The High Tide Club

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “These were with one of the letters the nuns sent Josephine, after she’d paid for a new kitchen and hot water heater at St. Joseph’s. I thought you might like to have them.”

  Varina picked up the rosary, letting the smooth beads slide between her fingertips. She clutched the silver crucifix dangling from the end. “Thank you.” She looked up. “Could you take me home now?”

  “Of course,” Lizzie said.

  “I’m going over to visit C. D. in a little bit,” Brooke said. “I have to tell him that his DNA didn’t match Josephine’s. Should I tell him about you?”

  Varina wound the string of beads around and around her narrow wrist. “What’s he gonna say when he finds out? How’s he gonna feel about having a mama who’s black and a daddy…” Her voice trailed off.

  78

  “This really sucks,” Lizzie said as they trudged toward the chauffeur’s cottage.

  “Totally. I don’t blame Felicia for being outraged. I feel like burning down the house too. I don’t see how Josephine was able to live with all the pain she caused all those years,” Brooke said.

  “I guess, at the end, she thought her money would absolve her of all her sins,” Lizzie said.

  As they approached the cottage, they spied C. D. on the porch, sitting on a wooden kitchen chair. His right arm was in a sling, and as they grew closer, they smelled the acrid smoke from his cigarillo.

  He was awkwardly pawing through the contents of a rusted red metal tackle box with his left hand. “Hey,” he said. “Excuse me for not standing up.”

  “How are you feeling, C. D.?” Brooke asked.

  “Still kicking,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Better. The headaches from the concussion are gone, and my face seems to be healing.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He touched his shoulder. “I did a tour in Vietnam, came home and worked on the docks, and been thrown out of just about every bar on this coast, and this is the first time I’ve ever been shot. Some folks would say I was overdue.” He studied the two women’s serious expressions. “You just come over here to check up on me?”

  “I brought you something,” Brooke said, holding out the envelope. “The sheriff found this in Gabe’s car. After the shooting.”

  “You mean after you killed the son of a bitch? Best day’s work you ever did.” He took the envelope, glanced at the return address, then handed it back. “Can’t open it with my bum arm. It’s the DNA report from the lab, right? I reckon you already know what it says.”

  “I do,” Brooke admitted.

  “And?”

  “There is no DNA match between you and Josephine. I’m sorry, C. D. She wasn’t your mother.”

  He reached for the cigarillo and took a puff, letting the ash drop unnoticed onto his lap. “Well, shit. And that’s 100 percent?”

  “They say 99 percent in the report, because it’s scientifically impossible for anything to be 100 percent,” Brooke said.

  He looked past them, out at the barn, and then the green lawn that sloped gently down toward the road to the beach, the landscape dotted with huge moss-draped live oaks.

  “I guess you and your mama own all this now. Y’all will be wanting me to move along. Right? I mean, I ain’t no good to nobody with my arm like this.”

  “You can stay put. We’ve hired a new lawyer—an honest one this time—to handle the estate. You can stay as long as you like.”

  “Okay.” His nod was as close as he’d come to saying thanks. He pulled himself up by his good arm, went into the cottage, and came out holding a bottle of beer. “Open that for me, if you would.”

  Brooke obliged, and he knocked half the beer back in a single long gulp, setting the bottle on the porch rail and letting out a beery belch.

  “Back to being an orphan again. It was nice for a while, you know, letting myself believe I might own a piece of this. I ain’t ever really owned anything before, except a truck or a boat, stuff like that.”

  “I’m truly sorry. I know it’s not enough, but my mom wanted you to know she intends to honor all the bequests Josephine made for her employees here on the island.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five thousand. You won’t get the money right away, because the estate will be probated, but she’ll continue to pay your salary, the same as she will with Louette and Shug.”

  “Guess that’s better than nothing, but why’s she paying me to sit on my can on this porch? Docs can’t tell me yet how long I’ll be laid up.”

  “Consider it worker’s comp,” Brooke said. “And before I forget, if you’re interested, Josephine’s service is Saturday, at 6:30 P.M., at the AME Church.”

  “I can give you a ride if you want,” Lizzie offered.

  C. D. finished off the beer and belched again. “I’ll let you know how I feel.”

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you around,” Brooke said.

  They were halfway down the path toward the barn when he suddenly called out. “Why’d she give me that toy truck, then?”

  Lizzie raised one eyebrow, then followed Brooke back to the cottage.

  “If I wasn’t her kid, why’d she give me that truck for Christmas? Why’d she treat me special, over all them other kids? Hold me in her lap and act like I meant something to her?”

  Brooke took her time answering the question, walking the tightrope between truth and fiction.

  “We think your mother was somebody Josephine cared about. Somebody who was special to her. Which made you special.”

  “Just not special enough to adopt. Or raise as her own,” C. D. said bitterly. “Got it.”

  79

  The Episcopal minister imported for Josephine’s funeral looked out at the tightly packed pine pews in the small wood-frame African Methodist Episcopal Church on Talisa Island. Her face gleamed with perspiration, and a fly buzzed persistently around the podium.

  She was short and young, in her midthirties, with a cherubic face and a tangle of enviable black curls that touched the collar of her vestments. The Reverend Patricia Templeton admitted that she’d met Josephine Bettendorf Warrick only once, six months earlier, when she’d stopped in at her church on the mainland to ask her to preside over her funeral.

  “I say asked, but really, it was more of an order,” Rev. Templeton said.

  “I know that’s right,” mumbled a woman near the back, loud enough to provoke scattered laughter and rib-poking.

  “Miss Josephine explained to me that she believed in God and believed that he was calling her home, and she said that although she had sinned mightily in her life, she had come to believe the promise of redemption that we, as Christians, cherish,” the minister said.

  “Hmmph,” muttered the same woman. Just as Brooke turned to see who the commentator was, she was astonished to see C. D. slip into the only open seat remaining at the back of the church. He was nearly unrecognizable in a starched white dress shirt and baggy black trousers. He clutched his ever-present ball cap in his good left hand, and his wiry gray hair was slicked back to reveal his balding forehead. He saw Brooke’s stare and nodded a greeting.

  Brooke and Marie were wedged into the “family pew” at the front of the church, alongside Lizzie and Louette and Shug. Varina sat on the right end of the pew, but Felicia, her great-niece, had declined to attend the service. The room was uncomfortably hot, so the AME church members fanned themselves with the photocopied funeral programs.

  They’d deliberately planned an early evening service, hoping the June temperatures would have cooled off by six, but Brooke was certain it must have been at least ninety degrees. She felt her eyelids sag. The church, with its simple whitewashed plank walls and Gothic arched windows, had only a single, barely functioning air-conditioning unit installed in a window near the altar. Large brass vases brimmed with bunches of white gladioli, asparagus ferns, and palmettos lovingly arranged by members of the church’s altar guild, and gardenias, which had been wired onto chicken wire–framed crosses, hung at the end
of every pew, their overpowering scent filling the air.

  All of this, even the menu for the reception to be held afterward at Shellhaven, had been spelled out in a letter that Josephine had entrusted to Louette right after her cancer diagnosis.

  Brooke had stressed the need for brevity to the pastor and was thankful when, fifteen minutes later, Marie roused her from a nap with a subtle tap on the arm in time to hear Rev. Templeton intone the final words from the Book of Common Prayer.

  They recessed from the church while a joyous version of “Amazing Grace” was played on the AME Church’s organ and then they gathered outside, shaking hands and accepting condolences from two dozen islanders, most of them current or former residents of Oyster Bluff, along with a smattering of old friends from the mainland whom Josephine had specifically included as invitees to the funeral.

  Marie had rebelled on only one point of Josephine’s instructions and invited the cousins, Dorcas and Delphine, despite Josephine’s specific ban.

  “They’re her family too,” Marie had insisted. Still, she’d been relieved when the women begged off, instead sending a huge, hideous arrangement of carnations in the shape of an open Bible.

  As they stood in the late-afternoon heat, Brooke was grateful for the light breeze that ruffled the fronds of nearby palmettos. She was even more grateful when, thirty minutes later, Shug pulled Samuel Bettendorf’s Packard up to the front of the church.

  It had been another of Shug’s thoughtful gestures. He’d fine-tuned the old engine, then washed, polished, and buffed the car until it gleamed in the dimming sunshine like a burnished coin. He held the driver’s-side door as Marie climbed behind the wheel with Varina in the front passenger seat and Lizzie and Brooke in the back.

  * * *

  The funeral-goers milled around inside the house, helping themselves to the buffet provided by Louette, Varina, and other AME church ladies. Platters of golden fried chicken vied with trays of deviled crab, potato salad, pickled shrimp, baked ham, macaroni and cheese, and sliced tomatoes on the polished dining room table. The sideboard was loaded down with more desserts than Brooke had ever seen in one place. Coconut cake, caramel cake, pound cake, chess pie, lemon meringue pie, pecan pie, brownies, and three different colors and shapes of congealed Jell-O salads. Pitchers of iced tea and lemonade stood on a huntboard alongside an enormous crystal punch bowl that held a vivid red concoction that resembled Hawaiian Punch and lime sherbet.

  Lizzie brought a plate of food to Varina, who, as the oldest living member of Oyster Bluff and Josephine’s oldest friend, held court in a high-backed chair near the fireplace, then joined Brooke and Marie, who stood near a pair of open windows in a corner, hoping for a bit of cool air.

  “I don’t know about you, but I could really use a drink,” Lizzie told the women. “And I can’t wait to get out of this dress. I’m melting!”

  “Amen to that,” Marie said, fanning herself. “I wanted to have an open bar, but Louette and Varina were appalled at the suggestion. They said Josephine didn’t mind drinking, but she wouldn’t want to be ‘likkerin’ up half the island,’ as they put it.”

  “How much longer before everybody clears out?” Brooke asked. She’d smiled and nodded and accepted the sympathy of strangers for what seemed like an eternity. Her feet hurt, and she desperately wanted a cocktail.

  “It’s nearly eight,” Marie said. “But it seems like everybody is just settling in.”

  Brooke looked out at the sky, which had turned a deep bluish purple. She leaned forward and spotted what she was looking for. “It’s a full moon tonight.”

  Lizzie looked out. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “There’s C. D.,” Lizzie said, nodding toward the dining room, where C. D. was clumsily attempting to load a plate with fried chicken.

  “I saw him in church,” Brooke said. “It’s sweet that he made such an effort to dress up for Josephine, especially considering what we know now.”

  “Uh-oh,” Lizzie said as Felicia walked into the dining room. “Look who the cat dragged in.” Felicia was dressed up too, in a long, black halter-necked dress. She wore subtle makeup and large gold-hoop earrings. Once again, Brooke was struck by how stunning Felicia was.

  She stood for a moment, leaning down to chat with her great-aunt before noticing the other women and walking over to join them.

  “My goodness, C. D. really does resemble Varina,” Marie muttered. “It’s uncanny.”

  Felicia spotted C. D., who’d found a spot on the sofa and was balancing his plate on his lap. “It looks like he’s taking the news in stride. Better than I would.” She looked at Brooke. “I’m sorry I lost it and blew my stack at you yesterday.”

  “It’s understandable,” Brooke said.

  “Here’s the thing. Auntie is over it. She was upset when she came home, but this morning, when I got up, she was dressed in her church dress, all ready to go. At 7:30 in the morning! She was sitting in a chair, reading her Bible, clutching a string of rosary beads, of all things. And she proceeded to cite me chapter and verse on forgiveness.”

  Marie smiled. “I think I’ve marked some of those same verses in my Bible lately.”

  “She waited until ten, then she went into Louette’s kitchen and fixed a plate of food from all the stuff the church ladies have been cooking, covered it with foil, and then she asked me, sweet as pie, if I would take her to see C. D.”

  “She what?” Lizzie said.

  “She wanted to be the one to tell him. I tried to talk her out of it, but Auntie was not having it. So I took her over to C. D.’s cottage. She told me to wait in the big house, then she went up and knocked on the door, and he peeped out, and she offered him his plate of takeout.”

  “I would have loved to have heard that conversation,” Brooke said.

  “Me too. I waited an hour, then I walked back over there, and they were sitting on that teeny little front porch, kind of talking and staring at each other.”

  “How did C. D. seem?” Marie asked.

  “Shell-shocked,” Felicia said. “Auntie said he had no idea.”

  “Did she tell him the whole story? About Russell Strickland and the rape and how they somehow disposed of the body and kept it a secret all these years?” Marie asked.

  “Yep,” Felicia said. “She spilled it all. Then I took her home, and she had a nap and insisted on going over to her house at Oyster Bluff to check on the progress. And then she fixed two dozen deviled eggs and her famous 7UP Jell-O salad to bring over here. I can’t keep up with her, y’all.”

  “Your aunt is a marvel, Felicia.”

  “She’s my superhero,” Felicia agreed. “God, I wish I had a drink.”

  “Look at that moon tonight,” Brooke said. “We need to figure out what time the tide is high.”

  “I’ll go ask C. D.,” Lizzie volunteered.

  She maneuvered through the crowd, then pulled up a chair and sat down beside the old man. They talked quietly for a moment, then he became visibly agitated, gesturing wildly with his good hand and occasionally pointing at Varina, who was in turn watching him.

  “That was a whole lot of conversation just to get a tide report,” Brooke said.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Lizzie said as she rejoined them. “That old goat does not miss a beat. Varina told him about being attacked and raped by Millie’s fiancé, but she still won’t say his name. That’s what he was asking me. I figured the secret’s already out, right? So I told him everything I know about Russell Strickland, how he disappeared the day after the party and was never seen again. I told C. D. that Russell’s grandparents hired a private detective to come down here from Boston to look for Strickland. C. D. wanted to know all about Strickland’s family—where they were from and whether they had money. I told him Josephine said the family was stinking rich and that Russell was an only child. His face lit up like it was the Fourth of July.”

  Brooke laughed. “He’ll be over at the library in St. Ann’s before the
doors open Monday morning, badgering those poor women to help him track down the Strickland family fortune.”

  “And why not?” Felicia asked. “If there’s any money anywhere, why shouldn’t C. D. get it?”

  “Did you ever get around to asking C. D. about high tide tonight?” Brooke asked.

  “It’s at 9:10. We’ve got forty minutes.” She glanced at Marie. “Are you in?”

  Marie’s smile was impish. “You know, I’m seventy-six years old, and I’ve never done it in my life.”

  “No way,” Felicia said.

  “It’s true,” Marie insisted. “Let’s do it.”

  “But we can’t just leave with all these people here,” Brooke said. At least a dozen stragglers seemed to have made themselves at home, lounging on the sofas, leaning in corners, chatting with old friends.

  “I’ll ask Louette to put away all the food. That’ll clear stragglers out,” Marie said. “I’ve got a couple bottles of good white wine in the fridge. I’ll pack them up and sneak them out to the car.”

  “And I’ll run upstairs and get some beach towels and a quilt out of the linen closet,” Lizzie volunteered. “Felicia, will Varina come with us? Do you think she can manage?”

  “I’ll help her manage. Going out to Mermaid Beach tonight is just what she needs. I think it’s what we all need, after the past few days.”

  80

  Marie eased the Packard off the pavement and as far as she dared drive down the sandy beach overlook before stopping and setting the hand brake.

  The ocean spread out before them with the full moon a glowing white orb, spilling silver onto the surface of the deep blue sea.

  “Look at all those stars,” Marie marveled.

  Brooke and the others scrambled out of the backseat, and Felicia hurried around to her great-aunt’s side, taking her arm and guiding her carefully through the soft sand.

  “This looks like a good spot.” Brooke pointed toward a flat stretch of beach just above the high tide line. Lizzie spread the quilt onto the hard-packed sand and unfolded the beach chair she’d brought for Varina.