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“Did he come to the hotel often?”
“To my knowledge,” Norma said, “he came only once. But I’m not really sure about that, so don’t quote me.”
Candy could understand why Henry would not have been a repeat visitor. The room was tiny. There was a narrow bed against the far wall and a chair in the corner with a small black television perched on it. In front of it was a second chair, on which was perched an over-filled ashtray.
“Some of our employees come up here when they have half an hour to spare to catch up on the soap operas,” Norma said, by way of explanation.
“So they don’t believe the room’s haunted?”
“Put it this way, honey,” Norma said. “Whatever they believe it doesn’t put them off coming up here.”
“What’s through there?” Candy said, pointing to a door.
“Look for yourself,” Norma said.
Candy opened the door and stepped into a minuscule bathroom that had not been cleaned in a very long time. In the mirror above the filthy sink she met her own reflection. Her eyes looked almost black in the murk of this little cell, and her dark hair needed a cut. But she liked her own face, even in such an unpromising light. She had her mother’s smile, open and easy, and her father’s frown; the deep, troubled frown that Bill Quackenbush wore in his beer-dreams. And of course her odd eyes: the left dark brown, the right blue; though the mirror reversed them.
“When you’ve quite finished admiring yourself …” Norma said.
Candy closed the bathroom door and went back to her note-taking to cover her embarrassment. There isno wallpaper on the walls of Room Nineteen, she wrote, just plaster painted a dirty white. One of the four walls had a curious abstract pattern on it, which was faintly pink. All in all, she could not have imagined a grimmer or more uncomfortable place.
“So what can you tell me about Henry Murkitt?” she asked Norma.
“Not that much,” the woman replied. “His grandfather was the founding father of the town. In fact, we’re all of us here because Wallace Murkitt decided he’d had enough of life on the trail. The story goes that his horse upped and died on him in the middle of the night, so they had no choice but to settle down right here in the middle of nowhere.”
Candy smiled. There was something about this little detail which absolutely fit with all she knew about her hometown. “So Chickentown exists because Wallace Murkitt’s horse died?” she said.
Norma seemed to get the bitter joke. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess that about sums things up, doesn’t it? But apparently Henry Murkitt was very proud of having his family’s name on the town. It was something he used to boast about.”
“Then they changed it—”
“Yes, well, I’ll get to that in a moment. Really, poor Henry’s life was a series of calamities toward the end. First his wife, Diamanda, left him. Nobody knows where she went. And then sometime in December 1947, the town council decided to change the name of the town. Henry took it very badly. On Christmas Eve he checked into the hotel, and the poor man never checked out again.”
Candy had guessed something like this was coming, but even so it made the little hairs on the nape of her neck prickle to hear Norma say it.
“He died in this room?” Candy said softly.
“Yes.”
“How? A heart attack?”
Norma shook her head.
“Oh, no …” said Candy, beginning to put the pieces together. “He killed himself?”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.”
The room suddenly felt a little smaller, if that were possible, the corners—despite the sun that found its way through the dirtied glass—a little darker.
“That’s horrible,” Candy said.
“You’ll learn, honey,” Norma said. “Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst.”
Candy kept her silence. For the first time she saw how sad Norma’s face had become in the years since they’d last met. How the corners of her mouth were drawn down and her brow deeply etched with lines.
“But it wasn’t just love that broke Henry Murkitt’s heart,” Norma said. “It was—”
“—the fact that they changed the name of the town?” Candy said.
“Yes. That’s right. After all it was his family name. His name. His claim to a little bit of immortality, if you like. When that was gone, I guess he didn’t think he had anything left to live for.”
“Poor man,” Candy said, echoing Norma’s earlier sentiments. “Did he leave a note? I mean, a suicide note?”
“Yes. Of a kind. As far as I can gather he said something about waiting for his ship to come in.”
“What did he mean by that?” Candy said, jotting the phrase down.
“Well, he was probably drunk, and a little crazy. But he had something in the back of his head about ships and the sea.”
“That’s strange,” Candy said.
“It gets stranger,” Norma said.
She went to the small table beside the bed and opened the drawer. In it was a copy of Gideon’s Bible and a strange object made of what looked like brass. She took it out.
“According to the stories,” she said, “this is the only object of any worth he had with him.”
“What is it?”
Norma handed it to Candy. It was heavy and etched with numbers. There was a moving part that was designed to line up with the numbers.
“It’s a sextant,” Norma said.
Candy looked blank. “What’s a sextant?”
“It’s something sailors use to find out where they are when they’re out at sea. I don’t exactly know how it works, but you line it up with the stars somehow and …” She shrugged. “You find out where you are.”
“And he had this with him?”
“As I say: according to the stories. This very one.”
“Wouldn’t the police have taken it?” Candy said.
“You would think so. But as long as I’ve been working in the hotel that thing has been here in that drawer, beside the Gideon’s Bible. Henry Murkitt’s sextant.”
“Huh,” said Candy, not at all sure what to make of any of this now. She handed the object back to Norma, who carefully—even a little reverently—returned it to its place and slid the drawer closed. “So that and the note were all he left?” Candy asked.
“No,” said Norma. “He left something else.”
“What?”
“Look around you,” Norma replied.
Candy looked. What was there here that could have belonged to Henry Murkitt? The furniture? Surely not? The age-worn rug under her feet? Perhaps, but it was unlikely. The lamp? No. What did that leave? There weren’t any pictures on the walls, so—
“Oh, wait a minute,” she said, looking at the stains on the wall. “Not those?”
Norma just looked at her, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow.
“Those?” Candy said.
“No matter how many coats of paint the workmen put on that wall, the stains show through.”
Candy went closer to the wall, examining the marks. A part of her—the part that her morbid grandmother could take credit for—wanted to ask Norma the obvious question: how had the stains got up there? Had he shot himself, or used a razor? But there was another part that preferred not to know.
“Horrible,” she said.
“That’s what happens when people realize their lives aren’t what they dreamed they’d be,” Norma said. She glanced at her watch. “Oh Lord, look at the time. I’ve got to get going. That’s the story of Henry Murkitt.”
“What a sad man,” Candy said.
“Well, I guess all of us are waiting for our ships to come in, one way or another,” Norma said, going to the door and letting Candy out onto the gloomy landing. “Some of us still live in hope,” she said with a half-hearted smile. “But you have to, don’t you?”
And with that she closed the door on the room where Henry Murkitt had breathed his last.
3 (#u1555276c-0c49-5f99-89e9-b0674a8986d9)
DOODLE (#u1555276c-0c49-5f99-89e9-b0674a8986d9)
MISS SCHWARTZ, CANDY’S HISTORY teacher, was not in a pleasant mood at the best of times, but today her mood was fouler than usual. As she went around the classroom, returning the project papers on Chickentown, only her few favorite students (who were usually boys) earned anything close to good marks. Everyone else was being criticized.
But nothing the rest of the class had faced compared with Miss Schwartz’s attack on Candy’s paper.
“Facts, Candy Quackenbush,” the woman said, tossing Candy’s paper about Henry Murkitt’s demise down on her desk. “I asked for facts. And what do you give me—?”
“Those are facts, Miss—”
“Don’t answer back,” Miss Schwartz snapped. “These are not facts. They are morbid pieces of gossip. Nothing more. This work—like most of your work— is worthless.”
“But I was in that room in the Comfort Tree Hotel,” she said. “I saw Henry Murkitt’s sextant.”
“Are you hopelessly gullible?” said Schwartz. “Or are you just plain stupid? Every hotel has some kind of ridiculous ghost story. Can’t you tell the difference between fact and fiction?”
“But, Miss Schwartz, I swear these are facts.”
“You get an ‘F,’ Candy.”
“That’s not fair,” Candy protested.
Miss Schwartz’s upper lip began to twitch, a sure sign that she was going to start yelling soon.
“Don’t talk back to me!” she said, her volume rising. “If you don’t stop indulging in these dim-witted fantasies of yours, and start doing some real work, you’re going to fail this class completely. And I’ll personally see you held back a year for your laziness and your insolence.”
There was a lot of tittering from the back of the class, where the coven of Candy’s enemies, led by Deborah Hackbarth, all sat. Miss Schwartz threw them a silencing look, which worked; but Candy knew they were smiling behind their hands, passing notes back and forth about Candy’s humiliation.
“Why can’t you be normal?” Miss Schwartz said. “Give me work like this from Ruth Ferris.” She leafed through the pages.
Miss Schwartz held up the paper, so that everybody could see what an exemplary piece of work Ruth had done. “You see these graphs?” Miss Schwartz was flicking through the pages of colored graphs Ruth had thoughtfully provided as appendices to her paper. “You know what they’re about? Well, do you, Candy?”
“Let me guess,” said Candy. “Chickens?”
“Yes. Chickens. Ruth wrote about the number one industry in our community: chickens.”
“Maybe that’s because her father is the factory manager,” Candy said, throwing the perfect Miss R. Ferris a sour look. She knew—everybody knew, including Miss Schwartz—that Ruth’s pretty little charts and flow diagrams (“From Egg to Chicken Nugget”) had been copied out of her father’s glossy brochures for Applebaum’s Farms.
“Who cares about chickens?” Candy said.
“Chickens are the lifeblood of this town, Candy Quackenbush. Without chickens, your father wouldn’t have a job.”
“He doesn’t have a job, Miss Schwartz,” said Deborah.
“Oh. Well—”
“He likes his beer too much.”
“All right, that’s enough Deborah,” said Miss Schwartz, sensing that things were getting out of hand. “You see how disruptive you are, Candy?”
“What did I do?” Candy protested.
“We waste far too much time on you in class. Far too much—”
She stopped speaking because her eyes had alighted on Candy’s workbook. She snatched it up off the desk. For some reason Candy had started drawing wavy patterns on the cover of her book a couple of days before, her hand simply making the marks without her mind consciously instructing it to do so.
“What is this?” Miss Schwartz demanded, flipping through the pages of the workbook.
The interior was decorated in the same way as the cover: tightly set lines, hundreds of them, waving up and down all over the page.
“It’s bad enough you bring these morbid stories of yours into school,” Miss Schwartz was saying. “Now you’re defacing school property?”
“It’s just a doodle,” Candy said.
“Good Lord, are you going crazy? There are pages and pages of this rubbish.” Miss Schwartz held the workbook at arm’s length as though it might infect her. “What do you think you’re doing? What are these?”
For some reason, as Miss Schwartz stared down at her, Candy thought of Henry Murkitt, sitting in Room Nineteen on that distant Christmas Eve, waiting for his ship to come in.
Thinking of him, she realized what she’d been drawing so obsessively in her workbook.
“It’s the sea,” she said quietly.
