The Night She Won Miss America

by Michael Callahan

  He nodded, almost imperceptibly. He circled around the dark living room, sidling up next to the window and peering down onto the street. “So predictable,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A Hudson is parked right in front of the building. I can make out two guys in the front. She’s got to be in the back.”

  She didn’t know why, but Betty glanced toward the light streaming from the bedroom, thought of Reeve on the floor. A dead man in the rear, a mother on a mission of salvation out front. To her, the choice was obvious. If Honor had come without the authorities—and it appeared she had—she was their best, and only, option.

  “I could go down and speak to her—”

  “Shhhh! Quiet! I can’t hear my own thoughts with all of you talking!”

  With all of you talking.

  What were the voices telling him now?

  Betty reached for her coat. “I’m going to go down and explain—”

  Griff had charged from the living room wall and intercepted her, backed her up against the anteroom wall by the door. “No! No. No.” Each “no” became calmer, flatter, like a punctured tire slowly deflating. He kissed her, hard, his lips hungrily parting hers. His cheek was next to hers, his mouth on her ear, her neck. “I love you. I love you so much, Betty. Everything I have done I have done for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  She encircled his shoulders, for the briefest of seconds considered trying to reach into his coat pocket. “Of course I do, my darling. Of course I do. You’ve done so much for me. Let me do this for you.”

  “I’m not ready,” he said, his eyes moist and full, boring into hers, his voice an exigent moan. “We have to get away. Go somewhere where we can be alone, like we planned. They’ll never understand. They’ll find . . . him . . .”

  Betty pulled him closer. “All right, dearest. I understand. We’ll go. The car is just down the street. We’ll be down the stairs and in it before they even know it’s us.”

  ༶

  The car banks another hard right turn, jolting Betty out of the memory. Where were they now? A big street. Back on Eighth Avenue? No. Farther west. The West Side Elevated Highway.

  “Where are we going?” Betty asks, daring to turn and look out of the rear window. Various cars behind them. She can’t be sure if the Hudson is still one of them. “I think we may have lost them.”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  Griff presses his foot to the floor of the Fleetline, dodges in between two cars in the left lane, then back to the right, then again, crossing and crossing back, trying to evade the accelerating Hudson, which drops out of view, then back, then out, then back. “This silly car,” Griff says. “If we’d kept the Mercury, we’d have ditched them at Twenty-Third.”

  At the very last minute, Griff jerks the wheel all the way to the right, sending the Fleetline skidding across two lanes of traffic, barreling toward the exit at Seventy-Second Street. Betty closes her eyes, waiting for impact—with a wall, with another vehicle, with something—but the only sound is that of a crash behind them, a small explosion of twisting metal and shattered glass as the Hudson’s driver loses control of his car, sending it careening into the right-side barrier of the highway. Betty jerks back just in time to see the Hudson spin completely around, its front now partially blocking the right lane of oncoming traffic, where a speeding Packard tries to veer to its left at the last minute but cannot make it. The two cars collide, the impact spinning the beleaguered Hudson back into the right direction, but wedging it between the barrier on the right and the now-smoking, battered wreckage of the Packard on the left.

  Betty whirls back to Griff. “Griff, please, we have to go back! Your mother may be badly hurt!”

  Griff shifts the clutch, his eyes never leaving the road. He keeps driving, as if they were out on a pleasure tour on any Wednesday night.

  After several minutes, they safely blend in with the traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway. Griff reaches into his jacket pocket, extracts a cigarette. “You know what that road used to be called in the old days, before they built the West Side Elevated?” he finally asks, his lips encircling the cigarette.

  Betty shakes her head.

  He flicks his lighter, leans the cigarette into its jumping flame.

  “Death Avenue,” he says.

  ༶

  “Kansas.”

  Betty startles awake at the sudden sound of his voice. How long has she been asleep? It seems like each one of her limbs weighs a hundred pounds; her brain feels fogged over. So much to process. Too much. It’s just all become too much.

  She shakes her head to clear the cobwebs, checks the landscape outside her window. It’s Thursday, by the look of the light sometime in the relatively early morning. After evading Honor, they’d parked somewhere late last night, immediately fallen asleep. She’s frightfully hungry.

  They’re now on some winding country road, trees on either side, the occasional cottage-type house popping up, mailboxes and newspaper boxes lined up like toy soldiers. Where are they? She has no idea what direction they were headed when they left New York. North, she thinks. She wonders if the police have found Reeve’s body yet, if they are on this very road, looking for them. But she and Griff are in someone else’s car, and even they don’t know where they are going. Or maybe now they do.

  “Kansas?” she finally utters aloud. “That’s where we’re going?”

  “It’s as good a place as any.”

  Betty tenses up again. It was one thing to escape to New York, to catch their collective breath. It is quite another to take off for the Midwest, especially after leaving a dead body in their wake. “Who do you know in Kansas?”

  “Not a soul,” he says nonchalantly, as if he’s reporting tomorrow’s weather on WDEL radio. Perhaps this is all part of his illness, this veneer of nonchalance he takes on and off like a Halloween costume. It’s what bubbles underneath the costume that has her still gripping the door handle as if she’s dangling from a window ledge twenty stories up. “We need to get as far as we can from all of that craziness in New York,” he continues. “I was a fool to take us there. But that’s all behind us now.”

  “But what will we do in Kansas? We know no one. People will be looking for us. We must almost be out of money.”

  He shakes his head softly, like a father losing patience with a child begging for an advance on her allowance. “Nobody is going to look for us in Kansas. That’s the point.”

  Buffalo. Now Kansas. And then what? she wants to scream. We buy a farm? We change our names to Ted and Ida and hoe potatoes?

  No. No no no no no.

  She searches the dewy countryside for answers. She needs a new plan, now.

  She must get them somewhere they can hunker down undiscovered but where she can access help to get them back to reality. To get the gun out of his pocket, the voices out of his head, the cavalry to come in and sort out the mess they’ve made without anyone going to jail or getting hurt. Or anyone else dying. She has gotten them into this mess; it is up to her to get them out. She goes back to the night she won, lying in the bed with him, her head on his chest, begging him: Let’s go somewhere. Someplace where they can’t find us.

  There is nothing for them in the Midwest. They can’t go south—he’ll be panicked at the thought of crossing back through New Jersey. North. What’s north? Upstate New York. Connecticut.

  Rhode Island.

  Betty turns back to him. “Baby,” she says, in almost a purr, “I’m starving.”

  They stop at a diner called the Lucky something, Betty couldn’t make out the sign right away as they pulled into the gravel lot—and take a back booth. It’s a little after eight in the morning, yet there are only a few stragglers in here, most perched at the counter, sipping bad coffee and eating eggs. Betty adjusts her hat, which itches but which she cannot take off. Her hair is a fright. Ciji will be able to fix it.

  Ciji. How did she not think of Ciji sooner? As she flips through the menu, the new plan begins to crys
tallize in her head: they will go to Newport, to the hotel where Ciji works. She will find a place to stash them. Then she will somehow get Ciji alone, confess everything. Perhaps Ciji can get her hands on a sleeping aid, which Betty can crush up and use to drug Griff into peaceful slumber. She’ll steal the gun, have Ciji get rid of it. Then she can call Martha, find out how Honor fared in the accident, arrange for help to come and retrieve them without alerting the authorities. They’ll go back to Atlantic City. Surely the McAllisters will find a lawyer to explain everything? Griff will get to a hospital, away from the police. And Betty will go where she should have stayed all along: home.

  She exhales, mulls the potential comfort of pancakes. It’s a blueprint. Not bad for being composed within half an hour. It’s simple, and it won’t take long to execute. They just have to get to Rhode Island.

  A bolt of doubt slams her in the stomach. What if Ciji isn’t there? She doesn’t even remember the name of the hotel. Don’t I have a card somewhere? What if Ciji has taken her pageant money and already left for Hollywood? God couldn’t be that cruel. Could He?

  She can’t risk it. She has to call first, make sure the plan gets underway before they show up. Her eyes flicker up over her menu on to Griff, who is softly humming. A man who a little over twelve hours ago killed another man in cold blood, who left his mother possibly dead in a car wreck behind him, who is on the run with a girl he’s known less than three weeks in God Knows Where, sitting at a diner, and he’s . . . humming.

  Betty Welch, we jumped into the deep end of the ocean without a life preserver.

  Ciji would have to deliver one. She had to. It was the only chance they had to get out of this madness without any more collateral damage.

  “Poached eggs, bacon, hash browns,” Griff says, “with a few slices of toast, or maybe a corn muffin.”

  Keep it light. Keep it fun. “You’re even more ravenous than I,” she says.

  “What about you? What are you in the mood for?”

  If you only knew. “French toast with lots of butter and maple syrup,” she says nonchalantly. “And no stealing from my plate, either. You’ll have enough food of your own.”

  He smiles, reaches his hand across the table. For a moment it’s just the two of them, back at Captain Starn’s. Then a pang of memory. The next morning she met Eddie. Where was he now? The look on his face, standing in the light of the streetlamp. Confused. Disappointed. Heartbroken. Her intentions had been pure. Truly. If he had just gotten her message in time, they might be on their way back home right now. Reeve might even still be alive. But there is no escaping how callous she has been with Eddie’s fragile, open heart.

  There is no time for any more recriminations.

  The waitress, a bony woman wearing a name tag that says SHIRLEY, fills their coffee cups, jots down their order. “So I’ve been thinking about Kansas,” Betty says.

  “Oh?” Griff replies, splashing sugar into the cup.

  “It’s awfully far, honey. The amount of gas we’d need alone . . . and what if the car breaks down and we’re in the middle of nowhere? I’m worried we’ll run out of money. And I don’t like the thought of going somewhere where we have no one to help us.”

  “You mean like Reeve helped us?” He says this stoically, his eyes still staring into the milky coffee he stirs.

  “You didn’t know Reeve as well as you thought you did.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask,” he says, “but what happened back there?”

  Betty feels a flame of indignation rise up through her chest. “I don’t want to talk about it. And this certainly isn’t the time or place to discuss it.”

  “We’re in the back of a diner in the boondocks. It’s the perfect place to discuss it.” For some unknown reason, he clangs his spoon on the side of his saucer. Betty wonders if one of his voices is telling him to. The voices, the voices. She is both glad she herself cannot hear them and at the same time terrified that she cannot hear what they are saying inside the soupy mess inside his brain. “Attacking a woman like that,” he continues, “that doesn’t seem like the Reeve I know. Knew.”

  She knows she shouldn’t say it, but she has to. “Are you implying I somehow . . . encouraged him to try to rape me?” He eyes her evenly, and she feels her blood starting to boil. But she must suppress. Immediately. She cannot allow her emotions to get the best of her. Especially anger. Anger would be the worst possible element in this equation.

  She is surprised how easily she is able to manufacture tears. Perhaps they come quickly, she thinks, because she has not allowed herself to ponder the horror of what might have happened if Griff had not come into the room. “I’ve never been so afraid of anyone in my life,” she says faintly.

  He reaches back across the table. “I’m sorry, angel. I’m being a knucklehead.”

  Shirley the waitress brings the food—the French toast smells heavenly—and as Griff forks a heaping serving of his bacon and poached eggs, Betty goes on offense. It is a peculiar trait of his, though certainly not his oddest, as she has learned in the most unpleasant manner, that he has a fanatical aversion to uttering a word with his mouth full, under any circumstances. “I think we should go to Rhode Island,” she says.

  He chews thoughtfully, takes a bite of toast, swallows. “Ciji.”

  “Ciji.”

  She pours out a stream of syrup over her breakfast. From across the diner, they might be a couple discussing the best route to a friend’s birthday party. Griff’s eyes search the air above her head, as if the correct answer is floating there, scrawled in an air balloon, like in a newspaper comic strip. He nods. “Maybe.”

  “We know we can trust her. She has been a terrific gal—to both of us. She runs a hotel”—not quite true, but close enough—“and she can stash us somewhere inside it easily, with no fuss and with no one asking who we are. We wouldn’t even have to pay for it. We can take our time, get cleaned up, figure out what to do next, with no pressure. It’s perfect.”

  He scoops up another helping of his eggs, chews them like a Guernsey. It has all come down to this—the fork in the road literally tied to the fork in his hand. If he agrees, there is the chance to avoid disaster. If he doesn’t, she has no idea what to do. He’s the one with the car keys. And the gun.

  “It’s a good idea,” he pronounces finally.

  She revels the doughy sweetness of her French toast. Her appetite returns with a fury, and soon she’s stuffing her mouth like a child. They’ll go to Rhode Island. This ordeal will finally be over.

  It is this thought that’s pleasantly wafting through her head as she sees the policeman walk through the front door, whispering something to Shirley before heading straight toward their table.

  Twenty-three

  Ciji has errands to run but cannot remember a single one of them. She simply ambles about Bellevue Avenue, trying to look like she knows where she’s going, when in truth she has no idea about anything at the moment.

  Mr. Clifford, the manager of Newport Florists, brushes by her carrying a large bouquet of cymbidiums and tulips, odd blooms for this time of year, but florists always seem to know how to get flowers mere mortals cannot. “Oh, hello, Catherine,” he says, in the courtly manner that has made him the preeminent purveyor of flora to every socialite in Newport. His eyes narrow, his brows two bushy haystacks above them. “Are you quite well, dear? You seem like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

  Ciji tosses out her best faux smile, the one that greets hotel guests when she is tired and cranky and doesn’t care a whit about the extra pillows they request, the one that got her to the Top Fifteen at the Miss America Pageant. Mr. Clifford likes it when young ladies flirt. It’s how you get better flowers. “Not at all, sir,” she replies. “Just distracted by this lovely fall weather. And, of course, such a handsome man walking the streets.”

  “Such a charmer. I still cannot believe they did not crown you in Atlantic City.”

  “I tried very hard to get you named a judge
but, alas, was unsuccessful.”

  “Have you heard any more about the girl who won, the one who vanished? I haven’t read much about it lately.”

  Ciji looks casually around the street, as if suddenly searching for an address. “No, not a word. I confess I haven’t been paying very close attention.”

  He seems puzzled. “Didn’t I read in some account that she was your roommate?”

  “Yes, but we were always so scheduled, so busy, there wasn’t much time to form friendships, I’m afraid. The whole thing’s dizzy, if you ask me. I only know I was done for when it was all finally over.” She glances over his shoulder, waves to someone who isn’t there. “I have to run. But I’ll see you Saturday.”

  “Bright and early. A lot of work to do. Goodbye, Catherine dear.”

  She roams the streets, picks up a few items at Downing Brothers pharmacy, makes a quick deposit at Newport National Bank on Washington Square, remembers that she has an order to retrieve at William Covell—housekeeping needs two new mops. The stop she’d really like to make is on Broadway, to Rex Liquor Store. Never mind that it is the middle of the morning. She is in desperate need of a stiff drink.

  It has been only two hours since the front desk phone rang and Ciji casually picked it up, as she did dozens of times a day. “Good morning, Cliff Lawn Manor. This is Catherine. How many I assist you?”

  There’d been a pause, so pronounced that Ciji had almost hung up. “I’m looking for Joan of Arc,” came the barely audible reply.

  You’ll say, “Joan of Arc, I need you,” and I’ll be there. Always.

  “Betty?!” Ciji had whispered, clutching the phone tightly to her ear. Instinctively her eyes had darted around the reception area, as if secret agents might be eavesdropping. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. But I need your help.”

  Ciji was still attempting to get her bearings, grappling with the fact that it was Betty on the other end of the line. “My God! What happened—”