by Vicki Grant
I was trying to decide between three postcards when I heard a little girl shouting, “Spot! Spo-ot!” I figured she’d just lost her dog so didn’t turn around until I felt someone yanking at my sleeve.
“Spot! How come you didn’t answer me?” And there was Jody looking up at me, the wobbly red face of a dictator over the grubby yellow bathing suit of a six-year-old.
“Because it’s Dot, sweetie,” Sandra said, staggering into view, little Wendy in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Dot with a D—like demon or despair. Now, here’s a nickel. Take your sister down to the canteen and buy yourself some junk. I’ll be there in a sec.”
She was smiling like a perfect mother as she watched them go, but she muttered, “Thinks she rules the world, that one. Sorry about that.”
“No. She’s cute.”
“For about ten minutes. Try taking a full day of it. I’m going to lose my mind if it doesn’t stop raining. I put them in swimming lessons specifically so I could get an hour of peace a day. And then they cancel the lessons? Kids can’t swim in the rain?”
She let out a low growl. The man at the front desk smiled apologetically. I decided to buy all three postcards.
“Oh, listen,” Sandra said. “Seeing Eddie anytime soon?”
“Tonight.”
“Could you tell him something for me?”
“Sure.”
She waved me over to the far side of the lobby, away from a bridge game that had just gotten started near the fireplace.
“I remembered something about that party.” She whispered like a Bond girl passing on government secrets. “Eddie’s mentioning the pit was what did it. There was a girl named Lois—Kincaid, I think—who claimed to have seen something. There were all sorts of wild stories floating around back then, but Lois seemed really serious. Said she saw somebody that night, a man, sneaking through the woods. He had something in his arms, and she was pretty sure it was a baby.”
Eddie was going to love this. That was the first thing I thought.
“Did she tell anybody about it?”
“Other than us? Ooh, I doubt it. Nobody wanted to draw any attention to what went on in the clearing. The booze, the necking, etcetera—and now a baby? The grown-ups would have shut it down for good. Crokinole in the staff cafeteria and lights-out at ten for the rest of the summer. Didn’t want that.”
“Is Lois still around?”
“Haven’t seen her for years. That’s why I wasn’t going to mention it—but then this morning I remembered who she was dating. She was in the pit that night with the Simmonds boy.”
“And he’s around?”
“Yes. I think Bas works in the laundry here or something.”
“Bas? Bas was there?”
“I’m sure of it. He was at all the parties. Bad boy—but very popular. And not just because he was such a looker. He had some kind of in with the bootlegger. A cousin maybe? We always figured he’d end up in jail—had a bit of an issue with authority, as I recall—but he managed to keep his nose clean. I bet he’d know something.”
Almost too good to be true. “Mrs. Smees was there that night too, wasn’t she?”
“Muriel? At the clearing? You’re joking, right?”
“No. That’s what I heard.”
“Well, you heard wrong. If Muriel had been there, no one else would have been. Absolute killjoy, that girl—and anyway she was a good five years older than us. She’d never have rolled with that crowd, even if she’d been the type to actually enjoy life occasionally. Muriel…” Sandra sputtered at the utter craziness of the idea, then checked her watch. “Better go. Got to find those girls before they get me barred from the Arms.” She sighed. “Again.”
Twenty-Two
I WAS BUSTING to talk to Eddie but knew he’d be out of touch all afternoon, repairing the screen at the Adairs’ and then getting that article on the new highway done by seven for Monday’s paper.
At around three thirty, Mrs. Smees collected an armload of files and headed for the door. “I’ll be about fifteen minutes, which isn’t an invitation for you to do nothing until I get back.”
I made myself sit still until I heard her heels click up the stairs, and then I bundled together a few things that conceivably needed washing and slipped into the laundry room. Bas was at the sink, sleeves bunched up around his elbows, scrubbing at a white tablecloth, a dark-blond hank of hair bouncing over his forehead.
“Peach stains. Bane of my existence.” He glanced over his shoulder, then got back at it. “What you got there? Slipcovers? You sure she wants those done?”
“Yeah. Pretty sure. ”
He gave his hands a hard snap over the sink, then turned to look at me.
I tried to act normal, but I had the feeling I looked less like I was smiling and more like I’d just asked him if there was spinach between my teeth.
“This isn’t about slipcovers, is it?”
“Um. Not exactly. They looked a little dingy, but there’s also something I—”
He laughed in his throat and brushed that hair off his forehead. I could sort of see why Sandra thought he was good-looking.
“Could have sworn we’d been through this already. Don’t be sneaking around making a fool of me, Dot. Ask your questions. I’ll decide whether I want to answer.”
“You knew Lois Kincaid?”
“You’re worse than my ex-wife. Jealous, are you?”
I gave a polite chuckle.
“Yeah. I knew her. Knew her pretty good for a while. Nice girl, Lois. Great legs.”
“Were you with her the night the baby disappeared?”
He stopped smiling. Sandra was right. He’d been there.
“And don’t say, ‘What baby?’” I said.
“Is that what this is about?” He took a piece of Juicy Fruit out of his pocket, peeled off the wrapper and tucked the gum between his back teeth. He didn’t offer me one.
“You saw something, didn’t you?”
He turned back to the sink, went after that stain again. I hustled over and stood right beside him.
“A man?”
He didn’t answer. I was so excited, so determined to find out. I could just see Eddie’s face when I laid it all out for him, wagging my tail like a retriever with a limp duck between my jaws.
Bas dropped the tablecloth, leaned his hands on the edge of the sink, and stared into the water.
“This may come as a surprise to you, Dot, but I got into my share of trouble when I was your age. I’d hate to see that happen to you. You’re not poking your nose someplace it shouldn’t be?”
I must have paused too long.
“Forget it. Less I know the better, frankly. I got to work late tonight as it is, so scram, if you don’t mind. I’m busy.”
“This is really important to me, Bas.”
He tapped his fingers on the tin sink. Didn’t answer.
“You were in the pit with Lois that night, and you saw a man carrying something. I’m right, aren’t I?”
He laughed at that, although it wasn’t a happy laugh. “What do you know about the pit? Little girl like you.”
“Enough.”
“Enough to know how dark it is out there?”
“It wasn’t dark that night. If you were in the pit, you could have seen someone walking out along that old logging road.”
Bas turned, clasped his hands at his waist, took a moment to compose himself.
“Where you from, Dot?”
“Hope.” Or here. Maybe I’m from here. You tell me.
He curled up his lips and nodded. “Well, you’re forgiven then. Can’t be expected to know how things work in this neck of the woods, though my guess is Hope ain’t a heck of a lot better than Buckminster. Small towns are all the same—and once the summer folk leave, that’s all Buckminster is. Another small town with its share of peculiarities and oddballs and things most of us would prefer to forget.”
“Such as?”
He gave a little laugh. “When did you get s
o bold all of a sudden?”
“C’mon, Bas. Such as?”
“I’ve kept my mouth shut for a long time, and it hasn’t hurt me. I will tell you one thing, though, for your own benefit: there are people around here you don’t speak ill of, regardless of what you may know about them. Don’t give me that look.”
“What look?”
“That look. Like you’d have done different. You think you’d have just tromped over to the police station, all righteous indignation, told your story and that would have been that?”
He put on a fake voice. High. Girly. “Sure, it was dark, Officer, but I know it was him. I seen him limping off through the woods, and he was carrying a baby…Well, yes, I did only see him from behind and no, I didn’t actually see the child, but it sure as shooting sounded like a baby to me, or maybe a kitten…And, all right, I did have the tiniest bit to drink, Officer…well, maybe slightly more than that, but I know what I saw and, believe me, it was him!”
He stuck out his chin. “How you think that would go over? The word of a couple of soused teenagers against a man everyone—”
He caught himself.
“Everyone what?”
“Doesn’t matter. What we saw—or didn’t see—don’t matter a bit. You think the police were going to bring the wrongdoer to justice just because that’s what’s supposed to happen in this good world? Well, Dot, I got news for you. Here’s what I’ve learned after almost twenty years of scrubbing the stains out of other people’s unmentionables. A lot of folks around here got a lot of secrets hidden behind their money or their charm or the medals pinned to their chest. We opened our mouths about what we saw and nothing good would have come of it. For either of us. And a hell of a lot worse for me than Lois too. She was going back to college in the fall. I had to live in Buckminster. And I had a widowed mother to look after, and a sister who wasn’t all there.”
The medals pinned to their chest. This was the guy. What was it Alvie Comeau had said? One that got the medal.
“Dot!” Mrs. Smees was back in her office and unhappy.
Bas must have heard my heart pounding and misread it. “I’ll have her back in a jiffy, Muriel.”
“Who was it?” I said.
“Can’t be 100 percent positive about a man’s identity if you’ve only seen him from behind. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“But you recognized him, didn’t you?” I knew he did. “How?”
“Get back to work.”
“Was he really tall or something? Short? Fat? What?” Then I had an idea. “It was his coat. He was wearing a long coat, like an army coat, wasn’t he?”
Bas’s face scrunched up in genuine confusion. “I don’t know nothing about no coat.”
“Were his first two initials E.B.?”
Bas didn’t answer, but I could tell I was right.
“Dot!”
“Hold your horses, Muriel. She’s coming.”
He picked up the tablecloth and wrung the water out of it. The muscles in his arms sprang like plucked wires.
“You better get going before she hauls you out by the scruff of your neck. But a word of advice, Dot. You like your job? Then keep your mouth shut.”
Twenty-Three
A TINY BABY.
A pool of blood.
A woman—a girl?—curled up in the back of a car at the side of the road.
A man slipping through the woods behind the clearing, something in his arms.
I sat in the staff cafeteria, staring at my hamburger casserole, picking over everything I’d seen or heard, hoping they’d miraculously congeal into some sort of theory.
The mother had to have known the way to the clearing or had someone take her there who did. It was just too hard to find otherwise.
Everything kept pointing back to someone from the Arms, but that didn’t narrow it down too much. By the sound of it, anybody who’d ever worked there had been to the clearing. Even Mrs. Smees, hard as that was to believe. An employee—a young one, at least—would have known that on Tuesday nights the place would be empty.
Provided the dance at the Boat Club didn’t get canceled.
I choked down a forkful of peas.
Is that what happened? The mother went there for privacy but got caught off guard when they kicked everyone out of the club?
Maybe she’d had to hide really fast when she heard people coming. But why wouldn’t she have taken the baby with her then? Itty-bitty little thing. Easy enough to carry, even slip into her pocket, by all accounts.
Or had she left the baby there on purpose? Left me there to the elements. Not wanted me. Too tired, too sick, too confused to figure out what else to do with me?
I squished the peas with the back of my fork, their tiny brains exploding through the prongs. What kind of mother would do that? Desert her own flesh and blood. No chance of survival.
But then I realized that’s not what had happened. I’d survived. Someone had found me, got me to the Home, made sure I had a life.
Maybe that’s what the mother had wanted. She wasn’t just leaving me there. She was leaving me there for someone. She’d known someone would come and get me. The baby will be at the tree. Please look after her for me.
I liked that theory better.
I took a bite of casserole, but it was cold and rubbery now—which was only moderately worse than warm and rubbery—and I pushed it aside. I checked to be sure Ida wasn’t looking, then got up and scraped my plate into the garbage can.
That’s all I was thinking of—dumping the casserole—but the garbage can was right beside the wall with the photos on it. Every employee, year by year, all the way back to who knows when.
I wasn’t sure it would do much good other than letting me put names to faces, but I scanned the wall until I found the summer of ’47. The photo was taken outside the boathouse. There were a few old guys, but most of the employees looked like teenagers. Some were sitting on the dock or on upturned boats, legs hanging over the edge. Others were lined up class-picture style, tall ones in the back or crouching in front. The names were written below in neat black letters.
It didn’t take me long to find Bas. The sleeves of his uniform were rolled up high on his biceps, and that curl of hair still tumbled over his forehead. He had a cigarette cupped in his hand. Like Sandra said, a bad boy.
I searched the names until I spotted Lois’s. Tall pretty girl, but I couldn’t confirm how great her legs were. A guy in a sailor’s cap was crouched in front of her.
Sandra was there too, three kids over, but with decidedly darker hair than now. She had her arm around the shoulder of another waitress and her thumb up in the air.
I checked the names and figured out the other girl was the infamous Cecily Ingram. When Sandra told the story, I’d pictured a beauty—milky skin, silky hair, nose a perfect little triangle—the classic rich kid. The real Cecily didn’t look like anything special. The photographer could have just caught her at a bad angle, I suppose, or maybe rich people can be ordinary too.
Dougie Pratt was stretched out on one of the overturned boats. One knee up, hand dangling off it. Dark tan. Nice enough-looking guy. Smiling to be polite or because he was told to, not because he found anything wildly funny.
Ida was there as well, and we were right—she was pretty cute back then, with her lipstick and her Rosie the Riveter scarf. How old would she have been? Mid-twenties? Hard to tell. Not a whole lot older than Bas. She just seemed to have aged faster.
I could hear her clanging away behind me now. I turned around. She was wiping a table as if she was scraping paint, the dimply raw chicken of her upper arms slapping against her side with every stroke.
“This you in the picture, Ida?” She might know something.
“More than likely. Been here forever.” She lined her hand up with the edge of the table and swept cold macaroni into it, not interested enough to look.
“You were a knockout,” I said.
Now she threw her cloth over her shoulder, dum
ped the crumbs into the garbage can and waddled over to take a peek.
“Yup, that’s me.” She tapped the glass. “My husband said he married me for my figure—so I kept making more of it for him.”
“That’s not Bas, is it?” I was just chatting until I could figure out how to ease her into the whole Bye-Bye Baby conversation. Didn’t want her clamming up on me too.
“Handsome devil, wasn’t he?”
“Girls must have loved him.”
“Oh, they did, all right. Except the one he wanted, of course. But ain’t that always the way.” She shook her head and turned to get back to her work.
“Which girl was that?”
She rubbed her hand over her mouth. “What was her name?” Looked at the ceiling. “Oh for heaven’s sake. I’m not that old.” Turned back to the photo. “Minister’s daughter. I’ll know her when I see her.”
She ran her finger over the picture until she came to Lois. “Not her. Bas went out with this one for a while but only to make the other girl jealous. Just because she broke your heart, doesn’t give you the right to break someone else’s. That’s what I told him.”
“Which other girl?” Now I was just being nosy.
“She’s here somewhere.” Ida moved her head as if she was watching a very slow Ping-Pong game. “Little bit of a thing. About your size. Bas was crazy about her from the time he was a young fella. Never understood why. Nice girl and all but nothing much to look at. And you know Bas. Coming home from school every day with a black eye, and her being little Miss Goody-Goody. Ah. Here she is.” She blew a little dust off the glass. “Lucinda Harvey.”
“Lucinda?” My voice caught in my throat. That’s what Miss Cameron had called me.
“I know. Lucinda. Can you believe it? But her mother was like that. Always putting on airs.”
“Which one is she again?” I said.
Ida pointed her out. Lucinda was standing at the far end of the second-last row, even though everyone else that far back was taller. She had limp hair. Thick glasses. Ida was right. Nothing much to look at.