by Bret Lott
But then it stopped, the vehicle all the way in. The brake lights went out, the garage door started down.
Unc stood, started for the door. I turned from the window, said, “You didn’t know she was gone, did you?”
He stopped inside the doorway, one hand to the jamb. He stood there a second, said, “Guess I must’ve dozed off downstairs earlier.” He paused. “Can’t keep track of everything, now can I?”
He looked back over his shoulder at me, and I could see a sort of half smile on his face. “But now she’s home,” he said, “you see if you can’t smell a shooting range on her. Even if it’s slathered in that lavender hand lotion she’s all the time putting on.” He tapped the doorjamb once, stepped on into the library. “Because I’m betting that’s where she’s been, no matter what camouflage she brings in with her.”
Her camo: a roast chicken, gallon of milk, bag salad, and loaf of bread.
And a perkiness off the Richter scale.
“Hello, sleepyheads!” she nearly shouted on her way in the door off the breezeway between the kitchen and the garage. I was in the foyer, Unc already coming through the sitting room next to the kitchen, and I heard plastic grocery sacks settling on the island in there, then Mom call out, “Mama Bear’s brought home dinner!”
By the time I made it in there she had the chicken in its plastic container out of one Bi-Lo grocery sack, was pulling the milk out of another. “Took advantage of you boys and your naptime to go over and see Deb Bloom at the Med U. She’s senior pediatric nurse-practitioner over there now, and today she—”
She stopped, looked up at us, quiet and side by side across the island from her. “What?” she said, and smiled, tilted her head, finished peeling the sack from the milk jug. She turned to the refrigerator door, pulled it open, her back to us now. “You two know Deb Bloom. She was my buddy back when I was working down there. My shift supervisor for three years.”
She’d changed clothes since last night—or this morning—from that white turtleneck and blue sweater to a white cotton blouse a little snug on her, snug enough so that with her back to me I could tell she wasn’t wearing that holster. She set the milk on the shelf inside the door, then turned, reached for the bag salad. “Deb’s the boss lady up there now and I just wanted to pop in, give her a big hug for all the hard work she’s had to go through all this while.”
She opened the crisper drawer, dropped in the salad, then closed the refrigerator, turned back to us. “You know Deb,” she said, still with that smile. “Deb Bloom. You met her a few times when you were little, Huger. Over at the Med U.” She nodded.
Maybe it was nothing more than the power of suggestion, or maybe it was the truth. But I thought I could smell something on her, the smallest tinge of an idea of the sharp edge of smoke, nothing more than a match strike three days ago, a burnt-out sparkler from last Fourth of July. But it was there, buried beneath that lavender always on her.
I said, “I remember her,” and nodded, smiled, though I couldn’t for the life of me bring anything to mind.
Unc was already coming around the island, reached out into the air above the granite and landed it right on the third white plastic bag. He reached in, pulled out a loaf of bread. “Let me help,” he said.
We ate dinner, there at the breakfast table in the kitchen, that same table we’d all sat at last night, and where still my book bag lay at my feet. The sun was down now, the water on the creek gone silver for the fading light, the greens and browns only going deeper. Then here came a pinprick of light out there in the pale orange: Venus.
We talked a little, Unc about commercial shrimp season starting up and maybe this fall we ought to go out and shrimp bait for ourselves, me about heading out to Hungry Neck one day next week to take a look for some turkey. But mostly we listened to Mom carry on, trying her best to convince us of how she spent the afternoon with this Deb Bloom who’d been at the Med U for twenty-eight years now and was the first nurse Mom had met her first day and who had a married daughter my age living up in Bloomington, Indiana, getting ready to have a baby in June, and wasn’t it funny Deb’s daughter’s maiden name was Bloom and she lived in Bloomington?
No one said a word on a body in a marsh, or on poker night creeping up on us by the minute. And when we finished, Unc and I carrying the plates to the sink to do our nightly duty—I washed what couldn’t go in the dishwasher, Unc dried—and after Unc wiped down the island and I did the counters and table, we thanked her like this were a cotillion lesson and we were penitent students, then told her we were going to watch the news up in Unc’s room.
“I’m just fine,” she said, though neither of us had asked her. But she wasn’t stupid. Not by a long shot. She knew we were worried about her. And she knew there was news we needed to see. She winked at me, picked up the glass of white wine she’d been sipping at all through dinner. “You boys don’t need to worry a whit about me,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“Good,” I said, and nodded at her, smiled. Unc echoed, “Good,” and we left her there.
And watched at six and again at seven the same empty announcements about a body in Hanahan, then a story and footage about a body in a Toyoter in Wambaw Creek. Both channels had also interviewed the sire of Tick, who gave the same story we’d already heard; both channels had a fleeting second or so of Tyler and a couple other men in uniform, hands on hips or arms crossed as they spoke to one another.
Yellow crime scene tape hung in the still air out there. Somebody in the studio droned. And the world went right on.
Like always this time on a Thursday night—10:08 by the numbers on the dash clock—there were plenty of cars already parked on the street, the usual BMWs and Audis and Lexi. But I lucked out, saw up ahead a spot only two doors down from the Whaley manse.
Already I could feel my neck going hot, my palms on the wheel the smallest bit sweaty.
Prendergast was in there.
A parking spot two doors down in this neighborhood meant we were still a good fifty yards away. This was Hamlet Square, a high-end development out on Rifle Range Road here in Mount Pleasant, the Beverly Hills of South Carolina. Home of big black SUVs with MY KID IS SMARTER THAN YOURS bumper stickers, plastic surgeons by the score, and a kind of residential sprawl that’d let this suburb across the Cooper River from Charleston bleed north for the last twenty years until it seemed almost to touch Virginia.
The streets here were all half-acre lots plotted out with raised houses. Clapboard siding and Charleston Black shutters, front porches with rocking chairs or joggling boards, three-car garages underneath each house: all predictable. And somehow allowed in this the wild hair of Thomas Warchester Whaley the Fourth’s orange stucco place, dropped smack in the middle of it all.
I know I was being snarky about this neighborhood, and all of them over here. I know I was being shitty about those highlight-haired and Botoxed women behind the wheels of their tanks, and about the husbands who drove these luxury cars over here on Thursday nights to throw away money like it was peeing in a ditch.
But there was nothing I could do for feeling that way, because I was a piece of the shit I smelled: here were Unc and me in his black Range Rover, pulling into a place at the curb. Driving here from our own posh digs in a neighborhood more exclusive than this place could ever hope to be.
This is where it’d gotten us: meeting up to play some sort of game that involved a set of goggles and a man who’d blowtorched a piece of my mother’s soul.
And there was a dead body involved here. One it seemed, if our talk on the way over was any kind of pulse check, Unc was having second thoughts even thinking about.
We pulled into the spot, parked behind a silver Mercedes CL550, the paint job almost too bright in the headlights. I sat there a second, squinting at it, and the row of cars in front of us and across the street. And that orange house up there, all lit up and ready to go.
I turned the engine off, looked behind me to the backseat, where the book bag lay there in the dar
k. Right where I’d put it.
“It’s going to be all right,” Unc said beside me, and I looked at him. Just his shadowed profile, him looking straight ahead. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”
My neck went even hotter, no matter how much I wanted to believe him.
We’d left about 9:30, Mom already in her pajamas and in bed. Of this I was certain, as I’d seen her into her room, gave her a hug, told her not to worry about us and that we’d be back early. She’d smiled, nodded, flipped on her own TV to start watching her TiVoed American Idol results show: her Thursday night routine.
Tyrone was working security up at the front gate. We’d pulled up to the white-brick gatehouse, the wrought-iron gates in my headlights making their slow push forward to let us out, and I rolled my window down. Usually I just eased on through, but there seemed this night something better I could do, something different, for no other reason than that Jessup had been out front of our house last night, watching. Just in case.
Tyrone, smiling and with his hands in his pockets against the cool night air in through his open door, stepped out of the gatehouse, leaned forward toward the car. “Mr. Huger, Mr. Leland,” he said, “how you doing tonight?”
“Good,” I said, and Unc said, “Just fine.”
“Bad night last night,” Tyrone said, the smile gone now. “Heard about what you found out there. And about Segundo having to fight off the news crews.” He shook his head, grimaced. “Told me he had to threaten to call the cops if they didn’t turn around and go on home. Three vans showed up here.” He looked to his left, out front of us where the gate still stood open. “Sad piece of news, whatever it was happened.”
He looked back at us, shook his head again. Then he opened his mouth, on him what looked a kind of surprise. “Oh!” he said, and turned quick back to the gatehouse, stepped in and reached down beneath the window. Then here he was with Unc’s golf club, the camp chair folded up in its bag. “Jessup brought these up before he went on home this morning,” he said, and held them out, an item in each hand, like they were prize fish. “Wanted me to bring ’em on over to you, but I clean forgot, what with all the buzz going on.”
I popped open my door, stepped out and started around to the back of the Range Rover, Tyrone right behind me. “We can put them in here,” I said, and Unc called out from inside, “What is it?”
“Club and chair,” I said, the tail door open now, Tyrone settling them inside. “From last night.”
Unc said nothing, and Tyrone stood up, brushed his hands together like this was the end of a job well done. I closed the door, and he stepped in front of me, headed for the gatehouse door.
I came around to my door, put one leg up into it to climb in, but paused a second. “Jessup did a good job last night,” I said. “If you talk to him before I do, let him know I want to thank him.” I climbed in, pulled closed my door.
“He’d of been here tonight,” Tyrone said from the gatehouse door, hands back in his pockets. “This was supposed to be his regular shift. Supposed to be me working last night, but a couple days ago he said he had something coming up and couldn’t work tonight, and we traded.” He shook his head again, looked out front to those open gates, glanced behind us. He let out a small laugh, and looked at us. “I’m not gonna lie, I’m sort of sorry I missed all the action. This is a good job and all, and I’m sorry somebody was killed. But, well …”
He stopped, blinked, swallowed. He glanced down at the ground and back up to me again, and I could see he’d realized he’d walked too far into the sentence he’d begun, one that was going to end with what a boring job he had. This to a couple people who lived out here: his employers.
He stood up a little bit taller, took his hands out of his pockets, and now Unc called out from beside me, “Can’t imagine what it would be like having the job you do.” I turned, saw him leaning across the console between us and looking up and out the window. “Just wanted to stop and say thank you for that.” Unc nodded once, and sat up, faced forward. “We have to head on out now,” he whispered then, low and just the least bit sharp. Just loud enough, I guess he figured, for only me, and I turned back to my open window to see if Tyrone’d heard him.
But he was inside the gatehouse again, reaching down for something else beneath the window. “Almost missed these,” he said, and stepped out, held a Ziploc bag out to me, inside it four golf balls and a few tees. “They were out with the chair and the club.” He nodded. “With Jessup’s best,” he said, and I took the bag, dropped it in the console tray. I smiled back at him, nodded. “Thanks again,” I said, and pulled forward through the gates.
We’d driven then that same old quarter-mile spit of asphalt edged with overgrown trees to the light at North Rhett. The road into Landgrave Hall we were on was meant to look like a dead end to anyone driving by, even a yellow ROAD ENDS warning sign up at the head as soon as you made the turn off North Rhett so that anyone not in the know would think they were headed into the marshy unknown.
I turned left, headed for the on-ramp for the Mark Clark a couple miles down, and just like that we were in the lower intestine of Hanahan: on the right sat an industrial park and its prefab metal buildings with their oddball array of business signs on the sides—CHARLESTON RUBBER AND GASKET, THE ODLE GROUP, MOTION INDUSTRIES, NORANDEX DISTRIBUTION—while on the left stood those jet fuel storage tanks, each one big as an airplane hangar, out front of them all a chain-link fence eight foot high with three strands of barbed wire above it. More Navy land.
This was the same fence that separated Landgrave Hall from Perimeter Road, the paved single-lane that encircled the whole Navy property. That fence you could see in winter when you were on the green at sixteen or the tee at seventeen. Here was where it came out of the woods to meet the public proper, cordoning off these storage tanks, and corralling in Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, all those SPAWAR nerd-spies at their computers, and keeping from the civilian world the Army transportation battalion fitting out the never-ending convoy of MRAPs for Afghanistan and loading those bad boys onto the Navy ships moored at their wharf on the Cooper River.
Just then I saw out my window and off to the left past the tanks the snapping blink of lights on some kind of aircraft, and knew in just that moment, with how slow it was, and the way it was easing straight down, it was one of those Chinook helicopters, making a night landing at the heliport over there.
And out my window too, off to the right and looming high above the fence and a half mile away, stood the stadium lights of the Navy brig, illuminating the world just like they had the fairways when I’d walked them home last night, their light washing the stars out of the night sky.
We passed two more warehouse-like buildings on the right, these for something called Blackhawk Logistics, then Lee Distributors on the left, with its rows of Miller Lite trucks in the lot out front, waiting to be filled for tomorrow’s deliveries. All this military and all this industry, hiding the fact of the homes we lived in, the manicured greens, the docks and picture windows and marshes, and the ghost beneath it all of a history three hundred years old.
And though my head was jammed tight with what we were heading out to do tonight, no matter how ridiculously minor a black-ops mission it was for a blind man and an unemployed rich kid to hand over a pair of goggles, it came to me the fact that someone right then was thinking on an order of gaskets and how to get them boxed and shipped in time tomorrow, and someone else was tallying up the cases of beer to load into one of those trucks. Someone, too, was working through his head the spy specs of the schematic on his SPAWAR computer back at the office, where tomorrow morning he’d pick right back up working on it once he passed through military security at the gate off Remount Road.
And just then, if the rumors always going around were any of them true, a terrorist or two or three were sitting in a cell beneath those lights right over there, running off in their heads wisdom from the Koran.
Terrorists who wanted to kill any and every A
merican they could get their hands on, only walking distance from here.
All this going on, while my mom sat at home in bed, skimming through commercials with the remote in one hand, in the other, I felt pretty certain, a subcompact Storm. The entire pastoral world out to Landgrave Hall wrapped in the disguise of industry and military, my mom gated inside its refuge.
But only a knock on the door away from practicing what she’d preached out on the shooting range.
We bumped over the railroad tracks just past the beer distributor, passed next the rec baseball field and the Kangaroo mini-mart. The light at the intersection with Remount turned yellow, and I gunned through it, just ahead the on-ramp for the Mark Clark and our path to Mount Pleasant.
That was when Unc said, “Just don’t know what one has to do with the other.”
I moved to the right lane, made the slow swoop onto the ramp and started up, and let myself glance at him even inside the tight circle we were making up to the elevated freeway. “What do you mean?” I said.
He was turned to his window, shaking his head. We were at the top of the ramp now, and I moved left out onto the freeway, ahead of us the metal cage of the Don Holt Bridge shooting high over the Cooper River toward Daniel Island. Below us to the right I could see the 84 Lumber, to my left the paper mill in all its nighttime glory: lights and towers and that smokestack chugging out steam. On the highest tower flew an American flag, lit up with a floodlight from below.
“For some reason I keep tangling these two things one in another,” Unc said. “But it’s two events. Two things.” He paused, and I could see him face forward, above and around us now the beam-and-girder skeleton that was the bridge. “One is a murder,” he said, “plain and simple. We were the ones who found her. That’s all. The other is, somebody’s out on patrol over to the Naval Weapons Station and sees you wearing a set of goggles civilians aren’t allowed to have. Prendergast’d have to grab his ankles and hold on the rest of his life for the ass-kicking he’d get if someone higher up finds he’s giving out equipment in a poker game, so he sends a couple of his men to get them back. They come on over to Judge Dupont’s place for the goggles, but walk in on a late-night patio party with all these people who weren’t there when they first saw us from over on the weapons tract. The Cuthberts, Mrs. Q. That screaming nurse of Dupont’s.” He let out a quick breath, shook his head again. “Stanhope and Harmon got no choice but to improvise then. That’s when it all turns into this haul-you-in-for-trespassing hoo-ha. Prendergast figures maybe the best thing to do is to make like he’s arresting us, confiscate the goggles, then let us go on home. All there is to it.”