“No fooling?” Molly Marshall grinned and pushed the cart into Room 609.
Mary followed, and looked around appreciatively. Room 609 matched the lobby. There were ridiculous chairs and a bed with a headboard of matched veneer. Through the bathroom door she could see the steel sink, a cone rising from the floor.
Only one of the twin beds was unmade. Mrs. Marshall began pulling off the disordered sheets.
Mary watched her, rejoicing in the fact that women everywhere could talk to each other. They had a common language in their daily tasks—the cooking of meals, the cleaning of houses, the changing of beds. And of course a lot of women had their pregnancies to talk about, their labor pains, the births of their children. Mary had not given birth herself, but she had heard innumerable stories. It was their shared experiences of housework and pain that bound women together, even professional women and important executives.
“I’m so glad to have caught you,” said Mary, beaming at the chambermaid. Carefully, leaving nothing out, she explained her connection with Sergeant Kennebunk and the case of the missing woman named Pearl Small. “She had this room a week ago, a pretty woman with yellow hair. Do you remember her?”
“Oh, sure, I remember. Usually I don’t see folks, but I saw her because she come in the first day she was here, while I was doing the room. When she see me, she say, Excuse me, and go away again.”
Mary showed her the picture from the newspaper. “Is this the same woman?”
The maid chuckled and shook her head. “Sorry, honey, I just don’t know. I only see her for a second or two. She had this long yellow hair hanging down her back, I remember that.”
Mary asked her childish question: “With all that golden hair, did she look like a princess? You know, a princess in a fairy tale?”
The chambermaid laughed. “Yellow hair don’t make no princess for black folks.”
“No, of course not.” Mary glanced around the room. “How many people have used this room since she was here?”
“Nobody. Empty since she left. This here hotel, don’t tell nobody, it’s half empty most of the time.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Marshall, could you explain what you do in every room, I mean the whole routine you have to go through? Do you have a list?”
“Oh, sure, we got a list. I’ll show you.” Mrs. Marshall turned to the big bureau. “First we puts down a clean doily, and we has to make sure the name of the hotel’s in the front, and then we puts out clean glasses with these here paper covers, and we makes sure the lampshades have the seam in the back, and then we got to check all the hotel cards and refill the booklet with writing paper, and look in the closet because sometimes they takes home the pants hangers, they’s got to be six, and we got to leave the thermostat cooling on low, and make sure the TV’s turned straight, and then there’s the beds.”
“Isn’t this supposed to be a single room? Why does it have two beds?”
“Oh, it’s a single all right. They’s just twin beds. Double rooms, they got two double beds.”
Mary watched Mrs. Marshall pull the sheets off the unmade bed and float a clean one over it. “How do you know the other bed’s not been slept in? I mean, just because it’s made up, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t occupied”
“That’s right. We got to check.” Mrs. Marshall reached over and lifted a corner of the spread on the other bed. “Well, look at that, it ain’t got no tuck. Somebody did sleep in it. See, we got our secret little tuck at the corner, and it ain’t there. I got to change this one too.”
Mary looked reverently at the chambermaid, who was a fount of wisdom. “Do you think they were pretending that only one person spent the night? So she left her bed unmade, and “put the other one back together just so, only she didn’t know about the tuck?”
“Well, I dunno.” Mrs. Marshall giggled. “Maybe she just got tired of sleeping in one bed, so she got up and tried the other one. I dunno.”
Mary watched her gather up the sheets and shove them in the hamper attached to the cart. Then, while the chambermaid’s back was turned, Mary bent down with a sudden gesture and lifted something from the floor. It was a long blond hair.
Chapter 29
Rapunzel had beautiful long hair that shone like gold.
The Brothers Grimm, “Rapunzel”
Back home from Albany, walking into the small house on Fair Haven Bay, Mary said, “No, no, I’m not tired at all, just hungry.” At once she took a folded tissue out of her bag and showed the strand of yellow hair to Homer.
She had coiled it in a ring. Homer looked at it, and said at once, “Dirty blond.”