St. Michael’s graveyard.
She pulled closer to me, a bundle of soft vulnerability. She pulled my head down toward her face.
I loved her. I deserved her. I wanted her. I ached to protect her. I’d dreamed of this. But she was another man’s wife. Whatever might happen next would be poisoned by that inescapable fact.
That was the reason, I told myself, that I could not let this continue. But her accusations of a day before made my heart feel like frozen wood. You were a lost little boy, wanting so bad to be part of the rest of us. You did anything for me, just to belong, and I was young enough to enjoy that kind of control without knowing how tedious it might have become had we stayed married.
Those words were another reason I pulled away. “No,”
I said. If she could hurt me, I could hurt her.
“No?” Her fingertips brushed my lips again.
“No.”
She straightened. Wiped her face. “Go away,” she said.
“Claire . . .” I was remembering the last time I had pushed someone away to spite myself. Already I regretted this. Claire had been this close to giving herself to me. She was separated from Pendleton. How much would it take for her to leave him completely and come back to me? Especially when she learned the truth about why I’d left. “I’m sorry, Claire.”
Too late. She’d moved away from me, hugged herself with her arms. Her face was cold again. “Go away. Don’t come back. Tomorrow, I’ll forgive myself for this drunken weakness. But I don’t want to ever see you again.”
Chapter 24
Amelia was waiting on the porch of the bed-and-breakfast when I returned. Standing at the rails. Staring coldly at my approach.
She did not sit on one of the rockers when I reached her.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. It was a quarter past noon.
“Not important,” she answered. “Your life is not my business. With the exception, perhaps, of one area. I won’t even apologize for asking.”
“Ask.”
“Have you heard of the phrase remittance man?”
I raised an eyebrow. “That is a strange question. Will you tell me why you asked?”
“Remittance man,” Amelia continued, face suddenly scornful. “During the mid- to late-1800s, aristocratic English families rid themselves of sons with embarrassing habits by shipping them across the ocean to the frontiers of the new America, where it would not matter how openly they displayed drunkenness or gambling, providing them with monthly remittance payments as a guarantee to
keep them from returning to England to spoil the family name.”
“I am familiar with the phrase,” I said. Too familiar. I could guess where she was going with this, why she was so edgy.
“I learned that phrase today from Geoffrey Alexander Gillon.”
“Gillon!” I leaned forward. “Why would he call you? How did he know where to find you? How—”
“He’s our family attorney,” she said icily. “Has been for years. Because of my father, there are arrangements to make, difficult in these circumstances.”
I leaned back.
She remained icy. “He told me you eloped with Claire deMarionne. The deMarionnes would have done anything to get rid of you because your background was white trash—his words, not mine—and you gave them the excuse they needed in less than a week. He said my father found you drunk behind the steering wheel of an accident that left Claire’s brother in a coma and eventually killed him. Said Helen deMarionne gave you an offer: Stay in Charleston and face criminal charges for the accident. Or annul the marriage and accept a monthly settlement. He said you dumped your new wife for the money and left the hospital as soon as you could.”
“Why would my name come up in a conversation with Gillon?” I asked.
“So you don’t deny it?”
“I won’t deny it,” I said.
“That’s all I need to hear.” Without another word, without looking back, she walked off the porch, down the sidewalk, and past all the magnificent mansions that lined the waterfront.
**
Pastor Samuel had only been able to tell me where Ruby’s sister Opal had last worked as a maid. I was very familiar with the mansion where the family lived. It was near the bed-and-breakfast, and I found it intolerable after Amelia’s departure to continue to sit on the piazza and torture myself with memories.
So I tried to find solace in movement.
I walked. I took a degree of savage satisfaction in the biting pain of my plastic limb.
Five minutes later, I arrived at the Ellison mansion.
**
Honeysuckle and magnolia perfumed me as I approached the front door.
Without hesitation, I knocked.
I heard footsteps. The footsteps stopped. I knew I was being scrutinized through the peephole by whoever had approached the door.
The footsteps moved away.
I knocked again.
Then I began to pound. Doors like this had been a barrier to me all of my childhood.
Finally, the door swung open.
“Go away. We don’t offer tours.” The old woman was dressed formally, down to her white gloves. Her dull red skirt was conservative, and her jacket was discreetly ornamented by a gold pin holding a carnation. Her blue-rinsed hair had been set and sprayed, her cheeks rouged, and her eyebrows penciled in.
“I need to ask a question,” I said.
“Read a guidebook. Now go away.”
She began to shut the door. I inserted my foot. My right foot.
She slammed the door, hoping I would yelp. I did not.
I was grimly amused that my plastic limb finally had a use.
“Remove your foot and go away.” She was unintimidated by my stoic response to the slammed door. She spoke in soft, long southern vowels, her voice filled with the supreme politeness that in her circles meant just the opposite.
“No guidebook will have the answer I need,” I said.
“Please try to understand.” She spoke to me as if I could not possibly understand, using the tone she might have chosen for a colored person, before it had become out of fashion to call servants that. “If you do not leave immediately, I will call the police.”
“A maid once worked in this household,” I said. “Opal Atkins. It would help me greatly if you could give me her address.”
I spoke clearly, biting off each syllable, something I had consciously taught myself as part of my effort to leave everything of Charleston behind.
“The business of this household is of no matter to anyone except those of this household.”
For a moment, I felt thirteen again, as though facing the collective disapproval at the family’s nightly meals in the Barrett place, with a haunting perfume of wisteria and jasmine wafting in from the garden through open windows.
“Sordid business usually is,” I said. I allowed the polite southern drawl back into my voice. “Wasn’t it your husband, Edmund Ellison, who resigned as college dean to take a job in your daddy’s bank? Marijuana and two coeds at a private after-curfew party in their dormitory room, I believe, which would have been forgivable if he hadn’t also used scholarship foundation money to fund the trips he took to Bermuda with those two coeds. Your daddy replaced the money and had a talk with someone at the newspaper and none of your husband’s activities became public. It helped that your daddy and his bank held a million-dollar demand loan against the newspaper, which, of course, was
a lot of money at the time.”
Wide as Lauren Ellison’s eyes suddenly opened, I was confident she wouldn’t recognize me. These people never saw beyond themselves, and anyway, too many years had passed since I’d been in Charleston.
To her credit, she did not back down. “I have suffered your rudeness long enough. Go anywhere with those rumors and face a slander suit.”
“You have Opal’s address,” I said calmly. “If not, you know of someone who does.”
She pushed the door, squeezing my foot
into the frame.
I could like this old woman’s stubbornness. But I, too, had that quality.
“Your son Fraser dismembered animals in the carriage house at the back of your fine property,” I said. “Other people south of Broad wondered what happened to their dogs and cats, but I knew. And I think you did too. How is Fraser these days?”
“I should be able to find something that has her address,” she said. “Will you wait a moment?”
Chapter 25
“Who do you know who owns a Rottweiler?” I asked.
“Another bedside visit,” Edgar Layton said. His head trembled as he spoke. Although I did not want to be, I was impressed at the effort he put into keeping his voice strong and under control. “Haven’t you given up hope of some kind of deathbed confession?”
Implying that there is something to confess. It strengthened my resolve to be here, regardless of how much
acrimony I risked if Amelia appeared in the next few minutes.
I repeated my question. “Who do you know who owns a Rottweiler?”
“What a stupid question.”
“Where is my mother? You took her to the train station the night she left Charleston.”
“Say I could tell you right now where to find her.” Layton’s grin was a death mask, his skin stretched tight across his forehead, his nostrils large, dark openings into his skull. “How would you force it from me?”
By his reply, I found it interesting that he did not care that I knew. Or how I knew. I did not flinch at his smirk. I looked directly into the man’s glowing eyes. “You’ve got a day, maybe two, to live. No matter what happened that night, no one can hurt you for it. Telling me won’t cost you a single thing. Please, help me.”
“The mercy route.” Layton had to take several deep breaths to continue. “Is that it? You’ve dropped all pride and you’re on your knees, begging. Do it more. I’ll consider telling you.”
He does know.
“I’ve dropped all pride. I’m on my knees. I’m begging. Please help me.”
Layton studied me. “Nope. That doesn’t do it. But I enjoyed watching you.”
I stared steadily back at Layton.
“Maybe try force,” Layton said. “Threaten to kill me. I’d suggest a pillow over my face. I doubt there’d be an autopsy. No one would suspect murder, not with me this close to dead anyway. You could get away with it.”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me,” I said tonelessly.
“Nope. That threat doesn’t frighten me. You’d be doing me a favor. Like you said, I’ll be gone in a day or two. You’ll save me a lot of pain. And, trust me, time goes slow when every breath is agony.”
I continued to stare at the skeleton of a man in the bed in front of me.
“See? With me, you have no leverage. When a man cares about nothing, nothing controls him. He is free. On the other hand, you care so much about finding your mother that it gives me control over you.” Layton cackled. “Me, an old dying man with the power to make you beg.”
Layton recovered his breath again. “I’ve always known that. This city is filled with fools who gave me power because they had something they wanted to protect. Reputation, money, loved ones. I could always find what was important to them and use it against them. Like plucking cherries from a tree. Rich, juicy cherries that I sucked dry. But me? I don’t even care to live. I’m not even afraid of God. There’s not a single thing you can use against me.”
“No, there is nothing to use against you,” I said. “But I can make you a promise.”
“What could you give me that I would care about?”
“Protection for Amelia.”
He blinked.
“Why did I ask you about a Rottweiler? Someone tried to kill me last night. Only a day after Geoffrey Alexander Gillon made a threat that I should leave all of this alone. There is something terrible that I may bring to light. And you are part of it.”
I was just guessing. But what did I have to lose? And Edgar’s focused stillness told me I wasn’t totally wrong in my guess. About the threat. Or about the love for his daughter.
“Whoever is trying to stop me might believe Amelia knows what you know. What if they go after her next? The truth about my mother is a hornet’s nest. I know this from Senator Gillon. He’s already warned me about swinging a stick at it. But I’m not going to stop my search. If you help me find the truth, I may be able to prevent the hornets from stinging innocent bystanders. Like Amelia. You do care about her, don’t you?”
“Go away,” he croaked. “Go away.” His face formed into lines of anger.
I pressed harder. “You blackmailed Pendleton. To how many others have you done the same? When you die, people with power are going to want what you once held over them. Even if it means hurting her.”
“Shut up,” he said. He spoke with strength that surprised me. “Shut your mouth.”
“Oh,” I said, “you do care about something.”
I taunted him, a dying man. “Suddenly you are no longer free. And, after you lived this life of yours, does your precious daughter love you as you love her?”
He rang the nurse’s bell, rolled over, and faced away from me.
I left him there. I walked away, feeling diminished.
**
I was standing at the elevator doors when I heard my name called.
I turned and saw a nurse hurrying toward me. Middle-aged, huffing from the effort.
“Yes?”
She slowed. “Nicholas Barrett?”
The elevator chimed. The door opened.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Layton asked me to catch you. He wanted me to tell you something from him.”
I let the elevator door shut behind me.
“It doesn’t make much sense to me,” she said. “So if you don’t understand it either, don’t feel bad. Sometimes patients on morphine . . .”
“Yes.” I tried to hide my impatience.
“McLean Robertson owns a Rottweiler,” she said. “That’s what Mr. Layton asked me to tell you. McLean Robertson owns a Rottweiler.”
Chapter 26
“Nicholas Barrett?” Opal Atkins said after I introduced myself at the doorway, drawing a hand to her mouth with a gasp. “Lord, have mercy. The devil’s finally come around to make me pay for my sins.”
While her ground-floor condominium spoke against any stereotype of the elderly, Opal Atkins resembled the short, flower-patterned-dress-wearing, pie-baking grandmother of any television commercial. The curls of her short white hair framed a deeply wrinkled face. She wore wire-rimmed bifocals. Age had begun to hunch her back.
She retreated into the apartment, wordlessly beckoning me to follow. She pointed me to the couch and, still without speaking, filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove to boil.
This interlude gave me time to look around the interior.
I cannot comment, of course, on the quality of retirement of all maids who spent a lifetime of service in the homes south of Broad, but moments earlier, from the sidewalk, it had appeared to me that Opal Atkins had not fared badly in her pension years.
By taxi, I’d traveled from the old quarter over the Cooper River to the opposite side in Mt. Pleasant. The address I’d been given for her was a seniors’ complex of one-level condominiums. By the new brick exterior, large grounds of trimmed grass, and expansive flower beds, this was no depressing prison where the elderly were sent to await death.
The interior of her condominium confirmed it. The layout was open and filled with midafternoon sunlight from generous windows; her kitchen was separated from the living room by a half wall inset with glass blocks. The furniture was modern, as was the taste in paint colors. All that betrayed her age and sense of fashion were the profusion of knickknacks and dozens of family photos scattered throughout, filling the spaces on every shelf, ledge, and windowsill.
The wait for the water to boil gave me time to ponder her words of greeting: Lord, have mercy. The devil�
�s finally come around to make me pay for my sins.
Was I the devil?
Or had he appeared with me?
I did not ask. Not immediately. Opal did not seem to be in a hurry to banish me. Over the half wall that separated us—me on the sofa, she in the kitchen—I saw that she was cutting slices of chocolate cake and setting them on a plate.
When she was ready, she came around the corner with a tray, carrying a teapot and the prepared cake. She poured the tea. Her tiny, shaking hand paused over a bowl of sugar lumps.
“If I remember right,” she said, “when you were a boy, you took sugar and some milk. Has that changed?”
I shook my head.
She added the sugar and milk and stirred the tea before handing me the cup on a saucer.
I sipped and smiled a thank-you. “This is a nice place to live.”
She pointed at two nearby wedding photos. Each showed a young proud man beside a beautiful woman. “My oldest boy is an engineer. The other, an architect. I helped them get through college, and they haven’t forgotten. Some do, you know. I know plenty of old folks who don’t get help from their children.”
I sipped and nodded, then asked the obvious question. “You remember me as a boy?”
She looked up from her task of lifting a slice of cake onto a plate. “Sure do. It was my sister Ruby who looked after you, but there were times, especially when you were younger, that she brought you over when she was looking after you and wanted to get out of your mama’s house.”
I dimly remembered a clanky ceiling fan in a small house that always smelled of gingerroot. “That was you? In the house on Amherst?”
“None other. You were a handsome boy. Nice and polite. I’m glad to see you grew up the same.”
I accepted the cake.
“I know what’s on your mind,” she sighed. “You heard me say the devil’s come around to make me pay.”
I nodded.
“You want to ask me about your mama, right? About Ruby, right?”
Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series) Page 15
