Fadeaway Girl (5 page)

I finished the twelve “personal” lettuce salads, which were no fun because I wasn't allowed to stick things on them like hard-cooked-egg faces. I tried dressing them up with a slice of black olive on top of each until Vera saw them and told me to remove them, which I did; when her back was turned I hid the olives inside the tight little lettuce leaves.

What would be wonderful would be Miss Bertha finding hers and thinking it was a bug. I studied an olive slice, then searched the jar for an end slice, which would not have the hole in the middle. I found one, more buglike. I exchanged it for the one with the hole, tucking it into the salad I would serve Miss Bertha.

In life, just as in my mother's Angel Pies and Ham Pinwheels, it's the little things that count. Father Freeman once said to me, “God's in the details.” The Sheriff said, on the other hand, “The devil's in the details.” So it made no difference which one of them was planning something, God or the devil, it was the details that mattered.

I patted Miss Bertha's Bibb lettuce and took the ice-hard butter patties into the dining room.

Again, I remembered Aurora's drink. Mrs. Davidow was on her second martini, so that meant she planned on staying in the kitchen. I grabbed up a ruby goblet, rooted some ice from the butter patty dish, and tossed it in. I hightailed it through the long hall to the lobby and the back office.

Ree-Jane was standing by the fireplace again, posed with her arm draped across the mantel, talking to herself. She had changed into one of her expensive Heather Gay Struther dresses, this one a pearly blue with a crowd of knife-sharp pleats in the skirt.

In the back office, I looked over the bottles that sat double deep on the shelf. There was a bottle of Southern Comfort that I checked for fullness: half full, which made it safe to use.

I hadn't made a Cold Comfort in some time and wasn't sure of the recipe. Recipe? Who was I kidding? Who cared, least of all Aurora? I poured an inch of the Southern Comfort into the glass and added a little crème de menthe, then a little brandy. It really needed some juice or something light, such as club soda, but I couldn't go back to the kitchen. Then I remembered that Will liked to keep a bottle or two of Orange Crush in the bottom drawer of the typewriter table in the outer office.

I moved to the outer office, staying out of Ree-Jane's line of vision, and looked in the drawer. I uncapped a bottle and poured until the glass was full. I recapped it, put the bottle back in the drawer, returned to the inner office, and finished the drink with a maraschino cherry on a plastic swizzle stick.

I had no tray, so I had to hand-carry the glass, a practice strictly forbidden in the dining room. Any item of food or drink had to be transported to the diner on a tray. That was probably why I had become so adept at carrying trays. Vera wasn't the only one who could hoist a tray on five fingers.

Ree-Jane had her back to the staircase and was so engrossed in what she was saying to herself that she didn't hear me. It was another opportunity. You'd think she'd have learned by now.

I stood on the wide stairs for half a minute, watching her. She could have been talking to herself, talking to an invisible companion, rehearsing a part for a play—though not
Murder in the Sky,
for I knew Will and Mill wouldn't let her within a country mile of that. But there were other possibilities: she could have been rehearsing a speech to be given to the United Nations; rehearsing her acceptance of the Duke of Oxford when he proposed; making her screen test for Cecil B. DeMille; or throwing kisses to the people on both sides of the runway as she pivoted down it at the Paris fashion show.

Aurora's drink was warming in my hand, but I just had to say something. “There's only one female in the play and she's dead and she's me.”

Ree-Jane twirled like a drum majorette (which she also could be rehearsing) and the pleats in her skirt made a pretty fan. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

“You're spying on me!”

I shrugged.

With a toss of her head she had learned from Veronica Lake (her future costar) she said, “Oh,
that
play? I found out about the female lead and turned it down.”

I was stunned. Ree-Jane was actually thinking on her feet! I almost applauded. Of course, so did she. I marveled at this shred of thought coming from Ree-Jane (as if I'd been rooting for her all along), and continued my trek up the stairs.

 

“About time, miss! The yardarm's way over the bow.”

That didn't sound exactly right but I knew what Aurora meant. “I do have other things to do,” I said. “There's a dinner party tonight. Ten people.”

She was agitating her Cold Comfort, prior to drinking. “Whose?”

Aurora was as interested in gossip as a normal person. “The Baums.”

She made some lip-smacking sound of disapproval. “They're just throwing themselves around, trying to buy their way up the social ladder.” She held her red goblet up to the window, and the setting sun made it look like blood splashed on her silver crocheted mitten.

“Into what?” I was truly curious.

“High society, of course.” She took a long swig of the drink.

“In La Porte? There's no society in La Porte, much less a high one.”

Aurora put down her drink long enough to waggle her finger at me. “That's where you're wrong, miss: there certainly is and I was once its leader!”

If she had been talking about a pack of sled dogs I could have believed her. But high society? “There isn't one now, is there?”

“Oh, one or another of them thinks she's got the toehold and then
Wham
!” Down came her empty glass on the chair arm. “She's on the ground, flat on her ass, pardon my French. What's wrong? I could plant beans in the lines on your forehead.” She emptied her glass in a couple of long swigs.

I guess I had on my stupefied frown. “This is a little town on the tag end of Maryland, nearly in West Virginia—”

“Where they got liquor stores, as I recall—” She jiggled her glass in a meaningful way.

I did not attend to it. “Maybe we've got the poor and the well-off, but we have not got high society.”

She looked as if she could spit bullets. “My lord, girl, that's how much you know? After all your talk about the Devereaus and Woodruffs and the Belle Ruin?”

“The Devereaus? They were society people?” And here I thought they were just killers.

“Well, of course. Look at Iris. Look at Elizabeth.”

“I can't look. They're dead.” I was suddenly overcome with a sense of dread that there were too many people I couldn't look at. I had to depend on the likes of Aurora Paradise and Isabel Barnett, which brought me out of my mood, remembering the reason I'd come up here: to check on the snapshots. Aurora held out her glass.

“In a minute. First, I want to see those pictures again, the ones of the Slades and the Woodruffs.”

“Lost them. So get downstairs and make me another Cold Comfort.”

“You didn't lose them. They're in a blue satin box that you keep in your steamer trunk.” I pointed to the trunk, draped with beautiful dresses.

Heavily, she sighed and set down her glass. And wearing her put-upon face, wheeled her swivel chair over to the trunk and opened one of its drawers and pulled out the blue box. Sighing again, she wheeled back. Then she rooted in the box and drew out the snapshots. But then she said, “There's one of Morris Slade that's gone missing. Last time I had it was when you were looking at these.” She fanned several of them out. “So where is he?”

“I have no idea.” Yes, I had. The snapshot was lying in my drawer under my socks.

“I bet you don't. Here, what about them?” She held several snapshots out.

I took the picture of Imogen Slade holding her baby, tightly wrapped in a blanket. You couldn't see its face. “This one with the baby in it. You said they were at the Belle Ruin. Now if they were, that means Miss Isabel isn't lying about seeing the baby.”

Aurora gave a fake sigh. “She's a liar, all right. But I guess the poor soul can't help herself.”

Aurora calling her a “poor soul” really said Aurora didn't care. There was no care in her. I kept to it: “I'm talking about this baby being taken from the hotel. Kidnapped, snatched, whatever. The only person who actually saw the baby and who's around now is Miss Isabel—”

“Well, there's whoever took that picture.”

“Yes, but all you see here is the blanket, not the baby.”

Aurora looked absolutely pained. “Girl, you got more ways to explain away what you don't want to believe than a politician. Why can't you just go for the simplest thing? A mother holding a blanket like it had a baby in it
does
have a baby in it.”

I said, “Just listen: It's natural that anyone might have taken for granted that if there was a carriage, there was a baby in it, or in its mother's arms. But remember, not even the babysitter actually
saw
the baby.”

Aurora waved that away. “Oh, that Spiker girl. You can't depend on what she—”

I stepped on her words. “Imogen Slade told her not to bother the baby. Now, if this snapshot was taken that weekend when they were at the Belle Ruin—” Then I recalled that before, Aurora had said the Slade baby was only a few weeks old. Not months. “You said the baby was weeks old. But it was four months old according to the police report.”

Aurora squeezed her eyes shut and motioned with her fidgety fingers. “God's sakes, girl, don't you ever stop thinking? What in the tarnation difference does it make? Could've been weeks, could've been months. No wonder people drink.” She thrust her glass toward me.

I ignored it. “Because if the parents went to so much trouble to make out the baby was there, then maybe something happened that they wanted kept secret. So look again: was that snapshot done on the occasion of the Belle Ruin ball?” To get her closer to saying, I took the glass from her fingers.

She perked up a little. “Hell's bells, give me my specs. They're in that little top drawer.” She motioned to the steamer trunk.

I opened the drawer. Small as it was, I had to rummage through it. My fingers lit on something steely and cold and I pulled it out. “What are you doing with a
gun
?” I held it away from me as if it were a dead rat. It was small, with a short barrel.

“That? I've always had that. Woman alone has to protect herself. Well, for goodness' sakes, it ain't loaded. It's just a thirty-two, little revolver is all.”

“Where'd you get it?”

“One of my men friends gave it to me. A gift.” She looked off, dreamily.

When I saw her eyes were lighting up with the past, I shoved the gun back in the drawer and handed her her glasses. “The snapshot.”

“Now, hand over my spyglass.”

By this, I supposed she meant the magnifying glass atop one of the trunks. I gave that to her also. Stems of her glasses hooked around her small ears, she studied the snapshots with the magnifying glass, which I bet she didn't need. After a moment she said, “No. Couldn't have been that weekend.” She tapped one of the pictures with her fingernail.

I looked. It was the one of old Mr. Woodruff.

“See there, he's got that mustache. Well, he never had it that weekend, not at that ball. I should know, as he danced with me all night.”

I should have felt relieved to know that Miss Isabel could have been wrong, but it was then I realized the snapshot would settle nothing, whether it was taken that weekend, or the one before, or the one before that; the picture would be nothing more than a little chink of possibility—a possibility that Miss Isabel had seen the baby, a possibility that the baby had been there. Or on the other hand, the possibility that she hadn't seen the baby. But that proved nothing.

At that point, I was so keen to get away I grabbed the glass and nearly ran out of the room. Behind me Aurora called, “Just why are you so all-fired interested in this?”

I turned back. “It's because the baby disappeared. I'm interested in disappearances.”

Fadeaways,
I could have said.

I
t was to Mrs. Louderback's I went whenever things got complicated or when whatever I saw in my mind's eye looked like another one of the devil's details.

This part of Spirit Lake sat across the highway from the hotel. It was quite pretty, for the streets were tree-lined and the houses almost all white clapboard with green trim and wide porches. It was as if everyone had banded together and decided to make the houses look alike, which was probably true.

We were in the very bottom of Maryland, where we could fall on our faces into West Virginia. But West Virginia's okay. My mother always said you could build a fence around West Virginia and you'd have everything you needed. It would certainly have everything Lola Davidow needed: a state liquor store was right over the line. It's about twenty miles from La Porte, an easy drive (especially if you stay in the ruts worn by Mrs. Davidow's station wagon).

My mother was from there and so was my grandfather, not a Paradise but a Dunn. My mother's father. My grandfather had owned a hotel there too, so maybe the hotel business was in my mother's blood.

Yet, close as it was, my mother never wanted to visit it. If it were me, and my old home was practically next door, I'd be over there all the time, nosing around. But maybe their left-behind homes are too painful for some people.

I would knock on the door of my old house, and when the person who lived there now came to the door (an elderly woman in a flowered apron) I would say, “I'm sorry to bother you but I used to live here, I mean my family did, but they were all killed in a train wreck and my mother, as she was dying, pleaded with me to go back home—Emma, go back and find those photographs!” By now, of course, I'd be inside and saying something about a photo album buried upstairs, perhaps in a window seat . . . and so forth. I would certainly want to see my old room.