Fadeaway Girl (10 page)

“After we're finished, of course.”

“When will
that
be? I want to know what Patty Flynn is like.”

Mill's piano started up, and so did Will:

It was all I could take, so I left.

H
ours later, I came downstairs to find Ralph sitting on the porch with the Duchess of Devonshire, rocking and smoking, sending streams of smoke upward as if he owned the air.

 

Ree-Jane was doing her appreciative laugh in answer to something he'd said, her head thrown back, ruby lips parted.

Their backs were to the front screen door, so I stood behind it and listened to hear if either said anything quotable.

“So how . . . be staying?”

“. . . business . . .”

“What . . . ?”

The tall backs of the rockers muffled their voices, especially Ralph's as his was deep. Ree-Jane's was often high and screechy, so her words carried better. But from the little I could make out, Ralph Diggs was here on some kind of business. Then why had he said he was just passing through? And she was speaking to him as if he were a guest, not an employee.

I heard her high-pitched laugh again. It was mirthless.

He would of course charm her to death.

I thought of
Night Must Fall
.

“Why don't you like him?” I said to my mother as she slid a chicken breast onto Aurora's dinner plate. Just a moment ago, she had said hiring Ralph might not have been the best idea in the world.

“Like who?”

I rolled my eyes. “This Ralph-Rafe Diggs.”

“I don't know; he just seems suspicious. Hand me that napkin.”

“It's Chicken Cordon Bleu, isn't it?” I knew my chicken, at least my mother's. I knew my French too, if it was attached to food.

“It is.” She was wiping a narrow stream of chicken juiciness from the rim of the plate. Peas from the Emerald City of Oz were spooned onto it.

“I don't think Great-Aunt Aurora likes this kind of chicken.”

“I don't think I care.” Mashed potatoes, pooled with butter, crowned with a snip of parsley, made up the plate.

“But if she likes chicken at all, how could she not like this?” I said.

I took note of how quickly my mother and I could change the subject of suspicious bellhops to food.

 

It was another “Night of the Baby Bibbs” with Mrs. Davidow hovering over them protectively. She seemed to look on these lettuces as the communion wafers of the Hotel Paradise. I liked to imagine Father Freeman on a Sunday, as he was going down the line, placing tiny Bibb lettuces on the tongues of his flock, then coming back with a chalice of French dressing.

“Emma!”

Vera jumped me right out of my church visit.

“Don't put too much dressing on them; don't use the ladle, use a spoon.”

I liked the big ceramic pot of French dressing. At the bottom, an onion sat, marinating for a long time like a hermit in a cave. I liked to stir the dressing and watch it bind together, the oil and vinegar, the paprika, garlic, salt, pepper, sugar.

“All right,” I said. “Who's coming?”

“The Custises and their party.” She sniffed.

Vera had a thin, angular nose, good for disdainful sniffing. When she sailed out into the dining room in her black uniform with starched white cuffs as sharp as knives, she could have cut the Custises' throats by passing the Parker House rolls. I dwelt on this image awhile and then started ladling out the dressing.

Now Lola Davidow was back, martini in hand, to make sure herself I didn't drown the baby Bibbs. Seeing they still breathed, she grunted and went away.

I counted the salads, subtracting two for Miss Bertha and “her party” and one more for Mr. Muggs, our traveling salesman.

That left eight salads, so that was the number of the Custis “party.” I myself couldn't stand the Custises. They lived in one of the big white frame houses across the highway on nearly an acre of land. They were “summer people” and liked to take over each and every holiday and event they could. Every summer there was a tennis tournament, where they'd play mixed doubles, but were always so hung-over they had a hard time seeing the net. But they made sure they were at the center of every cocktail party, every corn and weenie roast, every dance and prize award.

Ree-Jane drifted in (she didn't seem tied to earth) and came over and leaned on the salad table. She'd lean on one hand, jutting her shoulder up and hip out in what I guess she thought was a model's pose. All she wanted was to make sure I noticed her new dress.

“I don't think I'll have a salad tonight.”

Eleven baby Bibbs breathed a sigh of relief.

When I didn't mention the dress, she said “We went to Europa today.”

Europa was Heather Gay Struther's dress shop. It was expensive, and that's where the Davidows got their clothes. She was wearing a caramel-colored, off-the-shoulder silky dress; she held out the skirt. “How do you like it?”

“It's okay. Excuse me.” I brought a ladle of dressing dangerously close to where she leaned.

“Rafe thinks it's beautiful.” Here, she gave me a big-eyed look, as if she really wondered. “Or haven't you met Rafe yet?”

“You mean Ralph? The bellboy replacement?”

“Rafe. It's the English pronunciation.”

“I know. It rhymes with ‘safe.' ”

“He prefers to be called Rafe.”

I wondered if this was true, or if she was telling me he did so she could keep saying
Rafe, Rafe
.

She watched me do the salads for a minute, then said, “I might have a lobster tail for dinner.”

I was glad these were frozen because the sight of a live lobster dropping into a pot of boiling water just for Ree-Jane's dinner would have made me cry. I never got to eat lobster or filet mignon, as they were too expensive. On the other hand, Ree-Jane turned her nose up at Ham Pinwheels, calling them leftovers. So who was the loser here? I asked the Bibbs and they all cheered for pinwheels.

“Why are you staring at those stupid salads?”

She hadn't impressed me yet, not with the dress, with Ralph, or with the lobster, and it really got her down. Then she smirked. “I'm going to the Double Down after dinner, but don't tell anybody!” This was spoken in a raised voice that told everybody.

The Double Down was a club outside of Hebrides, run by a man named Perry Vines. He must have been twenty or thirty years older than Ree-Jane and had been married a zillion times. Ree-Jane said he was crazy about her.

“If he's so crazy about you, why doesn't he put himself out and come here?”

That was an unwelcome question. “Because he's too busy with the club, of course.”

“You're a minor. Or didn't you know?”

Haughtily, she smiled as she flipped her Veronica Lake locks out of her eyes. “Well, Rafe isn't.”

“I never knew that the person you were with changed your age.”

I don't know whether she just ignored that or didn't understand it. She said, “I hope Perry isn't too jealous.”

“Ralph just got here and already he's moving on the heiress. That's quick work.”

It was clear she didn't know whether to take this as a compliment. Her mouth worked it over, but came up with nothing.

“I wouldn't worry about Perry. He'll never go hungry. There's always Scarlett Bittinger.” I think I must have been mixing up images from
Gone with the Wind
. I hummed and picked up my tray of salads.

That brought her almost into this life. “
What?
What about Scarlett?”

“Hm? Oh, you know, in that yellow convertible of hers? I saw it whizzing down Alder Street.”

Ree-Jane was so fast on my heels she nearly fell through the swinging door into the dining room. “Perry was with her?
Perry
was?”

“Did I say that?” I asked in just that tone that said I said it.

I
had no idea how Ree-Jane's big night at the Double Down went, if it went at all. The last thing I recall is seeing her climb into Ralph Diggs's black Chevy and the two of them go fizzing off down the drive. Since she wasn't bragging the next morning about Perry's undying devotion to her, indeed she was pretty grumpy, I assumed they'd never gotten into the back room and the gambling. Probably they'd never gotten very far into the front room.

After what I referred to as my double down stack of Silver Dollar Pancakes and maple syrup, I decided to walk along the highway to the Belle Ruin. I needed, I guess, some taste of faded glory.

The Belle Ruin sat on several acres of wooded land once called Soldiers Park. I had no idea where that name came from. Probably it had something to do with World War Two, or even the Civil War. I wasn't sure what side we were on, South or North. Hadn't this state taken some kind of cantankerous view of the war back then? Some for South and some for North? Wasn't anything black or white? Did I have to reside in a state that probably couldn't choose up a volleyball team?

I wondered if Soldiers Park could have been some kind of army cemetery, and I looked as I walked for signs of grave markers, but saw none. Of course, they could have been toppled or buried when the ground was torn up to build the Belle Ruin. But then I thought, probably not, because there would have been some kind of survey, something that told the lay of the land, and I doubted they'd have gone on to build over a Civil War graveyard of dead servicemen. That was called desecrating the land or the graves or something like that. I didn't like the idea I was stepping on a soldier's grave. It gets you thinking, though, if not about the Civil War (about which I knew nothing), then about dying.

I was sitting on a log from a fallen tree, most of which had rotted. I was looking at the part of the Belle Ruin that had not burned down—the huge ballroom. A lot of the walls had burned, but oddly enough, not the floor, not the bandstand. There had been a big dance on the night of the Slade baby's alleged kidnapping. The thing was, I was coming more and more to believe that she hadn't been and that it had been made to look like a kidnapping.

Why? To collect a ransom from the rich grandfather, Mr. Woodruff. At least that would be the obvious reason. Only there had been no ransom demand, at least as far as we knew around La Porte. For after the Slades and Mr. Woodruff had gone back to New York City, nothing more appeared about the kidnapping. Its similarities to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping had been noted, like the ladder up against the wall outside the hotel and, of course, the baby's being snatched from its crib. The ladder belonged to Reuben Stuck, who'd been one of the men painting the hotel at the time. I'd interviewed him and listened to his woeful account of being under suspicion.

Here was a kidnapping very like the Lindbergh case, and then nothing further had been reported. It was as if nothing had happened at all, and I was thinking that maybe nothing had, and that Mr. Woodruff had paid off the police because he had discovered it was his daughter Imogen and Morris Slade who'd set up the whole thing.

But what—as both Dwayne and Mrs. Louderback had pointed out—about the phone call? Gloria Calhoun, who used to be a Spiker, and that friend of hers, Prunella-somebody, had been on the phone at the time. I thought it was worth talking to Gloria again. She would hardly want to admit she'd had anything to do with the kidnapping, but I might be able to get something useful out of her.

I got up and walked over to the ballroom, where my phonograph sat. I didn't want it out in bad weather, and I could always bring it back if I felt like dancing. I had brought only three records. The last one we had played a few nights ago, when the Sheriff and Maud and Dwayne had been out here. That was “Moonlight Serenade.” The one that was now on the turntable was “I'll Be Seeing You.”

How could that be? I looked around almost as if I expected to find a roomful of dancers. Who had put on “I'll be Seeing You”? I imagined a hundred uniformed World War Two soldiers dancing with stage-door-canteen hostesses in print dresses. The ghosts of them, the soldiers and their partners, floated across the dark hardwood floor. And I imagined one of them was the Girl, who fit in perfectly with her pale hair and mild blue dress.

I snapped the lid shut and stuck the records under my arm and left the Belle Ruin and Soldiers Park.

As I trudged along back to the Hotel Paradise, I thought of the Waitresses, for this had really been their phonograph, an old Victrola with a crank handle, left forgotten in one of the storage rooms on the second floor for six or seven years. It was hard to believe they'd been gone that long. When I see a picture of exotic birds, I think of the Waitresses. They were as bright and free as flamingos.