“There’s no time for that now. I’ll explain later. But I need you to do something for me. Has anyone been in contact with you, looking for me? For us?”
“Us? Griff is with you?”
“Ciji, please! Has anyone been poking around there, asking you questions?”
It had been hard to hear her. There was static on the line, maybe wind. Betty had sounded like she was outside, maybe inside a telephone booth by the side of the road. “No. A local detective came by early on, the first week you were gone, asked me some routine questions. I think the Atlantic City cops had asked him to. And I had a call from some private dick working for Griff’s mother. And of course reporters. But nothing since then. Betty, where have you been? Your parents are worried sick.”
Ciji absorbed the silence from the other end of the line. She thought she heard Betty choke out a sob. “Betty? Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Betty replied weakly. “I’m almost out of change. Listen to me: I need you to do something for me. We’re coming to Newport. We’ll be there tomorrow sometime, probably later in the evening. I don’t want to risk arriving during the day. I need you to find us a place to stay. Just for a day or two. Just until I can figure things out.”
“Figure what out? Betty, do you realize how many people are looking for you? I—”
“Ciji! I’m begging you. You’re my only hope to get out of this mess. You don’t know what’s gone on. You were my friend in Atlantic City, and I need you to be my friend now. I’m sorry for getting you into all of this, going back to asking you to find Griff that night. Truly I am. But I desperately need your help. I don’t know what he’ll do . . .” She trails off. Ciji can make it out more clearly now. Sniffling, the onset of tears.
“Sweetie, of course I’ll help. But shouldn’t we call the police?”
“No. You can’t. You have to promise you won’t tell anyone I’ve contacted you or that we’re on our way there. Promise me.”
“All right, all right. I promise. I promise. But you need to tell me something first: Are you really okay? Has he . . . hurt you?”
Betty cleared her throat, regained her composure. “I’m fine. Really, I am. I just need a place to get to so I can undo all of this in a way where no one gets hurt. Will you help me?”
Ciji had looked up at the ceiling, wondering how much she would come to regret the only answer she could possibly give. She spied a middle-aged couple through the window, walking up toward the front door, the man carrying a large brown suitcase. “I will do whatever I can,” she told Betty. “I’m working tomorrow from nine on. Call me and let me know what time you think you’re going to get here, and I can arrange to meet you somewhere and get you settled.”
Another pause. “I . . . I can’t thank you enough.”
“Joan of Arc,” Ciji replied. “Always here.”
She steps out of the recollection, walks purposefully down the street en route to William Covell and the mops. She has no idea where Betty has been the past two weeks, or what to do now that she’s headed here. Do I really want to get mixed up in all of this?
Do I really have a choice?
The responsibility of hiding Betty and Griff weighs on her with each passing step, like she’s walking in leg irons. What if something goes horribly wrong? What if they’ve been up to no good since they’ve disappeared, and I’m dragged into it? She pictures Miss Slaughter marching into a courtroom in her pearls and heavy leather shoes, loudly telling a judge that Ciji’s scholarship has been revoked, that it’s perfectly fine to lock her up and throw away the key for harboring a fugitive. She’ll be run out of Newport, shunned by Hollywood, her dreams evaporated in a cloud of scandal.
She wonders if she’s doing the right thing by not calling the police. How does she not know that Griff was standing right at Betty’s side, listening to every word, scripting her entreaty as he pressed a knife to her throat?
I need advice, she thinks, smiling and nodding at two women she knows by sight at church as they pass her. But she has promised not to utter a word to anyone.
Unless . . .
She stops dead, pretends to look in the window of Joseph’s Beauty Salon, surveying the women gabbing under the dryers. The place will be a madhouse in two days, when every matron in town comes in to pretty up for the Masquerade Ball.
She has given Betty her word to tell no one of her plans, but she cannot keep it. He won’t betray her, she’s sure of it. She just has to find his business card, fish it out from the bottom of the bag she was carrying that day at the Claridge, now shoved onto the back of a shelf in her bedroom.
Even Joan of Arc didn’t fight alone.
She begins walking again, faster now, each minute suddenly more precious. Joan stood up, did the right thing, she thinks.
And they burned her at the stake for it.
༶
At noon the following day, Ciji walks back into the hotel, exhausted. The meeting at the Hotel Viking with the Preservation Society has dragged on for hours, a round robin of seating charts, décor quibbling, tangents about the latest grand mansion being sold for taxes, gossip about whether Mrs. Peyton van Rensselaer really had snubbed Mrs. Armando Canizares, the wife of the naval attaché of the Mexican embassy, during a particularly feisty round of bridge two days earlier. Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Fitch, the chair of this year’s Masquerade Ball, tried in vain to keep order but found herself swept away with the chattering tide, until she, too, was submerged in the minutiae of the foibles and fallacies of what was left of Newport’s gilded class, covering everything from whether it was too late in the season for pastel tablecloths to whether Barbara Hutton’s diffident RSVP (“I shall make every endeavor to join you”) could somehow be solidified into a firm vote of attendance—preferably with husband number four, Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, in tow.
How the relatively modest—by Newport standards, anyway—Cliff Lawn Manor had managed to get itself selected as the site of this year’s ball remained a mystery. Somehow, the dowagers and their assorted ladies in waiting had deigned that the idea of a sprawling tent over the back lawn, with its soft slope down to the Cliff Walk and the sea below, would provide the perfect tableau for the fete. Ciji had come back from Atlantic City to find herself thrown into the hurly-burly of preparations, along with every other breathing staff member on the property. While hardly in charge, she had managed to amass enough responsibility to wake up each morning with a low hum of anxiety rippling through her. As the reigning Miss Rhode Island, she warranted a kind of respect from her superiors, who were planning to show her off during the ball to the guests, the way one might ask partygoers to pet the family’s new dachshund.
Not that she had the time or the energy to worry about any of that. As she walked through the calling room, past the parlor on the left and the dining room on the right, she bore left to the sitting room, its fireplace already cheerfully ablaze despite the mild temperatures outside. Guests loved seeing the fire crackling every day, even if it made the place feel like a gentlemen’s bathhouse.
Cliff Lawn Manor sat on six prime Newport acres, an ivy-covered, gothic reminder of the legacy of the great summer “cottages” that had helped define Newport as one of the great American playgrounds of the rich. A Wuthering Heights–style estate, it had originally been built for a New York congressman and his wife—an Astor—in 1873 and had hosted guests ranging from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Teddy Roosevelt. It had been sold in the early 1940s, changing hands seemingly every year—a girl’s school one year, a naval officers’ retreat the next—until a fire in 1944 did in the third floor. It had now been reimagined as a thirty-room hotel, where on certain days at the front desk you could find yourself greeted by Miss Catherine Grace Moore, beauty queen and aspiring movie star.
It was a modest hotel by anyone’s standards. But its location on a picturesque, if not particularly steep, cliff, and the curving walkway that ran to its left all the way around to some of the grandest estates in town, ending at Doris Duke’s
kingly Rough Point, imbued it with a rustic élan it would not have otherwise possessed.
Mrs. Hensley, the brisk head of housekeeping, intercepts Ciji as she makes her way toward the kitchen to retrieve a Coke.
“Your young man is on the back porch,” Mrs. Hensley says disapprovingly, because Mrs. Hensley says everything—whether it is “Good morning” or “The oatmeal was particularly hearty this morning”—disapprovingly, and especially so if there is a young man involved. Ciji has often wondered what it must be like to go through life possessing no talent for expression other than the scowl.
“Thank you, Mrs. Hensley.”
The housekeeper issues a soft harrumph and flits away, assuredly to share a confidence with one of the maids about how Ciji has hastily arranged a room for the young man now waiting for her, no doubt to begin some questionable assignation that will disparage the reputation of the hotel and everyone in it. She can cackle like a hen. Ciji doesn’t care.
He’d come.
When she pushes through the screen door to the back porch, littered with scattered fallen leaves in hues of chocolate and orange and yellow and stubbornly hanging-on green—it is virtually impossible to keep up with them this time of year—his back is to her. He wears a tan gabardine jacket and casual light wool trousers, no hat, his blond hair Brylcreemed to a shine. He stands at the far end of the porch, surveying the calm blue water that shimmers in the autumn sun.
He can hear her approaching—she sees him turn his head slightly, catch her out of the corner of his eye—but he doesn’t turn around. As she draws closer, he says, “I had no idea it was so beautiful here. You live by an ocean you think nothing could be sweeter, but this . . .”
She follows his sightline. “Yes. It never grows old.”
Eddie Tate pivots around, and for a few seconds they look at each other, sharing a “How did we get in this fix?” expression, both of them seeming to fight bursting into inappropriate laughter at the absurdity of it all. He steps forward and embraces her, not because he wants to or she wants to, but because it seems like what the situation calls for. “Thank you for coming,” she whispers.
He shrugs. “A free train ticket to Providence, a fancy car picks me up and takes me to Newport,” he says. “Hell, before all of this, I’d never been out of Jersey.”
“Where do they think you are, your bosses at the paper?”
“I don’t imagine they much care. They canned me yesterday.”
Ciji instinctively gasps, quickly scans his face in the hope he’s joking. When she’d called the newspaper office, they had simply said he wasn’t in, given her his home number. “Why?”
“Well, you can’t really disappear for a few days and promise your editors you’re going to deliver the goods on the biggest story going and then come back . . .” He struggles to finish the sentence. “With nothing.”
“You knew where she was?”
“More than that. I met with her. In New York. She and Griff were hiding out in the apartment of a college friend of his. She promised me she’d come home with me as long as I made sure Griff wasn’t hurt. He’s not well, you know.”
“Not well . . . how?”
So he tells her: the truth about Griff’s condition, about his meeting with the now raven-haired Betty at the restaurant, about finding Reeve’s dead body in the apartment after watching Betty get in the car and speed off, Griff’s mother right behind them. Ciji’s hands fly to her face. “I know, I know,” he says. “It gets worse.”
“How much worse?”
“Well, I decided to cash in right then and there. Walk away—from her, from the story, all of it. The girl’s done nothing but twist me up sideways and back around again since the day I laid eyes on her. Which is your fault, by the way. Do you remember, that morning after the photo shoot of all the girls on the Boardwalk? You said to me, ‘Oh, you’ve got to interview my roommate, Miss Delaware. She’s a pistol.’ She sure was.”
“None of us could have guessed what would happen.”
He sighs wearily. “That’s for sure.”
“You said it gets worse?”
He leans back against the railing, folds his arms, as if trying to decide either how much to tell her, how to couch it, or both. “Look, I don’t know what happened in that apartment. But once Griff and Betty took off, Honor and her two goons took off right after them. I had no idea how it turned out until I got back to Atlantic City. Before they fired me, one of the reporters told me that Honor’s car had been in a bad wreck on the West Side Elevated. Evidently Griff must have ditched them off one of the exits and her car crashed into the rail.”
Oh, Betty. What are you doing? “Christopher Columbus,” Ciji exclaims. “Was she badly hurt?”
“Just pretty banged up, from what I could gather. She may have broken a bone in her foot. I think the driver took the worst of it—I heard his hand went through the windshield. Guy in the front passenger seat fractured a rib or two.”
“I haven’t read a word about any of this.”
“It’s a car accident in New York. They happen every day. I don’t think anybody’s pieced it together yet. I’m sure Honor invented a whopper of a story about why she was in New York and why the car crashed. Though how she explained away the detective in the front seat, I don’t know.”
“She’s still protecting him. After everything.”
He shrugs. “She’s his mother.”
“And Reeve’s death? That hasn’t been reported, either? How?”
He stares back out at the water again. He’s silent for longer than he needs to be to answer such a simple question. Finally, he says softly, “Perhaps they don’t know he’s dead yet.”
She feels her blood freeze. “You mean . . . you didn’t call the police? You just . . . left him there?”
He shakes his head, as if willing absolution. “I needed it to be over, don’t you understand? She’s . . . I mean . . . I lost my job over her. I will have killed my career if it ever gets out I sat on this story instead of telling it to the world. She doesn’t love me. She loves him, no matter what he is or what he’s done, how sick he is in the head. And I couldn’t bear it any longer. And I didn’t want to know—” He can’t make the words come.
“If she’d done it.” Ciji rests against the railing, so they are now shoulder to shoulder, facing opposite directions. “You can’t honestly believe she’s capable of murder.”
“I didn’t think she was capable of abdicating Miss America,” he says. “But she did. The fact she got into that car with Griff, when she had a clear path of escape, opens it all up to question. I mean, I was standing less than half a block away from her. She could have run.”
“And let a mentally unbalanced man get behind the wheel, with his mother in pursuit behind him? If anything happened to Griff, Betty wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. She feels responsible for all of this.”
“She shouldn’t. She— It doesn’t matter.”
“I think it matters to you a great deal.”
“I wish it didn’t.”
“I know. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure you’d agree to come.”
He scoffs. “Funny. Me neither.”
“So why did you?”
There is no mistaking the pain in his eyes: deep, raw, exposed. A little boy’s brand of wounding. Ciji is certain she has never loved anyone the way Eddie loves Betty. Looking at him, she is equally certain she never wants to. She possesses neither the bravery nor the optimism to forge such a feeling for a man.
He smiles resignedly. “The heart wants what it wants.”
Twenty-four
Her neck aches. Everything aches. Her arms, her legs, her back, her head. Her dress looks like an unmade bed. She’s now slept in the car for two straight nights, the last curled up like a kitten on the back seat, repeatedly trying and failing to get comfortable against the hard leather. Griff had simply slinked down in the front seat, tilted his fedora over his eyes, and conked out, the voices inside his head blissfully go
ne silent. Or so she’d hoped.
He hadn’t mentioned them of late, and Betty hadn’t asked. She was too fearful of what they were saying. There had been times since she discovered the truth about him that she had looked over and forgotten he was suffering, become delightedly unaware, once again, that there was anything amiss at all. But then she’d see it—a twitch of the eye, a faraway look, a nervous gesture—and she’d remember that deep inside his brain there was a war going on.
Had he sat there with her during that first dinner at Captain Starn’s, listening to these voices as he blithely sipped his martini? Had they been yelling at him as he’d leaned over in the shadows that night on the Boardwalk, taken her into his arms and kissed her as if he were going into battle? She has lost any sense of what is real anymore. If she thinks about what is real, she must think about the consequences of what she’s done, and she cannot afford the recriminations that will come if she does. She has to get Griff to Newport, find a way to get him help, and get it all done before anyone links them to Reeve. It may already be too late. But she must try. She owes it to him to try.
“Look,” Betty says, pointing to a big blue metal sign on the right that says: WELCOME TO RHODE ISLAND, THE OCEAN STATE. “We’re here.”
“A bit of a ways to go before we get to Newport,” Griff replies. He seems almost merry, as if they’re headed to a long-overdue holiday with friends.
She catches glimpses of her own reflection as they wind their way north. She looks tired. Bluish dark circles have formed under her eyes; her hair is a black, untamed haystack. She attempts to smooth it down in spots but quickly gives up the ghost. She’s always liked that metaphor, wonders where it comes from. It’s fitting. I certainly feel like a ghost.
She rests her head back on the seat, succumbing to the rhythmic rumble of the car. Her mind is a jumble of puzzle pieces—images of her mother making lemon cake in their kitchen, waiting for Betty to walk back through the front door; of Miss Slaughter, huffing down the Boardwalk trailed by nervous men in suits, trying to salvage the image of her pageant; of Griff’s gun. She’s lost track of it, thinks he must be constantly switching where he keeps it. She likes to consider that perhaps he has thrown it away but knows that cannot be true. When the image of Reeve, lying in a pool of blood on the bedroom floor, takes its turn on the kaleidoscope that plays through her head, she shuts it down. Some houses on Memory Lane need not be visited.
The Night She Won Miss America Page 22