She stared at me as if I were being born in front of her, and perhaps I was. I cleared my throat and held out my tray. The glass glistened, its tiny tracks of moisture shining in the late morning sunlight that streamed through the tall window. We made a pretty picture, I
thought, me and the pink-tinged drink, for I had scrubbed my face and brushed my hair. “I brought you something.”
Naturally, she was speechless (I expected that), not with gratitude but with total surprise at this unrequested visit.
“Aunt Aurora—”
“Do
not
call me ‘aunt.’ I am
no
relation of
yours.
Oh,
I
know who you are.” She said, as if I’d been trying to keep my identity secret. “You’re the Graham girl.”
“What should I call you, then?”
“Nothing. And I won’t call you anything, either. We’ll both be nameless. With any luck, we’ll both disappear. Who made
this
? That Davidow person? This drink”— she had reached out and taken the glass and was holding it up to the window light, where the sun painted both her hand and the glass a lovely daffodil yellow—“is poisoned.” She smiled an unpleasant smile. Her lips were thin and slightly blue and snipped off words like scissors.
“I made it. It’s a special drink.”
“I’m already dying, you know.” Her thin lips smacked a bit over this news and her eyes narrowed to see how I would take it.
“I doubt it,” I said calmly. I was feeling strangely steely. It must have been being in the same room with her.
“Here!” And she thrust the glass towards me. “Try it out on the dog.”
I looked around behind me to see where it was.
“No, no,
you
, you idiot. It’s what the kings did, to see if their food was poisoned. They tossed some to their dogs.”
There was no arguing with her; I took it, sipped, and refused to cough, for all that my throat burned and my gullet flamed. But the taste, after these moments of fire, was nice and sweet from all of the fruit.
She retrieved the glass and held it, saying, “I’d better wait to see if you collapse and writhe on the floor.”
I stood and she sat in silence for perhaps half a minute.
When I didn’t writhe, she said, “Very well.” She took a drink, smacked her lips a few times, considered. “Not bad.
Interesting.
What’s in it besides the gin?”
“Well, there’s Jack Daniel’s and Southern Comfort and pineapple juice and some apple brandy and—” I stopped, remembering my mother’s rule to never give out a recipe without adding to it one or
two ingredients that weren’t in the mixture, so that if the other person made it, it would taste wrong. She’d learned that after Shirl at the Rainbow had got the recipe for her Angel Pie and started selling those pies as her own creation. When Shirl had tried to wheedle the recipe for her famous chocolate cake, my mother had told her to be sure to add a handful of cold coffee grounds.
“And strong tea.” Thinking of the coffee grounds, I added. “
Used
tea. That’s important.”
Aurora frowned. “That’s peculiar to put in.”
“I know. But that’s what gives it the nice tart taste.” If anything gave my drink its tart taste it was three jiggers of gin.
“What’s it called?” She pulled the liquid up the straw.
Names crowded my mind from
Joy of Cooking
, my mother’s personal bible—Gin Sling, Singapore Sling, Gin Fizz, Zombie—the last being the best, but not original. Then I remembered a chief ingredient was Southern Comfort. “Cold Comfort,” I said, feeling clever.
Aurora looked totally surprised and suspended drinking for a fraction of a second to actually congratulate me. “I never would of thought a Graham had any imagination.”
“Some of us do,” I answered smartly. Since there were only the three of us, that left Will and my mother up shit creek imagination-wise. But I was careful not to smile, or to register any sort of pleasure in this visit, knowing that if I did, she would probably tell me to get the hell out. So I waited.
She studied me for a while, her eyes traveling over my face and frame as if she were sizing up some item she couldn’t make up her mind to buy. “You play poker? Gin rummy?” She grabbed up the tattered pack of playing cards, cut them quick, and snapped the two halves together in a lightning shuffle. There was in Aurora the strong hint of the card shark.
But I wasn’t to be put off. “No.”
“Wait until you’re old and forgotten,” she said, slapping down a card. “Then you’ll be glad of cards.”
This pitying description of herself was laughable. “You’re not forgotten. That dumbwaiter must come up here a dozen times a day.” I was getting reckless. “And you wouldn’t be alone if you lived downstairs with the rest of us.” I hoped she wouldn’t take me up on this. She paid no attention; her hand was straying back over the table, the card forgotten, on to the several items there set out for her
entertainment, and came down on the walnut halves. “We can play this, penny a point.” She slid the dried pea under one of the shells and gave me a wily look. “You guess which one it’s under.” Expertly, she whisked the shells around. “Guess.”
The thing was, on the table sat a large bowl of walnuts, and these shells had been cracked open, the nuts eaten. “You can’t play it with real shells,” I said. “Because they’re all different.” I pointed out the broken off end of one shell, the blackened line that ran down another. “It’s like playing poker and having an ace of hearts in there from a pack with a different design on the back. People would always know who had that ace.”
She said nothing, just sat there waiting with her lips clamped together.
“The pea’s under this one,” I said with a sigh as I touched the shell.
She shook her head and with a grim little smile said, “No, it isn’t.”
Well, it was. But she wasn’t going to lift the shell to prove it, and when I started to protest she swept shells and pea off the table into her palm.
She said: “For someone that wants something, you don’t seem to be willing to work for it.”
“Who said I wanted something?”
“You wouldn’t be up here bribing me if you didn’t.” Her hand in its sequined gray mitt curled around the Cold Comfort; it made me think of a snake, its flashing scales, coiling.
“I only wanted information.”
“Ha!”
The syllable exploded, flung upwards as if through the ceiling, as if she were challenging an Archangel with an “I told you so! Didn’t I tell you?”
“It’s just something nobody remembers anything about, much. My mother only remembers a little—”
The “Ha!” hit the ceiling again. “Your
mother
, she’s not a Paradise! And that Lola Davidow—they think they can steal my hotel out from under me! Well,
I
have my plans to stop
that
, don’t think I don’t!”
“What plans?”
Her eyes were bright as the sequins on the mittens as she gouged the bottom of her glass with the straw, the way I like to do with sodas. Right then and there I had an overpowering desire for a chocolate ice
cream soda with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. I told myself when this Aurora ordeal was over, that right after lunchtime, I would walk into La Porte to Souder’s Drug Store. Mrs. Souder used real whipped cream on her sodas.
I clutched the black dragon-painted tray as Aurora leaned towards me out of her green wicker chair, stirring up motes of dust and light and sending out whiffs of rosewater and lavender. The closer I was to her, the sweeter the air became, a whole potpourri of scents. I had expected a fouler air, I guess, something rank and nasty you’d associate with old age and a wasting body and a mean mind, something smacking more of fire and brimstone.
“My
plan
, Miss Smartypants, is to burn the Hotel Paradise to the ground, if it don’t combust before I get around to it!”
Involuntarily—for I had meant to stand my ground, no matter what—I took a step backwards. “When?” My first thoughts were not for anyone’s fate, but to get my belongings out of the Pink Elephant.
“At my con-ven-i-ence, of course. It’ll be like Manderley! I’ll go down with the hotel! I’ll be out there on that balcony”—and she waggled her hand towards the window— “laughing fit to kill! I’ll be the last thing to go! Anyway, that’s my plan,” she wound up in a completely normal tone of voice.
“You’ll be the
first
to go if you’re out on that balcony, it’s so rotted.”
“Oh, don’t be so goddamned
literal
! Here”— she brandished the empty glass— “scare me up another Cold Comfort.”
I didn’t take it. I stood there resolute and said, “I will if you tell me about the Devereaus.”
Her forehead clenched in a deep frown. “You mean the ones lived over by Spirit Lake?”
“Yes.” I relaxed a bit. At least she hadn’t thrown the glass at me. Seeing I wasn’t reaching for it, she relented and set it on the table. But she stared at it as if by sheer power of will she’d raise the bit of liquid in the bottom to brimful.
“Tell you
what
about them?”
“Whatever you know.” I didn’t want to qualify this by mentioning Mary-Evelyn’s death.
“They were all touched. Especially Isabel Devereau. Though maybe that made her less coldhearted than Louise. Well, craziness is
to be expected if you have all those sisters living together. If I lived with
mine
I’d be stark raving. And there was the young one, Rose Souder.”
Rose? My mother hadn’t mentioned a Rose Souder. “You mean she wasn’t a Devereau?”
“Oh, she was, far as I know. She was a half-sister. Her mother was related in some way to these trashy Souders around here.”
I thought of Souder’s Drug Store. Old Mrs. Souder didn’t strike me as “trashy” at all. But I didn’t want to say so and have her arguing all over the place and bringing in other Souders to prove her point. I said, “My mother didn’t ever mention a Rose Souder Devereau.”
“That’s because no one talked about her. She was the black sheep.”
Those words stilled any nervous shifting I’d been doing, standing there with my tray. “Black sheep” was a phrase that always got my attention, since I thought probably I belonged to that poor flock. “Why? What did she do wrong?”
“Made trouble.” Aurora had put back the walnut halves, the dried pea under one, and was playing the trick on herself, since I wouldn’t cooperate. Her bony hands whisked the three halves about the table’s surface. “She played the piano, though. She played and that crazy Lillian, or Isabel, sang. You could hear it from down the road.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Now she was sitting back, staring in frowning concentration at the shells, ready for another round. She looked up at me from under penciled-in eyebrows. “Where’s the pea?”
I guessed I’d have to play the stupid trick. “This one.” Anyone else would have been clever enough to choose the wrong walnut shell. But I had no patience with this sort of thing. We both knew where the pea was, and I couldn’t pretend
I
didn’t, even if she could. I don’t know what it was about me that made it so difficult to go along with harmless deceptions.
Her mouth cracked in her version of a smile. “No it isn’t.”
“It is too.” I reached out my hand to prove it and she smacked it, smarting the knuckles.
Then she removed the pea, at least I suppose she did, since she shielded the operation with her hand. And, still keeping the shells blocked from my view, she hid the pea.
It was just plain silly. “Wait a minute! The whole idea of this trick
is to show the hand is quicker than the eye. That doesn’t work if I don’t see where the pea’s put at the very
start.”
But she was paying no attention to my objections, just shifting the shells quickly about. “Which one?” Her tone was triumphant, as if she’d really bested me this time.
I didn’t even care where I pointed, and she clapped her sides several times,
whack whack whack
, and cawed with laughter, as if she’d just done the cleverest thing in the world. “Wrong! Wrong! It’s
this
one!” This time, of course, she raised a shell-half to reveal the traveling pea. Satisfied now that she’d finally got me, she pushed them to one side, picked up her glass, and gurgled the straw.
But I refused to knuckle under. “What about Rose Devereau?”
“Who?”
Impatient, I said, “Rose Souder
Devereau.
You didn’t tell me why she was a black sheep.”
“Ran off with Ben Queen.” Now, she had the Bicycle cards in her hand and was snapping them.
I was rooted. Here was another name totally new to me.
Ben Queen.
I nearly licked my lips, tasting these new names that seemed as delicious as the Souder’s soda I was hankering after. New names I could search for, since my investigation into Mary-Evelyn’s strange death had pretty much stalled.
Even without my asking, putting the cards down for solitaire, Aurora said (but it was clear it was to herself), “Ben Queen! Now wasn’t he the best-looking man I ever did see! Women’d line up all the way to perdition and back for a chance at Ben Queen. I think he took a fancy to me; it was him taught me how to play cards, poker especially.” Her hand ruffled the pack of cards, as if it too had a memory. “I was a
little
older than Ben Queen—” Cagily, she looked at me. “He mustn’t have been much more than twenty or twenty-one—or else I might just’ve run off with him myself, even if those Queens was crazy. I wonder if he’s still alive? Be in his sixties by now, I guess.”
Did she think she’d taken me in with that age business? If he was sixty now Aurora would be thirty years older than Ben Queen.
“Well, they wouldn’t let him come to see Rose, those crazy Devereau sisters. Never set foot in that house. Probably thought the Queens wasn’t good enough for the Devereaus. Ha! But men like Ben Queen,
they always find a way in. So Rose ran off with him.” Aurora stopped a moment to study the walnut shells. “Then there was the scandal.”
My eyes bugged out. “The scandal?”
She gave me a sly look. “Never you mind, miss. It was over in Cold Flat Junction, anyways.”