Five minutes later, she steered the Wagoneer onto Gulfview Lane, and a minute after that, she turned into the sandy driveway at the Dunes.
G’mama exhaled deeply and turned around in her seat to face Winnie. “The old girl’s still standing.”
“No thanks to that last hurricane,” Winnie said.
Conley was surprised to find herself blinking back tears as she surveyed the rambling old wood-frame house that had been the family’s summer home for the past sixty years.
The house had been built in the 1920s by a wealthy Birmingham department store owner who’d been one of Conley’s great-grandfather’s golf buddies. In the 1930s, after the man died suddenly, her great-grandfather agreed to buy the house, sight unseen, from the widow.
Hurricanes had buffeted this part of the Florida Panhandle for decades, but because the house was built on a section of beach that resembled a bite out of the curving coastline, it had somehow escaped the fate of other nearby Gulf-front homes.
The Dunes’s cedar-shingle exterior was painted a dark spruce green. The trim was white, and the front door was dark red. Mindful of hurricane-force winds and the threat of flooding at high tide, in the early sixties her grandfather had the house jacked up and placed on concrete pilings. Four cars could pull underneath the house now, and a wide screened-in staircase led to the porch that wrapped all the way around the house.
Lorraine pulled a huge brass ring from the depths of her pocketbook. She looked at the stairs and sighed. “You know, when Pops insisted on putting in that doggone elevator fifteen years ago, I told him he was crazy to spend that kind of money. Wasn’t a reason in the world why able-bodied people like us couldn’t use the stairs. Told him it would keep us young.”
Conley recoiled in mock surprise. “Are you saying you were actually wrong about something? Stop the presses!”
“Smart aleck,” Lorraine said. “Go ahead and take Opie for a potty break. Winnie and I will take up the first load and get the house unlocked.”
“Leave the heavy stuff for me,” Conley said.
* * *
The front porch floorboards creaked with each step she took. G’mama had left the front door ajar. With a suitcase in each hand and a wriggling Opie tucked under her arm, Conley bumped the door with her hip and stepped inside.
She set Opie down on the floor, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, letting the old beach house scents settle into her bones. It was a peculiar bouquet unique to this shabby but beloved home of her heart; of old wood and lemon oil, salt air, and maybe a hint of mildew.
Winnie and Lorraine were already busy, tugging at the heat-swollen sashes of the dozen windows that ran across the front of the house, separating the porch from the main house. Tattered cotton curtains fluttered limply in the faint breeze.
“Bring up the cooler next,” G’mama instructed. “I want one of those cold sodas we brought from the house.”
An hour later, Conley was drenched in perspiration, and her legs felt like rubber after making dozens of trips from the car to the tiny two-person elevator and into the house.
She sank down onto a wicker armchair near the fireplace, and a fine dusting of paint chips fluttered onto the hooked rug beneath her feet. There must have been two dozen pieces of wicker just in this room alone—a combination of living room, dining room, and library, united by the age-darkened, heart pine shiplap walls and the worn wooden floors. None of the sofas, chairs, rockers, and tables were an exact match, but all wore the same shade of pale aqua G’mama had been painting them for decades.
The lumpy cushions were in a faded deep green bark cloth pattern featuring ferns and caladiums, and Conley knew that when this generation of cushions got too threadbare, her grandmother would have Jacky, her seamstress in town, run up another set from the huge bolt of the same fabric that she’d purchased decades ago, long before Conley was born.
Her grandmother approached with a broom in her hand. She’d already changed out of her “town” clothes and into a neatly pressed flowered cotton top and pastel cotton pants. She had a silk scarf fastened over her hair and wore a pair of white Keds without shoelaces. This was G’mama’s cleaning uniform.
“I’m putting you upstairs in the big room,” Lorraine announced. “Winnie and I will stay down here.”
“In the girls’ bunk rooms?”
“It’s cooler down here,” Lorraine said matter-of-factly. “And Winnie doesn’t need to be climbing all those stairs, what with her bad hip and all.” She raised the broom and began batting at the long strands of cobwebs that crisscrossed the mantel and whitewashed brick fireplace surround.
* * *
Conley set her suitcase on a luggage rack she found in the cedar-lined closet of the “big room” on the second floor, trying not to feel guilty about occupying what was indisputably the best room in the house.
This had been her grandparents’ bedroom for as long as she could remember. Unlike any of the other five bedrooms in the house, including the two others on this floor, this one had a small, attached bathroom, featuring a claw-foot bathtub, a commode with the original pull-chain flush, and a minuscule corner-mounted sink.
The heavy brass bed was dressed with a white chenille bedspread with a pattern of blue-and-green peacocks that Conley had always loved as a child. As G’mama had pointed out, there was no air-conditioning up here, only a ceiling fan whose blades whirred ineffectively overhead.
The room was stifling in the late-afternoon heat, the wooden floor littered with the dried corpses of long-dead bugs.
She wrenched open the heavy french doors at the foot of the bed and stepped onto the porch.
The shimmering turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico beckoned beyond the dune line. The water was calm, but she could hear waves lapping at the sand. She needed to unpack and find sheets to make up her bed. She needed to sweep the floor and find a putty knife to pry open the heavy wooden window sashes that were nearly impossible to open. Then she needed to go downstairs and take her grandmother to the grocery store.
But Conley did none of these things. Instead, she kicked off her flip-flops, peeled off her sweaty clothes, and climbed into her bathing suit. Then she hurried down the back stairs, through the path across the dunes. She waded into the warm Gulf water and dove headlong into the first medium-size wave she could find.
11
When Conley returned from the IGA, she saw her sister’s aging silver BMW parked under the house. She considered making up another errand for herself, but shrugged and pulled in alongside Grayson’s car. No use delaying the inevitable.
She found the three of them—G’mama, Winnie, and Grayson—seated on the back porch, their chairs pulled into a companionable semicircle, highball glasses in hand, gazing out at the sky, which was blazing coral and orange and pink as the sun sank toward the horizon.
The frosty glasses were beaded with condensation, and Conley knew they were drinking what G’mama called her sunsetters—pink grapefruit juice, vodka, club soda, and a slice of lime.
“Oh, hey, Gray. Did you drive all the way out here to make sure I’m taking good care of G’mama?”
Her grandmother shot her a reproving glance and tapped the folded copy of the Beacon resting on the wicker table beside her. “Grayson always delivers my copy of the paper in person. Every week.” She gave her oldest grandchild an indulgent smile. “It’s an excellent issue. I think that new reporter of yours did a nice job on the train derailment piece. What’s his name again?”
“Michael Torpy,” Grayson said. “He’s a good kid. Young, but definitely a hard worker. And he’s willing to learn, which a lot of these millennials aren’t.”
Lorraine picked up the paper and ran her finger across the front page, bringing it to rest on the column running down the left-hand well of the page.
“And then there’s this.” She jabbed at Rowena Meigs’s outdated photo topping the Hello, Summer column and sighed deeply. “I hate to say it, but I really believe it might be time for Rowena to reti
re.”
“I’ll second that motion,” Conley said eagerly. “I know she’s a friend of yours, G’mama, but the truth is, Rowena is a dinosaur. Her writing stinks, she’s out of touch, and she can’t even spell. According to Lillian, half the time, she doesn’t even get the names right. She’s an embarrassment.”
“I’d love to fire Rowena,” Grayson said. “Or retire her or whatever. But it’s not that simple. She’s as beloved and unmovable a community fixture as that damn Confederate statue on the courthouse square. Plus she basically works for free.”
“Goes to show you get what you pay for,” Winnie commented.
Grayson gulped a slug of her cocktail. “Have you two forgotten what happened the last time we tried to get rid of Hello, Summer?”
Lorraine rocked backward in her chair, shaking her head. “Actually, I had forgotten. Never mind. We don’t need to go through all that again.”
“All what?” Conley asked.
“It was years ago. I can’t remember the specifics, just that it was so awful, so libelous, that Pops did fire her.”
“I remember,” Winnie said suddenly. “It was Rowena’s usual crap column, rich-lady tea parties and such, but then she wrote something about the new youth minister at the Baptist church, how he’d been seen ‘gadding about town’ in a shiny new convertible with the pastor’s wife.”
Lorraine shuddered. “Oh dear Lord. It’s all coming back now. Rowena as much as inferred that the youth minister and the pastor’s wife were having some sort of torrid affair. She wrote some catty comment questioning how he could afford an expensive car on his salary. She all but accused him of embezzling money from the church.”
It was Winnie’s turn again. “Turns out the convertible belonged to the pastor’s father-in-law, or maybe it was the youth minister’s father…”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lorraine said. “It was a deeply unfortunate incident. Pops made Rowena write a retraction, and he ran it on the front page of the Beacon, and then he fired her.”
“And yet she’s still writing Hello, Summer, with the same airbrushed photo sig that she must have had done at Glamour Shots thirty years ago.”
“The day after she was fired, calls started coming into the office. Rowena’s friends from church. Her friends from the women’s circle, bridge club, garden club, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the DAR.” Lorraine ticked off the list one by one. “They all threatened to cancel their subscription to the paper if Rowena’s column was dropped.”
“Pops folded to public pressure?” Conley asked, disappointed. “Rowena couldn’t have had that many friends. I mean, back in the day, the Beacon was the only paper around. Every family in town had a subscription. I know, because I used to ride my bike to deliver the copies on our block.”
“It wasn’t the loss of subscriptions,” Lorraine said. “We could have withstood that. Two weeks after the firing, Sam Greenbaum came into the office and had a confidential talk with Pops. And the week after that, what do you know? Hello, Summer was back.”
“Sam Greenbaum?” Conley looked from Lorraine to Grayson.
“He owned Green’s Department Store,” Grayson explained. “They were the Beacon’s biggest advertiser. Back in the day, they’d run four, sometimes six full-page display ads. Every week. And in September, we’d publish a full-color back-to-school fashions preprint section. Eight pages. Same thing at Christmas.”
“I remember Green’s Department Store,” Conley said. “That’s where we’d go see Santa Claus every year. So this Mr. Greenbaum was a friend of Rowena’s too?”
“Oh Lord, no!” Lorraine said, chuckling. “Sam—may he rest in peace—definitely was not a fan of hers. But say what you want about Rowena—she may be crazy—but she’s not stupid. No, Rowena got all her friends, those DAR and UDC and garden club ladies, all of them, to march themselves down to Green’s and threaten to cut up their credit cards unless Sam Greenbaum persuaded your grandfather to put Rowena back in the Beacon.”
“Oh.” Conley shook her head.
“Conley thinks it’s terrible that Pops caved in to pressure from our biggest advertiser,” Grayson told their grandmother, her voice mocking. “She probably never realized that ad revenue paid for her expensive boarding school and out-of-state college tuition.”
“That’s enough, Grayson,” G’mama said, her voice sharp. “Sarah is part of this family and part of the Beacon ownership. She has a right to question our editorial decisions. Just as you have a right to explain our rationale.”
“Okay,” Conley said slowly. “But Green’s Department Store has been out of business since, what, the nineties? So you actually could fire Rowena now, right?”
“We could,” Grayson agreed. “If we wanted to lose our status as the county’s legal organ, and if revenue from our legal ads wasn’t the only thing keeping us from financial ruin.”
“I don’t understand,” Conley admitted. “I mean, I know the Beacon is the official legal organ for Griffin County, which means we run all the bankruptcy, liquor license applications, and death and divorce notices. But what’s Rowena got to do with that?”
“It’s not Rowena,” Grayson said, scowling. “It’s her grandson, Rusty.”
“Wait. I didn’t know Rowena was ever married,” Conley said. “And she had a kid too?”
“Lawton Meigs was a darling man,” Lorraine said. “Everyone adored him.”
“Smartest thing he ever did was have the good sense to drop dead of a heart attack before that woman could make his life a living hell,” Winnie said.
“Rowena had a daughter, Rebecca,” Lorraine said, “who ran off at seventeen when she got pregnant. A few years later, she married an older man, who adopted Rebecca’s son, Rusty.”
“And Rusty Cummings is the Griffin County clerk of court,” Grayson concluded. “Who, coincidentally, holds the power to appoint any publication as the county’s legal organ of record.”
“Oh.” Conley picked up the newspaper and fanned herself with it. “Thus, it’s either Hello, Summer or goodbye, legal ads.”
“Exactly,” Grayson said.
“There’s another reason I came out here today,” Grayson said. “G’mama asked me to pick up her prescription.” She held up a small white paper bag and shook it. “She was supposed to have you pick up her prescription before y’all headed out here this morning.”
“I forgot, all right?” Lorraine snapped. “Sometimes things slip my mind. It doesn’t mean I’m senile.”
“No, it means her hair was about on fire to get out here to the beach,” Winnie said.
Lorraine glared at her housekeeper. “I called Grayson to ask her something, and she very sweetly volunteered to bring my medicine out to me. And to stop at the liquor store on the way.”
Grayson wagged a finger in G’mama’s direction. “One sunsetter a day, agreed?”
Lorraine shrugged and looked away.
“There’s something else on my mind,” Grayson said, sitting back in her chair. “Skelly and I were chatting, and he told me about that wreck you guys came across last night. He said you took some pictures?”
Conley nodded, waiting.
“Do they know who was in the car?” G’mama asked.
“I called Michael in and had him make some phone calls. I just heard from him as I was driving out here. Nothing official yet, but it looks like it was Symmes Robinette.”
“What?” G’mama’s drink slipped from her hand, the glass shattering on the wooden floor.
“Oh my God,” Winnie said, her face turning pale. She jumped up from her chair. “Don’t move, y’all. I’ll get the broom.”
“Symmes Robinette? For real?” Conley asked, just as shocked as her grandmother.
Symmes Robinette was actually Congressman Charles Symmes Robinette, a longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives, from Florida’s Thirty-fifth District, which included Griffin County.
Conley hadn’t kept up much with local politics over the years. She’d bee
n sent off to Virginia to boarding school as a teenager and hadn’t really lived in Silver Bay since graduating from college, but she knew the Robinette family, particularly the congressman’s son, C. Symmes Robinette Jr.—or Charlie, as he liked to be called—on a personal—and painful—level.
“I can’t believe it,” Lorraine said.
Grayson went to the bar cart and deftly assembled another cocktail, handing one to Conley, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, fixing a replacement drink for their grandmother.
“They’re sure it was Symmes?” Lorraine asked.
Grayson nodded.
Winnie returned with the broom and a metal dustpan and attacked the shards of glass and ice cubes with a vengeance.
“The accident was actually just over the county line in Bronson,” Grayson said. “The sheriff’s office there told Michael it won’t be official until their coroner makes a ruling. I gather the body was pretty badly burned.”
Conley dug her cell phone from her pocketbook and opened the photo library. She tapped the video of the car engulfed in flames and felt another twinge of queasiness before handing the phone to her sister.
“Oh my Lord.” Grayson pushed the phone away. “No way anybody walked away from that.”
“No,” Conley agreed. “They got there as fast as they could, I’m sure, but it took the firefighters a while to put out the flames. Skelly and I didn’t have the stomach to hang around and watch the recovery effort.”
“Poor Vanessa,” Lorraine said. “What a tragedy.” She sighed heavily. “I suppose the women’s circle will do the reception after the funeral. I should call Bunny and the other girls.”
“No!” Grayson put a hand on G’mama’s arm. “I mean, please don’t do that. Michael had to swear he’d hold on to the story until the coroner’s report comes in. It hasn’t been made public yet.”
“But Vanessa knows, right?” Lorraine asked, her eyebrow raised.
“According to the police, she’s been notified,” Grayson said. “But again, it’s not for public consumption yet.”
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