“Rowena gave it to me yesterday.”
“Gave it? I never heard of that woman giving anybody anything.”
Conley hopped down from the bunk. “You’re right. She charged me forty bucks.”
“Why, that old bandit!” Lorraine exclaimed. “Pops had those books printed for her. I think we used to sell them for ten dollars apiece. Of course, we didn’t sell but maybe two cases, and most of those were to Rowena’s relatives.”
Conley chuckled as she headed upstairs toward her own room.
“Wouldn’t you like to go to church with us this morning?” G’mama called after her. “We’re having a pancake breakfast afterward.”
“Another time, maybe,” Conley said, pausing on the staircase. “But wait. You’re not thinking of driving yourself into town, are you?”
“We’re going to beach church,” G’mama said, referring to the nondenominational service held on Sundays at Kirby’s Karaoke Café, where the family had attended summer services for years. “And Grayson is picking me up. I think you should go too. I want to clear up this unpleasantness between the two of you.”
“No, thanks,” Conley said, turning to go. “I’ve got work to do in town this morning.”
Upstairs, she turned on the shower in the tiny claw-foot tub and stripped out of her pajamas. But she yelped at the shock of the cold water streaming from the showerhead. She turned the nozzle on the hot water up all the way, got out of the tub, and waited five minutes, until finally, she gave up and took the fastest shower of her life.
Wrapped in a towel, she plugged in her hair dryer and turned it on—at which point the light fixture overhead sparked. A glance at the wall socket showed scorch marks. She cringed, thinking of how close she’d just come to electrocuting herself. And setting the house on fire.
* * *
When she got back downstairs, she found her grandmother waiting for her ride to church, dressed in what passed for casual in Lorraine’s world, a colorful floral-print shift, pearl earrings, hot-pink ballet flats, and a straw handbag, which hung loosely from her wrist.
Opie sat at Lorraine’s feet, sensing, from his mistress’s apparel, that she was about to leave without him.
Her grandmother wrinkled her nose at the sight of Conley’s own outfit—gym shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes.
“You’re going into town looking like that?” She touched her granddaughter’s damp hair. “On a Sunday?”
“I’m working, G’mama,” Conley said. “Nobody’s going to see me. By the way, is the hot water heater broken? I had to take a cold shower just now. And I think I might have shorted out the electrical panel upstairs when I plugged in my hair dryer.”
“Oh,” Lorraine said, waving her hand. “I should have warned you. It takes a long time for hot water to travel all the way up to there. And I was taking my shower too, so I’m afraid I might have hogged all the hot water this morning. Sorry, dear.”
“That’s okay. But have you had the wiring checked lately?”
G’mama shrugged. “I’ll speak to Grayson about it. She handles that kind of thing.” She then reached into her pocketbook and brought out a small white envelope. “I have something for you.”
Conley took the envelope and ran her thumbnail under the flap. A key ring with a circular brass fob slid onto her palm. “What’s this?”
“It’s the key to the Beacon office. In fact, this happens to be Pops’s old key.”
Conley turned the key fob over and saw her grandfather’s monogram. “Why give this to me? Why not give it to Grayson? She’s running the paper, not me.”
“Your sister has her own key,” Lorraine said. “I wanted you to have this one. To remind you of your place in this family and in this company. I want you to understand what’s at stake here.”
“You know I’m not going to stay in Silver Bay permanently, G’mama. This is strictly a temporary situation, until I get a job…”
“You mean at a real paper?”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Conley protested.
Her grandmother’s piercing blue eyes stared her down. “You won’t find anything more real or as rewarding as your hometown, Sarah. And you won’t find a community that needs a real newspaper as much as Silver Bay. You can make a difference here. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t ask you to stay.”
Conley sighed. “G’mama, I just don’t—”
A horn sounded from outside. Opie went to the door and started scratching at the screen.
Lorraine peered through the door’s glass sidelights. “There’s Grayson. I’d better go. Think about what I said, will you, please? And, Sarah?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“It would be lovely if I didn’t have to receive any phone calls about you today. And be a good girl and take Opie with you, please? I think he’s feeling neglected.”
* * *
As she rounded the courthouse square downtown, she saw the faithful drifting out of Sunday services at the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches, the women dressed in summery floral dresses, the men in short-sleeved shirts, jackets slung over their shoulders, children skipping along behind, clutching their Sunday school art projects. The square was otherwise deserted, except for a frail-looking elderly woman seated on a bench, feeding popcorn to pigeons near the Confederate statue.
Conley parked at the curb outside the Beacon building and turned to the Jack Russell, who’d rode into town in the passenger seat, staring out the window, wagging his tail in enjoyment of the impromptu ride-along.
“C’mon, Opie,” she said, and the dog hesitated but then hopped down onto the pavement.
The Beacon office was dark and silent.
She flicked on the lights, and after unpacking her laptop and research supplies, she sat down at her assigned desk and consulted the text message Kevin had sent the night before, with Symmes Robinette’s local address—21 Sugar Key Way.
She typed the address into the search bar on her laptop and waited. The first hit came up on the county’s tax rolls. It showed that the title to the home at that address had conveyed to Vanessa Robinette two years earlier, which meant that the sale had been completed after Robinette’s last congressional campaign.
The county records showed that the seller, Sugar Key Corp. Ltd., sold a 4,228-square-foot home on a half-acre waterfront lot with five bedrooms, five baths, a three-car garage, and a swimming pool to Vanessa Robinette for the sum of $260,000.
“Damn. I want a deal like that,” Conley murmured aloud.
Opie, who’d been dozing at her feet, looked up and thumped his tail in agreement.
For comparison, she typed in the addresses for the lots on either side of the Robinettes’ bargain beach house.
The house at 19 Sugar Key Way sold six months prior to Robinette’s, for $1.95 million, and the house at 23 sold in November of 2018 for $2.1 million.
Checking Robinette’s financial statements from 2016, she saw that for a man who’d spent his last forty years in public service, the congressman had managed to amass an impressive fortune.
He had a SEP account with a balance of $3.3 million and had stocks that, at the time of the filing, were worth another $6 million.
She ran a finger down the list of stocks Symmes owned, noting that most were blue-chip stocks, with a modest number of tech stocks and bank stocks, along with stock in a company called, oddly enough, Sugar Key Holdings.
Among his personal assets, he’d listed a home at 2331 Trinity Street in Silver Bay, which he’d purchased in 1980, for $32,000. She knew the house must be only a few blocks from G’mama’s house on Felicity Street.
According to the assets list, Robinette also owned a home on eight hundred acres of land in Bronson County, with a valuation of $2 million. Was that Oak Springs Farm? She jotted down the address of the property. If so, where had Toddie moved after the divorce? Surely she wasn’t renting from her ex?
Conley went to the Bronson County tax assessor’s website and stared at the screen for a moment
. She typed in the address for the parcel of land listed as an asset by Robinette in his last financial disclosure statement, and when the deed listing came up, she had to blink and reread the listing twice.
Symmes Robinette, it appeared, had conveyed title to the eight-hundred-acre parcel, plus a house, to Emma Todd Sanderson, as of May 8, less than a week before he’d died in a fiery car wreck, for the sum of one dollar “plus other considerations.”
Emma Todd had to be Toddie Robinette, who’d probably reverted to her maiden name after her divorce from the congressman.
“Son of a bitch,” she whispered.
She looked around the office for the printer, then realized she didn’t know how to sync it up to her laptop to print. Instead, she took a screenshot of the property assessor’s card.
Her stomach growled, and she did a silent fist pump. It never failed; whenever she was working on a story and hitting on all cylinders, she became ravenously hungry. And, she realized, she hadn’t had any breakfast. Or lunch.
She prowled around the empty office, looking for something to eat. The break room refrigerator was disappointingly barren except for a suspicious-looking carton of greek yogurt and a soggy, half-eaten sandwich. Of course there were no vending machines, and she knew, without looking, that nothing would be open around the square on Sunday morning.
Her eyes lingered on the closed door of her sister’s office. As a kid, Grayson had been a notorious snack hoarder. Winnie complained bitterly over all the times she’d found random bags of half-eaten Cheetos under Grayson’s mattress and Snickers bars hidden in her underwear drawer.
Luckily, the door to Grayson’s inner sanctum was unlocked. In her starved condition, Conley would have picked it without a single pang of guilt.
She walked directly to the desk and pulled open the deep middle drawer. Jackpot! Strewn among the stray paper clips, Post-it notes, and pencils, she found a veritable snack smorgasbord. There were Cheetos and Snickers, of course, because they were her sister’s classic childhood comfort foods, but in addition, she’d stockpiled granola bars, bags of peanuts, even those cute little prepackaged cheese-and-cracker combos.
There was, Conley thought, a lot of snackage here. She swiveled around in Grayson’s desk chair and spotted a mini-fridge under the console table behind the desk. Opening the fridge, she found containers of orange juice, bags of grapes, baby carrots, packages of sliced turkey, and tiny, round, red-wrapped cheese wheels.
She thought back to the previous day, when she’d spotted a pillow and blanket on the sofa here. She got up and opened the door to the room’s tiny coat closet. The pillow and blanket were neatly folded on the closet shelf, but the clothes rod held a plastic dry cleaner’s bag containing several dresses, skirts, blouses, and suit jackets. A laundry basket on the floor held more folded clothing, including lingerie and gym clothes. Four pairs of shoes were lined up on the floor.
In the bathroom, she spotted her sister’s hair dryer and curling iron, as well as a bag of toiletries.
Grayson, she realized, was living here. In her office. Not just taking the occasional power nap or grabbing a meal because she was too busy to go home to Tony.
Conley sat down on the sofa, ripped the wrapper off a granola bar, and began chewing nervously.
What was going on between Tony and Grayson? She and Tony had never been especially close, but she’d always thought Tony, whom Grayson had met during her last year of law school at Stetson, was a good match for her sister. G’mama approved too, especially after Tony had been so understanding about moving back to Silver Bay to allow Grayson to take over running the paper after their grandfather’s death.
Tony was corporate counsel for a software company based in Texas, so he traveled a lot for business, and since, according to Grayson, he wasn’t into “family stuff,” Conley seldom saw him outside of major holidays and family funerals.
How like Grayson not to say a word about whatever was going on in her marriage. In addition to being a snack hoarder, as a child, she’d been so secretive, Conley never knew what was going on in her sister’s life.
Whatever it was, Conley decided, it would be up to Grayson to decide when to reveal the details of her personal life. She finished off the granola bar and swept a few telltale crumbs from the sofa before tiptoeing back to the outer office.
She’d just settled herself in front of her laptop again when her cell phone pinged with a text message. It was from Skelly.
Mama’s having a good day. Want to come over for lunch?
The half-formed idea in her head suddenly blossomed.
Sure thing. How about a drive in the country after that?
Conley watched the little bubbles that meant he was typing a reply.
Okay. What are u plotting?
25
“Sorry,” Conley said when she arrived on the Kellys’ doorstep at noon. She gestured down at Opie, who was already straining at the leash to go inside the house. “When you invited me, I neglected to say I had a plus-one.”
“It’s fine,” Skelly said. He leaned down to scratch Opie’s ears, and the terrier immediately rolled onto his back to allow for a thorough belly scratch. “Mom loves dogs. She misses Buford something awful.”
“Awww. Buford. What a good boy he was,” Conley said, smiling at the memory of the Kelly family’s golden retriever. The dog had been their constant companion in their childhood. “But he’s been gone a long time, Skelly.”
“I know. But Mama doesn’t,” he said. “C’mon in. Lunch is ready. Nothing fancy.”
Conley followed Skelly down the hall and into the dining room. Miss June was seated at the head of the mahogany table, which was covered by a grand damask tablecloth. Three places were set with fine bone china, crystal, and slightly tarnished sterling silverware. A cut glass bowl in the center of the table was filled with a riot of colorful zinnias, cosmos, and sunflowers, and pink tapers burned in the silver candelabras.
“How pretty you look today!” Conley exclaimed as she leaned down to kiss Miss June’s cheek.
The older woman wore a bright blue housedress with snaps up the front and had tucked a sprig of pale blue plumbago behind one ear.
“You look nice too, Sarah,” Miss June said diplomatically.
“Whoops! I’m sorry to show up at your beautiful table dressed like what G’mama would call a ragamuffin, but I didn’t know I was going to be the recipient of such a lovely lunch invitation,” Conley said.
“And who is this?” Miss June cried, spotting Opie, who was busily sniffing her ankles.
“This is G’mama’s dog, Opie,” Conley said. She scooped the dog into her arms and held him out to the older woman, who beamed, letting the dog lick her chin and face.
“That’s enough now, Opie,” Conley said, trying to sound stern. “I’m going to put him in the backyard for now, or he’ll be pestering us for food all during lunch.”
“Oh no, let him stay,” Miss June protested. “He can sit on the floor right here by me. And he’ll be a good boy, won’t you? What did you say his name was, Sarah dear?”
“Opie,” Conley said. She touched the rim of one of the dinner plates. “This is so elegant. Much too elegant for the likes of me.”
“Seanny did all this. Just for me,” her hostess said happily. “I do like things to look nice, especially on Sundays.”
“It’s beautiful, Seanny,” Conley said teasingly.
“Do not call me that,” he said under his breath. “She’s been so excited about having company for lunch. Do those flowers look familiar?”
She turned and scrutinized the centerpiece. “Are those…?”
“I figured your grandmother wouldn’t miss a few flowers from her garden, now that she’s out at the beach. She usually sends Winnie down with a bunch every week.”
“I know she’d love knowing your mother is enjoying them,” Conley said, following him into the kitchen. “Now what can I do to help? Did I mention I’m starving?”
“You can help me car
ry in the salad. Everything’s ready. Nothing fancy over here at Chez Kelly. Just a green salad and spaghetti and meatballs.”
He went to the stove and lifted the lid of a huge saucepan, and the smell of oregano, garlic, and tomatoes filled the kitchen.
“Smells divine,” she said, picking up the plates he’d already filled with tossed salad.
* * *
An hour later, she was washing dishes in the kitchen while Miss June sat in a chair in the living room, petting Opie and feeding him treats.
“Where’d you learn to make red sauce like that?” she asked her host, who was filling plastic quart containers with the leftover spaghetti.
“I had a friend in pharmacy school. He was from a big Italian family in New Jersey. We’d have these communal study groups on Sunday nights, and he’d always bring what he called his nonna’s Sunday gravy.”
“If you ever get tired of running a pharmacy, you could probably open a restaurant with a recipe like that,” she said.
“Not a chance,” Skelly said, putting the last container in the refrigerator. “I don’t get a chance to cook that often, but when I do, it’s strictly for relaxation. I make this spaghetti all the time. It’s one of Mom’s favorites, and it’s easy for her aides to warm up for lunch and dinner. She’s fine with eating the same thing every day, because she never remembers she had it the day before and the day before that.”
“She seems pretty alert and happy today,” Conley said. She hesitated. “I was going to ask—do you think she’d be up for a Sunday drive out in the country?”
“You mentioned that in your text. I know you, Sarah Conley Hawkins. What’s up? It’s got something to do with Symmes Robinette, right?”
“Guilty,” Conley said. “I’ve been poking around, looking at Robinette’s most recent campaign finance statements. In addition to the house on Sugar Key, I found the address for what I think must be Oak Springs Farm. Looks like a pretty rural part of Bronson County.”
“Why is this important to your story?”
Hello, Summer Page 19