Krysty answered for them all. “Yeah, Maybelline, it’s really just something.”
“It was in this very room that Elvis recorded his best-selling album in 1976, entitled From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee . Copies of some of his records can still be obtained on vinyl, cassette or cee-dee at the Elvis souvenir stand across the way.” She hesitated. “Though I’m not that certain it’s open today. We don’t get quite as many folks as we used to and” The sentence trailed away like rainwater down a choked gutter.
The countess made her boredom obvious in the first ten minutes, always the first to leave a particular suite or room, eager to get on with the tour.
“Through this window you can glimpse Elvis’s famous pink Cadillac. It is the 1955 Fleetwood Series Sixty that he bought for his beloved mother. Sadly the elements of weather have done some harm to the automobile.”
“Can we visit the grave?” Mildred asked, wanting to get out of the choking atmosphere of the haunted mausoleum.
“I’m afraid not,” Maybelline stated with well-rehearsed mock regret. “There has been a sorrowful increase in interference with the memorials, and we have had to limit access to nil access.”
As they moved through the surprisingly small twenty-three rooms and eight bathrooms, Maybelline continued to flood them with facts and figures about Graceland four hundred and sixty acres, built by Dr. Thomas Moore in 1939, bought, including nearly fourteen acres of surrounding land, for 102,500. Five times that had been spent on improvements in the first six months, the security wall of pink fieldstone costing 62,500 alone.
The Trophy Room included row upon row of Elvis’s golden disks, more than one hundred and sixty of them, though there were gaps in the collection and several of the records were badly tarnished, with peeling labels.
“Sadly some damp has intruded here, and also callous thieves have made off with souvenirs from the collection,” Maybelline complained.
Room after room, tired and sad, barely redolent of the hot house atmosphere of Graceland when its owner was in residence. Somehow the sorry spirit of Elvis haunted it, with the aura of physical and moral decay.
They finally reached the end of the tour.
Mildred had become more and more miserable, whispering her sorrow to J.B. as they trailed along. “It’s pitiful. This isn’t the memorial that Elvis Presley should have. A spider-veiled, mice-nibbled, worm-gnawed tomb that’s rotting in on itself. Someone should do something. He really was the King, John. I feel like I should do something about it.”
Once they were all out in the grounds, Maybelline was all rosy cheeks and bonhomie, trilling away in her little-girl voice. “Apart from the Meditation Garden, which is denied access, you may visit the grounds of Graceland. We hope you have enjoyed your visit here and will come back and see us again real soon. Tell your friends. Thank you very much.”
Ryan muttered his thanks, and the others also nodded and mumbled. But all of them felt downcast at the sorry, run-down spectacle that Graceland had fallen to.
He looked around, suddenly noticing that Mildred was missing. “Anyone seen Mildred?”
J.B. had been standing polishing his spectacles and he started at the question, though Ryan knew him well enough to know that the Armorer was faking surprise.
“Millie?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, she thought she might have left something behind and she just went back to get it.”
“What?” Ryan pressed.
“What? How do you mean, bro?”
“What did she leave behind?”
Maybelline had finally tumbled that something had gone wrong and was hopping agitatedly from foot to foot. “Have we lost a member of our party? Oh, dear me!”
“I don’t know what she thought she might have forgot,” J.B. snapped. “Didn’t tell me. Ask her yourself when she Here she comes.”
Mildred emerged from a side door a little farther up the gardens of Graceland, stopping in her tracks when she saw everyone staring at her.
“Where have you been?” Maybelline asked. “I just hope you haven’t been pilfering. Oh, dear, we get so much of that these days. Now we have no security. From what I hear of the olden days” Again her sentence trailed off into silence.