Pawleys Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  I decided to go by the gallery to bring them Cokes, or Co-Colas, as Huey said. So two sacks in hand, I pushed open the door at ten-thirty and found Huey and Rebecca actually working. Rebecca was cutting a mat and Huey was writing checks.

  This Coke-slash-sausage-biscuit routine was not healthy for anyone, and I knew it. I made a mental note to make some fruit salad for tomorrow.

  “Morning all!”

  “The sausage angel! My love!” Huey said.

  Rebecca giggled and stopped working.

  “Sausage angel?” she said and laughed again. “That’s some title!”

  “Don’t mind him, Rebecca. He’s just a little cracked, that’s all.”

  Huey took two Cokes and, after counting what was in the bag and pouting at me, only one sausage biscuit. “Are you putting me on a diet?”

  “No, baby. I just need you stay healthy for my sake.” I smiled at him and he shook his head.

  “Women,” he said. “Forgive me if I take this to my office. I have a pile of checks I want to get out in the morning mail.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Mind if I join you?” I said to Rebecca.

  “Of course not!” she said and cleared away her work from the counter.

  “So listen,” I said, taking a bite of my biscuit, “I need a little bit of information and then I can unleash the hounds.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  I asked Rebecca for the information I needed, and she very willingly supplied it. Nat was Nat Simms of Simms Autoworld. The business was started and still very tightly held by Nat’s father, Tisdale, although his father had given Nat a letter on his thirtieth birthday granting him a twenty-five percent ownership. I had indeed seen their television ads all my life. Hi! I’m Tisdale Simms! When you’re in the market for a new car… They were horrible. I could still see the old man in his straw hat, squinting at the camera, reciting his lines from an unseen poster and smiling from ear to ear. Navy jacket, white shirt, red tie, khaki pants—it was the Lowcountry good old boy uniform that erased the lines of class and wealth and joined men together. You’d buy a car from a guy who seemed like your best pal, wouldn’t you? Apparently a lot of people thought so, because Nathaniel Tisdale Simms and his boy Nat sold more cars than anyone in the entire state of South Carolina. It also meant they had more money than the Saudis. And while money shouldn’t have been an issue, it was. She explained it was her father-in-law who owned the big boat, the mountain house, the beach house, the art collection. Nat’s partnership in his daddy’s business was on paper only and paid no dividends. I tucked that information away in the back of my mind.

  I just listened to her, nodded my head, took a few notes and a few bites of breakfast and thought, my, oh my, what an interesting can of worms am I about to open.

  I couldn’t wait to call Everett Presson, which I did as soon as I got back to my house on Pawleys. Maybe I’d even take a drive to Charleston and look for a car for myself. Yes! That might be fun!

  “Everett? Hi! It’s Abigail Thurmond!”

  “Well! As I live and breathe! How the heck are you? Where have you been?”

  “Oh, Lord, Everett, it’s a long and, I’m afraid, sad story that I’ll tell you when I see you. Listen, I’m calling you because I need a favor.”

  “You just name it! After all you’ve done for me? Just name it.”

  I told him about Rebecca and her husband, Nat, and he listened carefully, stopping me now and then to take notes or to clarify things, and at the end he said exactly what I thought.

  “This guy’s got a girlfriend. I’d bet my Chevy on it.”

  I told him I agreed and then gave him a little grief about his car. “You still driving a Chevy? Same old nasty clunker? With all the checks I signed to you, you should be driving a giant Benz!”

  “Hey, I gotta be low-key, you know. I looked at a Buick last year, but it had too much chrome. Anyway, just give me a few days and I’ll report back.”

  I gave him my home number and said, “Thanks, Everett. I mean it.”

  “Sure thing.”

  For the next ten days I filled my time with a member guest tournament at a golf club in North Myrtle Beach, placing fourth. I could not have cared less, but the women I played with were all out of sorts.

  “Hey! We won a little nut dish, didn’t we?”

  The glare of their bitterness was so intense that I slipped away as soon as I could. Honestly, some people took this golf business just way too seriously for me. I picked up my dry cleaning, the New York Times that was saved for me at Litchfield Books and decided to go home. At the last moment, I decided to swing into the Bi-Lo and see what I could make for dinner that wouldn’t require too much effort.

  I was pushing my cart by the hermetically sealed boneless, skinless chicken breasts when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Rebecca.

  “How was your tournament?”

  “We placed fourth, which I thought was pretty darn good, considering it was ninety-five in the shade,” I said. “You cooking tonight?”

  “Yeah, Huey decided to close early, so I thought I would just grab something easy. What are you up to?”

  “The same. I’m hitting the sack early tonight. I’m exhausted. Too much sun.”

  “No word, huh?”

  “You mean from Everett?” She nodded, and I said, “No, but as soon as I hear anything, I’ll call you right away.”

  “Okay.”

  Well, at least she was curious.

  Several days later I found a day-old message in my voice mail from Everett.

  “Call me,” he said. “I’ve got lots of nice pictures…”

  It was after seven. I dialed him as fast as I could, kicking myself that I hadn’t given him my cell number (but it didn’t work half the time anyway) and cursing Bell South for their lousy voice mail service.

  “Everett? Everett? Hey, it’s me, Abigail! Sorry to call you after five…”

  “No problem. When are you coming to Charleston? Or Mount Pleasant?”

  “I can be there tomorrow morning if you’d like me to.”

  “I’ve got something in the morning, but how about we meet at Jackson Hole for an early lunch? It’s on Shem Creek. Do you know it?”

  “Hole is the operative word. But they have great crab cakes. Eleven thirty?”

  The hour was fine with him, and I knew that if I asked him what kind of pictures he had, he wouldn’t want to tell me. Everett would rather have the pleasure of seeing the shock on my face and I could certainly give him that. He deserved it.

  In general, the public didn’t fully appreciate how dangerous private investigator work was. Contrary to what I’d told Rebecca, Everett had been in more than one rumble with one angry husband or another, and his nose had been broken so many times it was sort of a scrapbook of his adventures. Each bump and turn it took was a reminder of another battle weathered and won. But he was still the best in the business because he took those risks and always got results.

  I crawled into my Pawleys Island hammock—what other kind would I own?—and began reading the Week in Review section of the Times. The only thing I could focus on was the political cartoons, which perfectly rendered the climate. It was another election year and the mudslinging was well under way.

  Maybe it was just me, but the political world that had once fascinated me now just left me shaking my head wondering how America, who had fed, sheltered and defended the masses, had arrived at a place of such low esteem to the rest of the world. Clearly, part of it was fanatical religious ideology and the exported vulgarities of our culture. I mean, if I had never known an American and I watched a few episodes of Sex and the City or even the old reruns of Dallas, I would think Americans were totally immoral. Even though those shows were designed to parody our lives, if I didn’t know better, I might believe what my eyes saw on the television or movie screen.

  Everything was perception. Even from my hammock on Pawleys Island, this little spot in the Atlantic Ocean, I could smell a trace of disdai
n from across the water. But of course, I knew that was in my own head because I was only wondering about myself and how I would stand up to scrutiny. I, who had made a living of dissecting the lives of others, would wither, dry up and evaporate under public examination. Worse, I had become a crone, stirring the pot of Macbeth. How in the hell had I let that happen?

  With the heel of my foot, I pushed back from the banister to make the hammock swing gently back and forth until I was so drowsy that I knew if I didn’t get up then, I would wake up with rope marks all over my body. I stood up from the hammock as it came to its resting position and looked out over the dunes. It was low tide and the beach was illuminated by the stars overhead. There in silhouette I saw the form of a man in a coat. He was all gray. My heart lurched as my first thought was, who in the world was on the beach alone at that hour in an overcoat in late July? When I looked back again, he had vanished. The Gray Man? Ridiculous.

  In the morning I thought about the Gray Man again. He was our local insurance adjuster of sorts, except that he had been dead for over a hundred years. No matter. The story goes that he was returning on horseback from the big war (he was wearing gray, after all!) to his fiancée’s home on Pawleys. It was raining to beat the band. The horse fell in a muddy hole, the Gray Man went flying and he died as a result of his injuries. I don’t know what happened to the horse, but apparently he got up dead and went to her house and rapped on her windows. She saw him waving frantically to leave the island. She did leave with her father, and the house was spared from the storm. So if there’s a storm coming and you see him, your house will survive intact.

  I saw him right there that night. It wasn’t my imagination. I was sure of that. But there was no hurricane in the forecast other than some piddling tropical depression off Florida’s coast. The only real hurricane was the one we were about to cook up for Rebecca.

  On the drive to Mount Pleasant, I thought about calling Huey and then decided against it. I would call him after I met with Everett. I listened to the weather reports and they were predicting afternoon thunderstorms. So what else was new? Every morning the temperature climbed with the humidity, and when Mother Nature couldn’t stand it anymore the skies grew dark, lightning crackled and it rained like the end of the world. Around eight, the sun would appear for a few minutes until it began to slip away. I loved that hour, and nowhere was it more lovely than at Huey’s. I would call him to see if he wanted to have dinner. I would tell him my alleged Gray Man story, and he could update me on the ghost of Alice Flagg. We would talk about the supernatural world that Huey believed in so strongly, and I would argue that it was all nonsense. But I really didn’t want to believe that it was. If there was nothing to the Gray Man or Alice Flagg, then where were Ashley and John? No. I couldn’t vouch for Alice, but I had seen the Gray Man with my own eyes.

  SEVEN

  GIVE ME A RING

  WHEN I walked into Jackson Hole, it took my eyes a few moments to adjust. The sun, catching the edges of the thousands of beer cans lining the ledge around the ceiling of the area, was throwing beams of corneal abrasion around like a Las Vegas light show. I had forgotten how delightfully tacky the place was, and I took a deep breath, anticipating a relaxed lunch.

  Someone named Linda, wearing a diamond as big as a judge’s gavel, greeted me and showed me to the table. Things must be good in the cheap seafood restaurant world, I thought.

  “Here we are,” she said. “I hope you enjoy your lunch.”

  I could never figure out why these people who worked in all these restaurants that littered the shores of Shem Creek seemed so happy. If I had been forced to spend my days in a dump like Jackson Hole, I would have been the Zoloft queen. But what did I know? Maybe all the tourists were serious tippers, but I doubted that.

  “Thanks,” I said, and before sitting down I gave Everett a huge hug. “How are you, Everett?”

  There was Everett in khaki shorts and a knit shirt, and I had overdressed in a black linen dress. Was it my fault the dress codes of the world had fallen to something a notch above pajamas? But I realized I was something of an old fart so I brightened up to match his enthusiasm.

  Everett was just bubbling over and couldn’t wait to show me what he had. “How am I? Great! You look fabulous! So tell me what’s going on with you? Where have you been?”

  “Everett? I’m gonna give you the Cliffs Notes version of my horrendous story, and then we are going to move on to other more pleasant topics.” I took Everett through the chain of death, and he was completely surprised and somber.

  “Good Lord, Abigail, I wouldn’t wish any of that on my worst enemy. I am so damn sorry.”

  “Thanks. I know. But I’m okay, really—I mean, as well as anyone would be in my shoes. What can you do? Life goes on, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess, but man oh man, that is too much.”

  “It is exactly as much as I could stand without losing my mind, and believe me, there are still moments when, if I think about it all too much, I might still go insane. That’s why it’s good for me to get busy. So tell me what you found.”

  “Okay, her name is Charlene Johnson,” he said, handing me a manila envelope. “And guess what? She works for Nat in his daddy’s business. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  “Bloody convenient too. Tsk, tsk. Why does it always happen in the workplace?” I opened the envelope and removed two folders. The first one held a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. I began flipping through them. First there was a picture of them leaving the Bank of South Carolina on Meeting Street and another of them using an ATM machine at the Bank of America on Savannah Highway. Then there were pictures of them at Community Firstbank and Washington Mutual, and all I could think was, gee, they sure do go to the bank a lot. Not very romantic. At the bottom of the stack were a few pictures of them coming and going from the cosmetic surgery center on Calhoun Street. What was that about? Well, it looked to me like Charlene was just a regular girl in the first photograph but in the last one she had become Jessica Rabbit. Poor thing. Who would ever take her seriously?

  I opened the other folder. They were grainy and some were slightly out of focus, but one thing was obvious. Nat Simms knew Charlene Johnson in the biblical sense, and we’re talking in detail.

  “How did you get this picture of them?”

  “There’s a huge live oak across the street. I just shinnied up the trunk and positioned myself with my zoom lens…”

  Before I could stop myself I said, “Looks like Nat positioned his zoom as well.”

  Everett burst out laughing and I turned a thousand shades of red. “Abigail!”

  “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I just couldn’t resist.”

  That was the kind of joke I might have made with Huey, but never with someone from my professional life. Maybe I was mellowing after all. I continued to stare at the pictures, one after another, but I kept going back to one of them in the living room of Rebecca’s house. They were smoking what looked like a cigarette, but I knew it wasn’t a cigarette by the way they handled it.

  “Everett? Let me ask you something. In your professional opinion, does this look like they’re smoking pot to you?”

  “Yep. Absolutely. In fact, I could smell it across the street. I’d bet if I went back and hung around for a few days, I could figure out where he’s getting it or who he’s getting it from. I saw them getting high on several occasions, but this was the clearest photograph I had of them actually smoking. You say this guy got custody of their children?”

  “For the moment.”

  “Well, I don’t think family court would approve of this, do you?” Everett handed me another folder from his briefcase and grinned widely. “Take a look at this.”

  I opened the folder and nearly fainted from what I saw. There was Charlene Johnson spanking Nat’s bare backside with a hairbrush. He was lying right across her lap. But not to worry, it wasn’t like Nat was naked. He was wearing a Clemson football jersey.

  “I guess his panties
got lost in the shuffle somewhere?” I was choking on laughter.

  “He’s got issues,” Everett said.

  “Uh, yeah!”

  As the young waitress approached I closed the folder as quickly as I could.

  “Hi! I’m Gracie and I’ll be your server this afternoon. I’d like to just go over the specials with you…”

  Gracie was as cute as a bug and she chattered on with so much perkiness as though she could save our eternal souls from the flames of hell by convincing us to order the seafood plat du jour. The more she described the food the wider her eyes became. This was one very dramatic young woman.

  “And if you’re really hungry, there’s the Captain’s Platter. That’s a dozen sautéed scallops, a dozen shrimp, two deviled crabs and a whole fried flounder. It comes with two sides. Personally, I’d get the red rice and the collard greens and ask for extra hush puppies, but then the fried okra is banging…”

  “Whew! Gracie! Too many choices! I’ll just have the crab cakes and a side salad. How ’bout you, Everett?”

  Everett ordered a fried fish sandwich with a side of fries. We both ordered iced tea and some crab dip to pick on while we waited for our entrees. The irrepressible Gracie swept away and I pondered youth being wasted on the young for a moment and then checked my watch. How long would lunch take to get here? Knowing I had the evidence to prove Nat was a skunk had left me absolutely ravenous.

  Every now and then I would pull out the folder and sneak a look at the pictures. Everett would say, Good, huh? And all I could think about was Nat’s ass and the old saying about someone who was cheap—that they were tighter than a gnat’s…Well, you get the drift, I’m sure. Basically, I giggled my way through lunch, pausing every thirty seconds to thank Everett and to sneak another peek.