Fadeaway Girl (11 page)

 

I asked Abel Slaw if he would mind my leaving the phonograph in the garage so that I could get the next train to Cold Flat Junction. Slaw's Garage was just across the highway from the railroad station.

“Just as long as you come back and get it, hear?” He was always crotchety when he talked to me.

No, Mr. Slaw,
I wanted to say,
I will never be back. I am flying off into the long gone and the sweet hereafter.
But I didn't want to hear him complain about my backtalk.

I guess it was the Waitresses that made me think of flying away. I wondered what the sweet hereafter actually was. Was it heaven? Was it paradise? I wondered if that's where they'd gone.

I
had money with me and decided for a change to actually buy a ticket to Cold Flat Junction. It was only twelve miles from Spirit Lake and didn't cost much, and it was easier than being a stowaway.

I smiled and handed my money up to the conductor after the train started moving. It was the same conductor who was always on this train, although he didn't seem to remember my stowaway status.

He punched the ticket and said, “Well, little lady, what are you going there for today?” He handed back my ticket.

“To see my gran.” I looked up at him through squinty eyes, as if I might need glasses but was too poor to buy any. “She's awful sick.”

He swayed a little with the movement of the train. “Sorry to hear that. She lives in the Junction? I know folks there.”

Then she can't live there. I thought of the Simples, whom I had told the Windy Run Diner people about. The Simples didn't exist, of course, but I'd had need of them one day for some reason. I sorted through the family names, seeing if I'd mentioned a grandmother. I didn't remember anybody in the family except the son who was retarded. “Her name's Alberta Simple. They live a distance outside Cold Flat Junction, on a farm. You probably don't know them. Anyway, Granny Alberta fell down and hit her head. Bad.”

“Sorry to hear that,” he said again, with a sway and looking down the aisle, obviously wanting to move on.

I wouldn't let him. “Yes, it is. The Simples have got enough trouble in their lives without her getting hurt. She's the one who takes care of Miller Simple. He's retarded and kind of dangerous.”

“You don't say? Well, now I got to be—”

“Once, Miller—” Was that his name? “Once, he hit his daddy over the head with a chair leg, just ripped the leg right off the chair to do it, and now he's got to be watched closely.”

The conductor tipped his hat, like a wave good-bye. “Got to see to my tickets.”

I turned and watched him move quickly along the aisle. “Good-bye!” I called.

Well, he'd asked me, hadn't he?

 

When the train pulled into Cold Flat Junction, I stepped down to the station platform and stood while it pulled back out, then looked across the track at the dark line of trees in the distance. I always looked at them for a longer while than a person would ordinarily spend on trees. They looked, from this distance, sometimes dark gray-green, and sometimes navy blue, and the line was as straight as an arrow. They almost stood at attention, like ranks of soldiers. I thought of Soldiers Park. I supposed that behind them lay only the same wasted land that ran between them and the railroad tracks, yet I couldn't be sure. I think they hid a mystery that drew me.

I had started out thinking I'd go to see Gloria Spiker Calhoun again, but then I thought, no, it's her friend, this Prunella-someone, I should talk to. It was Prunella whom Gloria had called. It was just too much of a coincidence: the telephone call and the baby being kidnapped during that twenty-minute call.

Prunella. The reason I remembered that name was because I had never liked it. I wouldn't like to be a Prunella. Ree-Jane would call me Prune-face.

So once again, I needed to stop in the Windy Run Diner to find out about Prunella and where she lived. The best thing to do was think about this over a slice of pie. So it was to the diner that the sandy path from the station led me.

 

It was pleasant, I might even say a comfort, to find the same old faces in the Windy Run, three at the counter, one in a booth.

“Well, look't what the cat dragged in,” said Don Joe, with a snuffly laugh.

“Lo and be-
hold,
” Billy added, not wanting to be shown up in the greetings department. Evren, sitting on the other side of Don Joe, just smiled.

Louise Snell was wiping down the counter. “Hello, hon. How're you today?”

“Okay.” I climbed up on my usual stool, the one near the pie and cake glass shelves. There was a new one among the pies, a pale pink chiffon.

Louise Snell saw me looking and smiled and said, “We got Strawberry Chiffon today. It's real good.”

“It surely does look it,” I said, trying to get a little Junction twang into my speech.

Mervin, who usually sat with his wife in one of the maroon-colored leatherette booths, asked me how I was coming along with my story for the paper. Mervin was probably the only customer who didn't feel he had to make fun of other people just to prove he was alive.

He went on: “Sure is the best thing I've read in the papers in a long time.”

Irritated that he hadn't thought to say that, Billy said (as if it were my fault), “Haven't them police over to La Porte found out who killed Fern Queen yet? My lord, how long's it been since she got shot? Six weeks, like?”

“It's been three,” I said.

Don Joe said, “They don't still think it was Ben, surely?”

I could hardly tell them what I knew about the murder of Fern, mostly because it wasn't official and partly because I'd be in for so much questioning, I'd be here all day. I did have a life to lead, after all.

But I did answer, as Louise Snell had set my pie before me. It had little flecks of red in it, bits of strawberry. “Well, Ben Queen is a suspect still, but there's nothing to point to him, I mean no physical evidence, nothing to say he was at White's Bridge that night.” He wasn't. I knew because the same person that killed Fern had been the one to nearly murder me: Isabel Devereau. She had told me, since she didn't think I'd be telling anyone else. Ever. Yet, the Sheriff called this “hearsay evidence.” Imagine. It made my blood boil.

I was glad Mervin's wife was absent, for he was much freer to speak. She was a devil, always jabbing at him and telling him to be quiet. He said, “What about that crazy woman that attacked
you
? I'd think she'd be more of a suspect than Ben Queen. Wasn't she a relation of Rose Queen?”

I looked at Mervin, amazed that he seemed to have read my mind. But it was just that Mervin gave thought to things, and sometimes seemed to be the only one in here who did. Besides Louise Snell, that is. She was pretty smart and not always talking just to hear herself talk like the others.

“Yes. Rose was a Devereau, as you know.”

“Then it could've been revenge, couldn't it?” said Mervin.

Billy, who usually sat with his back to Mervin, turned around on his stool to face him. “Now, Mervin, you never knowed Rose Queen, nor Rose Queen's family. But you sure are tossin' words around as if you did.”

Billy was so jealous of Mervin that it hardly bore thinking about. I furrowed my brow as if I were considering the Rose Queen business, but I was really just enjoying my pie. I could think up something when I finished.

“I been here many years, Billy. And I heard stuff. Like Fern went off with her mother for several months. That sounds likely, I'd say.”

“Likely what?”

“Girl goes off for a few months. It's the usual story, I'd bet.”

Billy, and now Don Joe, wanted to argue against that. You could just tell, the way they sat with their arms folded tight across their chests.

Louise Snell said, “Well, all I know is that girl was trouble growing up.”

Don Joe snorted. “Trouble, yes, you could say. Stabbed her mom twenty times with that knife.”

Except that never was proved,” said Louise Snell. “Ben had an alibi all along and he never used it, probably because he knew it was her that did it.”

He had an alibi, and I was the one who'd uncovered it, in Smitty's Feed Store, where Ben Queen had been when the murder of his wife had been committed.

Louise was wiping down the counter. She seemed to enjoy doing this. “The pity is they couldn't have another kid.”

I frowned. “You mean Rose and Ben Queen? Why not?”

There was a quick look that seemed to go up and down the counter like Saint Elmo's fire. I figured adults do that only when it's something to do with sex. I sighed. “You mean Rose had to have”—I could not remember the word—“whatever removed?”

Don Joe snorted again. “You'd think someone knew all about Alaska and Hawa-yah, she'd know ‘whatever.'”

“Oh, shut up, Don Joe,” said Louise. “No, hon. Trouble was with her husband. You know, sometimes when a couple can't have kids, trouble's with the wife, but sometimes with the husband.”

“Oh.” I didn't know, so I changed the subject to the reason I'd come in the first place. “Any of you know a woman around here named Prunella?” It had suddenly occurred to me that now I was a reporter for the
Conservative
and I didn't have to make up reasons for wanting to find or talk to people. Which was not to say I wouldn't make up reasons, only I didn't have to.

Evren, on the other side of Don Joe, said, “Yeah. There's one named Prunella Rice. Don't she live in the Holler, Billy?” Evren almost always deferred to Billy, even though Billy was wrong 99 percent of the time.

“Well, now let me just think on that while Louise fills up this coffee cup.” He grinned as if he'd said something really clever. He got his coffee and opened his mouth to say something but not soon enough.

Mervin said, “Red Coon Rock's where she lives.”

That really got Billy's goat. “Now, how is it you, that's hardly been here ten years—”

“Fifteen,” Mervin corrected him, and drank his coffee.

“Well, I been here forty-five years, Mervin. How is it you know every goddamned thing about the Junction in only ten or fifteen?”

Evenly, Mervin said, “Don't know everything, just that Prunella Rice lives in Red Coon Rock.”

That made me grin. Mervin, if he was ever called as witness in a murder case, would be a dream of a witness for whichever side, defense or prosecution. For the other side would never be able to shake him, or make him contradict himself or back down. Mervin was solid as a rock. More than that, he let nothing get him off the point. No one could shy a stone and skip it around him, not even Perry Mason.

I said, “Which house does she live in, do you know, Mr. Mervin?”

Naturally, that caused an argument.

“It's the one a little ways up from Cary Grant Calhoun's. I think it's painted brown,” said Mervin, “but I'm not sure. I do know there's a little wishing well in the yard.”

Billy's hand slapped down on the counter and made the cups jump, as well as Don Joe and Evren. He wheeled around on his stool again. “Now, there you are
wrong,
Mervin. That wishing-well house belongs to Earl Midge. It's his wife had that well put in.”

“That may be so, but that's another house. Don't Earl Midge live out the end of Sweetwater Road?”

“No, he does not!” said Billy.

“Oh, for pity's sake,” said Louise Snell as she pulled out the Hebrides and area phone book. She flipped through it, ran her finger down a column, and said, “There's six Rices, mostly in Hebrides, but two in the Junction. One lives in Red Coon Rock and the name's ‘P. Rice.' So Mervin's right.”

I snuck a smile. I wanted to say, “Again.”

“That there's an old phone book,” said Billy, lighting himself another cigarette.

Louise Snell rolled her eyes. “That is so ridiculous. When does anything change in Cold Flat Junction? How many people ever move? When dinosaurs roamed here, there was still a P. Rice”—here she put the open telephone directory straight against Billy's eyes—“living on Red Coon Road.” Then she slapped it shut.

Billy sat and smoked, trying to think up a reply.

Evren said, “Hell, we still got the dinosaurs. You seen them Wicker sisters lately? Must be carrying six hundred pounds between'em!”

They all managed a laugh at that, even Mervin, and so I decided to leave before the Wicker sisters showed.

D
ubois Road, where the Queens lived, ended up at Flyback Hollow, or “the Holler” as they called it in the Windy Run. Jude Stemple lived back there. It was Jude Stemple who'd made the comment that Fern Queen had never had any kids. If he was right, then the Girl could not have been Fern's daughter. But the people at the Windy Run Diner hinted at another view of Fern.

The last time I was here, there was a girl sitting behind a stand, selling Kool-Aid, even though her sign read LEMONADE 5¢. She wasn't there, but the table and chair and sign were, along with a pitcher of green-colored Kool-Aid. There was also a box that had once held kitchen matches, and that was where she kept her money. It was empty.

I guessed the Kool-Aid must be lime, not my favorite flavor in anything, and certainly not Kool-Aid, which I didn't much like in any flavor. I thought she wasn't being completely honest, selling Kool-Aid for lemonade, but she had said it was a lemonade stand, not that she was selling lemonade, nor did she have to.

I pulled a plastic cup from a small tower of them, poured an inch of Kool-Aid into it, and dropped a nickel into the matchbox. Then I poured the drink out and mashed the edge of the cup a little so it would look as if a customer had indeed gone and taken a drink. I thought it was important; she was making an effort and this was really a bad spot for a lemonade stand. How many people had I ever seen walking about here?