Cold Flat Junction

by Martha Grimes

  “But if you’re a doctor, you really have to be. I mean, you’ve got to be able to tell things—oh, like about death. What people die from. Don’t you always have to fill out those certificates?”

  “Death certificates? Yes. Not anymore, though.” He sighed. I couldn’t tell from the sigh whether he did or didn’t miss writing out death certificates.

  “It’s probably not easy, a lot of the time. I mean some deaths can look like they’re caused by more than one thing.”

  “True.”

  I smiled. What I liked about Dr. McComb (and the Sheriff, and Maud) was that he didn’t tell me I was being morbid, or I should be out playing ball. And he didn’t look fearful. I’ve noticed how easily adults become fearful when children say something they don’t expect.

  I went on: “Like, you can’t tell that somebody’s died of a particular poison unless you go looking for that particular poison.”

  “You been reading up, I’d say.” He poured us some more coffee. “I’m glad I made the brownies and not you.” He laughed.

  Eating my second brownie, I said, “Oh, it’s just interesting. Especially about poisons.” I was getting good at this. “I guess arsenic is the most common to murder someone, right?”

  He munched and frowned. “I can’t say with any certainty. I haven’t come upon such cases. I’ve come on accidental poisonings, of course. But poison in that case is pretty obvious. Kids getting into things, stuff like that. Or sedatives, taking too many, which of course might not be accidental at all.”

  I brought up shootings.

  “You’ve been hanging around Sam DeGheyn too much. What about them?”

  “Didn’t you ever have someone get shot you had to pronounce dead?”

  “Yeah, sure. Hunting season’s full of ’em.”

  “But that’s accidental. I mean deliberate.”

  He shook his head. I thought it was safe now to bring up drowning, drowning as just one way of dying among others. “How about drowning? Can you always tell that?”

  “You mean tell if someone did or didn’t? Oh, sure. Your lungs fill up with water, you drown. No way I’d mistake that.”

  I paused, frowning, as if thinking hard. “Remember Mary-Evelyn Devereau?”

  “How could I forget? How could anyone forget that poor little girl?”

  I stopped eating. That expression, tears sprung to my eyes, actually described it. It was the surprise at finding Mary-Evelyn’s death was important to somebody else, and after all this time.

  Dr. McComb pushed the Blue Willow plate toward me and then took out one of his cigars.

  “I know she drowned—”

  He sighed. “Indeed she did. No two ways about that.”

  “But can you be sure”—I should have led up to this question more, but I was getting impatient—“where she drowned?”

  Dr. McComb stopped in the act of lighting his cigar. “What? She drowned in Spirit Lake.” He looked at me for quite a time. “You getting at something?”

  I shrugged. “Oh, I was just thinking. Here’s an example: what if I shoved Jane Davidow’s head (it hadn’t taken long to scare up an example) down in a bucket of water until she drowned. Then I dragged her dead body (I can’t deny I was enjoying this) to Spirit Lake or Lake Noir and dumped her in. How would you know she didn’t drown there?”

  “How? Well, it’d look pretty damned suspicious for one thing.” He dragged in on his cigar, hollowing out his cheeks.

  “Why? What if everyone knew she wasn’t a good swimmer?” Which she wasn’t. “Okay, so it looks suspicious, say. What would you do?”

  “Analyze the water. See if it was lake water. See if it was that lake water.” He rolled his cigar around in pouty lips and gazed at me. “What you’re talking about is the Devereau girl, isn’t it? You’re saying maybe that girl didn’t drown in Spirit Lake, but elsewhere.”

  There wasn’t much use beating around the bush, I guessed. “I’m saying”—I chomped my brownie—“they killed her.”

  Dr. McComb finished lighting his cigar as he stared at me. He seemed unable to say a word. He did not make fun of me or try to dismiss the idea. I knew he wouldn’t.

  “You thought it was strange, too, you said so.”

  He nodded.

  I went on: “Of course, they could still have done it in the lake, only probably on the other side, the side their house was on, for it would have been nearly impossible to take her through the woods and get her into a boat without her yelling or crying. If she was alive, I mean. Ulub would’ve heard her if she’d yelled. You know he was there because he came with Ubub to tell you.” Carefully, I cut the last brownie on the plate in half. I took one half and pushed the plate across to him. But he didn’t seem to notice. He sucked in on his cigar. I ate my brownie, trying not to swing my legs under the table the way I did when I was little. He was looking around the kitchen as if it weren’t his and he couldn’t make out whose it was. Then he studied the ash end of his cigar as if he wasn’t sure whose that was either. I suppose because I wasn’t used to being taken so seriously, or giving any adult something worth thinking about, I was surprised by his silence. I wanted to ask him if he felt guilty about Mary-Evelyn, but I didn’t. It wasn’t my place to.

  By now what was left of my coffee was cold, but I drank it just the same, not wanting him to think I didn’t appreciate his trouble.

  He said then, “I should have done something.”

  He knew. That was probably why I’d told him. I knew he knew. “I should have done something,” he said again.

  I was quick to disagree. “The police should have done something. It was their job, not yours.”

  He blew out a thread of smoke. “It’s the job of anybody who thinks there’s a wrong been done to try and right it, I’d say. It being your job makes it only one more reason.” He said, “I remember that sheriff. He wasn’t like Sam DeGheyn.”

  Who was? I wanted to say.

  “He was just a toady, spent most of his time at the pool hall or licking the mayor’s boots. He wasn’t about to mount an investigation.”

  “Wasn’t he even suspicious?”

  Dr. McComb shrugged. “Beats me. He didn’t let on if he was.” He held his cigar over an ashtray and flicked the long ash from it. “No one I knew of knew the Devereau sisters very well. They were considered very odd. They left Spirit Lake right after. I heard later one of them died, don’t know which one. But I guess they’re all dead by now.” He frowned. “Maybe not. At least one of ’em was probably my age, and I’m still alive. Seventy-six, I am.” He sighed.

  Seventy-six. But of course Aurora Paradise was a lot older still, and it’d be some years before he caught up to her. Somehow, as he sat back, he looked older, his eyes now not bright as they had been out there chasing butterflies. He asked, and it seemed more of himself than of me: “Why would three grown women do such violence to a little girl?”

  I looked up from the Blue Willow plate. And the word locked in my brain as if it were a puzzle piece that I’d been looking at sidewise out and upside down and every which way but the right one. But now it locked in perfectly.

  “Revenge.”

  A word, a space to fill a lack.

  40

  Waiting time

  “Again?” Delbert whined when I told him I wanted to stop at the library. “There’s waiting time—”

  “I know.”

  He pulled out, saying, “It’s your money.”

  “Well, then, stop acting like it’s yours.”

  I watched the same scenes go by in reverse outside the window on the other side of the cab. The trailer, the plastic flamingos—

  Flamingos! I pounded my head with the heels of my hands, picturing them out there in the center of Hialeah racetrack, where I hadn’t gone as I’d planned this afternoon. I sat back, sighing. I’d just get Walter to call the bookie.

  Inside the library I said hello to Miss Babbit and made my way to the history shelves. I looked for Greek history. I cannot say
why I was going about solving the mystery this way, when what I should be doing was gathering evidence. But what evidence was there to gather in Mary-Evelyn’s story?

  Yet, I knew it wasn’t only Mary-Evelyn’s story; it was also Rose Devereau’s and Fern Queen’s; it was Ben Queen’s and Lou Landis’s; it was Rebecca and Imogene Calhoun’s story. It was also mine.

  I dragged book after book off the history shelf, but I couldn’t find Do-X-machine. One reason was because I couldn’t spell it. I couldn’t look it up for that reason. I really hated asking Miss Babbit because you should be able to do your own research and also (mostly) because I was embarrassed to.

  I leaned back against the stacks. Mill had said it was a Greek idea and I thought: if Will and Mill are using it in a play, then maybe I should look under Greek plays. I went to the drama shelves, where I found an anthology of Greek plays and ran my finger down the index under “D.” I couldn’t find it, again, because I couldn’t spell it, so I went back to the top and started looking much more slowly.

  Here it was, or must be: deux ex machina. Wow. Seeing it that way, it looked even more important. Mill certainly hadn’t pronounced it right, though he did know what it was. Here it was explained as “God-from-a-machine” and Mill was right about this character (God) coming down in some contraption to set things right. But it didn’t tell you how to pronounce it. I guess the book figured if you were smart enough to know what it was, you must know how to say it. I took the book to Miss Babbit.

  She adjusted her glasses and smiled down at the page. Miss Babbit always seems in a lovely temper, never harsh or saying things to make you feel dumb. “I believe you pronounce it ‘day-uus ex mack-in-ah.’”

  My eyebrows slid upward in wonder. Wow, I thought again. I tried it out: “Dayus-ex-MACKinah.”

  “That’s right. Only the first word is more of a ‘day-u.’ Think of two syllables.”

  “ ‘Day-you.’ ”

  “That’s about right. It’s very difficult, I know.”

  She only said that so I wouldn’t feel dumb. I smiled. “Thank you, Miss Babbit.” I knew I had to get back to the taxi or Delbert might just take it upon himself to leave. “Now, would you happen to have a picture of Hialeah racetrack?”

  All the while we drove through town, past Miller’s and the Prime Cut and Souder’s Drugs, up Second Street and past the Rainbow Café, I watched out for the Girl. She could have gone on to Spirit Lake as easily as alighting in La Porte, or she could still be traveling to some stop up the line, some stop she knew but I didn’t.

  41

  I could have danced all night

  Walter told me when I came in the kitchen that he didn’t call my bookie because I never told him how much or what horse. I said that was okay, and I might have time to go to Hialeah tomorrow and place my own bets. He then said that Miss Bertha was mad as hops she never got her dinner at the usual time. “They was settin’ down in there,” he nodded toward the dining room, “and I just went in and told ’em you got called away on an emergency.”

  I tied on my apron. I hadn’t bothered changing my clothes as it was nearly seven-thirty.

  As I filled a water pitcher, Walter said, “I set the rolls to warm and put them butter patties on the bread plates.”

  The rolls were in a basket on the ledge above the stove. My mother never served cold bread. I thanked Walter and asked him if he’d take Aurora Paradise her dinner. I’d make her a drink, but if I started fooling around with her I’d never be done. He said sure he would.

  “I don’t want to be late again for the dance,” I said, and pushed the swing door through to the dining room where Miss Bertha waited like a big gray spider.

  Ree-Jane came to the dance (as my guest), wearing a mustard-colored long dress with puffed sleeves and a sweetheart neck-line. The style was more that of a ten-year-old, which it was, as it had been my first long dress. If I do say so myself, I had looked pretty cute. Ree-Jane didn’t.

  My mother wore a black linen dress with a string of (real) pearls. This plain but perfectly cut dress shot from shoulder to floor and looked grand. She looked free and unburdened for once.

  Lola Davidow wore a dark brown satin two-piece dress, the top straining across her bosom and the bottom straining across her stomach.

  I, of course, wore my white tulle with the sequins and the moment we all stepped through the door, I was asked to dance by the son of the Rony Plaza’s owner. My mother twirled off with the owner himself. I asked the son (whose first name I hadn’t caught, but what do names matter at times like these?) to dance me by Mrs. Davidow and Ree-Jane so I could wave to them, which he did and I did. Ree-Jane was as red as fire from falling asleep in the sun (again) and her face was peeling. The mustard color against her hair and skin made her look like a big hot dog. Mrs. Davidow stood at the rim of the dance floor pursing her mouth in and out like a fish, wanting either a dance or a drink.

  The ballroom was immense. The twenty-foot ceilings had vaulted marble arches. The chandeliers turned the sequins of my dress into tiny stars and I looked like the Milky Way. The orchestra sat on a platform at one end of the room, all of them dressed in black pants and flamingo-pink jackets. In the very center of the ballroom was a circular pool planted with royal palms and poincianas. In this pool flamingos waded up and down and around, more graceful than anyone on the dance floor (except for me and the son).

  The band was playing “Poinciana” as Ree-Jane, who had finally been asked to dance by a short bald man, stumbled by. Her partner was not more than five feet five or six. Ree-Jane sported a phony smile on her empty face as she looked over his head, pretending she enjoyed all this. He stepped on her foot. She gritted her teeth as the son and I floated on by. I called out, asking her if she was having a good time.

  Lola was. By now she’d had three or four martinis, and she’d found herself a drinking buddy. They were doing some dance that wasn’t a jitterbug but also wasn’t anything else, that involved dancing in place and shoving the index fingers of each hand up and down and up and down. They were both laughing. That was fine with me.

  On several occasions, new dancing partners had cut in on us, and each new partner twirled me away. The son looked disappointed when this happened, but we always got back together again.

  The bandleader brought a fast number to a close and then announced a special treat for the dancers. They were now to hear a rendition of “Tangerine” sung by Miss Emma Graham.

  Imagine! It seemed my fame had spread all the way from Trader Bob’s to South Florida!

  Breathless, I moved up to the stage, passing Ree-Jane and the bald man. You could tell she was just beside herself, seeing me get all of this attention.

  At this point I got out of my beach chair and put the needle on the record and swayed to the music.

  And down in the Pink Elephant, while my royal palm fluttered in the breeze stirred up by the fan, and the waves lapped the beach of the Rony Plaza, and the flamingos bunched among the poincianas, I belted out—Taaaan-ger-ene,

  She is all they claim,

  With her eyes of night,

  And lips as bright as flame;

  Taaaan-ger-ene.

  (Here I was joined by three backup singers.)

  Da du de da

  When she dances by

  (I trucked along the stage)

  Do do de do do

  Senoritas stare and caballeros siiiiiigh!

  And I’ve seeeen—

  (Boo be boo be boo)

  Toasts to Tangerine

  Raised in every port across the Ar-gen-teeeeen—

  Here all of the dancers raised their champagne and martini

  glasses in a toast. I was a tremendous success.

  And the night, as they say, was still young.

  42

  Psssst! from overhead

  The next morning I lay in bed an extra few minutes casting my mind back to Brokedown House, to Maud and the Sheriff and me in that fusty old bedroom, and something I was trying to remember.
I saw the room, Maud, the Sheriff reading, the ring he’d held out. My mind’s eye roved that room, but I couldn’t discover what I needed to remember.

  I got out of bed and padded down the hall to the bathroom. The stairs to the fourth floor are near the bathroom and I could hear Aurora banging around up there and talking to herself. I sat down on the toilet with my head in my hands, still seeing us in Brokedown House. I tossed cold water on my face and swiped my toothbrush across my teeth a few times. I studied my face in the mirror for signs of dis ... another “dis” word, dis, dis, dissipation! I left the bathroom.

  “Pssst! Psssst!”

  I looked up. Aurora was hanging over the fourth-floor bannister. I honestly couldn’t remember ever seeing her out of her chair before.

  “Pssssst!”

  “Why are you going ‘pssssst’? There’s no one else around.”

  “Don’t you get fresh with me, Miss! I want an Appledew.”

  “But it’s hardly more than seven A.M.!”

  She responded to that by saying—fluting, more—“I have something you’d like to see.”

  I hadn’t noticed she was holding a book, or journal, until she patted it and looked really smug.

  I’d been standing at the bottom of this last flight of stairs up, and as I started up them, she yanked the book back. “Oh, no you don’t! You don’t get to see it till I get my Appledew!”

  Stopping on the third step, I said, “What is it? You can at least tell me that.” More than likely, what she had was of no interest to me. But then I thought, no, if she tried tricking me with it, then I’d never know whether to believe her; I’d always think she was tricking me and wouldn’t fall for it.

  “It’s a picture album.” She patted it again.

  Now, photographs have a lot of promise in them as far as information goes. I said, “I’ve got to serve Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright their breakfast before I can make any drinks.”