Chapter Fifty-Two
“Another ship,” I say, throwing a sideways glance toward Penny, whose windswept hair is whipping cheerful circles around her face.
She leans on the railing, looks out over the rolling expanse of steel blue, and says, “I like the view from this one.”
I turn to take in the scene: Lady Liberty, who first sailed in this direction in the name of freedom, now slips from sight behind us as Penny and I glide the other way, gazing out upon the open Atlantic and, beyond that, a freedom unlike anything either one of us has ever known.
“Yes,” I say, agreeing with my friend. “I do, as well.”
On the steamer to Marseilles, we keep to ourselves. Penny transforms my famous dark mane of hair into a chin-length bob of burnished auburn. “Lady Liberty brought her copper this way, and you’re leaving in some new copper,” she quips, as I take in my changed appearance in the stateroom mirror.
We remain mostly in our rooms and on our own private deck, booked in Penny’s name.
If I do have to step out, I wear broad-brimmed hats, netted veils over my face, loose and dowdy clothing that conceals my famed figure.
Anyone who saw me would think I was a wispy old widow, deep in mourning and disinterested in talk.
It’ll be the last costume I have to wear, and it’s only for a few days.
I welcome the rest, especially after the past few months.
Heck, the past few years. Our roomy and luxurious accommodations weren’t a problem to acquire, since we’ve got more than enough money.
Hal, as he always liked to tell me, had enough in his monthly allowance to support an entire family for a decade.
He never even noticed the bills slipping away in recent months.
And besides, he won’t be needing the money anytime soon—he’s just shot to kill in front of a hundred people.
He’s locked up and no one is much concerned with guarding Hal Thorne’s cash for him.
If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else who got to it.
“Saving up was smart, but the true stroke of genius was the gun,” Penny says in a quiet voice.
We are back belowdecks in our private stateroom.
She chuckles, apparently pleased with herself for nabbing the prop firearm, at my request, from backstage in her theater, just before meeting up with me in Central Park.
“But how did you switch his pistol out for the prop?” she asks.
I nod, feeling more at ease with each ocean league we put between ourselves and Hal, but I well remember how nerve-racking those last few days were, planning and preparing for every detail leading up to the ruse.
“Hal was on so much morphine in our last days together—disoriented, forgetful. He’d slip off into spells where he’d sleep like a rock.
That’s when I switched out the guns. I tossed his real one into the lake in Central Park, shortly before I met up with you.
The key was bringing the prop gun into the water with me when I went overboard, so that no one was the wiser. ”
Penny lets out a slow whistle. “You sure did play it well.”
I throw her a wry smirk. “I was a rather famous actress for a time. Before all this.”
“How could I ever forget?”
I sigh. “It’s what got me into all this trouble to begin with.”
Penny gives me a heartfelt nudge. “But then you got yourself out.”
I fall into a moment of reflective silence until Penny says, “Some kind of swell final show you put on, Ev. Prop blood and everything. I don’t think a single person aboard that cruise had a moment’s doubt.”
I meet Penny’s gaze, saying, “I couldn’t have done it without you. Not only the gun, the rescue in the rowboat. Getting Stan there, so Hal could go mad with rage. And for once, in public. So that not only I had to be party to it.”
Penny nods thoughtfully; it was she who arranged the invitation to get Stanny on the same dinner cruise that night, sending a note from a “secret admirer” along with a ticket.
Stan, with his shameless ego and the enticing thought of meeting yet another admiring and pliable young lady, hadn’t hesitated for a beat.
There was only one more matter to settle once I knew that both men would be stuck together on the same boat, with Hal enraged and armed: all three of us had to play our parts.
If I could make Hal jealous enough, he just might make good on the promise he’d been making for years, to kill the man who had “ruined” me.
Before I’d done my best imitation of Salome, I’d put one final note in the mail.
A letter to Mr. Comstock, longtime enemy to Stan, erstwhile ally to Hal.
Outlining in lurid detail what Stanley Pierce had done to me back when I was a sixteen-year-old girl first learning my steps on Broadway.
“Please, Mr. Comstock, my husband is a man so preoccupied with a woman’s virtue that I fear he may take action on his own to avenge my debasement.
I fear that my husband and Mr. Pierce, should they ever meet, may come to blows in a confrontation that could prove harmful to one or both of them. ”
Salome herself could not have fixed it better, I dare say.
Comstock has my written accusation against Stanley Pierce, one that now seems to shine with preternatural prescience from my watery grave.
Let’s call it my last will and testament—at last I’m writing the story.
Comstock will be delighted and inspired to take action against Stan, and I have no doubt he’ll print my entire letter in the papers.
He’ll ensure they both get what they deserve.
Hal is already in the Tombs prison awaiting trial for murder.
Stan will be called in for questioning—at the very least he’ll face a scandal and public outrage; Comstock will see to that.
Stanny and Hal can both answer for their crimes.
My plan works. Comstock and his Society for the Prevention of Vice do go public with charges against Stanley Pierce of indecency and abuse, just as a judge and jury in Midtown Manhattan prepare to try Hal Thorne for murder.
As we steam across the Atlantic, Penny and I read the news bulletins in the privacy of our stateroom.
My murder has caused nothing short of a sensation. It’s “The Crime of the Century!”
A Playboy Millionaire shooting to kill his rival and instead killing his beautiful Broadway bride.
As the ink pours out, what was dark for so long comes to the light. An employee of Mr. Pierce, who works in his tower, is quoted: “We always knew that someone would come for Mr. Pierce eventually. We just figured it would be a father, not a husband.”
Mr. Thomas Edison declares he will produce a nickelodeon moving picture about our sordid love triangle and its murderous end. He vows to speed production, predicting it’ll bump aside The Story of Jesus as the nation’s most popular picture.
My body is still the source of scandal and conversation; there are all sorts of theories on what happened to it.
Other than its sinking into the harbor, some posit that Hal had his men recover my corpse from the water.
Others claim that Stanny’s men had my body whisked away.
Or that I simply disappeared, that I was an angel of death, pulled up to heaven or down to hell.
They are calling me “The Girl Houdini,” my famous figure having vanished off the shores of New York City, never to be found.
It’s gotten so sensational that President Teddy Roosevelt has asked the papers to stop printing on the matter of my murder.
But they can’t stop. Column after column speculates on how it all got so violent.
Asking how I endured for as long as I did.
Rumors, long bubbling under the surface, come gushing up.
Speculation that Hal was a predatory fixture in the Tenderloin District for years before he moved me to Pittsburgh.
So many girls, and even some young men, come forward with horrible accounts—canes, whips, welts. I don’t doubt a single one.
Hal is being tried for the electric chair.
Mother Thorne—I can see it in the headlines—is attempting to walk a tightrope between her son’s act of murder and the question of his madness.
“My son is not mad,” she insists. “He was driven to a temporary madness by his love for that girl, by his virtuous desire to avenge the wrongs done to her by that beastly man. All my son ever endeavored to do was restore honor to his poor, fallen wife.” I wonder how those words tasted coming out of her pinch-lipped mouth.
Mother Thorne, who always lamented to anyone who would listen that I would be her son’s undoing.
I’ll leave all that to the jury. Hal’s madness is no longer my torment, though I very much hope that the memory of me will be his. Perhaps now poor dead Mary Thorne won’t be the only Thorne lady to haunt the family.
And I hope that Stan is in a tomb of his own, as well.
I made sure to hold each of their eyes. To say, clearly, for all to hear, “You did this” to both of them.
They each played their own starring role in the tragedy of my young life.
As much as they hate each other, they were collaborators in their cruelty.
And now I’ve charged them both, those two men who almost destroyed my body and my soul.
Almost. But they did not succeed. Because here I am, staring out at the waters that will bring me to freedom. I’ve survived the harrowing swells that threatened to pull me down, I’ve fought my way back to the surface, and now I’ll choose a different shore.
For now, France. With the pretty little fund we have stashed for ourselves, Penny and I plan to set ourselves up somewhere beautiful and warm.
Some place colorful—the shimmering aqua of the Mediterranean, the gold of the southern sunshine.
I’ve still got that piece of paper from Philadelphia with an address scrawled on it.
I already have a pair of friends who followed their dreams to France.
“Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Provence, France.” I smile, giddy at the thought of how shocked—and delighted—Rachel and Leah will be when we materialize outside their door.
I might just have to don a green snake as I knock.
“Don’t believe that it was all Eve’s fault.
” My guess? Eve just needed out of that garden.
Eve, yes. America’s Eve. That’s me, escaping a garden of delight that turned to hell. Surviving the fall and then learning how to climb back up, no longer interested in looking back as the men wage their wars in my wake.
Turns out a girl can write herself a happy ending and a new beginning, after all. It’s not about luck or the kiss of a prince. And if there is magic involved, well, it comes from within the gal herself.
As I stand at the ship’s railing on the final evening of the crossing, I know the next time the sun rises, France will be visible before me.
I tip my head upward to catch the last few spears of the setting sun.
I breathe deep of the clean, salty air. I listen to the distant caw of a bird that flies free overhead.
And I savor the golden warmth as it shines on my skin, my hair, my face, my entire body. I know how to find my light.