Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Sometimes, I believe, trying to comfort someone is no comfort at all. I did not try to stop her tears.

  How much time passed, I could only guess.

  When her breathing stopped coming in short hitches and gulps, she placed her right hand on the table. She’d made a fist and did not open it.

  “All along,” she said, “I thought he didn’t know that I knew about that night. It was among his stuff in the closet upstairs. When I was a girl, I thought I’d lost it. I was wrong. He’d taken it from me. He knew there was only one place I would have found it. That night in the car.”

  She continued to cry. “All these years, he knew that I knew.”

  Again, I waited, not sure what she meant, for her fist was still closed.

  She reached across the table to offer it to me. I stretched out an open palm. She opened her hand and the object fell onto my palm.

  A silver cross on a silver chain.

  I knew whom it had belonged to. At least it was confirmation, if I had needed it, that the woman in her father’s car was my mother. But that was the least of it.

  I pulled my hand back before Amelia might notice any trembling. I squeezed so hard on the cross that the points bit into my skin.

  “Your mother’s?”

  I shook my head, not trusting my voice. I rose, found a glass in a cupboard, filled it with water from the tap, returned to the table.

  “She had it with her that night,” Amelia said. “Did you know that?”

  It was not something I wanted to answer. “Where did you find it?” I asked.

  Chapter 30

  Amelia told me the rest of the night of her eighth birthday.

   All of it.

  **

  After my mother stepped into the police cruiser, Amelia understood the longer she remained unknown to her father, the greater his anger would become if she was discovered.

  I can picture her curled into a ball on the floor of the back of the cruiser, eyes closed in fear, straining with all her other senses to judge the progress of the car, as if the metal skin of the car had become her skin, every bump of the road transmitted to the marrow of her bones.

  She heard nothing from her father or my mother until they were well outside of Charleston, when the blur of streetlights no longer washed over her and when the vibrations of the car had increased as it gathered speed on the open road.

  Then my mother spoke. “Can you turn on the siren, then? Can you go faster?”

  “I’d rather not. No sense risking an accident.”

  In her father’s voice, Amelia heard the beginning trace of anger that always frightened her.

  The woman’s voice was urgent. Young as Amelia was, she was able to sense it, and my mother would not let Amelia’s father’s anger deter her. “But I thought you had to get us there as soon as possible.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

  The rising anger in Amelia’s father’s voice must have finally frightened my mother, for Amelia told me the silence returned to the car.

  Amelia pushed herself as deeply as possible into the pool of darkness on the floor. When the car slowed again, Amelia remembered hearing crunching as the tires hit gravel.

  “This is not the way to the beach house,” my mother said.

  No answer from Amelia’s father. By now, silent tears ran down Amelia’s face. She knew something bad was happening.

  Farther down the road, my mother repeated herself. “This is not the way.”

  “You’re right,” Amelia heard her father answer. “This is not the way.”

  The car stopped.

  “Out,” her father said to my mother.

  Both front doors opened. Both front doors closed.

  They left Amelia alone in the car and too afraid to

  move.

  **

  Twenty minutes huddled on the floor after my mother and her father had left the car, Amelia’s bladder betrayed her. She could not wait huddled on the floor any longer.

  She reached to open the rear door, but because the car was occasionally used to transport desperate or dangerous men, there were no door or window handles on the inside. Amelia crawled over the seat back, tumbled onto the passenger side, her feet kicking the steering wheel. Her face pressed briefly against the fabric of the back of the front seat. It still held the perfumed scent of the unknown woman.

  Amelia slowly opened the door. After the terror of her silence, the croaking of bullfrogs in the nearby swamp seemed deafening. Immediately, mosquitoes attacked her bare arms and her face and her neck.

  She was afraid of snakes in the long grass in the dark. She squatted and lifted her dress, making water at the side of the car, the half-open door protecting her. There were no lights aside from the stars in a night sky as black as her fear. Nothing to give her any clue of where she was in the darkness.

  Beneath the immensity of the ceiling of stars and crushed by her fear, Amelia had never felt so small. She was barely aware of the function of her body, not until she finished. She hurried back into the front of the car, easing the door shut behind her.

  As she leaned on the front seat to begin to crawl over to the rear, her hand pressed on something faintly cold. The silver cross on the silver chain. She grabbed it and pushed herself up and over the seat, huddling on the floor again.

  She was nearly asleep from exhaustion when the car rocked with motion again.

  It was the trunk lid of the car.

  Opening.

  The car sagged as a heavy weight was placed inside the trunk. Then sagged again with a second heavy weight.

  The trunk lid closed.

  Amelia curled against herself.

  A new voice reached her from the open window on the front driver’s side. Cigarette smoke drifted into the car.

  This new voice belonged to a man Amelia did not know either.

  “Think Gillon is going to make it?”

  “I don’t care,” her father answered. “One way or another, the admiral will take care of it. We’ve got our own worries. We’ll go to the train station. You head home. I’ll meet you there.”

  “This makes me nervous,” said the unknown man. “I mean, going right back into town with what you have in the trunk.”

  “What?” her father asked. “A cop is going to pull me over?”

  Amelia heard the second man giggle nervously. “I guess not. But why are you going to meet me at my house?”

  “I happen to like insurance,” Amelia’s father said. “Like the gun the admiral used. I’ll be keeping it in my collection for as long as we need it.”

  “What’s that got to do with my house? I mean, we can’t just . . .”

  “Remember the cuff links you lent me for the last charity ball?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Anyone finds her, they find your cuff links.”

  “At my house,” the unknown man said. “Not a chance.”

  “You’re in this too far to say no now.”

  Amelia heard the audible sigh from the unknown man. He lit another cigarette. The smoke itched Amelia’s eyes.

  “Trust me. It’s a very safe place. Unless you decide to talk. Or try to blackmail me.”

  “Me blackmail you? What guarantee do I have that you won’t blackmail me?”

  “None,” Amelia’s father said. “None at all. But when you make a deal with the devil, you’ve got to expect that.”

  **

  The driver’s door opened. It was her father, grunting as he slipped behind the wheel.

  The front passenger door opened. Amelia heard a woman’s voice, very low and very soft.

  “You should not have killed them,” she said. “You should not have killed them.”

  Hidden on the floor, Amelia put a tiny fist in her mouth, as if this action would keep her from making the slightest noise. The next words she heard came from her father. His voice was thickened by an animal hatred she did not know could come from any human, and this frightened her even more than h
er fear of being discovered.

  “Listen, you tramp,” her father said. The hoarse whisper seemed to come from right above Amelia. She squeezed her eyes tighter shut, but she could not block the sounds from her ears. “I know where you came from. I think I even know who killed your father. White trash.”

  “Touch me and someday when you least expect it, I will find a way to kill you,” the woman said. “And you’re right. It won’t be the first time I’ve killed a man who deserved it. Now get us into town so I can get away from you.”

  From there, Edgar Layton drove her to the train station, where she got out.

  **

  The car made one more stop after the train station.

  Amelia could not resist her curiosity. After her father stepped out of the car, after he opened the trunk of the car, after she heard the quiet voice of another man greeting her father, after the heavy weights were removed from the trunk, and after ten minutes of terrified waiting, she found the courage to push up on her knees to look out the window of the back of the car.

  She allowed herself a brief glimpse of lights in the upper stories of a mansion on the other side of a dark garden. Saw the yellow beam of flashlights. Then she ducked, afraid she might have been seen. But this brief glimpse burned into her memory like a photograph.

  Although she was only eight, she knew she was witnessing the beginning of a burial.

  **

  When the chief of police’s car finally returned up the drive to their home, Amelia waited until her father left the car. She waited until he entered the house. Amelia was not worried if her mother had noticed her absence. Amelia’s mother noticed very little by the time evening had settled on the household. But she knew her father would immediately go into her bedroom. Her father checked on her nightly and would often wake her to give her a hug and a kiss.

  So Amelia knew she had little time.

  She snuck out of the car. She hurried past the familiar bushes of the yard and climbed into the hammock between two oaks. She fell back into the hammock.

  From the hammock, she saw the light go on in her bedroom.

  The light flicked off.

  Moments later, her father appeared in the light as the back door opened. He turned on a light that bathed most of the yard in yellow, throwing shadows of the oaks down on Amelia like grotesque stickmen.

  “Amelia,” he called.

  Amelia let him call twice more.

  “Yes?” she said, finally.

  “What are you doing out there?” Her father walked toward her.

  Amelia was only eight, but she was smart. She waited until he was close enough to see her. Then she yawned and rubbed her eyes as if she had just awoken.

  “You and Mama were yelling,” Amelia said. “I came out here to get away because I was a little afraid. Is it bedtime?”

  “Yes, my little sugar pill,” her father said with great affection.

  Her father carried her to the house. Once she delighted in his strength, delighted in the sensation of his complete control. Now it terrified her.

  The night before, only one night before, his words and tone and arms around her were a security like the comfort of a fuzzy flannel blanket. Now the sights and sounds in her memory made that security a mockery.

  This was the night when she learned to hate and fear her father.

  She knew then that he had two faces, and she knew which one was real. The one that belonged to the devil who made deals.

  Chapter 31

  After she told me all of this, Amelia composed herself and asked if we might go for a walk. There was something she wanted to show me.

  I wanted time alone to think about all that I had just learned, and I nearly declined. But I was touched at her vulnerability, and so it was we stepped away from her father’s house and walked, slowly, in the Charleston

  night air, framed by the ancient buildings crowding the street.

  “Tonight, when you answered the phone,” she said quietly, matching the mood of the city around us, “you thought I was . . .”

  “Claire,” I said. “Claire deMarionne.”

  “You and Claire are now . . .”

  I took so long to reply that Amelia spoke again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Not my business.”

  “I would guess,” I said, “with what we’ve been sharing in terms of secrets, a question like that is minor.”

  Again, we met eyes. Again, that unspoken current I’d felt upon first entering the kitchen earlier.

  “I’m reasonably sure,” I said, “all of what Claire and I once had has been resolved.”

  “Oh.”

  We both heard one word in what I had just answered, the one word that a lawyer would pounce on as a qualifier. Reasonably sure. As in there was some room to not be sure.

  “Does she know,” Amelia asked with hesitation, “the truth behind the accident?”

  “I will repeat myself.” I did not want to hurt Amelia by appearing harsh. So I reached across the darkness and touched her face. I enjoyed the sensation of the softness of her skin. “The accident is a closed subject.”

  I took my hand away. “You’ll understand?”

  She nodded. I wanted to reach across again and push back some hair from her forehead.

  **

  It was not a long walk from her father’s house over to South Battery. We chose to go along the waterfront and took a longer route than necessary.

  Amelia seemed in no mood to talk, and I was lost in thought. What did I now know about the night my mother disappeared from Charleston?

  According to Amelia, while I was at the Barretts’ summer house on Folly Island, Edgar Layton had stopped at our Charleston town house to pick up my mother. It was my mother because Amelia had found the silver cross in the front seat. If that wasn’t enough proof, I had confirmation of this from Opal, who had seen Layton from the top of the stairs that night. And, if Opal was right about the man who had killed her sister Ruby by a hit-and-run, then Layton had wanted no witnesses to that fact.

  Seen from the point of view of a frightened eight-year- old on the floor of the cruiser, the rest of the night unfolded like this:

  My mother and Edgar Layton had driven out somewhere in the country. They walked out into the darkness, leaving Amelia behind. When they returned, it was with a body or bodies, placed into the trunk of the cruiser. Then Amelia had watched, back in Charleston, as the woman from the cruiser walked to the train station. And from there, Edgar Layton had found a place to dispose of the bodies. A place that Amelia was about to show me.

  I found myself with mixed guilt and hope. If that night of confusion for Amelia had happened as she remembered and if my mother had left Charleston because of a murder, I could absolve myself, allow myself to believe I had no part in her departure, no reason for the guilt I carried. Yet what kind of son would wish his mother to be a murderer?

  As we walked past the old buildings, it finally dawned on me that in these circumstances my sorrow was extremely self-indulgent. While for me there was still a question about my mother and her past, for Amelia there was no doubt about her father’s conduct. Now Amelia’s father had only days or hours until death took him from her.

  I stopped.

  She stopped, puzzled. I held out both my hands. Slowly, still puzzled, she took them.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “All of this. It can’t be easy for you.”

  She understood what I meant. She squeezed my hands briefly in gratitude.

  That’s all I said.

  We began walking again.

  **

  Ten minutes later, Amelia and I reached East Bay and turned right. We continued south on Broad.

  We passed by the postcard-perfect restoration of Rainbow Row, town homes that in daylight would show bright pastel colors, giving tourists a flavor of the Caribbean that had once been important to the seafaring trade of Charleston. Built in the mid-eighteenth century, the ancient town houses were originally stores on the first floor with living quarte
rs for merchants above; Amelia probably already knew that once they had fronted the water, giving the merchants easy access to ships on the wharves. If she did, she listened patiently as I explained, giving her the stories my mother had once given me.

  In this vein we walked south, I pretending to be a tour guide, and she pretending to be a tourist with no fears or concerns for a father about to die from colon cancer.

  In the warm night air perfumed with the flowers of the expensive landscaping, it was a pleasant distraction from the matters that had drawn us together.

  To our left was the Carolina Yacht Club, the farthest point south for moored boats, and then we reached the beginning of the mansions on our right that faced the seawall and the convergence of the Cooper and Ashley Rivers.

  Our grim journey did not take much longer. We passed the bed-and-breakfast, then came to the mansions of South Battery.

  “Here,” she said to me. She pointed at the three-story antebellum mansion in front of us. “It’s here. The place that my father stopped that night after dropping your mother off at the train station. Where I think they buried someone.”

  “Here?”

  “When I was a girl, I would ride my bicycle past this place, trying to see who lived here,” Amelia said. “But the hedges and fence keep the yard hidden. From the street there is nothing to see. Now I know that my father knew that. With these houses, so much is hidden from the world.”

  She turned her face upward, and the streetlights showed her vulnerability to me all over again.

  “Once,” she said, “I think I saw you near this house. You were alone. On the steps, looking out at the harbor. I remembered your face because I wanted so desperately to know more about what happened that night. But now I don’t know if I trust that memory. It was so many years ago, and it was only once that I saw that boy. It might be my imagination that his face grew into yours. That’s why I was so startled to see you at the hospital.”

  “It’s not your imagination,” I said. “This is where I grew up after my mother ran away. The Barrett place.”

  Chapter 32