The Lady in Residence

by Allison Pittman

  Instead of the usual blue conversation bubble, she found an image of a handwritten message. Tapping the picture to fill her phone’s screen, she needed less than a second to know what she was seeing. The color of an unripe peach, cadet-blue lines. It was a picture of a blank page from Carmichael’s notebook, and on it, in Quin’s neat, utilitarian handwriting, a simple message:

  Come to supper.

  Car should be there at 7:30

  Next came a selfie, the rich, dark tones of the bar surrounding him, Teddy Roosevelt peeking over his shoulder. Her hand trembled, the tiny keyboard blurring in her hand. How was this possible? How could he have concocted this kind of surprise? How was she supposed to feel? She texted only:

  D: How?

  But his response was nothing but a repeat of the summons. All of their talks, their texts, their messages and memes were peppered with Hedda and the detective, so she texted: ARE YOU BACK FROM TENNESSEE? before jumping into the action of getting ready.

  It was after seven already. Her mind buzzed with unanswered questions, but the fatigue that seemed ready to turn her bones to powder repurposed itself as nervous invigoration. She turned off the oven and put the pizza away. Her hair was still damp when she took the towel off, so she used a few precious minutes to scrunch her curls under the diffuser until it was mostly dry, using her free hand to put on enough of a face to camouflage a fourteen-hour day in recycled air. Alexa added to the excitement by playing “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and Dini sang every word.

  Her favorite jeans, washed to butter-like softness, hadn’t made it into her suitcase, so they waited in her closet to be paired with a cute top and wedge sandals.

  “What do you think, Hedda?” She spoke to the image hanging in the midst of her starry sky—the photograph of Hedda, messy and content, which Dini had enlarged and printed on canvas. “I’m going for cute and casual. Did I get it?” A quick twist in front of the mirror affirmed that she had, and as a last addition, she grabbed the witch’s heart ring from its box and pushed it onto her first finger. “Because, you know…he came back.”

  The first person she saw when she walked through the door was Gil, who clutched her fingers and held on to her hand a bit longer than necessary after their high five.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Haven’t seen that color on your hair in a long time.”

  “It’s the real deal,” she replied, tugging at the curls. “Is he here?”

  She followed Gil’s eyes, spotting Quin at the foot of the steps leading up to the second level. The minute she did, she regretted her choice to wear the tall wedges, because her shins disappeared, and she couldn’t manage a single step. But then, she didn’t have to, because within two heartbeats, Quin crossed the room and took her in his arms, lifting her off the ground in an embrace that brought an appreciative awwww from the crowd scattered among the tables.

  Dini buried her face in his neck and breathed in the scent she’d been guarding in her memories for the past seven months. Nothing before ever felt as perfect as this moment, her body suspended, his voice in her ear saying her name. When her feet were once again on the floor, he took her face in his hands and kissed her—properly and appropriately for their public display.

  “I have a table upstairs,” he said, taking her hand and leading her. She grabbed a glass of water from Gil on the way up and resented the creak of every step, because it seemed to delay the moment when they could greet each other again in the privacy of a dark corner.

  “How are you here?” she asked, once her breath and lips were free for conversation.

  “I had to see you, and I didn’t want to see you anywhere but here.”

  “Don’t you have school?” It was a Thursday night.

  “I took a couple of days off. I figure I worked during my spring break last year. Tell me about your travels.”

  “You know about my travels.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Are you stalling, Quin? Is there important stuff to talk about after the food gets here?”

  The minute she said it, Gil appeared with two plates of chopped steak, peppers and potatoes. He set them down, saying, “It’s off menu. You got to have connections in the kitchen.”

  Dini’s stomach, empty save for the Kind bar she had on the last flight, growled as if on cue, and she dove in the minute Gil left, wishing, “Bon appétit.”

  “What a guy,” Quin said, attacking with equal gusto. “You know, they should put this on the menu. Call it the Hedda Carmichael plate.”

  “Or the Tennessee dinner,” Dini countered.

  They ate and they talked, falling into an easy rhythm of family stories (from Quin) and theme park shenanigans (from Dini). They had the entire second level to themselves, which limited the number of times the staff would make the journey to check on their needs. Finally, their dishes cleared and drinks refreshed, Quin handed their waitress a twenty-dollar bill and promised he would holler down if they needed anything else.

  “It’s like the night we met,” Dini said, taking in their solitude. “But I’ve been lugging bags around all day, so I don’t have any cards to do a trick.”

  “I don’t want you to do a trick,” he said, his voice suddenly taking a turn that transformed their table into an island that stranded them in the midst of all that kept them apart. All of the distance, all of the days—whoosh, like a coin up a sleeve.

  “Why are you here?” It was the first question she’d ever asked him, and now it came with a tiny tug of fear. There had been no mutual agreement to fall into a relationship. But the intimacies they had shared—not physical, of course, but the dreams and memories and silly moments—would call for a mutual ending. She hadn’t given the possibility even a thought until now. What she knew of Quin, what she loved about Quin, pointed to a guy who would not break up via text. “Why did you come all this way?”

  “So—” He took a sip of his drink and adjusted his glasses, his one nervous tell. “I found all of that stuff cleaning out my great-great-grandfather’s house, remember?”

  “Do I remember the ‘stuff’ that led me to find my ancestry linked to the actress who gaslighted Hedda Krause into thinking she was robbed by the ghost of Sallie White? Vaguely.”

  Quin took a deep breath before continuing. “Anyway, I gave a bunch of clothes to my school’s drama department for costumes and such. Stuff from all decades and in really great shape.”

  “I would have loved to have gotten my hands on some of that,” Dini said, imagining the accessories.

  “Right. Well, the department is putting on a production of Our Town, and a couple of weeks ago the drama teacher comes to my room and says she feels guilty keeping some of the items.” He took out his phone and opened it to his photo gallery. “Look,” he said, bringing her to sit beside him.

  She did, wondering about the grim set to his features.

  Quin held the phone between them. She saw a small leather case, and when he scrolled to the next picture, saw that it held a detective’s badge. He scrolled and narrated: “His cuff links, an FDR campaign pin, a pocket watch, a wrist watch, an ornate fountain pen. And then, this.”

  Quin scrolled one more time, and Dini gasped, tears pooling instantly as her throat burned beyond speech. It was sitting on a folded white square—a handkerchief with the initials IC monogrammed in the corner. The stone was a deep, rich purple, set in gold, with three gold beads clustered at the top. The amethyst earring. “He kept it,” she said at last.

  “He did.”

  “I always pictured them as teardrop,” she said, speaking more to the image. Then she looked over to see Quin studying her in a way he never had before, like he was holding her up the way he did when he first greeted her downstairs, and to look away would be to drop her and lose her forever. “You came all this way to show me?”

  “I wanted to see the look on your face.”

  She smiled, the tears now free and harmless. “Was it worth it?”

  As an answer, he kissed her. “Le
t’s go.” Dropping his phone in his jacket pocket, he stood then descended the steps, remembering her preference for who led who down narrow stairways. He called out his room number to Gil to charge the food and drinks, then took her hand as they walked, not stopping until they were in front of the black marble fireplace, surrounded by the glass-enclosed antiquities of the Menger Hotel. Quin gestured for Dini to sit on one of the leath-eresque sofas, but he did not follow suit. It was like they were moving through some sort of fog, like they were the ghosts projected in this room, because the air had gone out of it the moment Quin’s knee hit the floor.

  They’d had countless conversations about the fate of the earring Sallie White returned. It was never accounted for in any of the writings about Hedda after her death, so they took her at her word that it was somehow buried beneath this foundation. Even if she had been rehomed during the times of major renovation, she may have strolled over and tossed this bit of stone among excavated rubble. Or into the concrete. Or behind the marble slabs of this fireplace. They concocted scenarios where she’d embedded it in the bar, with Bert’s help, or beneath the surface of the pool.

  “Do you remember,” Quin said, an almost imperceptible quiver in his voice, “what answer she gave when people asked why she stayed?”

  She looked up and away; somehow the words on the page came clear in Dini’s mind. “I am simply waiting for that which I have lost to be found and to make its way home where its partner is buried beneath a new foundation.” When she looked at him again, he was holding a small box, and a gasp came from a group of ladies rounding the corner from the Victorian lobby.

  “I don’t want to be haunted by you anymore, Dini Blackstone. I don’t want to keep you in my memories, I want to keep you. With me. When I hear your voice, I want it to be because you are next to me.”

  “Quin—” The room, her world, her past disappeared behind this moment. Her pulse raced in her ears, and it was just as Hedda described the moment she was face-to-face with the specter of Sallie White. Fear, lodged in her throat, pressing her into place.

  “I took some liberties,” Quin was saying, “because I knew nothing else could be as perfect.” Then he opened the box, revealing what she knew would be inside. The amethyst earring—no, now the amethyst ring, released from its case and held out to her.

  The band was thick, perfectly proportioned to the stone. She held it in her right hand, seeing it and the witch’s heart together. This ring was not intended to be worn on her first finger, she knew that. It was not a distraction or meant for any kind of conjuring. Its past was buried, gone forever, and here it lived a new life. A new design. A new purpose. She slid the ring onto its intended finger, and everything fell into place. No illusion, nothing magic, but a moment so inevitable it must be true.

  “I love you, Dini.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you, Quin. But I don’t want you to think you’re somehow…I don’t know…bound by some kind of past honor. Would you love me if you weren’t—you know—who you are?”

  “I wouldn’t have met you if I wasn’t who I am. Think about it: God set our paths toward each other a hundred years ago.” He took her hands, kissed her pulse, and stood, bringing her to her feet.

  “I don’t know how to share my life,” she said. “I don’t know how to be with another person.”

  “We’ve been sharing our lives from the moment you spelled my name with the cards.”

  Entwined before they met. “It’s like the setup for an illusion,” she said. “All of the planning and rehearsing means nothing if the timing isn’t perfect. If the angle isn’t just right. It seems so effortless, meeting you and just …” She wished she had a flash paper. What a moment to expel a harmless bit of flame.

  Instead, Dini snapped her hand, the way she would if she’d drawn a coin from Quin’s ear, and let the amethyst catch the lobby light.

  “Will you marry me, Dini?” His question was simple, leaving no room for her own. Like where would they live? Or how would she work? Or whether or not his niece was limber enough to fold herself into a box. All of that would be worked out later. If Hedda and Carmichael taught no other lesson, it was that some questions need answers in the moment, while others could be solved over the course of a lifetime.

  She kissed him before saying, simply, “Yes.”

  Those who witnessed the moment—and there were many—did so through the lenses of their cameras, capturing each kiss, each gaze. Quin on his knee, Dini and the ring. They exploded in familial joy and approval, posting to their Instagram and Twitter accounts (@Dini-Blackstone, #Proposal #MengerHotel).

  Later, much later, that night as she texted a final good night to Quin, she lay beneath her sky of twinkle lights and scrolled through her phone, tapping red hearts and replying, “Thank You!” to a world of well-wishing strangers. She zoomed in on the pictures, looking for the tiniest blur, the most minuscule orb—anything that might have hinted at other unseen well-wishers. But the spirits of Sallie White and Hedda Krause haunted only her heart. She looked at the ring, the stone fathoms deep in the darkness, forged in a broken past. It hadn’t come back to the Menger. It came home to her hand—a hand that would hold another and spin its own worthy tale.

  Author Note

  A confession: I love a good ghost story. Do I believe in ghosts? No, at least not in the restless spirit of the dead variety. Ghosts are memories. Stories. When I hear stories about a “haunted” house, I don’t care about the current bumps in the night; I want to know the story of the person behind those bumps and why the story has lived long after the soul.

  The story of Sallie White is true, and the details of it as depicted in The Lady in Residence fall in line with the newspaper accounts of the time. If you take the Sisters Grimm Haunted History Walk in San Antonio (which I highly encourage!), you will stand on the sidewalk where she was murdered by her common-law husband. That’s where I first heard her story, and while it might have disappeared into the thousands of other historical tidbits I carry in my brain, instead it haunted me for two reasons. First, the murder of a chambermaid impacted the owners of the Menger Hotel—easily one of the most prestigious hotels in Texas at the time—enough that they paid for Sallie White’s funeral and burial. The entry in their financial ledger is proof of their compassion. Rarely would that kind of attention be given to such an employee. Second, the most often reported haunting of Sallie White is a brisk two-knocks sounding in the middle of the night. Nothing terribly frightening or ghoulish. Something that associated her with the simplicity and mundaneness of her life. (Also, something super easily explainable if you’ve ever spent a night in a hotel.)

  Still, I didn’t want to write Sallie’s story, because there’s no happy ending there. But I wanted a story of a haunting. There’s a Russian nesting doll structure to The Lady in Residence. Sallie haunts Hedda. Hedda haunts Dini. I tried to bridge the idea of haunting and obsession: obsession can lead to a certain self-destruction, but a haunting? Think about all those times when you speak out loud to a lost loved one, or the times when a memory is so bittersweet you can’t really tell if you’re crying from joy or loss. Think about the biographies of men and women who inspire you to work for change—either in yourself or in the world. Think about the lessons you learn from knowing the mistakes others have made. All of that is haunting. I tried to bring all of that into the stories of Hedda and Dini. I wanted them to break free of a past that haunted them. I wanted them to look to the stories of the women who preceded and learn. What is the opposite of a woman murdered at the hands of the man she trusted? A woman who could forge a life without needing to trust a man. But then, what is the opposite of choosing to walk away from a lifelong love? Choosing to run right into it.

  I can’t tell you enough how beautiful the Menger Hotel is, but there is a heaviness to it too. I would love for everyone who ever reads this book to make a pilgrimage to San Antonio for a stay, but don’t let its reputation for being o
ne of the most haunted hotels in America be the reason for your visit. The place is just historically exquisite. It has been expanded and renovated through the years, but you can still book a room that (with the welcome additions of air-conditioning and Wi-Fi) is exactly how it was at the time of construction in 1859. Creaking floors, tiny rooms, antique furniture. I booked one of these rooms last summer, needing to really make sure the halls would accommodate my Pepper’s Ghost plot point, as well as Hedda’s world. The COVID-19 shutdown delayed my research trip, as the hotel was completely closed, but I was there the first week it reopened. I, along with maybe twelve other guests. I stayed the first night with my husband but opted to stay alone a second night so I could really get some work done. The place was massive and empty. There was literally one employee working as a makeshift bartender, food server, and room-service runner. I roamed the halls—every hall, at all hours—without encountering another human being. My air-conditioning unit had a sharp little knock sound at the end of each cycle, which brought me out of a dead sleep the first night and kept me wakeful from that point on. The second evening, I heard conversations outside my window and looked down to see the ghost tour crowd. That’s when I realized my room was directly above the spot where Sallie White was murdered. I was all alone that night, so—yeah, I prayed and read until the wee hours and slept with a light on.

  Both Hedda and Dini, of course, are women crafted purely from my imagination. And I promise I included a line about Hedda knitting during World War II long before my research uncovered hotel guests claiming to see a woman in a blue 1940s-style dress sitting in the lobby, knitting. If you find Hedda a bit unreliable as a narrator, that’s fine. So do I. Lots of authors will tell you that their characters speak to them, but that’s not usually the case for me. I tend to keep my characters on a pretty tight leash. I know what the story is and how it’s supposed to happen. I tell them what to say and they (with a few exceptions) say it. Dini, in fact, sounds a lot like me. She tells some of my jokes. But not so Hedda. Of all my heroines, she is the first to come with her own voice. I heard her almost audibly as I typed. Even as I wrote her, I questioned—is this true? Did this really happen? Are you lying to me, Hedda? But then I wrote it anyway.