Fadeaway Girl (38 page)

“You mean so nobody would know you were meeting? Or that you knew each other?”

He nodded. “Or so that I'd never be found. Fey said, ‘You can lie here until you rot.' ”

I sat back hard. I really felt the effort of that, his own son saying that. “That's terrible.”

The Sheriff put his hand on my arm, but not for comfort. I guess to keep me from talking.

“We'd abandoned him. He'd disappeared. He thought it would be fitting if the same thing happened to me.”

The Sheriff said, “Ben Queen. What about Ben Queen?”

At first he didn't answer. Then he leaned toward the Sheriff, his arms on the table. “What do you know about Tragedy Town?” His smile was crooked.

I was surprised he remembered and puzzled he was bringing it up.

The Sheriff was puzzled too. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I know you don't.” Morris sat back. “I've already told you what happened at that house. I tried to get the gun away from Fey. It went off. Now he's dead.” Morris wiped his hand across the table, as if he were sweeping crumbs. “I didn't mean to kill him.”

To me, he looked incredibly sad. Almost to the point of heart-break.

“You don't believe me,” he said, looking up at the Sheriff.

The Sheriff said nothing and I couldn't read anything in his expression. I guess he was a really good policeman.

Morris Slade asked if he could smoke.

The Sheriff nodded and shoved the pack of cigarettes toward him, then lit the cigarette with an old Zippo. Maybe he didn't want Morris reaching into a pocket, or maybe he was just being nice. “Why did he want to kill you, Mr. Slade? Will you tell me that much?”

Morris Slade sat smoking for a few moments, I guess turning that over. The why was a big part of the story. He looked at me, then said, “Because he was angry he'd been abandoned. He was more than angry, he was raging. I certainly can't blame him for that.”

“You're—you were his father, is that right?”

He nodded.

“It was really more than abandonment, though. You—or someone—had him kidnapped.”

Again he nodded, then said, “I didn't know about it. That's the truth. And that's all of the story I'll tell you.” He looked at me again. “I'll tell Emma the story. I mean, beyond, or before, the shooting. What she can do, if she wants, it's up to her, is write it up and print it as part of her piece in the paper.”

“If it's going to be made public, Mr. Slade, why not tell me now?”

“Because you don't deserve it, Sheriff.”

I was glad to know I was humble enough to be staggered by Morris Slade—or anyone except maybe Maud—talking like this to the Sheriff. But more than that, I thought it was one of the strangest things I'd heard.
“. . . don't deserve it”?

There was a long silence while the two of them regarded each other.

When the Sheriff finally pushed back his chair and said to me, “Emma,” I slowed down leaving by asking the first question that sprang to mind: “Why'd you call him Fey instead of Ralph?”

He smiled. “Because my father's name was Ralph, and I hated him.”

“Emma,” the Sheriff said again, drawing me forward.

All I could think of was all of the information, the answers, I'd never get.
Why did you come here now? Why did Ralph not go after his mother, Imogen? Why did they have him kidnapped? Why did you go to Cold Flat Junction looking for Ben Queen?—And what did it have to do with Rose?
That last question, I don't think I wanted to ask.

When I glanced back over my shoulder at Morris Slade, he looked at that moment as if he were a true inhabitant of Tragedy Town. He seemed to think this was enough; he wanted Ben Queen kept out of it and must not have known that Ben had given himself up.

They were saving each other.

T
he heavy church door closed behind me with a deep sucking sound. I passed down the nave and wondered where I thought I was going. I didn't know, so I sat down in a pew and looked around. The stained-glass windows were pretty, bright broken pictures, pieces of brilliant blues and reds.

St. Michael's Church was right behind the courthouse and across the street. I wondered where Father Freeman was and pulled one of the hymnals from the rack and leafed through it, stopping to read now and then. Nothing there could compare with Robert Frost.

I thought I knew why. The hymns were all about hope and victory. Even if the words didn't appear to be, when the end came around, it was clear the end was about hope and victory, with a big helping of glory thrown in.

Father Freeman came out of a door up there on the side and walked across to the long table where the things for the Catholic service were kept (you could say) under wraps. He appeared to be rearranging things, candles and chalice and so forth, as if for a dinner party. He made his various bows and scrapes and signs of the cross and I wondered how much of it he believed.

He turned to look out over the absent congregation, probably sensing a presence there, having a priestly turn of mind. He saw me and waved, then disappeared through the doorway again. In another few moments he reappeared, minus the white smock.

“Hi, Emma,” he said, and sat down in the pew before mine and turned to face me. “Did you come to see me?”

“No, to see God, but he's not around, so you'll do.”

“Thanks.” He was silent, giving me, I suppose, a chance to speak, but I didn't.

He said, “I heard about Ralph Diggs. That was terrible. How do you feel about it? I know he worked at the hotel, but was he a friend?”

I shook my head. “Not especially. I felt bad about who they arrested and who's going to prison for it.”

“You mean Morris Slade?”

“I mean Ben Queen.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “That I hadn't heard. The Sheriff arrested Ben Queen?”

“He did the shooting, but it was only to keep Morris Slade from getting shot.” I didn't bother to add my thoughts about the guilty ones going free. I was riffling the pages of the hymnal like Aurora shuffling her pack of cards. I unfolded the piece of paper with the poem on it.

“What are you reading?”

“Poetry and hymns. They don't have much in common.” I slid the hymnal back behind its strip of wood and folded the paper with the poem into even smaller squares.

“What poetry is it?”

“Robert Frost's.”

Father Freeman held out his hand as if he had every right to see it. I didn't give it to him.
You don't deserve it.
I think I knew what Morris Slade had meant.

“Well, will you read it, then?”

The way he settled his arms along the back of the pew and settled his eyes on me meant the answer had to be yes.

“No.”

“Emma, what are you so angry about?” He rested his chin on the tips of his fingers, prayerfully.

I was amazed that he wondered. “I just told you.”

He frowned. “Ben Queen?”

“He has to keep being blamed and punished and coming back again. Nobody helps; nobody helps either one of them. Morris Slade didn't do anything either.”

His chin, which had lifted for a moment, came back down on his fingertips, putting him in praying territory again. “You think you should be able to do something about it?”

I stared at him. Of course I should be able to do something about it. But so should he, so should a lot of people. I unfolded the paper and read:

Just as Ulub had, I stumbled—

I raised my eyes and drilled them into his, and came down hard on the line:

I drilled another hole into him with my eyes.

“You believe that, Emma? That something has to be left to God?”

I got up from the pew. “Something. But not much.”

I walked out.

W
hy I then took refuge in the back room of the
Conservative
offices among the old newspapers and dusty magazines, I don't know, but I felt somehow comforted, looking at ancient ads for BB Bats and Campbell's soups; for Jell-O in fancy molds; and for Morton's salt with its picture of a girl holding an umbrella, unaware of the salt leaking out behind her. There was Tangee lipstick in little tubes just waiting for Miss Isabel Barnett to shoplift them. And I knew that for some reason, that was what gave comfort to Miss Isabel: shoplifting.

Some of these papers went way back to the 1910s and '20s. And all of these things were still around, and would still be around in another forty years. I marveled at that: these things would last longer than we would, and I found that very strange. Here was a 1930s stove that only my mother would love. We had one in the small back kitchen that burned wood and had black iron plates you lifted with a handlelike device. It sounded more like something Aurora's mother (if time went back that far) would use.

I lined up all the magazine covers I could find that pictured the Fadeaway Girls:
Good Housekeeping, Life,
the
Saturday Evening Post.
I studied each one, thinking the pictures might tell me something about how to write the story that I was having trouble with; that is, the pictures might reveal something of the understory. For there was more to the story than the facts of the Devereau sisters' drowning of Mary-Evelyn; more than the facts of the murder of Rose Queen; of Fern's murder; of Morris Slade and Ralph Fey Diggs. And of me.

The
Life
cover reminded me of Vera, except for the girl's being young and pretty: the maid in a black uniform kneeling and looking through a keyhole. I had to admit I didn't think Vera would do that. Her black uniform faded into the black wall behind her.

Here was the Christmas issue that I liked so much, the red-coated girl in front of a wrought-iron fence, slipping a Christmas card into a mailbox. The background was red and part of her coat faded into it.

Here was the amber-haired girl, in the amber woods, walking with an amber and white collie. If you wanted to see the whole of her, you had to imagine her out of the background.

Maybe a person never knew the whole of a thing because it kept coming and going, never wanting to meet the eye dead-on. A shoe here, an arm there. But, no, not even an arm, for the sleeve that covered it faded into the background.

Is that what I was trying to do? To imagine people into their background so deeply they'd disappear?

Maybe that was the understory.

T
he big papers would take the first part of “Tragedy Town” away from me, as the shooting at Brokedown House and the arrests of Morris Slade and Ben Queen were too big to be confined just to the
Conservative
. That news would make it to much bigger papers and maybe even to the New York ones, given that Morris Slade and Imogen Woodruff were part of it.

That Imogen Woodruff was the cause of it all—that would not be reported. Imogen and her awful father, Lucien Woodruff. The only ones who knew all of the story were Morris Slade and Ben Queen. The Sheriff might have known all of it, but I kind of doubt it. From the way Morris Slade was talking in our interview, I wouldn't think so. Ben Queen might have been more willing to talk to the Sheriff, but I doubt he'd tell all of it either.

I knew some of it, but I hadn't worked out the rest.

Jude Stemple had said this, some weeks ago, when he'd been one of the first people I'd talked to.

In my mind I sat down again in the Windy Run Diner watching that look move around the counter sitters, Billy and the rest.

“His sainted wife.”
Donny's voice.

A woman with a newborn wants to put it up for adoption:
that had been one of my theories.

“He said he owed me.”
For saving his life?
“Not just that.”

Jude Stemple had described Rose in perfect detail that first time I talked to him. He had described the Girl. And that's why I thought she was Fern's daughter.

And that was also how I came to realize what had been so painfully obvious all along. How much Ralph Diggs looked like Morris, forgetting that he looked exactly like Rose.

“Rose.”
The Sheriff had said the name, but nothing more.

“His sainted wife,”
Donny had said, with his usual leer.

If I were Imogen Slade and discovered that the baby I thought was adopted was actually my husband's by another woman, what would I do? If, mind you, my own mind worked in the mean way of Imogen's and her father's.

I'd have him kidnapped.

What greater punishment for Morris Slade could there be than what was done?

 

Morris Slade was freed, of course.

I don't know what will happen to Ben Queen, but the Sheriff said “mitigating circumstances,” which I think means being in such a bad spot that you didn't have any choice but to do what you did.

I was going over all of this on the train to Cold Flat Junction.

As the train pulled into the station, I thought about maybe asking Morris Slade if this story I'd come up with was true.

When I stepped down from the train, I did not go right away to the Windy Run Diner or any of the other places I seemed to make myself welcome at: the Queens' house, or Louise Landis's, or Jude Stemple's, or Gloria Spiker Calhoun's. I was surprised I could call up half a dozen others, but I could.