Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  I wished there was one other here. I had not been able to reach her, but I had left a message. I guessed, however, it was too much to hope that she would join us.

  We were all here to say good-bye to Mama. Quietly. Away from the media barrage that had overwhelmed me in the hours after finding her. I had given the reporters nothing beyond the clichéd—that I was glad to finally discover she had not run away from me.

  The rest of it I had not divulged, except to Glennifer and Elaine as fulfillment of my bargain with them. Nothing about Claire and her attempt to kill me—it would be my word against hers. Nothing about my inheritance—that battle I intended to begin away from Charleston, hidden behind the lawyers who would happily protect me for their percentage of the Barrett fortune. Nothing about who had murdered my mother—I wanted time to absorb and understand all of what I had learned. In that regard, the story would safely remain secret, with no one else to tell it but me. Edgar Layton and Helen deMarionne were gone. So were Geoffrey Alexander Gillon and Admiral MacLean Robertson. Their lifeboat had been found at dawn, drifting empty as testimony that they had chosen to fight each other rather than join together for survival.

  Etta finished her prelude to the funeral and, with a swish of her dress, pushed away from the organ to join Glennifer and Elaine and me at the pew second from the front.

  In those seconds of silence between the end of the organ music and before Pastor Samuel began to speak, the door at the back of the sanctuary opened.

  Glennifer and Elaine turned their heads first to see the visitor, then gave each other knowing smiles before looking at me. I finally turned, too, and watched Amelia walk up the aisle with hesitant steps.

  I stood and met her halfway. We each stopped.

  “I’m glad you left a message,” she said softly. “I wanted to see you again.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and escorted her to the front.

  Pastor Samuel waited until we were seated.

  He cleared his throat and began to read from the Bible open in his hands.

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

  **

  After my release from the hospital the morning after surviving my time in the ocean, I had walked past the Barrett mansion for the final time and remembered Amelia’s descrip-

  tion of what had happened on the night of her eighth birthday. It had occurred to me that perhaps she had misheard her father’s dying words.

  Sister. The dry sister.

  I’d heard of a lawyer who had purchased a house on Lamboll Street. As part of his renovations, he had converted his cistern into a wine cellar. It was perfect, he had explained once, deep enough and wide enough that he could stand upright in there and line it with shelves. What he had told me was that Charleston’s land base was barely above sea level. Wells could not be dug for fresh water. Instead, each mansion funneled rainwater from the roof through a series of gutters into a cistern below the house. The cisterns were centered beneath the kitchen, the water raised into the sinks by a hand pump. As Charleston modernized and ran a grid of sewage and water lines, the cisterns became obsolete tanks of emptiness. This lawyer had been proud of his ingenuity; most people, he’d bragged, sealed their cisterns with a concrete plug and found no use for them.

  Most people except for Edgar Layton.

  What Amelia must have seen with her glimpse out of the car on the night of her eighth birthday was his flashlight beam as he entered the crawl space beneath the Barrett place. Amelia had described to me what Edgar had told the man who must have been Lorimar Barrett: Remember the cuff links you lent me for the last charity ball? She’s got them in her pocket. And she’ll be staying at your house. Anyone finds her, they find your cuff links. Trust me. It’s a very safe place.

  The cistern was a very safe place.

  Not sister. Not try the sister.

  But cistern. The dry cistern.

  And so, finally, I had found my mother.

  **

  He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.

  I knew what I would soon tell Amelia. That she was right. That God does reach many of us in many different ways.

  As an astronomer, I know it is impossible to understand or explain all of the workings of the universe. People who prejudge any event as impossible by saying that rational or scientific explanations are the only reality deny the mystery of love or other human passions and deny the inspirations that reflect those passions in music, art, poetry, or novels. Reality is not fixed and closed but is wonderfully open and filled with the mysterious possibilities of a universe created with an equally awesome and incomprehensible God be-hind it.

  We are handicapped because we view this world only with the five senses of a human body, and we too easily believe there is nothing beyond what those senses can comprehend. But in our body, we are only fledglings, waiting for eternal flight beyond.

  Faith is letting go and trusting that God is there and waiting, trusting that God sent us a way to reach him through Jesus and his message, trusting that Jesus proved this love by allowing Pontius Pilate to send him to the cross, trusting that Jesus reappeared on earth after his death by some means I will not understand until my own soul leaves my body.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

  We all are lives in shattered pieces, our disappointments and betrayals strewn as debris across the paths of each of our histories, with God longing for us to allow him to reassemble these brittle shards and fragments into what he always intended us to be, yearning for us to allow him to heal the damage we inflict not only on our souls but upon the souls of those close to us in love or hate.

  A fortunate few understand this in one compelling moment, dramatically transformed from the grips of personal hell of addiction or depression into the embrace of peace with the suddenness of one who steps from a prison into freedom and full sunlight.

  For many, it is a slow, gradual comprehension. Prosperity, or the search for prosperity, numbs them to the erosion of their souls until they can no longer ignore the abscess that comes from life without meaning; and as they wake from the edge of this dark night, the sun edges above the horizons to spill its rays across the land and warm their cold aching bones.

  Yet for others, like me, the courtship between God and the human soul is a complicated dance, filled with our own clumsy human mistakes, making the result uncertain until the music ends.

  We are the ones who most resist his call. We know in his light there is something we need, yet we are wild animals, injured and skittish and determined to nurse our wounds unseen in the depths of the valleys. We do not want to risk coming out of the shadows, preferring to remain in the darkness of lives of quiet desperation, afraid of all that is unknown about God and holding on to our only certainty, even if this certainty is the pain we know and understand.

  For us, the stubborn ones, when faith finally gives our soul the vision to see God, this new light is not the sudden sun of stepping out of a prison or the slow dawning of a new day. Our journey to the light is a life of enduring a storm. For us, the ones who chose to hide, patches of dark clouds sweep across the sky, with his presence hinted at occasionally by glimpses of the sun, until finally the storm passes.

  With those final steps out of the shadows and into the light, we finally understand what was always there and waiting.

  And in so doing, we are given the gift that allows us to endure the deepest valleys of all that we might face during our lives on earth.

  We are given peace.

  **

  My final moments with my mother, before she began the chain of events that would lead to her death, took place upstairs at the Barrett beach house on the Wednesday evening after I had punched Pendleton. So, in a way, it was that punch that began it all.

  “Where would you like to be?” she had asked when I refused to tell her why I had punched him, putting her hands on my shoulders.

  �
�Away.” I pushed her hands off my shoulders. “Just away.”

  A long, long silence held us, until my continued rejection forced her to speak.

  “Away from me?” she asked softly.

  “Yes. Away from you.”

  In the dying sunlight, my mother saw two halves of a torn photograph on the dust of the windowsill. She reached past me and pieced them together. It was the wallet-sized snapshot of David Barrett, handsome in his navy uniform. The precious photo that she’d seen me pull out of my wallet endless times, asking her for stories about the father I’d never met.

  “Nick?”

  I believe this was when the first brush of dread touched her soul, the exploratory tentacles of a monster stirring as it finally woke from a long hibernation.

  I turned my head toward her. “Babies take nine months, don’t they?”

  My mother slowly shifted her gaze from the torn photograph to the defiance on my face. “Yes.”

  How she must have prayed that this, the inevitable, would never arrive.

  “When was the last time you were with him?” I asked. “The last time before I was born? Less than nine months? Or more?”

  “Nick,” she said, “I’ve always wanted to talk to you about this. But I never knew when you might be ready. And I never was ready either.”

  I jutted my chin in defiance as I stared at her. “Who is my father?”

  Now she flinched.

  Her silence confirmed all the suspicions and doubts I had faced alone during the eternity of that afternoon waiting for her. The order and stability and foundation of my life were gone. As if I had been standing on a sheet of wood across an elevator shaft, and my own mother had pulled it out from under my feet, with the drop of doom into the darkness of the waiting shaft.

  “Go away,” I said.

  “Nick . . .”

  I slapped away her hands. I would not reach up to her as I began my lonely fall into the darkness of that horrible shaft.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  I needed her and loved her, but it was my only defense.

  “I love you,” she answered. “You are my world.”

  “Go away. I want to stay here. I’ll apologize to Pendleton. Just go away.”

  She stood. The beauty in her trim figure, something that had once given me such innocent pride, suddenly disgusted me. Unbidden, Pendleton’s words leaped into my thoughts: A sleazebag. A tramp. Does bad things with men.

  She moved reluctantly to the door, probably hoping that

  I would not see her cry.

  She stopped in the doorway. I did not allow the hardness in my face to dissolve at the pain I saw in her eyes.

  I desperately wanted to call her back. This was the moment. One word and she would have rushed back to me and held me. The very fact that I needed and loved her so much tormented me in the face of her colossal betrayal.

  I was so alone, and she was my only answer. I hated her

  for it.

  A sleazebag. A tramp. Does bad things with men.

  “Sleazebag,” I said, blurting my angry thoughts aloud and repeating Pendleton’s accusations. “Tramp. You do bad things with men.”

  When she bowed her head and covered her face with her hands, I knew with finality that Pendleton had not lied.

  “You do bad things with men!” I screamed. “Don’t you! That’s why you can’t tell me who my daddy is!”

  She did not lift her head.

  “Don’t you! Bad things! Don’t you!” I screamed louder, hoping against hope she would deny it.

  When she took her hands away from her face and looked at me, it was with such sadness that again I wanted to rush to her and cling to her. Yet I also wanted to rush to her and flail my fists against her. Tramp. Does bad things with men.

  “Nicky . . . ,” she pleaded.

  She only called me Nicky in special moments. When our love had no other way to release itself except in the intimacy of the name I allowed no other person but her to call me. Nicky.

  Our eyes met. I should have heeded the depths of pain and love that reached to pull me in and share that pain. But I rebelled. How could she now call me Nicky after she had lied to me for so long?

  “Sleazebag,” I said. Quietly. Almost a whisper. I now knew what the word meant.

  “Nicky . . . ” Her voice broke.

  “Tramp. Go away, you sleazebag tramp. I hate you.”

  I hurled the silver cross at her. It spun through the air, end over end, chain and cross whirling. The cross hit her beneath the eye and landed at her feet.

  She picked it up, blinking away her pain, her determination to hold back her tears shattered by the impact of the silver cross. The edge of the cross had torn deeply into the skin of her left cheekbone. Drops of blood mixed with her tears.

  “Sleazebag,” I repeated. “Tramp. Go away.”

  Slowly, she turned, cross in her hand, chain draped from her fingers.

  Even then, I knew I could call her back and all would be forgiven.

  I did not.

  I turned my face toward the window. Not until the door closed did I allow myself to sob.

  **

  I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

  With those words, Pastor Samuel closed the Bible.

  Amelia touched the tears on my face and smiled. “You all right?” she whispered.

  Helen could have given me no greater gift than passing on my mother’s final words to me.

  Please tell Nick I love him.

  I’d been forgiven. Even as she faced the death I had brought upon her, she’d forgiven me. As my mother died, she could only hope her forgiveness would reach me.

  Because of those final words, her love will wash over me always. The silver cross she once gave me as a gift hangs from my neck again.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m all right.”

  Amelia put her hand in mine.

  Here’s the beginning to Crown of Thorns, the next novel in Nick Barrett’s Charleston series:

  Chapter 1

  As a child, I knew well the greatest tragedy of the Larrabee family, for many around me were happy to openly speculate on its delicious horror. This was the tale of the thunder-filled night that young Timothy Larrabee delivered a potion of death to his grandmother.

  Indeed, most of Charleston’s proper families are haunted by the tales of eccentricity and madness and scandal and deviances of previous generations, tales flaunted with proud defiance in the way that the once rich will cling to ancient and fading silks even as they are reduced to begging. These tales circulate among the other proper families, so that all of us among the self-crowned aristocracy of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation Charlestonians each know the shrouded heritage of the others.

  The legacy of the Larrabee family was no different, as its members could count among their ancestors the regular assortment of rogues and idiots, ranging from pirates and slave traders to cowards and heroes of the war of Northern aggression, imposed upon the South by Lincoln.

  But it was Timothy Larrabee who achieved the most notoriety among all the scandals in the two-hundred-year recorded history of the Larrabee family. This story was not even a generation old at the time of my childhood, so it was treated as recent gossip, and it was not difficult for me to imagine how it happened.

  He was only ten the night it occurred, slender and constantly aware of his grooming in clothing and heritage, and had already learned to carry himself with great elegance and to speak with perfect clarity, as if constantly and consciously rehearsing a style of delivering future edicts that would be firmly obeyed once he took official reign of the Larrabee dynasty—even though the dynasty had dwindled to his grandmother, himself, and the vastly reduced fortune that had once bolstered their family name. It

  was with this great elegance that he stepped into the bedroom

  of Agnes Larrabee that night, in a mansion two streets over from the similar mansion that would become my childhood prison, and roughly a decade befor
e I was born.

  I have been told it was his habit to wear a tailored, freshly pressed double-breasted black suit, and that he greased his hair back Gatsby-style to add maturity to his precocious appearance. As on all other evenings, he approached his grandmother’s poster bed where she sat waiting in a white dressing gown, propped against a half dozen pillows. Timothy Larrabee looked like a tiny adult as he crossed the hardwood floor and Persian throw rug, balancing in his white-gloved hands a polished silver tray with shortbread biscuits and a gold-rimmed china cup filled with densely sweetened Earl Grey tea. The sweetness of the hot tea, the delivery of the tray, and the manner in which Timothy was dressed to perform his task were part of a nightly ritual that Agnes demanded in the Larrabee household. Timothy Larrabee did not see it as a burden, for young as he was, Timothy Larrabee had been well taught to respect ritual and tradition and all the power they would bestow upon him in adulthood.

  On this evening, as on all others, Timothy Larrabee had taken the tray in the kitchen from Samson Elias, the lifelong family servant who prepared it nightly. This was the same servant subsequently accused of stealing from the Larrabee family a seventeenth-century miniature portrait of King Charles I, father of the namesake of Charleston. This was the same servant accused of the murder of Agnes Larrabee, convicted and sentenced to execution despite his advanced age.

  Because on this night, the sweetness of the tea in the gold-rimmed china cup disguised the taste of enough rat poison to kill a horse. Among the unkind whispers that followed her death was the observation that the dosage was so strong simply because Samson Elias knew well that Agnes Larrabee had the meanness of temperament and constitution that would have survived any less.

  Sheet lightning cracked the darkness of the rains that pounded the bedroom window as Timothy Larrabee glided forward with his tray and waited for his grandmother’s approval of his manners and presentation before setting the tray on a nightstand. With those white-gloved hands, he passed her the gold-rimmed cup that would deliver death.