Life Everlasting

by Robert Whitlow

“Where did you come from?” the young man asked. “I thought you were going to be with the car.”

  “Oh, I just went for a little walk. Did you see a gray van as you turned onto Pelican Point Drive?”

  “Uh, I didn’t notice anyone.”

  Alexia glanced back up the road. “Okay.”

  “Do you have your membership card?” the driver asked.

  In a matter of minutes, the car was back on terra firma. Alexia got in and waited for the wrecker driver to turn toward the highway. Instead of driving home, she followed him. She didn’t want to take the young man’s word about the absence of the gray van. When they reached the picnic area, it was empty. But her sense of safety was gone. Her refuge by the marsh had been violated.

  A full moon was coming up as Alexia climbed the steps and unlocked the front door of her house. Built close to the marsh, the house was perched atop six concrete pillars. Two times since the house had been built, storm surges swept beneath the structure, but Alexia wasn’t home for either event. During hurricane season, she kept a close eye on the weather and stayed with Gwen in town if the ocean turned ugly.

  Alexia could hear Boris barking on the other side of the door. She pushed it open and was met by a deep growl. An instant later, Boris, barking fiercely, bolted past her, skidded down the front steps, and started running up the road toward Pelican Point Drive.

  “Boris!” Alexia yelled.

  The dog slowed at the sound of her voice.

  “Come!” Alexia commanded.

  Boris was an unruly, boisterous juvenile, but he stopped running and continued barking as he stood in the middle of the road. Her heart pounding, Alexia peered into the darkness illuminated only by the light of the moon. Nothing. Boris turned around and trotted back up the steps and into the house. Alexia closed the door behind him and quickly flipped the dead bolt. Misha, her silver Persian cat, rubbed against her leg in greeting. Alexia leaned against the door frame until her heart returned to a normal rhythm. She leaned over and scratched the cat’s neck.

  “You don’t seem worried,” she said.

  Alexia carefully inspected the house, but everything was as she’d left it that morning, except for an expensive shoe Boris had gnawed. Alexia picked it up and shook it in front of the dog’s face. One of the narrow leather straps was dangling where it had been ripped loose.

  “Bad dog,” she said. Boris wagged his tail. Alexia dropped her hand to her side and continued. “But, like most criminals, without immediate punishment, you don’t have a clue about accepting responsibility for your crime.”

  Reassured that everything was in order, Alexia calmed down. She walked through the living room and dropped the remains of the shoe into the trash compactor in the kitchen. The kitchen, on the south side of the house, contained a breakfast nook with large windows that overlooked the marsh. Nestled in the nook was a small, glass-topped table and two chairs. Alexia fixed a sandwich and a bowl of soup, and then sat in one of the chairs to eat. Misha hopped into the other chair and kept her company. Boris lay at Alexia’s feet in case a morsel fell to the floor. She dropped a piece of smoked turkey as a treat.

  Alexia didn’t do a lot of entertaining, but the large, open living room was a comfortable place for a crowd to mingle. Because the house wasn’t a vacation home, she didn’t fill it with common wicker beach-house furniture. Her tastes ran more to steel, glass, and leather. On the other side of the living room, a screened porch jutted out from the north side of the house. It was bare except for a large Pawleys Island hammock and a small table. The main floor also contained two small bedrooms and a broad deck that stretched across the rear of the house.

  The second level was smaller than the first and dedicated solely as Alexia’s bedroom. The spacious area had a sitting room where Alexia had set up her computer, and she’d positioned her bed so that the sun rising over the barrier island could greet her with a glorious good morning.

  She went upstairs, put on her pajamas, and turned on her computer. She slipped a CD of a pianist performing Debussy’s Claire de Lune into her music system. In the quiet of the night, her bedroom filled with the composer’s musings about French evenings when the diaphanous veil between the imagination of man and the beauty of nature lifted for a glimpse of an enchanted land.

  Alexia sat down in front of her computer screen. After she deleted a long string of uninvited e-mails, she read a brief note from her mother about the weather in Florida. She was about to turn off her computer when she decided to do a preliminary search of the Richardson companies. Going downstairs, she retrieved the list from her briefcase and then accessed the records for the South Carolina Secretary of State, Corporations Division. She typed in the name of the first company. It came up unknown. She tried a minor variation and didn’t score a hit. One by one, she went down the list. None of the businesses had been incorporated in South Carolina or even registered to do business in the state. Puzzled, Alexia pushed back her chair and stared at the screen.

  Obtaining governmental approval to do business in South Carolina was a simple process. Companies meant jobs; jobs meant greater tax revenue. Government bureaucrats made it easy for companies to transact business in the state, and a corporation that didn’t register with the Secretary of State ran needless risks. Alexia couldn’t imagine Ralph Leggitt failing to process Ezra Richardson’s business activities through the proper channels.

  She tapped her fingers on the wooden surface of her computer stand and then typed in the keywords for the Delaware Secretary of State. For generations, Delaware had cultivated a reputation as a place where businesses could be birthed cheaply, confidentially, and without the regulatory entanglements of New York and other northeastern states. As a result, more companies listed tiny Delaware as their place of incorporation than any other state.

  Alexia typed in the first name on the list, Jasmine Corporation, and received immediate confirmation. The registered agent served as the Delaware contact for companies wanting to keep the names of the people in control hidden from public scrutiny. Four of the ten companies on Jeffrey’s list had been incorporated in Delaware. Each one listed the same registered agent as the legal contact. The other six companies remained a mystery.

  She printed out the information she’d found and considered her next step. In recent years, Nevada had emerged as a competitor to Delaware in preserving the secrecy in corporate records. She searched for information on the remaining six companies through the Nevada Secretary of State and scored four hits, the last a company named MetBack, Inc. She printed out these results as well. As the last sheet came out of the printer, the pianist performing Debussy struck the final poignant notes. Alexia hadn’t thought about the shadow over her paradise for the past hour.

  Rena didn’t have to wonder if someone was watching her every move. She had a videotape to prove it. Jeffrey had handed the tape to her with a sick smirk and suggested she might want to view it alone while she ate. The first time she watched the surveillance video on the small television in the kitchen, she lost all desire for food and didn’t eat for a day and a half. When the screen went blank, she swore she’d never watch it again. It had been impossible, however, not to revisit the images.

  Close to midnight, moody and depressed, she took the tape upstairs to her bedroom and slipped it into the VCR. Each time it started to play, her secret hope rose: maybe this time the plot would be different.

  It began with a shot of the front of her house and the red convertible in the driveway. The date and time stamp counted minutes at the bottom of the picture. As she watched, the front door of the house opened, and she saw herself coming outside. She got in the red convertible, turned the car around, and drove down the driveway. The grainy picture followed her through two stop signs and a traffic light that turned red as she sped through it. When a truck pulled in between her car and the vehicle following her, the video ended.

  That day, she had taken her joy ride down the coast toward Charleston, and the stupid, fat policeman stopped her
for speeding. He slipped and broke his neck all by his brilliant self, but who would believe that truth? So she made up the car-theft story. She really had no choice. The occurrence of a second serious accident so close in time to Baxter’s fall would have raised awkward questions. Unfortunately, the tape undermined her fictitious alibi, and Jeffrey gleefully held it over her head to ensure her cooperation.

  Watching the tape again made Rena so mad that she didn’t know whether to cry or to scream. She paced across the bedroom several times. Glancing up, she saw her reflection in a decorative, gold-framed mirror on the wall. The contorted image made her even more furious. She went to a window and threw open the curtains. Raising the window, she leaned out into the darkness and looked across the broad lawn toward the street. Rena saw no cars. She didn’t know if her handlers took the night off or not. She glared, trying to bore a hole into the future. In a few moments, she sighed in despair. At the end of sight was only more of the unknown. She glanced toward the cottage. Ultimately, this was not her fault. Her husband did a long-distance free fall onto unforgiving rocks and survived. The obese policeman keeled over backward and died instantly. It wasn’t fair.

  Rena slammed the window closed. No, it wasn’t fair.

  4

  Oh, how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding ring!

  COLLEY CIBBER

  Baxter Richardson opened his eyes a second time.

  The white ceiling was now a dim gray. His thoughts were a jumbled mess, impossible to decipher and categorize into coherent concepts. Words without context ran through his mind. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was gibberish. A female voice spoke, not the singing voice that had helped vanquish the darkness.

  “Mr. Richardson. Can you hear me?”

  The words entered his ears, but he couldn’t process them. He tried to respond, but it was hopeless. He moaned.

  “Are you hurting?”

  All he could muster was the sound of a single letter.

  “Buh,” he said.

  The voice called out. “Make a note of the time in his chart. We need to call his doctor first thing in the morning. I don’t think this is random. He’s waking up.”

  The sun, rising from beneath the ocean waves, changed from a massive orange ball to a circle of yellow fire. Alexia was putting on the last touches of makeup when the phone rang.

  “You’ve got to come over here,” Rena said frantically. “The night-duty nurse stopped by the house a few minutes ago and told me Baxter may be coming out of the coma.”

  Alexia forgot about her eye shadow. “What did she say?”

  “That he’s trying to open his eyes and make sounds.”

  “Any words?”

  “No.”

  “Is he still paralyzed?”

  “I think so. I was so shocked I didn’t ask.”

  “Have you been over to the cottage?”

  “Not yet. I’m afraid to go. The last time I looked into Baxter’s eyes he was trying to kill me. What would I say to him? Should I ask him why he tried to push me off the cliff? Warn him about his father? Tell him that he’s paralyzed? Threaten to talk to the police?”

  Alexia waited for her to stop and catch her breath.

  “I’m not sure what you should say to him,” Alexia finally interjected. “If he doesn’t know what’s happened, it wouldn’t make any sense to confront him. I think you should keep everything simple until we know more about his mental status. Wait and see what happens.”

  “Wait and see!” Rena exploded. “That’s all I’ve heard since the first meeting with the doctors in Greenville! I’m the one who’s paralyzed here! I can’t go anywhere or do anything because I don’t know what’s going to happen. What did I do to deserve this?”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong,” Alexia reassured her. “We just have to take everything one step at a time. Did the nurse contact one of the doctors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which one?”

  “Dr. Leoni, the neurologist from Charleston.”

  Alexia had not yet met Dr. Simon Leoni, the neurologist recommended by the neurosurgeon who originally treated Baxter.

  Alexia rested the phone against her shoulder and applied the final touch of faint eye shadow. “There’s no use in my coming over now, but I’d like to be there when the doctor arrives. If Baxter regains consciousness and can think for himself, it will make our lawsuit against his father moot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Unnecessary. If Baxter is mentally competent he would have to pursue his own claim. You wouldn’t have legal standing to complain.”

  “But I’m his wife!”

  “I’ll explain in more detail later. First, let’s find out what the doctor thinks about Baxter’s condition. I’ll be at my office in an hour and can come over when Dr. Leoni arrives.”

  Rena was silent for a few seconds. “I’m scared,” she said in a subdued voice. “I’m sorry I got upset, but I don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

  Alexia gave her short dark hair a few more quick brushes. She had come alongside Rena as her legal champion, but there was a limit to the role she could play as counselor. She had waited for this opening.

  “Rena, you may need a professional to help you cope with what this is doing to you. A lot of my clients talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist.”

  “I’m scared, not crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy, but extreme stress can affect you more than you might realize. A lot of people need a counselor or therapist to help them work through traumatic situations. When the crisis is over, they go on with their lives.”

  “I don’t know,” Rena spoke slowly. “It’s hard for me to trust anyone, and I don’t know any psychologists or psychiatrists.”

  Alexia responded in her most soothing tone of voice. “I’ll give you some names to consider. In the meantime, focus on getting through this day one moment at a time.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  After she clicked off the phone, Alexia quickly finished getting ready. She stepped onto the deck and called Boris home from his morning jaunt. In the clear air of a new day, the unsettling events of the previous night faded. Boris ran up the steps onto the deck with happy eyes.

  “Anything bad in our world?” Alexia asked him.

  Boris wagged his tail.

  “Good.”

  Alexia opened the door and followed the dog inside. He walked over to his water dish and began lapping noisily. Alexia removed the cover from the doggie door so the Labrador could come and go during the day.

  “And there aren’t any shoes under my bed today,” Alexia continued. “If you get bored, gnaw on the big piece of rawhide I bought you last week. I saw it in the corner of the living room.”

  On her way to the front door, Alexia paused to stroke Misha’s back. “Watch the dog and let me know if he gets into mischief.”

  Alexia drove past the spot where she’d been stuck the previous evening. The tide had flowed in and erased tire marks from the sand. The road was empty, the picnic area deserted. She decided to call Ted Morgan and tell him about Baxter.

  The music minister didn’t know the truth about the events leading up to Baxter’s injuries because the information was protected by the attorney-client privilege. So when Ted asked Alexia to help him gain access to play his keyboard and pray for Baxter, she hesitated. Baxter’s condition seemed just punishment for his conduct. But in the end, Alexia agreed to help. Rena didn’t care, and the treating neurosurgeon wrote a note authorizing “music therapy.”

  She turned onto Highway 17 and punched in Ted’s number. The phone rang several times before a sleepy voice answered.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Did I wake you?” Alexia said as she glanced at the clock in her car. “I thought you got up a lot earlier than this.”

  “Normally I do, but I was up late last night.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I couldn’t sleep and went over to the
sanctuary. I played the piano for a while and then prayed for Baxter.”

  “Well, I’d say you got through.”

  “Why?” Ted’s voice grew stronger. “What’s happened?”

  “Rena just called and told me Baxter’s waking up. He opened his eyes and tried to talk.”

  “Is he moving his arms or legs?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Didn’t Rena give you any details?”

  “Not really. She was in shock herself. I asked her to let me know when the doctor comes to check him.”

  “Did he recognize her?”

  “She hasn’t seen him yet. The nurse told her what happened, and Rena called me.”

  “That’s odd. Why didn’t she rush over to the cottage?”

  Alexia hesitated. “I’ll find out more today and let you know.”

  “Okay, but I won’t be satisfied if all he did was flutter his eyelids.”

  “I understand. Get some sleep.”

  “Not now. I’m wide awake.”

  Alexia snapped the phone shut. In a few minutes she entered the downtown area of Santee. The center of town was about eight miles from her home on the marsh and retained the slow-paced atmosphere that predated the area’s commercial development.

  Land use along the South Carolina coast was divided into narrow strips. Along the sandy beach, condominiums for tourists mingled with the vacation homes of those wealthy enough to afford oceanfront real estate. Just beyond the coastal area, commercial developments selling beach chairs, sunscreen, and body boards had sprung up. Next came restaurants featuring seafood buffets laden with enough calories and cholesterol to clog a water main, and trendy clothing boutiques that charged high prices for skimpy women’s garments. Golfing communities provided a third level of expensive residential development for year-round residents who had moved south to escape colder weather.

  The town of Santee was home to a small number of people who had resided in the area for generations. Natives avoided houses with high property-tax values, wore hats to ward off the sun, and considered loud-mouthed tourists as pesky as mosquitoes. Alexia had represented several local residents and earned a measure of acceptance into their tight-knit circle.