Fadeaway Girl (14 page)

Here came Vera. Or rather, here whisked Vera. She would be taking care of the party of four.

After serving Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright, I was making Aurora's before-dinner drink when the yelling began.

My mother gave me a look. “Is that Miss Bertha?”

I was holding a tall glass full of Southern Comfort, brandy, and various juices and looked over my shoulder. “I'm just making Great-Aunt Aurora's drink.” I was always to refer to her as “Great-Aunt” and only did so when my mother was around.

I had told Walter to get a glass of ice water ready. He was putting it on a small tray.

More yelling.

“Emma!”

“Finished!” I called to her, and set the drink on my small tray, not bothering to add a paper umbrella.

Miss Bertha was grabbing her throat when Walter and I sailed into the dining room with our fatal antidotes.

 

Aurora loved hers. She sipped and slurped and smacked her lips. She was not a tidy drinker. I hadn't been too careful in my measuring, but as long as brandy outsmarted juice, my drink was on safe ground.

“Good!” She sipped some more. “Where's the pineapple half, though?”

“You don't get pineapple in a Cold Comfort. You're thinking of a Pine Bomb.” (This was a new concoction of pineapple and Bombay gin.)

“Oh, yes. I'm telling you, girl, you should do this for a living, get yourself a night job over to the Double Down.”

“I'm twelve.” Had Aurora ever actually been to that club? I didn't think Perry Vines had operated it that long.

I was leaning against the wall, my tray under my arm, as always. “Let's go back to the Slade baby, and don't say ‘What baby?'” She was wearing that fake, wondering expression.

“I wasn't going to say anything, miss, except this drink is one of your best.” There was a wide display of her dentures in what Aurora thought was a captivating smile.

“Here's what I learned today from Miss Isabel Barnett. You remember I told you she said she'd seen Baby Fay in town that afternoon before she was kidnapped? Well, she doesn't remember that it was the Slade baby at all, it turns out. She was mixing up babies.”

Aurora fiddled with her lace cuff. “Told you she's a liar, didn't I?”

“No she's not; I think she just made a mistake. And she was the only one I asked who claimed to have seen the baby that weekend.”

“I know what you're thinking: the baby wasn't there at all. Told you that too.”

No, I had told
her
that.

Her remark was delivered to the tapping of her nails against the glass. My summons to refill it.

“You won't be able to eat your dinner if you drink another Cold Comfort.”

“Oh, don't be such a stick! ‘You won't be able to eat your dinner—' ”

It was maddening. She sounded just like me.

“Just who do you think you are, girl?”

“The bartender. Keep your mind on the Slade case. If the Slades were just pretending the baby was here, well, why were they?” I asked.

“They might have wanted it known the baby was alive at that particular time. For example, say there's a will, and somebody left a fortune to a person who would get it only if the baby predeceased him. Now, say the baby had died on Friday night: this other person died on the Thursday night. So it'd be the relatives of that person who'd want to collect. They'd pretend the baby was kidnapped, not dead.”

“I don't think that happened.”

Aurora set down her glass long enough to fling her arms into the air. “I know it didn't happen, you ninny, I was giving you an example.” She picked up the glass again and held it out. She looked hopeful.

“Give me one good reason for them pretending the baby was with them when she wasn't and I'll get you a refill.”

Aurora stared at her glass as if enough concentration could make it walk down to the kitchen on its own. But I guess she was just thinking.

Then she lifted her eyes to me. They were gray and glittered as if their irises were a mix of steel and mica.

“Maybe they lost her.”

I flinched. I nearly dropped the tray my armpit was holding up. “Lost her? How would you lose a baby?”

“Same way you lose a million dollars or a fish off your line or your way home.”

When I just stood there being stupid, she tilted the glass back and forth. “Or a bet.” Then she laughed in her crafty way.

Lost,
I thought. I could hear Mr. Root's rough voice reading Robert Frost's poem about the orchard's plight when no one would come in with a light.

It was so sad. And it sounded like pure chance that anything would be saved.

It sounded, as Aurora said, like a bet.

I
t made me so sad I wasn't even careful getting the Southern Comfort from the back office. So sad I walked right past Ree-Jane without thinking up something to rile her. So sad I nearly cried tears into the orange juice. So sad I forgot my dessert. (I didn't forget what it was—pear and pecan tart with butter brittle ice cream—I just forgot to eat it.)

While I ate my dinner, Walter took the fresh Cold Comfort up to Aurora Paradise. I left my plate on the dishwashing counter for Walter and went out the side door and down the gravel drive to the Pink Elephant. The grass outside the door was uncut and thick and wet. The door was thick, and it creaked; I had to stoop to get through it.

The little room was underneath the dining room and housed only my few things, together with mice and cobwebs. The hotel cat liked to visit sometimes, either to sleep or to check out the mouse situation.

But the room's main purpose had been as a place for a cocktail get-together. Hence its name, the Pink Elephant. Its rough stucco walls were painted pink, of course. Once there had been a painting of a pink elephant in a party hat, waving a bottle of champagne, but it was now gone.

There was a dark wood table and benches, something like a picnic table, but here the benches weren't attached. Around the room were bottles into which I'd stuck candles, now burnt down to stubs. I also had a lantern that gave off enough light to read by and made interesting shadows on the walls. The room was something like a cave, but a pleasant one.

There was a Whitman's candy box on a shelf in which I kept a few things I especially liked, things like an old photograph of the Devereau sisters and Mary-Evelyn. There was a neckerchief Ben Queen had given me when we were at Crystal Spring.

I pulled out a gold locket I had found in the room where my mother's things were stored. She said I could have it. It wasn't hers; she didn't know where it had come from. Inside was a brown photograph of a man and a woman. My mother did not know who they were.

This set off a fresh wave of sadness in me, sadness for the unknown couple in the picture. She was wearing a straw hat between two dark wings of hair; he was unsmiling in little round glasses, with hair parted straight down the middle and damped down with tonic or rain.

I wondered, was there a family or friends somewhere who still remembered them? My mother had acquired the locket, yet they were total strangers. I could tell the picture was decades old from the hat and the hairdo and the high collar of her dress and also from the way they didn't smile. Back then people did not smile at the camera. Now, you couldn't bribe a person not to smile in that phony way reserved for picture taking.

Who were they? It made me feel almost guilty, having this locket that someone had taken care to slip a picture into behind the locket's glass. It angered me that the locket had gotten mixed in with other pieces of jewelry, with scarves and gloves, with letters and documents, all scattered around the suitcases as if none of it mattered, as if my mother just hadn't taken the time to care.

Yet she had to take care of this whole hotel: cook, seamstress, furniture restorer. I guess when you have all that to do, there's not time to sit and be sorry about two people in a faded photo in a locket.

But it still made me mad that if I hadn't found it, the locket would probably have been lost forever. I felt sorry for anything that had to depend on me to find it.

I should have been able to discard Aurora's idea, but I couldn't. I tried to imagine a scene in which a baby was lost. Forgetfulness? (“Where did I leave that carriage? Surely it was right here.”) A kind of amnesia? (“What baby carriage?”) But if the carriage had been left outside the grocery store (as often happens), and the baby was taken, that would again be kidnapping.

I heard Aurora's insistent voice and its list of losses: a million dollars, a fish, the way home . . . A bet.

A bet.

That made me shiver. Surely, that would be impossible. It was the most shocking thing I could imagine. Then I heard Mr. Gumbrel's voice: “That boy was a gambler. He was forever at that poker club—‘club' being what they called it. He'd bet anything just to stay in the game, anything. Had a lot of debts, I'd guess.”

In the Western movies I'd seen on Saturday afternoons, men would play cards in a saloon and when they ran out of money, they'd bet crazy things like their horse, their house, their “spread”—anything. But I never saw a gambler bet a life.

I sat for a long time thinking about this wispy little life, this will-o'-the-wisp baby who floated between being there and not being there, like the deer emerging from the fog or mist that hung around the Belle Ruin and fading back into it. It was like having your life suspended between something solid and hard, like Miss Bertha at the dining room table, and something impossibly airy, like Will moving his lips and words only seeming to come out. A sound waiting for itself.

Then I remembered another word Aurora had used: changeling. That was where one person was exchanged for another, usually babies, I supposed, as it would be pretty hard to exchange one adult for another without people getting wise.

This led me to wondering, what if Fay Slade hadn't actually been theirs? I sat up straight. What if in the hospital Imogen's baby had been swapped for a different one and then the real parents found out and demanded their own baby's return? Morris and Imogen didn't want Mr. Woodruff to find out about the baby's identity and so staged the kidnapping.

But I forgot: Mr. Woodruff had not wanted an investigation. That would not have been his reaction if my new idea was right. But maybe he would not want anybody to know either. Why? Embarrassment? Humiliation? “You old fool. There you were thinking all this time the baby was your granddaughter, buying her things, giving her money.” No, wait, I forgot Fay was only four months old when she disappeared.

I outlined the story to myself. Hospital: a mistake is made and two babies are given to the wrong parents. . . .

No. That would hardly have brought about a
staged
kidnapping.

Hospital: Imogen's baby is stillborn (whatever that meant) or it dies and Imogen steals some other woman's baby.

Stealing a baby is so bad that it would probably wind up with a violent happening, such as a kidnapping. How she took the other baby was a loose end I would tie up later.

Or: a woman with a newborn wants to put it up for adoption, so Imogen agrees to take the baby.

But there'd be nothing really wrong with that, so where did the humiliation come in for Mr. Woodruff?

Hospital: Imogen's baby is stillborn (that must mean “born still,” dead), but they
don't want to tell Imogen
because she'd get hysterical. So Mr. Woodruff pays a nurse a lot of money simply to show Imogen a baby from the rows of babies you always see in a room with fathers outside tapping the glass. The nurse tells Imogen it's her baby, but that she can hold it for only a little bit, as it's weak or underweight or something. I don't know. That at least gives Mr. Woodruff time to track down a for-sale baby, or an orphan baby (although I really couldn't see how a newborn could be an orphan—yet).

Mr. Woodruff and Morris would let Imogen think it's her baby up until Fay is four months old, when something awful, something tragic, happens, and Morris and Mr. Woodruff are forced to think up some solution and hit upon this kidnapping scheme.

But what could have happened to make them stage a kidnapping?

The thing was this, and it was very important to me: Fay couldn't have died. She must have lived or else there was someone else walking around who looked exactly like Rose Devereau Queen and Morris Slade.

I hunted in my Whitman's Sampler box for the picture of Rose Queen and the one of Morris Slade. I set them side by side. Peas in a pod. I had found out that they were related as half brother and sister, that Rose's mother, who'd been a Souder, had married a Slade before marrying old Mr. Devereau.

Rose was murdered by her daughter Fern; then Fern was murdered by crazy Isabel Devereau. I put my head in my hands. What a horrible family history. It was almost as bad as ours, although in ours, no one had been murdered. Yet.

Right then the hotel cat decided to squeeze through the opening in the door that never closed right unless you pushed or pulled. The cat was gray and had a thick coat, so it was hard to tell if he was thin or fat.

He jumped up on the bench without seeming to move a muscle. I could have said he thought himself up to the bench. Cats were like magicians; they could levitate; they could suspend themselves in air; they could hover in silence.

The cat sat and washed himself as if the jump had rearranged the lay of his fur. He went on with his washing, paw licked and then rubbed over his face, then all of a sudden stopped and looked at me straight in the eye and blinked slowly several times. Maybe he had lost me and was just trying to blink me up.