Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “I know that now,” I said. “My mother was—”

  “Yes,” Helen said. “There was a reason why Carolyn held her silence about that horrible night as she did. Her husband, David, adored his older brother, Lorimar. Think about it. How could she tell her husband that his own brother betrayed him in such a way? Especially if it would be Lorimar’s word against hers, the poor girl from a bad part of town? By the time she knew she was pregnant, it was too late. Then David was killed in action. She demanded that Lorimar pay monthly into your trust fund. She wanted Lorimar to be reminded every month what he’d done, how he’d betrayed his brother. Much as she hated it among the aristocrats of Charleston, she wanted you raised with all the advantages she never had.”

  I could hardly comprehend what she was telling me. “Lorimar Barrett was my father?”

  “Lorimar Barrett was your father, Nick. You and Pendleton are half brothers.”

  Chapter 28

  “Nick, I need to see you.”

   It was a whispered voice over the telephone. Ten o’clock. I had been half asleep, trying to lose my misery in the escape of exhaus-

  tion, and at first my hopes fooled me.

  “Claire?”

  “No.” Long pause. “Amelia Layton. We have to talk. Right away.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Sure. Where?”

  “My father’s house. I’ll give you the address. You can walk here from Meeting Street.”

  **

  In the old quarters of Charleston, you can walk nearly anywhere else within twenty minutes. I made it in less than ten, for Edgar Layton’s house was south of Broad, naturally among all the other moneyed houses clustered near the tip of the peninsula.

  It was a stone building, rising high and narrow with similar darkened houses on both sides. The previous night’s storm had long since cleared, and while the glow of the city lights obliterated any but the brightest stars, the moon fought through the haze, pale blue, hanging just above the roofline of the house, casting a shadow directly in front of the piazza that ran along the back side. In the flower beds, dead stalks of last year’s marigolds cast thin lines of black against the dim backdrop thrown on the ground by the light of the moon; it seemed like they were tall, crippled soldiers waiting wearily for the reaper’s scythe to take them down.

  Amelia explained to me later that this house was not her childhood home; that had been a bungalow north of 17, a highway that essentially bisected the haves on the south from the almost-haves on the north. It was so close to the Citadel that on Friday mornings the cadence of military marches rolled among the live oaks of her yard like a breeze shimmering the leaves, the sounds of the school reaching her as surely as the tangy salt air off the swampy lowlands of the Cooper River beside it.

  Amelia had been thirteen when her mother died, the same year that Edgar Layton moved south of Broad among Charleston’s rich. By then, her hatred for her father had escalated into a cold war with occasional skirmishes of hot-blooded teenage rebellion that he always won on the surface but lost on a much deeper level because his unyielding punishments scourged further her diminishing love and respect for him. Amelia lived like a stranger in that cold, empty house, waiting no longer than the morning after her final day of high school to move from her father, never visiting again.

  As I was about to find out, she had her own childhood ghosts of guilt that she’d never quite been able to bury.

  **

  The back door was unlocked. I found Amelia in the large luxurious kitchen. Copper-bottomed pots and pans hung from hooks above an island with a granite countertop; it was definitely a cook’s paradise, obvious even in candlelight.

  For the ceiling light was not on. Amelia was illuminated by those candles, as if she wanted the comfort of near darkness to hide alone in her thoughts. She sat at a small dining table in the corner of the kitchen that overlooked the backyard. She wore black jeans and a black turtleneck.

  As I entered the kitchen, she smoothed her long thick hair by running her hands through it.

  I sat opposite her. Papers were spread across the table. There was a Ziploc bag that held a pistol. I made no comments.

  Because Amelia was staring at the table, I, in turn, was able to study her. Despite the burden inside me, I acknowledged to myself the understated beauty of her face. Then I realized my assessment was not that impartial. It was my first awareness of a current between us.

  She lifted her eyes and caught me staring.

  More of that electricity.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “I am so sorry, Nick. Sorry about what you’ve gone through. And sorry that I assumed the worst about you.”

  She sighed. “I told you earlier that I’d met with Senator Gillon,” she said. “I didn’t tell you he’d asked if I’d found my father’s collection. I asked Gillon what he meant by a collection. He told me not to play dumb and warned me that hiding my father’s collection could put me in great danger. So, of course, after I left Gillon’s office, I began to wonder what he had meant. That’s why I came here tonight.” She smiled wanly. “I found it.”

  Amelia picked up a yellowed sheet of paper from the table and gave it to me. “I was wrong about you. The accident when you were nineteen. Tell me about it.”

  “Not much to tell,” I said. I took the sheet of paper. I was holding a copy of an accident report. That involved me. “Where did you find this?”

  “Why did you tell me you were driving?”

  “I didn’t. I told you I was found behind the steering wheel.”

  “But you weren’t driving. I know that now. This report. And the photographs of the accident scene. I’m not a detective, but even I can tell you weren’t driving. The front passenger side door is buckled in where it would have crushed your right leg. Blood on the floorboard on the passenger side. Yet the photograph of you behind the steering wheel doesn’t indicate any damage to the car that might have hurt your leg. It’s obvious from the photos that someone dragged you over from the passenger side and left you behind the steering wheel. Yet you took the blame. Why?”

  “Where did you find this?” I asked, deliberately ignoring her question. I held up the report. I indicated the contents on the table. “What is the rest of this?”

  The flickering light of the candles showed the sadness on her face. “Why did you let everyone think you were driving? Just tell me that.”

  “The accident is a closed subject,” I said. “It’s my mother I want to find.”

  I picked up the plastic bag. The pistol inside sagged heavily in the bag as I held it by the top and read the label, knowing I would see the date of Amelia’s eighth birthday—the date that my mother stepped onto a train and abandoned me in Charleston—starkly written behind the initials M.W.R. & C.L.B.

  C.L.B. Carolyn Leah Barrett. My mother’s initials. How was this pistol linked to her? Had she witnessed or been part of a murder?

  “This pistol . . . that night . . .”

  “You’ll understand better,” Amelia said, “when you see where I found it.”

  “Sure,” I said. My heart was heavy. Had I really wanted to learn this about my mother? That she had left behind her son and left behind a murder?

  “It’s been since high school that I last visited my father,” Amelia said. “Do you see any irony in the fact that my first return has technically been a break-and-enter?”

  It wasn’t a question that needed an answer.

  She stood. “Are you curious?”

  I answered by standing.

  I followed her out of the kitchen and down the hallway. She snapped on some lights. “You know,” she said, “my father cared little for cooking, but he hired an interior decorator to provide the appearance of those with rich tastes he aspired to imitate. You’ll see the rest of the house is the same.”

  She was right. Antiques, rugs, and furnishings straight from a home decorator’s magazine.

  “This house has no soul,” she said. “Money can buy a house, but it won’t
make it a home. Trust me, I know.”

  I continued to follow as Amelia moved upstairs, shutting off lights behind her as she turned on lights ahead. The floors were all hardwood, the walls and ceilings smooth plaster with ponderous moldings at the joints. There was no place for dust to hide, no place for anything to settle without the knowledge of Edgar Layton and his disapproving attention to detail. Despite the age of the house, the renovations he had directed had sterilized it so thoroughly with his determination to make it proper that with one single exception, the entire house was devoid of any interesting nooks and crannies that might provide an illusion of character, give it a personality that a person could grow to love as much as an eccentric aunt.

  We reached the top of the stairs. She pointed at a linen closet at the end of the hallway on the second floor.

  “When I was a teenager, I caught my father there once,” she said. “Caught him in the act of stepping, crouched and backward, out of the tiny closet, although it was half his size.

  “It was weird. I’d returned home after forgetting my purse and knew he didn’t expect me to be in the house at all. It was so weird, I immediately turned around in silence and sneaked down the stairs and out the back again without letting him know what I had seen.”

  She led me to the closet. “A few weeks later, when I was sure he was on duty, I explored the interior of the closet, poking and prodding and tapping at the walls and shelves.

  I couldn’t find anything. Still, I never forgot the sight of his huge body, bent and folded, as he backed out from the inside of the closet. My father never did anything without a coldly calculated reason. I knew something was hidden inside.”

  We neared the closet.

  “When Gillon asked me about the collection, I decided it must be hidden there.” She laughed softly. A hammer and crowbar rested on the floor. “Unlike during my teenage years, tonight I wasn’t afraid of leaving any damage behind as I searched it.”

  She pointed upward. “I replaced the ceiling panel, but that was before I made my decision to call you. You’ll find it moves aside easily. And the shelves are built sturdy enough to use as a ladder. I’d like you to see what I saw. That way you’ll more easily believe my story.”

  I was very conscious of the prosthesis that served as my lower right leg. While it served me fine for walking, climbing was another thing.

  She misunderstood my hesitation for the politeness of someone who wasn’t going to pry unnecessarily. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll wait for you in the kitchen.”

  There was a flashlight resting on a stack of towels on one of the shelves. She handed it to me. “Go on,” she repeated. “You want to learn about your mother, don’t you?”

  **

  Alone, I studied the inside of the linen closet. The shelves were wrapped around the walls in a U-shape. Left wall, rear wall, right wall. Some of the linens stacked on the shelves showed the imprints of shoes where Amelia had climbed.

  Above, the interior of the closet ceiling was lined with crown molding at the joints of the wall and ceiling, just like the rest of the house. But why would anyone bother to spend money on expensive molded wood when the decorative effect would never be seen? Unless the ceiling, as Amelia had discovered, rested on top of the molding.

  I stepped on the bottom shelf of the rear wall, holding shelves on each side for balance. Like a rock climber moving up the inside of a chute, I reached the ceiling with the top of my head; my feet were now on the shelves some four feet off the floor.

  I tensed my neck muscles and pushed. The ceiling popped loose from where it rested on the crown molding.

  A draft of cooler air hit my face.

  I slid the piece of ceiling ahead, resting it on crossbeams. I climbed one set of shelves higher, so that my upper body was now thrust into the opening. All of this movement was difficult and slow for me—I was grateful that Amelia did not witness my crippled awkwardness.

  With my upper body in the opening, my hands were free to shine the flashlight beam around me. All that separated me from the roof of the house were trusses, five feet of space, and cobwebs between the trusses. Shredded insulation filled the floor of the attic between the crossbeams. The end of the house was some five feet away from here, a patch of bare stone the color of old bones in my flashlight beam, with some exposed wiring that ran down into the insulation and out of sight.

  Just in front of me, I saw where Amelia had pulled up strips of insulation to expose a large ring handle on a square cover of plywood. I took the ring and pulled, lifting the square of plywood and sliding it onto the crossbeams of the ceiling below my waist. My flashlight beam showed the interior of the storage area hidden behind the linen closet. Primitive wooden ladder rungs ran down one wall. It took me five minutes to clamber down the back side of the linen closet.

  The total area of the hidden storage space was double the interior of the linen closet. The front half was empty; the back half held a large—almost antique—safe, the black exterior pitted and chipped.

  The safe door was open.

  I scanned with my flashlight.

  The interior of the safe was compartmentalized, with perhaps two dozen rectangular shelves made of thin steel. The tiny alcoves held plastic bags, and I pulled one out.

  It held a small knife with a smear of blackened, dried blood across the blade and bottom half of the handle, a blurred fingerprint trapped in the blood. There was handwriting on a white label on the outside of the bag: C.W.Y., 08-10-69.

  I pulled out another bag. It held two misshapen bullets labeled A.N., 02-02-65.

  One by one, I pulled out more plastic bags. A pair of scissors, one blade broken: O.H.G., 09-11-72. A derringer: K.I.T.W., 12-11-63. Other plastic bags with photographs, some showing sprawled bodies at a crime scene, others showing surprised couples in bed, pulling blankets up to protect themselves against the camera, invariably against a backdrop of a cheap hotel room.

  Another caught my eye. A folded piece of paper within the clear plastic, handwritten ink blotchy across the paper, labeled C.J.R., 05-09-68. I opened that bag, half knowing already what this macabre collection meant and wondering if the writing on the letter would confirm my suspicions.

  Dated May 5, 1968. I, Clifford James Ritchell, deputy mayor of Charleston, confess by my free will that I was engaged in an adulterous affair with Laura Lynn Swanson, secretary of the Public Works Department, and that said affair included secret liaisons at City Hall. Our first encounter took place at . . .

  Somehow Edgar Layton had once leveraged a confession out of this man, then held the confession.

  I understood. These labeled plastic bags, heaped around me like explosives from the past, were able to detonate shock waves into families and generations unaware of the past horrors hidden among them. This collection had given Edgar Layton his famed and, to outsiders, almost unfathomable power base. Crimes covered but never forgotten. The guilty, never free of their guilt, and like me, always beholden to Edgar Layton.

  A collection of the sins of the city.

  Chapter 29

  In the kitchen, Amelia was motionless and seated at the table again. In her hands was a large scrapbook.

  I touched her shoulder lightly. I wanted her to know I had returned, but I didn’t want my voice to intrude on her thoughts.

  She gently set the scrapbook down on the papers of

  the table, just to the side of the sealed plastic bag.

  She reached up and held my hand in place on her

  shoulder.

  “It’s a scrapbook of my life,” she said. “He documented everything about me. Even my graduation from med school. I didn’t know he was in the audience, but there’s a photo of me accepting my diploma and a photo of him at the banquet hall, as if he was trying to fool himself that he had been part of it.”

  She dropped her hand from mine and wiped her eyes. “The combination to the safe? My birthday. I had tried my father’s date of birth, my mother’s date of birth, the date of her death, the dat
e of their marriage. But it was my birthday that he used. I thought he’d learned to hate me as much as I hated him. But I was wrong. He just hid his love from me, because when he showed it, I let it bounce off me like garbage thrown into the street.”

  Her voice had been rising with her emotions. She stopped suddenly and became very calm.

  “In his den—you don’t have to look—there’s a film projector set up. And a screen. For the old eight-millimeter films. I ran the film before I went upstairs. It’s family stuff. Me as a little girl on my bicycle. Me at the swimming pool. Me at the Grand Canyon. All the dumb boring stuff that no one would find interesting except your own family. Beside the chair in his den, there’s probably two dozen empty bags of chips. He’d been sitting there, night after night, watching the films. Of me as a little girl. Before I started hating him.”

  She took a deep breath, trying not to cry. “And now he’s dying. Alone. Holding inside how much he loves me because he knows I’d just throw it away.”

  The sobs came. She muffled them in her hands. “Oh, God. I don’t want him to die like that!”

  I gave her time and silence. I moved to the window and stared at the darkness of the garden, thinking that all of us were vulnerable to something that had no source in body chemicals, body glands, body organs.

  Love.

  We all needed it. Even a man like Edgar Layton, who hid that need from the world and perhaps from himself.

  “Nick?”

  Amelia’s voice trembled.

  I moved back to the kitchen table.

  “I was eight years old,” Amelia said. “I knew it was wrong. But I couldn’t tell anyone. Not Mother. It would hurt her. Not my father. After what I saw him do, I was terrified of him. Not the police. He was the police. And even if there had been someone to tell, my secret would put my father in jail. I knew that. How could I put him in jail and hurt him and hurt my mother, who would then know what he had done? So I had to hold that secret. And I began to hate him.”

  Amelia began to cry again. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I knew. I never felt like I had a father after that night. And I began to hate myself because I knew it was wrong not to tell anyone.”