And boy, did crack move in. And heroin. And alcohol. And to some extent crystal meth, though the close quarters of these mill houses made brewing the noxious mix almost certain to grab the attention of neighbors — and police. Far more often, the meth lab busts occurred in the countryside south of Grambling, where a house might not have a neighbor for half a mile or more.
Randall Mill, once queen of the crescent, was now as bad as it got. Whereas some of Grambling’s old manufacturing mills had become hot condominium properties — including a few owned by Heath Resnick — the Randall plant had burned. All that remained was a single blackened smokestack, surrounded by a massive swath of cracked concrete. Local skateboarders had built makeshift wooden ramps, but plans to make it a more commercial establishment failed repeatedly. Seems skateboarders weren’t the most able businessmen.
Now Randall was broken, defeated, weary. The original residents had died, in many cases leaving their properties to children who no longer lived in Grambling. The mill houses with their distinctive four-room floor plans might be rented, or they might be abandoned. Crack dealers moved freely through both. Power and running water were optional. Boarded-up windows and signs announcing “condemned” were no guarantee that a house was empty.
It was depressing. Or it was, until Branigan entered the path toward the Garner Bridge that she and Liam had walked last night. Then “depressing” took on a whole new meaning.
She walked past a garbage heap, jumping back when she heard a hiss from its depths. A snake? A possum? She didn’t wait to find out.
Hurrying past in unsuitable sandals, she reached the leafy river birch that made a feeble attempt to conceal the opening to this city under the bridge. Once she rounded the tree, the view opened — numerous tents, open fire pits, another garbage pile and a stack of firewood left over from winter. A pit bull the exact color of the packed red mud was chained to a wooden doghouse. That house always raised the eyebrows of Liam’s visitors: So the dog has a house, but his owners don’t? The dog opened one eye in the afternoon heat, but decided Branigan wasn’t worth a bark. He closed it again.
She was already inside the camp when she realized she didn’t know what she was doing. Did these people know Davison? She peered over a tent and saw three men sitting in rusting beach chairs around a cold fire pit. To her relief, she recognized Malachi.
She walked over, speaking softly, aware she was entering someone’s home.
“Mr Martin? I’m Branigan? From breakfast at Jericho Road?”
Malachi looked up and gave, if not a smile, at least an acknowledgment. “Yes, ma’am. I remember. Gramblin’ Rambler.”
“I’m here looking for my brother. Davison Powers?”
If the men were surprised, they didn’t show it.
“Skinny white dude? Look kinda like you?”
“Yes. Do you know where he is?”
“Rita let him stay in her place,” Malachi said, swiveling to point to a rickety plyboard structure at the top of the incline. “Guess he’s still asleep.”
She looked at her watch: 3:45 p.m. Sheesh. And Rita? Could there be more than one homeless Rita?
“Um, how do I get up there?” Branigan asked, eyeing the incline.
“Well, not in those shoes,” said one of Malachi’s buddies.
She laughed along with them. “Clearly you gentlemen haven’t heard of Ginger Rogers. She did everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels and backwards.” To her relief, the men laughed again. All but Malachi, who sat with a bemused expression.
Branigan kicked off her sandals. She wanted to leave her purse as well, but thought it unwise. Gripping it under one arm, she started to creep up the concrete incline sideways, the way Liam had indicated that residents reached the ledge.
The men watched, snickering. Finally Malachi stood. “Ma’am, that’s gon’ take you all day. Lemme get ’im.”
Branigan was only a quarter of the way up, and looked at Malachi gratefully. He wore rubber-soled athletic shoes, and passed her quickly, his feet crossing and recrossing. If he’d been on level ground, he would have been line dancing.
He arrived at the structure with its cut-out window covered in plastic, and knocked gently on the door. “Dude,” he said, “your sister want you.”
The door opened almost immediately, and Davison’s stubbled face appeared, slack with sleep. “Branigan?”
He took in Malachi, then his sister, barefoot, thirty feet below, and laughed. “I’ll meet you down there,” he said, ducking back inside.
Two minutes later, Davison joined her on the ground, a worn, military knapsack slung over one shoulder. “What’s up?” he said. She could smell alcohol, not on his breath, but through his pores. He hadn’t been drinking today, she surmised, but had been drinking heavily in the days preceding.
“I want to hear about rehab,” she said.
“The gospel mission can take me Monday. They start a new group every week.”
It was only Tuesday. “Where are you going to stay ’til then?”
“You’re lookin’ at it. Liam didn’t have an open bed.”
At that moment, the woman from Ramsey Resnick’s drugstore stepped past the birch and into the shade provided by the bridge. She looked from Davison to Branigan. “Wha’s ol’ church lady doin’ here?”
“Church lady? Branigan?” Davison looked bewildered. “Rita, this is my sister, Branigan. She’s a reporter.”
Branigan closed her eyes, feeling physical revulsion at the thought of her brother and this woman.
“Yo’ sistah?” she cackled. “Damn. She don’t wanna stay with us too, does she?”
“No,” Branigan said emphatically. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Liam says I have to be detoxed by Monday, or the mission won’t let me in,” Davison said.
She looked at him, looked beneath the matted hair and the dirt-streaked face, looked past the stale scent of alcohol emanating from his pores, looked at the brother who, for so many years, had been her shadow self. Clearly he hadn’t taken up Liam on his offer of a shower.
“Can you do that here?”
“I can try.”
She didn’t know she was going to say it until the words came out. “Why don’t you come back to the farm with me? We’ll keep you sober ’til Monday.”
Davison and Rita had a whispered conversation before he left. She didn’t look happy that he was leaving. She thrust a dirty finger at his chest several times, her face contorted angrily as she whispered and pointed to her shack. He finally shrugged and walked away.
Branigan needed to get back to work, so she dropped Davison at an outdoor table at Bea’s with enough money for a sandwich and coffee. She dreaded telling her mom and dad what she was doing. After Davison dropped out of college, they had taken him in countless times. They paid $40,000 for a four-month rehab ranch in Utah, $60,000 for a six-month stay in New Mexico. After each, he moved in with them — and began using.
Finally, on a Saturday morning twelve years ago, they’d had enough of the heartbreak. “We will support you in recovery,” they told him in the language they’d all learned so well. “But we will no longer support your addiction. You cannot live here.”
He had gone to Branigan’s apartment before hitting the road. She gave him all the cash she had on hand — $35 — but had little hope it would be used for anything other than beer or crack. After closing the door in his face, she went to her bedroom and cried off and on for twenty-four hours.
For weeks afterward, her chest felt tight, as if there were a vise squeezing her lungs. Or more likely, her heart. She refused her parents’ invitations to dinner, regretful that she was adding to their hurt but unable to face her co-conspirators in this awful decision. The only time she didn’t feel like crying was when she was working.
So she worked.
She got back to the newsroom and glanced at the large desk calendar she kept as a backup to her iPad. Only then did she realize what she’d done: the word BEACH
was written in large capital letters across Friday, June 5. She wasn’t even going to be at the farm this weekend.
“Oh, no!” she said, laying her head on her desk. “Now what am I gonna do?”
Could she leave Davison at the farm alone? No. To his mind the place was full of great drunken memories. Could she take him with her? She didn’t want to. But maybe he and Cleo could stay at the beach house while she conducted interviews. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than leaving him under the bridge where the crack and alcohol flowed freely.
She updated an online story about a fundraiser for the public library. She answered email, confirming interviews with Mrs Resnick’s daughter at nearby Lake Hartwell, then her granddaughters in Edisto and Isle of Palms.
She called the South Carolina Department of Corrections, and left a message for the public information officer, asking if Billy Shepherd was still in prison. Then she called Liam to ask if he’d gotten any leads on the Resnick case.
“Yes and no,” he said. “I brought it up at this morning’s meeting. Sixteen of our guys were there — which is rare. More are usually working third shift and I don’t ask them to wake up. Anyway, only six remotely knew what I was talking about. Four remembered the story from news accounts back then. But two — Dontegan and Jess — said they’d heard vague rumors over the years. Let me get my notes.” Branigan heard scratching as Liam searched his desk, then a yelp and a curse.
“Why, Saint Liam, what did you do?”
“Knocked my coffee over.”
“Sorry.”
“I do that at least once a day. Okay, here you go. Jess said that a man named Max Brody — he’s a bad alcoholic — got drunk one night and was babbling that ‘this evening’s drunk is courtesy of an old lady who had the good taste to get stabbed’.”
“Those were his exact words?” She began scribbling. “‘This evening’s drunk is courtesy of an old lady who had the good taste to get stabbed’?”
“Yeah, as well as Jess could remember, anyway.”
“When was this?”
“Don’t know.”
“Okay, I’ll need to talk to Jess and this Max Brody. What did Dontegan say?”
“Dontegan said he’d heard a woman talking about a lady who got murdered downtown, but the woman was drunk and he couldn’t make much sense of it. I pressed him, and he said it was a homeless woman who eats here a lot. Rita.”
Rita again?
“Can you describe her?” Branigan asked.
“Tiny. In her forties, but looks sixty. White, horribly sun-damaged and wrinkled. Washed-out blond hair. She’s a prostitute and a bad alcoholic and, from the look of her teeth, a meth addict. She’s been impossible for us to reach out to.”
“I’ve met her.”
“How?”
“I ran into her on Main Street. Pretty drunk. And Davison stayed in her shack under the bridge last night.”
“Not good. No telling what kind of diseases she has.”
“I know. I’m taking him to the farm then the beach with me until he can get into the mission on Monday.”
“Hmm. Are you sure, Brani G?”
“No, not at all.”
He laughed. “As Mom would say, ‘Bless your heart.’”
“Yes, it needs blessing,” she agreed.
* * *
She worked for another hour. Before heading to Bea’s to pick up Davison, she drove to the Grambling Farmers’ Market, an open-air, tin-roofed series of stalls located several blocks off South Main. Operating daily nine months a year, it was the spot to get fresh flowers and vegetables, as well as home-baked breads, jams, milk, eggs, cheese and other goodies from local farmers.
Branigan loved the smell of the place, due primarily to the aromatic cantaloupes in a giant bin next to the watermelons. One August in Detroit, she’d stumbled into a farmers’ market. Walking down its concrete-floored aisle, she was suddenly transported to Gran and Pa’s farmhouse. Her heart swelled, and she looked around to see what had brought on the wave of homesickness. Sure enough, it was cantaloupes, their heady scent mimicking the smell of Gran’s kitchen. After that, she spent many a Saturday wandering the aisles of the giant market, always starting and ending by the melons. More than once, she went back to her apartment and booked a flight home.
Now she enjoyed a sniff, but she had arranged for the same smell to waft through her kitchen window. She selected half a pound of green beans to cook for Davison, then picked up some strawberries as well. She handed a ten-dollar bill to the clerk, a woman with a tight brown perm and fat arms straining at a sleeveless blouse. The woman took the bill, glancing behind Branigan. She felt an unfamiliar prickle on the back of her neck.
She turned, but no one was there.
Turning back to the woman for change, Branigan saw her eyes dart behind her again.
“What?” she asked.
“Them homeless,” the clerk muttered.
Branigan glanced back and saw a couple standing in the shade just inside the shed, telltale knapsacks on their backs. The woman caught Branigan’s eye and smiled. Branigan saw the man edge away from his partner, toward the parking lot.
“They gonna ask you for money,” the clerk said. “Can’t keep ’em away.”
“I thought you provided leftover produce at the end of the day.”
“We do. They’s a crate over there we fill with stuff too ripe to sell. It can get pretty full around 6 o’clock.”
“Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for.”
The clerk looked at Branigan skeptically. “Yeah, you come tell me that after you get to your car.”
Branigan gathered her produce and purse. She didn’t feel like being panhandled, so she walked down the shed’s interior, pretending to look at the marigolds and petunias. When she could see her Civic through the open side, she veered and made straight for it.
As she pressed her remote entry button, the homeless woman stepped from the shade, startling her. Branigan looked around for the woman’s partner, but didn’t see him. She wondered if he was behind her, but she didn’t want the woman to catch her looking.
The woman was short, with thin legs and a protruding stomach. She wore a yellow kerchief over dyed black hair. Tattoos ran up both arms. She smiled, revealing a missing eyetooth.
She started right in. “Ma’am, my husband and I just arrived in town for construction jobs, but my cousin, who was supposed to hire us, never picked us up from the bus station, and now we’re stranded. Could you give us a few dollars for a motel room tonight? Tomorrow, we’ll work day labor and get a room and bus tickets home.”
Branigan listened politely, dread settling in her stomach. It would be easy to give the woman a few dollars, but Liam had convinced her it was the wrong thing to do. Panhandling was the method for getting drugs and alcohol, he said, almost never meals and shelter.
“Have you been to the Salvation Army or the Rescue Mission?” she asked. “They have women’s shelters.”
“You have to wait in line,” the woman said smoothly, “and we couldn’t, because we were trying to find work.”
“I’m sorry, but no,” Branigan said. “I give to the Rescue Mission and Jericho Road. They’re set up to help.”
“We’ll go there tomorrow,” the woman said, a whine creeping into her voice, “but we need enough money to eat and get a motel room tonight.”
“Jericho Road is serving dinner,” Branigan said, getting into the Civic and feeling terrible. She shut the car door, but the woman didn’t stop talking. Since the window was down an inch, she could hear her continuing monologue.
“We’re not asking you to pay the whole $39 for a room, just $5 or $10.” The smile remained fixed on her face, but it was looking more like a grimace. The woman’s partner suddenly loomed in Branigan’s rearview mirror, blocking her exit. She wanted to lock her doors, but was embarrassed for them to hear the click. “You never know when you might need help yourself.”
Branigan looked up sharply to see the woman’s dar
k eyes boring into hers. Did she really say that? Her discomfort rising, she glanced to see if anyone else was around.
At that moment, a farmer came out of the market, carrying a load of unsold corn that he placed in his truck bed. He looked silently from the woman to the man. Without a word, they turned and hurried across the parking lot. The farmer met Branigan’s eyes, gave an almost imperceptible nod, and walked back into the market.
Unsettled by the encounter, Branigan drove quickly to Bea’s, unsure if she was feeling guilt or menace. She wanted to help people, but didn’t want to play into their scams.
She found Davison where she’d left him, at an outdoor table with an iced tea and a Rambler. “Ready to go?”
“Ready,” he said, standing to stretch.
“How are you set for clothes?”
“I’d love to chuck everything in this backpack.”
“Want to run by Dad’s and get some things?”
“No, I don’t think I’m ready for that. Could we go to the Salvation Army store? I have a little money.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Day labor.”
She drove to the thrift store located a few blocks from Jericho Road. The Salvation Army kept it clean and well ordered so that customers from the Eastside sought it out. Charlie and Chan had put together Halloween costumes here. Davison and Branigan entered the cavernous space. He headed to the men’s clothes racks, and she found a table stacked with paperbacks. She rummaged idly until she found a novel by Anita Shreve she hadn’t read, and seized it for a dollar. She was searching for another when she heard her name. She jumped, and looked up to see Malachi Martin on the other side of the table. He had come up so quietly she hadn’t heard him.
“You still workin’ on a story about that hit-and-run?” he asked.
The Cantaloupe Thief Page 8