Fadeaway Girl (2 page)

Now Aurora Paradise was claiming Miss Isabel had always been a liar.

I walked heavily down the stairs with my serving tray and Aurora's glass, thinking truth was hard bought.

B
ehind the hotel are several buildings: a cottage where we used to live when we were little, now set aside for guests who preferred the privacy of separate rooms; and two garages, one big and one small, the small one now filled with cast-off furniture, empty paint cans, and spare timber. The Big Garage was once used for guests' cars and it could hold at least twenty of them. Now it was used as a theater, housing Will and Mill's productions.

Mill is Brownmiller Conroy. His first name passed down through his family. No parent could be so mean as to make up such a name. We shortened it to Mill.

As usual, there was a lot of commotion inside the Big Garage. And, as usual, at my knock, silence fell like a blanket dropped over the clamor. I don't know how they did this, I mean, silenced everything like flipping a switch. Will and Mill demanded total secrecy. They did not want anyone to know anything in advance of the production. I wondered why and decided that they wanted to burst onto the scene with all of it so new it looked like the opening of the world. As if none of us had really lived until the moment the curtain went up; as if the sun and moon had sailed around with blinkers on.

It was no good trying to bang on the door. I just sighed and waited. Finally, the side door opened reluctantly, and Will appeared—that is, half of his face appeared through the opening.

“What?”

“Paul's mother's looking for him.” That was a lie and Will probably knew it, as Paul's mother was hardly ever looking for him except when it was time to go home. “What've you got him doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Listen, let me in.”

“No.”

I smiled. “Okay, then I'll tell everybody about your airplane set.” They'd been working on this set ever since
Medea, the Musical
had closed a week ago to thunderous applause. Will and Mill had made scads of money on that production; they had even extended its “run” (one of the many Broadway show-terms Will liked to use). But they seemed to spend all their money on Orange Crush and Moon Pies and the pinball machines over across the highway at Greg's Restaurant.

My seeing the new set had been by chance, when they'd had Paul strapped into the plane's cockpit.

Will was disgusted. “My God! You're nothing but a blackmailer.” At the same time he opened the door and then walked away from me. He had traded his pilot's cap for a top hat, I noticed.

The plane was even more refined by now. It was the inside of an airliner, one side shaved away so that you were looking into the interior. They had moved this craft up to the stage.

Mill, sitting at the piano, said “Hi.” He was never as hostile as Will. But then he wasn't my brother. He started trilling away at “When the Red, Red Robin,” singing in his nasal voice.

“Why are you wearing a top hat?” I asked Will, over the “bob, bob bobbin' ” of Mill and the piano.

“For my number.” He began to tap-dance, which was an irresistible cue to join Mill:

The piano pinged, the shoes tapped, and I yelled:

“What's all this got to do with
Murder in the Sky
?” That was the title of the new production.

Will stopped dancing and said, as if this were an answer, “I'm the pilot.” But incapable of stilling himself, he raised and dropped his top hat to the rhythm of Mill's piano, and went to tapping again.

“The pilot's a tap dancer?”

“Why not? Hey, Paul!” He shouted up to the rafters. “Come on down; your ma wants you.”

This order was barked to the dishwasher's son, Paul, a boy of eight, more or less. No one knew his age. Paul clambered down one of the posts like a monkey and came over to where we were standing. “Hello, missus,” he said to me. It was all he ever said.

“Did you finish the clouds?” said Will.

Paul shook his head.

“Well, finish 'em before you go to the kitchen.” To me, Will said, “It won't take long, you can tell his mom.”

I was going to ask what he was doing with clouds, but I knew the question would be asked in vain.

Paul, in the meantime, had sat down on one of the big stones left over from
Medea, the Musical,
and was dozing off. This didn't surprise me; Will and Mill were afraid to let him sleep up in the rafters in case he fell off.

Mill rippled the keys and sang,

Will joined him with

Piano keys tinkling, feet tapping, as if the world were just waiting for a duet.

I wasn't, so I went bob bob bobbin' along.

 

Feeling put upon, I walked the gravel drive and then the path to the back door of the kitchen. I saw a robin along the way, maybe a refugee from the Big Garage. Grumpily, I stood and watched it pulling a worm from the wet grass. Its breast was nowhere near red; it was a dusty shade of orange. And it certainly didn't “bob.”

In other words, it was nothing like the song, but then I guess things seldom are.

R
ather than take the chance of running into Ree-Jane Davidow, whom I'd last seen in the hotel lobby, I went down the back stairs and down the hall to the front office, where I could call Axel's Taxis.

There was a poet named Emily Dickinson, who I was told was called the Belle of Amherst. Ree-Jane Davidow thought she was the Belle of Everywhere—Spirit Lake, and La Porte, and Lake Noir. Anyplace roughly in a twenty-five-mile radius, Ree-Jane was the Belle of.

She was sixteen, going on seventeen. Her name was really Regina Jane, but one day she decided she wanted it pronounced in the manner of a famous French actress, Réjane. She kept after me to pronounce it throatily, but I couldn't or wouldn't. What I came out with was “Ree-Jane,” which of course made her furious. I have called her that ever since, and so are a lot of people now, thinking that's her real name. I don't correct them.

No one was in the hotel's back office (although I could hear Ree-Jane declaiming out in the lobby), so I phoned Axel's and asked the dispatcher to send a cab to the Hotel Paradise. “And make sure it's Axel that comes, please, Wilma.” It was never Axel who came.

“Sure, hon. He'll be back soon from taking a fare over to Lake Noir.”

I told her I wanted to be picked up at the bottom of the first driveway—the hotel had three drives—and
not
in front of the hotel.

As I said all of this I was studying the shelf that held Mrs. Davidow's liquor bottles. The shelf was right by the big rolltop desk where she usually had her drinks around five o'clock. I took note of the empty Myers's rum bottle and wondered if Lola would take note too. There was another bottle of a brand called Pyrat, about which Mrs. Davidow had said she better not catch anyone touching it because it was really good and really expensive. I had considered pouring a little of the Pyrat into the Myers's bottle (which I had used up in the Rumbas), but decided that would be chancy; for all I knew she might have the Pyrat bottle measured off.

After I put down the telephone, I stood chewing my lip, wondering what tasted most like rum. I thought of pouring some of the Jim Beam into the Myers's bottle, but Mrs. Davidow would know the taste was funny. I decided it would be better just to take the bottle away.

I left the hotel by the back door and walked the stone path to the cocktail garden, intending to leave the bottle on the table there. But then I decided, no, it would only call attention to its empty self.

Will said Mrs. Davidow was definitely an alcoholic. One way you can tell you're an alcoholic is if you do crazy things with bottles. Like in
The Lost Weekend
, a movie I was told I was not allowed to go to, which only meant I went as soon as it came to the Orion. (The owner, Mr. McComas, liked old movies.) Ray Milland was hiding bottles all over his apartment, even one in the chandelier.

So here I was carrying an empty Myers's rum bottle around, hoping I wouldn't run into anybody unless it was a movie producer who might see possibilities in this situation. I needed to stop fooling around, so I walked down to the end of the drive, where there were a lot of thick rhododendron bushes by the badminton court. I went up the bank and stuffed the bottle in the rhododendron. I felt like Ray Milland.

I stood at the end of the gravel drive, waiting for Axel and staring at the spot on the highway where our dog Rufus was hit and killed by a car. I'd been standing here just like this when it happened. Rufus had run out into the road, so it probably wasn't the driver's fault, but that didn't matter. I didn't remember the car or the driver. As I looked at that spot, it grew farther away and smaller, the way on a movie screen, at a fade-out, there's a circle of light in blackness, the circle getting smaller and smaller. What was in it was Rufus dying, getting tinier and tinier until he was gone altogether and there was only the black screen.

I blinked.

I could call him back anytime by some awful magic of blinking. Blink, he was there; blink again, he wasn't.

The trouble was that I thought I could still get Rufus back only if I blinked in the right way. It happened when I was little; I was only five, so it didn't surprise me I might have felt this way. A little kid might believe her dog was still around somewhere. When you get older you know death is only death and that's all there was to it.

But I still blinked.

 

Axel's Taxi pulled up at just that moment. It wasn't Axel driving, either; it was Delbert. I knew it would be Delbert because it always was, no matter how much the dispatcher said it would be Axel. I would have thought there was no such person except I'd often seen Axel in his taxi, driving somewhere. Only he never had a fare with him.

“You gonna just stand there all day?” Delbert stuck his head out of the driver's-side window. “Meter's runnin'.” He thought this was funny and slapped the steering wheel.

“You haven't got a meter,” I said, sliding in and down in the backseat so he couldn't see me in his rearview mirror.

The cab lurched forward. “No, we ain't got meters, but if we did, it woulda been runnin'. ” His laugh was more of a pig snort. “So where're you goin'? As if I didn't know.” He laughed again.

That made me really mad. “Oh really? Where?”

“Well, it's either the Rainbow or the courthouse. Though bein' they're across from each other it don't make much difference when it comes to stopping.”

We were passing Britten's store, where the Wood boys and Mr. Root were sitting on the wooden bench. Or rather, two of them were, Ubub and Mr. Root. Ulub was standing with a book in his hand. I rolled down the window and called and they all turned and waved.

Then I told Delbert to drop me at the bank.

“The bank? You never go there.”

“I guess you don't know everything, do you?”

Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of the First National and I got out and handed him the fare. I considered not tipping him, but then I gave him fifteen cents.

It was annoying to have to walk from the bank on Second Street all the way back to the Rainbow Café, five blocks up and over, though the walk did take me by stores I liked. I found all of them mysterious in some way, like Sincell's Haberdashery. The word itself seemed to belong to a past full of red-jacketed men and women, horses and foxes.

Sincell's was appropriately dark and cool inside, with tall narrow rooms. The room in the rear sold shoes and (I liked to think) rich brown hunting boots. The front room was stocked with dark silk dresses and men's three-piece suits. Among hats nested behind tall glass cases were, I was sure, dark velvet hunting caps. And over among the canes were riding crops. I liked to think all of this.

Just past the haberdashery was McCrory's Five-and-Dime, where Miss Isabel Barnett practiced her kleptomania. Around the corner was Souder's Pharmacy, with its unchanging window display of Evening in Paris toilet water and pale face powder spilling delicately from a silver compact by whoever had been wearing the long blue satin evening gloves. There was a story! I could make up half a dozen scenes on the spot to fit that perfume, those blue gloves. It made me feel warm and comfortable somehow, the notion that I could think up all of these stories and write them down. It was like always having another me around, a friend to help out.

Along the next street and closer to the Rainbow was the tiny Oak Tree Gift Shoppe, owned by Miss Flagler. Across the narrow alley from that stood the candle store run by Miss Flyte, who was no stranger to mystery. Her shop was the one that was most mysterious, for lighted candles flickered in the windows themselves and trailed in and all the way to the back of the store.

All of these stores had a backstory, and it occurred to me that our newspaper could do a piece on each of them. If I couldn't actually dig out a story on each one, I could still write down my impressions of them.

I was the youngest reporter the
Conservative
had ever had. Of course, I had got the job as a result of almost getting murdered at Spirit Lake, and what I was doing now was writing up the whole experience. But “Impressions of Souder's,” “Impressions of the Haberdashery,” and so forth, that could keep me on the staff and keep me famous for many months to come.