Cold Flat Junction Read online

  Cold Flat Junction. It’s the kind of place you might look out on from a train window and think, Thank God I don’t live there, what a boring town, what an empty place. It is an empty place, and maybe even a boring one, sometimes; but I think you’d be wrong to pass it by; you should alight from the train and stay awhile, which is what I did.

  There’s something about the place itself that I feel when I sit on one of the benches on the railroad platform and look off over the empty land to that line of navy blue trees so far away. The land and all of the woebegone town seem stripped of a protective layer that other places have and can hide behind. It’s the layer of busy-ness, profit, community pride; bunting on July the fourth; flower baskets hanging from lampposts in the spring, all ballooning up with civic pride. Cold Flat Junction has shed all of this, if it ever had it.

  I cannot let go of them, these Tragedies. I can’t let go of a thing—a puzzle, a person, a place. Once it gets my attention, I have to keep worrying it until it comes clear. I have to hang on, and it makes life really tiring. I work on these questions down in the Pink Elephant, a small chilly room which was once used for cocktail parties underneath the hotel dining room. The room’s cold stone walls are painted pink, and there’s a long wooden picnic bench and hurricane lamps. The candles give the room atmosphere. Cobwebs and dust and ghosts help too.

  Ghosts do not frighten me (as long as I don’t have to see them). Ghosts are said to haunt places where they died, if they died with things on their minds that they have to find answers to. I hope they find their answers. As for me, I see myself wrinkled and twiglike and dying—well, dying, anyway—still with this weary worrying problem on my mind, and then coming back and haunting the Devereau house, wondering about Rose, Mary-Evelyn, Ben Queen, and Fern—to say nothing of the Girl.

  But you’ve probably forgotten all this as you’ve been going about your own business. Probably, you’ve forgotten my name, too, which is Emma Graham. I’m twelve years old. And if you think I shouldn’t have waited so long to tell you more of this story, just remember:

  I haven’t been away. You have.

  2

  Dervish

  You must remember the Devereau house. You must remember Mary-Evelyn. One early morning her body was found washed up among water lilies on the edge of Spirit Lake. The rowboat she ventured out in was found capsized and floating in the middle of the lake. She was just my age, twelve.

  This was the first Tragedy, and I know it was the reason for the others. Her aunts, the three Devereau sisters, could not explain why Mary-Evelyn would be out at night in a boat. They went, they said, in search of her. When they couldn’t find her, it was then they called the Sheriff’s office. Why (I keep asking) did they wait so long? There are other questions: why was she out by herself, and in a rowboat? And why was her body so far from the boat? It amazes me that her death was put down to “accident” without a lot of questions being asked.

  There was a fourth sister, a half sister, who was younger and really pretty. Her name was Rose, the Rose who ran off with Ben Queen when they were both twenty years old. The Queens are Cold Flat Junction people, which doesn’t mean no-account (except to hear my mother tell it), but just that Ben Queen didn’t have the “advantages” of someone like Rose; the Devereaus were educated and if not wealthy, at least well-off.

  The Hotel Paradise is the only hotel remaining from the grand days when Spirit Lake was a famous summer resort. It has been in my family for over a century, or, to be more precise, in my great-aunt Aurora Paradise’s family, on my father’s side, even though he was not a Paradise, but a Graham. It is owned by Aurora Paradise and operated by my mother and her business partner, Lola Davidow. Aurora herself is ninety-one and lives in style up on the fourth floor, out of sight, but not (unfortunately) out of mind. The hotel might be said to be “family-run.” My mother is the cook; I’m a waitress; my brother Will works as a bellhop (when he works at all). These last few years haven’t provided either much waitressing or much bellhopping.

  The front desk is Lola Davidow’s job; the cooking is all my mother’s. To say that this division of work is not equal is laughable. Front desk work (the way Lola Davidow does it) is mainly overseeing guests when they arrive, and getting ice and setups to them in the cocktail hour, and joining them for drinks. All of this Mrs. Davidow does to perfection, especially when her private liquor supply is running low. Front desk work is also writing checks and going into the big black safe in the back office out of which I occasionally see Lola take a bottle of Southern Comfort. Front desk work is also getting away from the front desk, like going into La Porte to buy groceries and (if Lola’s lucky) meeting up with one of her drinking buddies at the Devon Manor.

  The Hotel Paradise has seen better days. You can still see those days reflected in the white-painted, green-shuttered Victorian cottages along Spirit Lake’s narrow streets. They have wraparound porches and gabled upper floors and are much too spacious to be called “cottages,” but that I guess was the popular term: “summer cottage.” Spirit Lake with its summer cottages; Spirit Lake with its pure air. Most of the cottages are a little shabby now, and even the air is stingier; to get those diamond-sharp days, that bright air, you have to get up very early when the air is so clean and rare it makes you feel doped. Early rising is not what I’m famous for.

  The Paradises have been around for over a hundred years, the Grahams for over fifty, and the Davidows for five. To hear Regina Jane Davidow tell it, they own this place lock, stock, and barrel. She loses no opportunity to tell me that her mother “saved” the hotel by putting her money into it, and if she hadn’t, the bank would have foreclosed and we Grahams would have been out on the street.

  Your mother hasn’t got any business sense at all. Everything was a mess before we came.

  No, everything is a mess now, and you’re making it.

  Ree-Jane wouldn’t know “business sense” if she fell over it, especially since it involves math, a subject she can’t seem to pass in school. She is four years older than me, two years older than my brother Will. She is not yet seventeen but tells people she’s nineteen. She walks her model’s walk, toe-before-heel, and smiles her empty, heartless smile, as if the world were a camera just waiting for her to pass its lens. We are always being compared in the matter of our hair, our faces, our posture, our feet. Since I lose the hair, face, and body contest, I think they should let my feet alone.

  Ree-Jane never does any work except for sometimes pinch-hitting as a waitress when there’s a crowd (which is hardly ever). Even in the dining room she uses the passage between tables as a kind of ramp on which she walks (toe-down-first) and turns and twirls, modeling whatever she’s wearing. She’s not forced to wear a uniform like the rest of us waitresses (three, including the head waitress, Vera). I have overheard Ree-Jane tell guests, as she fills their ruby goblets with ice water, that she is the dining room hostess. If there was ever a dining room that didn’t need a hostess, it’s the Hotel Paradise’s. This “hostess” talk infuriates Vera, since, if there were hostessing to be done, she’d do it.

  Vera wears a black uniform to set her apart from us ordinary waitresses, who wear white or light blue. She is tall, plank thin, and perfectly groomed: every dark hair hammered in place, uniform so starched it marches when she walks. But the way she is pays off in her expert serving, which is kind of amazing. There’s never a movement lost, never a tray clumsily held. She can raise one of the big, metal trays, heavy with dinners, up on her five fingers and waltz it into the dining room, then bring it down to the tray server with a quick one-two, fingers-arm movement that makes me think of a card-sharp toppling a deck of cards one-over-the-other down the length of his arm.

  Once I saw a short movie at school about the dervishes, who did a dance of unbelievably complex movements, their arms and legs whipping around and slicing air in more perfectly synchronized movements than the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. Why do people say “like a whirling dervish” to mean out-of-control whe
n it means just the opposite? In the middle of their semicircle sat a man whose body was as uncontrolled as a Raggedy Anne doll. His head flopped, his arms waved in meaningless movement. I got the picture: the nondervish in the middle was living his life out-of-control.

  If ever there was a whirling dervish outside of the dervish camp, it’s Vera. That’s how practiced, precise, and unwasteful all her movements are.

  And if ever there was a floppy doll of a person, one who could hardly even get her feet to go right, it’s me, Emma Graham, nondervish.

  3

  Benchsitting

  Mr. Root, who often occupies the bench outside Britten’s Store, knows the Queens, or at least knows Sheba Queen, Ben’s sister-in-law. Mr. Root was with me the last time I went to Cold Flat Junction. The Wood boys were along, too. It’s been a long time since they were ever boys, for by now they must be fifty or more; still, “boys” is what people call them, if they’re lumping them together. Speaking of one or the other, though, it’s “Ulub” or “Ubub.” These nicknames came about because of the license plates on their rusty pickup trucks: ULB and UBB. So they were rebaptized “Ulub” and “Ubub.” Their real names are Alonzo and (I think) Robert.

  The four of us have become sort of a team over the last weeks, trying to solve the mystery of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, which has now become the much bigger mystery of Mary-Evelyn and Fern Queen, and seems to be growing even from that to the mystery of several other people. You think you’ve solved one problem only to find it’s dragging a lot of others in its wake.

  We are all four of us important to the team. Ulub and Ubub had actually been around back when the Devereau sisters, together with Mary-Evelyn, lived across the lake in the big house, fog-gray or mist-white, take your pick. Fog and mist are appropriate settings for the Devereau house. As a boy, Ulub did yard work for them—raking leaves in the fall, cutting grass in the summer, seeing to what few flower beds they had. Indeed, Ulub had been there raking leaves the evening before the fatal night when Mary-Evelyn had gone off in the rowboat.

  Ulub was the only person I had found who could report on that night. But he has a speech problem that makes it nearly impossible to understand him. It’s not a stammer; it’s more like sounds getting lost in the cavern of his throat or knotted in his tongue. Ubub, a little older and a lot taller, isn’t much help because he also has trouble getting words across. He can understand Ulub, after a lifetime of listening, I guess. They don’t try to talk much, and who can blame them, what with people poking fun at them or treating them like idiots, which they certainly are not.

  The one person we discovered who is for some reason blessed with a word detangler in his head is Mr. Root. He is a retired person (I’m not sure from what, never having been curious enough to ask him) who, as I said, spends part of every day on the bench out in front of Britten’s Store. So do the Wood boys. So do I, lately.

  The bench is where we all met. I was sitting on it that first time watching passengers get off the Tabernacle bus that runs from Cold Flat Junction once a week to La Porte and Spirit Lake. I was there because I wanted to catch a glimpse of Toya Tidewater, who had a horrible reputation. I was not to go near any of the Tidewaters and especially Toya, my mother said. So the first chance I got, I set out looking for her, and that’s what took me to Cold Flat Junction that first time.

  I’m necessary to our group because I’m the one who decided we should all go to the Devereau house. The other three look pretty much to me to be the leader. It’s the first time anyone ever thought of me that way, so I try and keep my leadership skills sharpened. The reason I told them we should go to the Devereau place was so Ulub might better remember and could try and act out what he saw. But the other part of it was I wanted to see inside that old house where Mary-Evelyn had lived and I didn’t want to go alone.

  Britten’s Store is a short walk from the hotel and is the only store around. Often I’m sent there (or Walter, our dishwasher, is) to pick up flour or cornstarch or anything my mother runs out of. Britten’s is one of those places where people go just to hang out, drinking Cokes, buying cigarettes, spitting tobacco in the dust around the bottom step. Men like to go there and catch up on the gossip they like to say they’re not interested in.

  It was in Britten’s, when I was looking at cans of beans, that a man named Jude Stemple walked in on the group sitting around in front of the butcher counter arguing about who this dead woman was who was found by Mirror Pond, out along White’s Bridge Road. Nobody knew, including the Sheriff. Jude Stemple settled it by saying the murdered woman was “Ben Queen’s girl.”

  Fern Queen. At that time I’d never heard of Fern Queen, only of Ben himself, and that information came by way of my great-aunt Aurora, who couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth, and whether she did depended on her mood or on how many Cold Comforts she’d drunk. It was she who told me about Rose Devereau and Ben Queen.

  Ben Queen just got out of prison where he’s been for the last twenty years, convicted of murdering his wife, Rose. And this is where vengeance comes in. It turned out that it was their daughter, Fern Queen, who was shot over three weeks ago. But Ben didn’t kill Fern. I know he didn’t because I’m pretty sure I know who did.

  Every summer, my brother Will and his friend Brownmiller put on a play for the hotel guests (though it’s really more for themselves that they do it). A short while ago, my brother told me about what the Greeks called a “Do-X-machine.” This happens when things are in such a mess, or the hero is getting in more and more trouble, that God has to step in—that is, come down in a sort of chair from above, which is the “machine” part—and straighten things out. (God does not seem inclined to do this for the Hotel Paradise, I’ve noticed.)

  The Greeks are important to this story. This is because, although they might’ve wanted God to come in when things got really messy, they did not hang around waiting for God to take vengeance. No, they managed it on their own, which was swifter (and better, probably). Whenever the Greeks murdered somebody, somebody else came along later and avenged the death. Then another Greek would come along and avenge the murderer. So that it went on and on, generation after generation, revenge after revenge. It all seemed fated to happen.

  And that’s what I mean when I say the Queens are beginning to look like people in one of those Greek tragedies: first, there was Mary-Evelyn Devereau; then there was Rose Devereau Queen; then there was Fern Queen. It’s my opinion the person who shot Fern had no choice but to seek revenge and that is why Fern Queen died.

  I met Ben Queen. I’m the last person I can imagine such a thing happening to. It was in the old Devereau house across Spirit Lake—that is, the lake itself, for which the village is named. It wasn’t too surprising after I thought about it that the Devereau house is the first place he’d go after he got out of prison. That’s because he was looking for somebody. Not ghosts, not the ghosts of little Mary-Evelyn or his wife Rose. No, as grieved as he still is after twenty years, he is not a man to be pulled back to a house because he’s sentimental about it. He was looking for someone alive, and thought that’s where she would go. He might even have thought, when he heard me upstairs, that I was her.

  That I was her. It makes me feel a little strange to say it. But that’s probably what he did think when he walked into the house. After all, no one had lived there for forty years, not since the drowning of Mary-Evelyn Devereau. And it’s not just a coincidence I was there, either. I had been going there in the days following that first trip with the Woods and Mr. Root. That first time had given me courage to go back again on my own. I had begun to feel kind of at home there. I would try on Mary-Evelyn’s dresses, which were still beautiful and almost new-looking even after forty years. I examined things in her toy chest, like her Mr. Ree game, her dolls, her picture puzzles, and so forth. It got so I stayed for longer and longer periods of time. I’d take food with me, like my mother’s coconut cake, and sit out on the narrow balcony of her room and watch the sun streak the lake with the kind of s
ilver decorations my mother uses on wedding cakes.

  Ben Queen: here is a man wild in his youth, in jail for twenty years, and right after he gets out, another person in his family is murdered. You can hardly blame the Sheriff for thinking it might be the same man did it.

  The Sheriff is someone I never could imagine myself going against. But I did. I didn’t tell him I’d seen Ben Queen, much less tell him where. And I think that’s spoiled something in our relationship, for in the last couple of weeks, we haven’t walked around once to check the parking meters.

  No, in all my born days, I never thought anything would be more important than our friendship, the Sheriff’s and mine.

  4

  Orphns-in-a-storm

  Where I should have gone first was to the Queen house in Cold Flat Junction, where Ben Queen lived most of his life until he married Rose Devereau, until he’d gone to prison for murdering her.

  But remember my roundabout ways.

  Instead of going to the Queen house, I went to see Mrs. Louderback, who used cards to predict the future. I had seen her once before, and she is a nice, ordinary woman—nothing like the gypsies you sometimes see along the highway—and also honest. It’s clear she’s honest because you can “contribute” money or not. The suggested contribution is two dollars, which is certainly cheap enough for all she does. As I said, I went to her once and I’m perfectly aware she isn’t the sort of “fortune-teller” who predicts future events, like whether your pig or your apple pie will take the blue ribbon at the local fair.