Sheba stiffened, for she had always disliked Rose Devereau ; I had learned that plain enough from my visit here with Mr. Root.
George just shook his head in a woebegone way. “That poor poor girl. Ben never did that, and I’ll say it with my dying breath.”
“ ’Course he never did it.” Sheba looked away, out over the garden.
I took the opportunity to break my cookie into little pieces as I pursued my point. “I was overhearing some people talk about it in the Windy Run Diner—”
Sheba had to butt in and comment about the customers there. “That Billy and Mervin and Don Joe. All’s they do is sit around and talk silliness.”
I winced. “Anyway, they were saying your Ben went to Hebrides that day.”
“He was in Hebrides, that’s right,” said George. “He always went on Thursdays.”
I waited. To do what? I silently urged. I was afraid to get too technical on them, as that might make them wonder about my reasons for coming. “They said in the diner he had to go to get his truck fixed.” George set down his lemonade glass as I dropped some cookie bits between the slats of the chair.
“Not exactly. His truck got something wrong with it while he was there in Hebrides. So he took it into the shop.”
I frowned. “But if he was in Hebrides, how could he have been in Cold Flat Junction and killed Rose?”
“They said at the trial there was time after he picked up the truck to get to the house here and after he killed Rose to go back to Hebrides. They claimed Ben had used the truck as an alibi, but the alibi didn’t work, as it turned out. Those police doctors can figure times pretty good. Anyway, they didn’t have to do much figuring out because Sheba saw Rose go out to the barn to feed the chickens and after an hour or more when she never came back, I went looking for her.” As if the vision were rising up before him, he closed his eyes against it. “Blood everywhere. Awful.” He dropped his head. “Poor Ben. What they say in ninety percent of the cases where a man or wife is murdered, it’s the spouse that’s guilty. That’s what started ’em in thinking about Ben.”
I could understand how it might have started them, but not how they could have ended with thinking it was Ben Queen. The Sheriff once told me that when you’ve got a homicide staring you in the face, you begin by going for the most obvious explanation, for nearly all homicides can be explained that way. You don’t do what mystery writers do: you don’t hit on the least obvious, or one that’s so all-fired complicated only a damned fool would try it. So here we were: the police hit on what struck me as the least obvious explanation. Ben was in Hebrides, but others were here. So why not Sheba Queen, who was known to have taken a powerful dislike to Rose? Why not Fern Queen, who was in a rage over being sent to an institution and who was kind of crazy anyway? As far as I was concerned. Fern was the obvious choice. She had a motive; Ben didn’t.
I guessed in the end you couldn’t blame the investigation if Ben Queen never denied he’d done it. But you’d have thought his own lawyer could have worked out that he was protecting someone. Then, again, maybe the lawyer did figure it out, only Ben Queen told him to keep his mouth shut. There’s only one kind of person you’d do that for and that’s someone you feel responsible for. It leaves out, of course, how good Ben Queen’s judgment was to let a homicidal killer run around free.
But I just couldn’t tackle the matter of Ben Queen’s judgment right now. Right now I wanted to know what he’d done in Hebrides. “You said your brother always went into Hebrides on Thursdays. Was it some kind of regular thing he had to do?”
George said, “Well, he always picked up the feed Thursdays. Always went to Smitty’s outside town.”
“Did he get it that day? I mean with the truck acting up. did he have time?”
George frowned, concentrating. “Yeah, I think he did.”
Sheba had to butt in again with her thoughts. “That day, that day will live in infamy.”
She could live in infamy with it as far as I was concerned. Why hadn’t they done something? If they’d believed their brother Ben’s innocence so much, why hadn’t they questioned the times? Maybe it was from hanging out with the Sheriff so much and listening to him talk about past investigations that made me suspicious of conclusions. You’ve got to be sure you have every scrap of available evidence before you can draw your conclusion. (I wish he’d reminded himself of this in my case.)
I asked, “Flow long after it happened did he come back?”
“Couple hours, I guess. Of course, police said he came back before. You recall, Sheba?”
“Three o’clock. I remember because I noted the time that sheriff came.”
“So she was killed like around noon?”
“Well, police put it at between eleven and three. But of course we knew closer than that. I saw her at noon when she went to the barn. George here went out to the barn around one-thirty.”
George nodded. “That was the time all right. I never saw such a scene in my life. It was terrible, terrible. I tried to keep you from goin’ out there, Sheba, but you would insist.”
“Well,” was all Sheba said as she rocked more intensely.
“He got the truck fixed okay, though?”
“Yeah. Carl’s one of the best mechanics around.”
Carl. “My mother’s in need of a good mechanic. I guess he’s not there any more. It’s been so long.”
“Sure is. Carl’s had that Sinclair station for fifty years and his dad before that. But you got Slaw’s over in Spirit Lake. That Wayne ... what’s his name?”
“Dwayne Hayden?”
“That’s the one. Nobody’s better’n him. Not in Hebrides, Cloverly, or any place in a hundred miles.”
“I’ll sure tell my mother about him. We’re looking for a good feed store, too. We’ve got a mess of chickens out back.” We did have four, actually.
“What you been feedin’ ’em?”
“Ah, corn. And stuff. See, I don’t actually do it myself.”
Sheba said, “Well, you should. It’s good for youngsters to get a start on finding out what the real world’s like.”
They thought this was the real world?
54
Solace
I stood on Louise Landis’s porch thinking up a reason for coming. How I wished I’d chosen the history project I had told Imogene about. But couldn’t the project have started after my first visit to Louise Landis? No. I had to stick with what I had.
“Hello, Miss Landis,” I said, when she opened the door. She seemed really pleased I’d come. “Emma! Come in, come in.”
“Thank you. I just wanted to tell you about the entertainment for the orphans’ lunch.” I said this as I followed her through the cool, dark hall and into the living room. It was exactly the same as it had been when I’d left, down to the last detail, which included the length of orange yam I’d been using to make a cat’s cradle. Did I suppose she’d move all the fumiture around and hang wallpaper after I left? (This question was asked by my sarcastic self.) No, of course not (my more patient self answered). Perhaps it was more that everything seemed to have stopped and had just started in ticking now, like the mantel clock.
I sank into the deep armchair and considered curling up and going to sleep, it was so comfortable. Instead, I said, “My brother Will and his friend Brownmiller—he’s a real musician—would be happy to entertain the orphans.” Was I crazy? Why hadn’t I asked them yet? But wait! There was another way to approach this. “Now, what they said was they weren’t sure if they could come to the lunch, but they thought you could all come to their production. As their guests, of course. (They never charged anybody anyway unless it was someone they didn’t like.) They put one on every year in summer.”
“How nice of them to suggest it. What day is the performance?”
“The day’s not quite certain, but it’ll be in the next couple of weeks. Usually they do two or three performances. I have a part in it; I’m to be the deus ex machina.”
She looked tru
ly surprised. No wonder. How many people had ever heard of a deus ex machina, much less could pronounce it? “How ambitious of them! Is it Sophocles? Euripides? Is it Oedipus?”
I’d forgotten to find out who wrote it, though I imagine what Will and Mill were putting on didn’t have a lot of the original in it. “Medea. I mean it’s about Medea.”
“A Greek tragedy. My word, but your brother and his friend must be very well read.”
I could have argued that, based on the comic books and magazines under his bed. “It’s a lot different than most Greek plays because it’s a musical. That’s what Brownmiller is an expert at. He writes lyrics and is a musician. He plays just about every instrument you can imagine.”
Louise Landis’s expression didn’t give away much of what she was thinking and I supposed that came from teaching all these years, making your expression coolly polite like that. I went on: “Brownmiller writes all the words for the songs and just borrows the music from over there at the camp meeting or from other composers.” I sat forward a little to make my position clear: “I don’t think you should really do that—I mean, it doesn’t seem exactly right, morally right (how nice to toss that word in!) to have this woman that’s just killed or is going to kill her kids sing, ‘I’m Medea. Mama mia.’ ” I sat back.
She coughed and said, “Why—Emma. would you like some tea?”
“Yes, thanks.”
She rose rather carefully, as if trying to hold herself in check and walked out, just as carefully. I hoped I hadn’t upset her, though I couldn’t imagine why Medea would. I got out of my chair and turned to the wall of bookcases. I didn’t see Light in August,but there were a couple of others by William Faulkner I wasn’t familiar with. I wondered if he spent his whole life writing books and how he managed to do that, what with life being as busy as it is. I looked for Greek plays she might have, but didn’t see any. I would like to see a deus ex machina in action, instead of just hearing it described. (I certainly couldn’t depend on the one in Will’s play to be a good example.)
Miss Landis was back with our tea. As she poured I watched and commented on all of her books. Then we both sat down and I added three spoons of sugar to my tea. “There’s a lot of killing of family members down through the years in Greek plays. They’re always after revenge, it seems to me.”
“Well, the Greeks were certainly caught up in the notion of retribution.”
I blew on my tea (a habit my mother didn’t encourage), then said, “Do you think, if you wrote a play and needed a deus ex machina at the end that it’s a very good play? I mean, shouldn’t you have to get out of the mess on your own?”
“In some circumstances, perhaps you can’t.”
But that was just saying it again, it seemed to me. “How come?”
“It might be like running a fever. Eventually, it either breaks or it kills you. You can’t do much about it. Except to wait.”
I thought about this. “But—” I tried to put words to what I was thinking. Sometimes words just walked out on you and left you stranded. I went back to the murder. “What about that murder that happened here twenty years ago?”
“Rose Queen?”
I nodded. “And then somebody comes along and kills this Fern? Her daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Well ... you don’t think it was him do you?”
We seemed both to know who I meant.
“No. No, I don’t.”
There was a silence. I tried fashioning a cat’s cradle again and said, “At the diner I had lunch, and I overheard people talking about this Fern Queen’s murder. The Sheriff in La Porte thinks her father did it, but he can’t see any motive. Why would her father murder her?”
“He wouldn’t; Ben Queen would be incapable of such a thing. As your sheriff says, there’s no motive.”
“He doesn’t like coincidences.”
Miss Landis raised an eyebrow. “‘Coincidences’?”
I tried snapping the yarn taut, but I hadn’t done it right.
“Like Ben Queen getting out of jail just days before the murder of Fern.”
She looked over my head at the wall of books behind me, so long that I turned to see what she was seeing. “Sorry. I was just thinking that it might not be a coincidence; at the same time it doesn’t mean Ben Queen did it.”
I thought about that, frowning at the orange thread as if it had some part in the matter. “Have you lived here all your life?”
“Yes, I have.”
“What about your mother? And father?” I sometimes forgot fathers, as I didn’t have one. I wondered if that made me, as a person, lopsided.
“This house goes back to my great-grandparents. I think he’s the one who built it.”
“Nobody else has lived here, then? Nobody came along to interfere, did they?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, then she said, “You mean—?”
“To move in, to try and take it away.”
“Oh, no. I can’t imagine that happening.”
“I can.” I concentrated on my hands. Finding something to do with them, like the cat’s cradle, helps you not look at the other person.
“Interlopers?”
That was a good word, good enough to repeat. “Interlopers.” I smiled.
“You must be referring to the Davidow woman.”
“You know her?”
“Yes. I’ve often seen her in La Porte. I go there to buy groceries and things.”
“Well, I mean, more her daughter is the interloper.” I pulled the cat’s cradle as if both ends were Ree-Jane’s arms.
“Interlopers are extremely hard to take.”
Well, that didn’t tell me anything new. I said, “But you should be able to do something about them.”
“There should, you mean, be a deus ex machina?”
I looked over at her. She was not being sarcastic. And it suddenly came to me that a deus ex machina was exactly what I thought should come along. “Yes.”
“But remember what you said.”
I frowned. What had I said? I said so many things it hardly bore remembering.
To my blank (or perhaps surly) look, she said, “You said the playwright must not be very good if he couldn’t find a way for his characters to get out of the mess on their own.”
I wished I hadn’t said it; now I was stuck with it. Still, it was nice to have your words remembered. “Yes, but this isn’t a play.”
“All the more reason to be able to depend upon yourself. And wouldn’t you rather, in the long run?”
I slipped down in the chair, something I had a habit of doing if talk got around to my character. I didn’t want to talk about depending on myself. For one thing, it made me lonesome. I changed the subject. “Have you read all of these books?”
“No. A lot of them, but not all.”
“Do you like William Faulkner? Right now I’m reading Light in August.” Actually, I hadn’t picked it up after it came in handy for getting Dwayne to go with me to White’s Bridge.
“That’s wonderful. You must like words.”
“‘Words’?” But I right away knew what she meant. For I loved sitting in the Abigail Butte County Library with an open book, or several books, feeling they were consoling me, somehow. “I guess I do, yes.”
“They’re an idea of home, I think. Words are. It really is like opening a door, isn’t it, to open a book. If that’s not too sentimental to say. Books, words, stories are a kind of solace.”
I frowned, taking it in. This was definitely a new idea, one worth coming back to, when I didn’t have this mystery to solve.
Words, stories, solace.
55
Smitty
Instead of going to Spirit Lake on the 4:32 from Cold Flat Junction, I got off in La Porte. I figured Delbert would be waiting in his cab, hoping for a fare.
He was, but not for me. “You goin’ to the hotel?” he asked in a hopeful tone, suggesting he didn’t want to take another unscheduled trip with me.
“Hebrides?”
Did he have to make out that any destination outside of La Porte and Spirit Lake meant he’d have to trudge over sand dunes and mountains for a year? “You know where it is, don’t you?”
He half turned in his seat to present a worried face to me, to let me know just how much he didn’t want to do this. “That’s like a twenty-minute, even a half-hour drive.”
I sighed. “Delbert, why do you always have to argue about where your customer wants to go. This is a taxicab. Axel has this business to drive people where they want to go. Not where you want them to go.” I fell back against the seat. “So, go.”
He let out this enormous sigh, then grunted a little, then began pulling away from the depot. “Where at in Hebrides?”
“The feed store. It’s called Smitty’s, I think.”
This was so outlandish to him, he turned to look at me and nearly got hit by Helene Baum’s yellow Cadillac. I enjoyed this, for she was really mad and waving her fist at him. After we crawled out of the depot and turned left, he said. “There’s a Smith’s. J. L. Smith’s Feed and something. Is that the one? On the outskirts?”
“I guess. I wouldn’t imagine there’s more than one in Hebrides.”
“Yeah, I think J. L. Smith is called Smitty by people.”
I wondered how much more conversation we’d have before he was confident we had the same place in mind. “How far is it from Cold Flat Junction?”
“Why?”
I raised my hands, clawlike, to the back of his head as if to rip his neck open, but simply said, “I just want to know.”
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