Fadeaway Girl (19 page)

I trotted on and out, not failing to notice that most of the men at the counter and Wanda Waylans were snatching looks at him. Shirl didn't even give me her usual glum look as I walked out.

“He ain't here,” said Donny Mooma, shifting his feet off his desk and standing up for the express purpose of sticking his thumbs in his big belt and thrusting out his chest as if he had one. “Sheriff's out on police business.”

Maureen finger-waved a hello to me and I waved back. You would have thought we were worlds away instead of just across the room. It was a big room. She went back to her rat-a-tat typing.

Donny said, his tone sly, “Someone new in town we're all interested in.”

Knowing he wanted me to ask, I didn't.

“Yeah, someone I ain't seen around these parts for a good twenty years. Back when my uncle was sheriff. Yeah, sheriffing talent runs in the family, I guess.” He gave me a smile that was supposed to look know-it-all. “Caused a sensation, this fella did.”

Maureen more or less sang out, “Morris Slade's who it is,” and hit the typewriter carriage—
zzzzzzing
.

Donny turned on her. “Now, Maureen, you're not to go givin' out police details.”

“Sorry.”
Zzzzzing
! “I thought maybe you forgot his name.”

“Ain't forgot nothin'. I just don't tell every Tom, Dick, and Harry walks in here po-lice business, that's all.”

I said, “What's Morris Slade doing in town?”

The smirk. “Wouldn't you like to know?”

Yes. So would you.

 

Knowing there was no point in asking Donny where the Sheriff was or when he'd be back, I left the courthouse. It was only after leaving Donny that I thought of Dr. McComb.

Dr. McComb was retired and lived out on Valley Road. He was one of my favorite people and made the best brownies except for my mother's. The thing was, he'd been around back when Baby Fay had been kidnapped and must have known the Slades and the Woodruffs. The hotel might even have called a doctor when it happened in case the parents were hysterical or something.

“Valley Road.” Delbert said this in a puzzled way. Tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel.

“Delbert, you drove me there a couple of weeks ago and another time before that. You know perfectly well where it is. Dr. McComb lives out Valley Road.”

“Yeah, I
know,
I was just thinking, what's the best route?” He started up the cab, finally.

“There's only one route. You go to Red Bird Road and that leads to Valley Road.”

He drove along Second Street so slowly you'd have thought there was a series of red lights down the block. “There's more'n one route I could take, like out around the country club—”

I should've walked; it would have taken me over an hour, but so what? “Just go as you did last time.”

“Now, last time . . .”

I slid down in my seat and stayed there until we were passing Country Club Road. I wondered what La Porte and the area around were doing with a country club.

I
nstead of Dr. McComb, a strange woman I'd seen here before came to the door. She was even stranger than Mrs. Louderback's friend, or at least the experience was. She asked me what I wanted in a voice that sounded rusty, as if she didn't use it much. I know the first time I'd been here, we just sat and she didn't say a thing.

She did not answer my question about Dr. McComb's whereabouts, but just waved me in and sat down. She sat in a slipper chair and indicated I should sit across from her on the sofa. I did not know why.

But then I thought this might be my opportunity to find out about craziness. So I made my face look thoughtful. After a few moments of thoughtfulness, I said, “Did you ever know anyone who saw things that weren't there?”

She gave the merest inkling of a smile, as if she knew how but chose not to. It was worse than no smile at all. It was kind of eerie. “Things that weren't there,” she repeated, as if it were a lesson.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that the things
were
there and maybe hanging around behind me, so I turned and looked. Then I turned back and said, “I have a friend, and she sees people that I don't think are really there.”

She nodded, the ghost of a smile still in place, as if she knew the same people as my “friend.” If she did, that was very bad news to me. I twisted a strand of my mousy brown hair around my finger and drew it through my mouth. This wasn't a habit of mine; I somehow felt I was keeping some distance between us, some space.

We stayed like that for some moments, so that I jumped when I heard a voice behind me. “Emma Graham!”

Dr. McComb came into the room with his butterfly net. His smile was the sort that knows it's a smile and means it. “Didn't know you were coming.” He said this as if it were his fault.

“Hi, Dr. McComb.” I jumped up and breathed easier.

“Talking to Betsy, are you?” He turned to her. “Betsy, how about you putting the kettle on?”

Betsy nodded and rose, giving me another memory of a smile on her way out. I'd never seen Betsy in the kitchen when Dr. McComb and I were in there having brownies and coffee.

“Come on, Emma. I've got my eye on a clouded yellow out back.”

“Okay!” I wanted to sound really interested in butterflies, which I wasn't. Not that I disliked them, of course not; I just thought that hunkering down in tall grass and waiting for an hour wasn't time best spent.

But butterflies were Dr. McComb's first love. He had even written at least one book, which I had taken the trouble to read in the library. Also, I'd skimmed over other butterfly books and was grateful there were a lot of pictures. Studying up on someone else's hobbies is the best way to getting them to help you. You make it look like what they do is what you would have done too, had your life not taken a wrong turn.

We were out and around the corner of the house when he pulled up. “Wait. Kitchen. I was just about to put in the brownies. Lucky thing, you turning up.”

Lucky is right. He was in and out of the kitchen in two winks and we proceeded along the path through the junglelike acres behind the house. The grass in some places was as tall as I was. I plowed after him down a path beaten from many years of his footsteps.

“I was just wondering—who's Betsy?”

“Sister-in-law.” His eyeglasses slipped down his nose as he bent to inspect something. “My brother died ten years back and Betsy came to live with me. She's no trouble at all.”

“Oh, I can see that. She's very quiet.”

“As more people should be.”

I didn't know about that. “She's quiet like someone who misses somebody a lot. Now, I have a friend like that and she makes up people, you know, the way kids do.”

“Betsy's spent time in a mental institution. Broke down after Joe's death—that's my brother—and was in one for a year. You're pretty smart, figuring that out.”

“Oh well, you know. If a person's grieving, it shows.” Maybe it did, but not in Betsy's case.

We moved farther along the path and I swatted away a couple of butterflies. There was a school of pale yellow ones banking around Dr. McComb's head, and he looked as if he were bathed in light. “I wonder, did Betsy ever come across patients there who, well, saw people who weren't there?”

Dr. McComb swooped with his net and a dozen butterflies took off. “You mean hallucinating? Imagining you see something that's not there? Damn but I think that's a clouded yellow. Look.”

I sighed and bent down and saw a butterfly that looked like all the other butterflies. “Hm. I don't think so.”

He gave me a comical glance, surprised.

No wonder. “Because a clouded yellow's color isn't as bright as this one's.” Clouded, in other words. A rule I tried to live by was that if you're going to pretend to know something you've really got to sound sure you know it. If you're wrong, at least it isn't a wishy-washy wrongness and you've given the impression you must know a lot more about the field. “Now,
that
one”—I was looking at the empty air—“too bad, you missed it. That one I think was your true clouded yellow.”

He still turned to look back, but saw nothing.

“Of course,” I said with a shrug, “I might be hallucinating.”

He grinned and shoved back his cap and scrubbed at his head. “I doubt it. You're the last person on earth to start hallucinating.”

What?
“I am?”

“You got too much good sense; you got your feet so firmly on the ground they're practically in it. You're a tree.” He pulled his cap straight.

I wasn't sure that last bit was a compliment, but I felt hugely relieved that he didn't think I was seeing things. “What if I saw someone several times, saw her more than
once,
see, that maybe wasn't there.”

He frowned. “What makes you think she wasn't? Come on, time for brownies.”

We moved fast along the path, followed by deep breaths of clouded yellows. Or some kind.

 

Brownies could turn a bad day around very fast, as if a day had two doors and I could walk through the bad one and out the good one with a brownie in hand. What I liked about Dr. McComb was that he would sift confectioners' sugar on them; it would fall soft as snow. My mother did this too, on cakes, using paper doilies to make designs. The cake would have a snowflake pattern on top. They were beautiful cakes, layers and layers of light sponge held together by a chocolate or vanilla cream filling.

Dr. McComb and I sat at the kitchen table eating brownies and drinking coffee. My coffee was mostly milk, but being offered any coffee at all was a new experience. There was no sign at all of Betsy. I wondered if she ever ate brownies.

As usual, we kept an eye on the brownie pan, “reserving,” you could say, our second brownies. Almost always, our eyes went to the same one, but we were always polite about not taking it. I should say Dr. McComb was polite. As I was the guest, I naturally got the pick of the second brownie. But I gave him the pick of the third.

Just now we were on our first brownies. I continued talking about the Girl and hallucinations. “The thing is, she always looks the same. I mean, she always wears exactly the same clothes.”

His forehead furrowed. “I been wearing the same clothes for a decade or more. The same clothes doesn't signify.”

I had almost forgotten about Morris Slade. I hadn't come to talk about the Girl—indeed, I was surprised I'd talked about her at all. “Do you remember the Slades? Especially Morris Slade?”

“The one that married the Woodruff girl; of course I remember. They were the parents of that baby who was kidnapped out of the Belle Ruin hotel. Couldn't forget that, hardly. They went back to New York and we've not seen them since. Stands to reason they just wanted to put this place behind them.” He paused. “What happened to that poor little child to this day remains a deep mystery.”

“Morris Slade's in town. I saw him in the Rainbow Café.”

Dr. McComb set his cup back in its saucer. “Well now, that's news. I haven't laid eyes on Morris for over twenty years.”

“Did you know him when he lived here? I get the impression that people think he wasn't much good. You know, the playboy type.”

He chuckled the way you hear little kids do, but hardly ever grown-ups. Chuckles like that come from deep within a person.

“I guess that's kind of true. Morris was handsome even as a kid; in his teens he had every girl in town hot on his heels. As a man, he went with first one woman, then another and another. Not all La Porte girls, either. City girls. Had a job in banking, I think, in”—he studied the brownie pan—“Philadelphia, was it?” His hand went for a center brownie.

I had been thinking so hard I'd forgotten to make my brownie choice, which was the same as his. I picked the next best. “I thought playboys didn't take to work.”

“Not much, I guess. Had a bit of trouble there. I think he was some kind of bookkeeper and money came up short.”

“You mean he stole it?”

“There was talk, yes. Let's say, for instance, that, oh, Jane Davidow is employed as bookkeeper at your hotel—”

That was already a big fat zero.

“—so when, say, a guest pays a hundred dollars for his room, Jane enters eighty onto the books and keeps twenty herself.”

Now that kind of “bookkeeping” I could picture her doing. “Did he go to jail?”

“Oh no. Nothing was ever proved.”

“But did you know him personally? I mean enough to have some feeling about what he was like?”

“Yes. Morris struck me as a complete charmer. The most charming man I ever met.”

“A playboy.”

He smiled and polished off his third brownie.

O
nce again in the rear booth of the Rainbow Café, I wrote:

I stopped. That had a familiar ring to it; it sounded like something I'd read or heard. Since the only writers I was currently familiar with were the author of the Perry Mason mysteries and William Faulkner, my guess was William (“Billy,” as Dwayne called him) had said it. I was pretty sure Perry Mason hadn't. I would have to ask Dwayne.

So I read my opener again and decided to let it stand, as it was really good. It was hard enough writing like somebody else, much less making it all up myself.

I looked at the empty seat opposite me, at the empty air, at the ceiling, the walls. I heard the noises that came back to me, the rattle of dishes, the voice of Jo Stafford emptying out a pitcher of something sweet. All the emptiness.