“I’m Betty.” The woman’s hand nestled gently into Cassie’s like a little creature. “I hate that cancer. Your grandma was a real special lady.”
Cassie felt proud and sad at once, and wondered why she’d been hiding out, which suddenly seemed an obvious thing to wonder about. Why hadn’t she sought the company of a woman like this, who’d counted June as her friend? It seemed so much more humane than the isolation chamber she’d shut herself in for months. She felt as though she was breathing again, painful as it was to notice the empty spot June had left behind.
“Last time I saw your grandma was last summer, just before she was set to visit you in New York. She picked up a couple extra travel guides: for Southeast Asia, Taipei, Shanghai.” Betty watched Cassie carefully as she mentioned those three places, as if Cassie might betray some fabulous secret.
“She did?”
The woman offered an energetic grin. “Well, I’ve got my theories.”
“Please, illuminate me,” Cassie said. “You have no idea how badly I want to hear your theories.”
Betty’s head tick-tocked as she put her thoughts in order. “Your grandma sure could keep a confidence. But I got some Frangelico into her a few years ago and she told me about these frescoes she’d seen a few months back in a Florentine monastery, frescoes by the actual Fra Angelico, she just went on and on describing them to me, and I said, ‘June,’ I said, ‘you were in Italy a few months back?’ and she looked shocked and set down the drink and excused herself right then.”
“You think she’d really been in Italy?” June had never, not once, mentioned Italy to Cassie, especially not in the past few years. Maybe she’d been losing it.
“Well, why not?” Betty said. “She was gone so much, and she always said she was visiting you in New York City…” She leaned forward. “Only she wasn’t always in New York, was she? Seemed like an awful lot of visits to me.”
Cassie felt, suddenly, like crying. She shook her head, which was what she could manage.
“Oh, honey, I didn’t mean to make you blue. I only wanted to say I admired her. She was a role model, living on her own like that in that big old house, traveling places, taking care of you.” She reached for Cassie’s hand, and Cassie tried to focus on the friendly squeeze she offered. “You were her pride and joy, you know that? She was so impressed that you followed your dreams. I think if she’d lived in a different time, maybe she would have pursued art like you.”
This woman was really going to make Cassie lose it.
“Oh, I’ve gone and made you sad. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you for so long, and now I’ve gone and made you sad.”
“You’ve been looking forward to seeing me?”
Betty looked torn, as though she wanted to say something important but didn’t quite know how. “It’s only—my husband, Bob, he was the first responder for your accident.” Cassie couldn’t keep the lump in her throat any longer. She felt a sob choke up through her. She felt tears stream down her cheeks. She was messy and unhinged, and reminded of why she wasn’t allowed to leave the house. “Oh, please don’t cry,” Betty tutted. “I only mentioned it because I wanted you to know how dear you are to us. We think of you as a little bit ours, even though I know that sounds funny. Like you’re a miracle we got to witness.”
“Well, jeez, Betty,” Cassie said, wiping at her face with her sleeve, “this is not what I expected at the library.”
Betty laughed lightly. The old man gathered up his stack of pink copies and tucked them under his bare, liver-spotted arm. He waved good-bye, and the glass door coughed shut behind him.
“And what exactly were you expecting at the library?” Betty asked in her best librarian voice.
Cassie explained about Erie Canal, and June 1955. “Do you remember it?” she asked.
Betty pulled the cord of keys off her neck and pressed the warm brass into Cassie’s palm. “I’m afraid not. I didn’t live here yet—I hadn’t met Bob. But Bob’s father fancied himself something of a photographer! I’ll bet you’d be interested in his shots. Only trouble is they’re in a storage unit up in Lima. I’ll see if I can get Bob to dig them up, and we’ll have you over for tuna casserole. In the meantime”—she shifted her attention from Cassie to the far corner of the library, where a glassed-in room was locked and dark; the door had ARCHIVES painted across it in golden letters—“you should try in there. Lock is a little sticky.”
“Okay if I take your picture first?” Cassie asked. It was.
—
The three hours Cassie spent in the St. Jude archives gave her a great appreciation for Mr. Abernathy’s diligence, curiosity, and detective work. With Betty’s help she got the microfiche up and running. Hunched over the machine, scanning the archives of the St. Jude Caller and the Columbus Dispatch for the months of May, June, and July 1955, Cassie gaped at the St. Jude she found—a veritable boomtown. The photos were crowded with people trooping up Main Street and playing in Montgomery Square on a daily basis (which was called, yes, Center Square back in those days). She even found a picture of Two Oaks, which she spent a solid ten minutes examining; though she couldn’t place her finger on why, the house looked proud, and she wondered if she shouldn’t take Tate up on her offer to pay for repairs.
As for any pictures of Jack and June together, well, that was a pipe dream, but there were plenty of shots of the handsome man himself, surrounded by onlookers and costumed extras. There was always the chance that June was in those crowd shots. But, even with a magnifier, Cassie couldn’t pick out her grandmother from the hundreds of tiny smudged faces. Anyway, it wouldn’t prove anything to find June there—apparently everyone in town had shown up to watch.
The headlines were ecstatic: HOLLYWOOD COMES TO OHIO! JACK MONTGOMERY—WHAT A GENT! and ROMANCE BLOOMS IN ST. JUDE, accompanying a picture of Jack Montgomery and tall, leggy “up-and-comer Diane DeSoto.”
“Betty?” Cassie poked her head out of the archive room and nearly killed the old woman for the second time that day. She certainly hadn’t shouted, and there was no one else in the place, but Betty clambered down from her chair, lifted the gate separating librarians from the rest of the world, and shuffled across the pile carpet in her sensible brown shoes until she was two steps away.
“Yes?” she whispered.
“Do you have Internet?” Cassie made sure to lower her voice.
“Of course!” Betty looked a little insulted.
“I don’t,” Cassie confided, to make Betty feel better.
“Well, the library is the perfect place to binge when you’re on an information diet,” Betty declared. Cassie followed her to the back wall, where they found three PCs banked on a high desk. Betty turned one on, and together they watched it boot up. “They’ve cut our funding, so we keep these off unless they’re being used.” Betty leaned forward and lowered her already whispering voice. “Not to mention that someone was using them for pornography.”
“Who would look at pornography on your watch?”
“A damn fool is who,” Betty pronounced, and Cassie snapped another picture.
Cassie made sure Betty was out of sight before typing “Diane DeSoto Jack Montgomery” into the search engine. Hundreds of hits came up, pictures of the couple at black-tie affairs throughout the fifties and sixties. Cassie scanned the list of links, clicking on the first that caught her eye, a post about Jack Montgomery on a website cataloging the children of movie stars:
Esmerelda “Elda” Domenica Montgomery b. March 9, 1951, mother Conchita Hernandez
Tate Michaels Montgomery b. April 24, 1967, mother Diane DeSoto
Dennis Adelbert Montgomery, stillborn, June 6, 1971, mother Diane DeSoto
Cassie sat back in her seat. A dead baby; that was hard. A dead baby with her father’s name as his middle name. She remembered Nick telling her that Jack’s real name had been Adelbert, and clicked on Jack Montgomery’s Wikipedia page, which had come up in her original search.
Jack had been born Adelbert A
lan Michaels in Little Rock, Arkansas, to a janitor and his wife. Upon setting out for Las Vegas to seek his fortune, he’d ditched his given name for the one his manager dreamed up to match his good looks. Cassie skimmed the description of Montgomery’s hasty marriage—and subsequent divorce—to Elda’s mother, a dark-eyed Vegas showgirl named Conchita. Next came a series of girlfriends, a veritable laundry list of famous movie stars from the forties and fifties, capped with the mention of Diane DeSoto: “Although sources indicate DeSoto and Montgomery became involved before the summer of 1955, their affair reportedly intensified while on the set of the critical and commercial failure Erie Canal, half of which was filmed in the small town of St. Jude, Ohio, in June 1955. On November 18, 1955, Montgomery proposed to DeSoto in his Hollywood Hills home, and their wedding on March 12, 1956, was the event of the spring, attended by such luminaries as Dean Martin and Marlon Brando. Daughter Tate Montgomery was born on April 24, 1967, followed by a stillborn son, Dennis, delivered at Cedars-Sinai on June 6, 1971. After Dennis’s death, Ms. DeSoto reportedly slipped into a depression that spiraled as she turned to drugs and alcohol. She was found dead in her bathtub on January 20, 1977, reportedly by a nine-year-old Tate Montgomery, the daughter she and Jack Montgomery shared. Rumors of suicide have surrounded Ms. DeSoto’s death ever since, but no autopsy was performed.”
Cassie felt terribly sad for Tate. That she had discovered her mother’s body explained so much. Screw Elda for referring to that horrible event, even in the heat of the moment. Cassie could hardly bear to think of the agony little Tate must have endured, finding her mother’s body.
She opened a new tab and typed in “Tate Montgomery assistant Margaret,” more for the element of distraction than anything else, when she felt a particular itch at the back of the neck; someone was behind her. She turned to find Hank standing quietly at her elbow.
“Well, there you are!” Hank said with a smile just shy of bared teeth. “We looked everywhere!”
“I’m sorry,” Cassie said, closing the Internet window, wondering how much Hank had seen. “I should have left a note.”
“No worries.” Hank laid her hand on Cassie’s shoulder. “I’m great at sniffing people out.”
They climbed the cracked concrete stairs up to Main Street, with its empty storefronts and taped windows and tarps flapping in the breeze. Even Weight Watchers had moved out. The video store Cassie had begged her grandmother to take her to on summer vacations was gone too, as were the antiques emporium and the Red Door Tavern, which had been in operation since the 1890s, until it closed in early 2002. Up close, the strip didn’t seem quite as quaint as it had through Nick’s windshield.
But Illy’s was still there. The food was terrible and the service was worse, but at least it still existed, and, if Hank wanted to stay outside, well, that was just fine. But she remained at Cassie’s heels as they stepped into the squat, hot room.
The restaurant was exactly as it had always been: thick paper napkins rolled around the stainless-steel utensils; those big glass shakers of sugar that made you want to let loose a pile of white upon the red-lacquered tabletops; and, hanging over the register, that signed black-and-white photograph of the leading man Cassie had never recognized until now. What had June thought of Jack, up there on the wall, watching them from under his handsome brow? Maybe that picture was why she’d always resisted coming here for the little bit of civilization St. Jude offered; if it had been up to Cassie, they’d have eaten every meal here.
With its fried chicken and mashed potatoes, Illy’s had always been a second home for widowers; Cassie and Hank were the youngest patrons by a good fifty years, and the only women save the waitress.
Cassie didn’t need to look at the menu. When the waitress came, she ordered a cheeseburger with extra special sauce, fries with a side of Russian dressing, and a black-and-white milk shake. The fifty-year-old nodded her approval as she scribbled on her pad.
Hank greeted the waitress and tried to remind her that she’d been in a few days before and wasn’t it funny about the egg-white omelets? Needless to say, the waitress did not think it was funny, not at all. The whole thing was so awkward that Cassie actually liked Hank for a second, but then Hank wrinkled her nose and shrugged her shoulders and turned on her baby voice, asking for a spinach and cucumber salad with lemon juice on the side.
The waitress stared at her longer than was necessary, then deadpanned, “Sure, honey.” An old man dropped his spoon on the floor, which she apparently took as her cue to head back toward the kitchen, patting her spit-curled hairdo as she went.
Across the booth, Hank’s hands were neatly folded on the Formica. Her blond hair was parted just so.
“Your first fried salad!” Cassie said.
Hank looked like she’d been electrocuted. “It’ll be fried?”
Cassie waved off Hank’s concern. “It’s a phrase my dad came up with for any salad you order around here. Iceberg lettuce with cheddar, bacon, and croutons on top, slathered in a cup of ranch dressing.”
“Disgusting.”
Cassie tore a roll in half. “I love ranch dressing.” She unwrapped a pat of butter from its gold foil and spread it on the roll, relishing Hank’s look of alarm. Then she shoved it into her mouth. She reached for the other half of the roll, spread another pat of butter on it, and held it out to Hank.
Hank shook her head.
“I get it. Kale good. Gluten bad. But don’t you ever just want comfort food?”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, stop it with the Hollywood diet.”
“I’m allergic.”
“No you are not.”
Hank’s mouth formed a thin line. “I have celiac disease.”
Cassie shrugged and gobbled up the rest of the roll herself, even though she didn’t want it. She was buoyed by the memory of Tate bad-mouthing Hank the previous night. “I knew plenty of emaciated women in New York who said they had celiac when what they really had was a case of the an-o-rexia.”
Hank opened her mouth, then closed it.
“What?”
“Can I have my list back?”
“What list?” Cassie knew perfectly well what list. She wondered why she was being so mean. June, she knew, would be horrified.
“Why won’t you just let me help you?” Hank said, eyes burning feverishly as she pounded her fists on the table. “I know exactly who to call and exactly what to ask for and you don’t know any of it. You will screw it up.”
“Chillax, sister,” Cassie said, wondering, herself, where that loathsome word had come from, and why she’d chosen to sound so smug.
Hank’s eyes brimmed with tears.
The bread suddenly felt terribly dry in Cassie’s throat. “You can have the list,” she said. “It’s still in my pajamas, though, so you’ll have to wait until we get home.”
Hank crumpled back into the booth. Tears were now streaming down her cheeks.
“I shouldn’t have taken it, okay?” Cassie mumbled, reaching her hand across the table. “I’m sorry.”
Hank grabbed a stack of napkins from the dispenser and dabbed at her eyes. “It’s not about the list,” she offered up unhelpfully, inside a choked sob.
The waitress approached with the dewy metal milk shake container in one hand, and two glasses in the other. She set them in front of Cassie, glanced at Hank, who had covered her face with napkins, and shuffled away.
“Please don’t cry,” Cassie said, trying to sound soothing. She poured two half glasses of the black-and-white, and pushed one of them toward Hank. A few of the old men were looking her way, and they did not appear pleased. Cassie glanced back at Hank and tried to figure out what was going on. “Why are you crying?”
But Hank wouldn’t answer.
“Do you ever get a vacation? Tate”—Cassie caught herself, adopting the paranoia of her houseguests and changing to a neutral pronoun—“she has you doing everything. You’ve got a lot of weight on your shoulders.” She paused, then added, “I o
nly took the list because I wanted to help you out,” which wasn’t exactly the truth, but Cassie figured it wouldn’t hurt to try to spin it.
Hank emerged from her napkin shield to blow her nose. The sound was gratifyingly disgusting. “Everybody works hard.”
“I don’t.”
Hank didn’t disagree. Instead, she surprised Cassie by saying, “You are so lucky.”
“Lucky?” Cassie almost started laughing.
Hank rolled her eyes. “You have any idea what it took to get where I am? I work my butt off every day—”
“No one’s disputing that.”
“—because without my job, I have nothing. Without her, I’m nothing.”
“I mean, you’re really pretty,” Cassie said, trying to figure out the right thing to say. “And you cook well, and you can teach yoga and—”
“No offense, Cassie, but without her, you’ve still got that big fancy house.” Were they talking about Cassie? Cassie was confused. “Plus, worst-case scenario, you’ve got a million bucks for doing nothing. I’d kill to be in your shoes.”
Cassie felt her jaw drop. “You think I want this? My life is miserable. I’m an orphan living in a house that’s about to fall down around me.”
“Oh lord,” Hank groaned, “the orphan thing.”
“Wow,” Cassie said.
Hank blinked at her, and then, as though she’d pressed her own reset button, seemed to alter entirely. Cassie watched as she took a deep breath, bringing her shoulders up to her ears, then releasing them. She rocked her head side to side and closed her eyes. Then Hank shook her head and perked her whole face up and said, “I’m sorry. That comment was uncalled for.”
“Yeah,” Cassie replied, not exactly sure what had just gone down. Was Hank mad at her? Was she a little crazy—crazier than Cassie’d thought?
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