Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes Page B

from the lake. Sad business.” She paused and then was back on the subject of Ben Queen. “Probably he’s dead. People like Ben Queen don’t live long. They burn out. Cold Flat Junction people, the Queens.”
    Cold Flat Junction! My mouth dropped. And I had been there only a few days before, my one and only trip to Cold Flat. So here I was with three bits of fresh information: Rose Souder Devereau, Ben Queen, and a connection with Cold Flat Junction. I decided I shouldn’t push my luck with Aurora, and picked up the glass and said, sweetly, “Would you care for another?”
    “Well, don’t mind if I do, now you mention it.”
    I ran down the stairs, glass and tray in hand, praying it wasn’t yet time for my mother and the others to be filing into the kitchen for lunch preparation.
    My luck held; I couldn’t believe it. The kitchen was as empty as a tomb and I quickly dragged out the Jack Daniel’s and juice and Southern Comfort and tossed everything into the blender with a cube of ice, and, while it whirred, thought about my new information.
    Carefully, I checked out the dining room to make sure no one was around, and then walked through with the glass on the tray, the drink looking even prettier than the first one. It was certainly more potent. I had a heavy hand.
    Through the dining room and next through the music room, where I stopped and looked at our upright piano.
    Rose Devereau and Ben Queen.
    Into that splintered picture of that fatal summer, I could fit two more puzzle pieces. I pressed the piece that was Rose into place in theDevereau music room, sitting at a piano. My inner ear composed some sort of watery music line, trembling up and down the keyboard.
    Ben Queen, a wild card apparently in every sense of the word, I pressed into the dark and smoking wood that surrounded Spirit Lake.

TWELVE
    Between Spirit Lake and La Porte runs a dusty country highway, a two-lane road that’s used mostly by local people now, since another highway was built that bypasses Spirit Lake. The land on both sides is flat and windy, with breezes stirred up by passing cars. In the distance you can see bands of dark evergreen trees where the woods begin. Sunlight sifts through these burnt-looking acres of faded grasses and Queen Anne’s lace, which I had always spoken of as a flower until Ree-Jane told me it was “weeds, just weeds,” quick to de-beautify anything I love. And I wonder: why is it that a growing thing that springs up of its own accord and in surprising places must be “just a weed”?
    I pass this sea of Queen Anne’s lace and those fragile, starry-looking weeds called puffballs, whose white filaments I can make vanish with one breath. The puffballs make me think about God, something that my mind doesn’t dwell on much; I wonder if our souls are like the white threads of the puffballs and if God is the breath blowing them around, making them vanish. Would these almost invisible filaments finally curl and die like daisy petals pulled away from their source of life? I frowned over my comparison and thought it probably didn’t hold up. Finally, I stopped breathing at the puffballs, for I thought I was taking unfair advantage; they are too much at my mercy, and it seems childish and mean to pick wildflowers at all, much less pick them apart. So I let the puffballs alone and merely admire them and the Queen Anne’s lace, especially on my circuits of Spirit Lake where Queen Anne’s lace grows in profusion and puffballs line the rutted and overgrown road.
    Ree-Jane sometimes walks the two miles with me to La Porte, but only at those times when she can’t finagle the money out of her mother for the taxi fare. As it’s a somewhat lonely two miles I am glad of the company, even hers, even though she turns her cold eye on anything that I like.
    But this particular day, after supplying Great-Aunt Paradise with her second Cold Comfort and then doing my waitress work, I had the road pretty much to myself. During the