3

Benchsitting

Mr. Root, who often occupies the bench outside Britten’s Store, knows the Queens, or at least knows Sheba Queen, Ben’s sister-in-law. Mr. Root was with me the last time I went to Cold Flat Junction. The Wood boys were along, too. It’s been a long time since they were ever boys, for by now they must be fifty or more; still, “boys” is what people call them, if they’re lumping them together. Speaking of one or the other, though, it’s “Ulub” or “Ubub.” These nicknames came about because of the license plates on their rusty pickup trucks: ULB and UBB. So they were rebaptized “Ulub” and “Ubub.” Their real names are Alonzo and (I think) Robert.

The four of us have become sort of a team over the last weeks, trying to solve the mystery of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, which has now become the much bigger mystery of Mary-Evelyn and Fern Queen, and seems to be growing even from that to the mystery of several other people. You think you’ve solved one problem only to find it’s dragging a lot of others in its wake.

We are all four of us important to the team. Ulub and Ubub had actually been around back when the Devereau sisters, together with Mary-Evelyn, lived across the lake in the big house, fog-gray or mist-white, take your pick. Fog and mist are appropriate settings for the Devereau house. As a boy, Ulub did yard work for them—raking leaves in the fall, cutting grass in the summer, seeing to what few flower beds they had. Indeed, Ulub had been there raking leaves the evening before the fatal night when Mary-Evelyn had gone off in the rowboat.

Ulub was the only person I had found who could report on that night. But he has a speech problem that makes it nearly impossible to understand him. It’s not a stammer; it’s more like sounds getting lost in the cavern of his throat or knotted in his tongue. Ubub, a little older and a lot taller, isn’t much help because he also has trouble getting words across. He can understand Ulub, after a lifetime of listening, I guess. They don’t try to talk much, and who can blame them, what with people poking fun at them or treating them like idiots, which they certainly are not.

The one person we discovered who is for some reason blessed with a word detangler in his head is Mr. Root. He is a retired person (I’m not sure from what, never having been curious enough to ask him) who, as I said, spends part of every day on the bench out in front of Britten’s Store. So do the Wood boys. So do I, lately.

The bench is where we all met. I was sitting on it that first time watching passengers get off the Tabernacle bus that runs from Cold Flat Junction once a week to La Porte and Spirit Lake. I was there because I wanted to catch a glimpse of Toya Tidewater, who had a horrible reputation. I was not to go near any of the Tidewaters and especially Toya, my mother said. So the first chance I got, I set out looking for her, and that’s what took me to Cold Flat Junction that first time.

I’m necessary to our group because I’m the one who decided we should all go to the Devereau house. The other three look pretty much to me to be the leader. It’s the first time anyone ever thought of me that way, so I try and keep my leadership skills sharpened. The reason I told them we should go to the Devereau place was so Ulub might better remember and could try and act out what he saw. But the other part of it was I wanted to see inside that old house where Mary-Evelyn had lived and I didn’t want to go alone.

Britten’s Store is a short walk from the hotel and is the only store around. Often I’m sent there (or Walter, our dishwasher, is) to pick up flour or cornstarch or anything my mother runs out of. Britten’s is one of those places where people go just to hang out, drinking Cokes, buying cigarettes, spitting tobacco in the dust around the bottom step. Men like to go there and catch up on the gossip they like to say they’re not interested in.

It was in Britten’s, when I was looking at cans of beans, that a man named Jude Stemple walked in on the group sitting around in front of the butcher counter arguing about who this dead woman was who was found by Mirror Pond, out along White’s Bridge Road. Nobody knew, including the Sheriff. Jude Stemple settled it by saying the murdered woman was “Ben Queen’s girl.”

Fern Queen. At that time I’d never heard of Fern Queen, only of Ben himself, and that information came by way of my great-aunt Aurora, who couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth, and whether she did depended on her mood or on how many Cold Comforts she’d drunk. It was she who told me about Rose Devereau and Ben Queen.

Ben Queen just got out of prison where he’s been for the last twenty years, convicted of murdering his wife, Rose. And this is where vengeance comes in. It turned out that it was their daughter, Fern Queen, who was shot over three weeks ago. But Ben didn’t kill Fern. I know he didn’t because I’m pretty sure I know who did.

 

Every summer, my brother Will and his friend Brownmiller put on a play for the hotel guests (though it’s really more for themselves that they do it). A short while ago, my brother told me about what the Greeks called a “Do-X-machine.” This happens when things are in such a mess, or the hero is getting in more and more trouble, that God has to step in—that is, come down in a sort of chair from above, which is the “machine” part—and straighten things out. (God does not seem inclined to do this for the Hotel Paradise, I’ve noticed.)

The Greeks are important to this story. This is because, although they might’ve wanted God to come in when things got really messy, they did not hang around waiting for God to take vengeance. No, they managed it on their own, which was swifter (and better, probably). Whenever the Greeks murdered somebody, somebody else came along later and avenged the death. Then another Greek would come along and avenge the murderer. So that it went on and on, generation after generation, revenge after revenge. It all seemed fated to happen.

And that’s what I mean when I say the Queens are beginning to look like people in one of those Greek tragedies: first, there was Mary-Evelyn Devereau; then there was Rose Devereau Queen; then there was Fern Queen. It’s my opinion the person who shot Fern had no choice but to seek revenge and that is why Fern Queen died.

I met Ben Queen. I’m the last person I can imagine such a thing happening to. It was in the old Devereau house across Spirit Lake—that is, the lake itself, for which the village is named. It wasn’t too surprising after I thought about it that the Devereau house is the first place he’d go after he got out of prison. That’s because he was looking for somebody. Not ghosts, not the ghosts of little Mary-Evelyn or his wife Rose. No, as grieved as he still is after twenty years, he is not a man to be pulled back to a house because he’s sentimental about it. He was looking for someone alive, and thought that’s where she would go. He might even have thought, when he heard me upstairs, that I was her.

That I was her. It makes me feel a little strange to say it. But that’s probably what he did think when he walked into the house. After all, no one had lived there for forty years, not since the drowning of Mary-Evelyn Devereau. And it’s not just a coincidence I was there, either. I had been going there in the days following that first trip with the Woods and Mr. Root. That first time had given me courage to go back again on my own. I had begun to feel kind of at home there. I would try on Mary-Evelyn’s dresses, which were still beautiful and almost new-looking even after forty years. I examined things in her toy chest, like her Mr. Ree game, her dolls, her picture puzzles, and so forth. It got so I stayed for longer and longer periods of time. I’d take food with me, like my mother’s coconut cake, and sit out on the narrow balcony of her room and watch the sun streak the lake with the kind of silver decorations my mother uses on wedding cakes.

Ben Queen: here is a man wild in his youth, in jail for twenty years, and right after he gets out, another person in his family is murdered. You can hardly blame the Sheriff for thinking it might be the same man did it.

The Sheriff is someone I never could imagine myself going against. But I did. I didn’t tell him I’d seen Ben Queen, much less tell him where. And I think that’s spoiled something in our relationship, for in the last couple of weeks, we haven’t walked around once to check the parking meters.

No, in all my born days, I never thought anything would be more important than our friendship, the Sheriff’s and mine.