Don't Ever Tell

by Brandon Massey

  54

  He was still smiling when his parents drove off. He tilted his head backward—the movement aggravated his sore jaw— and let the afternoon sunshine warm his face.

  Lucky to be alive, the cop had said.

  The winter sky was a gorgeous, cobalt blue. Like a becalmed sea.

  The image caused an idea to sputter like a wavering flame in the back of his mind. He opened the cargo door of the Explorer. An aluminum baseball bat was wedged in the back of the cargo space, from when he’d played in the softball league at his former job. He pulled it out with his good hand.

  He doubted Bates would be so bold as to return to the house so soon after the cops had left, but better safe than sorry.

  Armed with the bat, he went inside.

  Coco was barking her welcome-home bark when he entered. He had confined her in her kennel in the bedroom upstairs until he had a chance to clean up the damage in the house, but the little dog’s yaps were as good a sign of any

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  that Bates wasn’t there. When Bates had been around, the dog had been silently hidden beneath the bed like a kid taking refuge from a hurricane.

  Keeping the bat balanced on his shoulder, he walked to the family room.

  Bates had ripped the photos and artwork off the walls and smashed the glass fronts. He had slashed some of the canvases to tatters, too.

  He found the picture he wanted beneath a heap of broken frames. The glass was cracked in the center, but it was largely intact.

  It was the panoramic photo of the beach. A curve of white sand. An ocean of clear blue water beyond the shore. A boat in the distance, cresting the waves.

  He took the picture to the kitchen counter. As he examined it closer, the idea that had flickered in his thoughts slowly gained substance.

  Two consecutive nights, he had dreamed of walking a beach with Rachel and their child. He hadn’t thought the dream had any particular connection to the photo. He didn’t even know where the beach was located. There was no title scrawled on the border of the picture, no indication of where it might be.

  But Rachel would know.

  Because that was where she was hiding.

  A chill of wonder stepped along the ladder of his spine.

  I can tell you that Rachel loves her property dearly. It’s been...a part of her for a very long time.

  This had been the first photo that Rachel had hung in their house. She kept miniaturized versions in her study, and in her office at the salon. She had a screensaver of the beach on her laptop and cell phone, too.

  When he’d asked her once about the photo, she’d said only that she loved all beaches, and that it was a picture that

  DON’T EVER TELL 285 made her happy whenever she looked at it. I think I was a beach bum in a former life, sweetie.

  The property management company operated exclusively in Georgia. They had a branch office in Savannah. Where could you find a beach in Georgia?

  On the southeastern coast of the state. Or on the barrier islands off the coast.

  He turned the photo facedown on the counter, and used a knife to pry loose the picture from the frame. He carefully peeled out the photograph.

  He checked the back side. There was a processing inscription from Wolf Camera dated three years ago, but that was all.

  He flipped over the photo. He brought it closer to his face.

  There was text scrawled on the side of the boat. But it was much too tiny for him to read.

  He stepped across the kitchen, avoiding the debris on the floor. He rummaged through their junk drawer—it was full of miscellaneous items that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else— and found a small magnifying lens underneath old Chinese take-out menus.

  He held the lens above the boat in the photo. No good. The text was still blurry. He needed more powerful magnification.

  He took the picture into his office. At the doorway, he stopped, cursed. He’d forgotten that Bates had banged up his computer, printer, and scanner. His work files were safe—he backed them up daily to an online file storage site—but his equipment was worthless, and he remembered that Bates had destroyed Rachel’s laptop and other devices, too.

  He rolled up the photo like a poster and went to visit Tim.

  55

  After the divorce was finalized, she returned to Dexter’s house—she’d never thought of it as her house—with a locksmith.

  The past several months, she’d been living with Aunt Betty, until she got on her feet again. She’d quit her job at the salon on the South Side, and found work at a small beauty shop in Zion. She was keeping her expenses low and saving money, in hope of making a much bigger move sometime soon.

  Dexter had been sentenced to ten years, but what if he got paroled sooner? What if he even escaped? He had so many cop friends that she would never be safe unless she got far away. Unless she started over with a clean slate.

  The money he was hiding in that floor safe could help her. The locksmith was a white-haired gentleman from Lithuania who spoke broken, heavily accented English and wore faded denim overalls. She’d intentionally gone to someone who would be unlikely to tell what he was going to witness to persons Dexter might know.

  She helped him drag the refrigerator away from the wall. He bent on creaky legs, glasses perched on the tip of his long thin nose, and pulled away the oil mat.

  He tapped at the stone tiles. “Here?”

  “Yes, under there.”

  He felt around the tiles for a moment like a blind man

  reading Braille, took a flat-bladed tool from his toolbox, and loosened a tile in the corner.

  She got down on her knees with a butter knife she’d taken from the drawer. “I’ll help you.”

  Together, they removed all of the tiles in the area where the refrigerator had stood, exposing a gray floor safe sunk in concrete. The locksmith ran his long, nimble fingers across the combination lock.

  She watched, heart thudding.

  “Can you crack it?”

  He gave her a grandfatherly smile.

  “One hour or sooner.”

  At first, she tried to wait sitting at the kitchen table, but wound up pacing through the house. She had taken nothing from Dexter’s home but her clothes. Her divorce attorney had advised her that because of the circumstances of her situation, a judge very well might have awarded her the house, but she was adamant that she didn’t want it. It held nothing but painful memories.

  She took bitter pleasure in the dust and cobwebs that had accumulated in the rooms. Let Dexter clean the house his damn self when he got out of prison. Her cleaning days were over.

  After about a half-hour, the locksmith called her into the kitchen.

  The hinged door of the safe was open. She peered into it.

  It was full of cash. Dozens and dozens of bundles of cash

  DON’T EVER TELL 289 held together with rubber bands. More money than she had ever seen in her life.

  The locksmith looked from the money, to her. His face was somber.

  “Please, sir,” she said, “I would be deeply appreciative if you don’t ever tell anyone about this.”

  He smiled, and made the motion of zipping his lips shut.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He gathered his tools and presented her with the bill. She paid with some of the money she had saved, and offered to pay him extra, but he declined with a firm shake of his head.

  “Do a good thing,” he said.

  He shook her hand and left the house.

  Alone, she locked the doors and pulled all of the blinds shut. She returned to the open safe.

  Working slowly, she removed all of the bundles and stacked them on the table. She counted them all, couldn’t believe it, and counted them again.

  The cash totaled one million, seven hundred ten thousand, and three hundred and sixty dollars.

  It was a lifetime of earnings, and more than enough to guarantee a fresh, successful start almost anywhere in the world.
<
br />   But that required her ignoring where this money had surely come from. Dexter’s dirty cop exploits. Blood money.

  The locksmith’s remark echoed through her thoughts: Do a good thing.

  Didn’t she deserve the money for what she’d suffered at his hands? Wasn’t she worthy of a windfall? She might never have another shot at this kind of fortune.

  She took a packet of bills and riffled her thumb across it, the distinctive, alluring smell of money blowing into her face. She could go anywhere with this, do anything she wanted. Help out Aunt Betty. Open a salon of her own. Buy a home. Buy a car.

  Buy a new life.

  Or do a good thing.

  She decided that she would think about it for a while, and then make her decision.

  56

  Tim was on a stepladder hanging a colorful sign advertising a new PDA from the ceiling when Joshua entered the shop. At the sight of Joshua, Tim almost lost his balance.

  “Dude, what the hell happened to you?” he asked. “Your lady kung fu you when she found you snooping, or what?”

  Tim wore a rumpled, black Megadeth T-shirt with a faded skull on the front, a shirt Joshua was quite sure Tim had used to wear in high school. His jeans had gaping holes in the knees, and he had on a pair of combat boots that looked as if they had trudged through two world wars.

  “No,” Joshua said.

  “Do tell, dude.” Tim hopped off the stepladder.

  Joshua shrugged.

  “I got in a fight.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. How’s the other guy look?”

  “I shot him three times.”

  “Whoa! Fuckin’-A, dude.” Tim suddenly squinted at Joshua. “Wait, you’re shitting me, right?”

  Joshua only looked at him. Then he unrolled the photo on the counter.

  “My scanner and computer are trashed, Tim. I want to scan this and magnify the boat image.”

  Tim came around the counter. He rotated the photo toward him. “Where the heck is this beach? Looks cool.”

  “That’s what I need to find out,” Joshua said.

  “Let’s go in the back.” Tim snatched the picture off the counter.

  Joshua walked around the counter and followed Tim through a beaded curtain into a cramped, windowless room full of lopsided boxes, CPUs, monitors, keyboards, and unnamable spare parts.

  Tim settled into a squeaky, spring-backed chair in front of a battered metal desk that held a notebook computer that appeared brand new. He lit a cigarette.

  “Just ease yourself on that box right there, dude,” he said, pointing.

  Joshua sat. Tim placed the photo in a scanner on the edge of the desk and turned on the machine.

  “You really cap someone three times?” Tim asked. “I always figured you for the nonviolent type, like Martin Luther King.”

  “Can you please pull up the imaging program, Tim?”

  “Guess you don’t wanna talk about it.”

  “You’ve always been a smart guy.”

  Tim tapped on the keyboard and opened the imaging software. After a few seconds, the image of the beach photo filled the screen.

  “Focus on the boat,” Joshua said.

  Tim centered the cursor on the boat and entered a command to magnify the image.

  Joshua leaned forward on the box. His heart had begun to pound. “Keep going.”

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  The text on the vessel was blurry at first, but it gradually became clearer as Tim continued to increase the magnification. Soon, the digitized boat was the only object on the screen, a reddish blur.

  “Voilà,” Tim said.

  Joshua pushed up his glasses on his nose and read the now-huge, blocky words across the boat’s hull.

  “Hyde Island Queen,” Joshua said. “I’ve never heard of Hyde Island. You?”

  Tim shook his head.

  “Google it?”

  “Please. Use Georgia in the search, too.”

  Tim pulled up Google, typed in the search phrases, “Hyde Island,” and “Georgia,” and was rewarded with over five hundred links.

  “You mind if I surf back here for a little while?” Joshua asked.

  “Mi casa su casa, dude.” Tim bounced out of the chair. “I actually gotta do work today. Knock yourself out.”

  Joshua sat in the chair, and started reading.

  57

  Hyde Island, Joshua learned, was a barrier island off the coast of Savannah. It was only about seven miles long, and had a population of less than a thousand. Most of the island was under the control of the Georgia State Parks Department, which operated a marine institute there in conjunction with the University of Georgia. The southernmost tip, however, called Hall Hammock, was a historic community of Geechees who had lived on Hyde Island for over two hundred years.

  He had once viewed a cable documentary about the Geechee and Gullah people. They were a small subculture of blacks on the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, brought there to work the cotton plantations during slavery times, who had managed to preserve significant elements of their African heritage. They had their own customs, rituals, and way of life. In the past few decades, encroaching beachfront development and lack of a stable economy had caused their numbers to dwindle as they left their island homes and integrated into life on the mainland.

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  How had Rachel come to find out about this place? Did she actually own property there?

  Hall Hammock, in particular, interested him. Her mother’s maiden name was Hall. Was there was a family connection to the island?

  The mystery surrounding his wife kept deepening. The marriage to Bates... the large sum of money she potentially possessed...now maybe an island property.

  He was angry that she had hidden so much from him, but he couldn’t help being intrigued, too.

  Hyde Island was accessible exclusively by ferry. On a tourism site, he found a ferry schedule: the boats ran four times a day, from seven in the morning through five in the afternoon, Monday through Saturday. Since it was a fourhour drive from metro Atlanta to the coast, it was too late for him to catch the boat that day.

  But he could get there tomorrow.

  PART THREE

  Day of Reckoning

  58

  Rachel burst out of sleep with a strangled scream and the feeling of strong hands crushing her windpipe.

  Springing upright in bed, she grabbed the .38 revolver that lay on the nightstand. The gun was already loaded. She clutched it in trembling hands and swept it across the bedroom.

  The lamps were off, but a nightlight burned on the side of the bed, radiating a greenish glow that cast the room in an unsettling, alien light. The dresser, the bookcase, and the leather club chair might have been mysterious artifacts beamed into the room by an advanced civilization.

  She was alone. The house was quiet but for a soft wind whispering through the eaves.

  She cleared her throat and drew in several deep, relaxing breaths. She placed the gun back on the table.

  The digital clock read a quarter past seven in the morning. She had gotten into bed around midnight, but she felt as if she had barely slept at all.

  Dexter haunted her sleep just as he did her waking hours.

  She swung her legs to the side of the mattress. Her sneakers sat beside the bed, ready to be slipped on at a moment’s notice. She’d gone to bed fully dressed in a pink sweatshirt and matching pants.

  Although she was safer there than she was perhaps anywhere else on the planet, she needed to be prepared for anything, at any time.

  She slipped into her shoes. Standing, she clipped a leather gun holster to her waistband, fit the revolver snugly in it, and pulled her shirt over the gun.

  The weight on her hip comforted her. She didn’t dare to go anywhere without the .38. Not even to the bathroom.

  She padded across the creaky floorboards to the balcony door. She disengaged the double-bolt lock, unlatched the security chain, and stepped outside onto a broad b
alcony constructed of sun-and-salt weathered pine. A rattan table and a pair of matching chairs stood in the center.

  There was a chill in the salty air; the thermometer beside the door read fifty-two degrees. She shoved her hands into her pockets and moved to the railing.

  Beyond the balcony, there was the beach, white, and flat, fringed on the landward side with tall Spartina grass.

  Beyond the shore lay the Atlantic Ocean. The moon rode the predawn sky, giving the crashing waves a pale, eerie radiance.

  This time of day, the delicate interval between light and darkness, her aunt Betty had called “dayclean,” for the night sky was being cleansed to make way for the sun and the promise of a new day. It was a sacred period, a time for prayer and reflection.

  Since she was a child, no matter the time of day, the ocean had tended to soothe her spirit. When she stood on the beach and gazed at the seemingly infinite body of water, she felt as if she lingered on the brink of unraveling all of life’s myster

  DON’T EVER TELL 301 ies, of understanding her ultimate purpose in the greater scheme of things.

  At other times, however—times like then—when she stared at the water, she felt insignificant in the face of such vastness. As if she could walk down the balcony steps, shuffle across the shore, and wade into the sea until completely submerged and the water took her life, and the universe wouldn’t give a damn, because she was as meaningless as the conch shells that dotted the sand.

  No, she was not meaningless. She was condemned. Aunt Betty had been killed because of her. Maybe other innocent people, too. All because of her.

  If she had never married Dexter, no one would have ever gotten hurt.

  If she hadn’t run away from Illinois and started a new life founded on deceit, she wouldn’t have met Joshua, wouldn’t have broken his heart with her lies.

  Condemned.

  Fifty paces would carry her down the steps and into the water. She could put an end to it all. She deserved a watery grave for all the damage she had caused.

  She faced the staircase. But she couldn’t make her feet move.

  There was the baby to consider.

  She touched her abdomen, rubbed gently, and imagined that she could feel her child’s beating heart, though it was much too early in the pregnancy for the baby to have developed that vital organ.