The Guests on South Battery

by Karen White

  Thomas was already sitting at one of the small tables across from the counter, two coffees and a pink-and-white-striped bag already waiting on the table. He stood as I entered, and gave me a warm hug in greeting. “It’s been too long,” he said as he helped me out of my coat and pulled out my chair for me, making me appreciate Charleston-bred men all over again.

  He slid the coffee toward me. “Lots of cream and sugar—and since I got here early, I took the liberty of ordering our doughnuts. There’s not a bad doughnut on the menu, so I got two purple goats—berry and goat cheese filling with lavender icing—a tiramisu doughnut, and a maple bacon. I’m rather partial to the maple bacon, but if you want it, it’s yours.”

  I nearly wept with joy as I opened the bag and smelled the lovely aroma of handmade doughnuts and all that wonderful sugar. He started to speak, but I held up my hand and then took a sip of coffee before pulling out a purple doughnut. We both waited in reverent silence for a moment while I took my first bite.

  “Thank you. That is simply amazing,” I finally managed to say after thoroughly savoring the fluffy pastry, followed by the strangest urge to smoke a cigarette. I met his eyes. “The maple bacon doughnut is yours,” I said. “But you’re going to have to fight me for the second purple goat.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I need all my fingers for my job, so you just take whatever you want.”

  I took another bite, then settled back into my chair, cradling my coffee and feeling absurdly content.

  “You look beautiful,” he said. “Motherhood definitely agrees with you.”

  Coming from any other man besides my husband, I might have felt uncomfortable. Even though I knew Thomas had been interested in me before Jack staked his claim, our relationship was now firmly in the friend zone. He’d even attended our wedding, and I’d promised—with Jack’s blessing—to use my sixth sense to help him with any of his cold cases. He’d called a few times in the past year, but I’d been reluctant to disturb the domestic peace I’d fought so hard for, telling him I just wasn’t ready. I wondered if this favor from him meant I’d have to reciprocate whether I was ready to or not.

  My cheeks flushed. “Thank you. I feel good now that the twins are sleeping through the night and I can get a full night’s sleep. I just wish all my clothes hadn’t shrunk—I’m a little tired of wearing my maternity clothes.”

  He choked on his bite of doughnut and I slid a glass of water in his direction. After waiting a full minute before speaking, he said, “I have that information you asked me for about Jayne Smith. I must admit that when you first told me her name I thought it must be some kind of alias, but that seems to be her real name—although she added the Y in her early twenties. There is no birth certificate on file owing to the fact that she was deposited on the steps of a church in Birmingham and turned over to foster care shortly afterward. The creative minds in the child welfare system must have given her the name.”

  He grimaced and I felt like crying. It seemed the motherhood hormones that had started in the first month of pregnancy liked to linger much longer than nine months. I supposed they were responsible for my desire now to cry during Humane Society commercials or after seeing Facebook posts showing baby animals that Nola liked to show me. I thought of the woman I’d met in my office and couldn’t reconcile what I knew about her with the heartbreaking image of a baby being left on church steps.

  “That’s so sad. So she has no idea who her parents are?” I took a large bite of the purple goat doughnut, hoping it would push down the lump in my throat. My mother had left me when I was six, and I’d been raised by an alcoholic father. For my entire childhood, I’d felt abandoned, but at least I’d known who my people were, had known the house on Legare where generations of my mother’s family had lived. And I’d always had my grandmother, who’d loved me unconditionally. It seemed unfathomable to have no history, no prologue to the story of your life.

  “No. I did a little digging into Button Pinckney, too, since it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that she might have had a baby and secretly gave it up. Lucky for us, Ms. Pinckney was very active in various social clubs, so her photo appears in the society pages pretty much every month during the year Jayne was born—apparently not pregnant and with no gaps in time. In addition, she was her sister-in-law’s companion after her niece’s long illness and death, and, according to everyone who knew Button, never left her side.”

  “So she’s just a generous philanthropist who decided to give her entire estate to a deserving orphan.”

  “Apparently. And Jayne certainly fits that description, considering how she started out. It’s really incredible that she turned out as well as she did. She was a straight-A student, never got into trouble, and although she had a succession of foster parents, they all had good things to say about her.”

  “But she was never adopted.”

  Thomas shook his head. “Sadly, no. She came close several times, but it always fell through.”

  “Does the paperwork mention why?” I took a long drink of my coffee, unable to forget the image of a small baby abandoned on the steps of a church. I wanted to think that it was because I was a mother now, with my own small babies who needed me. But there was something else, too. Something I couldn’t identify.

  His eyes met mine. “This is where it really gets interesting. Every single one of the foster families said practically the same thing: that she was a wonderful child but in the end wasn’t adoptable because”—he paused and opened a manila folder on the corner of the table to riffle through several pages before pulling one to the top—“things always seemed to happen around her. Little ‘disturbances.’” Thomas made little quote marks with his fingers. He looked down at the page and continued reading. “She was never named as the exact cause, but all events seemed to occur when she was in the vicinity, making her guilty by association.”

  I sat back in my seat. “That’s odd.”

  “Yep. And there’s one more thing I think you might find interesting.” He paused, drumming his fingers on top of the folder as if trying to decide how much he should say.

  “Tell me everything,” I said. “If she’ll be watching my children, I need to know all of it.”

  “True.” He took a deep breath. “She’s afraid of the dark. Has to have all the lights on when she sleeps.”

  “Many children are. She didn’t outgrow it?”

  After a brief pause, he said, “Apparently not. I got the references from her last two employers sent over, and it’s mentioned in both reports. Which are all glowing, by the way. The first called her ‘Mary Poppins’ and considered having another baby just to keep her with their family now that their other children are too old for a nanny.”

  I perked up. “Which is the important part—that she’s a good nanny. I’m okay with her keeping the lights on in her room all night. That’s pretty minor, really.” I took a long sip of my coffee, thinking. “Anything more specific about those ‘disturbances’?”

  “No, but from everything I read, I’ve gathered that it was regular occurrences of breakages—lamps, dishes, that kind of thing.”

  “So she’s a little clumsy,” I said, feeling relieved. “As long as she’s never dropped a child, of course.”

  “Nope, nothing like that. As I said, her former employers can’t say enough good things about her. Heck, just reading these reports makes me want to have children just so I can hire her.”

  He reached for his wallet to place a generous tip on the table before standing and pulling my chair back for me. “How’s the real estate business these days?”

  “Hopping, I’m happy to say,” I said as he helped me into my coat. “Made it easy to step back into my job.”

  “So no time to help with any cold cases, huh?”

  I thought for a moment, recalling how happy I’d been in the last year with no spirits staring back at me in a mirror. No d
isembodied knocks on my door. “How cold?” I asked.

  “Twenty years. A nineteen-year-old College of Charleston student was murdered, and the case was never solved. Her sister recently found something that made her think it would make it worthwhile to reopen the case.”

  Despite my reluctance, my curiosity was piqued. “What did she find?”

  “Half of a gold charm—like those old BFF necklaces where each friend gets half. Except this one had the first letter of the dead sister’s sorority, so it looks like the other half had other Greek letters on it. Perhaps spelling out another fraternity or sorority with a coinciding letter, but the other half is missing.”

  “Why would the woman think it’s important?”

  “Because she’d never seen it before. She was moving into her parents’ home and found her sister’s trunk in their attic—the one that had been in her sister’s dorm room at the time of her death. It had never been opened since they brought it home. The woman found the charm in the bottom along with a broken chain. She’s positive it didn’t belong to her sister and could be the lead we needed to finally solve it.”

  “Even I have to say that’s a long shot.”

  He looked at me steadily without saying anything, as if waiting for me to fill in the blanks.

  “Unless someone can talk to the dead girl,” I said slowly.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I was thinking.”

  I studied my hands as I slowly pulled on my gloves. “I’ll think about it and let you know. Life’s pretty crazy right now. Maybe after I get this nanny thing sorted out.”

  “I understand—thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “for being so quick with the references. Jack and I appreciate it.”

  “Anything to help,” he said, giving me a devastating grin that might have my knees weakening if it weren’t for Jack.

  We stood outside the shop on King Street. “Where are you headed—can I give you a lift?” he asked.

  “If you could take me to my car on Tradd, I’d appreciate it. I’m driving over to meet Sophie and Jayne at the Pinckney house she inherited and wants to sell. She has absolutely no interest in hanging on to it.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a virtual stranger left an albatross of a house to an unsuspecting stranger. Selling an unwanted inheritance is always an option.”

  “Yeah, but still. It’s a nice albatross. That house must be worth . . .”

  “A lot. Haven’t seen the inside yet, so it could be a total gut job.” I narrowed my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll have to ask my dad, but there was something bad that happened in that house back in the late seventies or early eighties when he was still a beat cop. I was pretty young, but I remember it because he was pretty shook-up about it—and he’s not the kind of guy who gets easily shook-up.”

  “I’ll ask Jack to do a little research. I’ll need to know for full disclosure reasons, assuming Jayne will still want to sell it after she’s been inside.”

  “She wants to sell it and she hasn’t even seen the whole thing?”

  I paused. “She hates old houses.”

  He stared at me blankly.

  “It happens,” I said, getting tired of justifying this perfectly rational perspective—one I happened to share for personal reasons but not professional ones, obviously. “You’d be surprised how many people will only consider houses built in the last decade. Most of them are afraid of the maintenance and care an old house requires. Jayne’s a single woman who probably just doesn’t want to mess with all that, and I can’t say I blame her. She can find something nice and brand-new in Isle of Palms or Daniel Island for what she might sell the Pinckney house for if I do my job right.”

  Thomas walked me to his car and held open the passenger door, then shut it behind me. After he slid behind the steering wheel and buckled his seat belt, he sat staring ahead without speaking for a long moment.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Were you afraid of the dark when you were little?”

  I turned to look out the side window and spotted a woman wearing white pants and running shoes and a fanny pack standing in the middle of the street to take a photo down King Street, apparently oblivious of the waiting traffic. “I was. At least until my mother left me. That’s when I realized that real life was a lot scarier than whatever might be hiding in the dark.”

  He nodded sympathetically and then started the engine. “I was, too, but only because I would stay up late to listen to my dad telling my mom about some of his cases. Enough to make a kid’s imagination run wild after the lights were switched off.” His jaw clenched. “I’m just wondering what would terrify a person so much that she grows into adulthood still being afraid of the dark.”

  “It probably has something to do with being abandoned as a baby. They say some traumatic experiences stay with us no matter how young we were when they happened.”

  Thomas turned the steering wheel and pulled away from the curb. “Yeah. That’s probably it. Poor kid.”

  “Poor kid,” I repeated. I looked away again, embarrassed to find my eyes moist, and remembered the moment I realized that my mother wasn’t coming back and how I’d promised myself then that I’d never be afraid of the dark ever again.

  CHAPTER 5

  Iarrived at the Pinckney house on South Battery after Jayne did, something I always tried to avoid when showing a client a house for the first time. I preferred to curate what they saw initially and took note of, focusing on the positive attributes so they wouldn’t notice the cracks in the mortar or wood rot in the window frames. That would happen later, after they’d fallen in love with the old house and were already willing to restore the ancient pile of lumber without a thought to the hole of debt that they were about to step into.

  I’d driven my car, finally finding a parking spot four blocks away after circling the area for nearly fifteen minutes. Jayne must have walked, since she was wearing flats and her face appeared windblown. Her blond hair, pulled back into a low ponytail, had begun to frizz around the edges like a frayed rope. After stumbling in my heels for four blocks, I knew I didn’t look much better.

  She stood on the sidewalk with her back to the house, her arms folded tightly across her chest, her hands in tight fists. I squinted—my glasses left on my desk as usual—thinking she might actually be smiling until I got close enough to see her clearly. The grim set of her jaw called to mind the expression of a condemned prisoner heading up to the scaffold.

  “Good morning, Jayne,” I said brightly.

  It was hard to understand the words that were forced from behind her clenched teeth, but I was pretty sure she’d said “good morning.”

  As I fumbled in my purse for my lockbox key, I said, “Dr. Wallen-Arasi should be here momentarily—she’s always running a few minutes late. If you’d like, we can wait for her outside so she can tell us a little bit about the architecture and history of the house, or we can go ahead inside. . . .”

  “I’ll wait.” Her eyes had taken on a desperate cast. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before speaking. “You’re probably wondering why I have such an aversion to old houses. I lived in one off and on for a few years when I was around nine until I was fourteen. With a foster family. They said it was a nineteen thirties Craftsman cottage that they’d restored themselves.”

  “Was it nice?”

  Her eyes were bleak when she turned them to me. “Nice enough, I guess. But I hated it. I hated the way the wooden floors creaked, and the way the wind blew under the eaves in the attic. And I really, really hated the front stairs with the thick oak balustrade. They were so proud of it, too—that balustrade. They’d found it in the barn and refurbished it so that it looked as good as new—even paid a carpenter to re-create missing and damaged spindles so you couldn’t tell what was new an
d what was old.” She looked behind me, across the street toward the river. “But it was still the same old balustrade. I always thought it would make nice kindling.”

  I remembered sanding down the intricate mahogany balustrade in my own house and how I’d shared the same thought at the time. “Okay,” I said, making mental notes to transcribe later. “In your future house, no Craftsman style, no creaking floors, and a solid attic.”

  “Just new,” Jayne said, turning around to peer through the elaborate garden gate—one I was pretty sure had been crafted by the famed blacksmith Philip Simmons. “And not located near a hospital.”

  “Because of all the noise from the sirens?”

  She didn’t respond right away. Tilting her head in my direction, she said, “Yes. The sirens. They can keep a person up at night.”

  I was about to ask her more, but the car at the curb in front of us pulled out just as Sophie’s white Prius appeared and slid neatly into the spot. She and Jack were like parking spot conjurers, something for which I’d yet to forgive either one of them.

  I watched in horror and amusement as Sophie stepped from the car, dressed in head-to-toe tie-dye in various hues of green. Even her unruly dark curls were pulled back from her face with a lime green tie-dye elastic headband. Her feet were clad in her ubiquitous Birkenstocks, these in green patent leather, her socks subscribing to the tie-dye theme.

  “I hope you’re planning on sending Skye to live with me when she’s old enough to learn about fashion and the proper use of color and patterns.”

  Sophie grinned. “Only if you’ll send Sarah and JJ to me when you’re convalescing from your foot surgery to repair them from the damage your shoes are causing.”

  “There is nothing wrong with my feet—” I began, but Jayne interrupted by stepping forward with an outstretched hand.