“And who’s with him now? Your wife and son alone?”
“No. He’s in the custody…excuse me, the possession of friends in New York.”
Mrs. Lovejoy looked him directly in the eyes, again revealing nothing with her own. “He sounds like a difficult case.”
Matthew didn’t know whether her cool, polished demeanor made him go faster than he’d intended, or if he wanted to shake her up. He said, “Honestly, I’m afraid he might take a knife some night and slaughter us in our beds.”
There was no reaction whatsoever. The lacquered surface between them held more expression than the woman’s leonine face.
“In a manner of speaking,” Matthew went on, a little flustered.
She lifted a hand. “Oh, I understand. Absolutely. I see many situations like this. An elderly person who is not used to being dependent, now finds the choices limited due to illness, waning strength or changing circumstances, and very often anger results. You and your wife have the demands of family and profession, and therein lies the problem. You say Walker will be seventy-two in December?” She waited for Matthew to nod. “Is he a strong man? In good physical health?”
“I’d say, for the most part, yes.” He was still looking for some reaction, for something. Now, though, he wasn’t sure he would know what it was if he saw it.
Mrs. Lovejoy picked up her letterblade and toyed with it. “I have found, Mr. Shayne, in my five years at this occupation—this calling—that the more physically aggressive guests are the ones who unfortunately tend to…” She cast about for the proper word. “Dissolve, when placed in a situation of being controlled. In time, they all dissolve, yes, but those…like your grandfather…do tend to go to pieces first. Am I making sense to you?”
“Perfect sense.” He was beginning to wonder what the further point of this was.
Maybe it showed in his own eyes and came across as boredom, for Mrs. Lovejoy leaned toward him and said, “Men like your grandfather rarely last more than two years here, if that. Now: we would wish to make him comfortable, and as happy as possible. We would wish to feed him well, to keep up his strength, and give him some kind of challenge. We do have gardening activities, a greenhouse, a library and a barn they can putter around. We have women who come from town to read to them, and to tell stories. Your wife will wish to inquire about the Bluebirds once you’re settled, I’m sure. They do all sorts of charitable deeds.”
She reached out and patted his hand, very professionally. “Everything is taken care of here. Once you sign the agreement, it’s all done. Your life is your own again, so that you may give it to your family and your future. And as for worrying about your grandfather’s future…let me say that we hope, as I’m sure you do, that he lives many more happy years, but…but…when the day of God’s blessing occurs, with your approval your grandfather will be laid to rest in Paradise’s own private cemetery. He can be out of your mind and cares, Mr. Shayne, and you will know that for the remainder of his days he has received the very best treatment any guest of Paradise can be given. For that is my solemn promise.”
“Ah,” said Matthew, nodding. “That sounds hopeful, then.”
“Come!” She stood up with a rustle of fabric. “Before we venture into the area of money, let me show you exactly what your coin would buy.”
Matthew got his cloak and hat, and in a few minutes was walking beside Mrs. Lovejoy along the gravel drive that went past her house into the property. It was an aptly-named place, because it was certainly beautiful. There were stands of elm and oak trees brilliant in the sunshine, a meadow where sheep grazed, and a green pond where ducks drifted back and forth.
Mrs. Lovejoy continued to talk as they walked. Presently there were twelve male and sixteen female guests, she said. The men and women were housed in separate facilities, because—she said—snow on the roof did not necessarily mean the fireplace had gone cold. Their ages were from the late-sixties to the eighties, the eldest being eighty-four. The guests had been brought from Boston, New York, of course Philadelphia, Charles Town and many smaller towns between. Word-of-mouth was building her business, she said. As life moved faster and responsibilities increased, many people were—as she said—stuck between a rock and a hard place regarding aged parents. Sometimes the guests resented being here, but gradually they accepted their situation and understood it was for the greater good of their loved ones. Oh, there were the rowdy guests and the guests who cursed and fought, but usually they calmed down or they didn’t last very long.
A doctor was within a thirty-minute ride, she assured him. Also, the doctor made several visits each week to check ailments and general health. A minister came on Sunday afternoons to lead worship in Paradise’s church. Seven workers, all female, did the cooking, the washing, kept everything scrubbed and fresh and all the rest of it. Very upright girls, every one. “Here’s our laundry house,” Mrs. Lovejoy announced, as they came around a bend.
There stood a tidy-looking white brick building with two chimneys spouting smoke and a pile of wood stacked up alongside it ready to be burned under the wash kettles. The door was wide open, and three young women wearing the gray gowns and mob caps stood beside it chattering and laughing; they also, Matthew quickly saw, were taking snuff up their noses from a snuffbox. When they saw Mrs. Lovejoy they went stiff-backed and the laughter died. Two of the girls turned away and rushed inside, where the heat was probably stifling, to continue stirring the laundry with kettle poles. The third seemed to realize too late that her friends had abandoned her. She had been left holding the snuffbox.
Before the girl could retreat into the laundry house, Mrs. Lovejoy said sharply, “Opal! Bring that to me.” And then, under her breath to Matthew: “I have told them such nasty habits will not be tolerated. Pardon me while I apply the whip.”
Opal held the snuffbox behind her as she approached, as if that would do any good. In her eyes there was a mixture of trepidation and…what? Matthew wondered. Barely-repressed hilarity? Opal’s mouth was twisted tight; was she about to laugh in mum’s face?
It was never to be known. At that moment came the crunch of hooves on gravel. Two horses pulling a wagon came trotting along the drive from the direction of Mrs. Lovejoy’s house. Matthew and the woman stepped aside as the wagon approached. Guiding the reins was a heavy-set, bulky-shouldered young man maybe Matthew’s age or just a little older. He was wearing a gray monmouth cap, a russet-colored shirt, brown breeches and stockings and wore a brown cloak over his shoulders. His hair looked to be skinned to the scalp, from what Matthew could see. He had a broad, pallid face with fleshy lips and his scraggly black eyebrows met in the middle.
“May I help you?” Mrs. Lovejoy asked.
“Need talk,” the young bulk said; something was wrong with his mouth or tongue, for even that simple sentence was garbled.
“I am with someone,” she said crisply.
He balled up a formidable fist and rapped three times on the wagon’s side.
Mrs. Lovejoy cleared her throat. “Opal? Would you continue Mr. Shayne’s tour of our Paradise? And please do something with that snuffbox. Mr. Shayne, I’m needed for the moment. I’ll meet you back at my house in…oh…fifteen or twenty minutes?” She was already going around to climb up on the seat. Matthew followed her to do the gentlemanly thing.
“Not necessary,” she said, but she let him help her.
As Mrs. Lovejoy took his hand and stepped up, Matthew glanced into the rear of the wagon. Back there, among dead leaves and general untidiness, was a scatter of workman’s odds-and-ends: some lumberboards of various lengths, a pickaxe and shovel, a couple of lanterns, a pair of leather gloves, a wooden mallet, and underneath the mallet a dirty burlap bag that—
“Mr. Shayne?” came the woman’s voice.
He brought himself back. “Yes!”
“You can let go of my hand now.”
“Surely.” He released it and stepped back, but before doing so he glanced one more time at what he’d thought he’d seen,
in case the problem with his vision fading in and out had become a problem of seeing what was not there.
But it was there.
“Later then,” said Mrs. Lovejoy. “Take care of Mr. Shayne, Opal.”
“Yes, mum, I shall.”
The wagon moved off, heading deeper into the property. An interesting wagon, Matthew thought as he watched it follow the drive and disappear beyond a stand of trees. Interesting because of the dirty burlap bag that was lying underneath the mallet.
The bag that had ‘Sutch A’ across it in red paint. If he could have picked the bag up and shaken out the folds, wrinkles and dead leaves he would have read its full declaration: Mrs. Sutch’s Sausages and, below that, the legend ‘Sutch A Pleasure’.
Twenty-Eight
WANT a sniff?”
The snuffbox, open to its mound of yellow powder, was suddenly up below Matthew’s nose. He stepped back a pace, still with Mrs. Sutch’s pleasure on his mind. “No, thank you.”
“Don’t laugh, you bitches!” Opal called to her friends as the girls emerged grinning from the steaming innards of the laundry house. She took two sniffs up the snoot and sneezed with hurricanious violence. Then she hooked an arm around Matthew’s, her eyes watering, and crowed, “I’ve got me a man!” She pulled him along as if he were made out of spit and straw.
Matthew let himself be pulled.
“Well!” she said, striding with a jaunty step. “What do you want to see?”
“What’s worth seeing?”
She gave him a deep-dimpled smile. “Now that’s an answer!” She glanced back to gauge if her companions in crime were still watching, and when she saw they’d returned to their labors she released his arm. “Not much worth seein’, ’round here at least,” she confided. She looked him over from boots to tricorn. “Here, now! You ain’t old enough to be puttin’ a mater or pater in this velvet prison!”
“I’m bringing my grandfather. And I don’t think Mrs. Lovejoy would care to hear your description of Paradise.”
“This ain’t my idea of Paradise!” she scoffed, her nose wrinkled up so hard Matthew thought the metal ring might go flying out. “Hell, no!” She suddenly seemed to catch her own imprudence. Her cheeks reddened and she widened the distance between them by several feet. “Listen, you ain’t gonna go blab about my tongue, are you? I mean, my tongue gets me in awful trouble. I’m already hangin’ on to my job by the curl of an ass-hair.”
“I won’t blab,” said Matthew, who was finding the girl to be a sparkling conversationalist. Just what he needed, in fact.
“Might have to go pack my bag anyways, cause of this here whuffie-dust.” Opal held up the snuffbox, which was fashioned of cheap birch bark and looked like an item from the shelves of Jaco Dovehart’s trading post. “Mizz Lovejoy’s already been on me twice this week about it. If Noggin hadn’t come along, she was sure to toss me out right then and there.”
“Noggin?”
“That’s who was drivin’ the wagon. What she calls him, I mean. Let’s go this way.” She pointed out a path leading off the main drive into the woods. Matthew had had his fill of forest travel, but he went in the direction she indicated. He waited a moment until he asked his next question, which was disguised as a statement. “I thought Mrs. Lovejoy told me all the workers here were female.”
“They are. Well, all the ones who live on the premises. Noggin lives somewhere else. He comes in to do fix-up work. You know, patchin’ roofs and paintin’ walls and such. And diggin’ the graves, he does that too.”
“Oh,” Matthew said.
“Matter of fact,” Opal said, “here’s the graveyard.”
They came out of the woods to face a cemetery surrounded by a white-painted wrought-iron fence. Everything was neat and orderly, the weeds kept at bay and the small wooden crosses lined up in rows. Matthew counted forty-nine of them. He didn’t know if that was high or not for five years of business, considering the ages and conditions of her guests. He doubted if any of them were too very robust when they arrived, and they went down from there.
“Be another one in here after dark,” Opal said. “The widow Ford passed late last night. She was a pretty good old lady, never caused much trouble. Had a merry kind of laugh.”
“After dark?” Matthew paused to lean against the fence. His sense of curiosity, still tingling from his sighting of the burlap bag, received a further pinch. “Why do you put it that way?”
She shrugged. “Ain’t no other way to put it. You come here tomorrow, you’ll see a fresh grave dug in the night. That’s how it’s done here.”
“Isn’t there a funeral?”
“There’s a service, if that’s what you mean. After the doctor looks ’em over and pronounces ’em dead, the preacher says some words. It’s done in the church, right over yonder.” She motioned toward a small white building that Matthew could see through the trees. “Everybody who’s able and wants to come can pay their finals. The coffin lies in the church all day. Then, after dark, Noggin takes the…listen, why are you wantin’ to know about this so much?”
“I’d like to know what to expect,” Matthew said evenly, “when my grandfather’s time comes.”
“Oh. ’Course. As I was sayin’, then…” She stopped and shook her head. “Maybe Mizz Lovejoy ought to be the one tellin’ you. I’m already up to my buttbone in trouble.”
“All right.” Matthew decided to pull back, so as not to scare all the conversation out of her. “Where to next?”
They walked along the path past the cemetery and the church itself. A road went by the church that Matthew thought must connect to the main drive. Further on there was a bench positioned among some trees, and beyond that vantage point the land sloped slightly downward toward a meadow. A number of other white-washed buildings were in view.
“Those are where they live. The guests, I mean,” Opal explained. “The one on the right is for the men, the one on the left for the women. Between ’em is the vegetable garden. Then…way over there…the smaller one…is where we live. It’s not much, but we’ve all got our own rooms. Barn’s back behind there. She’s got some cows and pigs over that way. I’ll milk a cow, all right, but I ain’t prancin’ in pigshit, and I told her just the same.”
“Good for you,” Matthew said. “What’s that?” He pointed toward a low-slung structure beyond the workers’ house that looked to be all panes of glass, shining in the sun. “A greenhouse?” He recalled Mrs. Lovejoy mentioning it.
“That’s right,” Opal said. “Grows her hot plants in there.”
“Her hot plants?”
“Her peppers. Mizz Lovejoy’s got a craze for ’em. You can’t go in there without your eyes start leakin’ and your skin get all itchy. At least I can’t.”
“She has a second business?” Matthew asked.
“What second business?”
“Well…she must sell her peppers at market, is what I’m thinking. A little of that goes a long way.”
“You’d be wrong,” Opal told him. “Mizz Lovejoy feeds ’em to her guests. Grinds ’em up in every damn thing, excuse my French. Even gives ’em pepper juice to drink, mornin’, noon and night.”
Matthew frowned. “For what earthly reason?”
“Makes the blood flow, is what she says. Keeps everything workin’. I don’t know, ask her. All I know is, you ought to see some of them oldies—guests—eatin’ their suppers and moanin’ with the tears runnin’ down their faces. It’s just awful.” And then she put her hand up to her mouth but she couldn’t catch the laugh before it came spilling out.
“I think you’re a very cruel girl, Opal,” Matthew said, but he was fighting to keep a straight face too because he could envision the scene she had described. That must make him cruel too, he thought. He was just about to laugh, and he also brought his hand up to cover his mouth.
Before the hand could get there, Opal turned and kissed him.
Actually, she flung herself upon him. She pressed her lips upon his with desperate ne
ed, and Matthew thought peppers were cool compared to Opal’s fire. He staggered back, but she had hold of him and wouldn’t let him go. Her mouth worked at his, her tongue explored, one of her hands gripped his buttocks and Matthew thought he was going to be thrown down and ravished under the trees. But…after all, this was Paradise.
“Come on, come on,” she breathed in his ear, cleaving to him like a second skin. “We can go in the woods, don’t matter. I know a good place. Come on, you ever done it behind a church?” He feared she was going to peel his breeches right off. “You don’t know,” she said as she pulled at him, her voice near sobbing. “Old people everywhere, and sick, and dyin’ right there in front of you, come on, darlin’, come on just let me—”
“Opal,” he said.
“—have a little bit, a little bit of warm, that’s all I’m—”
“Stop,” he told her, and he caught her chin and looked into her dazed blue eyes and saw it was not about him at all, no it was not; it was about the place, with its white paint and blue trim and lovely buildings that hid the dark side of Paradise. It was about the wrinkled flesh and the spottings of age and the old women who talked about old dead loves and the old men whose adventures had dwindled down to the size of a chamberpot. It was about the silence of midnight and the frost on the windowpane, and the way a day could be so slow and yet so quick, and how the merry laughter of that good old widow Ford had ended in a strengthless gasp. Matthew knew the truth of this place, and Opal knew it as well; it was where you were put to be forgotten.
“—askin’,” she finished, and suddenly the tears bloomed up and blurred the blue and she looked at him as if she’d been struck.
She backed away. Matthew thought she was going to turn and run, but she stopped at a distance and stood staring at the ground as if searching for something she’d lost.
“I…” she started, and then went silent again. She rubbed her mouth with the back of her sleeve. He thought she was going to rub her mouth until it bled. “I’m…” Once more she was quiet, and Matthew saw her considering her position. When she lifted her gaze to his again, she was full of flame and spite. “I’m going to have to say you advanced on me, if it comes to that.” Her eyes were blazing. “If it comes to that,” she repeated.