Chapter 33 #2
She offers to hand the floor to Jude, who lived and breathed the Eleanor Cleary mystery last year, but Jude insists she take it away.
I’m shocked Jude’s given up an opportunity to grandstand, but that’s before I notice him grinning at his phone.
He must be giving Nora the play-by-play, even though it’s the middle of the night in London.
I’m not surprised. Jude’s said before that neither of them sleeps well without the other.
For the next while, everyone listens, rapt, while Sasha talks about the story so far.
“So,” she finishes ten minutes later, “we know Eleanor and James spent a year hiding out in Switzerland while Eleanor’s husband disappeared to several of his mining operations around the Middle East and Africa—fathering several illegitimate children, I should add—then came back stateside after Eleanor gave birth to her baby. ”
“And gave baby Clea up for adoption,” Jude says.
“Clea’s short for Cleary, right?” Glo asks.
The whole table falls silent.
“What?” she asks. “It isn’t?”
“Damn,” says Jude. “Even Nora didn’t pick that one up.”
“See? This is why I invited you,” Sasha says. “I don’t know if it is, but it would make sense, especially since she might suspect she’d have no way of finding her again later.”
I lean over to Ford, who’s closer to me now that he’s made room for Glo. “Beautiful and smart. Out of your league, buddy.”
“You can go ahead and shut the hell up,” Ford says through his teeth as Gloria turns around and they smile at each other.
“Although why would Eleanor want her baby to keep her shithead husband’s name?” Sasha asks.
“Right. Also, why didn’t she just leave him?” Gloria asks.
She and Sasha exchange a look I’m not quite sure how to read. They did a lot of that back at my place, too. I don’t know how she managed it, but it’s like the two of them are sisters already.
“I don’t think it was easy to do back then,” Jude says.
“Yeah. Especially when her husband would have made her life a living hell,” Ford adds. “Her husband would have had all the money and all the power. He could have found a way to take James away from her, leaving her fending for herself and her baby alone. Scorned, no doubt.”
There’s a bitter edge to his voice. Ford was raised by a single mom who died when he was a teenager, leaving him to care for his little sister.
“Even though he was a serial adulterer?” Gloria says to him, looking at Ford as if seeing him for the first time.
“Yeah, he would have changed the narrative,” he says. “Happened all the time back then.”
Gloria shakes her head. It sounds like she’s got experience with something like this, too.
Sasha squeezes my hand under the table, her eyes on her friend. I guess she knows how I feel about assholes.
“So how soon after they got back to the states was Eleanor murdered?” Gloria asks.
We can all hear the emotion in her voice.
The funny thing about this Eleanor Cleary ghost story is that it seems to touch everyone who’s been a part of it in a different way.
“Within a month,” I say, wishing I could go back in time and kick a certain oil baron’s ugly ass.
We’re all silent then. Sasha leans into me, and I curl an arm around her, stroking her arm with my thumb. “It’s all so fucking tragic,” I say.
“Hear, hear,” Ford says, lifting up his beer.
“To Eleanor,” Sasha says.
As we’re getting ready to leave a short while later, Ford tips his head sideways. Good. He’s got news for me, hopefully about the tap on Sasha’s brother. The two of us step a few feet away from the rest of them while everyone says their goodbyes.
“Well?” I ask. “Is it somehow good news?” I know it can’t be that bad or he wouldn’t have waited to tell me.
“What do you think?”
I fix him with a cut the shit look.
“I can’t tell yet. Macklin sent his parents an email, said to be prepared for some more bad news to hit the press.”
“Hardly new.”
“Yeah, but by the sounds of it, he’s never given them that kind of warning before. Could be big.”
I grunt slightly, running through possibilities in my mind.
“There’s something else, though.”
My stomach jumps. “Creelman?”
“No, he’s fucking AWOL. You might be good on that front. Too soon to tell. He hasn’t made an appearance yet.”
That hits me strangely. I should be glad about this news. I am. But I don’t trust he’d give up on her that easily. Sasha’s not exactly easy to forget.
But that’s not what Ford was going to say.
He runs a thumb over his chin. “Now, it might be nothing, but have you heard from Lionel?”
This I wasn’t expecting.
“Yeah. We texted a few days ago.”
“Have you heard from him since, though? Any emails?”
My stomach shifts. “No.” Fuck. I’ve been far from observant these past few weeks. “I’ve been working, but not on anything that I needed to reach out to him about.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
I don’t say anything.
“Still, let’s let each other know if we hear anything.”
On the way home, Sasha slides her arms around my waist on the back of the bike. Between the talk about Eleanor and the gnawing feeling in my gut that something’s brewing, all I want to do is get her straight home and lock up my doors.
But as I’m putting my helmet on, she says, “I don’t want to go home yet.”
My stomach clenches. I consider just telling her no and heading home with her pissed, but I let that shit go. I can’t protect her from assholes by turning into one. “Where do you want to go, Angel?”
Her voice is soft through the speaker. “Take me to where she died.”
My chest squeezes painfully tight.
I kick the starter and turn us around, heading over the bridge to the other side of the Quince River, up the hill to my family’s hotel.
Despite it being in the same town as me, I haven’t been here in a couple of months. I haven’t been able to make the last few board meetings, and other than that, I don’t have occasion to go. But it’s funny how much it feels like home.
Both wings of the resort are now fully up and running after the east wing, where Eleanor was murdered, sat unused for decades. Cassandra and her husband Blake turned our family business around after it fell into serious risk of failing after Mom passed.
The resort, nestled high on the hill overlooking Quince Valley, is a favorite among heavy players from all over the east coast and beyond.
But to me and my siblings, it was always home. I pull around to the private road off to the side that leads to the staff apartments where I grew up—and where Cass, Eli, and Chelsea lived up until a couple of years ago.
I lead Sasha through the trees, where a path strung with fairy lights leads us to a side entrance of the resort reserved for staff.
On the other side of the trees, past the property line, there’s an abandoned shed Eli and I used to play in when we were kids, pretending we were explorers.
It’s the only time I remember playing make believe.
Yet here I am pretending to be married and utterly failing at it.
I use the fob I keep on me and hold the door for Sasha. She’s never been here before, so I lead her around the front lobby, which is the hotel’s crowning glory—aside from the expansive European-style spa and steam rooms downstairs.
“It’s stunning,” Sasha says, her eyes twinkling in the light of the enormous chandelier.
It’s quiet at this time of night, with only a few guests milling around the giant white-marble lobby.
She’s impressed, but not starstruck like most. I remember she grew up around money—at least once her parents married.
“I never wanted for anything when I was a kid,” she confessed to me the other night as we lay in bed. “Except for everything.”
My own childhood was noisy and chaotic, with the seven of us crammed into the apartment next door, but we had no lack of togetherness. No shortage of love and affection and laughter.
Sasha said she knew she was lucky and would never complain about her upbringing, but I could see how that loneliness weighed on her. It wasn’t nearly the same as suffering in poverty, but that didn’t mean it was the best way to grow up.
The night clerk and I exchange a wave as I pass through the doors to the newly renovated east wing. “We won’t be able to see her room,” I say.
“I know. This place is fully booked year-round, isn’t it?”
“Not just that, but the room doesn’t exist anymore.”
Sasha knows from Nora’s documentary and all the notes she’s been reading that the previous owners of the hotel plastered over the room Eleanor was murdered in shortly after her death.
“But we changed the floor plan after the renovation,” I said. “We didn’t want people coming here to stay in her room like her death was the feature of some kind of amusement park.”
We come to a stop where the old room 114 would have been. Now it’s a long expanse of wall. “We put a photo of her inside,” I say, running my hand over the wall.
When Sasha looks at me, she’s got tears in her eyes. “It’s just not fair what was done to her. She finally found happiness, and he stole it from her. It’s like he stole her from her own life.”
My phone buzzes then, but I ignore it, running a thumb under Sasha’s eye.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be sorry, Angel.”
“I just wish Eleanor’d had someone like you in her life, Griffin.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So instead of responding, I lead her outside into the crisp night air. Only once we’re outside under the stars do I tuck her under my arm and say, “She didn’t, Sasha. But you do.”