Hotel Paradise (33 page)

“
No
. It’s not even lunchtime,” I said disdainfully. I was irritated he was not responding to my comment. Maud and I had been discussing the article in the paper.

“Why would she want your cold, leftover chili?” Maud said this snappishly. She was in a mood.

“She likes chili,” was the Sheriff’s mild reply. He smiled.

Hardly ever did he rise to the bait of anyone’s bad temper. I don’t know how he managed this, for some of the things Maud and I said should have driven him to distraction. Well,
Maud
said.

Maud said, “Good Lord, I can get her some
hot
if she wants it.”

“I don’t want it. It’s not lunchtime. I don’t see how people can eat lunch so early.”

“I never had breakfast,” he explained.

“How can you eat chili for breakfast?”

“So are they working over there?” the Sheriff asked me, ignoring my criticism of his breakfast. “Or just pretending to?”

I had told him I’d come from the courthouse. I didn’t tell him Donny was sitting at his desk, big as you please. I
did
tell him that I had overheard “someone” talking about the newspaper account and
saying it wasn’t accurate. But remembering Donny’s saying “implicated,” I said I couldn’t remember just who it was. That’s when I’d tossed in the young-and-blond comment.

“How young
was
she?” Maud asked. “You’re not saying.”

“I know.” The Sheriff rooted in his pack of Camels for a cigarette, found none, crushed it up.

Maud didn’t offer him one of hers, I noticed. Payback for being secretive. “Probably you can’t tell age.”

His mouth twitched the way it did when he was trying not to smile. “About your age, maybe. Hair about your color, I guess. How young and blond’s that?”

A wave of relief swept over me before I realized he’d just said this to kid Maud.

“The trouble is,” Maud said, looking at me, “Sam doesn’t know any more about her than he did two days, nearly three days, ago, and he doesn’t want to admit it, so he’s pretending everything’s a secret.” She pocketed her cigarettes, patted the pocket, and blew a little smoke ring.

“Uh-huh.” The Sheriff looked behind him, sort of levering up to see over the top of the wooden booth, as if things might be more interesting up there with Shirl and the regulars at the counter.

“Well, you
don’t
know any more, do you?” She was really irritated because he wouldn’t tell her.

“While the investigation is in progress, I can’t talk about things.” His smile was maddening to Maud.

I said, “What I wondered about this man who said he knew who she was, was: How would he know unless he saw pictures of the body?”

Maud rubbed her arms. “This is giving me the shivers.”

“Maybe he knew her, maybe he knew the person he thought it was.” He frowned. “And you can’t remember him or where you heard it?”

I shook my head as I stared at him. It was such a simple explanation. All the while I had been looking at it from one end, not realizing there was another end. It was not that he was identifying her from seeing either her or pictures of her, but that he was assuming it was someone he knew who fitted the vague description because
this someone was gone or missing.

It was like a revelation.

Maud got up and went back to the counter, and I’m not sure I
said goodbye or anything, I was so deep into imagining. I imagined this Jude saying to someone: “I ain’t seen Ben Queen’s girl around for several days.” And this someone answering, “No, but there was a woman they found dead over to White’s Bridge there sounds just like her.” I needed to find this Jude. I had got the idea he didn’t live in Spirit Lake, from the way the other men acted like he didn’t often come to Britten’s.

“Want to do the meters with me?”

The Sheriff’s voice startled me. I came out of my trance and focused. “Meters? Oh. No, I can’t. I’ve got to get back to wait tables.”

He’d got up, put a few dollars on the table, and was hitching his holster around. “You need a ride?” He looked at me out of eyes that seemed to get bluer by the moment. He smiled.

“Uh . . . no, I . . .” The thing was that I wanted to stop at Britten’s store and I didn’t want to have to explain why. I had
never
turned down a ride with the Sheriff—never. “I’ll just get one of Axel’s Taxis.”

The Sheriff positioned his hat, sort of snapped the brim, and smiled at me again. He left the Rainbow.

I thought for another moment about Jude and then looked at my hand. Why was I holding a spoon? I put it down. I looked at the Sheriff’s bowl of chili. Empty. I’d been eating what was left.

He never said a word.

That was the Sheriff.

•   •   •

In the taxi (driven by Delbert) to Spirit Lake, I had practiced what I would say, but I had been planning on saying it to the old regulars who had been there yesterday. There was no one in Britten’s except Mr. Britten himself, which would make my task nearly impossible. Mr. Britten was not much of a talker at the best of times, and I’m sure he didn’t connect me with the best. He liked to bury his hands under his brown cardigan and look at me over the tops of his black-rimmed glasses, ducking his head down in order to look up over them, as if he couldn’t trust me not to try and take a swing at him.

That’s the way he was looking at me now—very suspicious, wondering what I was doing back. I would have to invent, now, something my mother had told me to pick up. “Bisquick,” I said.

“Must be doing lots of baking. Two boxes just walked out of here with Walter.”

That was always how Mr. Britten described the sale of groceries: as if they operated on their own. No one actually
bought
them; they “walked out” or “danced out” or “fought for space on the shelves,” so that I sometimes had a picture of cans and jars and sacks and boxes doing all sorts of things, the store shaking with ferocious activity.

“Walter’s already
been
here? Already? Why,
I
was told to come get the Bisquick!” I just rolled my eyes and shook my head as if no one at the Hotel Paradise could remember his proper chores except me. I sighed, walked over to the long glass counter, and took some time looking at the candy and gum. “I’ll have some Teaberry, I guess.”

Mr. Britten didn’t like having to move even an inch for the likes of me, so his walk was pretty slow and grudging. He frowned over the packet he plucked from the rows of gum and then handed it to me. I plunked change on the counter. Slowly (for I was giving myself rethinking time) I unwrapped a stick and folded it into my mouth. Then I asked him, “My mother was wondering if that man named”— I tried to snap my fingers in an effort of remembrance— “is it Jude? The one who was in here yesterday?” No indication yes or no as he just stared at me out of his flat brown eyes. “Well, she was wondering if he was available.”

“For what?”

“I’m not sure.” I wrinkled up my forehead as if trying to remember.

“Don’t know him.” Mr. Britten punched the cash register and gave me back my four cents change.

I stood there chewing my gum and feeling disappointed and was about to give up when the screen door banged and there was one of the men from yesterday’s conversation!

“Mornin’, Bryson,” he said. Politely, he nodded to me, too, as he put down a dollar on the counter.

“Lucas,” said Mr. Britten abruptly. Then he turned to the shelves behind him and slipped down a curled-up packet of Mail Pouch tobacco and put that on the counter in exchange for the bill. I guess it was Lucas’s standard chew. Britten’s was a little like the Rainbow Café in this respect, where Shirl and Maud knew more or less how everyone took their coffee—black, cream, sugar—and just set it before them.

“Anything else?” Mr. Britten glowered at me over his glasses. He always acted as if I’d come to hold up the store.

Now I had to reintroduce my subject. “You don’t know if this
Jude
lived in Spirit Lake?” Lucas had walked over to one of the wooden chairs, and I raised my voice a little so that he could hear. He did. He opened his mouth to comment when one of the
other
of the three men walked in (“Mornin’, Bryson—mornin’, Luke”) and took the other wooden chair. This was the one they called Bub.

Luke indicated me and said to his friend, “She’s askin’ after Jude. She wants to know does he live in Spirit Lake.”

All eyes were now focused on me, which I didn’t much like.

“No, he don’t,” said Bub, unfolding his paper. Why give out information to a kid?

Luke said, “Lives over in Hebrides, don’t he?”

Bub shook his head. “Over to Cold Flat Junction.”

I took in my breath sharply. Arrows flashed on and off in my mind like the sign above Arturo’s Diner, pointing to Cold Flat Junction. For a moment Bub and Luke quarreled over where Jude lived. I broke it up by saying, “And she—I mean my mother—said Mr. Jude did some work for her once.”

Luke shrugged. I think he might have been irritated that I seemed to know more about Jude than he did. I didn’t belong in here, after all; I wasn’t one of them.

Bub was friendlier, apparently eager for talk with anyone who came along, even me. “I seen you in here the other day, didn’t I?”

Mr. Britten said, loudly, “This is Jen Graham’s girl, from over at the Hotel Paradise.”

Whenever Mr. Britten decided to talk, it was always in this butting-in way. When you didn’t want him to.

Luke looked at me, wide-eyed. “You ain’t ever Miss Jen’s girl?”

I nodded and sighed, knowing Jude would now be forgotten, and so would Cold Flat Junction.

“Well, I’ll be! I used to work for your daddy, when you was a little bitty thing.” He measured off air the size of a mouse. He turned to the other man. “Hey, Bub, you used to work over to the Hotel Paradise, too, didn’t you? Fifteen, maybe twenty, years ago?”

And then they started swapping remembrances, which started at the Hotel Paradise and then extended to the whole of Spirit Lake. And it was just like a train coming down the track, stopping at this station and that station, picking up facts like passengers and suitcases and trunks, getting heavier and heavier because they were both so full
of memories of the last twenty years that they both kept refining (“No, that weren’t
Asa
Stemple, it was
Ada.
It was Ada packed up and went off to New York City. Now Asa, he . . .”).

I left.

•   •   •

My mother was miraculously absent from the kitchen when I ran in twenty minutes late. It was empty except for Walter, in the dark by the big dishwasher. Also, there were signs that Vera was back again, for her coal-black full-dress uniform was on a hanger, covered with Whitelaw Cleaners (no relation to Suzy, the star reporter) plastic. It must be the really good uniform, for Vera washed and ironed the others herself. And that must mean a big dinner party tonight.

I hated the thought of that, as I would surely be called upon to act as Vera’s slave; she would be in the limelight, setting the plates before the guests, and I would be back in the shadows, carrying trays and handing off dishes to her. It was like those Dr. Kildare movies where the Great Surgeon is allowed at the operating table and the unimportant nurse is standing back and slapping instruments into his hand.

I wouldn’t even have seen Walter if he hadn’t said hello. It was like a pocket of shadows back there, a place where you could stand and be nearly invisible. Since there didn’t seem to be any hurry about lunch, I decided to help Walter, something I hardly ever did. But I thought I should make up for pretending he was all wrong about the Bisquick. I picked up a towel and took up a dish. This way, I could both be helpful to Walter and invisible to Vera, should she walk in.

Walter smiled his half-moon smile; the corners of his mouth went nearly to his ears.

“I could have got the Bisquick, Walter. It’s too bad you had to make a trip.”

“That’s okay,” he said pleasantly, his hands slowly moving a sudsy cloth over a platter too big for the machine. Dishes were either too big or too small or too good, or pans too stuck with food. The dishwasher was near-useless.

“No, but I mean it. I was just up there and I could have picked it up. You shouldn’t have to run back and forth.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Well. . .” I put a certain grumpiness in the word to let him know
I
appreciated him. Which I didn’t.

Vera came through the swing door then and went about doing busybody Vera-things, needful things-to-be-done just popping up all around her like bright weeds springing through the floor planks. I could hear clinking and china rattlings down at the other end of the kitchen as she went from table to cupboard to tray like a bee pollinating. Then she hefted the laden tray and returned to the dining room and I moved again to wipe the platter.

“I guess she’s not sick anymore,” I said, noticeably sad. Walter didn’t like her, either, though he never would have said this.

“Says she still is.”

“Why’s she back, then?”

“Says it’s a big dinner party tonight and she’s ob-li-ga-ted.”

“She wants the tips, that’s what.”

Walter chuckled.

Since no one considered Walter very much except when they wanted to blame someone, I suppose it wasn’t strange that I didn’t much think about him and about his life. But now I wondered how long Walter had been in Spirit Lake. I asked him.

“Near my whole life long.”

And then I recalled Walter lived not far from Britten’s store. I’d once or twice seen him in there, just standing around, not participating, but sort of standing around smiling. “You hang out at Britten’s, don’t you, sometimes?”

“Uh-huh.” He handed me a pot.

“You ever talk to a man named Jude?” I could ask such direct questions of Walter because Walter never wondered why I was doing something. Walter just wasn’t curious, or figured it wasn’t his business. So it was almost like talking to myself.

“Jude, uh-huh. He comes into Britten’s onced a week, just about.”

I stopped wiping and stared. All of that trouble and here
Walter
knew the answers? Excited, I asked, “Who is he?”