Hotel Paradise (50 page)

Before I could think I said, “There’s a lady they found shot over in Mirror Pond by White’s Bridge.”

He looked off into the darkness, not answering.

So I went on. “Isn’t she some—relation of yours? That’s what I heard.”

He drew in on his cigar, let out the smoke before he said, “Her name’s Fern. She was my daughter.”

Saying it, Ben Queen sounded not so much sad as weary. The way I feel when I’ve cleared all the tables and they tell me there’s six more for dinner. Just plain weary, as if some chore you’d supposed was over turned out to be endless.

He looked at me for a long time from the hollows of his jack-o’-lantern eyes. Then he said, “If it’s any comfort to you, I didn’t kill neither of them, not my daughter and God knows not my wife, Rose. But they’ll be after me, of course. Sheriff here already is. Only he’s looking in the wrong place.” He struck another match on his thumbnail and raised it to the cigar, relighting it.

Then, to my astonishment—I was too surprised to be frightened—he pulled out a gun from inside his long coat, a little one not much bigger than the palm of his hand, broke the barrel, and tossed it on a table beside the sofa.

“There’s the weapon. You want to turn me in? Might as well—I
don’t feel much like trying to get away.” He shrugged and gave me a thin smile. “Times you just get damned tired. Excuse my language.” He made me a stiff little bow that could have seemed like he mocked me, but I knew he didn’t. My eyes riveted on the gun, this dangerous thing that he was tossing around with no more concern than I had shown when I tossed the doll on the chair.

“Found it near the bridge. Near that pond.”

“Mirror Pond. You
found
it? Nobody’s going to believe that!” That was one of the dumbest explanations I’d ever heard. And I said so.

He laughed, and his laugh was hearty and deep. “I reckon you’re right. It is pretty dumb.”

“But that means you were
there
; you were at the pond.” My arms came out in goose bumps.

“It’s getting late, Emma. I think I’d better leave and so should you, and I think you should let me walk you through the woods.” He reached to pick up the gun, which he then stuck back in some inside pocket of the coat. “I’d go ahead and leave it except some kid might get hold of it.” He moved over to the record player and lifted the arm, which had been sliding back and forth when the sad French song ended. “Come on, then. I’ll walk you.”

“Yes—but wait! I’ve got to change out of this—my dress.” Before he could reply, I rushed upstairs, took off the dress, and put my old clothes back on. Then I ran down again. He was nipping the candle flames out between thumb and forefinger, and if it hadn’t been for the moon, we would have plunged into total darkness.

I’ll say this: it felt a lot better going through those woods with him than it did going it alone. Especially someone who seemed not to have any fear about him. He pushed low-hanging branches out of my way and made sure I didn’t turn my ankle or fall over a root or a limb. And because he was so tall he could hold the lantern higher and give me a better pocket of light to walk in. Yes, it was nice to have someone making that trip with me. Especially Ben Queen. I expect people would have called me totally crazy for not being afraid of him—a strange man and one they said had killed a woman to boot—but I wasn’t. I had so many questions I wanted to ask I had a hard time settling on any one of them. We walked in silence until he said, “It sure sounds as if you made quite a study of me.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to think that, so I said, “Oh, it was
my great-aunt who made the study. She told me some about you. She said the Devereaus didn’t like you coming here to see Rose.”

He laughed. “That’s sure true enough.” He nodded toward some distance behind us. “Back there about a quarter-mile there’s an old dirt road I don’t suppose anyone ever uses anymore. I’d just leave my truck there and walk through the trees. Sometimes I’d come around the way you said, but they’d know my truck, see it from the other side of the lake. I think those women were always looking out of windows.”

We picked up walking again. I asked, “But why wouldn’t they let you come in the house?”

He gave a gruff laugh. “Now, the reasons they gave out were I wasn’t good enough for Rose Devereau. Cold Flat Junction people, they ain’t exactly thought highly of. Another thing was, they said I was wild.”

“Were you?” I was a little excited by this. I’d never had the chance to talk to somebody wild before.

“Sometimes I was. Drank too much, got in fights, played too much poker.”

“That’s what Aurora told me,” I said without thinking. “Said you taught her how to play poker.”

He stopped suddenly. “My Lord! You mean that woman’s still alive?
That’s
your great-aunt? My
Lord
! You talk about
wild
, Aurora Paradise could of taught me a few tricks. She’s still there at the Hotel Paradise? My Lord.” He shook his head.

“She lives up on the fourth floor.” I was absolutely thrilled that Aurora had been wild, too, along with Ben Queen. “What kind of tricks?”

Ben Queen chuckled and pushed away some briars for me to pass. “Never you mind.”

I stopped dead by the tree where the heart was carved. “People
always
say that to me.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Settle down. I’ll tell you one thing that you can hold over her head when she starts in giving you trouble, as I’m sure she does. When I was about your age, Aurora Paradise jumped buck-naked into this lake here in front of twenty people. Someone dared her, so she just threw off her clothes and did it.”

We walked on. I was pleased. He was right; I could just bring that
up the next time she wouldn’t tell me something. We walked on, and I said, “
I
don’t think Cold Flat people are to be looked down on.”

“Oh, that wasn’t those Devereau sisters’ real reason. The real reason was they didn’t want Rosie to be happy. They didn’t want
anyone
to be happy. You could tell it from their pinched faces and their tight corsets. They meant to keep her forever with them, miserable as they were. There’s people like that, you know. But in spite of them and having to live amongst that cold clutter, Rose was still a happy woman.”

I felt terrible again. Like I might cry, but angry, too. “Mary-Evelyn wasn’t.”

He stopped, looked down at me, and asked. “How do you know about Mary-Evelyn?”

“How do I know? It wasn’t exactly a secret, was it? It was in all the papers.” We had come to the opening where the spring was, and I didn’t know if I was glad to see it or not.

He pushed his hat back a little, wiped his forehead with his forearm. He said, “Yeah. I expect it was.”

Ben Queen looked around at the rocks, the tiled pool.

He nodded. “Let’s sit down a minute. I wouldn’t mind a cold drink.” We walked across to the spring and he bent and let water run into his hands.

“Wait a minute, there’s a cup.” I got the tin cup from its hole and held it under the pipe until it was nearly full. He was sitting now on the ledge around the spring and I carried the cup over and sat down beside him. I passed him the cup.

After he drank, he passed the cup back to me, then fired up another match for a fresh cigar and asked, “You know what a scapegoat is?”

Did
I? If there was one thing I knew, it was scapegoating. “I sure do. It’s a goat they used to tie things on, like pans and pots. Then they make the goat go off and it’s as if the goat’s taking all of their sins with him.” I scratched my ear. “Or something like that.”

“
Exactly
like that. Well, little Mary-Evelyn was one. In some families, they just got to have one person to pass all the blame to. Because sometimes it’s the only way the rest of them can get by. Either they’re too blind, or too weak, or too stupid to see what they’re doing. . . .”

I didn’t much want to sit and listen to excuses made for the Devereau sisters. “So they stuck her in that boat and shoved her off into the lake—” I stopped suddenly. Is
that
what I’d believed? It was
too horrible to think about, it really was. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see he’d turned his face to study mine. But I wouldn’t look at him; I was angry with him. I was angry because he hadn’t saved Mary-Evelyn Devereau.

“Why did they hate her so much? Why wouldn’t they talk to her? Why did they send her to Cloverly?” I wasn’t too sure about that last question.

“To where?”

“Cloverly. It means people not talking to you, shutting you out.”

He turned his cigar in his mouth, made a noise deep in his throat.

I just brought it out, my anger. “Rose knew they did it! Rose must’ve known it. She should never have run off and left Mary-Evelyn. Mary-Evelyn was all by herself. . . .” Well, this time I just broke down and cried. I jumped off the stone wall and just walked around the spring, crying. Ben Queen didn’t ignore me, yet he didn’t say a word, and I was thankful for that. The tear storm only lasted a minute and then stopped, like the sudden cease of rain or thunder. Just stopped. I went over to the pipe that jutted out, bent down, and turned my face so the icy water ran on my eyelids.

I was pretty wet, and Ben had taken the neckerchief from around his neck and was holding it out. “Here, Emma. Come now and sit down.” I did this, grateful that he didn’t say the sorts of things grown-ups like to, such as I had no reason to cry; or, even if I had a reason, crying wouldn’t do any good. “I’ll try to explain,” he said.

“Time someone did,” I said, with a lot more starch than I felt. I was folding the damp neckerchief into a small square.

He smiled. “You’re right there.” He was quiet for some moments, considering this, as he studied his cigar coal. “But we was going to go back and get her. We was trying to work out a way to get her out of there. The accident happened just a few days after we left.”

“You think it was an accident?”

“I surely do. That boat had a leak in it. Didn’t studying up on it tell you that?” He sighed. “We meant to go back for her.”

So she hadn’t simply been abandoned. My anger evaporated, and that same feeling of relief washed over me. More breath let out. But I said, sternly, “Well, it’s too bad you didn’t, because look what happened!” As if he hadn’t looked; I guess he’d been looking for a good long time. No one said anything. I passed him the tin cup and he took another drink.

He rolled his cigar in his mouth awhile then let out the smoke. “It was bad, real bad. I thought poor Rose’s heart would just break over that. For, you see, she blamed herself. Mary-Evelyn might just have thought no one could follow her, that those women couldn’t find her if she was in a boat. At least that’s what Rose figured—that maybe she’d row until she found a river. To go where, we couldn’t say, if to go anywhere.”

To row until she found a river.
I felt relieved, as if I’d been holding my breath for days and only now could let it out. But again I felt angry. “Well, she’d never have done it if you two hadn’t of run off and left her behind!” But my anger now was sort of manufactured; I believed they really would have got Mary-Evelyn out from under her aunts if they’d had the time. Then I remembered what Ulub had said and told Ben Queen. “They were making her go over to the boathouse!”

He frowned. “Most likely they were just looking for her, don’t you think?”

“
Looking
for her?” I was astonished. And then I realized, Ulub could have misunderstood. He’d already left and he was watching from this side of the lake. How could he have distinguished lamps from candles, or how could he be sure Mary-Evelyn was with them? By the time he left the Devereau house, ran home, and ran back, Mary-Evelyn could have come around to this side of the lake. Indeed, all along I’d been depending on Ulub for information about the Devereaus and had turned what might only have been their nature not to talk much into this policing silence. I had to admit, too, that I’d loved that image of the three of them walking through the black woods, lighting their way with lamps or candles. I thought of Miss Flyte and her “effects.” It was kind of Nancy Drew-ish. So if that kind of misunderstanding could apply to the Devereau women, well, why not to anything? All we had was either the evidence of our own eyes or that kind the Sheriff has to go on: footprints, thumbprints, alibis. “But why didn’t those women call the police?”

“I don’t know. Rose thought it was because they were so sure they’d find her or she’d come running back. They were too prideful to admit she’d run off, and Rose said they couldn’t stand to be thought wrong; they would have hated to make their business public.”

We sat in a pleasant silence for a few moments, me turning over and over the subject of the Devereaus. I hoped Ben Queen wouldn’t
mind me bringing it up, but Rose’s murder got to be too much for me to keep silent. “People know you didn’t kill Rose.”

He nodded briefly, as if that settled it. “They’re right. Too bad they weren’t on that jury.”

“Mr. Stemple—do you remember him?” Ben Queen nodded, said he sure did, and I went on. “He says your friend Miss Landis came under a lot of suspicion.”

Ben Queen waved that away. “Lou Landis was the kind of person could accept things that went against her. I never heard Lou utter one word against Rose. When we was married, she came up to both of us and sincerely wished we would be happy. Lou’s a fine woman.”

I thought of the woman in the dark dress, looking out over the schoolyard as if waiting for someone to come back. I lowered my head, for I might cry. It was all so romantic and tragic. I got control of myself—I always did—cleared my throat a few times so my voice wouldn’t tremble, and asked, “But why didn’t you even defend yourself? Why?”

“Guess I didn’t much care what happened, not with Rose gone.”

In a squall of anger, I half rose and said, “That’s not fair! You had Fern to look after—you had a
child
! It’s like you just
forgot
her and left her to fend for herself!” I sat down heavily, as if the burden of forgotten children were just too much for me.