Hello, Summer

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “He did have a cat,” Conley said. “In fact, don’t tell anybody, but when my friend and I went to his apartment, we found the cat, and we kind of kidnapped it because I didn’t want it to end up in a shelter. I don’t know what we’ll do with her. My family has a dog, and my friend claims he’s cat-phobic. We don’t even know the cat’s name.”

  “It’s Hi-Fi,” Kady said. “He told me that one time. Every cat he ever got, it was black, and he named it Hi-Fi. Predictable, right?”

  * * *

  “Can you transfer that call?” Conley asked Michael.

  “Sure. But, uh, I gotta give you the heads-up—I went ahead and filed a story about the shooting and everything. Because it’s such a huge story. Your name’s in it, because, like, you were there. The guy was trying to kidnap you. Grayson gave me the okay. She said you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. She’d interviewed dozens of crime victims over the years, but this was the first time she’d ended up in another reporter’s notebook. Of course, it had been her idea to call in Michael, so she could hardly complain that he’d done his job.

  “I’ll transfer her over.”

  The phone buzzed, and she picked up the receiver. “Hi, Selena.”

  “Conley! We just got a Google Alert from Silver Bay about the kidnapping and the shooting and the other thing. I’ve been trying to call your cell all day. Are you all right?”

  “Just a little shaken up,” Conley said. “My phone’s temporarily out of commission.”

  “Your colleague Michael? He filed some amazing photos. That one of the car with the porch roof falling down on it? And the body bag in the yard? Unbelievable.”

  “That’s my grandmother’s front porch,” she said quietly. “And her front yard.”

  “Oh my God. That makes it worse.”

  “It doesn’t get much worse than what happened this morning,” Conley agreed.

  “I hate to ask, but are you too shaken up to work? Because I’ve got a crew on the way down there. We want to do an on-camera interview with you, of course, but from that brief Michael filed earlier, I can tell there’s a lot more to this story. I mean, what? A rogue cop? And I understand he was stalking you?”

  Conley felt her face flush. “Yes.”

  “And the deejay, the one who got shot, trying to save your life, he was a fugitive?”

  “It seems so.”

  “I know I keep repeating myself, but this whole thing is so unbelievable. And coming so close on the heels of this whole Robinette story. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle of bad news down there.”

  “Yeah,” Conley agreed, remembering her complaint that nothing ever happened in Silver Bay.

  “It’s too late to get anything out of Atlanta now, but tomorrow I’m gonna fly into … Where’s the nearest airport?”

  “Probably Pensacola,” Conley said.

  “I’ll text you when I land, okay? Wait, you said your phone’s broken?”

  “Call the office like you just did,” Conley said. “I’ll be here.”

  “Unbelievable,” Selena said. “You’re like my shero. Can’t wait to see you again tomorrow.”

  She hung up the phone.

  “Well?” Michael had been unashamedly eavesdropping, but that was typical of every newsroom in which she’d ever worked.

  “She’s coming down tomorrow, and they’re bringing a camera crew,” Conley said slowly.

  He pounded his desktop. “I knew it. This story is your ticket out of here.”

  “What?”

  “You know, your ticket out. To the bigs. First, the Robinette thing, and now this? You said you were just here temporarily, right?”

  “Right. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to work for the network. That’s a big leap, you know.”

  “Not for you,” he said, ever loyal.

  “So. What have you found out about Walter Poppell?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Oh, man. So much. For one thing, he had a juvie record.”

  “Huh. My friend Skelly played football with him back in high school. He mentioned that Poppell got kicked off the team, but he said nobody ever knew why. It was hushed up. What did he do?”

  “Beat up a girl and sexually assaulted her.”

  “Oh my God,” Conley whispered. Her stomach lurched, and she was afraid she’d vomit again. She swallowed hard. “How does something like that get hushed up? How did he get hired as a cop?”

  “The girl’s mother reported it, and then the girl recanted,” Michael said. “He was sentenced to some kind of intervention program for a lesser charge, did some volunteer work, and his record was expunged. Juvie records are sealed in Florida anyway.”

  “Then how’d you hear about the rape allegation?”

  Michael grinned. “I have my sources. People in this town really didn’t like the guy. Guess that’s why he had to go to Bronson County to get a job.”

  “Did you talk to Merle Goggins over there?”

  “I called, then I drove over there to see him. Goggins wasn’t happy to see me, but after I pointed out that it was one of our reporters who’d been assaulted, he relented and gave me a quote.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Michael flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Shocked and disgusted that a former employee had betrayed the public trust. Recently discharged for dereliction of duty. Since juvenile records are sealed, he had no way of knowing about Poppell’s past. Like that.”

  “It’s better than nothing,” Conley pointed out, turning back to her own story.

  “Hey,” Michael said. “He said for me to tell you that he’s sorry. And I believe him. The dude’s not a friendly type, but he asked me to let him know if you need anything. At all. And that’s a direct quote. ‘Tell her anything she needs, at all, I’m here.’”

  60

  A VOICE IN THE NIGHT, LOCAL DEEJAY WAS AN ENIGMA

  By Conley Hawkins

  For fans like Winnie Churchwell, Silver Bay disc jockey Buddy Bright was a welcome guest in the kitchen, relaying the local news and weather reports and playing favorite rock music from the ’60s and ’70s during his popular Up All Night with Buddy Bright late-night shift. In high school football and baseball press boxes, he was the Man in Black, the familiar voice providing play-by-play commentary for the past six seasons.

  Melissa Padgett-Holland, a night-shift waitress at the Waffle House on State Route 28, knew him only as a regular customer. As soon as she saw his vintage white Corvette with the distinctive WORKING PRESS license plate pull up to the front of the restaurant in the early-morning hours, she’d put in his order for eggs over easy, crisp bacon, and grits. “Nice guy,” Joyner said. “Real easy to talk to; although he never said much about himself, he’d always ask about my kids. He’d talk to some of the other regulars here too. And he never left less than a ten-dollar tip.”

  Neal Evancho, station manager / owner of WSVR, said Bright showed up “outta nowhere” six years ago, asking for a job at the exact moment Evancho’s previous nighttime deejay departed without notice. Bright had no audition tapes or résumé, but Evancho said his new employee was obviously a seasoned pro. “I hired him on the spot.”

  Like most of Silver Bay, Evancho was shocked to learn of Bright’s murder on a quiet, leafy block of Felicity Street on Sunday morning.

  That shock was compounded when he learned that the amiable Buddy Bright was really a fugitive named Robert Breitweis, a disgraced Detroit deejay convicted of killing a Michigan teenager in an alcohol-fueled hit-and-run accident. Authorities there say Breitweis was working on a prisoner highway detail in 2008 when he simply walked away into obscurity.

  Over his years on the run, Breitweis bounced around small-market radio stations in the Midwest and the South, working under several assumed names, including Buddy Bright.

  The sixty-eight-year-old disc jockey was killed by a single gunshot fired by a disgruntled former Bronson County sheriff’s deputy as he rescued a local woman the d
eputy was attempting to abduct.

  I am that local woman. My name is Sarah Conley Hawkins. I was born and raised in Silver Bay, and I grew up in that house on Felicity Street. My great-grandfather founded The Silver Bay Beacon, and I am the fourth generation of my family to work in our family enterprise.

  Until Sunday morning, in the moment before he saved my life, I had never come face-to-face with the man we thought we knew as Buddy Bright.

  Brittany Michelle Pakowsky only met the man she knew as Robbie Breitweis once. At seventeen, the suburban Detroit teenager and some friends snuck into a hotel bar in Bloomfield Hills, where they encountered Breitweis, who’d earlier worked a live remote broadcast from a nearby auto dealership. It was December 1998, the week before Christmas.

  According to witnesses, Breitweis, who’d been drinking steadily most of the day, plied the girls with frozen daiquiris and invited them to accompany him to a private party. The teens declined his offer and were walking to their car when Breitweis, driving a white Corvette at a high rate of speed, struck Brittany Pakowsky in the hotel parking lot before driving away. The teenager died two days later.

  Marlene Pakowsky, Brittany’s mother, said she will never stop grieving the loss of her youngest daughter. She still lives in the home where Brittany grew up and keeps a small artificial Christmas tree in Brittany’s room, which she lights up every night, year-round.

  “I’m not glad he’s dead, because he got it easy,” Mrs. Pakowsky told me. “I prayed for years that he’d get caught so he’d have to rot in jail. You tell me he’s been out there, living, enjoying life, while my baby is cold in the grave all this time? I don’t know what to say.”

  Conley wrote the story in an adrenaline-fueled burst of creative energy, melding her harrowing first-person experience with facts and quotes and observations of an experience she couldn’t afford to forget.

  At four, she typed the last paragraph, and as she sat back in her chair, overcome with mental and physical exhaustion, she heard a faint mewling coming from the vicinity of her backpack.

  Michael whirled around on his chair. “What was that?”

  “Oh Lord, I completely forgot she was in there,” Conley said guiltily. “She’s been traumatized. I couldn’t leave her alone in that cat-carrier.” She picked up the backpack and brought out the squirming cat. “This is Hi-Fi.”

  Michael’s freckled face lit up as he reached for her. “A stowaway!”

  “She’s, uh, a rescue,” Conley said. “And I guess you could say she’s an orphan now.”

  She confessed the breaking-and-entering episode at Buddy Bright’s apartment and repeated her concern that the police, when they finally searched the apartment, would turn the cat over to an animal shelter.

  “What will you do with her?” Michael asked.

  “I’m not sure. I can’t take her home because of Opie, my grandmother’s dog. And my boyfriend claims to be cat phobic.”

  “You’ve got a boyfriend? Cool.”

  Conley felt herself blush as she realized she’d just referred to Skelly, out loud, as something other than a platonic friend.

  Michael placed the cat on his desktop, and she promptly curled up in a ball and fell back asleep. “Can I have her?”

  “You like cats?” She didn’t know a lot of millennial guys who were cat fanciers, but Michael continued to challenge her opinions about that generation.

  “Love ’em. We always had cats growing up. The place where I live now doesn’t allow pets, but I’m moving in with my girlfriend next weekend, and we’ve been talking about adopting a cat, so this would be perfect. I even like her name. Hi-Fi. Kind of retro, right?”

  “Very retro,” she assured him. “I’m glad you like the name, because if you didn’t, I’m afraid that would be a deal-breaker.”

  He picked the cat up and nuzzled her under his chin. “Awesome!”

  * * *

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Winnie said when Conley finally made it back to the Dunes. “Glad you made it before the storm came through.”

  The housekeeper and G’mama were sitting on the screened porch, looking out at the Gulf, where dark clouds hovered just at eye level.

  “You don’t know how true that is,” Conley said.

  “We saved you some supper,” G’mama said. “There’s fried chicken and butter beans on a plate on the stove, and Winnie’s potato salad in the icebox.”

  Conley shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m really not hungry.” She sat down on a wicker armchair beside her grandmother. “I’m sorry,” she started, but Lorraine shook her head.

  “Enough of that,” she said briskly. “Your sister sent me pictures. It’s an awful-looking mess, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I called my insurance agent, and he’s already sent an adjuster over there to take a look,” Lorraine said. “Tomorrow, we’ll get a contractor to give us some estimates for repairs.”

  “The whole front porch roof collapsed,” Conley said. “That car was going full speed when it hit. I’m afraid it probably damaged the foundation too.”

  G’mama waved away her concerns.”The only thing of real value in that house is standing right here in front of me. A little worse for wear, but alive. I don’t care about anything else, Sarah Conley. It’s just things. And things can be replaced.”

  She pointed out toward the horizon at the breeze blowing the sea oats. “We’re lucky to have a roof over our heads and beds to sleep in. And speaking of that,” she said, giving her granddaughter an appraising look, “your sister said that as soon as you got home, I should feed you and send you to bed.”

  “Who died and left her boss?” Conley joked. “Are you putting me in time-out for wrecking your house and beautiful yard?”

  “I’m putting you in time-out for working too hard. I’ll bet you haven’t even eaten today.”

  “Not true. Skelly fixed me this huge breakfast tortilla with eggs and bacon and potatoes. And he forced me to eat almost all of it.”

  “I tell you, Sarah, if you don’t snap that man up soon, I’m gonna steal him right out from under you,” Lorraine said.

  61

  It felt weirdly liberating and yet terrifying to be untethered to a cell phone as she drove to Bronson County on Monday morning. Conley kept glancing anxiously at the dashboard-mounted clip where her phone was usually anchored.

  When she walked into the sheriff’s office, she politely insisted that Merle Goggins would want to see her, in fact had requested her presence. The deputy working the desk looked unconvinced, but after a quick phone call, she was ushered into Goggins’s office.

  “Oh, uh, hi,” Goggins said. He pointed at her cheek, where an ugly palm-shaped bruise bloomed overnight. “That happen yesterday?”

  “Yes,” she said, sitting down.

  He winced.

  “You owe me,” she told the sheriff.

  “How do you figure?”

  “You hired a psychopath as a law enforcement officer. A mentally unbalanced bully who stalked and harassed and ultimately attempted to kill me.”

  “First off, I didn’t hire Poppell. I inherited him from my predecessor. I was in the process of trying to fire him the first time you encountered him,” Goggins said.

  “Did you know he had a juvenile record? Of violent sexual assault?”

  Goggins rubbed his chin nervously. “You know juvenile records are sealed in this state. The first I heard of this was when I read that story in the Beacon’s digital edition this morning.”

  “Poppell blamed me for getting fired,” Conley said. “What was the cause?”

  “Dereliction of duty was the official cause. Unofficially, it was chronic laziness and general dumb-assery.”

  “My sister, who is a lawyer, says we should sue you, individually, and the county,” Conley said, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

  “Christ,” Goggins muttered. “The county attorney would have my ass if he knew I was talking to you right now.” He got up and paced a
round the small office, stopping to wipe an invisible speck of dust from one of the picture frames. “I told that kid reporter, Torpy, I told him to tell you I feel terrible about Poppell. What he did to you. I’ve got a daughter. She’s only fifteen, but if something like that happened to her?” He shook his head. “But that’s all I can say about this mess. You understand? If the lawyers get involved, it’ll be real bad.”

  “I don’t want to sue you,” Conley said.

  “No? You don’t want your pound of flesh?”

  “I don’t want to spend years hashing it over, talking about it and reliving the worst night of my life,” Conley said. “Poppell’s dead. And I guess I believe you when you say you didn’t know about his history.”

  Goggins raised his right hand, palm out. “Swear to God, I’d have fired him my first day in office if I’d known what a sick bastard he was. So if you don’t want to sue, why are you here?”

  “Just doing my job,” Conley said lightly. “I need to know where you are with the Robinette investigation. You said at the funeral that the medical examiner found a toxic combination of fentanyl and alcohol in his system. Does that mean you suspect foul play?”

  “You think you’re gonna bargain information in return for a promise not to sue me?” Goggins asked, chuckling. “Like this is some kind of bartering situation?”

  “Not at all. I’m a journalist. You’re in law enforcement. Congressman Robinette’s death is a matter of public interest. Now what’s the story?”

  “Off the record?”

  “I’d prefer to be on the record.”

  He shrugged. “Then it’s still under investigation.”

  “Okay, tell me what’s not under investigation.”

  “He had a shitload of fentanyl in his system. But he was being treated for terminal cancer, and he had a transdermal pain patch, which was prescribed by his doctor.”

  “Not news,” Conley said. “You already told me he was dead when he hit the deer. And that he had a blood alcohol level of .06.”

  “It’s in the medical examiner’s report, but that still hasn’t been released yet, so you can’t say I was the source,” Goggins cautioned.