Cold Flat Junction

Aurora Paradise does not exercise any right of ownership, like hiring or firing or sending Lola Davidow and Ree-Jane packing. This is not because Aurora is humble or generous or indifferent, but because she doesn’t want to bother herself to come down from the fourth floor. She sometimes has her food sent up on the dumbwaiter that travels from the back office up to the fourth floor. I don’t know why the dumbwaiter was positioned in the back office, but it works fine and rattles the Hotel Paradise fried chicken and braised lamb and Angel Pie right up there.

The fourth floor is Aurora’s kingdom, or, rather, what she likes to call her “duchy” ever since I told her Ree-Jane intended to marry a duke so that people would have to call her a duchess. That’s assuming, of course, that Hollywood or Broadway or a modeling agency doesn’t grab her first.

Up here’s as close as that blond floozy’ll ever get to a duchy. To Aurora, Ree-Jane is always a blond floozy. When Ree-Jane was stupid enough to venture up to the fourth floor with Aurora’s chicken dinner, she got a chicken wing thrown at her. It hit her head; and I, pressed back into the shadows of the stairwell, was fortunate enough to witness this. Ree-Jane thinks she rules the world. But even she can’t pretend to have conquered Aurora Paradise (who she dismisses as a crazy old coot) or me (who she dismisses as a crazy young one).

I am one of the few people allowed on the fourth floor and that’s because I’ve been entertaining Aurora with the White’s Bridge murder, or, more specifically, the Mirror Pond murder, and (more important) because I mix drinks for her. Fancy drinks are my recently acquired skill; the best of them is my Cold Comfort. Aurora has her own liquor, but she would sooner use Lola Davidow’s. I complained about this. I said if Mrs. Davidow ever catches me at her liquor supply, she’ll kill me. “Just be glad you died in a good cause, ” she says, “for the duchy is piss-poor! The barons ain’t paid their rents!”

I didn’t bother asking her why barons were renting, for I knew Aurora didn’t understand feudalism and peasants any more than I did, and I’d even studied it in school. Aurora knows as much about running a duchy as she does about running a hotel. So I continue endangering life and limb by using Lola Davidow’s gin and rum and Southern Comfort to whip up Aurora’s Cold Comfort. (I have to make the drinks in the kitchen when no one is around, as the duchy is out of ice, orange slices, and maraschino cherries.) I wish I could make one of Lola Davidow’s mint juleps, for I have an idea they would take first prize in any drink contest. I’ll say this for Lola, she is first-rate at drink-mixing.

Aurora has been around forever, longer than us Grahams, and she knows, or at least knew, everyone in these parts. She knew the Devereau sisters and is the one who set me on the right track about Rose Souder Devereau running off with Ben Queen over forty years ago, right after Mary-Evelyn drowned. It wasn’t purposeful on Aurora’s part, as she has no wish to please me or anybody else. But without intending to be, she was and will be—though she doesn’t know it yet—a huge help in my investigation of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Rose, and Fern Queen.

Her information does not come easy. She blackmails me into being an audience for her “magical tricks,” which consist of pick-a-card or find-the-pea, both of them unbelievably dumb and both of which she cheats at, making it impossible for me to win.

Aurora always sits in the same ancient rocking chair, wearing black or dark blue wool or a shiny gray stuff that looks like thin armor when the light hits it at certain angles. Her lace net gloves have the fingers cut back to the knuckle. She needs her fingers free so she can cheat at find-the-pea. She argues that she never cheats, but of course she does. Up here, she is surrounded by her things—a big old steamer trunk full of really beautiful clothes that she never wears, pictures of horses and grazing sheep, a big 1939 calendar hung on a nail. She writes things in the squares in her stingy little hand. I looked back at April once and there was stuff written there about FDR and other people I didn’t know. She told me to get away, get away! and not to sully her calendar.

I took the glass and said, as sarcastically as I could, “Aren’t you worried I’ll sully the Southern Comfort?” Then I went downstairs, the glass in my hand preventing me from giving in to the temptation to slide down the bannister as I used to do when I was little.

As I said, I can entertain Aurora with what happened over near White’s Bridge. I know more details than our weekly newspaper does and even more than the police. That should give me a sense of power, but instead, it makes me uneasy. I’ve talked to different people, ones that the Sheriff hasn’t because he doesn’t know there’s a connection.

One of these people is Jude Stemple, who claimed the anonymous victim was “Ben Queen’s girl” (and he was right). Jude Stemple is from Cold Flat Junction; so was Fern Queen. She was missing for several days but that didn’t worry Bathsheba and George, the relatives she lived with, because Fern had always been touched in the head. There was no reason to connect her to a body found miles outside of La Porte. It was Aurora who’d told me about Ben Queen, and it was Jude Stemple who told me about Rose. But what Jude Stemple says is it couldn’t possibly have been Ben who killed Rose, for he loved her too much.

So when I met Ben Queen at the Devereau house across the lake and we walked to Crystal Spring, I must admit I agreed with Jude Stemple. Not that I wasn’t scared running into a man just out of prison, in an empty house in deep woods by a forgotten lake. I was plenty scared. But it only lasted until Ben Queen began to talk.

I have made a list of Sorrowful Places, and the little kitchen ranks number ten on the list. This surprises me because I wasn’t that aware I had feelings for the little kitchen. Then I remembered that we use it in the winter when we stay at the hotel all year round, which is seldom. So from the little kitchen’s windows I see blue mornings and deep snow, rime on the windowsills and, inside, the smell of biscuits baking and buckwheat cakes just beginning to bubble up before they’re turned by my mother’s magical hand. Now, I’ve never had occasion to handle a rosary, being non-Catholic, but from what I’ve seen, you go over and over its little beads, repeating Hail Marys or Mary, Mother of Gods, and thus you get absolution or get cleansed or something along that order. Me, if I want to do my soul a good turn, I just say buckwheatcakes-buckwheatcakesbuckwheat and my soul is immediately comforted and cleansed.

So the little kitchen is number ten on my list of places I would most miss if I were never to see them again. I rank them from one to ten. I only know which goes where by testing: I have to close my eyes and picture the place vanishing and tell myself I’ll never see it again. Then something wells up in me and my eyes spring open and I’m too cold or too warm. What wells up in me is fear, and I wonder if losing something is also the fear of losing something.

Sorrowful Places

1. The big kitchen

2. Spirit Lake

3. The Pink Elephant

4. The Rainbow Café

5. The Devereau house

6. The land across the railroad tracks in Cold Flat Junction

7. The bench in front of Britten’s store

8. The Windy Run Diner

9. The Abigail Butte County Library

10. The little kitchen

I had to limit myself to ten items, otherwise I could go on nearly forever. To make sure I wasn’t looking at every place I knew as a Sorrowful Place, I had to choose five places that were opposite, places that could disappear in an eyeblink and I’d be glad to see them go:

1. Ree-Jane’s room

2. The part of the porch railing where Ree-Jane likes to pose

3. Miss Bertha’s half of the dining room table

4. The salad table

5. “Europa,” the expensive store where Ree-Jane buys her clothes

It sounds like a strange thing to do, ranking places I’d miss. The way I know when I come upon such a place is that I’m gripped by this awful sadness. And it makes me think this sadness is always right there below the surface, and the surface is easily scratched.

I have to do this, but I’m not sure why. I have to do it in the same way of swallows flighting from cold places to warm ones. It’s instinct to do this, it’s as if there’s a rite I have to perform; then if it comes on that one of these places vanishes, like the little kitchen catching fire and burning into black ash, I will not be wholly unprepared.