Pawleys Island-lowcountry 5 (14 page)

That was the sordid reality of divorce in these duplicitous times. My father used to say,
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive
. So did Sir Walter Scott. Neither one of them knew how dead on they were. It was my job to untangle Nat’s web of deception and I would do it, one strand, one lie, one nasty little detail at a time.

I was startled by my cell phone. It was Byron.

“Hey, Miss Abigail. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure. What’s going on?” I took the handful of envelopes I was holding and threw them back in the box.

“You sound aggravated. You okay?”

Well? It was nice of him to ask, wasn’t it? “I’m fine—just doing paperwork.”

“Oh, good. Well, I found you somebody to straighten out your house.”

“Tell me about her. Or him.”

“She’s got a college degree in business, but she’s got to save money to go to graduate school. She’s a neat freak and she’s a little hyper, but she’s honest and works like a tornado.”

“She sounds perfect. Neat freak is good and hyper doesn’t bother me. Honesty is essential. Who is she?”

“My little sister, Daphne. She’s a ball of fire! Would you like to meet her?”

“Absolutely. Send her over. And Byron?”

“Yes’m?”

“Thanks.”

I could feel him smiling through the phone. Byron knew he irked me sometimes, and he was pleased to have me even somewhat in his debt.

Thirty minutes later, I heard a rap on the screen door. I looked up to see a skinny-as-a-stick young girl of about fifteen or sixteen standing there.

“Hello?” I said. “Can I help you?”

“No, ma’am! I’m Daphne and I’m the one who’s gonna help
you
! Can I come in?”

“You are?” Gosh! She didn’t look old enough to babysit, much less graduate from college! She couldn’t have weighed one hundred pounds.

I held the door open, and Daphne walked straight into the middle of the living room. She stood there with her hands on her nonexistent hips and looked around. She ran her finger over the coffee table and an end table, grunting in disgust at the tip of her finger. Then she started talking.

“Byron say you live by yourself and that you are very smart.”

“Yes, well, that’s nice of him…”

“And he also say that you probably ain’t much of a housekeeper…”

“Well, I have other priorities and…”

“Humph.” Daphne walked up to me, wiped her hand on her skirt and extended her hand for me to shake it, and I did. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you too.” I looked in her face for a glimmer of Byron’s features. Her nose was small and narrow. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced. Her smile was wide open with the kind of authenticity that made you like and trust her immediately. In contrast to Byron’s height and girth, all this tiny girl Daphne had in the way of family resemblance was attitude. “Do you want to look around?”

“May as well,” she said, not waiting for my lead.

I explained to her that I wanted to convert my parents’ bedroom to an office, and she agreed that it would be the nicest place to work.

“You can watch the ocean while you figure things out,” she said. “Byron said you’re a lawyer?”

“Yep, that’s right. With one client. But it’s a good one.”

Although Daphne probably had no earthly idea what I meant, from the condition of my house and having one client to claim, she surmised that I wasn’t exactly wealthy.

“You
sure
you can afford me? My work is the best, but it ain’t no bargain.”

“I think so,” I said and laughed. “I’d sell my jewelry to get help at this point!” She laughed with me, and over the next few minutes the deal was cut.

“Yeah, this is some mess you got here,” she said. “I’ll see you Monday morning.”

I watched her walk away back to her little red car, and I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself. She was a little ball of fire all right and probably just what I needed to get my home and my business in order.

I
T
was about seven o’clock Saturday night when Everett called. I was so deep in thought and focused on preparing subpoenas that the ring of my cell phone scared me half to death.

“Everett?”

“Got it!”

“What? The computer?”

“Yep!”

“You’re the best! Okay, so now we have to get it to a technician who can copy the hard drive and tell us what’s on it!”

“Already did that!”

“And…?”

“Pay dirt! The mother lode! Porn sites, teen chat rooms, you name it, we got it!”

“Oh, Everett! You’re wonderful!”

“All in the line of duty, Ms. Thurmond. And, I returned his computer. He’ll never know, except that I left one wire unhooked. Let him sweat a little, right?”

“Suits me.”

“I can bring it to you Monday morning, if you’d like. I’m playing golf at Diamond Back up on the north end of Myrtle Beach, so I’ll be in the neighborhood. I loaded all the data on an old computer I had in the gadget museum.”

“Your garage?”

“Yup. Wait until you see…”

“You know what? I’m so glad you did all this. It’s one less thing for me to handle.”

“Hey, I know you’re flying solo on this mission…”

“Well, pretty soon I’m gonna have to make you a partner!”

I thanked Everett again, we said good-bye and I figured it was probably time to call Rebecca. She answered and I didn’t like the sound of her voice.

“What’s the matter, Rebecca? It’s me, Abigail.”

“Oh, God, Abigail…” Her voice was cracking and she began to sob.

“What’s the matter? What is it?”

“I called…I called the kids at camp and they told me that Nat had…Nat’s attorney called them…he said I couldn’t talk…”

“To your own children? What is he? Crazy?”

“And they didn’t
want
to talk to me!”

“That’s even more insane.” I listened to Rebecca cry her heart out for a few minutes, and then I said, “I’m coming to pick you up. You gotta get out of that condo. I’ll get a pizza and we can talk it all out. Besides, I have a load of stuff to show you.”

“Okay.”

By the time I got there, I was so mad I wanted to pound Nat Simms and Harry Albright into a bloody pulp. How dare they do such a thing? I knew how. Intimidate the witness. They would do what they wanted and see what they could get away with. I could take care of this with a phone call to Mr. Albright Monday morning and another one to the camp. But in the meantime, Rebecca was stinging from Nat’s cruelty and black and blue from his stupidity. She was so uninformed about the law that she probably thought if Harry Albright made that phone call, it was legal to do it. And worse, that she deserved it.

I rang Rebecca’s doorbell, and she answered it, looking absolutely dreadful.

“I hate his guts,” she said. “And his lawyer’s guts too.”

“That’s the spirit! So do I. Go wash your face,” I said, “and let’s get out of here.”

“Fine.”

While I waited, I looked around. There were watercolors in various stages of completion spread all over her table. I stared at them in disbelief. Even though they were drawings and paintings of children’s toys, they were startling in a way I had never seen. I was certainly no art critic, but any simpleton could see that these images took Rebecca’s work out of the world of commercial decorative art and into another realm.

“Rebecca?”

She came out of her bedroom and down the hall, turning out lights behind her.

“Oh!” she said and began scooping them up to put away from prying eyes like mine. “What do you think?”

“I think they’re pretty stunning. You know, we should ask Huey of course, but I think we should show them to someone at the Gibbes, girl.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, I do. I mean, doesn’t South Carolina have a watercolor society?”

“Gosh, I don’t even know. Probably.”

“Wait! Yes, they do! You should join it. They have shows all over the place and awards that come in the form of cash.” We looked at each other, and Rebecca threw her hands in the air as if to say,
Why not?
“Come on. My car is probably reeking of pepperoni.”

On the way to my house, I explained to Rebecca that Harry Albright and Nat Simms had no authority whatsoever to stop her from talking to her children.

“First of all, I’m not playing tiddlywinks here with Nat and his Mr. Albright. That Nat was granted temporary custody and the house is a bullshit deal, which will be corrected by the courts. He got his order of protection today, so at least you don’t have to worry about Nat bothering you in person for a while. And I think it’s time for me to rattle his cage about his answer to our interrogatory.”

I told her that I had filed the answer and counterclaim and that we were looking at the week before Labor Day as a court date. Of course, even in a best-case scenario, it could still take a while for it all to be final. She just listened and didn’t say much at all. Maybe I was waiting to be thanked? How silly of me.

We pulled up in the yard and got out. Miss Salt Air had almost every single light on. It surprised me how alive and welcoming my house was. It was a monument to my family’s history, and while it had always been a vacation home, now it was something else. My permanent residence and a place of refuge. It welcomed Rebecca the same way it did me.

“What a great house,” she said, echoing my feelings.

After all, some houses had personalities that bordered on human.

“Thanks,” I said. “Been in the family for a jillion years.”

We climbed the stairs and went in through the kitchen door. I put the pizza on the counter and set the oven temperature to warm.

“I love funky old houses,” she said. “You’re on the ocean, right?”

“Yep.”

As though she was invisibly summoned, she was already moving toward the front porch. I knew Rebecca was about to fall under the spell of Pawleys Island’s wizardry.

I put two slices of pizza on plates, grabbed two diet sodas from the refrigerator and slid the pizza box into the oven. “Wanna eat on the porch?” I called out.

There was no answer, so I went through the living room and opened the screen door. There was Rebecca, leaning over the banister, watching the ocean recede with its musical pattern of swooshing the shore with silver and foam and then whispering good-bye as it pulled away for the night. Inch by inch, the beach widened. There was the beginning of a moonrise. It was going to be a beautiful night.

“Wanna eat out here?”

“Absolutely! This is fabulous!”

She followed me to the kitchen and then back outside. The porch had no table, so we pulled two rockers up to the rails and put our feet up, balancing our plates and drinks the best we could. These minor inconveniences were well worth it, just to have the time to sit in the evening breeze, watch the day slip away as the skies grew dark and listen to the movement of the tide. I thought for a moment that a table would be awfully nice to have out here and made a note to be on the lookout for something suitable. But who would come and sit at it besides me? Rebecca? Huey? God, the population of my world has shrunk to the size of a peanut, I thought.

I took a bite of the pizza and wiped the grease from my mouth with a paper towel.

“Not exactly like dinner with Huey, huh?”

“No, but this is great too,” she said.

“Yeah, every summer of my life was spent on this porch.”

“Must’ve been wonderful.”

“It was.” That was all it took to send me down memory lane. “But things have changed here. When I was a teenager, there was a pavilion where we would all go to dance and listen to music. I’ll never forget the summer I learned to shag. We were always sunburned…”

“Yeah, you’re from the baby oil and iodine generation.”

“Go easy now,” I said. “And all the girls wore these liberty print shirtwaist dresses made by Ladybug. Or David Ferguson Bermudas with starched shirts all tucked in. We all smelled like Noxzema and Youth Dew.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind, you’re too young to appreciate the fine details of life before ceramic hair straighteners.”

“No, I’m not—I’ve heard about orange juice cans and Dippity-Do!”

“Yeah, probably in an anthropology class! Come on, you want another slice?”

“No, I’m stuffed, thanks.”

I took the plates back to the kitchen, put them in the sink and turned off the oven. I didn’t feel like eating either. The whole thing with Nat and Rebecca’s kids made my stomach tighten, and the yet-to-be-seen information on his computer’s hard drive was another bomb. I had to tell Rebecca about it, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I put on a pot of decaffeinated coffee and went back outside, turning off the overhead porch lights, leaving the fans turning just enough to stir the air.

“So, Rebecca? We have to talk about something.”

“Sure, what?” She sat back in her rocker and put her feet back up on the rail.

As the sun sank behind us, I was quiet for a few moments. The blue dark of night produced the atmosphere of a confessional. It was easier to mount the courage to say the difficult things when you could barely see the other person’s face.

“I have a copy of the hard drive of Nat’s computer.” There. It was said.

“How in the world did you get that?”

“You don’t want to know. But let me just tell you…”

“No! I
do
want to know! How did you get it?”

“I had someone go in the house and take it, have it copied and replace it to its original spot.” I wasn’t going to lie. Ever.

“Oh!
That’s
nice! Breaking and entering? Stealing? Are you trying to send me to jail or what?”

“Of course not! It’s done all the time, Rebecca. Wake up! Normally I would have the wife copy it. But in this case, since you’re not living there, I took care of it. Look, if I had tried to subpoena it, he would have erased everything.”

Rebecca sighed so hard I could see her chest expand and collapse. “So what’s on it? Love letters to his whore?”

“I wish. Unfortunately, Nat’s been visiting a lot of porn sites and posing as a teenage boy in chat rooms.”

“What?”

“Yep.” I babbled on as though I was discussing the weather. “And plenty of trash a family court judge wouldn’t like. I say we just sit on it and only use it if we have to, because…”

“Wait a minute! Just wait a minute!
What are you saying?
” Rebecca jumped up from her rocker and began pacing the floor. “Porn sites? Teenage chat rooms? Who is this man? This is not the man
I
married! This man stole my house! He turned my children against me and twisted their minds until they were monsters! He’s running around with a trashy slut all over town? Porn sites? How sick is he?
Who
is he? That’s it! I’ve had it! Let him keep the house and the kids! They don’t want to talk to me? They hate me? Fine! He thinks it’s okay to push me off my chair in a restaurant? I quit! I’m staying right here! Screw all of them!”

“Rebecca! Calm down! You couldn’t possibly mean what you’re saying! Look, you don’t want the house? Fine! But the kids? Can’t you see what you’ve got to do here?”

“Yeah! I see fine! They can all go to hell!”

“Rebecca! You’re upset and I don’t blame you. But believe me, you’ve got to rescue your children from him! He’s sick!”

“No! I am never going to live with anybody who hates me ever again!”

I could hardly believe my ears. I had a very good grasp of what she had been through. But this was beyond my comprehension. What mother would choose to leave her children with someone like Nat?

“Let’s not go there just yet. If your children stay with Nat, they will be living in a very unhealthy environment. And, understand this, Rebecca, if we use what I’ve found as evidence in court, Nat will definitely not be able to retain custody. He’ll be lucky to have supervised visitation. So it’s a bargaining chit for when we begin to negotiate a settlement. And if you really and truly don’t want your children, they could become wards of the state and go into foster care.”

“Foster care?”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s the law.”

“Foster care?”

That pretty much knocked the wind out of Rebecca. She sat down again and even in the darkness I could see her almost dissolve into the slats of the chair. She was very quiet for a few minutes and then began to shake her head back and forth, disagreeing with her own internal argument. She stood and began pacing the floor.

“Look, you don’t understand, Abigail.”

“Okay, tell me what I don’t know.” I didn’t move. I was going to sit there and listen to her rant like a fool.
Let’s just get it all out right now
. And I was becoming very angry.

“Look,” she said again, “my own children hate me. Nat hates me. Everybody in Charleston knows about Nat and how he is. Why would I want to go back to that?”

“Um, because another woman, one who is as common a whore that ever walked the docks, will be raising
your
children? She’ll be enjoying
your
home, your bed? And if Nat marries her,
your
name? That her surgically improved behind will be in
your
chair at your children’s graduations, weddings, baptisms, Christmas dinners and every celebration that happens for the rest of your life? Have you thought about that?”

“No,” she said in the meekest voice I had yet to hear her use. “But every time I think about going back to Charleston and confronting them, I feel ill. They’re not going to listen to me, no matter what. Too much has happened. It’s too late, Abigail. My children will never love me again. They think I’m nothing but a nag.”

“I don’t doubt that you’re not anxious to go back to Charleston, but, Rebecca, think about this. You need to be seriously deprogrammed and so do your children. You know how people who join cults get brainwashed? They hear a thing over and over, and no matter how crazy it is, after a while they believe the craziness is true! Remember Jonestown? That’s what’s happened here. For whatever reason, Nat has made you and your children believe that they are better off with him, and it’s just absolutely not so.”