Cold Flat Junction

by Martha Grimes

  When I went back to the kitchen Walter told me Aurora Paradise had been hollering down the dumbwaiter when he went into the back office. “It was way past the cocktail hour is what she said and she wants her Cold Comfort.”

  I sighed. Then I went to the office to sort through the bottles, and found no Southern Comfort, only gin and vodka and Wild Turkey. Well, the Wild Turkey would do, so I took it and miniatures of crème de menthe and brandy. Back in the kitchen I mixed up a couple of juices and ice in the blender, then dumped in the liquor. I poured it, frothing, into a tall glass, speared some melon balls on a long swizzle stick and held it up for Walter to inspect.

  “Cold Turkey,” I said.

  We laughed.

  57

  Ghosts

  First thing after breakfast I got a taxi into La Porte. Because of yesterday, Delbert was in a really sour mood, which would have been fine with me if only it kept him from talking.

  “Courthouse don’t open till nine-fifteen; it ain’t even nine yet.”

  “The Sheriff will be there. He goes in early.”

  “Maybe. But that don’t mean the sheriff’s office is open. I know for a fact Maureen ain’t there yet, for I just got a call to pick her up over in Spikersville.”

  His bad mood was evaporating in the face of his need to disagree. I didn’t comment. I refused to say anything else in our trip to the courthouse. Now I was in a sour mood, but it faded as soon as I was out of the cab.

  The Sheriff was there, as I thought he would be, looking as if he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and hadn’t slept in a week. I felt sorry for him.

  Donny was also there. “Uh-oh,” he said, “here’s trouble.”

  Actually, that was a compliment, but he couldn’t see it. I ignored him and said to the Sheriff. “Could I talk to you for a few minutes? Please?”

  Donny answered: “Sam’s got enough to do without you dragging in more—”

  The Sheriff leveled him with a look, I was pleased to see. Then he said to me, as he unhitched his jacket from the back of his chair, “Come on.”

  “Where?” I picked up my folder and wondered if I was under arrest for file-drawer theft.

  “Over to the Rainbow. Donny can hold down the fort.” He turned at the door. “Donny, you hear anything, let me know.”

  “Well, sure, Sam,” he said, as if to say, Don’t I always?

  As we walked down the steps of the courthouse, I said, “What I have to tell you is kind of private.”

  “The best place for telling that kind of story’s in the midst of a crowd. People are so busy listening to themselves they can’t be bothered with somebody else. Of course, there’s Maud—?”

  He meant she might sit down with us at some point, and did that bother me? “No. Maud’s okay.”

  We had started across the street, but had to wait for a car to pass that had just rounded the corner. The Sheriff would never hold up his hand to stop a car just so he could cross a street.

  The regulars were pretty much settled at the counter, having their morning coffee. Morning coffee sometimes ran into early lunch and I wondered how people like Dodge Haines ever did any business. As we passed them, they said hi to the Sheriff, who said hi back again. Maud was taking a breakfast order from some man who was probably just passing through. She winked. And Patsy Cline was kind of presiding over all of this, as she often did, singing “I Fall to Pieces,” one of my all-time favorites.

  We sat down in the back booth and I lay my folder on the table. I still hadn’t shown him anything in it, but that would come as I told my story. I said, now, “I’ll make a bargain with you if you hear me out before you get mad, for I know you will, at least on the inside.”

  Smiling, he settled back in the booth. “I’ll try and reign in my temper.”

  “Because part of this is about Ben Queen. There’s evidence he never murdered his wife Rose. It’s not just my imagining things.”

  The Sheriff started in: “That old case isn’t mine and I don’t see how it’s important—”

  I held up my hand. “The reason it’s important is because you think Ben Queen killed Fern and you think that because you think he killed Rose.”

  “Wait a minute, that’s not altogether true—”

  “What’s not true? Altogether?” Maud was standing there with her order book and a Coke, which she set before me.

  “It’s true you’re looking for him. Why are you looking for him?”

  Maud said, “So he can help the police with their inquiries. That’s always what they say. Sam?” She sort of waved her order book back and forth. “Breakfast?”

  “No, and sit down as long as you don’t interrupt.”

  “Well! Emma?”

  I didn’t know if she was asking if she could, or if I wanted something. But she sat down beside the Sheriff.

  “What’s this proof you’ve got, Emma?”

  “Ben Queen was somewhere else when Rose got killed.”

  Maud raised her eyebrows, but didn’t interrupt.

  “Where?” asked the Sheriff.

  “He was in Hebrides. He went to Smith’s Feed Store, it’s out on 219 the other side of Hebrides. I was hoping you’d go and talk to Mr. Smith because he’s the alibi. The old one, not his son, who’s kind of dumb. If Ben Queen didn’t do it, don’t you think his name should be cleared? Twenty years in prison for nothing; I think he should get back his good name.”

  “Absolutely. But what’s your part of this bargain?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know about Ben Queen.” It struck me, though, that for a person who wasn’t there that night and hadn’t heard him, I didn’t know much. Ben Queen hadn’t out-and-out denied killing Fern. It was like the murder of Rose all over again. And he did have that gun with him. If the Sheriff had been there, he might have agreed with me.

  Maud had her chin propped in both hands. She turned her head to look at the Sheriff, who was surprised.

  “That’s fair. Tell me what you know.”

  I shook my head. “Not until you go talk to this Mr. Smith.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Of course not,” said Maud. “Why would she? You haven’t believed anything she’s said up to now.”

  The Sheriff looked, I can only say, crestfallen as he studied Maud’s face, as if he couldn’t imagine she’d think he was untrustworthy.

  The thing was, it wasn’t because I didn’t trust him to keep his part of the bargain, it was because I knew if I told him about Ben Queen being at the Devereau house, he’d be out of here like a shot. I couldn’t have that. “That’s one part of your bargain. The other is to go back and look at what happened to Mary-Evelyn Devereau. It wasn’t any accident. That sheriff back then was an idiot, or plain lazy, or was cowed by the Devereaus. Even Dr. McComb thinks the whole thing was peculiar and maybe hushed up. The way she died?”

  The Sheriff said, trying not to sound impatient, “I haven’t got the reports on that case, so how could I—?”

  I opened the folder and took out the police report.

  “Where’d you get this?” The Sheriff was astonished.

  “It’s all in your files. I just took this stuff out.”

  “Did you get this out of the files?”

  “Sam—”

  “When Donny took one of his seven-hour coffee breaks.”

  “Sam—” Maud said again, her hand closing on his arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you weren’t paying any attention to me.”

  “I wasn’t? Well, who went looking for you when you disappeared ? Who took—”

  So he did know the missing girl was me! Well, I hadn’t time to bother about that.

  “Sam! Stop being ridiculous!”

  The Sheriff turned to look at Maud, and somehow, some way, the anger seemed to drain out of him.

  “Listen,” I said, trying to get my story back on course. “The way Mary-Evelyn died, why would anyone not think it’s peculiar for a little girl to take a boat out at night.
If it’d been you, wouldn’t you have investigated?”

  “Of course he would have,” said Maud.

  The Sheriff’s face was down, but he held up both hands in a silencing gesture. “That case is forty years old, Emma.”

  “What difference does that make? They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. Mary-Evelyn’s good name is be-, be-” I couldn’t think of the word.

  “Besmirched,” said Maud, indignantly.

  “Right. They were so spiteful toward each other, those three sisters, they took it all out on Mary-Evelyn. You should go and talk to Imogene Calhoun that lives over in Cold Flat Junction, too. She actually went to that house when she was a kid, and she’ll tell you. They hated each other. Isabel and Iris hated each other because of him.” I slapped down the photo of Jamie Makepiece.

  The Sheriff picked it up. “Who is this?”

  “His name is Jamie Makepiece. And this letter”—I took out the letter the Sheriff had already seen—“is a good-bye letter to Iris Devereau.” The “I” could have meant Isabel, but what reason would he have to write it? He no longer cared about Isabel. I didn’t go into this for it would just complicate things more. “That’s reason enough for Iris and Isabel to hate each another. And for both to hate Elizabeth for breaking up the romance. And listen to this—Mary-Evelyn wasn’t their little niece, I bet you. Mary-Evelyn was probably Iris’s daughter. Now do you see why they’d hate the sight of her?”

  Maud had a paper napkin scrunched in the hands she held up to her mouth. She was wide-eyed. The Sheriff’s frown I can only describe as exquisite. Exquisitely wondering. Boy, I really had their attention. “Just look at her.” I pushed the picture of Mary-Evelyn around so both could give it a good, hard look. I also took out my one snapshot of the Devereaus under the porte cochere. “Look at her, then him, then them. Everything about her looks is like him, especially the hair. You can’t tell in the police picture because her hair’s wet and looks dark. But you can certainly tell in the other picture.” I tapped it with my finger.

  We were all silent for a moment. Then Maud asked, “What about Brokedown House, Emma? These things were there. Where does that come into your story?” All she had heard, I could tell by her look, by her voice, had seeped into her as if, like Mary-Evelyn, she might be drowning.

  I thought of that light shining in my face. “Somebody’s there.”

  “Ben Queen,” said the Sheriff, always ready to blame the man for the state of the whole world. “It’s Ben Queen, isn’t it? That’s where you saw him.”

  “No!” I said. “But there’s someone. You know from being there that night. Remember?”

  “Dwayne Hayden said there was somebody, but—”

  “You think Dwayne was making it up?” asked Maud, irritated. “You want to bend everything to fit your own theory?”

  “No, Maud, I didn’t say he was making it up. I’m only thinking he might have been mistaken.” He drummed his fingers on the table, looking at me all the while. “Who would have a motive for killing Fern Queen? I’ve got to say, it doesn’t sound like her father would. Unless maybe Fern killed her mother.”

  “Revenge?” said Maud. “That doesn’t make any sense if he’d gone to prison himself to protect Fern.”

  “Fern must’ve killed her mother. That’s the only thing I can see would account for it.” Ben Queen wouldn’t have any motive. But the Girl might, since her mother had abandoned and betrayed her. “There’s a Girl—”

  Maud leaned forward as if not wanting to miss a single drop of this story, and I thought, even more than the Sheriff, she was the person to tell it to.

  “What girl?” asked the Sheriff.

  I started to remind him about that afternoon a few weeks ago when I’d seen her through the window of Souder’s Drugs and run after her. I’d collided with the Sheriff and asked him if he’d seen her. I started to say this, but didn’t. After those few words I’d uttered, it was like I got stuck. Was I afraid he’d go after her? Was I afraid she wouldn’t come back if I talked about her? I studied my hands folded on the table, then my untouched Coke glass. My mind just seemed too empty of words. Words can abandon you just like people can. I had to get my mind going again. I said, “She looks like Rose Devereau. She looks exactly like Rose Devereau.” I opened my mouth to say more, but fell silent again.

  “Where?” asked the Sheriff. “Where have you seen her?”

  “In Cold Flat Junction. At the railroad station. And here.” But I didn’t want to say where here. I had told Dr. McComb more than anybody and that was precious little, but I had told him about seeing her across Spirit Lake, in front of the Devereau house. And I saw her again, when I was in the house, outside, standing just within the rim of pines out there. I did not want to tell anybody that I believed she was getting closer. For a moment, I thought she might know about being lost, know the secret of lostness. It all sounded crazy, even to me it sounded crazy, the whole story—wild, weird, nightmarish when you heard it like this all at once. I can’t say how far away my mind had traveled from the Rainbow Café, for Maud’s voice pierced me like an arrow.

  “You look,” she said, “as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  58

  Deadmanwalking

  Two hours was plenty of time to get to the Devereau house and tell Ben Queen, if he was there, what had happened. Warn him off, only he didn’t strike me as the sort of person that needed warning off, the sort who would hightail it out of town when trouble came his way. The Sheriff’s pursuit of Ben Queen would still continue, even if the reason for it had changed, even if the reason were only to ask him some questions. For there was still the murder of Fern and she was still, after all, Ben Queen’s daughter.

  But I had to lie down for a few minutes; I was more tired from telling my story to them than from all the running around I’d been doing. Maybe what tired me was the end of it. Or maybe what tired me was knowing the Davidows would be back soon to flatten everything. Or maybe I was just afraid my story was just a story, full of what William Faulkner said was sound and fury. (Or at least what Dwayne said he said.)

  I lay in bed, thinking all this while holding my bear who, I discovered, did have a very small hole in its stomach that could leak stuffing if I didn’t pinch it closed as I was doing. I found a tiny safety pin and closed the tear with that.

  To make up for being so lackadaisical, I ran down the back stairs, taking care to use the route that bypassed the dining room. Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright would be heading in for their dinner, if they weren’t already seated at their table.

  I took the wooden walk to the kitchen and announced to Walter I had to do something really important and would he mind waiting on the two for dinner? I also told him where I was going just to be on the safe side although I wasn’t sure the safe side of what.

  I didn’t mean to be dramatic about things; I left the drama to Will and Mill who were dramatic enough for all of us. I wanted to be more like Lena, who was the most undramatic person I had ever come across (except maybe for Walter), considering everything wrong in her life, and being about to have a baby and looking for the father (and even inexperienced me could see that disappointment coming a mile away). Imagine walking all the way from Alabama to Mississippi, taking a whole month to do it. Imagine having that kind of faith in your feet.

  My own feet were carrying me down the half mile of dirt road to Spirit Lake and another quarter mile or more to Crystal Spring. I stopped to look at the old boathouse and remember back to when my father brought us here and further back to the night of Mary-Evelyn’s drowning. At Crystal Spring I stopped to get a drink of water. The tin cup was where it always was, shoved back in against the rock by me so no one could see it except the ones who knew it was there. I drank and looked off into the woods where a look didn’t penetrate very far. I figured I had been through there eight times already, coming and going, so there was no reason I couldn’t do it the ninth and tenth times. It was still daylight, but however light out here, the woods were c
loser to midnight. And it had begun to rain, not much, but enough to veil the available light.

  In the woods the rain did not penetrate any more than the light. I was glad there was this rutted old road, even though it was mostly overgrown, narrowed to just the ridge of earth between tire tracks. A lot of tires and a lot of feet had trampled it down. The Devereau sisters had passed this way the night they had brought Mary-Evelyn through. Brought her, not gone looking for her. I believed that now.

  My feet scuffed up cold wet leaves, making as much of a squelch as they could for comradely noise. I had picked up a sturdy stick and battered and whacked the beeches and pines as I passed, again, I guess, to make noise, as if to scare something off. I moved as fast as I could and as noisily as I could through the laurel bushes and tangled vines, through pines and heavily laden oaks that littered the ground with acorns, past ash trees whose bark was like cold gray marble, through patches of wildflowers I couldn’t name, but which my mother could.

  I even stopped and thought of my mother as something more than my cook, as a person making her way through the Carolinas with crazy people, almost as crazy as Aurora Paradise could ever be. I marveled that my mother had been brazen enough or had enough starch in her to put up with them for all of these years without much help from Will or me.

  I tore bark from my stick as I thrashed along, getting it down to white bone. An uneven runnel of light showed above me where thin branches fretted the sky that was nearly canceled out. Then the trees opened up ahead and I was at the dark line of pines that edged this end of the wood and the Devereau yard.

  I crossed it and went around to the rear, to the kitchen door. The kitchen had been used again, which made me think Ben Queen was around. In the sink were a couple of plates, a bowl, and two cups. On one plate were the remnants of egg and toast. If only Walter were here! He could tell me not only when all of these dishes had been eaten off of, but what kind of person had done the eating! The drying baked beans that had been a careless puddle? “Ain’t Miss Bertha, she’s too mean to leave them beans behind.” Or the asparagus spear sheared cleanly in half? “Someone got a grudge on, it’s Aurora Paradise, most likely.” Yes, Walter could tell more from the state of uneaten food than an Irish famine. (I should tell the Sheriff to add Walter to his list of crime-scene people.)