The High Tide Club

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Hi,” Lizzie said smoothly. She went into her pretext again, this time adding more drama and substance.

  “Dad is at the end of his life,” she said sadly. “And this place has meant so much to him. He’s sort of searching for his identity, I guess, so that he can pass it along to his daughters.”

  Smalls adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. “Are all three of you sisters?”

  “Half sisters,” Felicia said, picking up her cue. “We had three different mothers. They’re all gone now, and Dad’s all we have left.”

  “I totally understand,” Smalls said. “Was your father looking to make some sort of bequest to Good Shepherd? As a memoriam?”

  “Not at this time, although that could change,” Lizzie said. “His birthday is coming up and we thought we’d put together a memory book as a surprise. He suffers from dementia now, you know. The problem is, we don’t have anything substantive to put in there from his childhood.”

  “We were hoping maybe the home had some old photos or documents in their archives that we could make copies of,” Felicia said.

  “We’d be happy to pay any copying charges,” Brooke added.

  “Well…” Smalls crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t know what documents you’re looking for. Most of that stuff would be considered confidential.”

  “Really?” Felicia wrinkled her nose in disbelief. “After all these years? I mean, he’s nearly eighty. Why all the secrecy?”

  “You have to remember, at the time this institution was a children’s home, there was somewhat of a social stigma attached to having been placed here. After all, living here meant either that you had no parents or that your parents were too poor or unfit to raise you themselves. Most of our alumni are quite proud of what they achieved, coming from such humble beginnings, but others would just as soon hide their connection with Good Shepherd.”

  “So there’s nothing?” Lizzie asked, shoulders drooping dramatically to signal her disappointment.

  “You’re welcome to look through the exhibits in the museum and the scrapbooks,” Smalls said. “They’re all downstairs in our museum, and they’re organized by year. Maybe you’ll find some photos or clippings from his time here. And although it’s not usually done, I don’t see any harm in letting you make photocopies here in the development office.”

  “Awesome!” Lizzie said.

  “We do ask for a minimal donation for entry to the museum,” Smalls said, reaching for his key ring. “Seven dollars.”

  After the women had paid, he walked them downstairs and unlocked the doors. “I’ll be upstairs finishing a report. Look around all you want, and if you do see something you want to copy, feel free. And, ladies? We close at five. I have a board meeting tonight, so I really won’t be able to keep the museum open any longer than that.”

  * * *

  They spent ten minutes or so browsing the exhibits and then made their way to a small anteroom where they found metal shelves loaded with rows of black leather-bound scrapbooks.

  Brooke ran her fingers over the spines of the books, searching for the right years.

  “C. D. would have come here in 1948, by my reckoning,” she said, pulling a book with the appropriate year stamped in gold on the spine.

  The three women crowded around a table as Brooke opened the scrapbook. The pages were of brittle black construction paper with newspaper clippings, black-and-white snapshots, and the miscellanea of a bygone era glued to the paper.

  “Look at this,” Brooke said, tapping a faded mimeographed sheet of paper. “It’s a play program. Oliver Twist. Appropriate, huh? Orphans putting on a play about an orphan boy.” She ran her finger down the names of the cast and was surprised to see a name she recognized.

  “Oh my gosh. Here’s George Trautwein. He used to own the biggest Cadillac dealership in Savannah. I went to Savannah Country Day with his granddaughter Ginger.”

  “Fascinating,” Felicia said. “Let’s keep going. We don’t have much time.”

  “Right,” Lizzie agreed. “Eyes on the prize.”

  She flipped more pages, and some of the old paper seemed to crumble under her fingertips. “What’s with all the pictures of cows?” Lizzie asked.

  “They’ve always had a cattle operation here, and a working farm,” Brooke said. “I think it was part of the whole vocational, self-sustaining model.”

  A few pages later, they found a typed report of the minutes of the Good Shepherd Alumni Association annual meeting.

  Lizzie read aloud. “Okay. Discussion about raising funds for a new roof for the hay barn. Announcements about new cottage parents. Announcements about fellow alumni, births, deaths, marriages … oh, hello!” She tapped a line item with her fingertip. “‘Construction has begun on a new cottage, to be named in memory of local benefactor Samuel G. Bettendorf.’”

  “Looking better and better for our buddy C. D.,” Felicia muttered. “First Josephine bought a new wing at St. Joseph’s, and then a new cottage here. Some guilt trip, huh?”

  “Keep flipping those pages,” Lizzie said.

  Two-thirds of the way through the book, they found a section devoted to black-and-white group photos of boys, organized by cottages.

  “Here!” Felicia stabbed a slightly out-of-focus photo of eight young boys posed in front of a small brick house. “These kids look to be the right age.”

  The boys stared into the camera, squinting in the sunlight. They were dressed in dungarees mostly, with two of the smallest ones wearing knickers and high socks. Their clothes were rumpled, and some wore baseball caps. A small balding man who wore pince-nez glasses stood behind the children, his hand on the shoulder of a dour-looking woman in a dark print dress.

  The handwritten caption on the page read: “Cole Cottage, 6–8 yrs.”

  “Do any of these kids look like C. D. to you?” Lizzie asked, peering down at the photo.

  “I’ve only laid eyes on him a couple of times, so I can’t imagine what he looked like over seventy years ago,” Felicia said. “One thing catches my eye. They’re all white kids, right? What happened to black children who had nobody to look after them?”

  “There used to be a home for black children in Savannah, according to my mom, but I don’t know too much about it. As for recognizing C. D., I’ve seen him and talked to him several times, but I’ve got no clue either,” Brooke admitted. “But look. You can see some writing on the back.” With a fingernail, she worked at the glued-down corners at the bottom of the photo. A moment later, she carefully turned the photo over to find a handwritten list of the children.

  “Dicky Abbott, Buck Anthony, Frank Armour, Sid Babcock, Bobby Bass, Mickey Beaman, Chick Garber, Timmy Potts.”

  “Buck Anthony,” she repeated. “That’s gotta be our guy. Bingo.”

  “Which one?” Lizzie asked, leaning down to get a closer look.

  Brooke shook her head. “I don’t know. It looks like they listed the kids’ names alphabetically, but there’s no telling if they’re lined up that way.”

  Lizzie reached for her cell phone and snapped a photo of the list, then flipped the photo over and shot one of the picture itself.

  They leafed rapidly through the rest of the scrapbook but found nothing else that showed a boy who could be C. D. “Buck” Anthony.

  “Now what?” Brooke asked, looking at her watch. “We’ve only got ten more minutes before closing. That’s not really enough time to go through any more scrapbooks.”

  “We’ve got a list of the boys who lived with him in that cottage,” Lizzie said.

  “And we know at least one of them is still living, or he was as of a few months ago, when C. D. ran into him at that reunion,” Brooke said. “But which one? And how do we contact him?”

  “Through the alumni association,” Felicia said. “That’s how my alma mater always reaches out to put the squeeze to me for donations.”

  They heard the door open, and Don Smalls popped his head inside. “All set, ladies? I need to set the alarm
and lock the place up now.”

  “But it’s not five yet,” Lizzie protested.

  “Sorry. I can’t be late for that board meeting,” Smalls said.

  “Can you do us a huge favor?” Lizzie asked, walking rapidly toward him. “We found a picture of my dad, along with the rest of the boys who lived in his cottage in 1948, the year he came here. And we found a list of the names of the boys on the back. I took a photo with my phone. Maybe you could take a look and see if you recognize any names? Dad said he ran into one of his pals at the last reunion, but he couldn’t remember the name because of the dementia. But it’s likely this man belongs to the alumni association if he came to a reunion, right?”

  “Maybe,” Smalls said.

  Lizzie scrolled through her camera roll until she found the photo, and then she enlarged it.

  Smalls read the list aloud. “Hmm. No, never heard of Dicky Abbott or Sid Babcock. Dowling, Garber, Potts, I’ve seen their names in old alumni newsletters, but I believe they’re all deceased. But Mickey Beaman, yeah. Mickey’s still active in the association. His son drives him to all the meetings and functions.”

  Brooke’s heart leaped. “Do you by chance have contact information for Mickey Beaman?”

  “No, but this time of day you can usually catch him at his son’s business. He likes to hang out there and chat with any old-timers who wander in. Mickey’s pretty loquacious. He’ll talk your ear off if you give him half a chance.”

  “What’s the business?” Lizzie asked eagerly.

  “Mr. B’s Quality Beverages,” Smalls said. He jangled his key chain to signal that their time was up.

  51

  Mr. B’s was a liquor store on West Broad Street, on the fringes of the Savannah College of Art and Design campus.

  “We used to try to use fake IDs to buy booze here when I was in high school,” Brooke remarked after she’d parked.

  An electronic doorbell rang as they entered the store, which was dark and cramped with narrow aisles built of liquor cartons, the walls lined with shelves of cut-rate wine. A glass partition separated the cashier stand from the rest of the shop, and behind it, an Asian woman with white-streaked dark hair was counting back change to a college kid with a case of beer tucked under his arm.

  “I don’t think this place has been cleaned since the last time I was in here,” Brooke muttered to Lizzie. “And that’s definitely the same lady who called the cops on us.”

  She waited until the store’s sole customer had departed and stepped up to the counter and gave a friendly smile to the cashier, who remained stone-faced.

  “Hi. I’m looking for Mr. Beaman?”

  “My husband’s out,” the woman said. “What do you want? Not another charity donation, I hope. You people are bleeding us broke with all these silent auctions and wine dinners.”

  “I’m actually looking for Mickey Beaman,” Brooke said.

  “Why?” The cashier looked over Brooke’s shoulder, regarding Lizzie and Felicia, who were loitering near the door, with growing suspicion.

  “Well, uh…,” Brooke stammered, caught off guard by the woman’s hostility.

  “We’re trying to find somebody who lived at Good Shepherd at the same time as a relative,” said Lizzie, stepping into the fray. “We just came from there, and a man in the development office suggested we talk to Mr. Beaman.”

  The woman rolled her eyes and turned toward a partially open door behind her. “Dad!” she hollered. “Dad! Some people wanna talk to you out here.”

  She waited a moment. “I’m warning you, once you get him talking about that place, he’ll never shut up.”

  The door opened, and an old man shuffled out of the back room. His thinning gray hair was combed across his balding head. He wore a Budweiser-logoed golf shirt stretched tightly over a massive stomach.

  “These ladies want to ask you some stuff about one of your Good Shepherd cronies,” the woman said.

  Mickey Beaman’s eyes lit up at the mention of his alma mater. “What do you want to know?” he asked, leaning against the counter.

  “Not here,” his daughter-in-law said. She pushed a button and they heard a buzz, and then a door opened between the store and the cash stand. “Take them back to the stockroom.”

  * * *

  A small card table and four folding chairs were shoved up against an ancient refrigerator in the stockroom, delineating what passed as Mr. B’s break room.

  “You ladies have a seat,” Beaman said with a gallant gesture toward the table.

  “Mr. Beaman,” Lizzie started.

  “It’s Mickey. Nobody calls me Mr. Beaman anymore,” he insisted. “Now, what can I tell you about Good Shepherd? Have you been out to see the new museum? Did you see the video? That’s me at the three-minute mark, talking about the values that were instilled in boys like me.”

  “That museum is very impressive,” Lizzie said. “We only got to spend a few minutes there today, so we missed out on the video. I guess we’ll check it out the next time.”

  “You do that,” Mickey urged. “Jimmy Yaz—that’s Jimmy Yazbek, he was three years younger than me—lived in the Blatner Cottage. His son is a big-deal cameraman on one of those TV shows, I forget the name of the show, but Jimmy Junior made that video. For free.”

  “Speaking of your classmates, we’re trying to help a relative of ours, C. D. Anthony, put together some information about his early life, both at St. Joseph’s and at Good Shepherd,” Brooke said.

  Mickey’s brow furrowed. “Say the name again?”

  “C. D. Anthony. The nuns called him Charlie, but when we were at Good Shepherd just now, we saw a photo showing all the boys who lived in your cottage. He was listed as Buck Anthony,” Lizzie said. “Does that name ring a bell?”

  “Buck? Oh yeah. I knew Buck Anthony. Like you say, we were both at St. Joseph’s, and then when we turned six, we were sent to Good Shepherd. I think I was maybe older than him. I’m seventy-nine, you know. Still drive, although Yvonne out there, she’s trying to get my son to make me stop. What can I tell you about old Buck? He was a hell-raiser as a kid, that’s for sure. He was always small for his age, but you didn’t want to cross him. The guy had a temper and a wicked undercut. We used to box, you know. I don’t think they teach boxing to boys these days, which is a shame. Boxing is a great life lesson.”

  “It sure is,” Lizzie said, trying to steer Mickey back toward the topic at hand. “Do you remember ever hearing about how Buck came to live at St. Joseph’s?”

  “Somebody left him in a church was what I always heard,” Mickey said promptly. “Not like me. My mom passed when I was two, and my dad was a traveling salesman. My grandma did what she could, but she was too old to raise a kid like me. And then my dad got killed in the war, Iwo Jima, so then I was a real orphan. But my grandma would come see me, when she could, take me out for my birthday, stuff like that. I don’t think hardly anybody ever came to see Buck, which maybe explains why he sort of had a chip on his shoulder, excuse the expression.”

  “By any chance, do you remember a woman named Josephine Bettendorf, who might have visited him while he was living at St. Joseph’s?” Brooke asked.

  “Bettendorf? The family the cottage is named after? At Good Shepherd?”

  “Yes,” Brooke said. “C. D.—I mean, Buck—says he remembers her coming every Christmas while he lived at St. Joseph’s. He says she brought all the kids gifts, but he got special ones. Like a toy truck.”

  “You want a drink?” Mickey asked suddenly. He stood and opened the refrigerator door. “We get all kinds of samples, for free. The sales reps are always trying to get us to order whatever’s new in their lines.” He held up a can. “Red Bull? The SCAD kids all love Red Bull. Or lemme see, how about a Peach Sunset Tea? Or maybe some Chocolate Mint wine? What will you have? It’s on the house. Just don’t tell Yvonne.”

  “No, thanks,” Brooke said. “We were talking about the Christmas visits? From Josephine Bettendorf?”

  “I woul
dn’t mind trying that wine,” Lizzie spoke up. “Strictly for research.”

  “Great! Take the whole bottle,” Mickey handed her the bottle and a plastic wineglass. “Now what were we talking about?”

  Lizzie twisted the metal cap from the bottle and poured an inch of milky brown liquid into the glass. She sipped, shuddered, shrugged, then sipped again.

  “Christmas visits? At the children’s home?” Lizzie reminded him.

  “There were several ladies who used to come around the holidays. They’d bring us kids candy canes and oranges. One year a Jewish lady whose husband owned a shoe store downtown brought us each a pair of new shoes. I tell ya, I was so proud of those shoes, I wore ’em ’til those nuns made me turn ’em over to one of the younger kids because they were way too small for me. I can’t think of the name of that store. But it’s right there on Broughton, near Levy’s Jewelers. Or used to be.”

  “How about Josephine Bettendorf?” Lizzie prompted. “Can you remember her coming to the home? She was tall, with dark hair. Very striking. And C. D. says she gave him a toy truck one year.”

  “The truck!” Mickey said, roaring with laughter. “I don’t remember that dark-haired lady, but I do remember a red truck. A beauty. The other kids were real jealous of Buck and his truck. This one boy—I can see his face, but I can’t remember his name … a big red-headed kid with freckles—grabbed that truck and bashed Buck in the eye with it. Buck yanked it back and busted the boy in the mouth. Kid bled all over the place. After that, nobody tried to take nothing offa Buck.”

  “That’s what he told me too,” Brooke marveled. “Do you have any other memories of Buck? From his time at Good Shepherd? Did the dark-haired woman ever visit him there?”

  Mickey popped the top on a can of Budweiser and sipped. “Not saying it didn’t happen, just saying I don’t recall it. But I remember him staying in trouble. Wouldn’t do his chores. Wouldn’t listen to the house parents. Fighting, like that. I heard he ran away after he got caught stealing cigarettes from a candy store nearby.”

  “That sounds about right,” Brooke agreed.