Fadeaway Girl by Martha Grimes Read Free Book Online

handed her her glasses. “The snapshot.”
    â€œNow, 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.
    â€œSee 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.

7
    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.
    I had sat myself down on the curb outside of the Moomas’ house (although I didn’t know which Moomas, as there were so many of them). Baskets of petunias and pansies hung along the porch roof, looking thirsty. Then I got up and walked on, kicking pebbles.
    Mrs. Louderback’s house was called “Traveler’s Rest,” which I thought especially appropriate for a fortune-teller. As if finally you could stop trying to fix your own messed-up life and let something else take control. Of course, it didn’t actually work that way for