The Edge of the Gulf

by Hadley Hury

The principal put her hand on the teacher’s upper arm. “There’s been an accident.”

  As though in a seizure, the teacher bent nearly double toward the floor. The two women reached down to support her as her limp body jolted with shuddering sobs.

  The camera moved in for a close-up. A grimace dissolving in tears. Strands of red hair plastered on the cheek. Glasses dangling madly from one ear.

  The screen went black and the sound system sputtered into silence.

  He turned to look up at the projection booth but apparently there was no one there.

  ***

  Though it felt as if he’d been asleep for hours, it had only been minutes. His legs were like cement when he stood up, but he got his bearings and headed over to the kitchen where he poured out a second small scotch and grabbed an ice cube.

  He walked down the hall and into the guestroom. He turned on the bedside lamp. He looked first in the waste can near the desk and then in the one in the bathroom. There were several wadded tissues in each. He opened the closet door and looked at the few things they had brought. He opened the overnight case and the shoulder bag they’d had with them when they’d come back from Tallahassee. In the bathroom again he went through her small beaded cosmetics bag and his Moroccan leather dop kit.

  He looked in the mirror. It was that haggard man in the middle of the night again. The brow furrowed, green eyes streaked with red and sagging in pinched sacks of bruised-looking skin, the hair a tangle of reddish brown and grey. The man he’d thought had gone away.

  He leaned forward, his arms on either side of the sink. His face was only inches from the glass but he was blind with the old upsurge of dank emotions. What seemed an inescapable pain that kept compounding. With all the not-knowing of life. The not being able ever to do enough. With everyone going away and leaving him. With Kate. With Charlie. With fearing that that he would never want to reach out to anyone ever again and knowing that if he ever did he would be afraid to.

  ***

  The mirror receded even farther and for the millionth time he saw Kate’s face. That early spring morning more than two years before that had become a fixed and eternal moment. Sitting beside him on the loveseat that flanked the small round table in the breakfast room. Talking idly about something in the paper. Laughing a low morning laugh. He had gotten up for more coffee. Only steps away. When he turned back, she had a look of astonishment on her face. She opened her lips as if to speak but instead suddenly sagged and fell forward heavily. Kneeling beside her, he looked up into her face. All in a handful of seconds.

  But, already, she was no longer there. A small rivulet of blood inched from the crevice of her lip. Her jaw had hit the edge of the table. He called 911 and while he waited, rocking her, looking into her sightless eyes he had said over and over and over, Oh, sweetie, you’ve hurt your lip, your beautiful lip, your lip, your lip….

  The paramedics were probably on the scene within eight or nine minutes, but those minutes had already become eternity. He propped her gently against the sofa to let them in and told her he would be back in a second. But he knew that when they reentered that room she would not be there. An aneurysm, he would later learn. No pain, the doctor assured him. Immediate. It didn’t matter. Her beautiful lip was bleeding, Kate’s lip was bleeding. The doctor. Aneurysm. Immediate. All that would come and go. Come and go.

  But her beautiful lip was bleeding. Her lip would always be bleeding…

  ***

  His face slowly swam back into view.

  When it did he no longer saw a face of grief but one of rage. Just as the tears welled suddenly from his staring eyes, toppled over the red bottom lids, and coursed down to the corners of his lips, he thought suddenly of Sydney, of how, on entering Charlie’s room during the past few days, he had often found her with her eyes glistening with tears. Never actually in the act of crying. Never an obvious show, never an overtly manipulative performance—but, frequently, the suggestion of having cried.

  That strained, reddish look in the whites of eyes that have been staring, held open, for awhile. Without blinking.

  In an instant he was crouching beside the waste can. He couldn’t believe it—and neither could Moon, who had awakened and now joined him—but he was pulling out the tissues, examining each one closely. There were seven or eight. Most of them were still slightly damp. But there was no sign of anything like makeup. Or mucus. He lifted each one close to his nostrils and breathed deeply, over and over again.

  He went out to the waste can by the desk and did the same thing.

  Of course he couldn’t be sure.

  But he knew something about tears. And in the slight, rather uniform moistness that remained in the wadded tissues there didn’t seem to be the faintest trace of salt.

  He set the alarm for six.

  Chapter 37

  “We need to talk,” he said to Libby. “Now. I wanted to call last night but knew you needed the sleep.”

  “Same here. I’m just pouring coffee and was about to reach for the phone.”

  “They’ll be here within the hour. I’m calling Camilla and will be right over.”

  ***

  By seven-thirty they had been through one pot of strong coffee, and were working on another of decaffeinated, along with an assortment of fruit, Susie’s oatmeal cookies, and Victor’s cold quiche Lorraine. They sat in various chairs, they moved around, they went onto the screened porch and came back in. Their few hours of rest had only fueled their sense of frustration, and they fell onto the food and coffee as though girding for a fight.

  They had been impressed and rather amazed at Hudson’s account of his odd late-night search but not, in the end, surprised.

  “I have tried over and over to tell myself that they’re just shallow and that that’s why we just don’t like them,” said Libby. “At first I found myself fighting some feeling of prejudice about Chaz. I thought it was an unfair expectation. Peter Cullen was such a lovely man and he and Charlie cared deeply for one another.”

  “All I can tell you,” said Hudson, “is that I think she is a rare actress, but that she is an actress, and that she’s acting now.”

  But why? For what reason?

  “They have their lives before them, shallow or not,” he reasoned aloud. “Chaz has kicked his addiction problems, they apparently love one another, have decent incomes, have some decent sort of inheritance no doubt from Chaz’s father, and were just given some substantial monetary gift by Charlie and the promise of one of the best houses on the Gulf Coast.”

  ***

  In the course of their conversation, Camilla seemed to Hudson to have become somewhat withdrawn and, more than simply fatigued, preoccupied. When she finally spoke again, she reminded him of himself at midnight, her thoughts and her voice disconnected from her body. She was oblivious of the coffee cup she had been holding poised before her for the past three or four minutes.

  “There’s just the one computer in the office,” she said quietly. I’m about to order a new one. Charlie took the old one home.” She smiled. “You know he went hi-tech kicking and screaming. He got competent at what he needed most but had become fond over the past year of joking, ‘Hey, I’m retired, I don’t have to learn that.’ He’d been disking the hard drive files he wanted to take home.

  “Three or four weeks ago, I was doing some bills and correspondence. I wanted to check something in a note I’d trashed. Instead I pulled up a letter Charlie had trashed but not yet emptied. It was brief and I suppose I sort of took it in before I realized that it wasn’t what I was looking for, and possibly not for my eyes. I put it on a disk with a couple of other documents he seemed to have missed on the desktop and put it aside for him. I remembered it for the first time this morning when I was dressing to come over.”

  She paused, finally taking a sip from her cup and putting it down. “I decided that, now, it was for my eyes. I stopped by the office on my way over and read it again. It’s only a couple of paragraphs, a few lines each, to his
attorney, Daniel Gardiner, who’s been in London for six months on an exchange program with a firm his own does business with. It simply says that he hopes it’s been interesting and fun.”

  She looked at Hudson and then at Libby. “And that as soon as he gets back in a few weeks he wants to get together and go over some changes to his will.”

  “The house? Maybe something else along with what we all assumed was a nice check the other night,” said Libby. “I wondered if Charlie might not be setting up some sort of trust to supplement whatever Chaz may have from his parents.”

  “That was my first thought,” said Camilla, but her tone sounded unconvinced.

  Libby sat down on the sofa heavily. A suddenly old woman, thought Hudson, weary to the bone, the sides of her mouth drooping. She looked out through the tall floor-to-ceiling windows into her garden.

  “None of which can possibly have anything to do with this Lukerson nut,” said Hudson.

  Camilla nodded. “That was my second thought.”

  Libby turned back to them, as though she had just remembered they were there.

  “I know that Peter Cullen was in Charlie’s will. He mentioned something once. But I have no idea in what way. And I don’t know what he would’ve done about that since Peter’s death four months ago. And the only other thing I know is that he’s made a passing reference or two to the fact that he’s making really sizeable endowments to a couple of the organizations he’s worked with. The child abuse shelter and the literacy council. And to the outreach programs of the diocese.”

  “And we know Chaz and Sydney are well provided for,” said Hudson. “And that you,” he said to Camilla, “and your group are buying the 26-A and the Blue Bar.”

  “Yes. I’ll be the majority partner, Fentry and Victor together will hold thirty-five percent, and Charlie’s keeping five. Charlie’s been edging toward the door these past few months. We talked about it again just a couple of weeks ago and were planning to do the paperwork as soon as his attorney gets back.”

  “Could any of that be in jeopardy now?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Was anyone unhappy about the plan?”

  “I think Terry Main’s nose may have been a little out of joint when Charlie first told him. They’d never discussed it but I had the feeling that Terry may have had some notion that he’d have a chance at it. Charlie asked me if he could assure him that he could continue as manager.”

  “And you said…?”

  “I said yes. It might not have been my first choice. Oh, he’s a fine manager. I’ve just never, well, warmed to him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps that I never know what he’s thinking. Of course I haven’t had that much reason to get over to the bar very often. If he was disappointed, though, he seems to have gotten over it. When we are together, I don’t sense any personal resentment. It’s a perfectly all right professional relationship.”

  They sat for a long while in silence.

  Finally, Hudson got up and walked slowly to the end of the room and back.

  “What about that land?” he asked.

  “No idea,” said Camilla.

  “No,” said Libby. “I suppose Brad and I have assumed for some time that that’s why he’s really retiring now. To make sure that it’s handled exactly the way he wants it. Something respectful and low-key. A small lodge, or a few really nice cottages, maybe. He wants people to enjoy it, but he doesn’t want it ruined. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t leave it as a conservancy or something like that.”

  “And it’s worth millions?” asked Hudson.

  “Brad has guessed the land could bring forty to sixty, but that if you had a major stake in some sort of heavy development that would easily increase to as high as a hundred.”

  “Have you told Brad about Charlie?” asked Camilla.

  “No,” said Libby. “No I haven’t. I wish he were here. But…” she shook her head, “you have no idea what these three weeks in Montana with his old buddies mean to him. I go gallivanting around all the time and he’s so wonderful about it. I want him to have this time. I just don’t have the heart to tell him. He’ll have to know soon enough.”

  The three of them sat staring at one another for a very long time.

  “So until Charlie made whatever changes he was planning for his will—who would inherit the property?” Hudson asked.

  “Some of it, at least, would have gone to Peter,” said Libby. “For all we know, he may even have owned parcels of it or held some of it jointly. And Charlie very well may have already designated all or some of it as a preserve or wilderness trust or whatever.”

  “We just can’t know, can we?” asked Camilla.

  Libby rose from the sofa, slowly, leaning for support on the arm. Hudson noticed, however, that the glint was back in her eye.

  “Let’s not say that just yet.”

  She went over to her old burled walnut writing desk, situated herself in the chair, put on her half-glasses, and pulled a small book out of the drawer.

  “Dan Gardiner’s mother was my best friend. He’s probably just about you all’s age and I can see him sitting right where you two are now about thirty-some years ago eating my peanut butter cookies.”

  She called his firm in Destin and got a number. “There’s attorney-client confidentiality, of course,” she muttered to herself as she hung up the phone. Then she looked over her glasses at them. “But when Danny hears what’s happened to Charlie, he’ll tell his Aunt Libby what we want to know.”

  “What time is it in London?”

  Chapter 38

  When Hudson arrived at the hospital he found the usually unemotive Victor in a virtually unrecognizable state. He kept watch over Charlie like a gentle giant, his large, muscular frame leaning ardently forward from the edge of the small armchair, Charlie’s hand completely covered in both of his own. As Hudson approached, he could hear the sonorous voice with its Aussie syllables approaching something like fervor.

  “At’s it, my man, c’mon Charlie, c’mon, we’re waitin’ on ya.”

  Hearing Hudson, his head turned quickly, the short blond pony tail swinging nearly horizontal for a moment. Almost always unrelievedly deadpan, Victor’s face was now ablaze like a six-year-old finding his heart’s desire on Christmas morning.

  “He moved his hand!” he grinned. “About twenty minutes ago. I was reading the newspaper to him and I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was this hand—his left. It moved and then a few seconds later it moved again. It wasn’t a tremor. He moved his fingers and flexed a bit.” He leaned closer. “You moved it, right, Charlie?”

  They talked for a few minutes until Victor rather reluctantly stood. Without ever having released it, he bent over and placed Charlie’s hand in Hudson’s as he might a small injured bird.

  “Well, here you go.”

  ***

  For the next four hours, Hudson held Charlie’s hand. Or rubbed it, or squeezed it, or gently manipulated the fingers. He stood from time to time and went to the other side of the bed to do the same with his right hand. Very lightly he massaged his forearms and shoulders, as much as the IVs and tubes and bandages allowed. He talked to him. He read to him. He read from magazines. An old U.S. News and World Report, the current New Yorker. He read some homework, Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. He read some poetry that he selected from an anthology, including one he’d never read before by Jorge Luis Borges titled “Plainness.”

  When his voice became hoarse, he placed the lightweight headset on Charlie’s ears and played a couple of his favorite CDs.

  As he watched his friend’s face, his arms and hands, hoping for the slightest sign, he went over and over again both the frustrations and the frightening progress of the morning’s conversations.

  Just before he’d had to leave for the hospital, Dan Gardiner had returned Libby’s call. He was stunned to hear her news but wasted no time in telling her what he could.

  He had
received Charlie’s letter about a month before and had made a calendar note to call as soon as he got back. He had no idea what changes he intended to the will. As it currently stood, the entire tract of eighty-five acres east of Seagrove would accrue to the estate of his cousin Peter Cullen and, unless the will were altered before Charlie’s death, would pass to his heirs.

  “He has one son, Charlie’s namesake, I believe?”

  “Yes,” Libby had said. She had thanked him and cut short his baffled questions. “You know that you can trust me with this information, Dan. I won’t abuse your confidence and you can trust that Charlie would want me to know this. I promise I’ll be in touch soon. Thank you again.”

  ***

  Camilla was to come at two, and Hudson grew anxious for her arrival.

  He felt as though he might rip apart. Part of him seemed connected at least as directly to Charlie as any one of the tubes that webbed his upper body and pierced his wrists. But another part of him wanted to be out doing something. Exactly what, he wasn’t yet certain, but in his gut, he knew that this nightmare wasn’t over.

  It had expanded.

  How could Sydney and Chaz possibly know, if his own attorney didn’t, that Charlie intended any changes to his will beyond leaving them his house and some extremely generous financial settlement? People didn’t casually murder their relatives on the possibility that they might inherit quite substantially but not entirely. And even if they could, indeed, somehow know that he was planning to dispose of the land otherwise, perhaps, as Libby posed, as a low-development resort or even a wilderness preserve, what possible connection could the svelte young Cullens have to somebody like Lukerson?

  ***

  When Camilla got there, he didn’t leave.

  At 2:25, Hudson moistened Charlie’s lips with some crushed ice in a paper towel and then rubbed a little Carmex on them. Camilla sat holding his left hand, lightly scratching the palm with her fingertips.

  Hudson walked across the room to throw the towel away and as soon as he turned back Charlie opened his eyes.