I sat on the platform, on the brown-varnished bench, waiting for the six o’clock train, hardly thawed from my state of frozen stupification. I was that close to finding out who she was for sure. Only a few yards of station platform between us. That close.
I was almost certain the Girl had shot Fern Queen. And one of the reasons was that I knew Ben Queen hadn’t shot Fern that night when he’d dropped the gun on the sofa in the old Devereau house.
But if he had a gun—?I imagined someone arguing.
It wasn’t his gun (I answered in my mind). He dropped that gun like it was a snake could have bit him.
A girl shooting her own mother? This was Lola Davidow’s voice, and no wonder she might have cause for concern.
It’s no less likely—the Sheriff said, who knew the score—than a man shooting his own daughter.
No, no, no, no, just about anybody would say, for it was, I agree, a fearful thing to have happen.
Hell! Donny was saying from his seat behind the Sheriff’s desk. Sam’s right. It was him shot Fern. How in hell you know it wasn’t his gun? Man walks in, drops a gun on a chair, you say it wasn’t his. That don’t make no sense at all!
Maybe.
I sat there and looked across the tracks at that empty, blistered land that drew me. Why would a place so barren and exposed pull at me this way? Dry earth the color of sand, sunbleached saw grass, some scattered rocks. And far off, that line of dark trees like a distant horizon. Not a single building, not a soul.
Yet, for some reason, it gave me a sense of ease, made me less tired. Indeed, looking at it, I realized how tired I was and how much things weighed on me. It was as if over there was the place where you could stop worrying things to death, where you could finally stop caring about Ree-Jane’s taunts, where you could set down the tray of dishes, where you could stop the lies and the connivery, where you could finally own up. Where you could drop the gun on the chair.
38
Solitary blue
The train ride was only fifteen minutes long, three minutes shorter because I was getting off in La Porte instead of Spirit Lake. I was going to call on Dr. McComb.
I spent the short train ride wondering about the Girl and why she was traveling between Cold Flat Junction and Spirit Lake. Maybe I’d have been better off figuring out what reason I was going to give Dr. McComb for visiting him. The last time I used the excuse that I wanted to ask him if there were any White Lace butterflies around this area, for I thought I might have seen one.
Butterflies were a speciality of Dr. McComb’s. We had spent some time out behind his house in grass up to my chin swishing nets around. At Spirit Lake, I had certainly seen a white butterfly, and it might have been a White Lace, but it looked so peaceful, swaying on a stalk of Queen Anne’s lace, that I couldn’t net it and stick it in the box I had taken for that purpose. I couldn’t stand the idea of carrying it to its death.
I stepped down from the train, loving that little yellow metal stool and the way the conductor placed his hand beneath my elbow. I walked up and down the platform, looked in the station waiting room. There was no sign of her; I guess I didn’t really think there would be.
One of Axel’s taxis was standing by the station, its motor running as if it were a getaway car. Delbert was driving, as usual. I wondered how Axel had ever started his taxi business with only the one ghost cab he himself drove. I walked over and asked Delbert if he was waiting for someone and he said, no, just sometimes he parked here in case anyone getting off might need a cab.
“I do,” I said, and got in. I told him I wanted to go to Dr. McComb’s house.
“Dr. McComb, Dr. McComb. Now whereabouts does he live?”
“You’re supposed to know where people live. You drive a taxi.” I sighed. “You go to Red Bird Road and along it until you come to Valley Road. You go along that and his house is at the end.”
“Hokey-dokey,” said Delbert, and turned the car toward the street.
I settled down in back, biting the bit of calloused skin near my thumbnail. I did this sometimes when I was thinking hard. I pictured the butterfly I had seen, clinging to the Queen Anne’s lace, when I had looked across the lake and seen the Girl. She and the butterfly seemed to occupy the same space.
Full of itself, the First National Bank rolled by. Banks always strike me as so self-important. Then we were coming up on the comer where the Abigail Butte County Library sat, and as it came into view, I yelled to Delbert to stop.
Delbert acted like he was having a heart attack, and I only hoped he’d get the car to the curb before it happened.
“I need to go in for just a minute,” I said, poking my head through his window. “Wait for me.”
Delbert said, “It’ll cost you waiting time.”
“That’s okay.” I darted across the road wondering how he figured “waiting time.” I skipped up the wheelchair ramp. I knew I was too old to skip, but I wanted to see if I still remembered how. I went into the library.
The butterfly books were on the “Nature” shelves, but I had found Dr. McComb’s book before in with “Local Authors and Authoresses.” These books were gathered on a table prominently stationed near the oval information desk. There were any number of local authors; I’d read scraps from different books when I was on my butterfly search two weeks ago. I thought none of these authors could write except for Dr. McComb (whose writing name was L. W. McComb). His descriptions of the various butterflies he’d seen and studied were, I thought, poetic.
Since I already had nine books out that were overdue, I didn’t want to try and check this book out because I didn’t want Miss Babbit looking up my record. I would just copy a page or two of Dr. McComb’s illustrations and comments. I carried the book to the copier, which children weren’t supposed to use without supervision. It was more or less hidden at the end of the stacks. I put the page face down and dropped in my money.
From the tiny bit I’d read just standing there, I knew I would like to check the book out, for it was very pleasant—dreamy, almost, as several of his passages mentioned he had to stay still so long he sometimes fell asleep. I thought it very brave of him to admit to this weakness in his scientific procedure. I then stuck the book back with the local authors and hurried out and back to the car.
“That’s going to be extra,” said Delbert, starting up the engine.
“I know. You already told me.”
“Well. Just so’s you know.”
I gritted my teeth and made some kind of throat noise.
“You say something?”
“No.”
“ ’Cause Axel, he says waiting takes time up just as good as driving does, so we got to charge for it.”
He was looking worriedly at me in the rearview mirror. I could see the mirror over the top of my copied page, which I raised to blot out his eyes. Delbert would go on and on about the “waiting” charge for days if a person encouraged him. I held the page so he couldn’t see my eyes and read Dr. McComb’s account of a blue butterfly that was really beautiful. Here, he’d climbed to the crest of a hill called “Hatter’s Hill,” a place I didn’t know about. Dr. McComb had gone there purely to try and see this blue butterfly. On this page, he described the scene before him:I wondered to whom this land belonged, for it looked un-farmed, untenanted. I gazed out over the fields which seemed as nothing, as endless. And I sat for over twenty minutes, nearly dropping off (a bad habit of mine, as I’ve said) when my peripheral vision caught a movement near the base of a yew. Carefully I turned my head downward and there in a patch of some weedy nectar plant swayed what appeared to be the Reakirt’s Blue, very rare in these Northern parts. Of unprecedented hue, it was no shade of blue that I had ever seen before. Perhaps I was partial to this butterfly, also called a Solitary Blue, because it tends to be a loner.
“Here’s Valley Road!”
Delbert’s voice snapped me back to my surroundings, only mine—the trailer home with its pink flamingos on the left, the falling-down barn on the
right—were far less seeable than the words on the page. A blue “of unprecedented hue,” no blue I had ever seen, and I guess never would unless I saw his butterfly.
“Well, go on. Didn’t I say it was at the end?”
Delbert sighed, the world on his shoulders. “Yeah, I guess.”
Finally he stopped where the road ended, outside of the square stone house. This time I told Delbert not to wait, as I knew I’d be gone long enough for him to have a conniption fit over the “waiting time” charge. As it was, he only charged me another fifty cents for waiting outside of the library.
I hoped Dr. McComb’s housekeeper or sister or whoever she was would not answer the door, as she had made me feel really uncomfortable the last time. But the door was open and I just went in and called Dr. McComb’s name into the silence. The room looked just the same, and why shouldn’t it? I’d been gone from it for only a few days, not ten years. Yet, life had lately taken on a ten-years-gone tinge. Lately, my sense of time was stretching out to accommodate all of the trips, talks, plans, ideas that I’d had going—not to mention that I was still in Florida, which about doubled everything.
The silence was nice, though, broken only by a grandfather clock ticking away. It was a place where I didn’t feel crowded the way I did in other places, as if there were room here to think, to lay things out in your mind and take your own good time examining each one. But I didn’t stop; I went through to the kitchen where another clock ticked quietly. I looked under a napkin covering a plate of what I hoped were brownies like the ones we had eaten before but were sugar cookies, which would do in a pinch. I did not take one. And something was in the oven, for the air was heavily scented with something sweet, a cake or brownies. I did not open the oven door.
I went out the kitchen door into the rear garden, though it could hardly be called a garden now, for it was overgrown with weeds, ivy, and bramble. Weeds stretched back to woodland. There was blue grass and buffalo grass; black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace; butterfly bushes and the ones he called his “nectar” plants. I knew this because he’d told me, not because I recognized them.
Looking down the narrow worn path, I couldn’t tell if what I saw bobbing above the dogbane and milkweed was a head of white hair or a cloud of tiny white butterflies he called Dainty Sulphurs. I followed the path as an arm came up ahead of me with a net and whissshed through the air. I took care on this overgrown path, as I wasn’t quite sure just what sorts of things were living near it, unseeable, hiding. I knew there were snakes and hoped they weren’t copperheads or rattlers.
“Dr. McComb!”
He turned, searching the air. It was hard, in this undergrowth, to see someone. “Who’s there? Who is it?”
“Me. Emma Graham.” In another few yards of bramble and brush, I made my way to him. “Hi!” I said, and waved. When I got up to him, I apologized. “I hope I didn’t scare off any Little Wood Sapphires.”
“You didn’t. And it’s ‘satyrs,’ not ‘sapphires.’ ”
I did not linger over my mistake. I thought I had been doing well to remember Little-Wood-Anything. “Are you busy?” Now, there was an ultradumb question. “I just wanted to talk to you about your book.” That would surely be the favorite topic of all the authors (and authoresses).
He grunted and said, “Oh, that.” Then his eagle eye lit on a butterfly that swayed atop a stalk of milkweed. In the pale sunlight splashing across the dogbane and butterfly bush, this green butterfly shone as brightly as one of the neon letters in the EAT sign of Arturo’s, the diner along the highway. Dr. McComb watched its wings closing, opening, closing.
I whispered, “Aren’t you going to net it?”
He brought his finger to his lips and said, “Ssssssh.” How much time passed as we watched the green butterfly, I don’t know. I know I was getting pretty bored. I didn’t want Dr. McComb to think I wasn’t sincere about my butterfly hobby; it’s just that you can’t stand around gazing at them unless butterflies are the end-all and be-all of your existence.
Yet, I think they might have been the be-all of Dr. McComb’s, even though you’d think medicine would be, as that had been his life’s work. While he still watched, not a muscle flickering into movement, I took out my copied page and read again his description. A lot of it really had nothing to do with the blue butterfly except in an indirect way.
Then I had one of those lightbulb ideas go off in my mind—the kind you see in cartoons, bulbs above heads—that the book wasn’t really about butterflies; that is, butterflies might not have been its purpose, but rather, its purpose had been to say things about life. This was such a new idea that I didn’t know what to do about it, so I filed it away in my mind until I had some time on my hands (which I never seemed to have these days).
Patiently I waited, wishing the butterfly would take off or that Dr. McComb would lose interest. Neither seemed to be about to happen. And I thought again about his description of the Solitary Blue butterfly, about how he’d said he waited for over an hour to see it, and wondered if there wasn’t a lesson to be learned in that. Not that I wanted a lesson. What I wanted was to know if that baking smell coming from the oven was brownies.
39
A drowning
At last the butterfly grew tired of being looked at (which seemed to be its chief occupation) and flew off. I reminded Dr. McComb that there was something in the oven that might burn up. We wended our weary way back to the house.
Overseeing the pan he took out of the oven—brownies!—I asked him what kind of butterfly it was. A Dogface, he said. I objected to that name for something so pretty. Then he told me a lot more about it than I needed to know, as he shook powdered sugar over the pan of brownies. I said my mother does that with cakes, only she places a doily on top and then the powdered sugar makes a perfect design. I went on in some detail about my mother’s cakes, which was probably more than he needed to know, so I guess we were even.
But Dr. McComb didn’t seem to mind at all, probably from a lifetime of listening to patients go on about their ills. (Imagine having Aurora Paradise as a patient!) He said my mother was the best cook he’d ever come across and was I one, too?
The question kind of staggered me because it was, after all, a reasonable question. Yet I can’t remember ever having asked it of myself, maybe because of the hint in it of death. I don’t think I really believe that my mother will die and I will then have to carry on. Me taking my mother’s place in the kitchen is the most harebrained notion I can imagine.
“I can’t cook worth a lick,” I said, I suppose to lay that notion to rest. I sat chin in hands watching the brownie pan while Dr. McComb went about the coffee. “I’m pretty good at bartending, though,” I added.
“Are you now? I like martinis, myself. Vodka.”
“That’s Mrs. Davidow’s favorite drink. But martinis are easy; they don’t take any imagination.” I watched him cut the brownies into squares.
“Martinis aren’t supposed to. They’re supposed to make you drunk.”
The brownies were now on the Blue Willow plate. I looked them over. “Well, you can get drunk with imagination as well as without it, can’t you? I’m talking about drinks that take two or three kinds of liquor. Among other things, of course. They’re my inventions. Cold Comfort’s one of them. That’s made with Southern Comfort.”
We both took the two largest brownies. He said, “That sounds imaginative all right. What else goes in it?”
“I’m sorry. The recipe’s a secret.” The recipe changed every time I made one, which was why it was a secret.
“Maybe you can make one for me sometime.”
“I’d be pleased.”
I drew from my pocket the page I had copied from his book, unfolded it, and slid it across the table.
“That looks familiar.” He seemed pleased.
“I got it from the library. I didn’t want to check the book out because other readers wouldn’t see it then. There was only the one copy.”
He sat
down and studied it, nodding. “I remember this day well.”
“Where’s Hatter’s Hill?”
“Mile or two the other side of Hebrides.”
Hebrides was the nearest big town. I loved it, for it had department stores and bookstores and candy shops. Stores that we didn’t have in La Porte. I liked to do my Christmas shopping there.
“I liked what you wrote there.”
He smiled. “Well, thank you.”
“You said you looked out over fields that seemed endless and ‘bereft of adornment.’ That’s very pretty. There’s a piece of land I look at sometimes and I get that same feeling. Only I can’t explain the feeling.”
“Where’s that?”
“Cold Flat Junction.”
“I haven’t been over there in a long while. It always struck me as deserted. A strange place. A sad place.”
Sad wasn’t really the right word, but I didn’t want to waste time thinking up the right word, as I wanted to get around to Mary-Evelyn’s death. The coffee tasted surprisingly good with the brownie. Dr. McComb is the only person who has ever offered me coffee. “It must take a lot of patience to watch butterflies.”
“Does. It takes a lot of patience to watch anything. I mean really see it.” He had polished off one brownie and was now studying the plate for another. “Most people aren’t really very observant.” He took the brownie I had my eye on. I guess we were both ultraobservant.
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