Bellweather Rhapsody (36 page)

Hastings clears his throat and straightens his tie. It takes much longer than it should, but he gathers himself and pushes up from the sofa. The phone has been ringing forever. It must be a worried parent, or maybe someone from the town with an update on the plowing. Life—here, in the present moment—is coming back. It’s all coming back, and when Hastings presses the cool plastic handset to his ear, he almost sounds like himself.

“Hello, Bellweather Hotel. Hastings speaking. How may I be of—”

“Mr. Hastings! Mr. Hastings, it’s Helen Stoller. Doug Kirk’s assistant from—from Statewide?” Her voice is wobbly and far away. “We’ve spoken before. Many times.”

“Yes, yes, of course. How are you, Ms. Stoller? And how is Dr. Kirk?”

Helen Stoller is silent. Hastings wonders how badly the storm has affected the phone lines, if she’s been disconnected, until he hears the unmistakable sound of crying.

“He died,” she says. “He was awake briefly this morning, he came out of the coma, but by the afternoon he was gone. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry to be telling you this. I’m so sorry that this happened. He has young children, you know.” She swallows, and then continues icily, “If you could please convey this information to Dr. Fabian. I’ve been trying to reach her but she’s not in her room. She must be at the banquet still.”

The banquet! What time is it? Has he slept through the banquet? What on earth is wrong with him this weekend?

“There’s no real protocol for . . . how to handle this. And the
timing,
” Helen Stoller says. “Fabian just needs to know, that’s all. She can tell people however she sees fit and we’ll figure out the details next week. When you’re plowed out, that is.”

“I expect that shouldn’t be long now.” His mouth is cottony. “I’m terribly sorry to hear about Dr. Kirk. He was a gentleman and a great supporter of this festival. And . . . a friend.”

“That’s so kind of you,” says Helen, before choking on a sob that Hastings has little doubt will turn into a full-fledged wail as soon as the connection has been cut. It isn’t until he hangs up the phone that he realizes why Helen is so very sad: Viola Fabian is now the head of Statewide.
That beastly woman is now the head of Statewide.

Hastings shudders but gets on with it. He straightens his sleeves and cuffs, tugs the wrinkles out of his jacket, and nods curtly at the boy at the check-in desk, he can’t remember his name, who barely looks up from his paperback when Hastings emerges from the office. It is nearly nine. He tells himself he’ll have ample time to feel embarrassed about wasting the majority of the day—not to mention missing the entire banquet and speaking program—
after
he’s found Viola Fabian. Students and teachers are still milling in the ballroom, but dessert has long since been served. He asks one of the girls tidying up an empty table if she’s seen a woman with long white hair, and is rewarded with a sympathetic shrug.

“Did everything go well tonight? Do you think they enjoyed their meal?” he asks.

The girl shrugs again.

“The dessert—did the kids like the flambé?”

“I guess,” she says.

Hastings has been an absentee concierge. He’s let them down. He’s wasted the precious time he has with them, this time that he waits for all year.

The elevator ride is excruciating. The hallway seems to double in length as he approaches Viola Fabian’s door. He knows how he’ll say it—simply, just the facts—but he has no idea how he’ll do so without betraying his own bitter disappointment at the pall that has hung over this particular Statewide.

He looks at his feet. He lifts his hand to knock.

The door is not quite closed.

“Dr. Fabian?” he calls. “Dr. Fabian, are you in there? I have an important message for you.” He knocks lightly on the open door, which swings in under his fist. “Dr. Fabian, is everything all right?”

Hastings peers into the room. Fabian is sitting at the desk, her back to the door, head down on the desktop. Her white hair, released from its ponytail, trails over the edge like a frozen waterfall.

He calls her name again, at full volume this time, and when she doesn’t respond he walks into her room. His eyes capture everything: the electric teakettle plugged into the wall, burping little clouds of steam. A teacup perched on its side. A small puddle of brown tea. What looks like a glass baby food jar full of sugar.

Fabian’s face is tilted forward. She is looking at a piece of white paper tented on the opposite end of the desk, in front of an empty chair. He doesn’t know she’s dead until he reads the note. Printed in neat black capitals, in familiar permanent marker, are the words
NOW WE ARE FREE.

Rome is waiting for him in the hall.

“Hastings,” he says. “We have to talk.”

Hastings pulls the door of Viola Fabian’s room shut with what he hopes is a respectful click. He unplugged the kettle but left everything else as he’d found it. He needs to call the police. He needs to leave the scene untouched. He needs to figure out how he’s going to tell them about any of this without sounding like the complete incompetent he is. Jill’s death
was
a murder, he can see it as clear as a banner headline:
FABIAN MURDERS DAUGHTER; CONSUMED WITH GUILT, TAKES OWN LIFE.

It had a pleasing shape. A logical symmetry. It ate its own tail.

But Viola Fabian would never eat her own tail. It didn’t make any—

“Hastings, look at me,” Rome says, and physically stops Hastings with a hand on each shoulder. “We have to talk about Caroline. About me. And Jess too.”

Hastings exhales angrily through his nose. “I have work to do. Where the hell did you come from, anyway?”

“That’s what we have to talk about. Listen—listen to me.”

He shakes Rome away and walks double-time to the elevator. He calls the car and steps inside, and when he turns, his gaze traveling the length of the hallway, Rome has vanished.

Hastings is suddenly terrified.

He’s sweating. His shirt feels sticky beneath his jacket.

A girl. A girl. A daughter in his arms on a dim dance floor. She should be happy but she’s sad.

The elevator ascends. Hastings’s lungs spasm with short, shallow gasps. He sees an unfinished Scrabble game. Pink and purple flowers on a casket. Bright blue bunting in the small ballroom. Bright blue cummerbunds. Bright blue frosting rosettes on the cake. He remembers dancing at her wedding. He remembers Caroline in his arms, his changeling, secret daughter, surprisingly light in that giant confection of a dress, smiling at him, pressing her warm forehead against his shoulder and humming along to Frank Sinatra, swinging together, singing. Rockies crumbling. Gibraltar tumbling.

He never talked to her. He never stopped her. He never knew her.

She didn’t let him save her.

And he would have,
he would have
. She didn’t even need to ask.

(But apparently she did.)

His bow tie is trying to strangle him. He works a shaking finger under the knot and pulls and he presses two burning tears from the corners of his eyes when he thinks of his daughter’s throat, of that horrible purple line on his daughter’s long throat, of that horrible red mass on his son-in-law’s chest. Purple and red. Not bright blue.

The elevator hovers and stops moving. The doors open.

23

“Y
OU JUST MISSED HIM.
Literally. By, like, ten minutes.” The kid behind the front desk bobs his neck, flicking the hair out of his eyes. “He’ll probably be back. He’s always here.”

Minnie drums her fingers on the counter. “Do you know where he went?”

“Dunno. He was moving pretty fast.” He rubs his forehead with the spine of his book. “He always walks like he’s got something important to do, so it’s hard to tell when he actually does.”

She looks over at Alice, sitting on one of the lobby chairs and leaning over to pet Auggie’s belly. They’ll have to wait. There’s really no other option. And all because Minnie herself had insisted on waiting—on ordering dinner from room service, getting all the background they could from Sheila, and not rushing into a confrontation with a fragile old man. Minnie felt more than compassion for him. She felt responsible, as though it was her duty, hers and hers alone, to ease his suffering.

The more she found out about Harold Hastings, the worse she felt for him, which was another reason to wait. The last thing in the world he needed was a pity party—this from someone who had been a walking pity party for the balance of her childhood. Minnie suspected that all she and Hastings needed was each other: someone who had been there, whom they could talk to about that night without saying a single word, who would never begin a sentence with “You poor,” followed by an invocation of a baby sheep. It had been ridiculously hard to talk about it with her parents and her pro-bunny therapist. But to have no one to talk to at
all
was unfathomable, horrifying, and, at least according to Sheila, Hastings was utterly alone. His wife had been killed in a car accident. His daughter had killed her husband and herself. His only friend had died and left everything he owned to Hastings, piles of junk he had to deal with. He had no other children, no other siblings, no other friends. He didn’t even have the same coworkers, the ones who had known daughter and wife and Hastings in better times. The management was new. The chambermaids and kitchen and grounds crew had turned over several times since. He was a relic, a leftover.

He was a ghost.

Auggie nose-nudges her foot when she takes the sofa seat opposite Alice. Minnie’s become acclimated to the idea of Hastings, to the memory she forgot, but she’s as sad and anxious and jumpy as ever, on the verge of tears, of screaming, of running way the hell away. Alice makes a fist and a face that would be tough if she weren’t so cute.
Solidarity, sister
. You can do this.

But what, really—what the hell does Minnie think she can do? How arrogant is it to think that
she
can be of use to a stranger with serious mental problems? Let’s be honest, she’s a cliché: an overweight girl seeking solace in stories, finding catharsis in movies, who would be pretty if she just took off her glasses, stopped referring to her pet and herself using the first-person plural, and went to the damn prom. It’s way too late for the prom. She has to believe it isn’t too late for everything else. But what can she possibly offer him? And why does she feel that she’s the only person who can offer him anything at all?

Auggie rights himself with a puppyish grunt and presses his forehead flat against her shins.

“Good dog,” she says, and rubs his silky ears.

Alice leans back in her chair, fingers laced, twiddling her thumbs.

Three people cross the lobby. Or rather, two walk while supporting a third between them, and they’re so quiet and focused on their mission that Minnie’s first instinct is to look away. There’s nothing to see; nothing to do with her, at least.

The youngest turns so Minnie can see his face.

“Is that your brother?” she asks Alice.

Alice was obsessed with the superpowers that came with being a twin. These powers, strictly speaking, did not exist, but that didn’t stop her from flexing her end of the muscle. On long car trips, she’d close her eyes, scrunch her face, and whip her head toward her brother.

“What number am I thinking of?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Think.
Receive,
Rabbit.” She’d laugh. “Adjust your psychic rabbit ears.”

Rabbit played along with her in the beginning—seven! thirteen! one hundred and eight and a half!—but it got pretty annoying after the hundredth wrong answer. He had a bit of a sixth sense about his twin, but that had less to do with parapsychology than with the fact that they lived in the same house, went to the same school, were raised by the same two people. Rabbit would have loved to believe his sister could speak to him using only her mind. He hated to think that she might, in fact, be able to do just that, that it was
his
mind that had faulty wiring and could neither broadcast nor receive. He’d tried sending messages to her, silent but strong shouts from the bottom of his brain—
Hello, Alice. Can you hear me? Thirteen. Blue. P.S. I’m gay
—but she never responded. She never gave any indication that she heard a word he thought.

So when he saw her in the lobby, Mrs. Wilson’s arm heavy on the back of his neck—how could she be so heavy, she was
skinny—
when he saw Alice’s face peering out from behind one of the high-backed chairs, the force of what he felt, what came at him from his sister, almost knocked him off his feet.

I love you.

She didn’t speak. She sprang out of the circle of chairs and ran to him. He was so happy to see she was safe and to know that she loved him that Rabbit almost forgot he was dragging his semiconscious chaperone through the lobby, and how he came to be doing so.

It happened at the end of dinner. The very end—dessert had been (flamboyantly) served, and most of the people at his table had gone back to their rooms, but Rabbit, still high from rehearsal, still convinced the future was coming at him like a locomotive, was ready. He had to find his sister, had to find her tonight.

Fisher Brodie leaned in beside him.

Rabbit tensed. The table was empty now, Brodie hovering over him with both palms flat on the tablecloth. He looked fidgety.

“Hello, Hatmaker,” he said. “Have you seen a redhead?”

“Uh.” Rabbit blinked. “Yes.”

“Oh, right, sorry—an adult. She’s a teacher. Natalie—last name starts with a W.”

“Wilson?”

Fisher frowned. “Yes.”

“You were sitting with her this morning, in the auditorium. She’s my conductor. My teacher, back home.”

“She’s
your
—” Brodie sniffed. “Well, naturally. Right, so, have you seen her?”

Rabbit shook his head. “Not tonight.”

Brodie was more than fidgety. He was, as Rabbit’s grandmother would have said, downright agitated.

“Listen, Hatmaker. I’m only telling you this because you’re a decent sort. Our friend Mrs. Wilson had quite a bit of drink tonight and has gone missing. I called her room but she wasn’t there.”