Hotel Paradise Read online

  The Sheriff likes Teaberry gum, so I carry a pack in my pocket for when he runs out. He always seems to be running out, which surprises me, as he’s a man with a good memory, hardly absentminded at all. But when he starts searching his pockets for gum and mildly cursing himself for leaving it back in his desk, I casually produce my pack. The Sheriff’s smile is high-voltage, and he turns it on when I do this. I always tell him to take a stick for later, too.

  Then, we’ll walk along the pavement, the Sheriff with his citation book, me with my fund of knowledge about cars illegally or at least wrongly parked. People use five-minute zones and the La Porte library lot shamelessly.

  Much of the time we share a comfortable silence on our curb treks. I love silence; I hate babble. Silence is a way of saying: We do not have to entertain each other; we are okay as we are.

  The only place I have seen this at work is in a movie theater. Of course, there is the film up there as a wholesale “distraction,” that’s true. And yet, and yet . . . I like to look around in the auditorium lit just enough so that you can make out profiles and planes of cheeks, smiles or downturned mouths. Feelings show. And what I see then is little infant faces, child faces, tilted toward the screen, eating popcorn or drawing on straws in Pepsis and Cokes. When people are unaware they are being watched they look so innocent. Maybe I’m speaking of thralldom, of minds working together, a hush of lips, a hundred eyes all seeing the same thing and wanting the same thing (“Oh, no! No! Don’t go in that room; he’s waiting for you, you poor girl. . .”).

  So the Sheriff and I walk in movie silence. The exceptional thing about him is that he never asks questions merely to fill a vacuum. “How’s the hotel?” or “How’s your mom?” never pass his lips. I imagine he’s fairly certain that if the hotel collapsed and killed all the guests and help, or if my mother’s eyebrows got burned in a grease lire, or if Lola Davidow got her hand wedged in the cocktail-onion jar—I would mention it. No, if the Sheriff asks a question or makes a remark it means something. And because we can’t always engage in meaningful conversation, we are sometimes silent.

  On one such occasion, the Sheriff asked me if Regina Jane Davidow had got that new car Lola said she was getting for her sixteenth birthday.

  “Yes,” I said, glumly to his back. He was kneeling down checking the rust on the underside of the fender of Miss Ruth Porte’s little VW. Miss Ruth knew nothing about cars, and Sam kept his eye on the VW.

  “Is it a white convertible?”

  Glummer still, I said yes, again. Imagine not only being able to drive, but having your own car, your own convertible to boot. Ree-Jane was all over town in it, showing it off. I had not been invited yet to ride. The Sheriff straightened up, put a nickel in the meter because you could just see the red flag was raring to go, and said to me, “I’ll tell you something, and you can do what you like about it. You know that tavern—the El Lobo—outside of Hebrides?”

  I frowned slightly. “I think so.”

  We continued on our walk. “Twice I’ve seen a brand-new white Chevy convertible parked outside it, sales sticker still on the side window.”

  That was Ree-Jane’s, all right! How wonderful she should be in bad with the Sheriff, since she’s so sure he adores her, although I have never seen evidence of it. I watched him then snap his citation book shut and jam it in his hip pocket. He did not look at all adoring of Ree-Jane Davidow.

  “That place is strictly off limits to kids—”

  Kids! He had referred to the future Countess of Kent as a “kid”! I could hardly wait to tell her.

  “—to anyone under twenty-one years old.” His look at me was very serious. “Now, I didn’t go in and drag her out by her heels, which I should’ve. But if ever I see her there, I’ll bust her. I’m telling you because you might want to warn her. Or not.” He shrugged slightly. His eyes were expressive, but I couldn’t quite read the message.

  Wonderful! How wonderful to be in possession of this nugget better than gold, this warning to plague her with! Of course, I was casual about it, and merely said, “Um . . . I’ll see what I can do.” But roiling around in my mind as the Sheriff and I continued on our walk was a selection of great openings for the subject of Ree-Jane getting busted by the Sheriff. There was: “Oh, incidentally, I was talking to the Sheriff this morning, and . . .”; or “Sheriff DeGheyn happened to mention to me that a white convertible . . .” Et cetera. Making sure I stuck in how the El Lobo was “off limits to kids.”

  It occurred to me that the Sheriff could easily have done the warning himself, as Ree-Jane has taken every opportunity to sit her ass on his desk since she’s been picking up speeding tickets from one of the deputies, Donny. She sits on the Sheriff’s desk like Lauren Bacall and tries to smolder.

  I wondered why he didn’t. Probably because he didn’t want to embarrass her; the Sheriff is really nice that way.

  FOUR

  Spirit Lake is a half-mile from the hotel, and I often walk down here and might even be the only person who does, aside from my brother, Will. I like to stop here at the spring and sit on the wall even when I don’t have any particular reason for coming, as I have tonight. The place is overgrown now, the untended grass and weeds and trees choking the narrow road halfway around so that a complete circle of the lake is becoming impossible, even on foot. But it is still quite beautiful, at least I think so, and some of its beauty comes from all of the undergrowth and overgrowth, from its wild look.

  The most important thing about Spirit Lake, or the most terrible, is that a girl drowned here over forty years ago. The girl was my age—twelve—and no one knows exactly what happened. They say she took a rowboat out into the lake and it must somehow have capsized. The boat was seen drifting in the middle of the lake one moonlit night, but the people who saw it thought nothing of it; they thought one of the rowboats at the boathouse must have come loose from its mooring. And then the girl was found. Her absence wasn’t even reported until the next morning, and finally the family had to call the police.

  Spirit Lake is small and partly covered with masses of water lilies and tall blowing grasses. Her body was found caught up in this water growth. Spirit Lake has always seemed mysterious, I think, and the drowning that no one could ever explain made it more so. No one back then knew why she had taken a boat out in the lake, especially at night, for her family said she had always been a little afraid of it.

  Her family was made up of three aunts who lived in the only house near the lake, a large gray house built a short distance back from the lake’s edge. There was no mother or father, only these sisters who all looked very much alike; yet she looked like none of them. Their name was Devereau, and her name was Mary-Evelyn. Mary-Evelyn Devereau.

  I know all of these details because I have studied up on the case. Also, my own mother knew the family when she was a young girl herself, although she was older than Mary-Evelyn. I think my mother was about sixteen back then.

  My mother was there when Mary-Evelyn drowned—I don’t mean she was an eyewitness, but she was one of the many people who gathered down at the edge of the lake when the police were searching for the body. My mother actually saw them pull the body in from the grasses and water lilies, where it had lain near the bank, tangled and floating. Mary-Evelyn was wearing a white dress like a party dress; it had layers of ruffles all around the skirt and was embroidered with tiny flower buds of blue silk up and down the front. My mother, being good at sewing herself, noted these details.

  And my mother knew the family from their visits to the hotel; this was when the Paradises were still rampaging through it, including Aurora. Forty years ago, my great-aunt Paradise was probably just working up steam. Anyway, the Devereaus would occasionally drop in to have dinner. The dinners weren’t nearly so good then, for my mother hadn’t yet started doing the cooking. She is famous for her cooking. I have always been sorry she never got a chance to go to Paris and be famous in a place that’s worth being famous in. The point about these visits, though, is th
at during one of them, which was a birthday party for one of the aunts, someone took pictures of all of them, and my mother kept one. So I know just what Mary-Evelyn looked like, and her aunts, just before she drowned. I keep the snapshot in a Whitman’s candy box, along with some other objects I prize. My mother doesn’t know I held on to it while she was rummaging through her snapshot collection, nor do I think she’d care or miss it.

  I like to sit in the Pink Elephant (a cellar room below our dining room) and look up from my notebook at the shadowy wall where I can see on the pink stucco that darkness in imagined moonlight where the boat slowly circles and drifts, and I see Mary-Evelyn float and bob in the rushes, among the water lilies. Her body moves slightly with the current, like the boat out in the middle of the lake.

  I see this in my mind and I feel like weeping; I think it is one of the unhappiest things I have ever heard. And I think perhaps Mary-Evelyn was one of the unhappiest girls who ever lived in Spirit Lake. Just a short while ago I merely suspected it. Now, I know this to be true.

  But I would take the picture out and study it and think about Mary-Evelyn Devereau. Her death puzzled me, and I don’t understand why it didn’t puzzle everybody at the time. I’ve written down a short list of questions which I keep in the candy box, and every once in a while I add another question to the list:

  Why was Mary-Evelyn out at night?

  Why was she in a boat, at night?

  Why was she wearing one of her best dresses?

  Why didn’t they report her missing until the next morning?

  Why was her body so far from the boat?

  The police back then must have been dumb, for they never tried to piece all of this together. Oh, they asked the obvious questions: Why was she out at night in a boat? But of course everyone would naturally ask that question. It’s just too bad that our sheriff now, Sam DeGheyn, wasn’t around back then, for he could have solved the mystery of the death of Mary-Evelyn Devereau.

  On Fridays, sometimes I accompany Mrs. Davidow when she goes into La Porte to do the weekend shopping for the hotel. She goes to town usually twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays, and it’s understood between us that I can go with her on Fridays. It’s a funny thing about Mrs. Davidow: although a lot of the time she’s like a tree across my path and makes my life a misery, there are these little pockets of pleasantness when we get on very well together—much better than she and Ree-Jane get on, and I think this is painful to her. So Mrs. Davidow and I ride into town, sometimes laughing about some crazy La Porte person or other, or maybe something one of the guests has done; then she goes about her grocery business with her long list, and I go about mine.

  My favorite business is always with Sheriff DeGheyn. Sometimes we sit in his office in the courthouse talking about one thing or another. Other times we might go into the Rainbow Café for a soda and coffee. But usually we walk around town, me doing most of the talking, the Sheriff doing most of the listening. And a lot of the talking for a long time has been about Mary-Evelyn Devereau.

  I had put the questions to him about the dress, and the distance between the boat and the body, and a couple of other questions. Not all of the details of the body’s discovery and the subsequent “investigation” (if you can call it that) were told me by my mother; most of them I got from going back into the archives in the Conservative offices. Mr. Gumbel, the editor-in-chief, thought it quite unusual that someone my age would be interested in an almost half-century-old death, and made a lot of tired jokes about me becoming an investigative reporter. No, I told him, I didn’t want to be a reporter and work for the Conservative. That’s Regina Jane Davidow (I told him) who wants to be a reporter, but she says she’s going to write for the New York Times or some other fabulous paper, and she’s going to be a foreign correspondent. I said all of this about Ree-Jane, of course, just to see what Mr. Gumbel would say, because Ree-Jane had written some tiny little thing once and Mr. Gumbel had accepted it for publication. He had accepted it when Lola Davidow got him drunk (and herself also) one night and foisted it on him. Well, it didn’t take up much space buried there in the back with a lot of advertisements for the feed store and so forth. But if there was one person who knew the limits of Regina Davidow’s writing ability, it was Mr. Gumbel. And he snorted down his nose when I told him Ree-Jane was going to be a foreign correspondent. She’ll get as far as Hebrides, was all he said.

  But he was very helpful in showing me where to look for reports on Mary-Evelyn. He remembered the drowning, but vaguely, as he was young himself, about my mother’s age. The longest report I could find was a triple-column with a picture of Mary-Evelyn at the top. The reporter’s account didn’t tell me much that I hadn’t already heard. There was a detailed description of Spirit Lake and the dock, but I figured that was just to take up space. (The Conservative has never been known for the originality of its reporters.) The picture was of a pretty but very sad-looking girl with silky hair in a beautifully sewn dress. I was tempted to take this account to put among my other valuables. I looked around to see if anyone was watching, and no one was, for no one else was around. I guess they had better things to do than hang around watching me. But as Mr. Gumbel had been so helpful, I left the account where it belonged. I know Mr. Gumbel wondered why I was so all-fired interested in it.

  The Sheriff, I know, wonders why, too. But he gives me credit for having a good reason. And he always gives a lot of thought to my questions. On Fridays, as we work the meters on Second Street, I talk to him about Mary-Evelyn. And he takes off his visored cap, wipes his forearm back over his forehead, and fits the cap on again, all the while slowly chewing the Teaberry gum I’ve given him. The Sheriff has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. They’re baked blue, as if they’ve been fired in a kiln. “That’s really a possibility,” he’ll say, of some point or other I’m making about Mary-Evelyn. He’ll say it as he pulls out his spiral notebook and makes a note to himself.

  On this particular Friday, we walked on, slowly. Up ahead, Helene Baum, the doctor’s wife, was plowing towards us. Towards the Sheriff, I should say. Helene Baum was La Porte’s biggest troublemaker. She always had some complaint about someone or something—a person, a dog, a cat, a bench by the bus stop. Probably, she’d just seen the parking ticket we’d left under her windshield wiper. The Sheriff took my arm and we walked across the street to continue our parking-meter ticketing on the other side.

  Helene Baum crossed the street too. Walking behind us was a wall of Friday shoppers, and they blocked us from her view just long enough for the Sheriff to grab my arm again and pull me into the nearest door. It happened to be our favorite place, the Rainbow Café.

  The Rainbow is owned and operated by a woman people just call “Shirl” who is well known for her ways with customers. You get the same impression from her as from Lola Davidow, and that is that their places of business are private residences and the customers are more like intruders. Between Mrs. Davidow and Shirl there is no love lost, especially since Shirl outright stole my mother’s recipe for Angel Pie and sells it right and left. I’d love to see Mrs. Davidow and Shirl duke it out right there on Second Street.

  The person I especially like who works in the Rainbow is Maud Chadwick. Maud Chadwick is the sort of person you don’t mind seeing when you don’t want to see anyone. And a lot of the time I don’t want to. (Mrs. Davidow tells me I’m “moody,” and I always think that’s pretty funny, considering the source.)

  The Sheriff really likes Maud Chadwick, I can tell. They are a lot alike underneath, although on the surface very different. Maud appears to be quite shy, except with a very few people like the Sheriff and me. But since I’m only twelve, I suppose she can feel fairly easy around me. Kids like her. She doesn’t have that uppity manner that most adults put on for children.

  I have always thought Maud Chadwick has a kind of pixie look, like the fairies in my old Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens book, which I don’t read anymore, of course, but I sometimes look at the silvery-blue illustrations,
just to see if they are as I remember them. As I said, Maud has that sort of look. Her eyes are wide-spaced and her mouth hooks up at the corners in an expression like a little kid’s. Maud is the only adult I call by a first name, for I have received strict instructions from my mother not to use adults’ first names. But since Maud waits tables (something else we have in common) and has to wear a little name tag on her dress, it’s only natural that everyone uses her first name—just as they called Shirley “Shirl” and Charlene “Charlene.”

  There are hand-lettered signs tacked up on the wall of each wooden booth, instructing the customers how many have to be in a party before the booth can be occupied. These signs seem to change constantly, depending on Shirl’s mood. Most of the time, three people are needed to occupy one booth. But two people are permitted to take up one of her precious booths if she’s in a good mood. At one point when she’d been on a real rampage there had to be four in the party to get a booth to themselves. And one person, well, occasionally some poor soul who doesn’t know the rules tries to sit in a booth alone, and that’s the last you ever see of him or her. That’s the truth. Shirl is always saying around the cigarette dangling from her mouth that she isn’t about to play host to the homeless of La Porte.

  But there are days when Shirl has to be absent from the Rainbow for one reason or another. She does her shopping in Hebrides two or three times a month, and regular as clockwork has her appointment at the Prime Cut (a poor name, I always thought, for a beauty shop). When Shirl isn’t there, Maud Chadwick always lets me have a booth to myself. On days when I figure Shirl isn’t going to be at the Rainbow, I take my notebook with me into town. I often walk the two miles from the hotel into La Porte, sometimes accompanied by Ree-Jane. Once in town, Ree-Jane goes off looking for new worlds to conquer, maybe going into the other beauty parlor (the Hair and Gone) for a makeover, and comes out looking like the neon sign above Arturo’s diner; or sometimes she drifts into the courthouse and the Sheriff’s office.