DONE GONE WRONG

by Cathy Pickens

  “Yeah. Well, I seem to be constantly second-guessing my decision to move back here. Not sure it was a good idea, all things considered.”

  “Melvin! That’s not the song you were singing last week. Then, it was ‘Avery, you gotta stay here in Dacus. You gotta open your office next to mine. You should rent the upstairs apartment. You gotta hurry and make up your mind.’ Now this?”

  “Don’t worry. You could still stay here, open your office here. I’d still give you a great price. This place needs to be fixed up and it needs to be used again. Houses can’t stay empty. It’s not good for them. I’m just getting cold feet. I’m not sure Dacus is a good choice for me, not after all the years of rumor and suspicion. Plenty of people still think I did it, or did something. I’m beginning to think you can’t change the spots other people choose to see.”

  “Don’t jump into any decisions. Promise me you’ll wait? Okay?”

  “I’m not doing anything rash, at least not this afternoon.”

  “Talk to you tomorrow?”

  “Sure thing. Good luck, Avery. I’ll see what I can dig up for you.”

  I clipped the phone back on my belt and leaned against the Battery railing. Winter sun glinted off the gray water. The humid haze that thickens the air most of the year was gone, and Fort Sumter was clear and solid at the mouth of the bay, without its usual surreal haziness.

  The folks who watched from their balconies as the first shots of the Civil War were fired on Yankee-held Fort Sumter had lived in these houses directly on the water. It seems odd sometimes that something more than a hundred years’ distance in time can still be so real and powerful. Odd, I suppose, until you listen to the Irish talk about the English. Wars fought on your own turf leave deep scars. I haven’t met a Yankee yet who understood that.

  Why was I trying to talk Melvin out of leaving Dacus? If he decided to leave, it would certainly take the pressure off me. Well, some of the pressure. I’d still have my family urging me to move back permanently. But Melvin’s cozy offer of a ready-made office and living quarters in easy walking distance of the courthouse had made me feel trapped. Without that option, it would be easier to make excuses to my family. So why was I lecturing Melvin about staying?

  I crunched back across the tabby-paved walk and darted across the street in front of a horse-drawn tour carriage, its passengers with blankets tucked over their knees.

  “That’s my room, the one with the second-floor bay window,” I wanted to tell them as the tour guide pointed out graceful Two Meeting Street.

  Back in my room, I decided against sitting at the fragile little writing desk and carried the binders to the covered porch outside my room. I had it to myself—and for good reason. It felt a bit nippy in the shade.

  I read for a while. Hilliard’s answers to the defense lawyer’s questions prompted questions I wanted to ask Dr. Demarcos tomorrow morning. I was used to immersing myself in a topic, usually medical, and becoming fluent quickly. But I had never had to do it this quickly. I wasn’t sure if the slight panic was giving me an edge or whether it would overtake and paralyze me.

  I kept reading and jotting notes, trying not to dwell on the difficulties, until my growling stomach overtook me. Small wonder. I’d read for several hours and let lunchtime slip into early afternoon.

  If I hurried, I could make it to Jestine’s, a several-block hike north on Meeting Street. I didn’t want to fool with navigating the narrow streets in my Mustang, trying to find a parking place, so I retraced my steps back toward Broad Street and past the now-busy Market Street area. Contrary to tourist—and maybe some tour guide—misinformation, the imposing Public Market with its double-wrap staircase to the second floor had never been a slave market. It had been the nineteenth-century equivalent of what it was now—a place to gather, buy food, drink, and miscellany. The smelly meat stalls were long gone, though, replaced by Ben & Jerry’s, specialty spices, and Confederate memorabilia shops.

  Walking five blocks more, I found Jestine’s open and a table by the window. Thank goodness. I’d had a momentary panic that it might be closed for the afternoon. I’d carried a folder full of deposition pages to read, but I found myself staring out the window, watching the occasional couple or family stroll past.

  I liked being back in Charleston. I hadn’t known whether I would. In my last case here, I’d stepped in when the guy handling the case for our firm left on paternity leave. I’m thirtyish, happily childless, and without many boyfriend possibilities, so I can’t get all excited about a family-friendly workplace when it leaves me holding somebody else’s bag. The judge in that case had pushed it to trial because of too many previous delays. The parallels to Jake’s case were uncomfortably familiar, though the lawyer handling Jake’s case had died, not taken time off to play with a baby.

  Jake had given me an odd luxury. Lawyers are never asked to be objective. They always have a role to play. In this case, I wasn’t an advocate; I was an observer, with the luxury of distance.

  Looking at this case, not as an advocate but from a distance, I could envision what would make it the ideal case, but that was a long way from what we had now. Judging from the pretrial depositions, Jake’s case rested on Per-force’s failure to warn that Uplift caused agitation and suicidal thoughts in some patients. That premise had two problems. One, in the studies cited by Jake’s expert, very few patients became agitated and none committed suicide or went on killing sprees. Second, I wasn’t a big fan of defective-warning cases.

  Everyone around Ray Vincent Wilma knew he was nuts. Warning him that he might become agitated would’ve prevented it? Not a chance. If the doctor who prescribed Uplift didn’t know Ray Vincent was on the edge, a warning label wouldn’t have helped.

  To me, an ideal product liability case would involve a design defect, where every product manufactured had the same defect and I could show the jury how the product should have been redesigned: the Ford Pinto could have protected the gas tank so it wouldn’t explode. That was a good case. But a defective warning or instruction case was usually a case of last resort; when no design or manufacturing defect presents itself, the attorney claims that warning of the danger would have prevented the injury.

  Looking at it objectively, I understood why I wasn’t excited about this case. The only way to put together my ideal case here would be to find something in the design or testing process, something that pointed to an error Perforce made or—even better—lied about. Unfortunately, most drag cases aren’t my ideal case; most involve misleading warnings rather than design or manufacturing defects. The drag affects a few people in a bad way, and warnings are the only way—though not a perfect way—to try to prevent harm.

  I knew South Carolina juries well enough to be glad Jake was bankrolling this case and not me.

  I finished my fried okra with macaroni and cheese and ordered a bowl of banana pudding. It struck me how quiet today had been. Somehow, in Dacus, somebody was always around—my parents, Lydia, Emma, my great-aunts, Melvin, people on the street or in the stores. Always people I knew. Here, other than polite exchanges with a waitress, or a phone call or a business meeting, I could be pleasantly anonymous and alone. Maybe that’s why I had time to dwell on my doubts. Maybe they were there all the time and I just couldn’t hear them for the distractions.

  I downed one last glass of luscious, sweet tea and, on the way down Meeting Street, detoured onto Market to get a couple of River Street Sweets’ warm pralines. For a snack, later. Despite having eaten too much lunch, I nibbled one bite, while it was still warm, which led to another. I polished off a whole praline before I’d reached Broad Street and St. Michael’s Church. Even walking the length of the historic district back to the inn wouldn’t make up for those calories. I was contentedly miserable.

  By midafternoon, I settled back on the porch, losing myself in my reading and notes. Later, an older couple came out of their room to sit at the far end of the porch, destroying my sense of proprietary solitude. Their murmuring broke my immer
sion, and I looked around at the lengthening shadows, blinking like a mole come to surface. I’d been motionless for almost three hours.

  I shook the mustiness from my brain, that thick, cobwebby sensation from too much concentration, and ambled downstairs for some afternoon tea. I drank two cups of hot cinnamon tea in solitude and wrapped a cheese straw in a napkin for later, to go with my lone remaining praline. I doubted I’d feel like eating supper.

  The sky had already turned dark outside by the time I left my china cup on the sideboard and climbed the stairs. I’d finished the depositions I’d brought, so I rummaged in the side pockets of my suitcase, pulling out a battered leather notebook. My grandfather’s journal. I’d found this volume—apparently one of several he’d written—tucked in the back of a desk at his cabin. I plumped the pillows on the bed and thumbed the thick pages, planning to rest for a bit.

  The green dial read 11:30 P.M. when I started awake. Dang. I knew from experience that I couldn’t turn over and go back to sleep. Usually during trials, something always chews at my brain, waking me up at odd hours.

  I didn’t have a key to Jake’s office, so I couldn’t get more reading material or do any online research. I’d done all I could with the materials I had here. No television.

  Maybe another walk. That’s all I’d done so far—walk and read. But maybe I could wear myself out so I could sleep.

  I slipped out the side door—which, in the creaky house, wasn’t easy to do quietly—and headed toward Legare Street. The air felt chilly and damp, and the street lamps were old-fashioned, attractive but dim. I looked for my favorite haunted houses: the incongruous white clapboard where the hunting accident victim appears in the library, the mansion the husband built around the comer from his wife’s, allegedly because she’d tricked him into marrying her and he refused to live with her. I didn’t hear her carriage rattle past on its way home. The Pineapple Gates next door loomed in the darkness.

  I trod quietly block after block, stumbling occasionally on the dim, uneven sidewalks, thoughts bumping about in my head, my hands jammed into my coat pockets. I hoped Charleston’s dark streets were as safe as they felt.

  As soon as I thought about safety, I noticed the sirens shrieking in the distance.

  Then the sound grew, swallowing the silence.

  I walked north, drawn toward the sound. At the comer of Montague and Rutledge, over the rooftops to the north and west, I glimpsed what drew the sirens.

  A fire.

  6

  MIDNIGHT THURSDAY

  I smelled the smoke only after I’d seen the light from the fire, and then the acrid odor was all I could smell. The sky glowed, then, as smoke billowed, grew blacker than the night sky had been. Sparks shot upward. Even though I stood blocks away, I could see strobing lights dancing off the smoke.

  More sirens came, homing in from several directions.

  I walked up Rutledge, drawn now to the lights and noise, smoke and sparks. I jaywalked across an intersection to get a better view of the burning house, fire-eaten black and red. Directly in front of me, reflecting the wildly bouncing lights from the emergency vehicles, stood four towering columns, the only remnants of a fire decades earlier that had leveled the abandoned Charleston Museum.

  Dozens of people stood scattered along the grassy block, the park left after that old fire, watching this fresh fire.

  I climbed the remaining steps to what had once been the museum’s portico. From that vantage, the stark gray-white columns framed the blistering view across the side street.

  Smoke crowded over the flames, so the scene wasn’t as dramatic as movie fires usually are. Thick sparks flew with the smoke in a spiraling dance from the roof. The firefighters aimed hoses at the houses on either side of the three-story fire; they’d largely given up on the victim and hoped only to contain the damage.

  Smoke grated on the back of my throat. Bystanders stood wrapped in jackets or each other against the cool air and the numbing fear of fire. I studied the huddled groups, their dazed eyes locked on the scene across the street. A redhead in a sweat suit sat on the museum steps with her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking to and fro. Tears streaked silently down her cheeks, leaving her face shiny in the light.

  Other groups huddled in clusters among the trees, all watching the fire. Most looked like college students—understandable since the College of Charleston filled several blocks to the east, and many older homes along here had been converted into a rabbit warren of apartments for medical students and college kids. Older faces were also scattered in the crowd, probably homeowners with expensive mortgages and even more expensive upkeep, and plenty of reason for worry and sadness as they watched.

  Clustered near me, under the imaginary shelter of the solitary columns, several cried or fought back tears. Among them, two women, one with the husky build of a swimmer, the other runner-lean in jogging shorts, stood protectively on either side of a woman huddled in an oversized jacket. She wasn’t crying, but the emotion on her face was palpable. Older than her two companions, she had thin, high cheekbones, short hand-combed hair, and deep-set eyes.

  The woman wearing shorts bent toward her. “Sanda.” Then she spoke a little louder. “Sanda.” The woman focused on her friend as if from a great distance.

  Sanda? I turned toward the fire with more than idle curiosity. The house number had disappeared. As I searched, a portion of the roof collapsed, sending sparks skyward in a dazzling cloud and ripping startled exclamations from the crowd.

  I looked at the house next door, its brass letters shining in the sparks as if someone had picked them out with a flashlight: the odd-numbered house next to Mark Tilman’s. I was watching Mark Tilman’s house bum.

  Sanda wasn’t a common name. There couldn’t be two here.

  I saw no point in waiting and stepped over to the woman. In my most gentle questioning tone, reserved in the courtroom for children and the exceptionally frail, I said, “Excuse me for intruding. Are you Sanda MacKay?”

  Her sentries stiffened. She turned her deep-set eyes on me and blinked once, wearily.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m so sorry. I had no idea—” I made an ineffectual gesture toward the fire, which had calmed some after the dramatic collapse. “I really need to talk to you. I understand you’re a friend of Mark Tilman?”

  Her eyes glistened, the fire reflected in the tears that sprang up. Her stocky bodyguard slipped an arm around her shoulders, as if to protect her.

  “Who—are you?” she asked with a seductively slow voice.

  I started to offer my hand, but hers clutched her jacket about her slight frame. “Avery Andrews. I was a friend of Mark’s brother. From his hometown.”

  Her grip on her coat relaxed slightly.

  “I hate to bother you. I left a message on your machine earlier. Just now, when I heard your name, I had to speak.” I glanced at ember house.

  The stocky swimmer shifted her stance, putting her shoulder between Sanda and me. “Can’t you see she’s upset? She’s—”

  “Shirl, it’s okay.” Sanda made a gentle patting motion with one hand. “You knew Mark—and his family?”

  I nodded. In the strobing emergency lights, Sanda MacKay’s age surprised me. She looked older than me, late thirties, maybe early forties. Of course, the bad light and the turmoil—and her bereavement over Mark—would’ve been enough to age anyone, but she was definitely older than Gregg Tilman’s kid brother. Was it only yesterday I’d waited for him, frustrated because he hadn’t come? No, day before yesterday.

  Sanda studied me in return. “I didn’t know his family.”

  “Mr. Tilman said you hadn’t met. He called me,” I explained. “He gave me your name. He wanted to make sure you knew...”

  It seemed important to tell her Mark’s family had known about her. Sorrow shared might not be a lighter burden, but it wasn’t such a lonely one.

  I hesitated, then blundered on. “Mr. Tilman was naturally upset about Mark—Mark’s death.
And he, well, he’s concerned.” I couldn’t seem to get to the question. Sanda waited, too shell-shocked to notice my stumbling. “He said Mark called him a few days ago, that Mark had been upset over something at work.”

  Sanda listened without any reaction.

  “Had he—had he said anything to you?”

  She sucked her cheeks in, biting the inside of her mouth, thinking. “He did have more on his mind lately. Something at work—preoccupied him. You know how you can tell, even when they won’t say much.”

  She almost smiled at some remembrance. “But he really didn’t say what. It probably had to do with the research project he’s working on, rather than anything else. He wasn’t one for office politics. Research and patients consumed his time.” She finished quietly.

  The flames had retreated back into smoke and sparks. The wood framing glowed with red cracks in the charred black wood. The size of the crowd had not diminished. If anything, it had grown.

  Sanda stared at the fire. The firefighters still sprayed neighboring houses, trees, and shrubs as the breeze carried sparks away.

  “Well...” I hated to give up without something I could offer Mr. Tilman, but she looked more peaked, shrinking into the large coat draped around her shoulders. “His dad was wondering; he wanted me to find out what I could.”

  She nodded. “If you do learn anything about Mark, could you—let me know?”

  “Sure.”

  “And tell his family—tell them...”

  I reached out to pat her arm, a gesture my mother would offer. She’s a great one for comforting arm pats. Shirl had had enough of my intrusion. She, too, had noticed the blueness of Sanda’s lips against the increasing pallor of her skin.

  “Sanda, you need to come in.” Shirl took her by the arm. “We’ll get some hot tea. There’s nothing you can do here.”