She Took the Rags, I Took the Empire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Badge Dead

Locked out of her own hotel, Cora faces Quentin and the press in the lobby and shows his text, then gets a voicemail asking her to meet him alone at the boathouse.

I took the commuter train into Boston the next morning and walked into the Ellingham Grand at nine o'clock on an ordinary Monday.

I had run events in that building for four years.

I knew the doormen's kids' names and which marble tile in the lobby rocked.

I tapped my badge on the staff entrance, and the reader beeped red.

I tapped it again.

The security guard on the door was a young man I had once covered a shift for, so he could attend his sister's graduation.

He looked at the floor.

"Ms. Ellingham, I've been told your access is suspended."

"By who?"

"Mr. Thorpe's office. I'm sorry."

"Then I'll go in through the front."

I went around to the revolving door in the same jeans and denim jacket Dinah's mother had lent me.

The lobby was full of cameras.

There was a podium by the fountain with a banner behind it that read A NEW CHAPTER FOR THE ELLINGHAM FAMILY.

Quentin stood at the podium in a charcoal suit with his hair combed back, and three reporters had microphones under his chin.

I walked straight across the marble.

The front desk stopped typing, and two bellhops stopped moving luggage.

"Quentin," I said.

He saw me and went still for half a second, then put on the face he used for donors.

"Cora. We're so glad you're safe."

"I'm in the lobby of a hotel I work in. I've never been unsafe here."

One reporter turned her microphone toward me.

"Ms. Ellingham, is it true the wedding was your sister's idea?"

"I don't know whose idea it was," I said. "I know I was engaged to the groom until last night at eight forty."

"Cora is under a great deal of strain," Quentin said to the cameras, with a gentle, sorrowful smile. "The family is giving her every support."

"I'm not under strain," I said. "I'm standing right here, and I can tell you exactly what happened."

I took my phone out of my jacket pocket.

"Four years ago he proposed on the rooftop terrace of this hotel. Yesterday at four in the afternoon he texted me this."

I held it up so the reporter could read it.

Whatever happens tonight, I'm yours.

"That was about the dinner," Quentin said.

"It was about the wedding you were already planning with my sister," I said. "You sent it knowing."

He opened his mouth and closed it.

A bellhop near the revolving door made a small noise that wasn't quite a laugh.

Quentin's eyes flicked to the camera that was still running and back to me.

He lowered his voice.

"You're embarrassing yourself."

"No," I said. "I'm just not doing it quietly."

I turned to the reporter.

"My name is Cora Ellingham. I ran every event in this building for four years, including the ballroom the wedding will be in. I'm no longer an employee, and I'm no longer a fiancée. If you want the rest, ask who benefits."

I walked back across the lobby.

The head housekeeper was waiting beside the service elevator with a cardboard box in her arms.

She was a woman in her fifties who had once taught me how to get red wine out of a tablecloth with salt.

"Your desk," she said. "I got it before they changed the locks."

I looked into the box and found my stapler, my mug, a picture of the staff at last year's holiday party and a plant that was supposed to be dead.

My eyes stung.

"Half of us would walk out right now if you said the word," she said quietly.

I looked at the elevators, and the line of uniformed people pretending not to listen.

"Don't walk out," I said. "Stay. Keep your eyes open and your mouths shut. If something strange happens in this building, I want to hear about it."

She nodded once.

"Strange how?"

"Anything that has Quentin's name on it," I said. "Or Leopold's."

She took a pen from her apron and wrote a phone number on the box lid in block letters.

"Ring that, not the desk phone," she said. "The desk phones are tapped."

I stared at her.

"Since when?"

"Since before you came," she said. "Elias knows. Ask him."

Out on the sidewalk I carried the box to the bus stop and sat on the bench with it in my lap.

My phone buzzed.

There was a voicemail from a number I knew by heart, and it was Quentin, speaking much more softly than he had in the lobby.

"Cora, please. I didn't choose this. I never wanted this. Meet me at the boathouse on Quarry Lake tonight at nine and I'll tell you everything. Come alone."

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