Belle Ruin Read online

  To little Scott Holland and his mom, Travis, and the way home. Love (with crinkles on it).

  If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes

  Will keep my talk from getting overwise,

  I'm not the one for putting off the proof

  Let it be overwhelming, off a roof

  And round a comer, blizzard snow for dust.

  And blind me to a standstill if it must.

  —Robert Frost, "Dust in the Eyes"

  1

  "Fame will not wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety."

  Dwayne quoted that to me, saying it was by Shakespeare. Its really "age," not "fame," he said, but he changed it to suit my life. "Age" (he said) could hardly be a threat to someone who's twelve years old ("and has been for a long time," I thought he didn't need to add). And my recent fame is the most notable thing that's happened around Spirit Lake since, well, forever. He said Shakespeare was describing Cleopatra, also famous in her time, almost as famous as I was. He was telling me this while he was under Bobby Stuck's old Studebaker. Dwayne is a master mechanic.

  I was sitting on a stack of new tires in Abel Slaw's Garage. I was not supposed to be in here with the cars and tools and lifts, so I waited until Abel Slaw got on his office telephone and then came in. I've never seen anyone who could spend as much time on the telephone as him.

  Dwayne pushed out from under the Studebaker on one of those flat things with wheels and went back to looking under the hood. The trouble with all this is I can't see his face when he's under the car and can see only half of it when he's bent under the hood, so I can't tell if he's smiling and laughing at me inside. He can kid around a lot and it's nearly impossible to tell if I can't see his face.

  I know it must seem like I've been twelve years old for a long time.

  but that's only because so much has been crammed into a few weeks, and I have to put in all these details, like Dwayne being a "master" mechanic, a detail I'm going to probably drop, which is what I told him.

  "Don't I wish."

  That's Dwayne with his head down under the hood of the Stude-baker.

  I want to review what's happened, not the entire story (which you should already know if you've been paying attention at all), but just the very end, where my fame starts to assert itself. (I've picked up some smart words from the newspaper articles about me.) My fame is the "aftermath" of the crime. The crime and its aftermath. The crime was really something, blood and bullets, which happened to me and that's the reason for its aftermath. And sometimes I almost think it's even more important than the crime.

  The aftermath had reporters sitting on the porch of the Hotel Paradise, rocking in the dark green porch rockers, drinking coffee or martinis (depending on who's hosting, my mother or Lola Davidow) as if they were hotel guests who'd paid for the privilege, and asking me questions about what happened at the boathouse on Spirit Lake, and wasn't I terrified, and so forth.

  This is what I mean: the reporters were there for me. It was hard for my mother and Mrs. Davidow and her unfamous daughter Ree-Jane— especially Ree-Jane—to believe. It was hard to believe since I'd spent my whole twelve years without getting serious attention from anyone. To see me the subject of all these newspaper stories, well, it was just too much. My mother was pleased I was famous, Lola Davidow was pleased for an occasion to break out the Gordon's gin and Ree-Jane was not pleased at all.

  There we were on the porch, the reporters, my mother, Mrs. Davidow, Ree-Jane and me. My brother Will was not there. He's usually not there. He spends all of his time up in the Big Garage with his best friend and musical genius, Brownmiller (who we called "Mill"), both of them making up songs and scenery for their production. My brother is too busy to care about fame, even his own, which probably says a lot about him. I do not share that attitude. Frankly, I could not be too famous for me.

  Details piled upon details, which I have been told is one of the problems about this story. It is drowning in details. Like Mary-Evelyn Devereau drowned in Spirit Lake. Like I almost drowned there, too.

  Ree-Jane said that I go on and on, endlessly, that its boring to bring in every little thing, that I'm boring. I'm endless. She doesn't know the difference between the two things.

  Remember, I said this before: it's my story. It's about the Hotel Paradise and Ben Queen and Cold Flat Junction. It could be, like me, endless, me going on endlessly, unwithered and various like Cleopatra. Not that I'm comparing.

  "You'd better be careful in those woods. You've got your hunters out there after deer," Dwayne said, his head down almost flush with the engine.

  I was inspecting the tread on the pile of tires beneath me. As if I had a car. "It's not deer season."

  "It ain't coon season, either, but that doesn't stop some people." He was piercing a can of Sinclair Oil as if it were a beer and now I could see his face. It looked even handsomer in the shadow thrown up by the hood of the car.

  "Like you-know-who," I said.

  He looked at me. "You been huntin' out of season again?"

  "Not me. You."

  That's how I met him. It was in another part of the woods, not the deer park, but the woods nearer Lake Noir. It was hard to tell where one wood began and another wood ended. I'd been investigating Broke-down House, if you can call shinnying up a tree "investigating." I'd heard twigs snapping and leaves crisping as if someone were walking my way and I was scared to death. It had turned out to be Dwayne with his shotgun and his sack of dead rabbits. It had been night and one of those black-hole darknesses where it's so dark night just sucks everything into it and you couldn't tell where the tree ended and I began, or the ground ended and he began.

  "There's this old hotel," I said, pointing in the direction of the highway beyond the garage. "It burned down one night, all of it, except part of the ground floor is still there. It was a ballroom. This hotel was way bigger than the Hotel Paradise, a lot bigger. It was called the Belle Rouen. That's French." In case he didn't know.

  Dwayne watched the oil nozzle and wiped his hands on a greasy rag, the kind all mechanics seem to keep in their back pockets.

  "I found out a lot about it from the woman in the historical society. In La Porte."

  "Girl, I'd see a deer climb up a tree before I'd ever see you in that museum, studying history"

  "What? I know a lot of history"

  "You don't even knovv the history of your own hotel, talk about another one." He pushed the oily rag back into his pocket.

  I was insulted and jumped off the tires. "I most certainly do! My great-grandfather owned it before my grandfather and my mother (and, I didn't want to remind myself, Lola Davidow). It really belongs to Aurora Paradise and her sister." Aurora Paradise was ninety-one and lived up on the fourth floor.

  Dwayne tossed the empty oil can into a big bin and slammed down the hood. "That's not what I mean, precisely What really went on there?"

  I was back sitting on the stack of tires and squinting as if this would better help me see what he meant. "Well, why would I want to know that?" I didn't know what went on anywhere. "Nobody talks about it, I mean, my mother once in a while talks about the awful Paradises—she isn't one, you know, she just married into it. But that's all ..." My voice kind of faded away. I was getting anxious (thanks to Dwayne), as if I'd been neglecting family history all this time, as if the family's history were my responsibility. I don't know, maybe it was.

  Dwayne had raised the hood of another car and fixed the thin rod that held it open. He was looking at me through the triangle of space the hood made. "You look white. What's wrong?"

  "Nothing."

  Dwayne kept looking at me and I must have gone from white to furious red because he pulled back. I must admit that's one thing he's good about: pulling back if he thinks som
ething's too hard on a person. He said, "So go on about this ballroom."

  "Not if you're going to keep on interrupting." I got haughty I wasn't very good at haughtiness, since no one noticed mine. That's along with sadness, madness and misery.

  He smiled slightly. "Sorry," he said, wiping his fingers on the rag he'd once again taken from his pocket. He did this so carefully you'd think the rag had just come fresh from the laundry.

  You can imagine how many times I've heard "sorry" from an adult. It was another good thing about him. So I was offhand. "Oh, that's okay Anyway, the hotel had these balls—more than dances, they were— fancy, with the orchestra in tuxedos and the women wearing dresses embroidered with beads and sequins and the dance floor so glossy with polish it looked on fire. Could have been two hundred people— why're you looking at me like that?" He looked doubtful.

  "You sure got a lot of detail there." He tossed the oily rag over his shoulder and bent down to look at the engine.

  I continued. "Two hundred people dancing or near that. I guess this was in the thirties" (a time that hardly existed since I wasn't in it) "when the music was like 'Bye Bye Blackbird' and 'When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.'" For some reason I started to sing: "No one here can love or understand me—" for a moment I was taken out of myself or out of one self and dropped down in another where my feelings were bottomless.

  "Oh, what hard luck sto-ries they all haaaand me."

  That was Dwayne singing. He was trying to pull me back, I think from some kind of sadness. It was almost like the way Ben Queen had dragged me back from drowning. I could have cried right then with the relief of someone's trying. I kept my face down, studying my feet. Dwayne went back to clonking with his wrench or whatever tool he used.

  "So go on," he said.

  I cleared my throat—it isn't frogs you get in your throat; it's memories. "There's a kind of pond that deer drink from. In this one picture it looks like a fawn and probably its dad, you know, with antlers."

  "Hmm. Fawn with a buck? Usually, they hang around their mothers."

  "Probably it's because you helped kill off all the mother deer." I could be sarcastic, too.

  "I hardly ever hunt deer and never would shoot a doe."

  "You shouldn't be shooting at anything. They have a right to keep on living just like you and me." Especially me.

  "My, but aint you ever up on your moral high horse today"

  He was busy with the wrench under the hood.

  Actually I didnt give the subject of hunting much thought. Truth was, the only time I'd given it any thought at all was when Dwayne came along with his bag of rabbits.

  2

  What I had told Dwayne was true, for I had found out about the Belle Rouen in the historical society's little museum. It was in what once had been a house belonging to the Porte family, the ones who had practically owned La Porte at one time. It was a nice old redbrick building and what I especially liked about it was that it was small enough that it wouldn't wear me out looking around. Dwayne was right: I didn't give two sticks for history as such, but I liked it a lot if it was a backstory to some mystery. "Backstory"—there was another newspaper word which I liked.

  The museum was overseen from 11:00 to 3:00 by Miss Alice Llewelyn, who had drifting white hair like Queen Anne's lace and was always dressed in pastels of pink or blue or green. She had a pastel face, too, a rosy complexion. But, then, only an old person would have a job like this one, being able to appreciate the way the past clung to things like dust.

  When I asked her about the old hotel in the deer park, she said, "Ah, the Belle Rouen," easing the R sound out rather than coughing it up as Ree-Jane always did. Miss Llewelyn said that, yes indeed, they certainly did have some "exhibits" of the Belle Rouen, and led me over to one of the display cases covered with glass.

  There were a number of photographs of the hotel and several had been done as postcards. There was a postcard of the hotel in sun and a postcard in snow. There was one that showed the deer drinking from the pool in winter, which I really liked. Then another of what I supposed to be an aerial photograph showing the hotel and the grounds— the golf course, the swimming pool, a stable and lots of walks leading into woods. "It was so big," I said.

  Miss Llewelyn nodded. "It had well over two hundred and fifty guest rooms and of course the public rooms, including a huge ballroom where there were dances on Saturday night. Not one but two golf courses, if you can believe it."

  I didn't try, golf being a pastime I thought almost as boring as a lecture on place settings from our headwaitress. Vera. "Well, they had a lot more guests than the Hotel Paradise." Which wouldn't be hard. The courthouse jail had more guests than the Hotel Paradise.

  I peered at one of the photos which showed a group alighting from a large car beneath a porte cochere three times the size of ours. It could accommodate six or seven cars at once. They pulled up and passengers got out, assisted by several bellboys. I should show this to Will as a demonstration of what his life could be like if people weren't as lenient on him. The suitcases and trunks resembled Aurora Paradise's. I thought the women's clothes kind of charming, too. The women passengers wore big floppy hats, or ones that looked like the helmets gladiators wore in movies set in Rome, where Christians were attacked by lions. (I wondered how they kept the movie lions from actually eating the Christians. Since Ree-Jane Davidow also planned to be a famous actress, I thought this would be a good starting place for her.)

  "You see," said Miss Llewelyn, who was looking over my shoulder, "from all that luggage they're carrying that they plan to stay the season."

  The season. Imagine someone staying "the season" at the Hotel Paradise. Usually, it only takes a weekend for them to see sense. "Did it cost a lot?"

  "Yes, I believe it was very expensive. But business seriously fell off after that baby was kidnapped."

  Jarred by this news, I stepped back. "A baby? Kidnapped?"

  Miss Llewelyn nodded, her eyes shut as if to follow the scene in her head. "It was such a beautiful night with a full moon. It just seemed so romantic, the night and the dance. Well, this baby was their only child, and it was taken right out of its little crib while the parents were downstairs dancing. The father was from here, you know. Morris Slade, a well-known local playboy."

  Now, granted my experience of playboys was limited, I do know they wore nice clothes, chased girls, drank champagne and drove fast in sporty cars. They were handsome and social butterflies. What I couldn't understand was how a playboy could be living in La Porte and even less, how one could have grown up here. What playboy ways could they have learned from their fathers? There were no old playboys in La Porte that I ever knew about, except maybe Jamie Make-piece, who'd romanced the Devereau sisters. But I wasn't sure Jamie was in the "playboy" category.

  Then I remembered my cousin, way older than me, the one who visited from the city now and then. He wore white linen suits and brought presents. I didn't care about the presents, only about him. He was, I guess you could say, "exotic." I always made sure I was the last person, not the first, to greet him. I would watch from my window on the third floor, which looked out over the cocktail garden behind the hotel, looking down as others ran out to tell him hello, except for Will, but it was hard to think of Will running out to greet anybody except Spike Jones or Medea. I would hang back and then go down and stroll up to the cocktail garden and be really casual, as if I were yawning my way through our hellos. Of course, it backfired when he said, "Emma. You finally bothered to come out and see me?" He wasn't making a joke of it. He was really annoyed. But what could I say?

  He was the only one I knew who could be a playboy. He'd sit around for aeons drinking martinis with Lola Davidow. But I hardly think she'd be called a playgirl.

  All of this ran through my mind as my eyes were fixed on the photo of the Belle Rouen guests, the women in their helmetlike hats and fashionably dressed, right down to their shoes. The men wore summer suits and stiff-looking white collars. But the
thing was they all looked happy. They looked almost brilliantly happy And this made me sadder even than the scarcity of playboys. I have never seen a group of people enter the Hotel Paradise looking that happy unless they were drunk.

  It must have been the Belle Rouen itself; it must have held out such a promise of happiness that its guests would pay anything and come from anywhere just to be happy.

  I looked at other pictures, ones of the interior. That dining room! It was twice the size of ours. Its tables were crammed with place settings, silver, water goblets, wine goblets around snowy-white napkins and fresh flowers. Maybe I should put a blossom in a bud vase for Miss Bertha. I knew what she was allergic to.

  Here was the ballroom, with the band members in tuxedos and the dancers in evening wear. They were swinging and turning as if a wind were sweeping them along. The gowns of the women were so much more sophisticated than Ree-Jane's sweet sixteen dress, it hardly bore mentioning. Perhaps they were more sophisticated than the Waitresses but then the Waitresses had lived on a whole other plane of existence.

  Looking at the aerial view of the hotel, I wondered if maybe Miss Llewelyn had a drawing of it, like a diagram. I asked her.

  "No. No, we don't. Why would you want one?"

  I don't think she was being nebby, just puzzled. "Because I'd like to see it better in my mind. I'd just like to know how the rooms—I mean the ones downstairs that you called the public rooms—were arranged. To get a better picture, I guess."

  "I see." She crooked her finger against her chin and appeared to be thinking. "You know, we could probably work it out, between the aerial view and the photos and postcards."

  It was a good idea. She went to get a ruler and a sharp pencil, and we set about working it out. She drew little squares and oblongs— lobby, kitchen, reading room, ballroom, solarium (What's that?).