Fadeaway Girl Read online

  No one was in the hotel’s back office (although I could hear Ree-Jane declaiming out in the lobby), so I phoned Axel’s and asked the dispatcher to send a cab to the Hotel Paradise. “And make sure it’s Axel that comes, please, Wilma.” It was never Axel who came.

  “Sure, hon. He’ll be back soon from taking a fare over to Lake Noir.”

  I told her I wanted to be picked up at the bottom of the first driveway—the hotel had three drives—and not in front of the hotel.

  As I said all of this I was studying the shelf that held Mrs. Davidow’s liquor bottles. The shelf was right by the big rolltop desk where she usually had her drinks around five o’clock. I took note of the empty Myers’s rum bottle and wondered if Lola would take note too. There was another bottle of a brand called Pyrat, about which Mrs. Davidow had said she better not catch anyone touching it because it was really good and really expensive. I had considered pouring a little of the Pyrat into the Myers’s bottle (which I had used up in the Rumbas), but decided that would be chancy; for all I knew she might have the Pyrat bottle measured off.

  After I put down the telephone, I stood chewing my lip, wondering what tasted most like rum. I thought of pouring some of the Jim Beam into the Myers’s bottle, but Mrs. Davidow would know the taste was funny. I decided it would be better just to take the bottle away.

  I left the hotel by the back door and walked the stone path to the cocktail garden, intending to leave the bottle on the table there. But then I decided, no, it would only call attention to its empty self.

  Will said Mrs. Davidow was definitely an alcoholic. One way you can tell you’re an alcoholic is if you do crazy things with bottles. Like in The Lost Weekend, a movie I was told I was not allowed to go to, which only meant I went as soon as it came to the Orion. (The owner, Mr. McComas, liked old movies.) Ray Milland was hiding bottles all over his apartment, even one in the chandelier.

  So here I was carrying an empty Myers’s rum bottle around, hoping I wouldn’t run into anybody unless it was a movie producer who might see possibilities in this situation. I needed to stop fooling around, so I walked down to the end of the drive, where there were a lot of thick rhododendron bushes by the badminton court. I went up the bank and stuffed the bottle in the rhododendron. I felt like Ray Milland.

  I stood at the end of the gravel drive, waiting for Axel and staring at the spot on the highway where our dog Rufus was hit and killed by a car. I’d been standing here just like this when it happened. Rufus had run out into the road, so it probably wasn’t the driver’s fault, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t remember the car or the driver. As I looked at that spot, it grew farther away and smaller, the way on a movie screen, at a fade-out, there’s a circle of light in blackness, the circle getting smaller and smaller. What was in it was Rufus dying, getting tinier and tinier until he was gone altogether and there was only the black screen.

  I blinked.

  I could call him back anytime by some awful magic of blinking. Blink, he was there; blink again, he wasn’t.

  The trouble was that I thought I could still get Rufus back only if I blinked in the right way. It happened when I was little; I was only five, so it didn’t surprise me I might have felt this way. A little kid might believe her dog was still around somewhere. When you get older you know death is only death and that’s all there was to it.

  But I still blinked.

  Axel’s Taxi pulled up at just that moment. It wasn’t Axel driving, either; it was Delbert. I knew it would be Delbert because it always was, no matter how much the dispatcher said it would be Axel. I would have thought there was no such person except I’d often seen Axel in his taxi, driving somewhere. Only he never had a fare with him.

  “You gonna just stand there all day?” Delbert stuck his head out of the driver’s-side window. “Meter’s runnin’.” He thought this was funny and slapped the steering wheel.

  “You haven’t got a meter,” I said, sliding in and down in the backseat so he couldn’t see me in his rearview mirror.

  The cab lurched forward. “No, we ain’t got meters, but if we did, it woulda been runnin’. ” His laugh was more of a pig snort. “So where’re you goin’? As if I didn’t know.” He laughed again.

  That made me really mad. “Oh really? Where?”

  “Well, it’s either the Rainbow or the courthouse. Though bein’ they’re across from each other it don’t make much difference when it comes to stopping.”

  We were passing Britten’s store, where the Wood boys and Mr. Root were sitting on the wooden bench. Or rather, two of them were, Ubub and Mr. Root. Ulub was standing with a book in his hand. I rolled down the window and called and they all turned and waved.

  Then I told Delbert to drop me at the bank.

  “The bank? You never go there.”

  “I guess you don’t know everything, do you?”

  Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of the First National and I got out and handed him the fare. I considered not tipping him, but then I gave him fifteen cents.

  It was annoying to have to walk from the bank on Second Street all the way back to the Rainbow Café, five blocks up and over, though the walk did take me by stores I liked. I found all of them mysterious in some way, like Sincell’s Haberdashery. The word itself seemed to belong to a past full of red-jacketed men and women, horses and foxes.

  Sincell’s was appropriately dark and cool inside, with tall narrow rooms. The room in the rear sold shoes and (I liked to think) rich brown hunting boots. The front room was stocked with dark silk dresses and men’s three-piece suits. Among hats nested behind tall glass cases were, I was sure, dark velvet hunting caps. And over among the canes were riding crops. I liked to think all of this.

  Just past the haberdashery was McCrory’s Five-and-Dime, where Miss Isabel Barnett practiced her kleptomania. Around the corner was Souder’s Pharmacy, with its unchanging window display of Evening in Paris toilet water and pale face powder spilling delicately from a silver compact by whoever had been wearing the long blue satin evening gloves. There was a story! I could make up half a dozen scenes on the spot to fit that perfume, those blue gloves. It made me feel warm and comfortable somehow, the notion that I could think up all of these stories and write them down. It was like always having another me around, a friend to help out.

  Along the next street and closer to the Rainbow was the tiny Oak Tree Gift Shoppe, owned by Miss Flagler. Across the narrow alley from that stood the candle store run by Miss Flyte, who was no stranger to mystery. Her shop was the one that was most mysterious, for lighted candles flickered in the windows themselves and trailed in and all the way to the back of the store.

  All of these stores had a backstory, and it occurred to me that our newspaper could do a piece on each of them. If I couldn’t actually dig out a story on each one, I could still write down my impressions of them.

  I was the youngest reporter the Conservative had ever had. Of course, I had got the job as a result of almost getting murdered at Spirit Lake, and what I was doing now was writing up the whole experience. But “Impressions of Souder’s,” “Impressions of the Haberdashery,” and so forth, that could keep me on the staff and keep me famous for many months to come.

  Ree-Jane liked to point out at least once a day that I was only a “cub reporter, not a real one,” but given Ree-Jane’s notion of reality, I was justified in not paying much attention to her opinion.

  I walked on to the Rainbow.

  Donny Mooma, the Sheriff’s deputy, was in the Rainbow, standing in front of the bakery case with a doughnut in his hand, talking to Wanda Wayans, the new waitress. We didn’t like each other, Donny and I. He was too dumb to be doing police work, and I never understood why the Sheriff kept him. Maybe Donny was what’s called a “political appointment.” The Moomas had been involved in police work in the county for several generations. There was a Mooma who’d been sheriff when the Slade baby had been kidnapped, but I guessed he must be dead now, or maybe the Moomas never died, ju
st walked the earth forever. Donny walked around kind of dead.

  I should say alleged kidnapping and for that matter even alleged baby, for, as I said, I wasn’t even sure there’d been a baby. One of the reasons I wanted to go to the Rainbow Café was to see if Miss Isabel Barnett was there. I wanted to ask her again if she’d really seen Baby Fay in that carriage. I would put it, of course, in a more polite way, not meaning to suggest that Miss Isabel’s word was unreliable. Just because she was a kleptomaniac didn’t mean you couldn’t count on her to know the difference between an empty carriage and one with a baby in it.

  I said hello to Wanda and she said hi back. Donny grunted. He was still smarting over the time I got him out of the office (so that I could inspect police files) by telling him he’d won the doughnut competition across the street, that is, in the Rainbow Café. Of course, there wasn’t any competition, but he fell for it and left without locking the office, telling me I wasn’t to go in it. Well.

  Donny was waving his doughnut with chocolate sprinkles around and talking six to the dozen about some “crazy guy” walking around town yelling at people.

  “I says to Sam we should take him in for disturbing the peace is what he’s doing—”

  “Who’s doing?” I asked.

  Donny treated me as if I were invisible. “I said, ‘Sam, the man’s a menace, a m-e-n-a-s-e—’ ”

  “C-e,” I said, looking at the doughnut display.

  He glared at me and ate some of his doughnut while he thought up an insult. “You think you know it all, don’t you?”

  “No. I just know how to spell ‘menace.’ ”I decided on a doughnut with different-colored sprinkles. I would’ve preferred chocolate, but I wasn’t going to eat the same kind Donny was eating.

  But Donny couldn’t think of any retort so he went on about the crazy person. As he munched the rest of his doughnut, he said, “ ‘The guy’s out there scarin’ little kids,’ I says to Sam—”

  “Not me,” I said, going to the unusual extreme of allowing myself to be lumped with little kids.

  “Oh, you-u-u-u,” he said, snarling and picking up his mug of coffee from the counter, which was next to the glass cases. There were stools lining the soda fountain counter, but the idea was that Donny was just too busy, too much in demand, to take the time to sit at the counter.

  “I don’t think he’s crazy,” I said, wondering who it was I was defending.

  “You? What do you know about it? You don’t even know what that sign he’s carrying means. Ha!”

  I could have just asked what he was talking about, but why do that when I could squeeze it out of him without his knowing. I’d already found out the “crazy” was carrying a sign. I asked Wanda for the doughnut I wanted. As she got it out of the case, I said to Donny, “It’s pretty obvious what it means, isn’t it?” I thanked Wanda and took my doughnut and looked at Donny as I munched on it.

  “Obvious? Obvious?” He was standing over me with a mean look in his lizard eyes and one thumb hooked in his belt while the other hand waved his coffee cup around. “Well, supposing you just tell us what the expression ‘end of days’ means, then?”

  I licked a few sprinkles from my doughnut and looked thoughtful. “One thing is, it’s not an ‘expression.’ ” That was good, I thought. That made it sound more like I knew what was going on than if I’d just waded in explaining “end of days,” which I didn’t know what it meant either. And it was always safer to say what something wasn’t, rather than say what it was. Since I had no idea what “end of days” meant. If I knew the context, now . . . Was Rudy’s or the haberdashery having a sale? Was the county trying to get liquor legal again and now some old prune that didn’t believe in drinking was going around shouting “It’s the end of days” about it? Having a liquor store right here in La Porte would save Lola Davidow the trouble of having to go into the next state to get hers. For her, it would be the beginning of days.

  “What d’ya mean not an expression?”

  Donny should watch more Perry Mason. Perry was always telling greenhorn lawyers you should never ask a question of a witness if you don’t already know the answer. “I mean ‘end of days’ means what it says. It’s literal.” Before he could ask me again what it meant, I said, “I don’t see why you think this person is scary.”

  “Oh, you don’t? Well, a course, what with all your exploits lately, I guess the end of the world coming wouldn’t bother you at all!”

  “Not especially.” So there I was: end of the world. I wanted a Coke and climbed up on a stool, my end of days set aside for the moment. I hoped Will and Mill never got wind of “end of days.” Murder in the Sky was putting us at enough peril.

  4

  I needed to see Mr. Gumbrel at the Conservative office, so I went back the way I’d come. The newspaper was beside Sincell’s, in another narrow building.

  The window of Souder’s Pharmacy stopped me again, as I looked at the Evening in Paris toilet water and the pale gloves and a photo I hadn’t noticed before, down in the corner of the window, that showed a sad-looking dog with HAVE YOU SEEN ME? beneath his face. He seemed so woeful, I wondered if when the picture was taken he’d known he’d go missing.

  I picked up my pace and walked around the corner on Second Street, but nearly stopped as I was going past McCrory’s Five-and-Dime. When I glanced through the glass door, I saw Miss Isabel Barnett at the makeup counter. I debated going in and striking up a conversation, but I didn’t want to interrupt a kleptomaniacal fit, and anyway, it would have been too hard for her to keep her mind on the Slade baby if she was considering the Tangee lipstick colors.

  When I got to the Conservative’s building I took the old oak stairs two at a time.

  “Emma!” Mr. Gumbrel was standing beside Suzie Whitelaw’s desk, reading some pages.

  “Hello, Mr. Gumbrel.”

  He slid his glasses up on his forehead and said, “Hope you’ve brought me that last installment.”

  He was, of course, referring to “The Spirit Lake Tragedy,” the story that had been selling a lot of newspapers lately, the last installment of which featured me.

  I put on my woebegone look and sadly said, “I’m really sorry. I’ve nearly finished”—I hadn’t even nearly begun—“but I just can’t get that final bit about the shooting and then I thought, ‘This isn’t exactly right.’ ”I frowned earnestly.

  “What’s not right?”

  I hitched myself up on the copy editor’s desk, trying to think up an answer to what might not be right. “Well. Well . . .”

  And then it came to me, and it wasn’t just an excuse for not doing my job. “Maybe what happened that night, maybe that’s only part of the story; maybe that’s not the end of it.”

  Mr. Gumbrel put down the pages he’d been reading. “Enlighten me.”

  You can imagine how many times anyone ever asked me to enlighten them. “Look: what happened to me is just part of something bigger.” It was unheard of for me to suggest, when given the opportunity for myself to be big, that there was anything bigger, but I managed to do it. “There’s Ben Queen, don’t forget.”

  “I haven’t. He’s in your story. He saved your life.”

  I nodded. “But Ben Queen’s story amounts to more than that. His story is also Rose Queen’s story, and that old murder. Now, that was twenty or more years ago, and that was around the time of the Belle Rouen—” I tried to pronounce it the French way but then thought of the way Ree-Jane sounded and gave that up. “Belle Ruin. Remember the disappearance of the Morris Slades’ baby?”

  “Of course I do, Emma. I had my theory about that, you recall?”

  I did, but I was more interested in my own theory. “I bet it’s all connected.” There were jumping jacks in my mind.

  Mr. Gumbrel frowned, thinking. “So what you mean is, all this is something else than the Spirit Lake tragedy—”

  I was shaking my head hard. “No. I mean it’s still the Spirit Lake tragedy. It’s just more of it. It goes on and on. L
ike the Greeks did. You know, like Medea.”

  Mr. Gumbrel laughed. “Medea, the Musical! That was some production! Your brother is some kind of genius—”

  “Yes, but he’s not part of the tragedy.” I certainly didn’t want the conversation to get sidetracked onto my brother’s “genius.” “I mean, Medea and her revenge. With the Greeks it’s all about revenge; all they ever think of is revenge.” With my mind lighting momentarily on Ree-Jane, I could understand why. “The police are finally convinced that Ben Queen didn’t murder Rose.” (I didn’t add, though I could have, thanks to me.) “I’m almost sure it was their daughter Fern—”

  “You got any evidence for this?”

  I sighed. “I’m a reporter, not a policeman. No. But it just seems logical. Anyway, my point is, somebody murders Fern out of revenge for her murdering her mother, Rose.”

  My mind was frantic with possibilities. It felt like one of the pinball machines up at Greg’s that Will and Mill played. Each little steel ball aimed and rolling into a hole. I pulled back the plunger and whicssssh went one thought after another, clack, click, clack into its hole.

  “We wrote that up about Fern Queen. But we don’t know who did it.”

  I wished he’d stop interrupting the sinking of the pinballs. “Then, don’t forget, there’s the murder of Mary-Evelyn Devereau before all of this, and I just know she was drowned because they thought she was their sister Iris’s child. Bastard child is what Isabel called her.”

  Mr. Gumbrel sat down in front of Suzie’s old Royal typewriter and tapped a few keys as if words should come out the tips of his fingers. “You’re saying the Devereau sisters killed that poor child?”