 38, resided with Mr. and Mrs. George Queen of Cold Flat Junction, where the victim lived for most of her life. The Queens, Fern’s uncle and aunt, are traumatized by the news.

  Sheriff Sam DeGheyn has been put in charge of the investigation, Cold Flat Junction not having its own police force. Sheriff DeGheyn has asked for the help of anybody who may have seen the victim’s father, Benjamin Queen. Mr. Queen has recently been released from prison where he served twenty years for the murder of his wife, Rose Devereau Queen. Fern was the only child.

  “It’s like it’s happening all over again,” said the tearful aunt, Bathsheba Queen.

  Deputy Sheriff Donny Mooma has asked anyone who can help the police with their inquiries to please get in touch with the Sheriff’s Office.

  I come under the heading of “anybody who can help,” but I haven’t helped, not yet. Whether I do or not I guess depends on how much my conscience is going to hurt me. And how is it I wind up knowing more about this whole thing than any other person? More than the relations and the police do?

  Bathsheba Queen, referred to as the “tearful aunt” and “traumatized” is Suzie Whitelaw taking her usual liberties. It would take a lot more than Fern being killed to get Sheba Queen traumatized and teary. But when Sheba says it’s like it’s happening all over again, she doesn’t know the half of it.

  It is hard being “anybody who can help” and not doing it. The thing is, Ben Queen more or less put his fate in my hands. I will never forget what he said: If it goes too hard on you, turn me in.

  This amazed me. It is the most astonishing thing anyone has ever said to me. It’s the first time anyone has placed my welfare before their own. I would have done just about anything for the Sheriff, but I couldn’t tell him that I knew where Ben Queen was, or at least where he was when I’d seen him at the Devereau house. I do not know who Ben Queen came looking for, but who he found was me.

  I would have given him a start if he hadn’t been a man beyond starts and surprises. He looked like someone who’d had enough to last him all his life long. You might say of a person such as this that life tastes flat on his tongue like stale soda. He certainly wasn’t bothered by me being at the Devereau house. Then I thought, Well, why should he be? I’m twelve years old and he was the one with the gun. I don’t know who he would have used it on; he didn’t need to scare me off as I wasn’t about to arrest him and drag him back to prison. But I can certainly understand why the Sheriff wanted to find him, what with Ben Queen only several days out of prison and his daughter getting killed. That must be too big a coincidence for the Sheriff to swallow; it’s certainly a horrible enough one.

  And Mary-Evelyn Devereau’s house is part of it, too, the reason why I held my tongue. I do not want police going into it, some thick-booted, clumsy policeman like Donny Mooma clumping around, opening drawers and looking at sheet music and photos, opening closets and going over Mary-Evelyn’s dresses and toys. I do not want them dusting for fingerprints and leaving their own.

  The Devereau house is my secret, one that I share with Mr. Root and the Wood boys. If it hadn’t been for them helping by leading a way through the woods, I might never have gone there, for the woods are very dense and thick, whatever road there must have been long since grown over. The woods turn day almost to night. Even when the sun strikes light on the lake, making its surface gleam like crushed diamonds, in the woods there is only this green, luminous glow, an underwater kind of light, a decoy, cunning and crafty.

  Keeping this secret weighs heavily on me; it weighs more on me than Ree-Jane’s snipes and Lola’s rages; it might even weigh more heavily than the death of my father, but I don’t remember how I felt about that, so it too is like a thicket illuminated by a subterranean light.

  Cunning, crafty.

  6

  Waitressing

  It was part of my waitressing job to fix the salads every night just before dinner, which usually started at six o’clock. It was a really boring task and I had asked my mother once or twice if somebody else could do it. She pointed out there were only two “somebodies”—Vera and Anna Paugh—and that Vera was needed in the dining room to check the Pyrex coffee-maker and all of the place settings (as if only Vera could tell where the fork and water glass went). Anna Paugh couldn’t do the salads because she couldn’t get away from her other job before six P.M. (With what the hotel paid her, I wasn’t surprised she needed another job.) So which “somebody” did I have in mind? My mother could be sarcastic that way.

  She would say all this while breading the chicken pieces, removing the cigarette from her mouth to rest it on the edge of the counter, which was scarred as black as notches on a rifle. Also, I think she talked like this—in her sarcastic mode—to amuse Walter, our dishwasher, who, wiping plates and pots, waited back in the shadows to hear her say things. Walter’s laugh was a kind of gasp, a sucking-in of breath as if each one were his last.

  I don’t really mind her amusing Walter at my expense; I like Walter and think he should be given more attention anyway, although not so much as to make him fall behind and result in me having to dry dishes. Lola Davidow claims Walter is retarded, for he’s a grown man who acts like he has hardly a child’s comprehension. But of course he isn’t, for if that were the case, how could he understand my mother’s sarcasm so well? Sometimes not even I get it, and I like to think I am no dumbbell.

  So I’m stuck with arranging lettuce in bowls and covering it with tomatoes and onion and pepper rings, taking care to position each of these as artistically as I can. (I am not, however, supposed to get too artistic and make chopped egg and olive faces, which I have done, on occasion.)

  The salad makings are kept on a big table with a white enameled top in the kitchen’s center. The crocks of salad dressings sit here, together with big serving trays. Whenever my mother announces an order is ready, we grab a tray and load it quickly. She insists the food reach the tables still piping hot and it just irritates the life out of her (she’s fond of saying) if we let her plates sit for more than five seconds. It’s almost as if she can see heat leaving those plates. She can stare at that drumstick, watching it cool and commanding whoever it belongs to to pick it up before she brings the whole plate down on the waitress’s head.

  Walter (who would be stacking his clean, dry dinner plates on the metal shelf directly over the big black stove) just about convulses with laughter. He really thinks my mother is a card. He calls her “Miss Jen,” which is what nearly everyone does, even Ree-Jane. (When I had suggested Ree-Jane as a salad-fixer, my mother merely gave one of her humorless laughs.)

  This dinnertime I had only three salads to make for our three full-time guests (or “regulars” as Mrs. Davidow liked to call them), so I had plenty of time to inspect the stove and countertop to see what was for dinner. To do this I can almost follow my nose, which has become so acquainted with my mother’s cooking, it can lead me to answers even if I shut my eyes. That would not do justice to the look of her cooking, though, and I keep them open. A cloud of whipped potatoes sat in the top of a double-boiler, steam rising from the bottom, keeping them moist; a long glass dish of French green beans, onion rings, and mushrooms sat on the counter; fried chicken baked in the oven (fried first, then baked). I inspected the pastry table for desserts and was pleased to see one of the brioche cakes, layered with butter cream, caramel cream, and something like vanilla pudding spiked with brandy. Just looking at it made me feel wonderfully fat and drunk. Sitting beside the cake w
as a sieve of powdered sugar. I did my mother a favor and dusted the top of the cake with it.

  Our “paying guests” (as if the other guests were charity cases) are Miss Bertha, Mrs. Fulbright, and the Poor Soul. His name is Mr. Muggs, but Lola Davidow has christened him the Poor Soul and now all of us call him that. He comes for a couple of nights when he has business around here and always requests the same room. How anyone could get attached to a room at the Hotel Paradise is beyond me. But for the Poor Soul I guess coming back to the same room is like coming home. That thought surprised me and was worth writing down in my journal. Several guests ask for rooms in this way—I want my old room back—and Mrs. Davidow will save a particular room for a particular person.

  So Mr. Muggs always gets number forty-two on the second floor. There is nothing at all special about it, except it’s the one nearest the bathroom. Very few of our rooms have private baths, as the hotel was built back in the 1800s, long before anyone had ever heard of motels.

  Sometimes we waitresses have to double as chambermaids when our one maid is sick or doesn’t show up. It is a thankless job, for there are no tips. Number forty-two looks unoccupied, even when Mr. Muggs is occupying it. It’s amazing. Even the towels on the wooden towel rack look unused. I have to look closely to see any wrinkles in them, have to feel them for dampness. You actually have to open the wardrobe—most rooms not having closets—to see if there are any clothes in it. Even the things people usually set on top of the dresser, the Poor Soul puts in the drawers: brushes, aftershave, keys, and coins.

  I can hear Ree-Jane’s voice again: You know his trouble, don’t you? He’s anal. She said this smirkily, pleased with her greater knowledge, doubly pleased because it had to do with body parts (which I didn’t know until I looked it up). “No, he isn‘t,” I answered. “It’s you that’s anal.” When I don’t know what Ree-Jane means, I just contradict her. This infuriates her. “You don’t even know what it means!” was her weak comeback. I didn’t, of course, but I was expert in looking as if I did.

  The dictionary definition goes on in a really complicated fashion, talking about “retentive” and “expulsive” and that these character traits have to do with toilet training. I wasn’t about to ponder toilet training, neither the Poor Soul’s nor my own. “Anal retentive” is how the dictionary puts it. I practiced the phrase until I was comfortable with it.

  I waited awhile, giving Ree-Jane time to forget. One Sunday morning after breakfast I walked out onto the porch where she was surrounded with more than one Sunday paper, pages sprawling around over the wicker rockers and the wicker table. I reached for the comics and she yanked them back and told me to get my own paper.

  “I knew I shouldn’t ask, seeing how anal retentive you are.”

  Well. Didn’t she ever open her mouth to say something cutting? Nothing came out. Then she said, “You are so stupid. Anal isn’t about giving somebody newspapers!”

  “Did I say it was? Anal retentiveness includes everything.” I leaned my head back against the green rocking chair and gently rocked, not looking at her, but humming a ditty Will and Brownmiller had composed.

  She huffed off.

  Oh, how I wish Ree-Jane were like the Poor Soul. How I wish she’d slip away like a shadow, leaving no footprint, no scent of perfume, no lock of hair.

  Poor Soul.

  Poor Ree-Jane.

  I recalled this whole incident while I arranged a green-pepper ring on the Poor Soul’s salad. Then I moved on to Miss Bertha’s and Mrs. Fulbright’s. These two old ladies are friends and together come as soon as the hotel opens in the spring and stay until it closes at the end of September. Since they are a source of steady income, we have to be extra nice to them. It’s not hard to be nice to Mrs. Fulbright, who is sweet and not at all persnickety. Miss Bertha is otherwise. She bangs her cane on the floor thump thump thump! when she wants more hot rolls or water, complaining that I’m not quick enough: Dish up my dinner, girl! Thump thump!—as if anyone but my mother ever does the dishing up. Who else can be trusted to dust a smidgen of red pepper over the satiny cheese sauce which lies in a wide band atop the toast points? No one, that’s who.

  One of Miss Bertha’s problems of course is that she doesn’t turn on (or up) her hearing aid, a big beige-colored plastic thing that sits in her ear like an extra ear, making it look deformed, which fits in with (or “complements,” as they say) her hump. Her head looks like a walnut, with the same creases and crevices in it. I try to feel sorry for Miss Bertha, who I guess isn’t making it through life on looks—neither am I, after all—but the second she starts in tossing rolls around or thumping with that cane, I forget my good intentions.

  I looked at the salads and thought they needed sprucing up. On a glass plate on the table were a few narrow strips of pimento which I used to adorn two of the salads. Then I went over to the main counter and picked out a hot pepper sliver and decorated the third salad with that. Only I needed to know which was which and with just three regulars, I would be serving tonight by myself. Vera and Anna Paugh did not have to come in. There was no need for them.

  When only the regulars eat dinner, my mother doesn’t go to the usual trouble of fixing three different entrees. She thinks they can make do with two. One is a dish she cooks from scratch, and the other, something done with leftovers. Tonight, it’s fried chicken and meatloaf, although to refer to her meatloaf as “leftovers” is to do it a serious injury, especially with that Spanish sauce she pours over it, tomatoes mashed with sunlight.

  Fortunately, the three regulars always come in the minute the dining room opens up, so I don’t have to be wasting time I can put to better use in waiting around for them.

  “I’ll be leaving in the morning,” said Mr. Muggs, sad as sad could be, as he said everything.

  As I put down his fruit cocktail, I said back (sadly), “That’s really too bad. Maybe you’d like two desserts tonight.” My mother’s cooking was the remedy for every trouble, including bleeding from your aorta (which I had learned about in science class). I added, “Tonight’s Angel Pie and Black Forest Cake.”

  The Poor Soul sighed. “That would be most appreciated. Perhaps half an order of each?”

  I blinked. Half a piece of Angel Pie? Solomon could have divided that baby easier. But I smiled and said of course.

  Tonight, Mrs. Davidow was at one of Helene Baum’s cocktail parties in La Porte, which is lovely news, as it allows the whole hotel to breathe a sigh of relief, and more particularly because it allows me to get at Mrs. Davidow’s liquor supply, so that I can make Aurora Paradise her favorite drink: a Cold Comfort.

  7

  Sorrolowful Places

  Aurora Paradise does not exercise any right of ownership, like hiring or firing or sending Lola Davidow and Ree-Jane packing. This is not because Aurora is humble or generous or indifferent, but because she doesn’t want to bother herself to come down from the fourth floor. She sometimes has her food sent up on the dumbwaiter that travels from the back office up to the fourth floor. I don’t know why the dumbwaiter was positioned in the back office, but it works fine and rattles the Hotel Paradise fried chicken and braised lamb and Angel Pie right up there.

  The fourth floor is Aurora’s kingdom, or, rather, what she likes to call her “duchy” ever since I told her Ree-Jane intended to marry a duke so that people would have to call her a duchess. That’s assuming, of course, that Hollywood or Broadway or a modeling agency doesn’t grab her first.

  Up here’s as close as that blond floozy’ll ever get to a duchy. To Aurora, Ree-Jane is always a blond floozy. When Ree-Jane was stupid enough to venture up to the fourth floor with Aurora’s chicken dinner, she got a chicken wing thrown at her. It hit her head; and I, pressed back into the shadows of the stairwell, was fortunate enough to witness this. Ree-Jane thinks she rules the world. But even she can’t pretend to have conquered Aurora Paradise (who she dismisses as a crazy old coot) or me (who she dismisses as a crazy young one).

  I am one of the few
people allowed on the fourth floor and that’s because I’ve been entertaining Aurora with the White’s Bridge murder, or, more specifically, the Mirror Pond murder, and (more important) because I mix drinks for her. Fancy drinks are my recently acquired skill; the best of them is my Cold Comfort. Aurora has her own liquor, but she would sooner use Lola Davidow’s. I complained about this. I said if Mrs. Davidow ever catches me at her liquor supply, she’ll kill me. “Just be glad you died in a good cause, ” she says, “for the duchy is piss-poor! The barons ain’t paid their rents!”

  I didn’t bother asking her why barons were renting, for I knew Aurora didn’t understand feudalism and peasants any more than I did, and I’d even studied it in school. Aurora knows as much about running a duchy as she does about running a hotel. So I continue endangering life and limb by using Lola Davidow’s gin and rum and Southern Comfort to whip up Aurora’s Cold Comfort. (I have to make the drinks in the kitchen when no one is around, as the duchy is out of ice, orange slices, and maraschino cherries.) I wish I could make one of Lola Davidow’s mint juleps, for I have an idea they would take first prize in any drink contest. I’ll say this for Lola, she is first-rate at drink-mixing.

  Aurora has been around forever, longer than us Grahams, and she knows, or at least knew, everyone in these parts. She knew the Devereau sisters and is the one who set me on the right track about Rose Souder Devereau running off with Ben Queen over forty years ago, right after Mary-Evelyn drowned. It wasn’t purposeful on Aurora’s part, as she has no wish to please me or anybody else. But without intending to be, she was and will be—though she doesn’t know it yet—a huge help in my investigation of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Rose, and Fern Queen.