Pawleys Island-lowcountry 5 (7 page)

“Chugging anything is considered an art form by most Southern gentlemen,” I said.

Rebecca giggled and continued picking up bits of crust and biscuit. Then she wiped her hands, picked up her bottle and took two large swigs. “Satisfied?” she said.

“It’s a start,” I said. “Frankly, except for these early-morning chugalug fests, I usually have mine in a glass over ice. My mother would roll over in her grave if she could see me consume anything straight from a bottle. Historically, Southern ladies don’t do this kind of thing.”

“Well, Miss Abigail, I’ll have you know that this little bottle has more than a footnote in history. Did you know it was invented in 1915? It was made this way for several seriously artistic reasons. First, the grooves on the sides are supposed to resemble a cacao pod. And its color…”

“Get comfortable, honey,” I said to Rebecca, well within Huey’s hearing. “His sermons can go on for
days.
”

“Shush!” Huey said, mildly irritated. “Its
color
was meant to enhance the brownish liquid to make it appear black like coffee, thereby broadening the market appeal to adults and children alike.”

“Most days I prefer an espresso,” I said, “but when it’s
this
hot…”

“It becomes the
perfect
coffee substitute!” Huey said, beaming. “I must say, though, there is
no
substitute for how the bottle feels. I mean, seriously, ladies, would you prefer this lovely little perfectly balanced jewel against your lips, or one of those nasty ragged plastic bottles?”

“Well, that is a good poi—”

“It’s rhetorical, dear,” I said to Rebecca and rolled my eyes. Honestly! Sometimes she was exasperating. All that naivete? “Yes, Huey darling, it’s like drinking from Stueben.”

“Oh, go kiss a goat’s fanny,” Huey said. He blushed and turned to Rebecca. “Forgive me, Rebecca, but sometimes our Miss Thurmond gets up on the wrong side of her duvet.”

“Sorry.”

Huey puffed himself up. “That’s not the issue. The issue is chicken walking.”

“What? What’s that?” Rebecca was mystified once more.

One more puff and he said, “Chicken walking is what hens do in a chicken yard—they peck around and around. That’s what we’re doing here. I’ve known Abigail Thurmond long enough to know when she’s upset. So, before the entire morning slips into the hands of the Lily Pulitzered decorators searching for the perfect painting to match a divine blue and yellow plaid couch, may we please—just us three—may we have a word about Rebecca’s
situation
?”

“What is there to say?” Rebecca said, shifting her weight and wrapping her arms around herself.

“I could make a phone call,” I said, wondering again if I really wanted to get involved, much in the same way a diver changes his mind in a midair jackknife.

“What possible good could a phone call do?” Rebecca said.

I drained my Coke and put it on the counter. “Huey? I sure could go for another one of these. Why don’t you be a sweetheart and go back to Sam’s. Buy every cold one they’ve got. Rebecca and I can watch the store and then we can chat alone—attorney/client privilege, right?”

Huey raised himself from the bar stool where we all sat in the framing area and made one of his campy departure speechettes.

“You are quite correct,” Huey said. “The fine details are none of my beeswax. It’s blazing hot and it’s best to keep consuming liquids. I shall return in two shakes of a lamb’s tail with enough hydration to fortify us for the day!”

We watched Huey leave and shook our heads, smiling at each other as the door closed behind him. Huey’s dramatic craziness was crazy-like-a-fox craziness. He had seen Rebecca flinch when I offered to make the phone call. So had I. I hadn’t even said who it was I intended to contact, or what they did. Still, she had gripped her hands on her bare arms so tightly that white spots immediately appeared where her fingers pressed her flesh.

But Huey and I had made careers from dealing with people. His typical client was a little insecure about the art world and just wanted to be sure they were investing their money wisely. My clients ran the entire gamut. In any case, Huey knew that if he lightened the mood, ducked out for a moment and left Rebecca in my hands, I would begin the process gently, letting Rebecca set the pace. I would not prod her any further than she wanted to go. On a curious note, this was a first for me. Usually the client sought me out. Here I was practically soliciting her business.

“So? Who are you thinking of calling?” she said. “Here, give me that.”

She took the wrappers and napkins, put them all in the bag to toss away, squirted the counter with Windex and began wiping up the nonexistent remains with nervous anticipation of what I was about to suggest.

“Sherlock Holmes,” I said.

“Be serious.”

“I used to know a guy who’s a PI—private investigator—who’s a regular Sherlock Holmes. I used him all the time. He owes me one. Actually, he owes me a lot. He’s fabulous.”

“What would he do?”

“Follow your estranged husband around for a few days, take pictures if there’s anything interesting going on, then report back to me. If there’s something fishy, you’ll know it. You can do what you want with the information. You can turn the tables on your rat, Nat.”

“What if he gets caught? What if Nat shoots him? Nat carries a handgun.”

“Nice of you to mention that.” Jesus, I thought, what else has she got up her sleeve? “Look, Everett Presson can handle himself. If he gets caught, he knows what to do. But just so you know, he’s never been caught.”

“I don’t know…I can’t imagine Nat is up to something like another woman or something. I mean, he’s just not
like
that.”

“Yeah, that’s what Jack Welch’s wife said, and Hillary Clinton, and Ivana Trump—honey, it’s a long list. You don’t think men cat around?”

“No. No, I know they do, it’s just that I would’ve known it. At least I
think
I would have.” Her voice trailed off as she began searching her memory.

“Sure.”

Rebecca took a deep breath. I could read her mind. She didn’t want to know what was really happening and she wanted to know what was happening. In a way, I didn’t blame her.

“Go ahead then. Call your friend, this Everett Presson person, this private whatever he is. Is he going to charge us a lot of money?”

“Zero. I told you. He owes me.”

“Okay. Abigail? Thanks. I mean, I appreciate your advice. Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. It’s just that—well, let’s not talk about this anymore unless something turns up, okay?”

I understood. Constant facing of the demon that’s eating you alive is just too much to bear. Especially when the demon might be you.

I
T
was six in the morning, and once again I was staring at the ceiling fan. There was too much I didn’t know about Rebecca’s husband, and the more I thought about it, I knew I had to talk to Rebecca again before I unleashed Everett Presson to her husband’s shadows. Like, for starters, I didn’t even know what the lout did for a living. We’d had the chat at Huey’s, and the moment he returned I’d left for a hair appointment. That just goes to show how reluctant I was to immerse myself in this.

I kicked back the bedcovers, washed my face and made coffee, taking it out to the porch to watch the ocean for a while. I settled myself in one of the Kennedy rockers and rocked. I wondered what could make a woman so passive, so meek that she wouldn’t fight back when something like this happened to her. It didn’t quite add up in my book, but then I wasn’t Rebecca. I would have killed anyone with my bare hands who tried to touch my son, much less take him away from me. But I had never had the chance for that fight, and I had lost him anyway.

I got up to refill my cup, stopped at the porch rail and looked out at the horizon. When the world was so filled with trouble, how could the day be this magnificent, this stunningly beautiful? Everything before me was so perfect it could have been the location for an ad for the department of tourism. The soft dunes were so fragile, one after another, springing plumages of feathered sea oats from the crowns of their heads. Buttercups, black-eyed susans and clumps of yellow-green grasses crept around the bottoms of them, happy to live on droplets of water during dry spells and growing rampant after heavy rains.

Beyond them, for as far as I could see, was the sparkling water of the Atlantic—another day dawning, birds repeating the hunt for food today as they surely would tomorrow. Everything about the birds and the plants was designed not only for their survival but for them to thrive. Maybe that was one reason I loved Pawleys Island so much. Eternity seemed to be in sight but slightly out of my grasp. Maybe it was the challenge to bring them together that convinced me Pawleys was the only place where my imagination and my soul could live in sync with nature’s plan.

I wondered what Rebecca’s real story was. Battered women—whether it was physical or emotional or both—sometimes they believed they deserved the punishment. But what woman could believe she deserved to lose her children?

I refilled my mug, found a little pad of paper and a pen and decided to stroll down the beach, making a list of questions for Rebecca. The first thing Everett would want to know was where to find Nat. I needed the address of his office, their home, his usual haunts and so forth. If she could give me his license plate number, that would be helpful. I could already envision her giving me the information but with reluctance. She didn’t seem frightened of Nat. It wasn’t that. The more I thought about it, her complacency made no sense. In fact, it seemed slightly grotesque. But I decided that my own experience was coloring my judgment and that I had to wait until the facts came in.

I decided to go by the gallery to bring them Cokes, or
Co-Colas,
as Huey said. So two sacks in hand, I pushed open the door at ten-thirty and found Huey and Rebecca actually working. Rebecca was cutting a mat and Huey was writing checks.

This Coke-slash-sausage-biscuit routine was not healthy for anyone, and I knew it. I made a mental note to make some fruit salad for tomorrow.

“Morning all!”

“The sausage angel! My love!” Huey said.

Rebecca giggled and stopped working.

“Sausage angel?” she said and laughed again. “That’s some title!”

“Don’t mind him, Rebecca. He’s just a little cracked, that’s all.”

Huey took two Cokes and, after counting what was in the bag and pouting at me, only one sausage biscuit. “Are you putting me on a diet?”

“No, baby. I just need you stay healthy for my sake.” I smiled at him and he shook his head.

“Women,” he said. “Forgive me if I take this to my office. I have a pile of checks I want to get out in the morning mail.”

“No problem,” I said. “Mind if I join you?” I said to Rebecca.

“Of course not!” she said and cleared away her work from the counter.

“So listen,” I said, taking a bite of my biscuit, “I need a little bit of information and then I can unleash the hounds.”

“Sure,” she said.

I asked Rebecca for the information I needed, and she very willingly supplied it. Nat was Nat Simms of Simms Autoworld. The business was started and still very tightly held by Nat’s father, Tisdale, although his father had given Nat a letter on his thirtieth birthday granting him a twenty-five percent ownership. I had indeed seen their television ads all my life.
Hi! I’m Tisdale Simms! When you’re in the market for a new car…
They were horrible. I could still see the old man in his straw hat, squinting at the camera, reciting his lines from an unseen poster and smiling from ear to ear. Navy jacket, white shirt, red tie, khaki pants—it was the Lowcountry good old boy uniform that erased the lines of class and wealth and joined men together. You’d buy a car from a guy who seemed like your best pal, wouldn’t you? Apparently a lot of people thought so, because Nathaniel Tisdale Simms and his boy Nat sold more cars than anyone in the entire state of South Carolina. It also meant they had more money than the Saudis. And while money shouldn’t have been an issue, it was. She explained it was her father-in-law who owned the big boat, the mountain house, the beach house, the art collection. Nat’s partnership in his daddy’s business was on paper only and paid no dividends. I tucked that information away in the back of my mind.

I just listened to her, nodded my head, took a few notes and a few bites of breakfast and thought, my, oh my, what an interesting can of worms am I about to open.

I couldn’t wait to call Everett Presson, which I did as soon as I got back to my house on Pawleys. Maybe I’d even take a drive to Charleston and look for a car for myself. Yes! That might be fun!

“Everett? Hi! It’s Abigail Thurmond!”

“Well! As I live and breathe! How the heck are you? Where have you been?”

“Oh, Lord, Everett, it’s a long and, I’m afraid, sad story that I’ll tell you when I see you. Listen, I’m calling you because I need a favor.”

“You just name it! After all you’ve done for me? Just name it.”

I told him about Rebecca and her husband, Nat, and he listened carefully, stopping me now and then to take notes or to clarify things, and at the end he said exactly what I thought.

“This guy’s got a girlfriend. I’d bet my Chevy on it.”

I told him I agreed and then gave him a little grief about his car. “You still driving a Chevy? Same old nasty clunker? With all the checks I signed to you, you should be driving a giant Benz!”

“Hey, I gotta be low-key, you know. I looked at a Buick last year, but it had too much chrome. Anyway, just give me a few days and I’ll report back.”

I gave him my home number and said, “Thanks, Everett. I mean it.”

“Sure thing.”

For the next ten days I filled my time with a member guest tournament at a golf club in North Myrtle Beach, placing fourth. I could not have cared less, but the women I played with were all out of sorts.

“Hey! We won a little nut dish, didn’t we?”

The glare of their bitterness was so intense that I slipped away as soon as I could. Honestly, some people took this golf business just way too seriously for me. I picked up my dry cleaning, the
New York Times
that was saved for me at Litchfield Books and decided to go home. At the last moment, I decided to swing into the Bi-Lo and see what I could make for dinner that wouldn’t require too much effort.

I was pushing my cart by the hermetically sealed boneless, skinless chicken breasts when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Rebecca.

“How was your tournament?”

“We placed fourth, which I thought was pretty darn good, considering it was ninety-five in the shade,” I said. “You cooking tonight?”

“Yeah, Huey decided to close early, so I thought I would just grab something easy. What are you up to?”

“The same. I’m hitting the sack early tonight. I’m exhausted. Too much sun.”

“No word, huh?”

“You mean from Everett?” She nodded, and I said, “No, but as soon as I hear anything, I’ll call you right away.”

“Okay.”

Well, at least she was curious.

Several days later I found a day-old message in my voice mail from Everett.

“Call me,” he said. “I’ve got lots of nice pictures…”

It was after seven. I dialed him as fast as I could, kicking myself that I hadn’t given him my cell number (but it didn’t work half the time anyway) and cursing Bell South for their lousy voice mail service.

“Everett? Everett? Hey, it’s me, Abigail! Sorry to call you after five…”

“No problem. When are you coming to Charleston? Or Mount Pleasant?”

“I can be there tomorrow morning if you’d like me to.”

“I’ve got something in the morning, but how about we meet at Jackson Hole for an early lunch? It’s on Shem Creek. Do you know it?”

“Hole is the operative word. But they have great crab cakes. Eleven thirty?”

The hour was fine with him, and I knew that if I asked him what kind of pictures he had, he wouldn’t want to tell me. Everett would rather have the pleasure of seeing the shock on my face and I could certainly give him that. He deserved it.

In general, the public didn’t fully appreciate how dangerous private investigator work was. Contrary to what I’d told Rebecca, Everett had been in more than one rumble with one angry husband or another, and his nose had been broken so many times it was sort of a scrapbook of his adventures. Each bump and turn it took was a reminder of another battle weathered and won. But he was still the best in the business because he took those risks and always got results.

I crawled into my Pawleys Island hammock—what other kind would I own?—and began reading the Week in Review section of the
Times.
The only thing I could focus on was the political cartoons, which perfectly rendered the climate. It was another election year and the mudslinging was well under way.

Maybe it was just me, but the political world that had once fascinated me now just left me shaking my head wondering how America, who had fed, sheltered and defended the masses, had arrived at a place of such low esteem to the rest of the world. Clearly, part of it was fanatical religious ideology and the exported vulgarities of our culture. I mean, if I had never known an American and I watched a few episodes of
Sex and the City
or even the old reruns of
Dallas,
I would think Americans were totally immoral. Even though those shows were designed to parody our lives, if I didn’t know better, I might believe what my eyes saw on the television or movie screen.

Everything was perception. Even from my hammock on Pawleys Island, this little spot in the Atlantic Ocean, I could smell a trace of disdain from across the water. But of course, I knew that was in my own head because I was only wondering about myself and how I would stand up to scrutiny. I, who had made a living of dissecting the lives of others, would wither, dry up and evaporate under public examination. Worse, I had become a
crone,
stirring the pot of Macbeth. How in the hell had I let that happen?

With the heel of my foot, I pushed back from the banister to make the hammock swing gently back and forth until I was so drowsy that I knew if I didn’t get up then, I would wake up with rope marks all over my body. I stood up from the hammock as it came to its resting position and looked out over the dunes. It was low tide and the beach was illuminated by the stars overhead. There in silhouette I saw the form of a man in a coat. He was all gray. My heart lurched as my first thought was, who in the world was on the beach alone at that hour in an overcoat in late July? When I looked back again, he had vanished. The Gray Man? Ridiculous.

In the morning I thought about the Gray Man again. He was our local insurance adjuster of sorts, except that he had been dead for over a hundred years. No matter. The story goes that he was returning on horseback from the big war (he was wearing
gray,
after all!) to his fiancée’s home on Pawleys. It was raining to beat the band. The horse fell in a muddy hole, the Gray Man went flying and he died as a result of his injuries. I don’t know what happened to the horse, but apparently he got up dead and went to her house and rapped on her windows. She saw him waving frantically to leave the island. She did leave with her father, and the house was spared from the storm. So if there’s a storm coming and you see him, your house will survive intact.

I saw him right there that night. It wasn’t my imagination. I was sure of that. But there was no hurricane in the forecast other than some piddling tropical depression off Florida’s coast. The only real hurricane was the one we were about to cook up for Rebecca.

On the drive to Mount Pleasant, I thought about calling Huey and then decided against it. I would call him after I met with Everett. I listened to the weather reports and they were predicting afternoon thunderstorms. So what else was new? Every morning the temperature climbed with the humidity, and when Mother Nature couldn’t stand it anymore the skies grew dark, lightning crackled and it rained like the end of the world. Around eight, the sun would appear for a few minutes until it began to slip away. I loved that hour, and nowhere was it more lovely than at Huey’s. I would call him to see if he wanted to have dinner. I would tell him my alleged Gray Man story, and he could update me on the ghost of Alice Flagg. We would talk about the supernatural world that Huey believed in so strongly, and I would argue that it was all nonsense. But I really didn’t want to believe that it was. If there was nothing to the Gray Man or Alice Flagg, then where were Ashley and John? No. I couldn’t vouch for Alice, but I had seen the Gray Man with my own eyes.