Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes Page A

piano, though. She played and that crazy Lillian, or Isabel, sang. You could hear it from down the road.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    Now she was sitting back, staring in frowning concentration at the shells, ready for another round. She looked up at me from under penciled-in eyebrows. “Where’s the pea?”
    I guessed I’d have to play the stupid trick. “This one.” Anyone else would have been clever enough to choose the wrong walnut shell. But I had no patience with this sort of thing. We both knew where the pea was, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t, even if she could. I don’t know what it was about me that made it so difficult to go along with harmless deceptions.
    Her mouth cracked in her version of a smile. “No it isn’t.”
    “It is too.” I reached out my hand to prove it and she smacked it, smarting the knuckles.
    Then she removed the pea, at least I suppose she did, since she shielded the operation with her hand. And, still keeping the shells blocked from my view, she hid the pea.
    It was just plain silly. “Wait a minute! The whole idea of this trickis to show the hand is quicker than the eye. That doesn’t work if I don’t see where the pea’s put at the very start.”
    But she was paying no attention to my objections, just shifting the shells quickly about. “Which one?” Her tone was triumphant, as if she’d really bested me this time.
    I didn’t even care where I pointed, and she clapped her sides several times, whack whack whack , and cawed with laughter, as if she’d just done the cleverest thing in the world. “Wrong! Wrong! It’s this one!” This time, of course, she raised a shell-half to reveal the traveling pea. Satisfied now that she’d finally got me, she pushed them to one side, picked up her glass, and gurgled the straw.
    But I refused to knuckle under. “What about Rose Devereau?”
    “Who?”
    Impatient, I said, “Rose Souder Devereau. You didn’t tell me why she was a black sheep.”
    “Ran off with Ben Queen.” Now, she had the Bicycle cards in her hand and was snapping them.
    I was rooted. Here was another name totally new to me. Ben Queen. I nearly licked my lips, tasting these new names that seemed as delicious as the Souder’s soda I was hankering after. New names I could search for, since my investigation into Mary-Evelyn’s strange death had pretty much stalled.
    Even without my asking, putting the cards down for solitaire, Aurora said (but it was clear it was to herself), “Ben Queen! Now wasn’t he the best-looking man I ever did see! Women’d line up all the way to perdition and back for a chance at Ben Queen. I think he took a fancy to me; it was him taught me how to play cards, poker especially.” Her hand ruffled the pack of cards, as if it too had a memory. “I was a little older than Ben Queen—” Cagily, she looked at me. “He mustn’t have been much more than twenty or twenty-one—or else I might just’ve run off with him myself, even if those Queens was crazy. I wonder if he’s still alive? Be in his sixties by now, I guess.”
    Did she think she’d taken me in with that age business? If he was sixty now Aurora would be thirty years older than Ben Queen.
    “Well, they wouldn’t let him come to see Rose, those crazy Devereau sisters. Never set foot in that house. Probably thought the Queens wasn’t good enough for the Devereaus. Ha! But men like Ben Queen,they always find a way in. So Rose ran off with him.” Aurora stopped a moment to study the walnut shells. “Then there was the scandal.”
    My eyes bugged out. “The scandal?”
    She gave me a sly look. “Never you mind, miss. It was over in Cold Flat Junction, anyways.”
    I sighed. She was making it up, I suspected. “Do you remember Mary-Evelyn?”
    She frowned. “Who’s she?”
    How could anyone forget, who’d been around then? “She drowned. She was the youngest of the Devereaus.”
    She shut her eyes, apparently thinking. “Oh, her. That child they pulled