Dead Low Tide (17 page)

Thought I’d tag along, just in case
, he’d called out.

And now I heard it, what Unc wanted me to listen to: the crunch of gravel on our drive. Unc turned back to the window again, and I stood from the bed, crossed to the blinds, lifted up one of them to see outside. Maybe it would be SLED come back to ask us something else. Maybe it would be Tyler.

Maybe, I thought, somebody gave a shit about a dead woman.

But it was Mom’s BMW—Moonstone Metallic was the color, though it’d always looked nothing other than a shiny beige to me—and for an instant I wondered who the heck had taken her car out on a jaunt and was bringing it back, the garage door opening right now to let in whoever it was.

Mom was supposed to be in her room, asleep.

“Is that Eugenie?” Unc asked, and I glanced down at him in the recliner beside me. He had an improbable look on his face, one I didn’t often get to see from a person who could judge time by the tilt of the earth, the touch of a shadow: he looked stunned, what eyebrows he had high on his forehead, mouth open even wider. He, too, had thought she was here and sleeping.

I looked back out the window. “It’s her,” I said, “unless some joyrider’s putting her car back where he found it.” She was almost in the garage all the way, the rear tire and trunk all I could see, Mom inching it in like she always did, even with that tennis ball hanging from
the ceiling to signal her exactly where to stop. The brake lights flared again and again, the vehicle twitching more the farther in she got.

But then it stopped, the vehicle all the way in. The brake lights went out, the garage door started down.

Unc stood, started for the door. I turned from the window, said, “You didn’t know she was gone, did you?”

He stopped inside the doorway, one hand to the jamb. He stood there a second, said, “Guess I must’ve dozed off downstairs earlier.” He paused. “Can’t keep track of everything, now can I?”

He looked back over his shoulder at me, and I could see a sort of half smile on his face. “But now she’s home,” he said, “you see if you can’t smell a shooting range on her. Even if it’s slathered in that lavender hand lotion she’s all the time putting on.” He tapped the doorjamb once, stepped on into the library. “Because I’m betting that’s where she’s been, no matter what camouflage she brings in with her.”

H
er camo: a roast chicken, gallon of milk, bag salad, and loaf of bread.

And a perkiness off the Richter scale.

“Hello, sleepyheads!” she nearly shouted on her way in the door off the breezeway between the kitchen and the garage. I was in the foyer, Unc already coming through the sitting room next to the kitchen, and I heard plastic grocery sacks settling on the island in there, then Mom call out, “Mama Bear’s brought home dinner!”

By the time I made it in there she had the chicken in its plastic container out of one Bi-Lo grocery sack, was pulling the milk out of another. “Took advantage of you boys and your naptime to go over and see Deb Bloom at the Med U. She’s senior pediatric nurse-practitioner over there now, and today she—”

She stopped, looked up at us, quiet and side by side across the island from her. “What?” she said, and smiled, tilted her head, finished peeling the sack from the milk jug. She turned to the refrigerator door, pulled it open, her back to us now. “You two know Deb Bloom.
She was my buddy back when I was working down there. My shift supervisor for three years.”

She’d changed clothes since last night—or this morning—from that white turtleneck and blue sweater to a white cotton blouse a little snug on her, snug enough so that with her back to me I could tell she wasn’t wearing that holster. She set the milk on the shelf inside the door, then turned, reached for the bag salad. “Deb’s the boss lady up there now and I just wanted to pop in, give her a big hug for all the hard work she’s had to go through all this while.”

She opened the crisper drawer, dropped in the salad, then closed the refrigerator, turned back to us. “You know Deb,” she said, still with that smile. “Deb Bloom. You met her a few times when you were little, Huger. Over at the Med U.” She nodded.

Maybe it was nothing more than the power of suggestion, or maybe it was the truth. But I thought I could smell something on her, the smallest tinge of an idea of the sharp edge of smoke, nothing more than a match strike three days ago, a burnt-out sparkler from last Fourth of July. But it was there, buried beneath that lavender always on her.

I said, “I remember her,” and nodded, smiled, though I couldn’t for the life of me bring anything to mind.

Unc was already coming around the island, reached out into the air above the granite and landed it right on the third white plastic bag. He reached in, pulled out a loaf of bread. “Let me help,” he said.

W
e ate dinner, there at the breakfast table in the kitchen, that same table we’d all sat at last night, and where still my book bag lay at my feet. The sun was down now, the water on the creek gone silver for the fading light, the greens and browns only going deeper. Then here came a pinprick of light out there in the pale orange: Venus.

We talked a little, Unc about commercial shrimp season starting up and maybe this fall we ought to go out and shrimp bait for ourselves,
me about heading out to Hungry Neck one day next week to take a look for some turkey. But mostly we listened to Mom carry on, trying her best to convince us of how she spent the afternoon with this Deb Bloom who’d been at the Med U for twenty-eight years now and was the first nurse Mom had met her first day and who had a married daughter my age living up in Bloomington, Indiana, getting ready to have a baby in June, and wasn’t it funny Deb’s daughter’s maiden name was Bloom and she lived in Bloomington?

No one said a word on a body in a marsh, or on poker night creeping up on us by the minute. And when we finished, Unc and I carrying the plates to the sink to do our nightly duty—I washed what couldn’t go in the dishwasher, Unc dried—and after Unc wiped down the island and I did the counters and table, we thanked her like this were a cotillion lesson and we were penitent students, then told her we were going to watch the news up in Unc’s room.

“I’m just fine,” she said, though neither of us had asked her. But she wasn’t stupid. Not by a long shot. She knew we were worried about her. And she knew there was news we needed to see. She winked at me, picked up the glass of white wine she’d been sipping at all through dinner. “You boys don’t need to worry a whit about me,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Good,” I said, and nodded at her, smiled. Unc echoed, “Good,” and we left her there.

And watched at six and again at seven the same empty announcements about a body in Hanahan, then a story and footage about a body in a Toyoter in Wambaw Creek. Both channels had also interviewed the sire of Tick, who gave the same story we’d already heard; both channels had a fleeting second or so of Tyler and a couple other men in uniform, hands on hips or arms crossed as they spoke to one another.

Yellow crime scene tape hung in the still air out there. Somebody in the studio droned. And the world went right on.

Like always this time on a Thursday night—10:08 by the numbers on the dash clock—there were plenty of cars already parked on the street, the usual BMWs and Audis and Lexi. But I lucked out, saw up ahead a spot only two doors down from the Whaley manse.

Already I could feel my neck going hot, my palms on the wheel the smallest bit sweaty.

Prendergast was in there.

A parking spot two doors down in this neighborhood meant we were still a good fifty yards away. This was Hamlet Square, a high-end development out on Rifle Range Road here in Mount Pleasant, the Beverly Hills of South Carolina. Home of big black SUVs with
MY KID IS SMARTER THAN YOURS
bumper stickers, plastic surgeons by the score, and a kind of residential sprawl that’d let this suburb across the Cooper River from Charleston bleed north for the last twenty years until it seemed almost to touch Virginia.

The streets here were all half-acre lots plotted out with raised houses. Clapboard siding and Charleston Black shutters, front porches with rocking chairs or joggling boards, three-car garages underneath each house: all predictable. And somehow allowed in this the wild hair of Thomas Warchester Whaley the Fourth’s orange stucco place, dropped smack in the middle of it all.

I know I was being snarky about this neighborhood, and all of them over here. I know I was being shitty about those highlight-haired and Botoxed women behind the wheels of their tanks, and about the husbands who drove these luxury cars over here on Thursday nights to throw away money like it was peeing in a ditch.

But there was nothing I could do for feeling that way, because I was a piece of the shit I smelled: here were Unc and me in his black Range Rover, pulling into a place at the curb. Driving here from our own posh digs in a neighborhood more exclusive than this place could ever hope to be.

This is where it’d gotten us: meeting up to play some sort of game that involved a set of goggles and a man who’d blowtorched a piece of my mother’s soul.

And there was a dead body involved here. One it seemed, if our talk on the way over was any kind of pulse check, Unc was having second thoughts even thinking about.

We pulled into the spot, parked behind a silver Mercedes CL550, the paint job almost too bright in the headlights. I sat there a second, squinting at it, and the row of cars in front of us and across the street. And that orange house up there, all lit up and ready to go.

I turned the engine off, looked behind me to the backseat, where the book bag lay there in the dark. Right where I’d put it.

“It’s going to be all right,” Unc said beside me, and I looked at him. Just his shadowed profile, him looking straight ahead. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

My neck went even hotter, no matter how much I wanted to believe him.

W
e’d left about 9:30, Mom already in her pajamas and in bed. Of this I was certain, as I’d seen her into her room, gave her a hug, told her not to worry about us and that we’d be back early. She’d smiled, nodded, flipped on her own TV to start watching her TiVoed
American Idol
results show: her Thursday night routine.

Tyrone was working security up at the front gate. We’d pulled up to the white-brick gatehouse, the wrought-iron gates in my headlights making their slow push forward to let us out, and I rolled my window down. Usually I just eased on through, but there seemed this night something better I could do, something different, for no other reason than that Jessup had been out front of our house last night, watching. Just in case.

Tyrone, smiling and with his hands in his pockets against the cool night air in through his open door, stepped out of the gatehouse, leaned forward toward the car. “Mr. Huger, Mr. Leland,” he said, “how you doing tonight?”

“Good,” I said, and Unc said, “Just fine.”

“Bad night last night,” Tyrone said, the smile gone now. “Heard about what you found out there. And about Segundo having to fight off the news crews.” He shook his head, grimaced. “Told me he had to threaten to call the cops if they didn’t turn around and go on home. Three vans showed up here.” He looked to his left, out front of us where the gate still stood open. “Sad piece of news, whatever it was happened.”

He looked back at us, shook his head again. Then he opened his mouth, on him what looked a kind of surprise. “Oh!” he said, and turned quick back to the gatehouse, stepped in and reached down beneath the window. Then here he was with Unc’s golf club, the camp chair folded up in its bag. “Jessup brought these up before he went on home this morning,” he said, and held them out, an item in each hand, like they were prize fish. “Wanted me to bring ’em on over to you, but I clean forgot, what with all the buzz going on.”

I popped open my door, stepped out and started around to the back of the Range Rover, Tyrone right behind me. “We can put them in here,” I said, and Unc called out from inside, “What is it?”

“Club and chair,” I said, the tail door open now, Tyrone settling them inside. “From last night.”

Unc said nothing, and Tyrone stood up, brushed his hands together like this was the end of a job well done. I closed the door, and he stepped in front of me, headed for the gatehouse door.

I came around to my door, put one leg up into it to climb in, but paused a second. “Jessup did a good job last night,” I said. “If you talk to him before I do, let him know I want to thank him.” I climbed in, pulled closed my door.

“He’d of been here tonight,” Tyrone said from the gatehouse door, hands back in his pockets. “This was supposed to be his regular shift. Supposed to be me working last night, but a couple days ago he said he had something coming up and couldn’t work tonight, and we traded.” He shook his head again, looked out front to those open gates, glanced behind us. He let out a small laugh, and looked at us. “I’m not gonna lie, I’m sort of sorry I missed all the action. This is a good job and all, and I’m sorry somebody was killed. But, well …”

He stopped, blinked, swallowed. He glanced down at the ground and back up to me again, and I could see he’d realized he’d walked too far into the sentence he’d begun, one that was going to end with what a boring job he had. This to a couple people who lived out here: his employers.