The High Tide Club

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Whoa. Whoa!” Gabe exclaimed. “She? You are referring to Josephine Warrick?”

  “Who else?” C. D. asked.

  “You’re telling me you are Josephine Warrick’s son?”

  “And only living heir,” C. D. said. He picked up a pen and extended it toward the lawyer. “Write it all down if you want, ’cause it’s all true and I can prove it.”

  40

  C. D. folded his sunglasses and placed them in his breast pocket. His pale blue eyes flickered around the library, taking inventory, finally resting on the side-by-side oil portraits of Josephine and Preiss Warrick.

  Preiss was posed casually in a tweed jacket, sitting on a tree stump, with a shotgun propped in the crook of his elbow. His left hand rested on the head of a black-and-white English setter who had a dead bird clenched between its jaws. Preiss had been a handsome man, with a narrow, bony face, deep-set eyes, and full lips. The painting’s backdrop was a romanticized version of Talisa with moss-draped oaks, blue sky, and puffy cotton-candy clouds.

  Josephine appeared to have been costumed for a fancy dress party in her portrait, in a floor-length emerald-green satin dress, triple strands of pearls, and a full-length mink tossed artfully around her shoulders. The backdrop matched the portrait of her husband, right down to the tree stump and the trailing Spanish moss. But in Josephine’s portrait the setter was curled up, asleep at her feet.

  C. D. drummed his fingertips on the leather-bound book cover.

  “We’re waiting,” Gabe said, tiring of the dramatics.

  “You were raised at Good Shepherd? In Savannah?” Brooke asked. Like most in Savannah, she knew that the former children’s home, founded in pre–Revolutionary War times, was considered the oldest child-caring institution in the country.

  “Back in my day, it was called Good Shepherd Home for Boys,” C. D. said. “They changed the name along the way. But I didn’t get sent over to Good Shepherd until the nuns closed up the orphanage I’d been in. St. Joseph’s Foundling Home, it was called.”

  “Never heard of it,” Gabe said flatly. “And I’m Catholic, and I was raised in Savannah.”

  C. D. shrugged. “You probably never heard of it, ’cause like I said, the nuns closed it up a long time ago. It was on Habersham Street, right where there’s a grocery store today. They shut St. Joe’s down sometime in the fifties, but they kept on running the girls’ orphanage. I reckon they decided boys were too much trouble.”

  “How does Josephine Warrick figure into all of this?” Gabe asked.

  “How do you think? She got herself knocked up. And she wasn’t married, either, so she did what rich girls did back then. She paid somebody to take the kid—that’s me—off her hands. The nuns took me in, then when I was five, they shipped me out to Good Shepherd.”

  C. D.’s mouth smiled, but his eyes were wary. “And that’s where I stayed, working on that damn cattle farm of theirs, until I got into trouble, and then I ran away before they could bounce me out.”

  “How old were you when you left Good Shepherd?” Brooke asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  “And where did you finish high school?”

  That smile again. “Who says I did? I was on my own, had to get a job, which I did. After a while, I was sick of Savannah, so I hitchhiked clear out to California and then back east. I ran into a recruiter in Baton Rouge, after an all-night bender, who promised me that I’d see the world if I signed up for the marines. Next thing I know, I’m at Parris Island, then right after that, I started seeing the world with the Third Marine Division in Vietnam.”

  C. D. rolled up his shirtsleeve to display the tattoo on his bicep. “Semper fi, motherfucker.” He nodded at Gabe Wynant. “How ’bout you? Did you ever serve?”

  “Nope. I turned eighteen in ’72, but I had a student deferment,” Gabe said.

  “College boy,” C. D. said. “Figures.”

  “I suppose you have some proof that Josephine Warrick was your birth mother?” Gabe asked. “Adoption records, birth certificate, something like that?”

  C. D.’s smile dimmed a bit. “That ain’t how it worked back then. Everything was hush-hush.”

  “Okay, what proof do you have?” Brooke asked. She couldn’t decide whether she was intrigued or horrified by C. D.’s unfolding story. A little of both, probably. “It’s not up to us, but a judge is going to want proof of the validity of your claim.”

  C. D. leaned forward and brought out a worn leather billfold that was attached by a chain to his belt. He slid a packet of papers from the billfold and smoothed them out across his knees.

  He held out a photocopy of a black-and-white newspaper photo of a small child of no more than two or three, dressed in cotton print pajamas and holding a toy truck, balanced on the knee of a woman who was looking away from the camera. “That’s me,” he said, tapping the image of the child. “And that’s Josephine.”

  “Can I see that?”

  C. D. passed the clipping to Gabe Wynant, who examined it closely and then handed it to Brooke.

  The newspaper photo was date-stamped SAVANNAH MORNING NEWS, June 18, 1945. The woman in the photo was dressed in a dark dress, with a frivolous feathered hat perched on her dark hair. She held the child stiffly at arm’s length from her chest.

  LOCAL BENEFACTRESS VISITS CHILDREN’S HOME, the caption read. Underneath, the copy said:

  Miss Josephine Bettendorf distributed smiles and Christmas gifts to orphaned boys this week at the St. Joseph’s Foundling Home. Three-year-old Charles Anthony delighted in receiving a new toy truck.

  Brooke studied C. D.’s face.

  “Charles Anthony is me,” he said. “And I still got that truck.”

  “That’s an amazing coincidence,” Gabe said. “But Josephine was probably just doing what wealthy socialites did back then. It was a charity visit, not a mother-son reunion.”

  “No way,” C. D. said. “She came to that home every year while I was there, at Christmas. She handed out candy and toothbrushes and pajamas to them other kids. But I was the only one who got a real toy.” He leaned forward, showing off a narrow white scar that ran through his left eyebrow. “Some other kid tried to take my truck the last year I was at the orphanage. I slugged him, and he hit me with the truck, which is how I got this scar and how he lost his two front teeth.”

  “Sorry, but that’s not really proof that you were her child,” Gabe said. “Maybe she just thought you were cute, or she felt sorry for you.”

  “I figured you’d say something like that,” C. D. said. He leafed through the packet of papers on his lap and held up another document. It was a photocopy of a typed page.

  “Now this here is what’s called the intake report from St. Joseph’s. The sister in charge filled it out when they took in a kid. This is a copy of my intake page. Take a look at that, why don’t you?”

  Brooke scooted her chair next to Gabe’s, peering over his shoulder. There were spaces on the page for the date, name, and address of parent or parents, child’s name and date of birth, weight, height, eye and hair color, and race. At the bottom, a space was reserved for comments.

  According to the report, on May 5, 1942, a male child named Charles D. Anthony arrived at the orphanage. Weight was eleven pounds, six ounces. The child’s hair color was listed as brown. Eye color: blue. Race: W. In the spaces for the child’s mother and father, someone had typed Unknown. Also unknown were the child’s exact date of birth, although someone had typed Approx. six months of age.

  The comments block had been filled out in Spenserian black script.

  Father Ryan brought male child to home last Sunday, stated he was found asleep, under pew, in church today, after 8:00 A.M. mass. No parishioners have any knowledge of child. Father stated hopes parent will return to claim child, but fears child has been abandoned. The boy is docile, in good health. Father Ryan believes that boy was born out of wedlock. Mother Superior advises we will accept child pending further investigation.

  “Somebody left a c
hild? A six-month-old baby in a church?” Brooke said, aghast.

  “Yeah. That was me,” C. D. said. “Turns out since they didn’t know my real name, they named me after that priest. Charles David. For a last name, they gave me the name of one of the nun’s favorite saints, which was St. Anthony.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine that? Me named after a saint?”

  Brooke found herself speechless, pondering the reality of C. D.’s childhood. She’d always known who she was, who her people were, and who their people were. Family and a sense of family identity were ingrained in every Southerner she knew, especially Savannahians, who were obsessed with family connections. What would it be like to wonder your entire life who you really were?

  “How did you find out about all of this?” Brooke asked. “Or did you always know about the orphanage?”

  C. D. rubbed the gray stubble on his chin. “I always remembered bits and pieces from the time I was in the orphanage. Like how us little kids all slept in one big room, with rows and rows of these iron cribs that had high sides so you couldn’t climb out. Even when we got older and were big enough to sleep in a real bed, they kept us in those cribs, almost like a cage, you know?”

  Brooke thought guiltily about the crib her own Henry had been sleeping in until recently. Would he too remember, someday, and wonder if he had been kept a prisoner there?

  “How were you able to track down these records?” Gabe asked.

  “That’s kind of a funny coincidence,” C. D. said. “After I came home from Vietnam, I’d been living in Savannah off and on for about twenty years. Retired there, after working as a longshoreman out at the Port Authority, and I knew a couple of guys, like me, who were Good Shepherd alumni. One of ’em told me about a reunion they were having a couple of years ago. It was the home’s 275th anniversary. So I went along out there, ’cause I was curious to see how the place had changed.”

  “I imagine there’s been quite a bit of change since you lived there,” Gabe offered.

  “Yeah, the ‘cottage’ I lived in, it’s some kind of classroom now,” C. D. said. “The whole place is a boys’ prep school now, ’cause you really don’t have a lot of honest-to-God orphans these days.”

  “My mom has a friend whose father and two brothers grew up at Good Shepherd, back in the Depression years,” Brooke said. “Their father had died, and their mother had to work and couldn’t care for three boys. So she kept his sisters and the boys were raised at the Children’s home.”

  “That happened a lot,” C. D. said. “Anyway, at the reunion party, I ran into a guy who lived in my cottage. He was a couple of years older than me, but like me, he’d been at St. Joseph’s before Good Shepherd. And he was telling me that he’d been able to look up his records. In the church office. I forget what they call it.”

  “The archdiocesan office,” Gabe said. “All the diocesan records were moved there after the girls’ orphanage was closed and remodeled.”

  C. D. snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s what it’s called. Anyway, they won’t let you look at the records unless you can prove you were what they call a former ‘resident.’ I told the woman there, ‘Hell, I wasn’t a resident, I was an orphan.’” He rattled the papers on his lap. “That’s where I found all this stuff.” He smoothed the newspaper clipping. “They let me look in my file. How about that? I found this clipping. And when I saw the picture of her holding me on her lap, something clicked. And I remembered her. How she come to see me, every year, at Christmas, and on my birthday, or what they told me was my birthday. I remembered she smelled like some kind of flowery perfume. And she had a pearl necklace, and I tried to play with it, but she’d slap my hand away.”

  C. D. paused in his story. “Now you tell me, why would she come see some little kid in an orphanage, bring him presents and all like that, unless she had a connection to him?”

  “Good question,” Gabe conceded.

  “When you came to work here, did you tell Josephine you thought she was your mother?” Brooke asked.

  He shook his head emphatically. “No. Because I wasn’t sure yet. I kinda wanted to get the lay of the land, check things out. I came over on the ferry, talked to Shug and asked about a job, and he’s the one brought me up to the house and told Josephine maybe I could run the boat and help with some other stuff around here.”

  “And she never recognized you? Didn’t recognize your name?” Gabe sounded skeptical. “Come on, C. D. This is an entertaining story, but none of it proves that you are her son or her heir.”

  “How about this?” C. D. asked. He handed over a faded color snapshot of a brick cottage surrounded by towering oaks similar to the ones on Talisa. Brooke squinted to read a plaque.

  “That’s the Samuel Bettendorf Cottage at Good Shepherd,” C. D. said. “I looked it up in the records. Josephine donated the money for it to be built in 1946—the year I got put over there once they closed the orphanage.”

  “And what do you think that signifies?” Gabe asked.

  “It means she felt guilty about walking away and giving me up,” C. D. said, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “Hell, I can’t explain why she did the stuff she did. I just know I am her son, and after all these years, it’s about damn time she did right by me.”

  He looked from Brooke to Gabe, then back at Brooke again, and then donned his sunglasses. “Kinda upsets your apple cart, don’t it? You and your mom and those women upstairs? Looks like none of y’all are gonna be heiresses after all.”

  Brooke shrugged. She didn’t know what to say or how to feel. Just the night before, the mistress of Shellhaven had shocked them all by telling them about a murder that had happened nearly eighty years ago, right here on this island. This morning, Josephine was dead, her estate left in limbo. Horror, grief, shock, disbelief. And now this. She was numb.

  She stood up and held out a hand to C. D. “Good luck to you, C. D. I hope you’re able to prove your claim. And I truly mean that. If Josephine really did walk away and leave you in an orphanage all those years ago, you deserve to inherit. But in the meantime, I need to get back to the mainland. To my own son.”

  41

  They found Marie and Lizzie in the kitchen, having lunch. Louette looked up from the sandwich she was eating.

  “Did C. D. tell y’all that crazy story of his? ’Bout how he’s Josephine’s son?”

  “What’s that?” Marie asked, startled. “You mean C. D., the man who pilots the boat? He’s Josephine’s son?”

  “That’s what he thinks.” Louette’s voice dripped scorn. She stood up and motioned for Brooke to take her chair. “Sit here. You want some lunch? I got chicken salad and crab salad.”

  Gabe dragged a chair up to the table. “I’d love a crab salad sandwich.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” Brooke said. “But if it’s all right, I’d like to call the ferry to book a ride back to the mainland.”

  “Oh, I already took care of that,” Louette said. “You’re on the two o’clock, if that’s all right.”

  Brooke gestured to Lizzie. “Will that give us enough time to get you to the airport for your flight back to California?”

  Lizzie reached for a potato chip from the bowl in the center of the table. “I’m not going home. Not just yet. I canceled my flight.”

  “But … I thought you were in such a rush to get back. For your deadline and everything,” Brooke said.

  “I was, until last night, when Josephine started spinning that amazing story of hers, and then, after what happened this morning, it dawned on me, there’s a story right here. Like, a once-in-a-lifetime story. And I’m a part of it. So instead of packing this morning, I pounded out a query letter and emailed it to a couple of magazine editors I know in New York, and I heard back from one right away, and she loves the idea. So I’m staying.”

  “Here?” Gabe asked. “At Shellhaven?”

  “Why not? Louette doesn’t have a problem with that, do you, Louette?”

  “Be nice to have company, especially with Jos
ephine gone,” Louette said.

  “Do you have a problem with me staying here?” Lizzie asked Gabe pointedly.

  “No. I mean, as I said, I’ll petition the court to be named administrator of the estate, but in the meantime, I guess there’s no reason you couldn’t stay on.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Lizzie said. “Now what’s all this about C. D.? He really claims he’s Josephine’s long-lost son?”

  While Gabe polished off two crab salad sandwiches, a homemade pickle, and a couple of tea cakes, Brooke recited what the lawyers had just heard from C. D.

  “This story just keeps getting better and better,” Lizzie said, rubbing her hands together gleefully. “Josephine, an unwed mother! Now it’s not just a magazine article or a book. We’re talking potential movie deal.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Gabe said, brushing cookie crumbs from the front of his golf shirt. “I hated to burst the guy’s bubble, but an old newspaper clipping of her holding a little orphaned tyke at Christmas probably isn’t going to hold water in court.”

  “That man is crazy,” Louette said, shaking her head. “I never heard a story so crazy. Even if it were true, don’t you think Josephine would have recognized her own flesh and blood?”

  “It does strain the imagination,” Marie said. “Abandoning a baby in a church? And then going to the orphanage every year at Christmas to visit him? How could anybody be that cruel? Even Josephine?”

  * * *

  Varina pushed her walker slowly into the kitchen, with Felicia following behind. “Is Josephine … gone? Did the funeral home man come?”

  “Yes, but actually, the coroner is a woman. Her family owns the funeral home too. They took her body back over to the mainland, just until the funeral arrangements can be made,” Gabe said, scrambling to his feet to offer his chair to the old woman.