Fadeaway Girl (20 page)

“The Devereau sisters lived a life of great emptiness.” No. “An empty life. Lives.” I didn't know that. And Rose certainly hadn't led an empty life, nor Iris. I should speak only of Isabel, anyway. She was the murderer. Yes, a murderer could lead an empty life—in her case, that's what was wrong. Or it could be. “Isabel Devereau lived an empty life.” I wanted to add, “and she took it out on me,” but that sounded too . . . I frowned and tapped my pencil on the table. Too whining. It wasn't the point either. Even if she did take it out on me. I wrote, “and she had to take it out on someone.” It was clear who, especially if I underlined
“someone.”
It said the same thing without the whine.

How could I tie this to my point about beginnings and endings? I cupped my chin in my hand and listened to Shirl yell at somebody, probably Wanda, as “You Belong to Me” wrapped up on the jukebox.

All I wanted was to get to the next chapter. “The story doesn't end here, as I said.” I crossed out “as I said,” which sounded like filler. Suzie Whitelaw was always going on about “filler.” Lazy man's writing.

“For the Devereaus had a brother—” But wait: what would he have been to Iris and Isabel? Step? Half of half? Morris's father was a Slade. Rose's was a Souder. I couldn't figure this out, so I wrote, “All families are complicated; this one was complicated in its own way.” And
that
had a familiar sound too. William Faulkner again? No. A Perry Mason case? Well, I'd think about that later. But the half brother, Morris, was
Rose's
half brother. Morris Slade and Rose had the same mother, but different fathers. So what was Morris to the other Devereau sisters?

My head was in my hands. This was taking me
hours,
it felt like. There were people in this world who got paid for figuring out families, and I wasn't one of them. So I'd just move on.

“The handsome and charming” (in case he read this) “Morris Slade married into the rich,” no, “well-to-do Woodruff family of New York City. Morris,” no, “Mr. Slade married Lucien Woodruff's daughter, Imogen. They had one child, Fay, whom they brought as a baby to La Porte one summer. . . .

“And here begins the tragedy of the Belle Ruin.”

There! Now all I had to do was tell the tragedy. I'd take this to Mr. Gumbrel just so he could see I was really working, and then finish it later. Maybe, just
maybe,
he would even use what I had here as a kind of “watch this space” sort of thing. “To be continued in the next issue,” or something.

I had put in a good morning's work and was quite satisfied. Maud came back with a cup of coffee and sat down, and I asked her what time it was.

She glanced at her watch. “Eleven-twenty-three.”

What? Did this mean I'd been writing for only
twenty minutes
? Twenty minutes? How did writers stand it if they put in a whole morning doing this?

“What are you working on?”

I was still irritated with the twenty minutes. “My story. This is a new part.”

“Good. Everyone's waiting to read it, I can tell you.”

Even with the compliment, I felt grumpy. “Do you think there's any connection between what you write and how long it takes you?”

“No.”

Ah. “
No?
In other words, you could write something very good in, say, twenty minutes?”

“Of course. Did you ever hear of Trollope's working habits?”

Since I'd never heard of Trollope, I didn't know his working habits. “No.”

“He put a watch on his desk. He forced himself to write two hundred and fifty words or somewhere near that every fifteen minutes.”

I just stared. “How many fifteen minutes did he write in a day?” That, I thought, was key.

Maud thought about it, looking at my page, which I covered up by leaning over it. “Well, probably four. That would be an hour. He'd have a thousand words then. But that was Trollope. Think about Flannery O'Connor.”

“How much did he write?”

“She. The thing is, she would sit down at her desk and stay there for four hours even if she couldn't write a word.”

Talk about mouths dropping open. If I had ten mouths they all would have hit the floor. “You've got to be
kidding
.”

Maud drank her coffee. “Or she's got to be lying.”

We both laughed.

Then we began talking about the kidnapping and what the reason for it could be.

I said, “What about the baby's great-grandfather, I mean, Mr. Woodruff's own father? I think his name was Raphael and he was really, really rich and he wanted his money left to his great-grandchild, Fay—”

“Why not just his grandchild Imogen?”

“Maybe he thought she was useless. It sounds as if she was really spoiled.”

Maud was toying with a cigarette she couldn't decide to smoke. I said, “Another reason could be Imogen hated the baby.” “Why would she?”

I thought of my hospital scenarios and frowned. I was missing something obvious. I raised my frown to take in Maud.

“What's wrong? Did I say something?”

“No. I did, but I don't know what.”

“You said maybe Imogen hated Fay.”

I nodded. But whatever notion had been lurking at the back of my mind had now escaped me. “Maybe Fay had something wrong with her.” I remembered Miss Isabel Barnett's remark about Down disease, although she had the wrong baby. “Maybe she was deformed or would never grow beyond four or five mental years, or something.”

“How horrible—to get rid of a child just because she wasn't perfect.”

This could be tiresome if Maud was going to get preachy about everything. “Well, but we're not judging here; we're just trying to work out what happened.”

Maud lit the cigarette, waved out the match, frowning in thought.

I said, “There's another possibility: it could have been an accident.”

Maud blew out a stream of smoke, still frowning. “No. If it was accidental, why go to such lengths to cover the death up? Staging a kidnapping is pretty extreme. And if you're bribing or paying off other people, that makes it even harder to keep control. You're leaving a string of witnesses behind you and one just might talk—as one did: Gloria Spiker.”

“But there's other kinds of accidents where people—in this case, parents—are to blame, where the law says they're negligent. For instance, mothers who leave their children in cars while they shop. Or leave them alone in the house.”

Maud just looked at me, her frown deepening. “But any kind of accident would mean Morris Slade was in on it, and Sheriff Mooma didn't think he was.”

Shirl was calling her name again, and she said, “I've got to scoot, Emma. We'll talk later.” She tamped out her cigarette and slid out of the booth.

I sat for a few moments, then gathered up my paper and pencil and scooted too.

M
r. Gumbrel was sitting at his desk in the back of the newspaper office.

“I just wanted to run this by you. I called a couple of times, but you weren't here.” No, I hadn't. As if the only thing holding up the installment of the story was his not answering the phone. “I need to know what you think of this story line.”

“Shoot.”

When I looked at the little I'd written, I felt disloyal.

“I'm all ears; go ahead.” As if to prove his point, he cupped his hand behind his ear.

I cleared my throat and went ahead: “ ‘The story of the Devereaus doesn't end here: it doesn't even begin here.' ”

Mr. Gumbrel brought his fist down into his hand. “Now that's good!” He paused. “Sounds a little familiar. But go on.”

I continued with my diagnosis of the Devereaus, not contributing much beyond their “empty lives,” which I repeated in three different ways, at least.

Mr. Gumbrel nodded seriously. “You're right there. Isabel Devereau—hell, probably none of them had inner resources. That's what gets you in trouble. That accounts for all this emptiness.”

I was pleased mostly by his interruptions, which made what I'd written sound several times longer than it was. “Now,” I said, “this is where it gets interesting—the Devereau sisters' relation to Morris Slade.”

His reaction was pleasing. Mr. Gumbrel apparently didn't know there
was
a relationship, as his next words bore out.

“Morris
Slade
? What's he have to do with them? He'd have been only a kid, wouldn't he? Much younger than them.”

I told him what Miss Flyte had said.

“Well, I'll be a monkey's. So he's a half brother of theirs.”

“Of hers, I mean of Rose Devereau's. Not of the other three.” I was about to say he looked just like Rose Devereau Queen; then I thought of the Girl and Fay and wondered if they both were gone.

A sadness washed over me. “What I'm thinking is that they got rid of her. The baby. Not necessarily all of them were in on it. Maybe just the mother or maybe Mr. Woodruff.” I heeded the Sheriff's warning.

That shocked him. “You mean killed her?” He flattened his hand against his forehead, then started, but didn't finish, a laugh. “Emma, you've got murder on your mind.”

“I'm not the one doing them.”

“Now, you're not thinking of writing that up, are you? What you just said?”

“Of course not. Not without evidence.” Of which there was none, as the Sheriff had pointed out.

“And with Morris Slade in town, I don't think he'd take to such a story.”

The interview! I'd almost forgotten. That could be the rest of the story, or, rather, the last of the “Aftermath” and the first of “The Belle Ruin Tragedy.”

“Mr. Gumbrel, what I'm thinking is that the part I just read to you could introduce the three interviews. The eyewitness accounts of that night. The alleged kidnapping.” I sat back and tried not to indulge in the childish habit of kicking my feet back against the chair rungs. I only did it a few times, for I was beginning to feel flyaway, as if I weren't pinned to the chair and the chair not anchored to earth. It probably all came from too much thinking.

I slid off the chair and said, “I think I'll have a look in the archives if that's okay.”

Mr. Gumbrel patted my arm and told me to go ahead, and if he'd known what a hard worker I'd turned out to be, he'd have fired everyone else “including myself”—we both laughed—“and just let you take over.”

I thanked him for saying it, knowing he was exaggerating, but not by much, having watched Suzie Whitelaw at nonwork.

It wasn't really old accounts in newspapers I wanted to see, but the magazine covers of Fadeaway Girls. I looked in the tall piles on the table inside the door and found five of them.

I lined them up and sat down to study them, beginning with the Christmas issue, the girl in the red coat, trimmed in white fur. It was the white fur that kept the coat from being absorbed completely into the background.

Sometimes the fadeaway trick was done with color, sometimes with pattern or texture. There were white birches in gold and amber woods, with a girl dressed in amber and white taking long strides through the autumn, and a collie dog with a white and amber coat running beside her.

I liked the maid in black, down on one knee, peeking through a keyhole. The uniform reminded me of Vera, but certainly not the face, which was young and pretty. The black uniform was all but blotted up in the black background, revealing its lines by means of the white apron tied in back and the white cuffs. I liked her nosiness, as it matched mine, except there were no keyholes around the hotel big enough to see through. If there were I'd spend most of the day down on one knee, I'm sure.

I sat there with my chin in my hands, my elbows on the table, and tried to see the line where the white dress met the snow-covered pine, the coat of the collie met the leaves, the connecting lines, but there weren't any. That was the point, wasn't it? If the artist had made the dress or coat or collie all one color, all of the Fadeaway Girl would be gone except for the head and perhaps the hands.

It was as if they were drowning in color.

I
got back to the hotel in the afternoon; to avoid Delbert, I had walked. I stopped in the Big Garage to see how lunch had gone and if my mother was angry with me for missing it.

Will was doing something with colored scarves; it looked like he was pulling them out of nowhere, as in a magician's book of tricks. “Where'd you learn that?”

“From Ralph. It's not all that hard.”

I was glad at least he wasn't calling him “Rafe.”

“Hello, missus,” said Paul, jumping and breathing hard; he was out of the rafters for a change. Not much of a change, for now he was jumping on a trampoline, a big one I'd never seen before.

Will yanked him off it.

“What's the trampoline for? And what are you doing with those scarves?” It was hard to keep up with them.

“Practicing tricks. We decided there should be a magician in this play.”

He was so pleased with himself, he forgot they never told people anything about their productions if they could help it.

“Who's the magician?”

“I am.”

“Wait a minute. You're the pilot. Why is the pilot a magician?”

“Maybe the copilot.”

I
heaved a sigh. Sometimes talking to Will I'd sooner have kneeled on the driveway and eaten gravel. “So who plays the
copilot
?”

“I do.” He pulled a sapphire blue scarf from the vicinity of Paul's ear. “I'm both.” He started winding the blue scarf around Paul's neck.