Fadeaway Girl (15 page)

Like I was trying to blink up that baby.

I
woke up the next morning and thought better of it and clamped a pillow over my head.

I needed to talk to someone who could do something, like the Sheriff. Or I needed to talk to someone with good sense, like Dwayne.

Or maybe I needed to talk to someone with a foot in both worlds, the real one and whatever else was out there, like Mrs. Louderback.

What I did
not
need was to carry breakfasts on a tray up to the Big Garage.

“Why should I have to wait on them? Why don't they come to the kitchen like everybody else?”

My mother was grimly shaping Parker House rolls. “Because they won't. You know them.”

“Let them starve, then.”

“They would.”

I fumed. “Well, where's Ralph Diggs?
He
should be doing things like this; he can certainly carry up a tray.”

“He's driving to Alta Vista with Mrs. Davidow.”

“It's not even nine o'clock; the state liquor store isn't open yet. Which is where they're going, of course.”

“By the time they get there, it will be.”

Plop!
went another small folded roll onto the thin baking sheet. They looked like two dozen tiny smiles. I loved Parker House rolls and was distracted thinking of how they'd puff up soft and golden brown.

“Emma.”

“What?”

She pointed to the white-porcelain-topped island in the middle of the room, where I did the salads. “The tray is there. I just have to add some scrambled eggs.”

My mother always cooked scrambled eggs in the top of a double boiler instead of a frying pan. She whisked them over the simmering water, and in that way got a lot of air into them. Like the rolls, they came out puffy and soft and smooth. I scanned the tray: orange juice and buttermilk pancakes. The pancakes were on a plate under a dome to keep the heat in. Good grief. Sitting beside that plate was a pitcher of maple syrup so pure that Walter must have gone and tapped it out of a tree. I let the pancake smell waft around me.

“Put the cover back on or they'll get cold. Here—” She handed me a large plate of eggs.

“You've even put
parsley
on them?”

“I always do on scrambled eggs.”

“This is
Will
and
Mill
we're talking about.”

“And that's parsley and parsley. Go.”

I heard noises in the dining room. It was nearly nine o'clock. “I hope that's not Miss Bertha scratching around in there.”

“I'll take care of Miss Bertha if you just stop whining and take that tray to the Big Garage.”

Not wait on Miss Bertha! I'd take the tray down to hell for that. I whisked it up on my palm and was out through the back door before my mother realized she was getting a raw deal.

I crunched along the gravel drive past the cocktail garden to the Big Garage. My hands being full, I had to knock at the door with my foot. As always happened, half of Will's face materialized between door and doorjamb.

“What?”

“You
know
what.” I tapped the tray.

“Oh. Yeah.” He opened the door and then walked away, not offering to take the tray. “Breakfast, mate!” he yelled to Mill.

Mate?
And it was said with a phony British accent. I set the tray on a red-spattered stump left over from
Medea, the Musical
. A lot of spray paint had been used in that production, especially red for blood. They loved the blood and speckled a lot of things with it. I came in once and saw Paul was a mist of red. Or, who knows? It could have been real blood, when it came to them and Paul.

Mill gave a blast on his trumpet. He played everything—horn, piano, clarinet, drums. He was the most talented person I'd ever met and probably ever would. He flung down the trumpet as if he had a hundred others and came over to join Will, who was pouring a ton of maple syrup over his pancakes.

“Where's Paul?” I asked.

With his mouth full and his fork pointed upward, he said, “Rafters. Tying clouds.”

Tying clouds. “Paul!” I yelled.

“Hello, missus.” His white-blond head appeared for an instant and then vanished.

“Breakfast!” I wasn't going to let them devour it all. “Come on down!”

“Hello, missus!”

“Have you got him tied down?”

Will was forking eggs into his mouth. He shook his head. “No, because he needs to let the clouds down. There's a rope around him, though.”

Around his neck, I wouldn't be surprised.

Mill folded a pancake and said, “I gotta get back.”

To what? To where? I watched a cardboard cloud being lowered to within a few feet of the plane's cockpit. Then another cloud hung over the cabin.

There was a knock at the door and Will went to it. I noticed he opened it in a perfectly normal way and actually greeted whoever was outside.

A couple of mismatched girls walked in, one short, one tall, maybe around eight and ten years old. They both wore the same dopey expression, so they were probably related. There are looks that sisters and brothers pick up from one another just from being around each other.

Will told me these were “the Evans girls” (as if they'd come directly from a stint in a Broadway hit). Then he told them to follow him up to the stage. They climbed the three steps to the stage and stood looking at Will in a double-dopey way.

“Okay,” he said, pointing both to the girls and to Mill at the piano. “Hit it!!”

Mill did: his hands came down on the piano keys like a starburst and rippled away.

“Come on, girls, go!” Will clapped his hands, tapped his feet, then waved his pancake like a baton. They apparently didn't know where to go. “Do what we practiced, legs up, legs kick, kick, kick.”

They kicked, but not together, and one was a lot higher than the other.

“Mill!” Will waved him over and the two gave the Evans girls a demonstration: “Left, right, left, right, kick, kick, kick.” Will & Mill were quite expert at it.

The Evans girls watched and learned nothing. Their next attempt had them kicking sideways, as they seemed to have no sense of direction.

“Okay, okay, take a break.”

A break from what?

The girls broke and sat down in a couple of the old Orion theater seats that had been discarded.

Will turned and threw his hands up in the air. “It'll all come to tears.”

“Where'd you get that expression?”

“The Brits say it—you know.”

“No, and neither do you. What's all the Britspeak for anyway?”

Will was making up his “book” some more. “The play's set in England.”

“England?” I got my face right up to his. “It's set in the
sky
. That's half of a plane you've got up there.” I pointed to their half of an airplane. “It's called
Murder in the Sky,
remember?”

Will was unperturbed by my attempt at reason, and he was joined by Mill; they were now equally unperturbed. They were always willing just to take any old partly hatched idea and hatch it all the way.

The Evans girls had now crawled into the cockpit as pilot and copilot and were pretending to fly the plane.

I said, “Did it ever occur to either of you there's a lot
really
going on right around here, in Spirit Lake and Cold Flat Junction and Lake Noir, including murder,
three
murders to be exact, and one attempted, enough to keep you in material for the rest of your
lives
?”

Will looked up from the production book and they both stared at me, so I ticked the murders off: “Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Rose Devereau Queen, Fern Queen. And me, nearly.” It was truly mind-boggling when I thought of it.

But they looked mystified. Will said, “So?”

So? “Well, there's your story. Call it
Murder in Cold Flat Junction
or
Murder at Mirror Pond
or
Murder in Spirit Lake
. As a matter of fact, you could do a . . . trinity. Three plays. You'd have the whole summer wrapped up.”

They both folded sticks of gum into their mouths in the same synchronized way they'd kicked their legs. Will said, “For one thing, why would we want to bother with something that really happened?”

What?

Mill said, “For another thing, who would we ever get to play you?”

L
unch wasn't very interesting. I had managed only to put a tiny piece of garlic clove inside one of Miss Bertha's strawberries. Of course, there was the usual fuss about poisoned food, but as she'd swallowed the evidence, the fuss soon gave way to raised eyebrows and head shakes.

Mrs. Louderback said she'd be glad to see me. She had only the one appointment at two o'clock and I was to come afterward.

So after being admitted by Mrs. Louderback's strange friend, I sat in the anteroom outside the kitchen waiting, along with a starer. A starer is a person who won't look away until she has you bolted to the wall with her awful eyes. Even staring back does no good. I tried it with this woman, to no avail. I was tempted to pass my palm across the bridge of air between us, but didn't.

It was truly unnerving. I was about to say something, when the kitchen door opened and a small woman, thin as a leaf, drifted out. Mrs. Louderback said good-bye to her and said hello to me, then turned to the starer and said, “Miss Jo, please come in.”

Then it was I saw the cane and observed this Miss Jo person kind of struggling up, eyes seeking nowhere and nothing. I was embarrassed by my earlier reaction. The poor woman was blind as a bat.

Since I was supposed to have been next after the two o'clock appointment, I figured Miss Jo's visit was not scheduled. So there must have been an emergency. I wondered what it could be. Could she have just gone suddenly blind? Now, that would be interesting and even good for an interview. I thought for a while and decided that would be good for a series of interviews: how things look from the standpoint of the suddenly disabled: the suddenly deaf, the suddenly completely paralyzed, the suddenly speech-impaired (which I only thought of because of the Wood boys, but they'd been that way all their lives); the suddenly amputated. There was a really good movie where the hero was hated by an old doctor who revenged himself by amputating the hero's legs—both of them. It was pretty horrible. His girlfriend kept telling him to buck up. How? I wondered. Should he learn to walk on his hands? The movie was good, though; it had Ronald Reagan in it.

I wondered if Miss Bertha had been suddenly humpbacked. If lightning had hit her, for instance. No, that posture took years of practice. I tried bending at the shoulders like Miss Bertha, but couldn't do it. Then I stopped, for I should be thinking about what to ask Mrs. Louderback or her cards. I hoped I didn't get the Orphans in a Storm card again. It was some kind of bad news. The Hanged Man, another card that followed me around, was supposed to mean good news. If you can imagine that. He hung from a branch by his ankle with the other leg bent across the first leg. (The Ronald Reagan character might have seen good news in that, but who else would?) Things are pretty bad if a hanged man is good news.

I realized these were stupid thoughts and extremely unsympathetic. I should learn to be more sorry for people who didn't have the great advantages I had, like my mother's chicken pot pie, which I think was on tonight's menu. It wasn't thin and watery like Banquet frozen; my mother's had big chunks of chicken in it.

I'd discovered a rubber band between my chair cushion and the arm and was about to snap it across the room when the door opened and the blind lady, Miss Jo, came out of the kitchen. A ton of adrenaline got dumped around my insides.

“Emma!” said Mrs. Louderback, sounding surprised, as if she hadn't seen me fifteen minutes ago. I was busy watching Miss Jo maneuver around a footstool in her path. I could have got up and moved it, but I thought it was probably better to let the handicapped fend for themselves. It was certainly more interesting.

I jumped out of my chair and went into the kitchen, still unsure as to how to approach the subject of the kidnapped—rather, the non-kidnapped baby. Mrs. Louderback had known the Woodruffs, for they had spent summers here in Spirit Lake. They owned the biggest house around; it sat on four town lots.

I stared at the deck of cards sitting neatly in the center of the table, keeping its secrets.

“Well, Emma,” said Mrs. Louderback, sitting down across from me and pushing back a wisp of hair. “How are you today? You sounded a little distraught over the phone.” She rearranged the cards, cutting them like a casino dealer.

“No, I'm okay.”

She turned over a card: the Two of Cups, in which I had no interest at all. The cups just reminded me of having to wait on tables at dinner.

Next came—I just knew it!—Orphans in a Storm. Though it wasn't called that.

Mrs. Louderback shook her head. “They really do seem to follow you around.” We pondered the card. “I think you must have a longstanding problem.”

“Well, this card isn't helping me solve it.”

“No, but I suppose you could say solutions lie within us.”

That was bad news. “I don't see it lying inside
them
.” I tapped the card. “They didn't bring the wind and weather.”

“You know, they're not really orphans; it isn't really a storm.”

“Then what's all that snow flying into their faces?”

I thought she could have told me that before. Maybe Miss Jo couldn't, but that was all the rest of us had—our eyes, ears, noses, and mouths.