Cold Flat Junction

by Martha Grimes

  On the stove there was a frying pan in which the eggs had been fried, a quart of milk and bread standing by it. Crumbs lay on the white enamel counter and a bread knife, such as my mother uses, with a serrated edge. My mother is horribly particular about which knives cut what. Vera once used her meat-cutting knife to slice lemons. It’s the only time I recall my mother giving Vera hell (which she very often deserves, as far as I’m concerned). What I was seeing here looked like the remains of a breakfast. It must have been Ben Queen’s.

  I walked through the dining room without stopping as I doubted the intruder would have set himself a place. With a table setting I would probably be as good as Walter was with food when it came to figuring out what kind of person had been sitting at the table. Cutlery shoved all anyhow? Miss Bertha, for sure. Knife and fork aligned perfectly on a plate? The Poor Soul, definitely.

  The living room produced in me the same mixture of gloom and nostalgia I had felt before, only now it was weightier, as if the room itself were inconsolable. I stood looking at the picture of the sisters that hung on the wall near a sideboard, the only picture there. Three of them with their dark hair worn loose or in plaits, and Rose herself, not more than a child and much younger then the Girl was now, but still with that light bright hair, incandescent if the sun hit it, otherwise shining with a cool and moonish glow. The sisters must have been in their late teens; it was hard to think of them that way, so solemn they looked, their dark hair against their black clothes.

  The piano and a small table were studded with candles stuck to small plates in their own wax, as if there had been a power outage. I looked at the sofa where Ben Queen had dropped the gun like a toy. I could see him doing it, as if tossing it off himself. He seemed himself almost affrighted by coming face-to-face with a little kid, no more dangerous to him than one of Dwayne’s rabbits. I could only think now he was afraid of my fear of him. I had never known an adult to react so quickly to something in a child, not even Maud or the Sheriff.

  I looked through the screen door that opened out onto the porch, across the yard for any sign of either of them, the Girl or Ben Queen. The rain fell sluggishly, or that was just me seeing my own tiredness in the rain.

  I climbed the stairs. I wanted particularly to see the relation between those two rooms, the one I thought to be Iris’s, since there was a sewing machine, and the one I knew was Mary-Evelyn’s. The doors were opposite one another, as I had thought. And there was a rocking chair in Iris’s room in direct line with the door. I sat in it and looked across the hall into Mary-Evelyn’s room at Mary-Evelyn’s bed. Had she been lying in it, I could have seen her clearly; had she been sitting by her toy chest, I also could have seen her. There was no way she could have left without Iris seeing her. I suppose Mary-Evelyn could have said she was going downstairs to get a glass of milk or something, but that was not in any of the sisters’ statements. There were other possibilities, such as her sneaking out when they were all asleep, but with the open doors upstairs and locked and bolted doors down, I doubted it. This house, after all, was geared to imprisonment.

  I left the rocking chair and Iris’s room and went across to Mary-Evelyn’s. She might still have lived here, for the white iron bed was made up with its yellow and white chenille bedspread and her beautiful dresses hung in the mahogany wardrobe.

  I really was in awe of these dresses and the fine workmanship that had gone into their making. But had they scared her into a carefulness of behavior she wouldn’t have felt if she’d had my old clothes to wear? Ice-blue taffeta, pale yellow cotton with tiny pleats and satin-covered buttons, rose-colored wool, as soft as cashmere.

  Then I went to the toy chest, opened it, and rummaged through puzzles, stuffed animals, cotton dolls, and a Ouija board until I found the Mr. Ree game. I removed the board and the cards and the tiny weapons and lined up the hollow tubes with their molded plastic heads, marveling at the care that had gone into the making of this game, as much care as had gone into the sewing of the dresses. I lined up the tubes: Mr. Perrin, Butler Higgins, Aunt Cora, Miss Lee. The tubes were used by the players to conceal the tiny weapons which you had to have in your possession to murder somebody. It was the best game I knew of.

  Niece Rhoda, of course, was missing. Dwayne had found her on the path. It brought up the same question I asked about Mary-Evelyn’s doll and Jamie’s photograph: how had they got to Brokedown House? The Artist George piece had been in the alcove in the wall of Crystal Spring where the tin cup was kept. There hadn’t been any message because—I thought this now, but hadn’t then—it might fall into the wrong hands. All of the character cards were here, though. Mary-Evelyn had cut the faces of her aunts from some old snapshot and pasted them over the card faces. I had discovered this the first time I’d looked in the toy chest. Somehow, I found that a totally terrifying act on the part of Mary-Evelyn.

  I sat absorbed, trying to make something of all this, and probably making too much, as I guess I tend to do about everything. I was not facing the door, but sitting sideways to it on the floor. I felt a kind of shadow hovering over the room and though there had been not the slightest noise, not even a disturbance of the air, I knew someone was in the hall. If I moved my head scarcely an inch outward, I would see the person. I moved nothing, not a scrap, as if my stillness might void the shape that I knew was filling the doorway. Whoever it was had been in the house all the while, and had kept quiet, which was the scariest thing of all.

  In seconds my mind would collapse under a weight of fear if I didn’t stave it off by just going blank. Blank. Any thought I had ran before my inner eye as if it were coming by ticker tape, from outside.

  “Why are you here?”

  It was a woman’s voice. There was no way I could pretend I was deaf. I was shaking, I couldn’t help it, but I could try and cover it up by pretending stupidity. I did turn my head then and said “Huh?”

  “Get up from there.”

  She was tall, gaunt, and plain, as plain as the dark wool dress she was wearing. It was an ugly plum color. She was fifty years older than she was in the picture with Jamie Makepiece, but she was still unmistakably Isabel Devereau.

  I had stared at the pictures of the sisters and Jamie long enough to know to a fault who was who. But her question was strange. Shouldn’t it have been “Who are you?” and not “Why are you here?”

  I could not hold the cards because my hands shook, but I could handle the tubes. I dropped the miniature gun and knife into the Miss Lee tube, as if I were continuing to play, and when it rattled, no one would know it was my shaking hand causing it. It wasn’t until then that I saw the gun. She was holding the gun Ben Queen had dropped on the couch, loosely, as if it were an afterthought.

  She appeared to look over my head and take direction from something or somebody. I resisted the urge to follow her look. The “huh” which had registered as stupidity or emptiness was frozen there, which probably made it that much more convincing. If I could keep her from doing anything for another minute I might come up with something from the mental ticker tape. One thing on it was that question, “Why are you here?” What threatened to upset me from this tightrope walk was the terrifying notion that Isabel Devereau took me for Mary-Evelyn. Here I was, the same age and size. My face wasn’t Mary-Evelyn’s, but I didn’t think that would matter to Isabel. After all, here I was in Mary-Evelyn’s room, with Mary-Evelyn’s things.

  She was crazy. I don’t mean the Davidow craziness or even the Aurora Paradise kind. I mean crazy crazy. Insane. A craziness perhaps shared by a few of the old people in Weeks’s Nursing Home, the ones who talked to the air and hit whatever was around to hit, even empty space. No, Lola and Aurora weren’t even in the running if it was Isabel Devereau they had to beat; they weren’t even close. She seemed to be listening to something. Although I knew nothing was there, still it was an effort not to turn and make sure nothing was coming up behind me. Her eyes widened and narrowed.

  Then she was standing over me and reaching down to gr
ab my arm. “Get up! We have to go.” Pulling me to my feet, she shook me as if I were one of Mary-Evelyn’s cotton dolls, the gun at my back.

  I couldn’t have put up any resistance even if I hadn’t been numbed by the fear I was trying to hold at bay. It would flood in like the news of a death if I so much as opened my mind for a moment to it. My blank self was pushed and prodded down the stairs. My hand was all this time glued around the Miss Lee tube.

  I mustered up some will to act as if this were just one more occasion of angry-adult-disciplining-willful-child. “What are you doing?” My feet clattered on the stairs. She didn’t answer; I hadn’t really expected her to. I wanted to hear the sound of my own voice.

  The screen door was at the bottom of the stairs and on the last step I gave a terrific yank, freed my arm of her grip and rushed the door. But she was just as quick, pulling me back, and this time her iron grip was on my neck.

  “Isabel!” I yelled.

  Her hand fell from my neck. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what to add to the shouted name. I turned and looked at her and wished I hadn’t. She was standing with the gun raised.

  “Go on,” she said, prodding me forward.

  With the gun at my back we came to the living room screen door. That I had managed to control her actions by calling out her name made me feel momentarily elated. If I had done it once, maybe I could do it again. Right now, I saw myself running. All you need to do is break the point of contact. No, I thought, running was instinct, and instinct was too dangerous. Anything without cold reasoning behind it was too dangerous. I realized right then that the enormous practice I’d had all these years in controlling my feelings would be to my advantage. I had, after all, controlled Isabel for a few seconds when I’d said her name. If I was patient, I could do it again.

  But patience with a gun at your back isn’t an easy thing to practice. I did what the gun wanted and it wanted me to cross the yard and enter the woods. Into the thick darkness we went. It was not the time to think of Donny Mooma and what he had said about the last mile.

  For here I was, dead girl walking.

  59

  The boathouse

  I wondered how much time had passed, for it felt like half my life. As I went by the few landmarks I knew, I thought the woods had never seemed such a friendly and familiar place, one I really would hate to leave. Something life-threatening does that I suppose, throws up a different face to things. I looked up briefly to that narrow bit of sky and saw that there was still a scrap of light and was relieved.

  Out of it, we came to the spring. We had to pass the little stone alcove where the cup sat, and, without knowing why, I reached out my stubborn fist and shoved Miss Lee into it.

  Why did I do this? Did I think someone would find it, like a message in a bottle, and come like a lightning bolt to knock mad Isabel down? Why had I taken the chance, when any sudden movement could have got me shot in my back? I think it was because of that fairy tale I told myself when I was little, that there are certain places that can’t be got at by the wrong people. That stone alcove was a charmed place. I think that’s why Artist George had ended up there. I knew it was why the tin cup was there in the first place. I had told myself back then a drink from that cup would arm me against evil. That was back when I knew what it was.

  But Isabel hadn’t noticed; she was too intent on getting where we were going. I was sure we were headed for the boathouse. The gun had dropped farther down my back as we walked; it was now at my waist. I imagined it as some tiny burrowing creature looking for a hiding place.

  Behind me, she spoke not a word. All I could hear was her ragged breathing, as if she’d run a race. Quick, short jabs of breath. I think I knew what she intended to do, and it was certainly preferable to the gun at my back, although it carried its own hazards with it. We had come to the boathouse.

  As in those old stories of pirate ships and mutinies, I was being made to “walk the plank”—the boardwalk to the boathouse. The boats, some of them, were still there, though I hadn’t seen anyone ever using them. Whether the one that had carried Mary-Evelyn like some old Eskimo woman sent out to sea to die was among them. I counted four rowboats, all of them old as the hills, none of them looking like it could bear any weight, but I hoped they could, even though they were oarless. My heart hammered; my stomach fell another foot as we left the boardwalk that stretched out over Spirit Lake, which I saw now, as I had the woods, with a fresh vision. I seemed to grasp the story all at once, as if my mind closed around it as my fist had closed around the Miss Lee tube.

  In my heart-hammering dread, I was surprised I could still talk, surprised I could still make out language. It wasn’t talk; it was more like an echo of talk, more like a memory of it.

  “She was dead before you put her in the boat, wasn’t she?”

  “Elizabeth drowned her first. Not I. I hate death up close.”

  “Why did you kill Fern Queen?” I choked this out, feeling as if a wasp were in my throat, stinging it closed.

  “She murdered our Rose.”

  “Our Rose? Our Rose? You hated Rose Queen!”

  Isabel smiled and her smile was dreadful, a blackened crescent, moon lava. Once she had been a handsome woman, cold but dignified. Her mind had ravaged her face, now. “Rose was under his spell. It wasn’t her fault.”

  I knew how much of a lie all of this was. But the Devereau sisters had managed to shore up each other’s beliefs with lies. There were things she wanted to believe, most of all in Jamie’s love for her.

  The gun touched my chest. Her tone was actually friendly as she talked about how I was a bastard child, how they had to get rid of me, even Iris thought so. (I had nearly forgotten that to her I was Mary-Evelyn and so was a hateful thing. I was proof of Jamie’s and Iris’s betrayal.) Her smile was impenetrable, as if me being a bastard child was of no consequence. She said Iris blinded Jamie with her beauty and then stole him away. It was then it occurred to me that she wanted to believe in Jamie, that there are things each of us wants to believe and could believe in spite of there being no evidence for it. If this weren’t so, she wouldn’t be doing all of this talking; it was nervous talking, the kind that keeps things at bay. What I thought was it wouldn’t be too hard to convince her of what she wanted to be convinced of.

  “Jamie. What about that letter Jamie wrote you?”

  She paused, uncertain. “What letter?”

  By now I had read it or heard it read enough times I could almost recite it. I did, coming down hard on the “I” of “My dear I.”

  “Iris is who he meant.”

  “How do you know if it only said ‘I’?”

  “Because Iris told me—”

  “She told you it was to her.” My teeth had finally stopped chattering. I was almost beginning to believe myself. Even with that gun pointed at me, I had a taste of power, which was what people usually had over me. Now I saw why they used it. It felt good. “You believed her and you shouldn’t have. He came back. He must have gone to that old Calhoun house where you’ve been living. Where you brought the photograph. Where you brought the doll.”

  “Jamie’s gone. Elizabeth sent him packing. She controlled all of us, excepting Rose. Rose was the lucky one—she ran off. Even though it was with that no-account Queen fellow. Too bad he got blamed for what his awful daughter did. But I fixed her.”

  For that minute she’d been seeing events in her mind. Now, she was seeing me. She shifted the gun. I could not look at it any longer. The moon was caught behind cloud cover and the stars were hidden. There was usually such a bright rash of them I could hardly believe they’d retreated on me, too. I thought of a hand shutting the eyes of the dead. I felt as if we were talking underwater, where words scarcely rose to the surface. Maybe I was drowning in the wake of a boat. I could hardly keep my head above all of this imaginary water.

  It’s as though all these years never were. Had she said that? Or had I thought it? I felt I was getting farther and farther away, drifting away ac
ross Spirit Lake, out of reach of everyone. I felt this more strongly even than fear, fear had almost nothing to do with it. It was loneliness, pure and simple. It was the blue devils.

  Yet I thought all of this while I was talking, telling things I could only guess at, but kept on talking, for that fixed her mind on that long-ago summer when for a while she had the power that happiness lent her: with Jamie she could have done anything.

  “My own sister.” That’s what she kept saying, in a dead voice, over and over again. My own sister.

  My mind tried to race to a way out of this, but it could only plod. Then I thought, Wait: she knew I—or Mary-Evelyn—was Iris’s child, but she didn’t know I was Jamie’s, not for certain.

  “I’m not his; I’m not Jamie’s. Iris lied.”

  At this the gun dropped to her side, but she still had a quick enough hold on it that I didn’t dare move. She was mad, but she wasn’t addled.

  “Lies.”

  “No. Iris was really bad. There were other men besides Jamie.” Then for some reason I came upon this lucid patch in my mind that said: You’re twelve years old and here you are trying to take charge of your own life and maybe death. I would sooner be sitting in the Orion with my bag of popcorn and my eyes silvered by the reflection of the silver screen, as if I were up there too in that fantasy land of men and women going mad for love or lack of it.

  It made more sense than this. I should have been merely an observer of life that I couldn’t possibly understand, instead of stuck down in the midst of it as an actor, a player, a participant. It wasn’t fair. Whine, whine, my player-self said. Nobody twisted your arm, did they? Then my mind rushed past this lucid place and I felt its weight again, trying, trying to get myself out of here.