“Not Symmes Robinette?”
“Close. Like blood close. Charlie Robinette.”
Conley felt her phone buzzing in the pocket of her shorts. She pulled it out, looked at the caller ID screen, and turned to Skelly. “Sorry. I gotta take this.”
“Hi,” she said softly. “Thanks for calling me back, Kev.”
“Where are you? Are those waves I hear?”
“I’m taking a walk on the beach,” she said, deliberately omitting the fact that she wasn’t walking alone.
“Sounds nice. Our D.C. correspondent did some asking around and managed to get your guy’s address in Georgetown and down there in Florida. I’ll text it to you. I also got you the names of the corporate officers of Sugar Key Partners, Ltd.”
“Who are they?” she asked eagerly.
“The names don’t mean anything to me,” he said curtly. “Guess you’ll have to do your own legwork. Okay, bye. Have a nice walk.”
Kevin had every right to hang up on her. But she couldn’t deny that it hurt when he did.
She sighed and put her phone away.
“Business call?” Skelly asked.
“Yeah. A friend at the paper. I’d asked him to help me with some research about Symmes Robinette.”
He raised one eyebrow. “A friend or a special friend?”
“Former special friend. That was the guy I told you about. Kevin Rattigan, my ex-boyfriend. He has access to a lot of databases and sources that I don’t have down here.”
“He’s helping you out even though you dumped him?”
“It’s a newspaper thing, Skelly. We were colleagues before we were a couple. That’s what colleagues do in our business.”
“Seems weird to me,” Skelly said. He walked on, then stopped. “Any chance the two of you will get back together?”
“Why all the questions about my past?”
“Maybe I’m trying to figure you out. That’s all.”
“Let me know when you do,” Conley said. She dipped her hand in the water and flicked it at him.
They left the lights of Villa Valencia behind and finally reached the south end of the island, the point where Silver Bay flowed into the Gulf. A long line of weather-beaten pilings jutted out into the water, the last remains of the Fisherman’s Pier that was blown away in a hurricane in the late 1990s. Pelicans roosted on several of the pilings, their heads folded under their wings as though tucked in for the night.
By unspoken agreement, Conley and Skelly trudged through the soft, white sand toward a swinging bench that stood at the edge of the dune line. The wind was up, and there were whitecaps on the waves. Her dark hair blew in the breeze and ruffled the fabric of her blouse.
“Remember when we all used to go shark fishing out there on summer nights?” Skelly asked, pointing at the remnants of the long-gone pier and stretching his left arm across the back of the bench.
“Did anybody ever catch a shark?” Conley asked.
“I think somebody caught a little nurse shark one time. Mostly, I think we just sat out there, drinking and smoking until the old guys who ran the bait shop ran us off.”
Conley turned her face skyward and gazed up at the stars. “Back then, I always thought summer would last forever. Like, I never even knew what day it was. We’d move out here to the beach right after school got out. Grayson and I had our bikes and a little bit of spending money from doing our chores, and every day, we’d wake up, eat breakfast, and then take off. G’mama’s only rule was that we had to check in with her at lunchtime.”
“Same with all my cousins and me. We’d roam from our place, to y’all’s, to the LaMonacos’, to the pier, and sometimes, if we had money, to the arcade,” Skelly said. “Don’t think we put on shoes—or underwear, for that matter—from June ’til September, when we had to go back to school.”
“Halcyon days,” Conley said, smiling at the memory. She and Grayson had been the only girls in the pack of boys that included the Kelly cousins, right up until puberty struck. After that, after she’d gone away to boarding school, things changed. She was suddenly an outsider. And she’d been one, she realized, ever since.
“Halcyon,” Skelly said, turning the word over in his mouth. “I’ve seen that word in books but never really knew what it meant.”
“I’ve always thought halcyon means a time of sweetness and contentment, of happy times remembered,” Conley said. “But let’s ask the Googles.”
She pulled her cell phone out and typed the word into the search engine.
“Huh,” she said reading the definition. “I never knew that.”
“What?”
“It’s a word that comes from Greek mythology, referring to a bird—a kingfisher, actually—who had the magical power to calm the wind and waves at the winter solstice so that she could breed in a nest floating at sea.”
“Halcyon days,” he repeated. “I guess you don’t know you’re living them until years later, looking in the rearview mirror.” After a moment, he said, “I can’t remember. Did your dad come out to the beach with y’all in the summertime, or did he stay in town for work?”
“Up until my mother left, the whole family stayed at the Dunes for the season. Dad kept what he called summer hours at the bank. He’d get off work at two and then come out and spend the night. He only worked half days on Friday.”
“My dad did the same thing,” Skelly said. “He’d tell his nurse not to schedule any patients after two in the summertime, unless it was an absolute emergency. He’d come out to my aunt and uncle’s house, change out of what he called his town clothes and into this ratty pair of orange Bermuda shorts with blue flamingos embroidered on them.”
“Oh my God! I totally remember those shorts. I don’t ever remember seeing him on the beach when he wasn’t wearing them. They’d faded so much they looked pink.”
“My mom tried hiding them, but he always found them. It was like a running joke between them. Finally, one year in August, she enlisted all us kids in her plot. She sent him to Mr. Tastee for ice cream, and while he was gone, she rigged the pants to some rope and she ran it up the flagpole on the front of the cottage. When he got back with the ice cream, we were all standing on the front steps, saluting his shorts. I’ve still got a photo of it somewhere.”
Conley pointed at the brightly colored shorts Skelly was wearing. “I was wondering when you’d suddenly gotten so sporty—these aren’t the same shorts, right?”
He laughed. “No, but they’re as close as I could find. I guess I have gotten sporty in my middle age. After wearing a white lab coat at the store all day, this is my way of changing gears. Maybe that’s how my dad felt too, after wearing his white lab coat all day.”
“Your dad was such a good sport,” Conley said. “I always thought he and your mom made a great team. They were always laughing and joking around. You could tell they liked each other.”
“I never really thought about that before,” Skelly said. He looked over at Conley. “I guess things weren’t so great between your parents, huh?”
She shrugged. “We never even knew there were any problems until the first time she left.”
Her phone pinged, signaling an incoming text. She glanced down, glad of the distraction, then stood so abruptly the swing hit her in the back of the knees, nearly sending her sprawling. “I need to get back to the house.”
“Something wrong?” he asked, trying to match her pace as she strode through the sand.
“The text was from Kevin. He sent me the information I need for my story.”
He reached out and grabbed Conley’s hand. “It’s Saturday night. I thought we were having a nice time. You told me there’s no internet out here. What’s the rush?”
“The Beacon’s deadline is Tuesday. I’ve got to get a handle on this Robinette thing so that I can convince Grayson there’s more of a story here than just a politician’s tragic accident.”
“I thought you said you quit the Beacon,” Skelly said.
“I did.
But G’mama wants me to see it through. Besides, if this story turns into a thing, it could be my ticket to a real job at a real paper. If it has national implications, I could freelance it out to the Times or the Post. At the very least to my old paper.”
“What if it’s not a thing?” he persisted. “What if it’s just a run-of-the-mill accident on a lonely country road? What then?”
She turned around to face him. “Then I find another story or, better yet, another job. I have to work, Skelly. I’m a journalist. It’s who I am. It’s what I’m good at.”
He watched her striding away, back down the beach toward her grandmother’s house. He took one last look at the remains of the pier and the dozing pelicans. “Halcyon days,” he murmured.
23
“She’s asleep,” Winnie reported when Conley got back to the Dunes. The housekeeper had dragged a chair into the hallway outside Lorraine’s bedroom and was sitting there, looking half-asleep herself, with a battered Nora Roberts paperback novel open on her lap.
Conley opened the door and tiptoed inside. Her grandmother was propped up on her pillows on the bottom bunk bed, glasses perched on the end of her nose, softly snoring. The bruise on her cheek made an ugly dark stain on G’mama’s pale skin. Conley reached out and removed the glasses, placing them on the nightstand, then leaned down and lightly kissed her cheek before turning off the reading lamp and exiting the room.
“You go on to bed too,” Conley told Winnie, pointing at the small bedroom across the hall. She was already having second thoughts about driving back to town for the night, especially after G’mama’s fall earlier in the day. Skelly was right. The story would have to wait.
When she heard a slight knock at the front door, she flew down the steps and opened it.
Skelly stood there, holding the sandals she’d forgotten out on the beach.
“I figured Cinderella might need her slippers,” he said, handing them over.
She looked down at her sandy bare feet. “Whoops.”
“Want me to follow you back into town?”
“There’s been a slight change in plans. I’m staying here tonight,” she said, stepping outside. “If G’mama’s feeling okay in the morning, I’ll go in.”
“What changed your mind?” he asked, clearly surprised.
“I guess you did. There’s nothing I could do tonight that I can’t do tomorrow. And in the meantime, if something happened, if G’mama had another spell, I’d never forgive myself for not being here when she needed me.”
“You’ll want to call her doctor Monday and let him know what’s going on,” Skelly said.
“I will,” she promised. And then she placed both hands on his shoulders, stood on her tiptoes, and impulsively kissed him square on the lips.
He took a half step backward and looked at her quizzically.
“That’s for being my Prince Charming,” she said.
He bowed from the waist. “My pleasure.”
* * *
Conley changed into her pajamas and carried her things downstairs, noiselessly slipping into the boys’ bunk room and climbing into the top bunk using the wooden ladder her grandfather had built by hand.
The beds were probably relics from the fifties or sixties, she thought, with maple wagon-wheel headboards and footboards to fit in with the vaguely cowboy-meets–Beach Boys decorating theme. The wall-mounted sconce on the top bunk featured a brass horse head, but the slightly musty-smelling chenille bedspreads had a tufted design of seashells, waves, and anchors.
She switched on the light, and the brass chain pull came off in her hand. She shook her head, looking around the bunk room. This had been the hangout for generations of boy cousins, and she hadn’t been in here in decades.
In the dim light from the sconce, she could see that the ceiling was mottled with large water stains. The wheezy air-conditioning unit in the bedroom’s only window dripped water onto the floor, where the boards were beginning to warp.
The Dunes was showing its age, and the effect, even in the semidarkness, was not flattering.
She picked up her cell phone, and using the flashlight app, she began leafing through the book she’d chosen for her bedtime reading—the collected wit and wisdom of Rowena Meigs.
The paper was shiny and the print small. It was evident that the book’s publisher had merely photocopied Rowena’s old columns instead of resetting them in more readable type.
Conley flipped pages until one of the hundreds of boldfaced names caught her attention.
HELLO, SUMMER
OCTOBER 28, 1984
A good time was had by all last Saturday as friends and family of Toddie and the Honorable U.S. Rep. Symmes Robinette gathered for a delightful harvest-time “hoedown” at Oak Springs Farm, the family’s country estate in Bronson County.
Toddie, always the “hostess with the mostest,” transformed the farm’s rustic horse barn using hay bales, jack-o’-lanterns, and scarecrows aplenty, into a magical party setting, complete with square dancing and cocktails for the grown-ups and hayrides, a pumpkin-carving contest, face painting, and bobbing for apples for the kiddies.
In keeping with the party theme, Symmes, who is our handsome and outgoing congressman for the Thirty-fifth District, and Toddie wore fetching his ’n’ hers denim overalls and plaid flannel shirts, while their teens were dressed in dungarees and T-shirts emblazoned with VOTE FOR MY DAD. A little birdie informed your correspondent that Toddie, as talented with a needle as she is with a saucepan, designed and whipped up the entire family’s costumes herself.
Spotted among the partygoers were the cream of Silver Bay polite society, including George and Winkie Covington. George is chairman of the Symmes Robinette for Congress committee, and Winkie is a whiz on the tennis courts. Luther and DeeDee Najarian were among the square dancing set. Luther does important things for the railroad, and DeeDee owns a darling boutique in downtown Silver Bay called Shoe Business. Later in the evening, Symmes and Luther were seen outside the horse barn, “holding court” with the Honorable Judge Beckett Martin, no doubt plotting how to keep progress moving in our fair community.
A “frightful” event marked the fifth birthday party of your correspondent’s own great-niece, Tara Torrence, at the Piggy Park Bar-B-Q Ranch in downtown Silver Bay. Entertainment was provided by a skeleton-costumed bluegrass group who proclaimed themselves as the Crypty Kickers. (Don’t tell the kiddies, but your correspondent happened to recognize Tara’s talented daddy, Tommy Torrence, as the fiddle player.) The Piggy Park chefs departed from their usual fare and delighted the young guests with such Halloween-themed delicacies as “spaghetti and eyeballs,” and “Frankenweiners” franks and beans, “Ghoulish Green Punch,” and chocolate-covered “Black Cat Cupcakes.” At party’s end, Tara’s little guests were each given specially made pumpkin goodie bags full of take-home treats.
Conley read only a few more of Rowena’s columns before closing the volume. Oak Springs Farm, she’d learned, was in Bronson County. Bronson had been a mostly rural area in the Florida Panhandle when she was growing up, a place of quail-hunting plantations and cattle farms. She’d taken horseback riding lessons at a stable there as a preteen, in her horsey phase.
Earlier in the day, June Kelly had said Oak Springs might have been where Toddie Robinette and her children moved after her divorce from Symmes. Maybe, Conley thought, Toddie was still there.
And if she did still live there, would she have anything interesting to say about her recently deceased ex-husband? Would she have any light to shed on the circumstances surrounding Symmes’s death?
She stared up at the ceiling, pondering her next move.
G’mama’s breathing, from the bunk below, was steady and even, punctuated by muffled, snuffling snores. She felt her own breathing fall into rhythm with her grandmother’s. As a child, Conley loved slipping out of her own bed in the bunk room she shared with Grayson and tiptoeing upstairs, where she’d noiselessly slide under the covers, spooning up against G’mama. Sh
e’d loved the scent of her grandmother’s night cream, the feel of the pink satin pillowcase she always used to keep her hair from being mussed. Falling asleep with her grandmother’s breaths tickling the back of her neck, she’d felt safe, secure. Loved.
24
She was floating in the warm waters of the Gulf, her body lifting and falling with each movement of the tide. Above, the ink-black night was spattered with numberless stars and just the sliver of a moon. Her father’s voice was calling. “Sarah. Sarah. Where are you?” She turned over, limbs flailing, trying to get a bearing on his location.
“Dad?” She spun around. “Dad?”
He called once more. “Sarah. Where are you?”
She struck out swimming, desperate to find him. Her strokes were awkward and uneven. She’d never been a graceful swimmer. She swam for so long! Her arms and legs burned from fatigue, and she struggled to keep her head above water. Now she was sinking, pulled down by the weight of her own body. “Dad?” she whimpered.
“Sarah! Sarah!”
She sat upright, gasping for air, yanked abruptly from one world to another.
G’mama stood by the side of the bunk bed, tugging at her arm. “Sarah Conley Hawkins! What on earth are you doing up there?”
Conley blinked and looked around the room and then back at her grandmother, her mind racing to come up with a plausible explanation.
“When I came in from walking on the beach, I was too tired to go upstairs to my own room, so I just decided to climb up here.”
Lorraine pushed aside the sheet Conley had pulled up to her neck. “But you weren’t too tired to go upstairs and change into your pajamas?”
“Busted,” Conley said sheepishly.
“I told you, I’m fine. I don’t need a babysitter or a bodyguard,” G’mama said. She picked up the bound volume of Rowena’s columns from the foot of the bunk, where Conley had shoved it before falling asleep. “Where did you get this?”
Hello, Summer Page 18