Cold Flat Junction Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - A dented cup

  Chapter 2 - Dervish

  Chapter 3 - Benchsitting

  Chapter 4 - Orphns-in-a-storm

  Chapter 5 - News

  Chapter 6 - Waitressing

  Chapter 7 - Sorrolowful Places

  Chapter 8 - Pink thinking

  Chapter 9 - A short history of Do-X-machines

  Chapter 10 - Moses in the bullrushes

  Chapter 11 - Moses and Aurora

  Chapter 12 - Falling out with the Sheriff

  Chapter 13 - Uninvited

  Chapter 14 - Bunny and me

  Chapter 15 - Last of the Butternuts

  Chapter 16 - Brokedown House

  Chapter 17 - Lost girl

  Chapter 18 - A new decor

  Chapter 19 - Their Florida vacation

  Chapter 20 - Sauerkraut

  Chapter 21 - Diner people

  Chapter 22 - Flyback Hollow

  Chapter 23 - Orphans

  Chapter 24 - Tracking poachers

  Chapter 25 - Master mechanic

  Chapter 26 - Tamiami Trail

  Chapter 27 - My real life

  Chapter 28 - Brokedown House, revisited

  Chapter 29 - My florida vacation II

  Chapter 30 - Rainbow

  Chapter 31 - Lazy days at the Rony Plaza

  Chapter 32 - Scent of grass

  Chapter 33 - End of the pier

  Chapter 34 - Bartending

  Chapter 35 - Deaf

  Chapter 36 - Diner life

  Chapter 37 - Lemonade

  Chapter 38 - Solitary blue

  Chapter 39 - A drowning

  Chapter 40 - Waiting time

  Chapter 41 - I could have danced all night

  Chapter 42 - Psssst! from overhead

  Chapter 43 - An album

  Chapter 44 - Light in August

  Chapter 45 - Master mechanic II

  Chapter 46 - Out of the clouds

  Chapter 47 - Deputy Dawg

  Chapter 48 - Inadmissible evidence

  Chapter 49 - Hell-bent

  Chapter 50 - She’s Medea

  Chapter 51 - Goldengirl

  Chapter 52 - We remember it well

  Chapter 53 - An alibi

  Chapter 54 - Solace

  Chapter 55 - Smitty

  Chapter 56 - Cold Turkey

  Chapter 57 - Ghosts

  Chapter 58 - Deadmanwalking

  Chapter 59 - The boathouse

  Chapter 60 - Ree-Jane goes spastic

  Chapter 61 - Star reporter

  Chapter 62 - Hearsayist

  Chapter 63 - Ree-Jane rousted

  Chapter 64 - Bugswirled,stumppocked

  Praise for the novels of Martha Grimes

  Cold Flat Junction

  “A marvelous gallery of idiosyncratic characters ... a thoroughly delightful reading experience.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Melds classic mystery with a coming-of-age story in which the young protagonist must face the hard and often shocking realities of adulthood ... Grimes gets that—and everything else—just right.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Eccentric characters keep [Grimes’s] enchanted, time-forgotten towns alive.”

  —The New York TimesBook Review

  “Character-driven psychological fiction ... smartly written ... surprisingly satisfying.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Hotel Paradise

  “Utterly engaging.... Emma’s voice [is] sharp, funny, perceptive.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Rich with metaphors and imaginative characters ... provocative.... Hotel Paradise takes on the mood of a lazy Sunday afternoon with its slow unveiling of events. Meandering and atmospheric, the novel reads with the ease of a daydream.... [Grimes] proves herself a writer of delicate sensibility whose work is notable for its delightfully quirky details, insightful perceptions into human relationships, and graceful prose.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  The Train Now Departing

  “Brilliantly told.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Full of suspense and surprise. These carefully written little gems showcase Grimes at her best.”

  —Library Journal

  “Grimes has created a work of value here, a book that expands her art, her reputation—and possibly her audience.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Atmospheric and chilling.... Grimes [exhibits] a complete mastery of emotional nuance and [a] virtuoso treatment of the grayest coloration.”

  —The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

  Biting the Moon

  “[A] coming-of-age odyssey [that] inspires some grand nature writing from Grimes.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A lyrical coming-of-age journey.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “For mesmerizing readability, it’s hard to beat Biting the Moon.... Quick, buy the book before it gets made into a movie. I suspect you only have a couple of weeks.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Characters to care about ... evocative.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  The Lamorna Wink

  A New York Times Bestseller

  “Atmospheric ... an elegantly styled series.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Swift and satisfying ... grafts the old-fashioned ‘Golden Age’ amateur-detective story to the contemporary police procedural ... real charm.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Fans ... will not be disappointed. The eccentrics who populate Plant’s life are back and provide wickedly funny cameos.”

  —USA Today

  “Entrancing. Grimes makes her own mark on du Maurier country.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  TheStargazey

  A New York Times Bestseller

  “Wondrously eccentric characters.... The details are divine.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The literary equivalent of a box of Godiva truffles.... Wonderful.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Martha Grimes’s wintry new mystery envelops the reader in all the comforts of a serviceable English whodunit.... The Stargazey is well worth setting your sights on.”

  —USA Today

  “Grimes’s popular Richard Jury returns in top form.... A delightfully entertaining blend of irony, danger, and intrigue, liberally laced with wit and charm.... A must-have from one of today’s most gifted and intelligent writers.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  The Case Has Altered

  “The way Martha Grimes tells it, there is no more atmospheric setting for murder in all of England than the Lincolnshire fens.... Richly textured.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Grimes is dazzling in this deftly plotted Richard Jury mystery.... Psychologically complex.... The novel also boasts Grimes’s delicious wit.... [She] brings Jury triumphantly back where he belongs.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A delicious ebb and flow of tension.... Twists and turns.... Beautifully rendered atmosphere.... Vintage Grimes.”

  —Library Journal

  “Provocative entertainment.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  I Am the Only Running Footman

  “Literate, witty, and stylishly crafted.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Everything about Miss Grimes’s new novel shows her at her best.... [She] gets our immediate attention.... She holds it, however, with something more than mere
suspense.”

  —The New Yorker

  Praise for Martha Grimes

  “Her wit sparkles, her plots intrigue, and her characters are absolutely unforgettable.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Grimes is not the next Dorothy Sayers, not the next Agatha Christie. She is better than both.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Read any one [of her novels] and you’ll want to read them all.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “She really has no superior in what she does. Grimes’s books are powerful comedies of no-manners, of the assumed gap between the blue-blooded and the red-blooded people.... Her world is enriched by every new novel, and our admiration grows.”

  —Armchair Detective

  “Martha Grimes, America’s answer to the classic British detective novel, is winning the hearts of readers who long to return to the golden age of the dagger beneath the tea cozy and the butler lurking at the drawing room door.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A class act.... She writes with charm, authority, and ironic wit.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The spirit of Christie, Allingham, and Sayers lives on.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  RICHARD JURY NOVELS

  The Man with a Load of Mischief

  The Old Fox Deceived

  The Anodyne Necklace

  The Dirty Duck

  Jerusalem Inn

  Help the Poor Struggler

  The Deer Leap

  I Am the Only Running Footman

  The Five Bells and Bladebone

  The Old Silent

  The Old Contemptibles

  The Horse You Came In On

  Rainbow’s End

  The Case Has Altered

  The Stargazey

  The Lamorna Wink

  The Blue Last

  OTHER WORKS BY MARTHA GRIMES

  The End of the Pier

  Hotel Paradise

  Biting the Moon

  The Train Now Departing

  POETRY

  Send Bygraves

  New American Library

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

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  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Viking edition.

  First New American Library Printing, February 2002 10

  Copyright © Martha Grimes, 2001

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17513-2

  Cold flat junction / Martha Grimes.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17513-2

  I. Title.

  PS3557.R48998 C65 2001

  813’.54—dc211

  00-043992

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  “Directive” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright ©Henry Holt and Co., 1947, 1969. Copyright © Lesley Frost Ballantine, 1975.

  “Tangerine” by Johnny Mercer and Victor Schertzinger. Copyright Famous Music Corporation, 1942. Copyright ©renewed Famous Music Corporation, 1969. “Tonight You Belong to Me” by Billy Rose and David Lee. Copyright (renewed) Chappell & Co. and C & J David Music, 1926. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  To Van, who was there

  I have kept hidden in the instep arch

  Of an old cedar at the waterside

  A broken drinking goblet like the Grail

  Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,

  So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t

  (I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)

  Here are your waters and your watering place.

  Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

  —Robert Frost from “Directive”

  1

  A dented cup

  I’m sitting here where you left me hardly more than a week ago. Every day and nearly every night I’ve been here on the low stone wall by the spring. I sit near the little alcove where spring water runs from a pipe jutting out of the stone. There’s a metal cup dented from years of use that sits beneath the pipe and catches the water so that people can drink it. The cup has been around as long as I have. It’s as if the alcove were its room, and people can take it out and drink from it and return it. It’s amazing that in all of this time, in all of these years, it’s never been stolen.

  Why would anyone bother stealing a dented tin cup? Because there are some things that go beyond reason—like the Girl, appearing and disappearing; like knowing Ben Queen didn’t kill anyone; like Do-X-machines; like vengeance. Probably, you’ve forgotten most of what happened, but you might remember Fern Queen being shot and killed over by Mirror Pond. That’s on White’s Bridge Road. You might remember because people think murder is more important than anything (except maybe sex).

  I asked my mother, who’s lived all of her life at the hotel, about the cup, and she said, “What cup?” So there doesn’t seem much point in asking about it. In the alcove where the cup rests, I found the Artist George tube taken from the Mr. Ree game and put here by Persons Unknown (yet I think it must have been the Girl) to communicate something to me, maybe to tell me, You’re on the right track, keep going, or maybe just to say, I’m here.

  I imagine it was I’m here, for if I were to tell anyone there was such a person and she was here, they’d say the opposite: No, she isn’t. That’s what Ben Queen said about her, but he had a particular reason: he didn’t want anybody, especially the police, to know she was around. He was trying to protect her. So he pretended there was n
o such person, and I pretended I went along with that, and both of us knew we were both pretending. We both knew we knew there was such a person.

  When there’s a great mystery you wish to protect—that is, a mystery you want to keep people from tearing to ribbons—then you’ve got to keep the wrong people away from it. You go about solving it in a roundabout way. You sometimes ask questions of the wrong people, people who know nothing, for instance, and although you eventually come to an answer, it will take much longer to get to it.

  But why is this? Why would I go about trying to solve it in this roundabout way? Maybe the answer wouldn’t mean the same thing to me if I didn’t ask the questions in my own way, and of the people I ask them of. Or maybe some part of me doesn’t want to know the answer. Or maybe both.

  It’s been forty years since the Tragedy. That’s the way people say it, in that awed, excited way you know means they wish it would happen all over again. Most people seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never knew there were two Tragedies, perhaps because one of them happened in Spirit Lake and one in Cold Flat Junction. Now, if you include the murder of Fern Queen, there are three Tragedies.