Harvestman Lodge Page 16

  “I think he likes us,” Melinda commented once the pattern became apparent.

  “I think he likes us liking each other,” Eli said. “Us liking each other as such good friends, I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she said and then chuckled for a moment. He was glad he’d spoken. He knew what he’d meant, too.

  “Hey Eli,” Melinda asked him one day at the table, “Has Jimbo ever said anything to you about the office down the main corridor from mine? The empty one?”

  “No. But I’ve never asked him about it, though. I suppose it’s just one Keith Brecht just hasn’t been able to lease out yet.”

  “Well, I did ask Jimbo about it, because I noticed he always looked over at that door in a … significant way, when he passed. Like there was something noteworthy about it.”

  “No idea what that would be. What exactly did you ask him?”

  “I just told him I enjoyed the quiet of my office, and the fact there wasn’t noise from on down the way, with that room being empty. Then he told me something odd: he said, ‘Lindy, there ain’t never going to be nobody using that room.’ When I asked why, he said it’s just because it’s one nobody would ever want.”

  “This sounds like the opening lines of a ghost story. You know, the old haunted motel motif.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s anything like that. And if it’s haunted, the ghosts have never come over to tell me hello. But I do think maybe something happened in there sometime. Jimbo didn’t want to say much, though … I could tell that from his manner. The truth is, it all kind of creeps me out.”

  “Well, there’s my next novel, if I decide to go the spooky, mysterious route: The Empty Chamber of Hodgepodge Hall.”

  Melinda laughed and went back to her salad.

  “IF YOU’VE GOT ANY NOTIONS that that gal is going to share anything more than lunch and car rides with you, son, you’d best divest yourself of any such thinking,” Lundy told Eli out of the blue in an afternoon parking lot conversation at the newspaper office. Eli had brought Melinda with him to the newspaper plant to introduce her to the three Brechts: David, Mr. Carl, and Keith. Introductions were superfluous, really; Melinda was a local person and already had encountered various Brechts at local events over the years, and they all knew of her through her family, her work in television, and her frequent mentions in the newspaper in the days she was Tylerville’s leading collector of scholarship awards.

  In reality, bringing her to the newspaper office was, for Eli, an excuse to spend a little extra time with her and, he hoped, encourage the Brechts to perceive her as a colleague rather than a media competitor.

  Melinda had gone ahead of Eli into the building, in search of a restroom, at the time Lundy buttonholed Eli outside his car and commenced his odd lecture.

  “What ‘notions’ are you telling me to forget, Jake?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. A girl that pretty, and sweet on you besides … your typical male starts getting notions about what he’s going to get from a gal in such circumstances as that, what he’s going to talk her into. What I’m telling you is to not be thinking that way in regards to that particular little lady. The family she comes out of, the way she was raised, the way her daddy thinks and acts – and, most of all, the temper he’s got – there ain’t going to be no rolling in the old haystack with that Buckingham gal unless you marry her first.”

  “What’s making you go off on that subject, Jake? You got a dirty mind inside that watermelon-sized skull?”

  “Just a realistic one, that’s all. I know what’s normal. And most normal males are going to get ideas, being around such a fine figure of a female. Don’t be giving me that saintly look, son. You got the same hormones coursing through your tubing that the rest of us do. You know exactly what I’m talking about, and you’ve thought about it. ’Fess up.”

  Eli couldn’t deny that his thoughts about Melinda had at times drifted in the direction of those voiced by that crude trucker who had leered so openly at her, but he felt no obligation to “’fess up” about any such thing to Jake Lundy. “Jake, listen to me: Melinda and I, we eat lunch together, talk to each other all we can, and work on the Bicentennial Planning Committee together. Yeah, I know how pretty she is, and yeah, I like her … a lot. And yeah, I’d like to be more than a friend to her, and I’ve gotten some signals that tell me I already am. But this other stuff, all this about me getting ‘notions’ about ‘rolling in the old haystack’ or whatever, you’re way farther down the track than the train has traveled. Way farther.”

  Lundy chuckled. “Turned you down already, has she?”

  “Hell, Jake! This is ridiculous!” Eli started to stomp on up to the building and maybe slam the door going in just to let Lundy know how annoyed he was. Instead he took two steps, stopped, and turned back. “Tell me, though, why it is you picked just now to say all this stuff?”

  “I’ve had that family of hers on my mind this morning. I saw Ben Buckingham unlocking his shop when I was coming to work. I know that bunch and their way of looking at the world. I know how that gal was raised and how serious her daddy is about protecting her from all the nasty young bucks out there on the prowl. There’s some history regarding all that that you’re going to find out about eventually. Not everybody knows about it because it kind of got swept under the rug, but some of us who know the Buckinghams well do know what really happened.”

  “You’ve completely lost me.”

  “Just take it this way: I’m going to warn you to step light and easy with that young lady, and don’t ever, ever let her daddy think you’re treating her like anything but heaven’s sweetest angel. If you do otherwise you’ll live to regret it. Or maybe not live.”

  “I’m not sure what that means, Jake.”

  “I’m saying that, to Ben Buckingham, that little lady is the proverbial silver chalice. And you don’t spit in the silver chalice.”

  “No chalice-spitting planned. Like I said, Melinda and I eat lunch together and go to committee meetings together, and we went to a movie the other evening. We like a lot of the same things and enjoy talking and having a cup of coffee. We’ll have to see how matters progress from there, if they progress at all.”

  “Just be aware that there’s one fellow in this world walking around with a permanent limp because he decided to ‘progress’ things with that young lady in the wrong way. Bam! Shot right in the leg, that boy was, by old Ben himself. Ben got lucky, though, because the fellow with the limp was prideful enough he didn’t want the circumstances of his wounding known, and went along with covering it up.”

  Shot in the leg. Eli wrapped his mind around that phrase and decided maybe there was no particular reason to rush meeting Melinda’s parents, particularly her father.

  “I bet you two burn up the telephone about every evening, huh?” Lundy said.

  Eli had to admit that they did. Seldom had they left their offices and returned to their respective homes (Melinda had gone back to residency with her parents – temporarily, she vowed – after finishing her higher education) before they were on the phone together, talking sometimes for hours. Of all the things they did, those extended phone conversations came closest to confirming to them that there was much more to their feelings for each other – or at least the potential for much more – than mere professional association or friendship. Each time Eli talked with Melinda, he couldn’t help but compare the happy spirit of the conversation to the miserable confrontations that he’d come to expect whenever he called Allison, something he was doing less and less.

  “I better get inside, Jake. Melinda doesn’t know anybody in the building, as far as I’m aware.”

  “Just keep control of yourself around that pretty gal, Eli. I’d hate to see an old friend like Ben Buckingham blow the brains out of a new friend like Eli Scudder.”

  Eli had not previously encountered this over-dramatic side of Jake Lundy. “That won’t happen. I’ll turn on the charm and win him over like I do everyb
ody else.”

  “You do that, son. Oh, and if you’re about to give her a tour through the building, I’d not introduce her to the press crew. Them boys are way too crude for you to inflict them upon her. Especially with the kind of pin-ups they got up on the wall behind the press.”

  “David made them take those pinups down last Thursday. But even so, you’re right. I’ll keep Melinda out of the press room.”

  IN FACT, WHEN ELI FOUND MELINDA she was already in the press room, facing a semi-circle of normally hyper-macho pressmen who had been struck silent and shy. The flawless young lady who had just wandered into their noisy, ink-stained world was not only the prettiest in several counties, but also a recognizable regional television personality. They were rightly awed.

  “There you are!” Eli said to Melinda. “I wondered where you’d drifted off to.”

  “I was just asking the boys here about how the press works, because I’ve never seen one before,” she said, cheerful and seemingly not all bothered by the blatant gawking of the pressmen. Used to such, probably. It angered Eli to know the kinds of things the pressmen almost certainly were thinking about. It was amusing, though, to see how thoroughly the testosterone-fueled group had been reduced to silent, schoolboy-shy mouth-breathers by the mere presence of a beautiful girl.

  “Well, now that you’ve met the true intelligentsia of this operation, let me take you around to meet some of the lesser folks,” Eli said, taking her hand and feeling the bolts of jealousy fired at him from the eyes of the press crew. Tough luck, boys. Go find your own.

  The rest of the introductions around the newspaper office were fast and easy, though Mr. Carl seemed wary of Melinda. Eli would later learn that this was because he saw all broadcast media as, above all else, competitors and usurpers of advertising dollars that should be his. He was not a businessman prone to be cordial to competitors. Unless, possibly, they possessed skill at playing bluegrass.

  Keith Brecht, whom Eli didn’t know well, provided a much less-sullen reception than had his father. He was welcoming and friendly, and being unmarried and younger, was perhaps smitten with Melinda like the pressmen had been, but with less shyness. Everything Keith said, and how he said it, seemed aimed at impressing his glamorous visitor. Melinda saw it as readily as Eli did. She played along and let Keith think he was bowling her over. A survival tactic of a beautiful woman.

  “I have met your father, by the way,” Keith said to her in a tone implying this fact was highly significant and should impress her.

  Melinda was tempted to point out that few people in Tylerville had not met her father, or at least had seen him doing his work. He had videotaped scores of weddings, bringing-home-baby moments, holiday church services, community festivals, family reunions, even burials, particularly those of veterans. With the steady rise of video in the culture of mid-1980s America, Ben Buckingham was a hard-to-miss local figure.

  Melinda merely smiled at Keith Brecht. “Well! I’m glad you know him. Have you seen his work?”

  “Seen it? I’ve hired the man! When the Imperial Hotel project began in the Mountcastle community, we had him come through and tape a walk-through so we would have a good record of the before and the after as regards that project.”

  Melinda smiled brightly. “I’ll be sure and tell him I’ve met you.”

  The Imperial Hotel project was a restoration done by the Kincheloe Preservation Trust, a local organization devoted to halting and reversing the decline of buildings of historic significance within Kincheloe County. Keith Brecht had been heavily involved as a Trust officer for five years.

  “Dad told me about that project,” Melinda said. “An old railroad hotel, I think?”

  “That’s right. Very dilapidated when we started, now a showplace. People rent it for weddings and family reunions and company Christmas parties and the like. There’s a good deal of history in that building, going back to the time Mountcastle was looking realistically at the prospect of becoming the biggest and most important town in Kincheloe County. When the railroad diverted the main line to Tylerville, those hopes were dashed. Have you seen the Imperial?”

  “Of course, just from growing up in Kincheloe County,” Melinda said. “I’ve never been inside it, though.”

  “I can provide a guided tour, if you’d like to see it,” Keith said.

  I’ll bet you could, Eli thought. And I bet it would be a private tour. Just you and Melinda, you taking your sweet time and gushing charm all the way along. Not going to happen, big boy.

  Perhaps Keith Brecht was able to read Eli’s thoughts in his expression, because he immediately added: “It would be a delight to show you and Eli through the place. He needs to see it too. Since both of you are focusing your journalism on our bicentennial celebration and are also on the Bicentennial Planning Committee, the Imperial Hotel restoration might provide you with an inspiration toward and vision of what can be achieved in this community when we set our minds to it and work together.”

  Sounds like a thrill a minute, Eli thought with heartfelt sarcasm, and a glance at Melinda showed him she was thinking much the same thing.

  “Does he always sound like he’s speaking from a script?” Melinda asked Eli after they left Keith’s office and headed for the circulation department, the next stop on the newspaper office tour.

  “Yeah, most of the times I’ve been around him,” Eli replied. “But he’s a good guy. Tries a little too hard, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He is your office landlord, you know. The proud landlord of Hodgepodge.”

  “I know. I’m glad I got to meet him. No guided hotel tours for me, though. I’m not really looking for … what was it? ‘a vision of what this community can achieve.’”

  “I guarantee you he’s got that line written down somewhere,” Eli said. “I suspect he’s a self-scripter, writing down lines for himself that he can practice in private until he can say them in a convincing off-the-cuff way. Like Mr. Collins in Pride and Predudice.”

  “Oh my, what’s that?”

  Melinda had just spotted something hanging on a wall of the front hallway: a huge black-and-white photograph of Tylerville’s Center Street, crowded by night with humanity clad and hair-styled in early 1960s fashion. The crowd faced a makeshift stage built on one side of the street, the stage bearing a gaggle of country musicians with guitars, a banjo and fiddle, and a bass fiddle being plucked and slapped by an extraordinarily skinny, lanky fellow in a loose-fitting, oversized suit … clearly the comic figure of the act, as bass fiddle players tended to be in country string bands of those days.

  Melinda stopped and looked at the photograph, which was nearly large enough to cover the wall, with intent interest.

  “So … what is this?” she asked again.

  “What this is, Melinda, is an election party, sponsored by the newspaper for the people of Tylerville and Kincheloe County. They used to do it every time there was an election; the last one, I think, would have been around the time you were born. According to Jake Lundy, they’d close off Center Street, throw up a stage – the parts of which, I’m told, are still stored in town in some warehouse the Brechts own – and they’d hire country music acts to come and keep the crowd entertained while votes were counted. Sometime late in the evening they’d have the unofficial results of all the races to announce from the stage, and then Homer & Jethro or Lonzo & Oscar or Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper or whoever they had hired would play some more music to keep the winners celebrating and the losers distracted. You can see the size of crowd the election parties drew. I’m planning to use this same image in the magazine, assuming there are smaller copies of the photograph, or maybe even the original negative around here somewhere.”

  She was still studying the huge image closely, scanning face after face with her brow furrowed, either looking for someone specific or exploring for any random recognizable person. This was, after all, her hometown, and it wouldn’t be surprising if her parents, grandparents, or other relative
s or acquaintances were among the many faces in the crowd.

  “Melinda … I’m going to run to the restroom a minute and then I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay.” She didn’t take her eyes off the old photograph for even a moment.

  When he got back, Melinda was not there. Thinking that perhaps she had simply gone to find a restroom herself, he headed around the next hallway corner. There was a customer bench there where he could await her.

  She was already there, standing beside the bench, tense as a spring and noticeably pale. When she looked at him her eyes were reddened. She’d either been crying or was trying hard not to.

  “Melinda? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” Her voice was tight, strained.

  “You look like somebody just walked on your grave, as my grandfather used to say.”

  “Please … it’s nothing. I’m ready to go now.”

  “We haven’t stopped at the circulation office yet … “

  “Another time, okay? I really want to leave.”

  “Please, tell me what’s wrong. Was it something in that photograph? Because there’s no denying that you are upset about something.”

  She gave him a look that made him feel like a fool, jolting him silent. She asked, “Why would you think I’d get upset by a photograph probably going back to before I was even born?”

  “I have no idea. Forget the picture, then. It had to be something. Did somebody say something to you they shouldn’t have? Did one of the press guys come up and bother you?”

  “I’m just ready to go, that’s all.”

  “Then let’s go. There’s some work I need to do at Hodgepodge, anyway.”

  She hardly had a word to say to him during the drive back to the office. It was inexplicable and unnerving. By the time they reached the office building, she seemed as distracted and upset as ever, and rushed to her office without so much as a thank-you to Eli for having been her chauffeur and newspaper tour guide for the afternoon. Not even a glance back or parting wave.