hand—gone. Only the ring on my left hand spoke of the woman I’d been, the man I’d married.
“She took everything,” I said, clutching my bedsheets, imagining her throat in my hands.
Chapter 12
Shrine seemed too strong a word. Dini preferred to think of it as a display. Her Hedda memorabilia—clippings and photographs, even a few personal items found on eBay fan sites. A rhinestone brooch, a monogrammed handkerchief, and most treasured, a fading snapshot of Dini’s own mother, all strawberry blond and freckled, standing beside the elegant old woman. Dini knew exactly the spot where the picture had been taken, and sometimes when a long, empty afternoon stretched ahead, she’d go into the Menger lobby and plant herself for a few hours with a book, imagining what it would be like if she never had to leave.
She kept her treasures in a glass-topped table; adding the items from Quin’s tattered box seemed presumptuous. He hadn’t explicitly said she could keep everything she brought home, so they were laid out carefully on the glass. Besides the Christmas picture, there were articles from the San Antonio Express about the theft, sensationalizing Hedda’s widowhood and calling on the scoundrels to turn themselves in to face justice. Dini had seen these articles before, but to hold the paper in her hand rather than squint at it on a screen was almost intoxicating. Odd how the newspaper accounts never mentioned the role of Sallie White’s ghost. Notably, the only quoted sources were Mr. Sylvan, the property desk manager, and Irvin Carmichael, the detective investigating the case. This had always bothered Dini, the idea of the victim herself being silenced in the story, but she supposed the journalist’s objective was to minimize the sensationalism of the crime. Too much focus on the ghost and nobody would try to look for the thieves. She chalked it up to the integrity of the paper, as most would have relished a good ghost story. Later, of course, when Hedda herself became somewhat of a specter on the property, articles would surface about the woman who came to the Menger Hotel and never, ever left. She even turned up in the occasional Reddit thread about little-known persons of the Alamo City or as a feature on MrsHavisham.com, a blog devoted to the true stories of eccentric women, alongside the Teddy Bear Lady at the Grand Floridian Resort. But those stories were about after, when Hedda became the “lady in residence” at the Menger Hotel.
It wasn’t until Quin’s treasure trove that she saw the ghost and Hedda linked in print in a June 1932 issue of Spicy Detective Stories magazine. The events were highly fictionalized, including a lurid illustration featuring a curvaceous Hedda, obviously nude but for the bed-sheet barely clinging to decency, draped in the arms of a man who was a conglomeration of Bert and Mr. Sylvan—a white barkeep with a trim, dark moustache.
She read the story that Sunday night when she got home from her—visit? Date? Encounter?—with Quin. By the time she’d left, evening was falling, turning the room into shadows and prompting a decision: turn on lights and stay or let darkness fall.
“The Haunting of Helen Kroft,” as Hedda’s story was titled, started on page thirteen of the magazine and continued for five pages with columns interrupted by ads for dental paste and other men’s grooming products. The sight of them called to mind Quin’s shaving kit, the lingering clean man smell of his bathroom. Dini read while eating a supper of banana oatmeal, the bowl stationed a good six inches away from the antique pages. Not exactly a faithful retelling—this story took place in an unidentified city where the “Merchants” Hotel was haunted by the ghost of a murdered debutante—but there were too many details for it to have been authored by anyone other than someone with firsthand knowledge of the events. A Google search of the author’s name, Herb Trellis, proved that “The Haunting of Helen Kroft” was either his only, or most successful, literary enterprise. It was published fifteen years after the event, thirty years before Hedda would pen her autobiography.
She texted Quin the minute she read the last line, just before 10:30 p.m.
D: MAYBE HT WAS ONE OF THE GUESTS? AT THE BAR?
Q: HT?????
D: SPICY DETECTIVE AUTHOR
Q: ARE YOU CALLING MY GGGRANDFATHER A SPICY DETECTIVE?
Dini smiled at the phone screen, picturing exactly what he would look like if he were speaking straight to her. Of course, he hadn’t read the detective magazine.