“Listen to me, Farrah Michele Miles. You still have a really good chance. You aced your SATs and your ACTs. You’ve got a solid 3.9 grade point average in mostly advanced placement classes, and plenty of extracurricular activities. You wrote amazing essays, and your teachers wrote you great recommendation letters. Do not screw this up. Please?”
“I’m not screwing anything up.” Farrah changed the subject. “So what happened this morning with Brittni?”
“I went over to the jail. Her stepfather still won’t post bail, and her court date’s not ’til next week, so there’s not much I could say except hang tight and try not to get in any more fights.”
Farrah shook her head. “I know she’s my cousin, but she is such a dumb bitch. She shoulda just paid the ninety-nine cents for the damn cup of ice. It’s not like she was broke!”
“I told her the same thing,” Brooke said, “but she says the KwikMart cashier was some kind of high school frenemy who thinks Brittni stole her boyfriend.”
“Right. That’s Kelsy Cotterell, and she hates Britt because she totes did steal Kelsy’s boyfriend. And also because Brittni had his name tattooed right across her chest, which is not even hot, despite that boob job of hers,” Farrah said. “She thinks because she used to be a cheerleader the whole world owes her something. Mama says she gets that and her lard butt from Aunt Charla.”
Brooke pressed her lips together to keep from laughing at Farrah’s dead-on assessment of her client and her client’s mother. “Okay. Enough about Brittni. As long as you’re here, you might as well get some work done. I need you to go online and do some research. See what you can find out about State of Georgia v. Josephine Warrick. Print out what you get and start a file.”
“Josephine Warrick? Is that the old lady who owns Talisa? What’s up with her?”
“She called me yesterday, wouldn’t say what it’s about. Just that she wants to see me about an unspecified legal matter. I’m headed over there in a few minutes.”
“Awesome. A new client. So that’s why you’re all dressed up today. You look nice, by the way.”
“Thanks,” Brooke said. “I kinda like that nail polish of yours too. What’s it called?”
“Violet Femmes,” Farrah said. She held up the bottle. “Want a hit?”
“No, thanks. I’ll stay with my Bubble Bath. Gotta look conservative in my line of business.”
Shunning her usual casual office attire, Brooke had reached to the back of her closet and brought out an expensive tailored navy pantsuit, which she wore with a white silk shell, pearl earrings, and a pair of black lizard-skin Tod’s loafers, throwbacks from her Savannah wardrobe, which rarely saw the light of day in St. Ann’s.
“That old lady’s, like, filthy rich, you know,” Farrah said.
“I doubt that she’ll end up hiring me. I don’t practice the kind of law it sounds like she needs.”
“You’re a lawyer, right? Why wouldn’t she hire you?”
“I’m a general practitioner, remember? From the little research I’ve done, it sounds like she needs somebody who does eminent domain law. But she seems like quite a character, so I’m gonna go see her anyway.”
“Text me some pictures of the house, okay? I’ve never actually been inside. Jaxson and I used to ride over to the island on his brother’s boat last summer to party at the top of that old lighthouse, but I hear she’s got an armed security guy roaming around now.”
“Talisa is private property. You and your friends had best stay away from there,” Brooke said, trying to look severe. “Unless you want to share a jail cell with your cousin.”
“Whatevs.” Farrah set the bottle of nail polish aside and turned the music on again.
Brooke promptly turned down the volume. “Who is that, anyway?”
The girl’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding, right? Seriously? You never heard Luke Bryan before?”
“These days my playlist mostly consists of Kidz Bop and the Wiggles,” Brooke replied.
“Girrrrrl, you need to get in the now,” Farrah said condescendingly, reeling off her current favorite country music acts before stopping abruptly. “Hey, I almost forgot to tell you the good news.”
“What’s that?”
“I might have gotten us a new client. Jaxson’s mom left his dad again this week, and she swears this time it’s for good. So I gave her your card. If she hires you for the divorce, do I get, like, a finder’s fee or something?”
Brooke laughed. “We’ve got to find a way to get you into UGA, kid. Someday, you’re gonna make somebody a hell of a lawyer.”
* * *
The municipal marina was quiet at midday. The tide was dead low, and most of the serious fishermen had set out earlier in the morning. Seagulls screeched and swooped for fiddler crabs scuttling across the exposed gray pluff mud of the riverbank. A couple of derelict-looking shrimp boats creaked at their moorings at the end of the wharf, along with a handful of the open, shallow-hulled center-console boats favored by local crabbers. There were seven or eight shiny new cabin cruisers and three sailboats scattered along the wharf too, but most of the larger, more expensive boats were to be found up the coast, on St. Simon’s Island, which was where really wealthy boaters congregated.
Brooke gazed along the length of the long wharf, wondering which of the boats belonged to Josephine Warrick.
She heard a sharp whistle and swung around to see who it was meant for.
Finally, she spotted a modest, faded-yellow craft bobbing at its mooring at the end of the dock. A lone man stood on the bow, waving at her. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called to her.
“Are you Brooke?”
She nodded and hurried toward the boat.
He was skinny, with thinning hair bound into a scraggly gray braid that hung down his neck, bow-legged and sun-bronzed, wearing an ancient green army fatigue shirt with the sleeves hacked off and unbuttoned to his bare bony chest, and cutoff jeans that had seen better days. Clipped to the belt of his shorts was a holster with a large pistol. Brooke wasn’t good with guns, but she was pretty sure it was a 9 mm.
His face was shaded by a sweat-stained ball cap, and his eyes were hidden behind cheap aviator sunglasses, but she felt the intensity of his stare.
“Are you C. D.? From Talisa?”
“That’s me,” he said, offering her a hand. “C. D. Anthony, in the flesh. Come aboard.”
He motioned for her to sit atop a cushioned bench at the stern and busied himself untying the boat.
“All set?” he asked, and without waiting for her reply, he gunned the motor and expertly backed the boat away from the wharf.
The man turned to look at her as the boat putted quietly through the marina’s no-wake zone.
“Nice day for a boat ride,” he said abruptly. “You ever been over to the island before?”
“A long time ago,” Brooke said.
“I don’t reckon it’s changed much, no matter how long ago it was,” he said. “You a friend of Miss Josephine’s?”
“Not really,” Brooke said.
“She don’t get a lot of visitors. So I reckon maybe you’ve got business over there?”
Brooke found herself squirming a little under his stare. “Something like that.”
He was sizing her up. “You a lawyer? You look like a lawyer to me.”
“Good guess,” Brooke said, keeping it light. “How about you? I assume you work for Mrs. Warrick? In what capacity?”
“Whatever needs doin’, I do,” C. D. said. “Run the boat, work on the vehicles a little. Fetch groceries and supplies from the mainland. Like that.”
“How nice.”
“She ain’t in real good health. Took her to the doctors over in Jacksonville last month. She don’t say a lot, but I reckon they gave her bad news. Louette, she’s kinda the housekeeper, she says Josephine don’t eat much. Makes sense. She was pretty stout when I met her, but lately, she’s gotten real skinny. Eat up with cancer probably.”
Brooke
wondered how Josephine Warrick would feel about one of her employees gossiping about her health with a total stranger.
“If that’s true, I’m sorry to hear it,” Brooke said politely.
She pivoted sideways, signaling their discussion was over, gazing back toward the mainland. She knew it was a five-mile crossing to Talisa, and she didn’t care to spend the trip chatting with this unnerving cornpone Popeye.
He took the hint and gunned the boat’s motor the minute they passed the last piling marking the no-wake zone. She gripped the seat with both hands and within minutes found herself being drenched with sea spray every time the small vessel crested one wave and bounced back into the water.
* * *
Eventually, Brooke saw a green swath appear on the horizon, and ten minutes after that, C. D. slowed the boat down and they glided into a narrow tidal creek. At the creek’s widening, she spotted a long dock jutting into the water. A sturdy black man stood at the end of the dock, his arms crossed over his chest. A child of about eight or nine sat at the edge of the dock, holding a cane fishing pole. Long, bead-wrapped dreadlocks reached to his shoulders.
“Hey, Lionel,” C.D. called. “Catching anything?”
The kid looked up and waved. “Ain’t no fish biting today. You take me for a boat ride?”
“Sorry, pal, maybe another time.”
As they approached the dock, C. D. put the boat in neutral, and the black man tossed them a thick line, which the captain knotted to a cleat on the bow.
“Hey,” the man said quietly, nodding politely at Brooke.
“This here’s Shug,” C. D. said. “He’ll drive you up to the house.” He busied himself fiddling with something on the boat’s console.
Shug bent down and gripped Brooke’s arm at the elbow, helping her make the two-foot leap from the boat’s deck to the dock.
“You okay?” Shug asked solicitously. “Got everything?”
“Oh,” Brooke said, pointing toward the bench on the stern. “Oh no. I left my briefcase.”
C. D. grunted, picked up the briefcase, and slung it in the general direction of the dock. Shug reached out and snagged it, midair, before it could hit the water.
“You have a nice visit now, you hear?” C. D. said. “I’ll be around when you’re ready to go back.”
* * *
An ancient, rusted seafoam-green Ford pickup truck was parked at the end of the dock among a motley-looking assortment of junker cars.
Brooke patted the rounded front hood. “Wow. How old is this thing?”
“Mmm, I think it’s from around the late fifties,” Shug said, opening the passenger-side door. “I do know that Mr. Preiss Warrick bought it new way back when. He’s been gone a long time, but Miss Josephine, she don’t like to part with nothin’ that was his. Likes to keep everything just like it was before he passed.”
He turned the key in the ignition and pumped the gas pedal. The truck’s motor whined, then stalled. He shook his head, repeated the same motion twice before the engine finally caught. Moments later, they were bumping along the narrow crushed-shell roadway. Brooke poked her head halfway out the open window, marveling at the scenery.
Gnarled, moss-draped live oaks on both sides of the road met in the middle to form a dense, nearly impenetrable canopy of green overhead. Thick stands of palmetto, swamp myrtle, pines, and cedars were festooned with blossoming jasmine, whose heavy scent perfumed the air. As they rounded a bend in the road, she spotted a pair of blue herons intent on fishing for their lunch in a shallow ditch. Another turn revealed an expanse of marsh where patches of sun-bleached driftwood and cypress knees were host to dozens of large, brown nesting birds.
“Wood storks,” Shug said, pointing. He gave her a smile. He was a thickly built man, in his fifties, she guessed, with heavily muscled arms. He wore neatly pressed blue jeans and a short-sleeved blue work shirt. “We got lots of birds over here. Famous for it, I guess. Is this your first trip to Talisa?”
“Sort of,” Brooke said. “I was here for a Girl Scout campout years ago. It didn’t end well.”
“You must have been on the other end of the island,” Shug said. “Whole different world over here.”
“It’s beautiful,” Brooke said. “So … wild. And peaceful. Do you live on the island full-time?”
“We do now. Louette, that’s my wife, she was born and raised here. We moved to Brunswick a long time ago for work, but then our kids got grown and moved away, and I got laid off my job at the port. Right around that time, Louette’s sister, who still lives here, said Miss Josephine was looking for some help. We come over and talked to her, and we been here ever since. Eleven or twelve years now, I guess.”
“I didn’t realize anybody but the Bettendorfs or Warricks lived here,” Brooke said.
“Oh yeah. There’s a bunch of black folks been living at Oyster Bluff, since right after the Civil War. The whole island was part of a plantation that got burned down by the Yankees, because they thought the owners were blockade-runners. Later on, the government gave all these former slaves a little piece of land up at Oyster Bluff. Nobody else wanted it, because it was swampy and they were afraid of yellow fever. Those folks, they stayed and scratched out a living, farming and fishing and hunting. They’re what are called Geechee. Louette’s people, they’re all Geechee.”
“And do they still own their own land?” Brooke asked, fascinated by this chapter of Georgia history she knew so little about.
“Nope,” Shug said. “People moved off and sold their land to the Bettendorfs, or they had so many kids, and none of them wanted to stay here, so they just abandoned the houses. There’s not but ten or twelve families still living at Oyster Bluff now, and Miss Josephine owns all that land. She’s nice and all, don’t charge hardly anything for rent, but it’s still not the same thing as owning your own place, you know?”
“I know all too well,” she said wistfully, thinking of the modest two-bedroom concrete block cottage she rented at St. Ann’s, as opposed to the restored Italianate three-story town house in Savannah’s historic district that she’d walked away from when she broke her engagement to Harris Strayhorn.
The truck rounded another curve, and suddenly, a blanket of bright green lawn spread out before them. The grass was patchy and spotted with clumps of dandelions, wild garlic, and silver-dollar weed. Overgrown formal beds of bedraggled-looking azaleas and camellias were planted in tiers on the gently sloping lawn, and a line of palm trees announced that they were approaching the Bettendorf family compound.
“We’re here,” Shug said, slowing the truck to a stop so she could get out and take a look.
3
Situated at the top of the gentle slope was an astonishing pale pink wedding cake of a mansion, consisting of a two-story central block bristling with vaguely Moorish-looking arches, a pair of peak-roofed turrets, and a crenelated balcony projecting over a porte cochere. This was flanked on either side by wings of only a slightly more modest design. Each was marked by a towering sentinel palm tree. The roof consisted of pale-green fired-clay barrel tiles that reminded Brooke of the frosting on a gingerbread house. The place bristled with leaded glass windows, wrought iron Juliet balconies, heavy plaster bas-relief flourishes, and curlicued ornaments. A thick green curtain of ivy crept across the façade of the house, and crimson bougainvillea traced the outline of the porte cochere.
“Wow.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Shug agreed. He started the truck again, and as they drew closer, she could see that the curving concrete driveway leading up to the mansion was buckled and potholed, the pink stucco on the house was cracked and faded, and the roof sported great gaps of broken or missing tiles.
Shellhaven was slowly, inexorably crumbling as surely as a century-old layer cake.
“It don’t look like it ought to,” Shug said, his voice sorrowful. “I keep after it the best I can, but it’s only me now. Time was, half a dozen hands worked on the grounds here. One man, his whole job was taking care of the roses. The
re was a tractor kept the grass cut and a grove with the prettiest oranges and lemons and grapefruit you ever seen. Peach trees and pecan trees, of course. A greenhouse too, just to grow flowers and orchids for the house. All gone now. A pine fell on the greenhouse, and some kind of blight killed all the fruit trees. Just as well, ’cause these days, you can’t find nobody wants to live way over here and do an honest day’s work. Plus, Miss Josephine, she’s pretty tight with a dollar.”
If Josephine Warrick was as rich as local legend had it, Brooke wondered why she’d allowed her home to deteriorate to this extent.
“I’m sure you do the best you can, and she’s probably very grateful to have you,” Brooke said tactfully.
He pulled the truck beneath the porte cochere and pointed to the heavily carved arched double doors. “Go ahead on inside. Louette’s waiting to take you to see her.”
* * *
She pushed the door open and stepped inside timidly, momentarily blinded while her eyes adjusted from the harsh sunlight to the near darkness of the entry hall.
The naked bulb of a tarnished brass wall sconce dimly revealed a high-ceilinged room with black-and-white checkerboard tile floors, cracked plaster walls, and age-darkened wooden beams overhead. The crystal chandelier hanging from an ornate plaster medallion was caked with dust and cobwebs. The air was oppressively hot and damp.
“Hello?” Her voice echoed in the empty room.
“I’ll be right there,” a woman’s voice called from the darkness. A moment later, a woman she guessed was Louette bustled into the room. She looked younger than her husband, with close-cropped graying hair and a freckle-flecked, caramel-colored complexion two shades lighter than his. She had the comfortable thickness and heavy bosom of solid middle age and was dressed in a white synthetic-blend uniform.
“Miss Brooke? I’m Louette. You got here okay? That C. D. didn’t ride you too hard coming across the river today?” Her pleasant accent had a distinct singsong lilt.
“It was bumpy, but I’m here in one piece,” Brooke said.
“Well, we don’t get a lot of company these days, and Miss Josephine’s got herself all worked up waiting to see you, so I guess I’d best take you back there.”
The High Tide Club Page 2