A somber wreath of white lilies with trailing white satin ribbons hung from the law firm’s plate glass doors. The door was locked, but there was a discreet intercom button on the casing.
She pressed the button, and a moment later, a man’s voice answered, “Who’s that?”
She was so startled, it took a moment to gather her composure.
“Uh, hi. It’s Conley Hawkins. With the Beacon?”
There was a pause. “Come on in.”
The intercom buzzed, and she heard the lock click. The bank’s former lobby, where, accompanied by her father, she’d opened her first savings account at the age of eight, had been turned into a reception area.
Charlie Robinette was waiting for her just inside the door. He looked like an ad agency’s idea of a young lawyer; straight blond hair brushing his eyebrows, horn-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses, untucked blue oxford cloth dress shirt, skinny jeans, and polished oxblood loafers.
“Here,” he said, handing her a piece of paper.
It was a copy of the obit she’d just read in her car.
She tilted her head and waited. Nothing. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Should I? Connie something, right? With the paper?”
“Not Connie. Conley,” she said, enunciating slowly. “Sarah Conley Hawkins.”
He let out a slow exhalation of breath. “Holy shit. Sarah!”
“That’s me.”
Charlie ran a hand through his hair. “Man! This is crazy. I never would have recognized you. I mean, you look awesome. Really. I like your hair like that. How long has it been?”
She straightened her shoulders. “Let’s see. I believe it would have been the summer before my senior year of high school.”
His face colored, and he laughed uneasily. “Well, that accounts for my memory lapse. I don’t know about you, but most of my summer that year was lost in a haze of Jägermeister and cheap weed. Up in smoke, right?”
“My memory of our last meeting was probably more vivid than yours,” Conley said coolly. “Let’s see. I went out with you two or three times at the beginning of the summer, when I got home from boarding school. I thought you were funny and cute. But when I refused to ‘put out,’ as you phrased it, for revenge, you told everybody in town that I’d—what’s that graphic phrase for group sex you used? ‘Pulled a train’? So cute and colorful.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “Kids, huh? If I really did that, I’m sorry.”
“You really did do it. And more.” Conley said. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, willing herself not to go batshit postal on Charlie Robinette. Batshit was not why she was here. She had a job to do. The past was the past. Ancient history.
Until the guy who’d ruined your teenage life didn’t even recognize you as an adult or have the grace to acknowledge the damage he’d done to your life.
He shrugged. “I’d do a lot of things differently now, if I had the chance.”
“Would you?” she asked.
“Hell yeah. Look, you can’t judge somebody by the stupid shit they did at the age of eighteen.”
Her head was starting to throb. She had to let it go, had to put the past firmly in the past, where it belonged.
“I didn’t come here to talk about this stuff,” she said. “Let’s start over, shall we? First, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Whatever.” He was obviously annoyed that she’d dredged up ancient history. “You came for the obituary, for the Beacon? Now you’ve got it.”
“Thanks, but Kennedy McFall just emailed it to me. I was actually hoping to speak to you about a story I’m writing about your dad for the paper.”
He sighed dramatically. “There’s not much I can tell you. We’re still in shock. It hasn’t really sunk in yet. What else do you need?”
“For starters, I was wondering if you have any idea why the medical examiner hasn’t released the body or determined the cause of death.”
“Who told you that?”
“The funeral home.”
His pleasant face reddened. “They had no business telling you something like that. We don’t know why there’s a holdup. Typical bureaucratic incompetence. The kind my dad battled his whole career.”
She nodded.
“My father was killed in a single-car wreck,” he went on, growing animated. “He was basically incinerated. Nothing else matters, okay? We don’t need this shit.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she repeated. “It must be incredibly painful. When I spoke to Sheriff Goggins over in Varnedoe—”
“Why would you talk to the sheriff?” he cut in.
“Because that’s part of my job. Your father was a prominent figure in this community, Charlie. In this state. Given the nature of his death—”
“Given the nature of his death, I find it totally inappropriate for you to show up at my office asking these kinds of questions,” Robinette said. “And since when does a crappy weekly like the Beacon run this kind of shit?” He took a step toward her, his fists balled up. “What the hell are you trying to insinuate?”
Conley stood her ground. “I’m not insinuating anything.”
“I think you need to leave here now,” Robinette said. “Despite the fact that I’ve tried to apologize, you’ve obviously still got some kind of personal ax to grind with me. I’m warning you, Sarah, if you come up with some kind of bullshit story about my dad’s death, I will grind you and that pathetic excuse for a paper into dust.”
She smiled. “Good to see you again, Charlie.”
19
Conley spent another ten minutes sitting in the front seat of the Subaru, trying to calm down after the confrontation with Charlie Robinette.
She was still sitting there when he emerged from the bank building and locked the door behind him. She slid down in the seat, hoping he wouldn’t spot her, but he went straight to a car parked at the curb, got in, revved the engine, and quickly backed up and drove off. He was driving a black Porsche Cayenne. When they’d dated all those summers ago, he’d driven a candy-apple-red Porsche 911. Same old Little Prince.
When the Porsche was out of sight, she drove away with more questions swirling around in her brain. Her innocuous questions about the congressman’s death had struck a raw nerve with Charlie. She’d been stupid to bring up their past, but after the searing pain and humiliation of the way he’d treated her all those years ago, the confrontation was inevitable, if unwise. He’d practically thrown her out of his law office. And she hadn’t even gotten around to asking the thing she was most curious about: Why had the family’s official obituary omitted any mention of Symmes Robinette’s other survivors, including his first wife and their children?
She had a lot of research to do, but there was no way she could go back to the Beacon office and the (very) temporary work space Grayson had allocated her. Grateful that she’d brought her laptop along, she drove back to Felicity Street and let herself into G’mama’s house.
While she was setting up her work space on the dining room table, she googled the name of the Panhandle district’s chief medical examiner.
Theodore Moriatakis, she learned, had been appointed to his position by Governor Lawton Chiles in 1995. It was Saturday, but she reasoned that since death doesn’t take weekends off, perhaps the medical examiner’s office didn’t either. She tapped the number listed on the county’s website and wasn’t surprised when her call was routed to voice mail.
The pleasant recorded voice directed her through a series of prompts for all the reasons a caller might need to reach the medical examiner’s office. The last prompt allowed her to leave her name and phone number and the reason she was requesting a callback.
“Hello. My name is Conley Hawkins. I’m a reporter for The Silver Bay Beacon, and I’m calling to inquire about the cause of death for Symmes Robinette. Please return my call as soon as possible.”
She disconnected and went back to the browser bar, mainly to satisfy her own curiosity.
It didn�
�t take long to find Symmes’s marriage and divorce records online. In 1962, in Varnedoe, Florida, at the age of nineteen, he’d married Emma Todd Sanderson, age eighteen. Their divorce decree was issued in May 1986. No surprise, Rowena Meigs’s account had been wrong. It had actually taken two days for Charles Symmes Robinette, age forty-three, to marry Vanessa Renee Monck, age twenty-five, in Washington, D.C.
As she’d suspected, there was no way to access Charlie’s birth record. When she checked the District of Columbia’s vital records page, she was informed that birth records could only be accessed by the person in question, a parent, or a legal representative.
On a hunch, she pulled up Charlie’s Facebook page. His profile photo was a professionally done headshot, showing Charlie dressed in a conservative coat and tie.
The Little Prince bore an uncanny resemblance to his father. He had the same slight, receding chin, flat cheekbones, and high forehead. They even shared the same nose.
Charlie wasn’t what she’d call active on the social media site. There were a couple of old postings—Charlie being sworn in to the Florida Bar with his proud father looking on; Charlie at a Tallahassee tailgate party, dressed in a fraternity jersey, clinking a beer bottle with similarly dressed guys; and Charlie, dressed in hunter’s camo, kneeling beside a huge buck he’d killed three years earlier. He hadn’t posted anything new in two years.
On a whim, she typed Vanessa Robinette’s name into the Facebook search bar and was mildly disappointed to see that Vanessa’s account was private.
What now? She drummed her fingertips on the mahogany dining room table and stared absentmindedly at the floral-patterned wallpaper.
What about Symmes Robinette’s house? Skelly, who’d delivered prescriptions there, had described his waterfront mansion in an exclusive gated golf and tennis community as gigantic, worth probably more than $2 million. Again, she was curious about how a country lawyer turned career politician, whose official congressional salary was $174,000, could afford such lavish digs.
Conley navigated to the website for the county’s tax assessor to see if she could look up the value of the congressman’s property. She typed Robinette’s name into the search bar only to be rewarded with NO RESULTS FOUND.
Now what? She really needed Robinette’s address. It wasn’t likely she’d find an elected official’s home address online. She considered calling Skelly but quickly discarded the idea.
She couldn’t even get a plat number to estimate the appraised value of the other homes at Sugar Key without the address of somebody who lived there.
What she needed was what she didn’t have anymore, which was an expensive, expansive database—the kind maintained by a big-city newspaper—much like the one where she’d been most recently employed.
Conley picked up her phone and dialed her former office husband, Butch Culpepper, whose number she knew by heart.
When he answered on the fourth ring, he was out of breath, and she heard echoing footsteps and muffled shouts and grunts in the background.
“Sare Bear!” he exclaimed. “What’s up?”
“Where are you?” she asked. “It sounds like you’re in a gym or something.”
“I am in a gym.”
“No way,” she said flatly. Butch was the most proudly sedentary human she knew, someone whose idea of a workout was a trip to the refrigerator for another pint of Cherry Garcia.
“Way. Benny’s team is in the NAGVA finals. We’re out in Seattle.”
“What the hell is NAGVA?”
“Sare Bear, we’ve been over this. It’s the North American Gay Volleyball Association. Benny is the star outside hitter.”
Several lame jokes came to her mind, but she immediately shelved them. “So I guess there’s no way you can get to the newsroom to do a little research for me, huh?”
“Afraid not, hon. We don’t go home until Wednesday. What’s up?”
“I think I’m on the trail of a hot story, but I keep running into dead ends. I need access to some databases.”
“A hot story in Silver Bay? What? Somebody rigged the goat rodeo?”
“That’s hilarious, Butch,” she said. “But I’ve got a dead congressman and a lot of questions.”
“Oooh,” Butch said. “Now you’ve got me all hot and tingly. And speaking of, why not just give Kevin a call?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Get over yourself. The poor man’s been mooning around since you left. He’s probably in the newsroom right now, staring at your photo and pining away.”
“Stop. I can’t just up and call Kevin out of the blue and ask for a favor like this. Never mind. I’ll call Tiana instead.”
“You could, but I know for a fact that she’s in Memphis for her cousin’s wedding.”
Conley sighed heavily. “Okay. You two have fun.”
“We always do,” Butch said.
She stared down at her phone for a full five minutes, trying to think of another way to get the information she needed. In the end, she scrolled through her contact list and tapped Kevin’s name.
He picked up after the second ring. “Conley? Hey.”
“Hey, Kev. How are you?”
“Good. How about you? How are things down in Florida?”
“They’re different. I’m kinda working for my sister right now. Or I was.”
“At the newspaper? Wow. How did that happen?”
“It’s complicated. And I sort of already quit, but I’m onto a story, and I just gotta keep going.”
“Same old Conley,” he said without rancor. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
That was one of the things that had drawn her to Kevin Rattigan. It was the thing that made him so good at his job. He was a world-class listener.
She recounted the details of Symmes Robinette’s death and filled him in on the hostility her rudimentary questions had triggered from the locals, including her publisher/editor.
“I think I saw an Associated Press wire story about your congressman’s death. How can I help?”
“I hate to ask,” she began.
“Just tell me what you need. I’m on my way to the office right now.”
“Okay,” she said eagerly. “I need some more info on Robinette. I guess I forgot to mention that I was there—at the accident.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It was past three in the morning, so as you can imagine, the timing is one of the things that made me suspicious. My friend and I were driving back to town, and we came across this black Escalade. It had rolled over. We could see a man trapped inside. Then smoke was pouring from under the hood, and Skelly tried to break the window with a tire iron—”
“Who’s Skelly?” Kevin interrupted.
“Just a guy I grew up with. And then the car caught on fire, and the heat was so intense we had to back away—”
“You’re dating this dude? That was fast. Even for you.”
“I am not dating Sean Kelly. I’m not dating anybody. Jesus! I haven’t even been home for a week. We grew up two doors apart, okay? I happened to run into him at a bar the first night I was home. I’d had a couple of drinks, so he offered to drive me back to town in my car.”
“It’s not really any of my business,” Kevin said quietly, and Conley knew she’d hurt him. Again.
“Kevin,” she said. “I swear. He’s like a brother. In fact, he’s more Grayson’s friend than mine. Look, I know things ended badly between us. And that’s on me. I screwed up. I treated you like shit. And I’m sorry for that. I’m just not good at this stuff.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” he said finally. “Okay, let’s get back on topic. Tell me exactly what you need.”
“One of the things I’m interested in is how a career politician can afford what’s been described as a waterfront mansion worth millions—on a congressman’s salary.”
“Maybe he inherited money?”
“I don’t think so. Up until a few years ago, he lived in a nice house not far from my
grandmother’s place. And then some developers come to town about five years ago, and they buy this little spit of land. It’s called Sugar Key. When I was a teenager, it was where kids went to watch the submarine races.”
“Huh?”
“It’s where teenagers went to drink rotgut and screw in the back seat of somebody’s Honda,” she said. “Nothing out there back then but scrub pines and palmettos. And mosquitoes. Lots of mosquitoes. From what I hear,” she added.
“I’ll bet.”
“They built a gated golf and tennis community with only like ten lots. And Symmes owns a house out there.”
“You should be able to just look that up in the county tax maps online,” he said.
“I should be, but I tried doing it with just Symmes’s name and came up with zip. I need an address. And that’s not easy to come by for a sitting member of Congress.”
“Okay, I think I should be able to get that. I can always call somebody up in the D.C. bureau.”
“While you’re at it, see if you can find out where Symmes lived in the district. And how much that place is worth.”
“Anything else?”
“My source tells me that Symmes was tight with the developers of Sugar Key. I’m thinking if we find out who the corporate officers are, maybe that’ll give us some insight into what kind of relationship he had with them.”
“You’re thinking a real estate developer killed a member of Congress? In a single-car accident on a country road?”
“I don’t know what I think,” she said. “I’m just doing what I know how to do. Turning over rocks.”
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “You’re asking for a lot, Conley.”
“I know. But there’s a story here, Kev. I can smell it. It’s just out of my reach. And it’s so damn frustrating.”
“Down the rabbit hole you go, huh?”
“Only if I can get somebody to help me dig that hole. And it ain’t gonna be anybody around here. It’s like Robinette is some sacred cow. Get this—he was married with a couple of kids, and when he was in his forties, he got his secretary pregnant. While he was in office! Somehow, he managed to hush it up, divorce the first wife, and marry the baby mama, who was a couple decades younger. And nobody in Silver Bay even raised an eyebrow. A columnist for the Beacon—she’s this ancient crone named Rowena—got wind of the story, wrote a piece, and my granddaddy killed her story, because he said it was beneath the paper’s dignity.”
Hello, Summer Page 15