I looked up the road towards a school ground I couldn’t see. Could that have been her—the dark lady who walked out of the door and stood and just looked straight ahead of her? Miss Lou Landis. It’s funny sometimes the way things all seem to be connected.
“And then what?” I asked.
“Well, there was this investigation, of course, and the sheriff—”
“Was it
our
sheriff?” I gasped.
He frowned a bit, puzzled. “Oh, you mean DeGheyn. No, Sam DeGheyn wasn’t sheriff then. Another one . . . can’t remember that fellow’s name. . . .”
I thought a moment and now
I
was puzzled. “Wait a minute. If there was this trial it must’ve been in La Porte! That’s the county seat. And I can’t imagine people wouldn’t remember it, like Mr. Root here—”
Jude Stemple was holding up his hand for me to stop. “But it weren’t in La Porte. There was a change of venue.”
I frowned. “Change of menu?” I guess my thoughts never strayed far from food.
“Not ‘menu.’ ‘Venue.’ That’s where they have a trial elsewhere when they think a jury’d be too prejudicial in the place where the crime was committed.” He spat tobacco juice. He seemed proud for being so knowledgeable about venues. “Trial was over in Meridian. Hundred miles away, that was. Didn’t last long, neither. But his lawyer got the other lawyer to agree to manslaughter, that Ben did it in a fit of temper. Something like that.” Jude Stemple sighed. Then he went on. “I think anybody’d really think twice before they hurt Rosie Queen. Yes, I think even the devil’d give Rose Queen a wide berth. There was just somethin’ about her, somethin’ that kept bad thoughts away.” He was looking up towards the tops of the trees now, up where the sun was going down and the leaves had trapped the red-gold light. “I recall one day seeing Rose walking along the Holler Road up there, a basket over her arm, for she was bringing eggs or something to sick old Mrs. Jessup. And she waved at me, halloo’d and waved, her arm up in the air, and I recall how—
bright
she was. Just
bright.
As if she was filled with the sun behind her back.” Here he raised his own arm, the fingers of his hand spread against the sunlight, and I could see the blood in it, looking red-gold. As if he were waving back at Rosie Queen. “Rose was so light you could almost look right through her—” He stopped suddenly, embarrassed. “Well, anyways. I’m not good with words, never was.”
“I think you are, Mr. Stemple. I think you’re real good with words.”
Mr. Root nodded, agreeing.
Mr. Stemple went on. “I just never in my life saw a girl as beautiful as Rose Devereau Queen. Never did. And she was still a girl, you know, even when she was near forty years old. I never seen her like again. I never have.”
I have
, I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. I was quiet in honor of Mr. Stemple’s powers of description. But not for long. “What happened to Fern? Did she just go on living with Sheba and George?” My mother always told me to never call unfamiliar adults by their first names. But by this time I really felt I’d known the Queens all my life.
“Fern, she went away for a long time. Sheba Queen’s got kin out west someplace, and I think Fern went to stay with them.”
“Out west” was almost as romantic-sounding to me as “Ben Queen.” “So when she come—came—back, was she still touched?” I had no trouble at all falling into Cold Flat speech.
“Yeah, she still was. Fern got better when she got older; she got a little common sense in her. But she always did act queer.”
I looked up to the tops of the trees where the sun turned the dark leaves now to a glassy greenness you could see through. I imagined them staying like this until autumn, when they would drift down and blow against one another so that everywhere would be the sound of wind chimes. I listened so hard to this glassy leaf-tinkling I lost track of Jude Stemple’s talk. Until he said, “Now he’s out.”
I was puzzled. I stared at Jude Stemple. “What?”
“Ben Queen. He’s out of prison.”
For someone who swore that we of the Hotel Paradise were trying to poison her, Miss Bertha certainly managed to get in for her meals quick enough so as to give us plenty of chances at it. She felt it her due to take up a lot of my time rehashing the sausage-breakfast calamity. Also, she felt that she was now entitled to refuse the set menu entirely, and insisted my mother cook her something special. This did not sound very logical, as it’s always those “special” dishes that have arsenic and so forth in them. She declined the pork chops and chicken. She wanted fish.
My mother was fit to be tied. She told me to go back and tell the old fool that she’d cook her a mushroom omelette, and if she wanted fish, give her one of Will’s fishing poles and tell her to go down to Spirit Lake. My mother banged the pots and pans around on the stove and Walter nearly killed himself laughing. I, of course, had to bear the bad tidings back and forth between them and was feeling put-upon until I remembered this was really my fault. So I accepted my punishment and offered Miss Bertha the mushroom omelette. She declined, saying there’d be a death’s cap mushroom in it, and toadstools for good measure. No thank you,
miss.
Poor Mrs. Fulbright, talcumed and pink-cheeked, was mortified that Miss Bertha could “blacken the good name of the Hotel Paradise.” Miss Bertha countered by pointing out nobody was trying to kill Serile Fulbright,
were they
? So naturally Serile would stick up for the hotel.
It was about this time that Will came in with his great big smile and great big lie. He told Miss Bertha how wonderful she looked and
announced he’d caught a fresh rainbow trout just for her. Would she like it almondine?
I stood there getting nauseous listening to him. But Will can do no wrong. Everybody trusts Will, and this always amazes me, because I am far more to be trusted than he is. Well, maybe not more to be
trusted.
I mean, I lie too, but for important reasons. Will just does it for fun.
Naturally, all of this wheedling attention worked on Miss Bertha like a charm and she said the rainbow trout would do fine, with just some lemon.
I stood with my arms wrapped around my tray wishing for something to get me out of this dining room.
For once in my life, my prayer was answered.
The dumbwaiter wasn’t working again and Aurora was demanding
I
bring her up her before-dinner drink. When I took Mrs. Davidow’s dinner out to the back office, she was shouting up the shaft Regina would take her up a drink and Aurora shouting back to keep that blond floozie off the fourth floor! I ran back to the kitchen to tell my mother. She could hardly contain her laughter, for I knew she couldn’t stand Ree-Jane either, in spite of always giving her white meat of chicken. Walter overheard me and laughed his hiccuppy laugh.
Mrs. Davidow shouted out of the office window for somebody to come. My mother went out and listened to her and came back and told me Great-Aunt Aurora wanted me to take her her cocktail up and her dinner too. My mother said further, to Vera’s astonished ears, that I could be excused from waiting tables any more that dinnertime, as I had to perform this chore. As a dinner party had canceled, that left only three tables of hotel guests, and Vera could easily handle them.
Vera would have to wait on Miss Bertha! She gave me a look that would have cut like my mother’s meat cleaver as she whisked around the kitchen, so starched and clean she looked varnished.
Lola Davidow fixed up a small pitcher of Davidow martinis and placed it on a tray together with a stemmed glass—probably no substitute for a Cold Turkey, but I couldn’t help that. As I went through the swinging door, Miss Bertha was refusing to have Vera wait on their table, said she’d trained me up to do it right, and she didn’t want Vera messing up Miss Bertha’s good schooling, that Vera wasn’t a good waitress, not like me. I was through the dining room and hearing
all of this to my extreme delight. Vera’s colorless eyes blazed at me. With the small tray of martinis professionally balanced on one hand, I called to her, “Be sure to give Miss Bertha lots of hot rolls,” and then made a dash, as far as the laden tray would let me, through the dining room door.
Aurora cast her eagle eye on the pitcher as I set it down beside her game of solitaire. I noticed that the cards were put down properly, red on black and black on red.
“Is this that Davidow woman’s martinis? Where’s my Cold Comfort? I told her you were to make me a Cold Comfort!” She slapped a black eight on a black nine and added, “So go make me one!”
“It takes some ingredients we’re out of.”
Suspiciously, she looked up at me over the rims of glasses set halfway down her nose. “Well, it ain’t liquor you mean. This place is
never
out of al-co-hol-ic refreshment.”
“No, but we’re out of maraschino cherry juice,” I said.
“Oh, for pity’s sakes. Just leave it out.”
I shook my head. “Can’t, because it’s part of the secret. It”— I searched for one of my mother’s cooking words—“binds everything together. It
binds
the whole drink together.” And before she could object, I said, “But after you eat your dinner, I’ll bring you a special after-dinner drink.” Since it could take hours for Aurora to eat her dinner, she fooled around so much, she’d probably forget all about it. “Or if I can’t, somebody else can bring you some brandy or something like that.”
She glared at me over the jack of hearts she was going to slap down on the queen of diamonds. She was doing it just to annoy me, I knew. “Not that peroxide-headed tart, not her!”
“I was thinking of Will. He’d be glad to.” Serve him right for that trout story.
“That smart-ass brother of yours? I don’t want him within a mile of my place. And not that Conroy brat, either. I will never know how that busybody mother of his ever laid still long enough to do what it takes to have a baby.” She swept all of the cards up and rattled them together in one dramatic gesture. Sometimes I could picture Aurora Paradise on one of those Mississippi gambling boats.
I was surprised hearing her talk about Will that way. I said Vera could bring up anything she wanted.
“That gussied-up plank of wood! My God, I don’t know how your mother stands her. I don’t see why
you
can’t do it.”
“It’ll be past my bedtime,” I replied.
Well, Aurora had the good sense not to believe
that
, but she said, anyway, “Let that man bring it up—at least he’s got the sense not to talk my arm off. He can bring up my dessert and coffee, too, since I see you do not seem so in-
clined.
” She bit the last half-dozen words off.
“That man”? Surely she couldn’t mean Walter. I never even thought she knew Walter was alive; besides, no one ever asked for Walter. “You mean Walter?”
“I don’t know his name, do I? Godsakes, ain’t I got enough to do without learning all the kitchen help’s names?” Briskly, she shuffled the cards, fanned them out, and shuffled again. “The one with black hair kind of falls forward.”
“That’s Walter. You mean he can bring up your dinner?”
“No, I mean the damned cat can bring it! Didn’t I just
say
I wanted him to do it?”
“Okay, that’s good.”
“Just as long as I get my drink later, too, you hear?”
I heard.
When I told them in the kitchen Great-Aunt Aurora wanted Walter to take up her dinner, everyone was dumbfounded. Except for Walter. He just dried his hands on the kitchen towel and said he’d be glad to do it. I marveled at how smooth and unsurprised he was, and then I left.
This time I took a stronger flashlight, a lanternlike one that can turn the entire area you’re standing in to a sick white light. It would be another hour and a half before darkness came, but I was ready for it. Dusk always seemed to last longer here than it did other places, hovering over Spirit Lake like a great gray moth.
As I walked, I looked across the lake to see the house blending into the trunks of gray trees, becoming part of the wood. It looked the same. Maybe I’d expected it to change with all of the new things I’d found out over the last few days.
I stopped here at the spring to get my usual drink of water and also filled up my water bottle. As I drank from the tin cup, I looked down into the tiled pool at the center of this way place, searching the bottom to see if anyone had tossed in any money. I must have been the only one who did throw it in, for I recognized my coins lying down there and none had come to keep them company. People hardly ever come to this spring now. Like my father, they used to, but not anymore.
I had lost something of my fear of the woods, having made this trip twice already. Still, to be sure the flashlight was working, I switched it on and off a few times to check the batteries. It worked fine. I picked up my old book satchel, in which I’d brought a triangle of coconut cake (in case I got stranded), and started walking.
For some time I walked through the stillness, with the only sound the soft squish of my feet on mulchy leaves, or, occasionally, the sharp snap of twigs breaking. As I walked, I began to notice that I felt proud of myself, and this surprised me. A year ago, even a month ago, I
would never have considered such a trip as I was making. The Devereau place had always seemed such a sealed-up secret, and the woods impassable. But now both house and woods had become recognizable and familiar places; I was beginning to feel secure just knowing where the leaf-blackened path led. That made the surroundings less mysterious, and I could imagine a day when there might be no mystery attached to these woods and the house at all. That made me pause a moment to wonder if I had to give up mystery to gain security. While I thought this over, I decided to take a drink of spring water from my canteen. And as long as I was taking a drink, I might as well sit down and have some coconut cake, too.
My seat was a crumbling log right by the tree where Ulub had carved AL beneath a heart, and I wondered again if he had ever had a girlfriend. With my cake in my hand, I got up and peered at the heart and ran my finger around its roughly carved edge. It was kind of hard to imagine Ulub with a girlfriend. But, then, I couldn’t imagine
me
with a boyfriend, either, so that was nothing against Ulub. I finished off the white icing and coconut shreds, picked up my satchel, and walked on.