The Falls Read online

  It was a sign of the red-haired woman’s state of shock that, seeing her husband’s car in the lot after all, she was only mildly surprised, and not at all relieved. In fact the concierge noted how she stood frozen in place, simply staring at the car and not coming near it. As if the gleaming black Packard were another riddle for her to contend with that day, and she wasn’t capable.

  The concierge checked the Packard’s doors and trunk—all locked. He peered into the shadowy interior which was cushioned in pale gray, spotlessly clean. Not a single item of clothing or a scrap of paper in the backseat. The concierge didn’t know if the presence of this car, which Mrs. Erskine seemed to have taken for granted would be missing, was a good sign, or not so good. The clergyman might have come to harm somehow, somewhere. Met with “foul play”—there were elements in the city of Niagara Falls known to be dangerous.

  The concierge said heartily, “Well! You see, Mrs. Erskine, he can’t have gone far on foot. Probably when we return to the hotel he’ll be there, waiting.”

  It had become so balmy a June day, after the mist and chill of the morning, such an optimistic pronouncement seemed appropriate. But Mrs. Erskine shuddered. “Back in the room? In the ‘Rosebud Suite’? No.”

  She was frowning, turning her rings rapidly as if she wanted to twist them off her finger.

  The concierge tried to comfort her, taking her arm to lead her back to the hotel, but the red-haired woman began speaking quickly. “Please, you don’t need to humor me! You’ve been very kind. I hoped not to involve anyone in this, especially strangers, but I don’t seem to know what to do next. Where to look. Where to wait.” She paused, her lips trembling. She was trying to choose her words with care. “Especially if Gilbert is gone, and won’t be back. I can’t face his parents. Or my parents. They will blame me. And I am to blame, I know. But I must be practical, too. My days of dreaming are past. I will be thirty years old in November. I do have money saved, in a bank account in Troy,” she went on earnestly. “I can pay for the hotel suite. If the management is concerned about payment, please don’t be. I will pay.” Mrs. Erskine had begun to cry softly. Or perhaps she was laughing. Her pale lips twitched.

  The concierge, a fourteen-year veteran of the Rainbow Grand, was stricken with pity for this woman, wanting to console her but at a loss for words. What do you say to a bride whose husband has abandoned her on their honeymoon? Mrs. Erskine’s eerie fatalism was beginning to affect him, like a slow-acting poison.

  Gamely he said, gently taking her arm, “Mrs. Erskine, ma’am, we’ll find your husband for you, I promise. Don’t fret.”

  “ ‘Don’t fret’!” Her laughter was like glass breaking. “This is my honeymoon.”

  2

  Where the hell was his boss Clyde Colborne? The concierge was anxious, exhausted. Like a hotel employee who’s been carrying an extra chair around, nowhere to put it. You carry the damned thing from room to room, and it’s heavy. Somebody else take this chair!

  “We’ll try once more downstairs. Then, your room. Are you feeling strong enough, Mrs. Erskine?”

  The red-haired woman inclined her head, lowering her eyes. As if to indicate Yes, yes! What choice do I have.

  Another time, the concierge checked at the front desk to see if there was a message for Mrs. Erskine in room 419—“Sorry, sir. Nothing.” Patiently then, like a man guiding an erratic and unpredictable child, the concierge escorted Mrs. Erskine through the main lobby, which was more crowded and bustling than before, the air heavy with tobacco smoke; and through the busy café (where a pianist was now playing sparkly Broadway show tunes); and into the Rainbow Terrace where well-dressed diners, milling about an extraordinary lavish buffet spread against an entire mirrored wall like a feast of the gods, glanced at Mrs. Erskine’s pale stricken face, with curiosity. In a lowered voice the concierge asked unnecessarily, “You don’t see him anywhere, Mrs. Erskine, I guess?”

  The woman’s head shake was almost imperceptible.

  No. Of course I don’t see him. Here? How could I see him, if he has gone?

  By this time most of the hotel staff had been alerted to Mrs. Erskine’s predicament. Bellboys had been directed to search the gentlemen’s lounges, private meeting rooms opening off the mezzanine, fire stairs and storage rooms and remote corners of the building. The hotel physician Dr. McCrady had been summoned in case Mrs. Erskine became hysterical or ill. Calls had been placed to Niagara Falls police and riverfront authorities including the Coast Guard rescue unit. The concierge was taken aside by a colleague and informed that an “unidentified man” had in fact thrown himself into the Horseshoe Falls early that morning; a gatekeeper at the Goat Island Bridge had tried to stop him. Search crews were out downriver, but the body hadn’t yet been found and the mayor’s office, in alliance with the powerful Niagara Tourism Commission, hoped to “keep a lid on it” for as long as possible.

  The concierge shuddered. Oh, he’d known! Something terrible.

  I believe I am—damned.

  Yes, the description of the suicide made it sound as if it might well be Reverend Erskine.

  The concierge saw the red-haired woman standing awkwardly near the registration desk, paying little attention to the the hotel physician’s repeated suggestions that she sit down in one of the plush chairs nearby. In her vague placid way she was watching as a young, attractive honeymoon couple, arms around each other’s waist, bantered and giggled with the desk clerk as they signed the register. She’d discovered that her French twist was coming undone and was trying to fix it, with clumsy fingers. She adjusted the limp bow of her crimson sash. Of all the women and men in the lobby of the Rainbow Grand, which had come to seem a nightmare simulacrum of the vast peopled world beyond the hotel, this woman, Mrs. Ariah Erskine, seemed the one singled out as extraneous; the one who was extra, unwanted; the one with no place to be.

  “We’d better tell her, eh? Take her to the police station.”

  “But if they don’t have the body yet, she can’t identify it. And maybe it isn’t the reverend. Jesus, it would be cruel to upset the poor woman any more than she’s upset now, if—if the dead man isn’t her husband.”

  “But if he is?”

  “Dale, where the hell is Mr. Colborne?”

  “On his way. He says.”

  Clyde Colborne, proprietor of the Rainbow Grand, was an affable, earnest, but not always reliable employer who delegated most of his authority to his staff. He’d inherited the distinguished old Prospect Street hotel, which had been founded by his grandfather in 1881, in an affluent, ebullient era of Niagara Falls tourist expansion; the hotel was still prestigious, but, like the other old, Victorian-style hotels near The Falls, built at a time when patrons traveled by train, not by car, and demanded luxury services including accommodations for their servants, the Rainbow Grand was beginning to feel competition from motels and “tourist cabins” springing up like toadstools just outside the city limits of Niagara Falls. If Mr. Colborne was much aware of this threat, he rarely spoke of it except elliptically—“People will always demand quality. The Rainbow Grand supplies quality. That’s the American way.”

  So far as his staff knew, Clyde Colborne spent a good deal of his time boating on the river and the Great Lakes, playing golf at the l’Isle Grand Country Club in warm weather, and gambling with his friends, who were men very like himself.

  The hotel manager, a woman named Dale who’d been Mr. Colborne’s assistant for a decade, suggested that they check Mrs. Erskine’s suite before taking her to the police station. It was a terrible situation for all concerned, but they had to think of public relations. Of the other hotel guests who’d come to the Rainbow Grand to have a good time. If poor Mrs. Erskine suddenly broke into hysterics, what a scandalous scene it would be! “Look, this is June. It’s a Sunday in June and it isn’t raining for once. It’s honeymoon season, for God’s sake. A damned happy time at The Falls.”

  So they talked Mrs. Erskine into reluctantly going upstairs to room 419. The red-
haired woman said plaintively that her husband wouldn’t be there—“That’s the very place, in all the world, I can guarantee you he isn’t.”

  By this time Ariah Erskine was moving so haltingly, with such an air of distraction, she seemed to the Rainbow Grand employees hardly aware of her surroundings. When the elevator door opened on the fourth floor she had to be gently urged to disembark. Yet she assured Dr. McCrady with an air almost of annoyance that she was “fine”—“not at all faint or light-headed.” She had lost her room key, however. Fortunately, Dale had a master key to let them in.

  At room 419, the concierge knocked loudly, nervously. Just in case someone was inside. “Hello? Is anyone here? Hotel management, coming in.”

  No answer.

  The ornate door’s exterior was covered in crimson plush. A brass plaque read ROSEBUD HONEYMOON SUITE.

  Dale unlocked the door, and the red-haired woman and the hotel employees entered hesitantly. There is no emptiness quite like the emptiness of a hotel room with no one in it. Through partly drawn venetian blinds a pale, filtered-looking sun shone. Somewhere overhead, a vacuum cleaner droned. The first room was the ornately furnished parlor, which was obviously empty. A few scattered tourist brochures and maps, a vase of drooping roses, an empty champagne bottle lying on its side; and two champagne glasses, both empty, some distance apart.

  The concierge opened the door to the bedroom, which seemed to be empty also. This room, Mrs. Erskine entered very reluctantly, her eyes nearly shut. “No one. There’s no one.” She spoke so softly, it wasn’t certain she’d spoken at all. The ornate brass four-poster bed with the crocheted canopy had been, it seemed, hastily straightened, the spread drawn up over rumpled bedclothes, and heart-shaped cushions placed on it. Your immediate, erroneous impression was that someone, or something, might be beneath the spread. That the bed had been made up struck the concierge as a fastidious touch: Mrs. Erskine had expected visitors, and wanted things to look neat. But the air smelled distinctly stale. A man’s hair oil, a woman’s cologne, an odor of slept-in, soiled sheets…

  What happened in that bed? What shock, what misery. What revelations.

  The red-haired woman averted her eyes. For a precarious moment she swayed on her feet.

  The concierge asked politely, uneasily, “May I check the bathroom, Mrs. Erskine?”

  “Yes. Of course. There’s no one.”

  A light was burning in the bathroom, but the room was empty. Dampened towels had been replaced on racks, and the shower curtain tucked into the big claw-footed tub. In the sink were several strands of dark hair: not Mrs. Erskine’s. And on the counter beside the sink was a man’s zipped-up toiletries case of no special distinction. But it was there.

  Not a good sign, the concierge thought.

  Suddenly the red-haired woman said, with a breathy laugh, “His toothbrush is inside, I checked. You’d think he would have taken it with him, wouldn’t you? But I suppose it’s easy to buy a toothbrush. Wherever you go.”

  Next, they checked the closet in which Mr. Erskine had hung his clothing, which Mrs. Erskine said hadn’t been disturbed so far as she knew. They checked the top bureau drawer, in which Mr. Erskine had placed neatly folded white undershirts and boxer shorts, black silk socks, several freshly laundered white cotton handkerchiefs, and a pair of cuff links. On a luggage stand was Mr. Erskine’s suitcase, empty except for a paperback book titled The Niagara Gorge: History and Pre-History, and, another bad sign, a man’s leather wallet.

  “Mrs. Erskine, may I—?”

  “Yes, of course. Take it.”

  Self-consciously the concierge examined the wallet, which contained the minister’s identification and photo, driver’s license, several blank checks torn from a checkbook, a half-dozen coins and bills of various denominations including fifties. The photo showed a dark-haired, beakish-nosed, narrow-faced young man wearing scholarly eyeglasses, unsmiling. This was Reverend Gilbert Erskine? The departed husband of the red-haired bride?

  A fanatic. The set of that mouth. Those eyes!

  Exactly the kind of man, the concierge thought, to throw himself over the Horseshoe Falls.

  “Mrs. Erskine, may I take this photo of your husband? The authorities will need it. And you’d better take this wallet, and keep it safe. Never leave valuables in a hotel room.”

  The red-haired woman accepted the wallet from the concierge with lowered eyes, as if embarrassed. She made no attempt to count the bills which, the concierge had swiftly estimated, came to several hundred dollars.

  They returned to the parlor, where Mrs. Erskine drifted to the window to gaze out blankly into the distance. Was she looking toward The Falls? Or—the sky? In profile, she did possess an antique sort of beauty. Her face seemed both ethereal and resolute, like a profile on an old coin. Again the concierge saw, or believed he saw, faint red marks like a man’s fingers on her pale, delicately-boned throat.

  The reverend. Must’ve been. Who else?

  While the concierge and the others made another quick search of the parlor, the red-haired Mrs. Erskine remained motionless at the window. As if thinking aloud she said, dreamily, “The Falls. Is it singular, as you speak of it? Or—are there several Falls?”

  Dale said, “We just say ‘The Falls.’ Not meaning the city but the river. It’s more than just the actual place, the American Falls, the Bridal Veil, and the—Horseshoe. It’s the rapids, too, and the Devil’s Whirlpool. And the Gorge. You could say it’s all the miles, about four miles, of dangerous water. ‘Hungry Water’ the Indians called it. It’s the spirit of the place, too.”

  “ ‘The spirit of the place.’ Yes.”

  It would seem to them afterward that in some way the red-haired woman knew. What had become of her husband.

  They were finding nothing of significance in the parlor. Several annotated tourist brochures and maps. A flier for the popular Maid of the Mist cruise past the base of the American and Horseshoe Falls. It was touching to think of the young honeymoon couple planning to take that cruise, back in Troy. “You say you found no note, Mrs. Erskine?” the concierge asked a final time. “Nothing that might be construed as—a farewell note?” He found himself staring into a wastebasket shoved beneath a Victorian ladies’ writing desk, where some papers had been crumpled and dropped.

  The red-haired woman seemed to waken, not quite fully, from a trance. “What? No. No farewell. I’m sorry.”

  Flush-faced, the concierge stooped to retrieve whatever it was in the wastebasket—two crumpled paper napkins, of which one had lipstick smears on it. But that was all.

  3

  “A GUEST AT my hotel? Tell me no.”

  Seeing in the eyes of his staff, before anyone dared speak, that there was bad news.

  At least, the hotel wasn’t on fire: he’d have known that by now.

  At least, no one had been murdered on the premises: the police would be here, the front drive filled with squad cars and emergency vehicles.

  By two-twenty of the afternoon of June 12, 1950, just in time to escort Ariah Erskine to Niagara Falls police headquarters, Clyde Colborne had arrived at the Rainbow Grand at last.

  He was a big-boned busy man in his mid-thirties. Aggressively friendly, with a prematurely bald, opaquely gleaming head like Roman statuary. His small shrewd restless eyes were deep set in a face lined from years of boating, waterskiing, golfing in the sun. His hands and feet were large, busy, agitated. He exuded an air, pungent as aftershave, of frantic and well-intentioned inaction. He spoke and laughed loudly, with an excess of energy. Today he was dressed as if he’d been to church that morning, in a seersucker suit, white dress shirt open at the throat, and straw fedora; as often he did on such occasions, dropping by the hotel on Sunday, he allowed his employees to think, not altogether accurately, that he’d been to church services with his family on the Island (as l’Isle Grand was called), and hadn’t simply stopped back home while his family was at church to quickly shower, shave, and change clothes before driving out again after a
marathon Saturday night of poker and drinking on a friend’s yacht anchored off Buckhorn Island, in the Tonawanda Channel of the Niagara River.

  Colborne wasn’t separated from his wife, at the present time. He was living at home, though often he spent the night in his suite at the Rainbow Grand. The previous night, after the marathon game had ended around 5 A.M., he’d slept five or six dazed, stuporous hours on the yacht, where he was always welcome. He’d lost money at poker and was feeling guilty, dissolute, and resentful that he, Clyde Colborne, a man worth millions of dollars, at least in properties and investments, a man liked and admired by other men if disapproved of by his prudish wife and in-laws, should be made to feel such things. Married too young! Married too long. His friend from boyhood Dirk Burnaby who’d never married at all, who’d hosted the poker game on his yacht and won $1,400 from Colborne over the course of the night, said that the domestication of the male of the species Homo sapiens was “the great unsolved riddle” of evolution.

  Not just the women have domesticated us for their own purposes, they make us feel guilty as hell when the domestication doesn’t take.

  Before he’d arrived at the Rainbow Grand, Colborne had heard the rumor of a suicide at The Falls. By this time it was likely a news bulletin. Burnaby had a police radio (unofficial, unauthorized) on the yacht to which he sometimes listened, especially in the late hours of the night when he couldn’t sleep, out of “congenital curiosity” as he called it. (Burnaby was a lawyer as well as a yachtsman, gambler, sports fan and sporadic “civic leader.”) So they’d been hearing the unwelcome news that a man, at the time unidentified, had been seen by a gatekeeper at the Goat Island Bridge to have “thrown himself” over the Horseshoe Falls early that morning. Another suicide! At the giddy height of the honeymoon tourist season, when visitors to The Falls came from all over the world. God damn suicides, Colborne thought, disgusted. This would be—how many in the past year alone? Three, four? That authorities knew of. No doubt there’d been more, and the broken bodies never discovered.