Hotel Paradise (49 page)

I didn’t really need the flashlight, for enough light trickled through the thick high branches. I heard the rustlings of small animals—or maybe milk snakes—in the undergrowth. And I heard a bird somewhere, and thought it might be a loon. It was all so still, and all so much the
same
as it had been before, I thought maybe it’s a Living Picture that remains the same all the time—even when I’m not here—and only its quiet breathing makes it different from moment to moment. At last, I was walking across the clearing towards the house, the sun starting to fall through the trees across the lake.

As I opened the screen door to the kitchen I imagined I saw out of the corner of my eye something move. I held my breath. I thought it must happen that on one of these journeys I would see the Girl again. Whatever moved (if anything had, and probably it hadn’t), it was a dark flicker of movement.

As soon as I was in the living room, I walked to the wall where the photograph of the Devereau sisters hung. I wanted to look at Rose again, thinking that maybe my new knowledge of her would work some change in her photo. But of course it didn’t. Rose was pretty all right, truly pretty; but to understand why Jude Stemple had talked about her as he did, had said she’d had a “lighted look,” for that you’d
have to see her in person. The picture listed a little; I touched the frame and set it straight. Then I walked slowly around the room, touching each piece of furniture I passed, with some notion in my mind that this might drive out bad spirits or call up good ones. While I did this I hummed the French song whose words I couldn’t understand but whose tune I couldn’t forget. I stopped to look out the front window, where the sun cut a burning path across the lake.

Perhaps I expected the Girl would turn up again over there, but of course she didn’t. I thought: It’s so strange how all of these generations of people hung together. First there was Mary-Evelyn, then Rose, then Fern, and now the Girl. All of them connected. I turned from the window and went up the stairs to Mary-Evelyn’s room.

I opened the wardrobe and carefully inspected each of the dresses. I wondered if the pale yellow one, so pale it was nearly white, was the dress Miss Flagler had described, the one Mary-Evelyn had worn to the garden party. With those satin-covered buttons, it certainly looked like a party dress. I took down the pink-dotted Swiss. I held it up under my chin and decided the color didn’t do much for me. I returned it too to its hanger and reached for the delphinium-colored taffeta. I held it up before the dresser mirror and saw how it made my eyes look really blue, so I took off my skirt and T-shirt and tried it on. I turned and twisted in front of the mirror (hoping I didn’t look like Ree-Jane doing it) and found the dress fit just as well as the green dress.

Then I went over to the toy chest and lifted the lid. I rested my forehead on the edge and peered into its dark blue shadows, wondering if there might not be something else in there that would tell me more about Mary-Evelyn. For with all of the information I’d got about Rose and Ben Queen, I still hadn’t heard any more about her. When I was searching for the Artist George piece, I hadn’t seen a notebook or anything; but wasn’t there always something like a diary being discovered in mystery stories? I myself had a five-year diary with flimsy pages that I could lock with a key but never bothered to. I hid it in my underwear drawer.

There were three dolls in the chest and I pulled out the stuffed one, a doll with a long full skirt and yellow hair with a pink ribbon in it. When you raised the skirt or turned it over, you would find a black doll in a bandanna. I once had one of these when I was little enough to play with dolls. I spent a minute turning the doll over and up again,
but couldn’t decide which—the white or the black face—I preferred. I know I liked the checkered bandanna a lot more than the pink hair ribbon. I stood the doll against the chest and pulled out a train engine painted black with bits of gold and looking a lot like the train that came through La Porte. There were a few broken pieces of track, and I wondered if Mary-Evelyn had ever had a train set. There were some jigsaw puzzles and a deck of cards spilled around that I collected and put in their box. On the bottom was a real find: a Ouija board! It was something I’d always wanted but forgot to ask for around Christmas time. Ree-Jane had one, but of course I wouldn’t play with her because she pushed the marker to wherever she wanted and then insisted it was done by the Invisible Hands. The Invisible Hands always had good news for her and bad news for me. If I had listened to the Ouija, I never would have got out of bed in the morning.

There were a number of books, too, several with their covers missing. I was surprised to see Babar stories, as they had been my favorites when I was a child. To make sure I had outgrown them, I chose one to read and lay back on the floor (carefully, so as not to muss the dress) and held the book above my face. While I read the story through, I studied the pictures closely, and then closed the book, sadly, for I found that it was true: I had outgrown Babar. So I merely leafed through the second book, not stopping to read much.

I barely noticed that a streak of sun had all but vanished from the page and left behind only a heavy pewter light. I returned the books to the chest, rooted down farther and found some doll clothes—a wine-red velvet coat and bonnet, but not meant for any of these dolls. I set the coat to one side and kept on looking. But there was no diary or notebook. And no Artist George, either. I thought this piece might have got buried beneath dolls and mittens and a couple of doll blankets.

I got up with the double-faced doll in my hands and went to the windows that looked out over the lake. Why had Mary-Evelyn’s things been left here, this way? Perhaps the Devereau sisters didn’t want to take any reminders of her. They might have wanted to blot her out. And yet, the furniture had also been left, and the pictures on the walls, the dishes and silverware, the music in the piano bench, the records of French songs. It was as if they expected to return at any moment; it was almost as if they’d never gone away.

I stood twisting the doll by its arms over and under—white face, black face; pink ribbon, bandanna—and wondering if the house had
a cellar, when a flicker of movement outside caught my eye, or the corner of my eye. I went very still and turned my head very slowly in case someone was watching me. I could see no one. But I
had
seen a movement; this time, I was sure of it. I left Mary-Evelyn’s room and ran down the hall to the end room that I thought must have been Rose’s. Its single window gave out over the woods.

I looked down into the gathering dark. A man stood there. He was a few feet back in the woods and he was just standing, looking up. Quickly, I stepped back from the window. Clutching the doll to me, I held my breath, as if the tiniest motion could give me away. I knew who it must be, because he was the only one besides me who would be drawn to this house. Ben Queen.

Carefully, I took a step to the window. He still stood there. I heard Aurora’s voice saying, “Never set foot in that house.” How Ben Queen would come through the woods and stand and watch for Rose. But maybe Aurora’d made that up so the whole thing would sound romantic.

He could have come the same way I did, but I didn’t think so. I heard Aurora again: “Men like Ben Queen always find a way in.” He stood there perfectly still, a frozen stillness, with his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets. He wore a long coat, and a wide-brimmed hat, and a kerchief around his neck, so that he looked like he was right out of a western, one of those Saturday-afternoon westerns at the Orion.

Even in the dusk and with that hat shadowing his face, I could tell he was still handsome, though he had to be in his sixties. It was over forty years ago Rose Devereau had run off with him and she’d been twenty then, and Ben Queen not much older.

I tried to imagine how Rose Devereau had felt, seeing him there night after night, wishing her—
willing
her—to come out of this house, to leave her sisters and run away with him. It must have been like trying to resist a terrific force, a hurricanelike wind or tornado rattling the house, shaking the trees, spinning along the lake’s surface. My stomach felt hollow, but not from fear. I can only explain it by saying I felt empty.

When he finally moved, I felt a shock, as if a statue had picked up and changed position. He walked the little distance to the house and then I couldn’t see him anymore, because he was coming inside. I heard the kitchen door creak open, creak shut. I stood there, not knowing at all what to do. I simply stood and listened to the sounds,
slow footsteps on the floorboards, stopping and starting, then other small sounds like the rustlings in the woods. Then silence. Then movement. And then, after a few moments, the music. He must have started up the record player. I had left the French song on the turntable, and that’s what he played.

Very carefully tiptoeing, I left the room, freezing as a board creaked beneath my foot. And then I realized that he must have seen me anyway. Outside, before I’d come in the house. He must have seen me. He knew I was here. So all of this taking care being quiet was kind of silly. So would hiding be. If Ben Queen came looking for me, well, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I thought I might as well go on downstairs.

But I still wanted to hang back. At the top of the stairs I stopped, then sat. I could see him just beyond the record player, standing and gazing out of the door at the side of the house. He was smoking now, a thin kind of cigar. As he brought his hand up to his mouth, he turned his face, looked up the stairwell, and went on looking, not saying a word.

For some reason, that look got me to my feet.
Pulled
me to my feet might be a better way of saying it. Even all the way down there to up here, it was a powerful look. He was taller than the Sheriff. He was handsomer too, something I thought I’d never in my life see. But he was. I didn’t see how anyone that old could be that good-looking.

If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it. He stood there smoking his cigar, his eyes giving me a considering sort of look. I guess if you’ve lived a lifetime of surprises, you learn to hide your feelings when you meet a new one. Hearing him speak surprised me, though. I nearly jumped.

“Whyn’t you come on down, girl?”

I did. Trying to be casual, I walked down the stairs.

When I was finally there, looking up at him, I guess he figured I wasn’t going to be the one making conversation, so he said, “You live here?”

I shook my head, unable to find my own voice. I saw I was still holding tightly to the double-headed doll and tossed it onto a chair.

“Didn’t think there was nobody lived here now.” He looked me over. “That’s a mighty pretty color on you. Matches your beautiful eyes.”

He gave me a flirty look, the kind I see Will giving people, and I
was a little breathless. Beautiful eyes. Not shrug-colored at all. I’d completely forgot I was wearing the taffeta dress. “There was a . . . party at the hotel; I dressed up.” I don’t know why I felt I had to explain things; it only got me in deeper.

But not this time, for all he said was, “You must like this place if it’s better than a party.”

I cleared my throat and said: “The Devereaus used to live here. They’re gone now.”

He didn’t comment. Slowly he shook his head. He looked directly at me, then; his eyes were a winter gray, the color that Spirit Lake gets in December. It’s a gray that seems to spread from the water itself to the grassy banks, the trunks of trees, up to the sky.

“Hotel? You’re not from over at the Hotel Paradise, are you?”

I was glad I could surprise him, at least. “Yes. It’s my mother’s.”

He was even more surprised and laughed. “My Lord, I know them over there. Knew them, I should say. Grahams own that place. I remember. What’s your name?”

“Emma.” It felt strange, my own name in my mouth, as if something about me had just come into being.

“I’ll be . . . I’ll be.” He shook his head. “Long time ago.” He looked away, and I knew from the direction of his gaze he must be looking at the photograph. “Long time.”

“You’re Ben Queen, aren’t you?”

He did look a little surprised that I’d know that. “Reckon I am.”

“You were married to Rose Devereau.”

He didn’t even nod this time.

“You just got out of jail, that’s what I heard.”

“You seem to know me pretty well. If you know all that, why ain’t you scared? Being alone here with a stranger that’s a convicted killer?”

“I—” I didn’t know. “What—why did you come here?” I asked him.

“I could ask you the same question.”

Well, I could see why they didn’t get much out of Ben Queen at his trial.

He said, “You must be hellbent on something, to go through them woods out there alone.” He nodded toward the part of the woods I’d come through, where the lake curved around. The night was coming on swiftly, and the trees out where he was looking shifted in a wind off the water like black feathers. I couldn’t see the lake now except for
a crescent rim. It was fading fast from view, disappearing part by part like that cat in
Alice in Wonderland.

And I guess it was Alice that made me think of the Red Queen, how she traveled over ground that moved as she ran so that she was always in the same place. I don’t know what it meant, but I felt like the Red Queen, and I really couldn’t stand it, all the effort it took to stay in one place. I was taken by a feeling of terrible sadness and was afraid I would start to bawl, so I kept my head down and my eyes fixed on the floor, trying to swallow the ache in my throat. “I guess I am hellbent, all right.”

“Makes two of us.”

It was safe to look up now, I was back in control of myself, and I raised my head to see he had pulled out a book of matches and with his thumb struck one up, expertly, as if he were used to doing things in the dark. He put the flame to the tallow candles where they wavered and threw up cones of light on our faces. Being lit from below, we must have looked like a couple of jack-o’-lanterns.