He kept his eyes on the road and was slow to answer.
“What do you mean?”
“Whenever somebody answers a question with a question, I start thinking they have something to hide,” Conley said. “I mean, my sister has been sleeping in the office. Basically living there. Are they separated? Did she run Tony off?”
“Ask her,” Skelly said.
She rolled her eyes. “You know Grayson. She’s so … uptight. Tight-lipped. And we’ve never really talked about family stuff.”
“Not at all? Like, well, like about your mom?”
“Nope.”
“Do you ever open up to her about what’s going on in your life? Does she know you broke up with your live-in boyfriend before you came back home?”
“Whose side are you on here?”
“I don’t take sides. I’m neutral,” he said.
“That’s bullshit,” she said under her breath.
A few more miles of pastures and farmland rolled past before he spoke up again.
“Before Danielle left, this last time, when we were still trying to save our marriage, we went to counseling. And the therapist—who was a guy, by the way—said something that clicked with me,” Skelly said.
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
Skelly ignored her sarcasm. “He said that seventy-five percent of the issues people have in their relationships—the reason they end up in therapy—is because they just assume things. They assume their partner knows what they want in life. They assume they both share the same values and goals. But you can’t do that. You can’t expect even the person who’s closest to you to know what you’re thinking unless you open up and talk about it in an honest and open way.”
“And did that help?” Conley turned in her seat to face him. “With you and Danielle?”
“Obviously, it wasn’t enough to save our marriage. Once we did start talking, it turns out that I assumed she wanted to stay married to me and live in Silver Bay, maybe even start having kids together. But Danielle didn’t. She assumed I knew she felt trapped—in our marriage, in the situation with my mom, running the family business, all of it.”
“So opening up to each other didn’t really help,” Conley said.
“In a funny way, it did. Not with the marriage, but it helped me clarify things. What I wanted, for instance, and what was important to me. I realized that even if I did what she wanted, things wouldn’t really change between us.” He gave her a sideways glance. “If you tried to really talk to Grayson, you might be surprised at what she has to say. Running that paper and looking out for your grandmother … I know from my own experience that things can get overwhelming.”
“My sister doesn’t want to talk to me,” Conley said. “She thinks I’m an entitled brat because I got to go off and have the career I wanted, while she stayed home to save the Beacon. You don’t really know my sister, Skelly. She enjoys being a martyr. She should have been a Catholic instead of a Presbyterian. Saint Grayson. Our Lady of Perpetual Sacrifice. That’s my big sister.”
“Isn’t that kind of harsh?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “If her marriage is in trouble, if she and Tony split up, she’s probably feeling pretty damn lonely. And vulnerable.”
“Grayson Hawkins? Vulnerable?” Conley said with a hoot. “Get real.”
27
When she came downstairs Monday morning, Conley found Winnie alone in the kitchen, stemming and slicing strawberries into a colander.
“Where’s G’mama?”
“Gone to the store,” Winnie said, shaking her head in disapproval. “One of the ladies at church brought her a gallon of these strawberries from their farm, and she’s determined to make jam today.”
Conley poured a mug of coffee from the battered aluminum percolator resting on the front burner of the stove. “You let her go by herself?”
“I tried to get her to let me drive, or wait until you were up, but she’s wanting to get going before it gets too hot. She does look a lot better this morning. That knot on her head is almost gone. Anyway, she was just going to the IGA, and it’s not but a few blocks from here.”
Winnie’s turquoise transistor radio was sitting on the windowsill. An announcer was reading the local news, most of it, Conley realized, cribbed directly from last week’s issue of the Beacon. A zoning commission meeting was coming up; construction was slated to begin on an annex to the jail. The Lutheran church was sponsoring summer day camp for needy kids, and the weather was expected to stay the same, hot and sunny.
“In other news, WSVR has learned, Florida’s late congressman Symmes Robinette will be memorialized Tuesday, when his body will lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Dignitaries expected to attend the service will include all the members of the Florida congressional delegation, the Florida governor and lieutenant governor, and, reportedly, the president and vice president. A contingent of Silver Bay residents will also attend the service, including Robinette’s widow, Mrs. Vanessa Robinette, and his son, Charles Robinette Jr.
“This community has been in mourning since last week’s tragic accident claimed the life of the eighteen-term congressman—”
Winnie reached up and snapped the radio off. “Not everybody is mourning,” she muttered.
Conley regarded the housekeeper over the rim of her coffee mug. “Winnie, can I ask you a question?”
Winnie turned and wiped her berry-stained hands on a dish towel. “About him?”
“Yeah. G’mama never would say what exactly happened, you know, that time you got in trouble.”
“Lorraine likes to call it an unfortunate incident,” Winnie agreed. “You know your grandmother. She likes to tippy-toe around the unpleasant stuff.”
“Must be a family trait,” Conley said. “Do you mind talking about it? I’ve always been curious.”
“There’s not a whole lot to tell,” Winnie said. “I did something the law says I ought not to have. Went to prison for twenty months.”
“What, exactly, did you do?”
Winnie looked out the kitchen window. Bright sunshine streamed in, seagulls cried, and waves crashed on the nearby beach. Just another morning at the beach.
“You know my sister, Nedra, the boys’ mama, died of cancer when she wasn’t even thirty yet. Cancer she got from that railroad switchyard over in Plattesville, where we grew up. The railroad stored barrels of chemicals there for years and years, chemicals they knew caused cancer. Those barrels rusted, and the chemicals leaked out, so the poison went into the lake us kids used to play in. It washed into the drainage ditches where we used to catch tadpoles and into the dirt where my mamaw grew her garden.”
“So you were living on a toxic waste dump,” Conley said.
“We didn’t know no better at the time. Then folks started getting sick. Nosebleeds, headaches, gut problems. Women were having miscarriages. Or worse.” Her hand rested lightly on her own abdomen, an unconscious gesture. “People were dying. Even little kids. Nobody put it together until this lady lawyer, Randee, showed up. She’d been looking at the statistics in the neighborhood. Putting pins in a map to show who got the cancer and where they lived.”
“A cancer cluster. But the railroad never accepted responsibility for it, right?”
“No. Randee did her best. She filed lawsuits, but the judges around here? They were in cahoots with the railroad. And of course, the railroad hired Symmes Robinette to go to court for them. The best judges and lawyers money could buy. What chance did we have? We were just a bunch of white trash from the wrong side of town. They brought in doctors that said we’d gotten sick from smoking cigarettes, or drinking, or just because.”
Conley sipped her coffee slowly and glanced at the clock above the stove. She needed to get to work.
“Did the Beacon ever write any stories about what went on in Plattesville back then?”
“Not that I remember,” Winnie said. “But then, I was busy working for y’all, plus taking care of my sick sister and her kids.”
<
br /> “When’s the last time you talked to that lawyer, Randee?”
“Probably the day she went to court with me to try to talk the judge out of sending me to prison,” Winnie said. “Didn’t do any good. But I didn’t hold that against her.”
“What exactly did you do?” Conley repeated.
Winnie rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, and her face took on a dreamy expression. “I used to smoke. Did you know that? Not inside your house, because your grandmother didn’t allow it. Drank a good bit too, after Nedra died. Most of the time, I don’t miss it. But when I think about those dark times? I kinda get the taste for a cigarette and a beer.” She took her coffee mug and refilled it, then sat down at the table opposite Conley. “One day, after he’d gone and gotten elected to Congress, I heard on the radio that Symmes Robinette was coming back down here from D.C. for some groundbreaking hoo-ha they were doing for the new Veterans Administration clinic. Nedra had been dead a couple of years, and times were so hard. I was lonely. Bitter too. Wasn’t thinking straight. I packed up Jesse. I think he must have been home sick from school, and I took him with me out to where they were getting ready to build the clinic.”
“Jesse’s the youngest, right? And he’s still here in town?”
Winnie nodded. “I kind of had a plan, but I was scared. I drank a couple of cans of beer in the car to get my courage up. Okay, maybe I had three. That part was wrong. Me drinking when I shoulda been watching out for that little boy. Then me and Jesse got as close as we could to the front of the crowd, listening to the speeches. Robinette spoke, so puffed up about how he’d brought so much money back to his ‘beloved community.’ All the time he talked, I was thinking about Nedra, about her boys being raised orphans, how sick she’d been at the end, how she suffered, begging to die. So I did it. When Robinette came down from the stage, for all his shaking hands and kissin’ babies bullcrap, I crept right up next to him. He patted Jesse on the head, and I just stuck my hand down in my pocketbook, got a big old handful of ashes, and flung ’em right in Robinette’s face.”
“Ashes?” As soon as she said the word, Conley realized what ashes Winnie meant.
“Nedra’s ashes. Her ‘cremains,’ the funeral home called ’em. I wish you’d seen the look on Robinette’s face. It was hot, and he was sweatin’ like a pig anyway, so those ashes stuck to him like flour on a biscuit.”
Conley shuddered at the image.
“Some lady screamed, because I guess they thought maybe I had a gun or something. There were cops all over the place, and one of ’em grabbed me and knocked me onto the ground.” Winnie’s eyes dropped to her hands, clutching the mug. “They handcuffed me. Jesse was right there. He saw all of it. Lord Jesus, I will never forget the look on that boy’s face. When the cop was handcuffing me, Jesse started kicking at him, screaming for him to let me go.”
“Oh, Winnie,” Conley whispered, touching her wrist.
“Lorraine and your granddaddy came and got me out on bail, did everything they could for me, even paid Randee to defend me, but the judge who sentenced me, he was set on making an example of me. Plus he was one of Robinette’s cronies. He said I’d made ‘terroristic threats.’ So I went to prison. The worst part? Nedra’s no-account husband, Ed, and his sorry mama got that judge to give them custody of the boys while I was away. They only wanted the kids because the county gave ’em food stamps, which Ed sold to buy drugs.”
Conley knew bits of the rest of the story—how the two older boys had run away from their father, ended up committing petty crimes and being sent away to Florida’s notorious juvenile detention center in Marianna.
“I was away at boarding school, but I remember how upset G’mama was about what happened to Jason and Jerry,” she said.
“It’s a miracle they didn’t end up getting killed or worse at that hellhole,” Winnie said. “You know the state shut it down about ten years ago. As soon as I got out of prison, your granddaddy helped me get my boys back.”
“Despite all that, they turned out to be wonderful young men,” Conley said. “You should be so proud of that, Winnie.”
“No,” she said emphatically. “Anything they made of themselves was despite me messing up their lives. Those twenty months I was in prison? They were in their own prison, first living with Ed and then getting sent to Marianna. And that was all on me. Because I messed up. They suffered because of me.” Winnie dabbed at her eyes with the edge of the dish towel. “Now you can see why I’m not sorry Robinette died. I know the Bible says I’ve got to forgive, but it doesn’t say when I’ve got to forgive him, right?”
“Right.”
* * *
They heard the clank of the elevator rising from the ground floor, and when the door opened, Lorraine emerged, carrying her canvas tote of groceries.
“Don’t you start fussing at me for driving,” she warned as Conley took the bag and began unloading the sacks of sugar, Sure-Jell, and lemon. “Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be at work this morning?”
“Am I?”
Lorraine took an apron from a nail on the back of the pantry door and fastened it around her waist.
“After church yesterday, I reminded Grayson that she’d be a fool to let somebody as talented and hardworking as you to quit over a little family spat,” she said. “So she’s expecting you this morning. I never did get a chance to ask you last night about your research. Did you find out anything interesting?”
“I found out Symmes Robinette died a rich man,” Conley said. “Just from his last campaign finance reports, I saw that two years ago, he had six million in stocks and bonds. And real estate holdings including his house in town, the Gulf-front mansion on Sugar Key, and a town house in Georgetown.”
“My goodness,” G’mama said. She reached into a cabinet and brought out a blue graniteware stockpot, then dumped in the strawberries and the sugar.
“Symmes’s people were not wealthy. I mean, his stepfather was a manager at the plant, but they were middle class at best. How did he get so rich?”
Winnie snorted. “Blood money. He made all that money off legal fees from the railroad after they poisoned all of us. How much money do you think he got paid?”
“But that was so long ago,” Lorraine said. “He’s been in Congress all these years. I don’t think congressmen are allowed to make money outside of speaking fees and things like that. So he only had his salary, right?”
“Which was about 174,000 dollars a year,” Conley added.
“The rich get richer,” Winnie put in. “He probably got stock tips every time he went to dinner with those Washington lobbyists.”
“I found out he deeded a quail-hunting plantation with a farmhouse and eight hundred acres of land to his ex-wife a week before he died.”
“Toddie? He just up and gave her that farm? Oak Springs, over in Bronson County?” Lorraine had been cutting up a lemon. She put her paring knife on the cutting board. “That doesn’t sound like the Symmes Robinette I know. The man was so tight his shoes squeaked when he walked. He wouldn’t even buy an ad in the Beacon to congratulate the high school graduating class for the special section we did every May. And I know Toddie used to sew the children’s clothes—and hers too—because he didn’t see any need for them to have store-bought when she could make them so much cheaper.”
“Apparently, he had a change of heart. According to the Bronson County tax assessor’s office, that was a gift worth two million. And he didn’t stop there. He also deeded over his old house, around the block from your house, G’mama, to Charlie around the same time. The place was worth over half a million.”
Winnie turned on the burner under the pot of strawberries and added water, picking up a wooden spoon to stir. “A lot of good all that money does him now,” she said with a glint of malice in her eye. “Like my mamaw always said, you don’t ever see a Brink’s truck in a funeral procession.”
“No,” Lorraine said thoughtfully, taking the spoon out of the housekeeper’s hand. “But now Va
nessa Robinette is a very wealthy widow. And since she’s almost twenty years younger than Symmes, she’ll have plenty of time to spend all that loot he left behind. She knows how to spend it too. I’ve never seen her dressed in anything but the latest designer fashions, and I know for a fact that she gets a new Mercedes every other year.”
“G’mama!” Conley said, feigning shock. “I can’t believe you just said something that catty.”
“Well…” Lorraine had the grace to look a little ashamed. “Call me a narrow-minded, judgmental old biddy, but I guess I never did forgive her for sleeping with another woman’s husband. It sticks in my craw. It really does.”
28
As soon as Conley entered the Beacon’s outer office, Lillian King was at her side. “Heads up. You’ve got a visitor waiting to see you in Grayson’s office.”
“Who is it?”
“She just showed up here five minutes ago, demanding to see the manager. I don’t know her name, but she looks rich. And she’s definitely pissed about something.”
“Conley?” Grayson stuck her head out of her office door. “Need to see you.”
The visitor was seated on one end of the sofa in Grayson’s office. She was slender, dressed in black slacks and a sleeveless V-necked black top that showed off tanned, well-toned arms. She’d gone redhead since the last time Conley had seen her.
She’d had some work done too, Conley thought. The nose was shorter, the chin line sleeker, the lips were much plumper, but the changes were subtle. And expensive. The only jewelry she wore was a platinum wedding band and an enormous diamond solitaire engagement ring.
Grayson was clearly flustered. “Conley, you remember Vanessa Robinette, right?”
“Of course,” Conley said.
“Ladies, I’m going to have to leave you to chat, because I have a meeting to get to,” Grayson said. And then she fled the office as though pursued by a pack of rabid dogs.
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