Hotel Paradise (36 page)

That stopped him dead.

I kept on quickly walking until I heard him shout, “Now, you just hold it right there, Miss Lickety-split!”

I obliged. I turned around.

“What’s all this about a sheriff?” His tone was belligerent.

“Nothing. He’s just a good friend of my grandmother. And she—”
I paused to think, but was pretending to get a pebble out of my shoe. “My grandma Aurora”— that certainly stuck in my throat—“she’s afraid maybe this dead woman the police found over near White’s Bridge, that she might be the woman my grandma knew. . . .” My voice trailed off.

For some reason, his annoyance seemed to have eased off. “Yeah. I read about that dead woman.”

I couldn’t understand, though, why he wasn’t asking me what I was doing here and questioning
him.
Why would any sheriff be sending
me
? Did I look like a deputy? I wondered if he was guilty of something, for he seemed to relax a little when I mentioned the dead lady, as if he was relieved it was some other business that didn’t concern him.

“They don’t know who she is. Like I said, Grandma’s afraid it’s this friend of hers. This former friend.”

“Huh.” He didn’t sound very interested. But he’d moved closer to the fence and was eyeing me now with suspicion. “How old’re you, girl?”

“Fourteen.” I pulled myself up out of my socks. Most people thought I was older than twelve.

Now, he was finally getting around to asking me what I was doing in Cold Flat Junction.

“Came to visit someone,” I answered without thinking.

“Yeah? Who?”

Desperately, I searched for names. I squinted over towards the porch. “That your dog?”

Slowly, he spat out a stream of tobacco juice. “Sittin’ on my porch, I guess it must be, don’t you? So who’d you come to visit here?”

Suddenly, the scene in the Windy Run Diner flashed across my vision. “You know Louise Snell over at the diner?” I hoped he didn’t; I didn’t want him comparing notes.

“Sure, I know her.”

“Oh. I came to see Betsy Snell. You know, her girl.” I hoped to heavens that Betsy Snell didn’t have anything wrong with her that meant people couldn’t visit her—like being in an iron lung or something. Apparently not, for Jude Stemple merely gave a disinterested little snort. I continued by saying, “So my grandma asked me, if I was coming to Cold Flat anyway, would I stop off in Flyback Hollow and see if I could talk to the Queens. About this dead woman.” I shrugged, as if I too were indifferent to the whole errand.

He thought for a bit, looking at me, but now without suspicion. “So which Queen does your grandma think this is?”

“Serena. Serena Queen.” How had I ever come up with that name? In my whole life, I’d never heard of a Serena, Queen or otherwise.

He shoved his checkered cap back on his head, wiped his forehead with his arm, and then resettled the cap. “I never heard of no Serena Queen.” But he seemed genuinely puzzled, and to be thinking this over.

I was relieved to hear that, at least.

“Maybe that’s one I don’t know.” He was fingering a cigarette from the crushed pack in the pocket of his woodsman’s shirt. I wondered if he intended to smoke and chew at the same time. Then he said, after framing his hands around a struck match and sucking in on his cigarette, “Anyways, that ain’t who that dead woman is.”

I chewed the inside of my lip. “It isn’t? Oh. How . . . uh . . . well, how do you
know
?” I wanted to be careful not to act as if I was challenging his knowledge of the Queens. But he didn’t take offense.

Blowing out smoke and looking off towards the trees, he said, “That’s Ben Queen’s girl, sure as God made little green apples.”

Ben Queen’s girl.
I stood there as a whippoorwill somewhere hit its mournful notes.
Ben Queen’s girl.
By now the words had taken on the chanting sound of prayer.
Holy Mary Ben Queen’s girl Mother of God Ben Queen’s girl.
They were potent, like magic, even though at the same time they weren’t at all conclusive. The words didn’t decide anything, or answer the ultimate question.

“You mean his daughter?”

“Uh-huh.” He drew in on his cigarette and then let go with a hacking cough.

For a moment I felt sorry for him. Trying to tread lightly (for my sake, not his), I said, “Then was Ben Queen’s daughter blond and . . . middle-aged?”

“Forty or so, I expect. But the blond come out of a bottle, you ask me.”

So the dead woman couldn’t possibly be the Girl, not if he was right. The Girl couldn’t have been more than twenty or so, and her pale hair had never come out of any bottle, not unless they bottled moonlight somewhere. The relief I felt made me shiver so much I had to wrap my arms around myself. Jude could be wrong about this
woman’s identity, but I didn’t think he was. And he hadn’t actually answered my question “How do you know?” So I asked it again.

He answered, “Because the lady I’m talking about left here for La Porte five days ago, got on the Tabernacle bus over there by the Cold Flat post office, and ain’t been seen since.”

I was wide-eyed. The way he said it made it all seem fraught with danger. “Well, but . . . I mean . . . listen, how come you didn’t go to the police?”

I was afraid then I’d offended him, but he only shrugged it off. “Why would I? That’s in La Porte, not Cold Flat, and I figured they already knew who it was.”

“The Sheriff doesn’t, at least not the last time I . . . I mean, not when he was talking to my grandmother. That was just yesterday. There wasn’t anything that identified her, see.”

He smoked some more, leaning over the fence. “I don’t see how it’s my job to go talking to no sheriff in La Porte.” He was getting defensive.

“I don’t either. No, I don’t think it is either. It’s those Queens you’d think would tell him. Why do you suppose they haven’t said something to the police? If she’s been gone five days?”

He shrugged and knocked off ash from his cigarette with his little finger. “Queens is kind of weird. Who knows? Maybe one of them did her in.” His chuckle was ghoulish.

It hit me that I’d nearly forgotten the woman was probably murdered. I shivered again and plucked my sweater sleeves down over my hands.

He said, “I can’t figure out this Serena, though. I can’t place her.”

“Oh, I probably got it wrong. Then who’s the woman you think they found?”

“Fern Queen. It must be Fern, to my way of thinking.”

I was astonished, though I don’t know why. “Rose Fern Souder Devereau,” that’s what Aurora said. Rose Fern had run off with Ben Queen, so if this was his “girl,” then the name “Fern” seemed natural enough. After her mother. I just stood there, thinking about the Devereau house on Spirit Lake.

Without any prompting, Jude Stemple went on talking. It was if he’d been waiting to talk for some long while, like in a fairy-tale, being at last released from a charm, and it didn’t make any difference I was only a kid. Adults do that with me—start talking, I mean. It’s very
strange. Sometimes I think talking to me must be for them like talking to themselves. I don’t know whether or not to compliment myself over this, though.

“The Queens, or leastways some of them, they live in that big house with the yellow shutters. You must of passed it coming along Dubois Road.”

“I passed it. With the roses growing up it?”

He spat out more tobacco at the same time he dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out. “That’s it. Now, this Serena, what’d she tell you about her?”

I wished he’d forget about Serena. “Nothing much.” And I chanced it. “Does Ben Queen live there?” I hurried on to explain my interest by saying, “I think Grandma mentioned him.”

“Ben?” He frowned at me. “Ben’s not been around for twenty years.”

He must be dead. I don’t know why my heart sank at this thought. But I didn’t let it show. Casually, I asked, “I wonder what happened to her mother. I mean Ben Queen’s wife.”

He looked at me very directly. “You do a lot of wonderin’ for a kid.” He was quiet for some moments, and then said, “Rose was near forty when . . . she died. That’s going on twenty, twenty-one years ago. Rose Fern Queen.” He shook his head, smiling, and his pale eyes were clouded over. “That was one pretty woman, Rose Queen. Prettiest woman I think I ever seen. Too bad Fern never got her looks. Thing is, no one could be as pretty as Rose.” Jude Stemple looked terribly sad, as if he’d lost something. It was all very strange. Then he leaned the axe against the fence and said, “I’m goin’ in to get me a beer. You want some pop, or what?”

I nodded, stunned that he was making this now a social occasion and including me in it.

He called back over his shoulder, “You go on round to the porch there. That dog, he don’t bite.”

So it looked like we were even to sit down by way of continuing our visit. I walked around to the front of the house and up to the porch, where there was only one wooden rocker. I sat down beside the dog, who flapped his tail around in his version of a wag, I guessed. I rubbed the old dog’s back and he seemed pleased with the attention, half-rolling over and stretching, his front legs partly off the edge of the porch and his head dangling there. I often wondered how animals
(cats especially) could get themselves into such uncomfortable-looking positions, but appeared not to be at all. My hand’s movement on the dog stopped a minute while I wondered if I should envy animals. It would be a relief not to want things, like white meat of chicken or buying clothes from the Europa. Or it would be a relief to be a cat and loll on a kitchen chair in a beam of sunlight and not have to pay attention to Vera shouldering trays and bossily calling out “Coming through, coming through!” But the other side was, if I were a cat I’d never be able to go to the Orion movie house and eat popcorn from a pink cone and watch a rerun of
Waterloo Bridge.

Jude Stemple was back with his beer, a bottle of Black Label, and with my soda. It was Orange Crush, and I told him that was my favorite. It was, too. I liked Orange Crush because of the brown bottle—dark brown and slightly ribbed up and down. I loved that bottle, which was like no other pop bottle. Almost all of them were plain clear glass.

Instead of taking the rocker, he sat down beside me on the porch step. I hoped the interruption caused by getting the beer and pop wouldn’t mean we’d have to start our conversation all over again with a lot of small talk, as people seem to do; they always seemed to have to remeet and get up a lot of small talk before they can continue along the line they’ve been discussing. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case with Jude Stemple. Once having mentioned Rose and Ben Queen, he seemed deep into his subject.

“Now, Ben Queen took off when he wasn’t much older’n you. Went out west somewheres—Nevada, Arizona, one of them. Come back when he was around twenty. Didn’t have much schooling. Didn’t have a trade. My guess is Ben lived by his wits. And his looks. Real handsome.” He stopped to take a long drink of beer and wipe his mouth. “Let me tell you, good looks, they’ll get you a long, long ways in this world.” Then he turned to look at me and frown, as if he figured I wasn’t going far. “The women just followed Ben Queen around like puppies. So somehow he gets to know Rosie Devereau. Rose Fern Devereau. Devereaus lived over your way, over to Spirit Lake.”

(As if I didn’t know.)

“Well, he ups and marries her, or at least I
assume
so. But they had to run off, for her family, though I never knew them, they were awful high and mighty from what people said, and didn’t much care
for the likes of no Queens. I’ll admit some of the Queens was damned peculiar—excuse my French. It’s Ben’s brother and sister-in-law lives in that house on Dubois. I guess he’s all right, but she’s a damned busybody. They grow their own produce out back—”

“I saw some tomato plants.”

He nodded. “They got them a big old garden out back—lettuces and asparagus, cabbages, you name it.”

“Did you know the Devereaus?”

“Rose’s people? I never did know them. Wouldn’t find no Devereau comin’ to Cold Flat Junction.” He picked at the label on his beer bottle.

“Didn’t she ever talk about them?”

“Not that I ever heard.”

“But what about Fern? I don’t see how someone wouldn’t report she’s gone.”

He let out a guffaw. “Probably they think maybe she run off and don’t care much, if the truth be known.”

I guess something in the way he said that stopped me from asking why. I had a funny feeling if I had asked it would have put an end to the conversation. But it was getting on late and I couldn’t be forever skirting around issues, so I did ask, “You never heard anyone mention Mary-Evelyn Devereau?”

He thought for a moment, looking off through the trees, frowning. “I do seem to recall something about an accident. It must’ve been thirty-five, forty years ago.”

I told him what had happened to Mary-Evelyn and he nodded, yes, that’s sort of what he’d heard. And he clucked around about its being real sad.

I was disappointed he didn’t know more about Rose. Then I said, “I guess you know about everybody in Cold Flat Junction.” He said yes, nearly. “I wonder, did you ever see—” I stopped. I don’t know why I didn’t go on and ask about the Girl. But I didn’t.

We were quiet, and the old dog was snoring lightly. I followed the direction of Jude Stemple’s gaze, off towards the tops of the high branches coming into leaf, where gray light fretted the outlines. The sky was a shade darker and I looked at my watch. I had twenty-five minutes to get to the train. “I’ve got to go!” I sang out, jumped up, and did a dancing step backward.

Jude Stemple straightened up and said, “Well, it was nice talkin’ to you. But don’t you go back and tell that there La Porte sheriff all I told you, hear?”

I stopped dead, thunderstruck. “Well, but—”

He was shaking his head no, no. “Now you promise me that, hear? After all, it’s none of my affair.”

Not tell the Sheriff? How could I not? I swallowed, hard. Yet Jude Stemple looked so—I don’t know—
downtrodden
, or miserable, that I just went ahead and nodded. I thought maybe he was lonely. I guessed a person would have to be, to be hanging around talking to me all this time.