As she filled my paper cup again, I asked, “Do you get much business on this road?” She shook her head in a defeated way. “You might do better if you moved your stand back there”—I pointed toward the way I’d come—“at an intersection.” That was a stupid way of putting it; did Cold Flat Junction have intersections? “You could get the traffic from Flyback Hollow and the Dubois Road, too.”
She nodded. “My ma doesn’t like me to go all the way down there.”
“Oh.” I squinted skyward. Was that a reason?
I thought, if she lived here she must know the Calhoun house. “I’m looking for Imogene Calhoun’s place. Do you know it?”
She pointed up the road. “It’s that next house.”
I made out a dark green roof, poking above the trees. The houses here, what few there were, were hard to see because of the densely leafed trees. Here and Flyback Hollow seemed to have got all of the trees in the region. I set down my half-drunk cup—I hated KooI-Aid—thanked her, and started walking again.
It was not very far. The house was set into the wood around it as if it had grown there like another tree. It was part fake brick and part real wood and the whole was painted a seasick green, as tan as it was green, and it just sort of melted into its surroundings, which I actually found rather nice.
The lady who came to the door looked a little like the lemonade girl, only older, and with the Cold Flat Junction look, unhappy and unsurprised, worn, like the long print skirt and brown sweater she was wearing. Her hair and her eyes were coffee-colored, and she was holding a can of Schlitz and a cigarette.
“Miss Calhoun? Are you Imogene Calhoun?”
She nodded behind the screen door. “You want something?”
I couldn’t tell if her tone was belligerent or just bored. “My name’s Emma Graham, and I live in Spirit Lake? I’m writing this history paper? It’s what my teacher calls a ‘project?’ He wants us to delve (a word I really liked) into something around these parts—you know, where we live—and to write it up. I understand you once lived around White’s Bridge and your sister—”
“My sister is deceased.”
“Yes, ma’am. I heard she was.” I dredged up what the Sheriff always said in these sad circumstances. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Chrissakes, she’s been dead nearly ten years. Come on, you best come on in.”
The screen door slapped shut behind me. The living room was dark, not simply because it got only slanted light, but because everything in it was dark—walls, woodwork, furniture. She sank back into her slipcovered rocking chair and told me to sit down in one of the armchairs. The upholstery was a burnt biscuit color and kind of scratchy. Dust shimmered up from it, caught in a slant of light when I sat down.
I went on, opening my purse and taking out a five-dollar bill. “Also, our teacher told us if we interviewed anyone we should pay them for their time. So I’ll be glad to pay five dollars an hour, or of course for less than an hour.” I put the bill on the coffee table.
That surprised her. “Well.” She smiled and the smile made her look younger than fifty, for she’d have to be in her fifties. Maybe it was the way she was dressed in that flowered skirt and sneakers, or maybe it was her long hair. I didn’t know. I would have mistaken her for thirty if I passed her on the street. “It’s sure okay with me, but what I could talk about for an hour that you’d want to hear beats me.”
“Did your sister wait tables at the Hotel Paradise sometimes?”
“Yeah. Becky worked there part-time for two or three summers. She used to take me with her places she went to work so I wouldn’t have to stay home by myself. And partly because I could do some work too and help her out.” She pushed her light brown hair back off her forehead. “Lord, but that must’ve been forty, forty-five years ago.” She sipped her beer in quite a ladylike fashion, considering she was drinking it out of a can. She tapped ash from her cigarette into a tin ashtray she kept on her lap.
I thought back too and wished I had a rocking chair to do it in, for with her leg pulled up and the foot resting on the cushion, and the smoke clouding the air around her, Imogene seemed honestly to be back there with Rebecca. I myself settled into the dark, rough armchair and listened to her talk in her dreamy way about the kitchen and the help and my mother, who she called “Miss Jen.” I reminded myself that these were pre-Ree-Jane days, pre-Lola Davidow days and my scattered thoughts flew to those days I hadn’t lived as if the past were a magnet.
“There were those trees up behind the kitchen, near that big garage, where I’d sneak off with the dishwasher’s kid and smoke cigarettes behind one of those trees.”
She went on about the hotel, the people who worked there, and the guests she sometimes ran across when she was making up their beds. Yes, she was definitely worth the five dollars I was paying. The atmosphere seemed so heavy with memories, my eyelids drooped. She might have been talking about me and Paul, our dishwasher’s son, who I could get to steal brownies from where they were cooling on the pastry table, and to bring them up to the woods where we ate them, and Paul got blamed.
It was getting so I was living not only my regular life, but other little lives. It was almost as if I were everywhere. I wondered if I was going crazy to the point where I would be like Miss Ruth Porte, making candlelight suppers for myself, or being a kleptomaniac like Miss Isabel Barnett.
“... Devereau house.”
My heavy eyelids snapped up. She was talking about the Devereaus and I hadn’t been listening!
“They were awful hard to work for. That Isabel should have been in the slave trade.”
“Wasn’t that the house where—” No, I was being too direct. You have to sneak up on what you want to know; you have to peek through windows at the facts so they won’t run off and hide. You cannot go smashing through doors.
“My mother says some sisters lived there. Maiden ladies, she calls them.”
“I guess you heard about what happened?” said Imogene.
“What?”
“That little girl that drowned? She was their niece, I think.”
I squinted up my eyes as if memory were refusing to budge. “Drowned . . . yes, I guess somebody said ... But go on.” I tried not to sound overeager.
Imogene lit another cigarette from the butt of the old one and threw the butt into the empty grate. The way the sun stole through the venetian blind and lay in stripes across her face lent her a shadowy prettiness. “It was early one morning, I think. Those sisters called the police and said this little girl Mary was missing—” She stopped to take a swig of beer. “Now, this is what Rebecca told me as best I can recall. They found the little girl in the lake, that one over near the Hotel Paradise?”
I nodded and tried to be careful about believing everything I was told, for a lot of what I heard was secondhand, and the person doing the telling had heard it from somebody else. Either that, or the teller couldn’t really know because they hadn’t been there. Jude Stemple was certainly an example of this when he said, Fern never had no kids. Fern could have and he not know, which is what I was sure was the truth of it.
So far, of course, Imogene was right; the things she was saying had been part of the newspaper report.
“She was supposed to have taken out a rowboat in the night and then couldn’t get back; the boat was old and leaky. Does that make any sense? Why didn’t those police look into it more? One thing that clinched it for sure in my mind was—”
I knew what it meant to be on the edge of your chair. “What?”
She stopped talking, as if she were holding on to a surprise, a gift she opened layer by layer—ribbon, paper, box, tissue. She stopped and started picking at the red polish on her fingernail. It was dark red and chipped.
“What?”
She blinked. “Oh ... sorry. I guess I just got—you know—carried back there to the Devereau house and those sisters.” Deeply, she frowned. “Those sisters. I keep thinking of three sisters, but wasn’t it four?”
/> She was asking not me—even though she looked at me—but the air around me, as if knowledge hovered in the room like light, like air, hovered but couldn’t settle.
“Rose Devereau was the fourth sister, and nothing like those other three. She married Ben Queen from here in Cold Flat, but I won’t go into all that. Rose was younger than the other three by a good fifteen, twenty years. She was real pretty, real alive. Those three, though, always seemed to me more dead than alive. There was no prettiness there.” Again she stopped to drink and smoke. “There was this kitten that was so scrawny it wasn’t much bigger than a pencil. Rebecca said there was always a water dish but no food.”
This actually scared me. I knew about the starving kitten, for Ulub had told us, but I never heard its fate. I never wanted to.
“It was the little girl’s—Mary’s. They wouldn’t allow her to feed it. It would’ve died, of course, but what Becky did was, she put the kitten under her coat and took it home with her and fed it for the week, then brought it back just so the sisters would see it and know that she hadn’t stole it. Then she’d take it away again. She brought in a little box of cat food for it, but she was afraid to leave it with Mary; it just seemed too dangerous, for what if the sisters found it?”
“It was like prison. She was in prison.”
Imogene laughed, but it wasn’t a carefree laugh. “That’s for sure. They didn’t like me coming there, either. But if they wanted Becky, they had to take me in the bargain.”
I was so relieved about the kitten. “Your sister Rebecca must have been a really nice person.”
“Yes, she really was. This little girl Mary, she was so pale. It’s funny, I can’t call back her face, the features of it, I mean, but I do recall the paleness of her.” Imogene frowned. “Why did they hate Mary so much? It was as if she’d been visited upon them as a punishment.”
Then Imogene stopped talking and just smoked and drank. I wondered if she’d forgotten I was there, even. But I didn’t want to say anything for fear of interrupting her chain of thought.
“She had these beautiful dresses, like party dresses. It’s what she always wore—a dress. Never shorts or jeans like me. What we used to do was stay in her room and play with the stuff in her toy chest.”
I thought about the Mr. Ree game and how Mary-Evelyn had cut faces from snapshots and pasted them over some of the character cards that stood for the people in the game: Mrs. White, Niece Rhoda, Colonel Mustard. I knew I’d have to go back to the Devereau house and look at things in the light of what I knew now. Yet, what did I know?
“You said there was something that clinched it for Rebecca. Clinched what?”
“How she died. That it wasn’t an accident. What accident could befall a child in that way? Police called it a ‘suspicious death.’ No damn kidding. Why in God’s name would that child take out a boat at night, anyway?”
These had been my questions, the ones I’d made a list of after I read the forty-year-old report on the death in the Conservative offices a while back. How I wished Imogene’s sister, Rebecca, was still alive! For she had got her information direct. Of course, Imogene had too, but being only ten years old, her memory of all of this would be colored by her older sister’s comments.
Imogene went on: “No shoes. Now, that always got me. Or it did Becky. How was that child supposed to walk through that thick wood without shoes? And no coat, don’t forget. Here it was October and the child had no coat.”
“Then you think—maybe her shoes were never on? Like, maybe they carried her?”
Imogene took a sip of beer. “Maybe she was already dead, that’s what I think.”
My heart really leaped into my throat. This had never occurred to me. I thought of what Ulub had seen at a distance: those lights, either flashlights or lanterns, moving through the woods, a kind of silent procession. How could Mary-Evelyn not have cried, or yelled, putting up some kind of resistance with no shoes and no coat on? She was already dead—that would explain it.
Imogene was talking about the kitten again. “He was almost white but with a faint blue or gray tinge to him. Poor thing didn’t even have a name. Mary-Evelyn really loved him. She told me she’d gone down at night sometimes and stolen bits of food and that’s what kept it alive. But the sisters caught her at it and put a padlock on the refrigerator. And of course they punished her.”
“How?”
“They had her pick up leaves. This was October, remember.”
“What?” My mind, used to Mary-Evelyn’s mistreatment, still could not take this in.
“From the yard: It was in October, so they kept falling. The leaves, I mean. One by one, she was to pick them up and put them in this potato sack. And when it got full she was to dump it and start again.”
Here Imogene turned her head to look out the window, as if maybe she could see it out there beyond the side of the house. And I did too. Mary-Evelyn, in one of her party dresses, stooping to pick up a leaf and put it in the potato sack.
There wasn’t a sound, both of us gazing out the window. By now I had moved without even knowing it and was standing by Imogene’s chair, my hand on its arm, as if I could draw comfort from it.
In my mind I saw Mary-Evelyn look up at me and even though I knew it was my own imagining, I could feel her telling me or us that we had to find out what happened, get to the bottom of it, that though I might have figured out Fern Queen’s death, that it might have avenged some part of Mary-Evelyn’s awful life and death, it still wasn’t enough. And that if I didn’t do this, she couldn’t be released from her terrible punishment and would be picking up leaves throughout eternity. It was like one of the fairy tales I read years ago when I was little, how in a lot of them the princess was under a spell, and the prince had to figure out what had happened before the princess could be released. So it was like Mary-Evelyn was under a spell. Or I was.
“What was Mary-Evelyn like?”
“Like I said. Quiet.”
“What was she like when she wasn’t quiet?”
“Oh ... she was real sweet.”
That pained me. It made thinking about her that much harder.
The clock chimed. It was four-fifteen. More than an hour had passed. I realized that Imogene was an ally, and I had the perfect reason for coming back: my history project. I also realized I owed Imogene another five dollars and took it out of my change purse.
“Honey, you don’t have to give me any more money. I liked talking. It brought back a lot of things about me and Becky.”
I put the bill on the chair arm. “Just say it’s for feeding the kitten.”
I walked back down the road. There was a terrible feeling in me, a heaviness. I felt I was dragging myself along, that my feet didn’t want to move, but since they didn’t have any better idea where to go, they had no choice.
The lemonade stand was where I’d suggested the girl move it to, where this road met Dubois Road, but she was gone. I guess she meant to return, for the Kool-Aid pitcher was there. It was a different color, orange instead of yellow, and I saw where she’d crossed out “Lemonade” and written in “Orangeade,” which sounded like my sort of truthfulness. Anyway, that might mean she’d been doing some business. I poured a little into one of the plastic cups and put down ten cents. It might encourage her to see business was going on even while she was away. I used to do things like selling lemonade myself, when I was young, only mine was real lemonade which my mother helped me make. It tasted as fresh as if it had dripped from a lemon tree.
Flyback Hollow was off to my right and for a minute I stood by the stand and thought about Louise Landis. She knew everyone in Cold Flat Junction. She certainly knew Rose Devereau and Fern Queen. I couldn’t think of a good enough reason for stopping in to see her. I guess I had made up so much of my life that it didn’t occur to me to tell the truth. Even if anyone wanted to hear it.
I poured the Kool-Aid out and stood there with my paper cup, afraid I was emptying out like the cup. Looking around me I had this v
ision of Cold Flat Junction that I never could have explained: there did not seem to be anything in it. It was like the card table and the pitcher and the missing girl; like the lone girl in the school playground and her Pick Up sticks; the lone boy there on a different day with a basketball he wasn’t playing with; like the empty train platform where I had first seen the Girl.
I knew what was both restful and fearful about Cold Flat Junction: it had all stopped. As in those old Twilight Zone episodes, where the street was always empty, leaves and blown paper being the only movement, and what people you finally met seemed made out of clay and in a different time and space. But such words as I could use were husks, empty of true meaning. I could put no words to it. You had to find words for it to get a handle on it. I didn’t even know what “it” was.
I walked Dubois Road, passing the Queens’s big house, wondering. Not that I expected to find Ben Queen sitting in the front parlor. It would be the last place he’d choose to hide out.
I heard the whistle of the 4:32 as I was walking down Windy Run Road and I broke into a run. It was moving right past me as I ran the open stretch, the beaten path there, between the diner and the station. I saw it stop up there and knew I’d never make it, so I slowed down as I came to the steps leading up to the platform.
I was down at the far end of the platform when I saw someone boarding. With one foot on the top step and one on the bottom, she turned, and, only for a moment, looked at me. If I had run fast, I might have made it. The engineer might even have waited, seeing a poor kid running for all she was worth (one of the few advantages of being a kid), only I couldn’t. I was frozen in place.
It was the Girl.
I sat in the silent landscape, thinking about her, wondering what her business was in Cold Flat Junction. This was where I’d first seen her, on this railroad platform, nearly a month ago.
I think she’s Ben Queen’s granddaughter. Ben’s and Rose’s. Anyone who saw her and knew Rose would think so, for Rose was who she looked like: she could have been Rose when Rose had been about the age to run off with Ben Queen. The trouble was, no one else I knew had seen her. But I admit I hadn’t been very forthcoming in any description of her. She looked nothing like her mother, Fern—at least nothing I could tell from the pictures of Fern in the paper. I bet Jude Stemple would see it, for he had been really taken with Rose Queen, had described her pale hair and her skin and eyes so vividly I could almost see her. Jude Stemple would have known he was wrong about Fern being childless.
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