Cold Flat Junction

by Martha Grimes

  Maud loved that. She said that Sam should be in the United Nations, settling squabbles between countries. She was not being sarcastic, either, when she said it. But of course she didn’t say it to him, only to me. Maud said Miss Isabel must really want to be punished. I said it didn’t sound like punishment to me, just having the Sheriff go and square things with the store owners. Maud said maybe it’s having to admit it to the Sheriff.

  I thought about that and sympathized with Miss Isabel Barnett, thinking of what I didn’t want to tell the Sheriff. “If Miss Isabel would just stop being a kleptomaniac, she wouldn’t have to tell him.”

  How true, Maud had said, smiling. How easy.

  Maud was there behind the lunch counter working the old milkshake maker, the aluminum container stuttering in her hands. Charlene was hanging her big chest over the counter with her chin on her linked hands trying to be cute. She was an awful flirt.

  Maud looked around, saw me, and smiled. Her smile really made you think that of all the people who might have walked through the café’s door, you were the one she wanted most to see. It was the most honest smile I think I’ve ever seen, except, of course, for the Sheriff’s.

  I didn’t know whether I did or didn’t want to see the Sheriff. It was hard facing him, knowing I should be telling him about Ben Queen and yet not doing it. And he knew I was holding back. There were a lot of little giveaways like me not meeting his eyes, or not inviting him to have some of my bowl of chili, and being clearly flustered if he and Maud started talking about the murder. I wouldn’t pass a lie detector test, that’s for sure. Anyway, the Sheriff wasn’t in the Rainbow, hadn’t been in for a couple of days, Maud had told me. He was being kept busy looking for suspects. That probably meant Ben Queen.

  Bunny wasn’t in the Rainbow and I wondered if she was the real reason I’d come in or if it was because I hoped the Sheriff would be there, or if I would at least find out from Maud if any “progress” had been made in solving the murder of Fern Queen. They didn’t know anything about the Girl, for they didn’t even know such a person existed. Ben Queen and I knew, though. There were times I thought I would collapse under this knowledge, as if a house had fallen in. But I have to admit that at the same time, it was exciting. It was exciting to be the one who knew and could look at what was going on and see the folly in it. For they shouldn’t have been looking for Ben Queen at all; they should have been looking for Her.

  I finally found Bunny in Miller’s Market where she does her shopping. I asked her if she’d do me this favor and explained what it was.

  “I sure will, hon.” She was over by the fruit stand, shaking a cantaloupe and holding it to her ear. “These darn things is hard as bowling balls. Just see.” She handed me the cantaloupe, meaning me to shake it, which I did, though I didn’t know why. “You’d know what’s ripe and what’s not, with all your hotel experience.”

  Whatever gave Bunny that idea, I can’t say. But it was nice to be looked on as an authority. I shook it, but had no idea what was supposed to happen unless it was loose seeds sounding. I smelled it too. “It’s not ripe at all,” I said, as if I knew. Disgruntled, I put it back and picked up another. I shook and sniffed this one and handed it to Bunny so she could, too. “This one’s okay.”

  Finally, we were climbing into her truck. I asked her why she’d parked so many blocks away from Miller’s, near the courthouse, and she said because she needed to see Sam. “Only he ain’t there today.” She sounded wistful, and I wondered if every woman in La Porte was in love with the Sheriff except for Maud and me. I told Bunny he was busy with all of this murder business.

  “Oh, God, yes,” she said. “I clean forgot that.”

  As we drove out of La Porte I told Bunny about my dinner date at the Silver Pear, a restaurant near White’s Bridge Road. It was with my aunt, I said, from Miami, Florida. She was on her way to New York and was stopping to see us. I reported how this aunt had driven the Tamiami Trail and up the west coast of Florida. She lived every winter in the Rony Plaza Hotel. “Which is extremely luxurious,” I added. Bunny exclaimed over all of this, about how my aunt must be real adventurous to do all that driving,

  “And rich,” I put in, to live at the Rony Plaza. “She also spends a lot of time at Hialeah, that racetrack? With all the flamingos in the middle?”

  It was nice to be able to talk like this with no fear of any of it getting back to my mother, since my mother never talked to Bunny. My mother considers her not only common, but worse; even worse than Toya Tidewater or even June Sikes (who lives near the hotel and presents, I guess, a greater danger for that reason).

  We drove past fields where cows grazed, lifting their square heads to chew in that dumb way of cows that makes you wonder if they know where they are and what they’re doing. (“Is this grass? Do I eat it, or what?”) We passed the Christmas tree farm that I thought really disillusioning and that I would never let any little kid see. Past the ramshackle trailer park and a rundown little shopping place.

  It was comfortable driving along in silence and surprising, too, as I thought Bunny was more the chatterbox type, only she wasn’t. When there was talk, I did most of it, tossing in details about my aunt’s days in Miami—the beach just beyond the Rony Plaza, and the royal palms and poincianas. And did she ever hear of Whirlaway? Bunny would just shake her head in wonder, or click her tongue, words not sufficing. And of course that only encouraged me to fill in more awesome scenes such as the Key West sunset and how it would throw its pink and lavender lights across the water.

  “My goodness, but it sounds like paradise!”

  I agreed and wondered if either of us would ever see it.

  15

  Last of the Butternuts

  The Silver Pear is an expensive restaurant on what the Lake Noir people call the Lake Road, but which is actually just an extension of White’s Bridge Road. Maud says the Silver Pear’s food isn’t a patch on the Hotel Paradise’s; she says my mother could cook better blindfolded. Still, the restaurant is in a huge and pretty Victorian house with a wide, wraparound porch, where customers can eat in warm weather. It is painted a soft gray-brown, much like the bark of the trees that surround it. It blends into its woodland setting in much the same way as the Devereau house blends with the trees on the other side of Spirit Lake.

  Since Bunny’s truck still sat in the driveway after I got out, I figured she wanted to see me safely up the stairs. So I climbed them and stopped on the porch to wave. Tables were set up on the porch and a few diners were observing Bunny and her truck, which looked out of place amidst all of the fancy foreign cars in the restaurant’s parking area.

  But still Bunny didn’t leave, so, waving again, I walked through the open doorway. Was Bunny waiting to make sure my aunt was there? I disappeared from her view and stood by one of the side windows and watched her truck rattle down the gravel drive.

  “May I help you?”

  The voice made me jump. A man stood behind me with menus clutched to his chest. He was wearing a powder blue linen suit, and his hair was cut in a high silvery sort of pompadour.

  I told him I was just watching for my aunt who was supposed to pick me up here. I didn’t want to say I was to meet her here or he’d go check his list of reservations. I know enough about how a dining room runs to figure that out.

  “I just saw someone driving away out there. Could that have been her in that old truck?” His nose twitched like a rabbit’s.

  “Of course not,” I said, making my tone resentful. Would my aunt drive that?

  “Oh,” he said, and simply smiled and stayed.

  If he was the headwaiter, why didn’t he get back to his customers? You wouldn’t catch Vera standing around in the dining room doorway gawking. And now here came another one. He was clutching menus, too, wearing a powder beige suit and his hair, similarly cut, was more ivory than silver. Then I remembered Maud had said their names were Ron and Gaby something. Something German, I seemed to remember. They did not look at all German
. They looked more like the butterfly population out back of Dr. McComb’s house. They simply looked flyaway, and I wished they would, but they didn’t.

  Why is it when you’re up to no good, the world wants to visit. And how could they be so interested in a twelve-year-old with no money?

  The first man explained to the second why I was there. I said I’d wait outside on the porch and thanked them. Did they watch me go as I’d watched Bunny? It was a peculiar feeling, imagining four eyes riveted on my back. But I couldn’t hang around so I just walked down the steps and out the gravel drive.

  It was barely a quarter of a mile to White’s Bridge, which lay farther along the same dirt road, which I supposed to be White’s Bridge Road, although I saw no sign. The walk was truly pleasant, with the smell of pine needles mixing with the fresh breeze off the lake. I couldn’t see Lake Noir from here, but knew it was close by. It’s the popular, rich people’s lake.

  Maud Chadwick lives in a small house on the lake, not far from Bunny. Maud’s has a long wooden pier out over the lake. I’ve never been there, but I heard she has a chair and a lamp (with a really long extension cord) on the pier and she likes to sit there reading and drinking cocktails. The Sheriff is always complaining about that extension cord and the lamp being so close to the water, but she pays no attention to him. Or maybe she just likes the idea of the Sheriff worrying about what happens to her. She keeps vodka out on the pier in an ice bucket. Mrs. Davidow described it all to my mother, both of them laughing fit to kill. Yet, it wasn’t unkind laughter; it was more appreciative. Anyway, Mrs. Davidow could hardly laugh unkindly at someone who spent her nights drinking martinis.

  I thought about Maud as I pulled up a hayseed and chewed on it the way old-timers do. I pictured the lamp and the book and the bottle in the ice bucket, and wished I could go slowly by in a boat, for in my mind’s eye it was such a pretty scene: the lamp shining on the pier and spilling over into the black water. But, then, I guess what your mind’s eye sees is often better than the thing itself. I’ve never seen the Rony Plaza, after all. It probably looks nothing like what I imagine, nothing so grand. It may not be set among royal palms and poincianas, but still I see it that way.

  I came to White’s Bridge, a plank bridge that rumbles whenever a car crosses it. I was still thinking about Maud, the lamp being the only thing lit against the black night and black water, this image soon surrendering to the one of Mary-Evelyn, floating on the surface of Spirit Lake, her white dress lit like a big candle, floating in the darkness of night, woods, and water. What I felt was what I felt about Maud on the end of the pier, though I could never have said why. It made me stop on the other side of the bridge and ponder as I chewed my hayseed.

  And then an image of the Girl came to me, how I’d first seen her at the railroad station in Cold Flat Junction in her dress of such a pale blue it seemed faded out to more a memory of blueness; her hair as pale as moonlight, her strange stillness, so that it was almost as if she was disappearing as I watched. Then how I’d seen her when I was trying to catch butterflies around Spirit Lake. I looked across the lake to the Devereau place and there she’d stood, where nobody should have been because nobody lived there. To me, she was just “the Girl”; she was one more thing I hadn’t told the Sheriff about.

  Two hours was how long I’d told Bunny I’d probably be (for she said she’d drive me back) and I’d frittered away nearly a half hour of it between the Silver Pear and stopping to think, so I put on a little speed for the last five minutes of my walk to Mirror Pond. It was a walk on soft marshy ground through leaves and branches that must have lain there since the year zero, so undisturbed did they look. But of course that was another illusion, for the area had been trammeled and sifted over by the police, and before that by Fern Queen and her killer two weeks ago.

  The yellow tape that warned POLICE CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS had been taken down. This made me feel sad, for it was as if the place was being returned to its long-gone-and-forgotten self, as if nothing had happened here. And I was sorry too because that canary-yellow tape was bright and cheerful, no matter what its message. It leant the place an air of habitation, of people and strolls and picnics.

  This was plain silly; people hadn’t picnicked here. I was wasting time. Yet, time, here, seemed meant to be wasted if it existed at all. It was the same sense I got about Cold Flat Junction.

  Mirror Pond itself was not, as Suzie Whitelaw reported, clear and tranquil. It was overgrown with rush grass and weeds; you could barely see the water. It was the sort of place to sink a body in, though Fern Queen’s had simply been lying at its edge.

  Now the place looked returned to itself as if a page had fluttered backward in a book to what I’d read once and now read again. The pond was in a clearing, and two dirt roads came together here, though the one that went straight on was little more than a trail. White’s Bridge Road, which I’d been walking on, turned to the right in the direction (at least I thought it was) of Spirit Lake. Going halfway round the lake is an old road no one uses anymore which passes the Devereau house and wanders off in this direction. It was this road Ben Queen must have driven his truck down when he went to the Devereau house that night, driving in on the other side of the lake, miles away.

  I picked up a small, dry branch and drew lines in a patch of dirt at my feet, just to clarify this road business to myself. Where these two roads intersect, here, there’s an ancient filling station with two bubble pumps and a clapboard building where they probably sold oil and soft drinks and things like that. The name of the place on the sign above the door, weathered nearly to invisibility, was FRAZEE. It’s mostly faded out and hard to read, but there are a lot of Frazees around, so it’s a safe guess. There were signs in the one window that still had glass in it for Clabber Girl Baking Powder and Mail Pouch Tobacco.

  I wondered how long it had been since a car had stopped here. And how could there have been enough traffic to keep the filling station going? Sunlight, in a sudden sweep across the clearing, speckled the glass of the one remaining window. Looking at the pumps, I grew more and more heart-heavy. It was just so deserted. I have this feeling for abandoned places: it’s as if they’re more real than the ones where folks hang out and the ones people flock to. The bench, the building—Frazee’s was like the ghost of Britten’s Market.

  I shook myself, wondering what I meant and knowing I should stop, for I felt the blue devils coming.

  “Hey! Girlie!”

  I turned so fast I nearly lost my balance. “You shouldn’t sneak up behind a person like that!”

  The old man—who I remembered from when Will and Mill and I came here—was standing less than ten feet away. He yelled—certainty louder than necessary—“Ain’t you the one came with them po-lice couple weeks ago?”

  I nodded and walked over to him so that he’d lower his voice. “I was with them, yes.”

  “How come you’re back here, then?”

  “You know how police work is. We’ve got to go over and over an area where there’s been a kill—uh, a homicide.”

  He spat into a patch of leaves and fern. I guessed he was chewing some of that Mail Pouch Tobacco. As old as he was, he’d know all about the filling station.

  As if arguing this point, he said, “Hell, I live right down there—” He shook his black walking stick off in a direction behind them. “I been here for near ninety years. My name’s Butternut.”

  “I remember. There’ve been Butternuts around here for over a hundred years.”

  His eyes squeezed. “How’d you know that?”

  “You told us.”

  Mr. Butternut looked up at the blank, cloudless sky. He seemed to be waiting for God to second what I’d said. “More’n a hunnert years, you’re right. See down there?” Again, he took up his stick and pointed off down the road. “My house’s down there. Lived in it all my life long. So did my daddy before me. My daddy’s name was Lionel. Lionel Butternut lived to be a hunnert and one. I’m the last.”

 
; Mr. Butternut wasn’t much taller than me. Age must’ve been shrinking him down and maybe instead of dying, he’d just disappear, blow off like puff ball filaments. Then I remembered Mr. Butternut had told Will (who’d said he and Mill were policemen) how he heard a car or a truck up here the night Fern Queen was murdered.

  “Where was that truck when you heard it, Mr. Butternut. I mean exactly?”

  “Ain’t no ‘exactly,’ I just did. I was asleep and it woke me up.” Impatiently, he said, “I done told all that to them lawmen. That there skinny po-liceman thinks he’s God. He said I better tell ‘em ev’rthing I seen and heard. Well, a’course I did, why wouldn’t I?” He spat another stream of tobacco against a rock. “They was out here and down the road lookin’ for tire tracks, they said.”

  “Was it a car or a truck?”

  “Truck. But there was more’n one ve-hic-le.”

  “You said one of them drove by your house.”

  “It did.”

  “What about the other one?” I remembered that Axel’s taxi had driven Fern Queen here that night.

  He was looking down at his feet, scraping mud off his shoe.

  “Mr. Butternut?”

  “Yeah?” He didn’t look up.

  “The car.”

  “What car?”

  I gritted my teeth. The Sheriff had to go through this all the time with witnesses. How did he stand it? I meant to ask him, whenever we were friends again. I was seized by a sudden and terrible breath of cold as if all around it had turned winter. Would there ever after be a rift, like the water between a drifting boat and the shore? Would there always be a distance in our friendship?