The Final Victim (7 page)

    Who knows what might have happened to her? Who knows how she would have managed to go on living?

    There was a time, after she lost Adam, when she didn't want to.
When she even considered seeing to it that she wouldn't have to.

    She knew from experience that the world would go on spinning without her; that in time, she'd be just ail other scandalous skeleton in the Remington family closet.

    After all, she wouldn't be the first young Remington mother to commit suicide.

    Thank God she backed away from the edge of that precipice. But she's never forgotten what it felt like to teeter there, not even caring that her life hung in the balance.

    
If anything ever happens to Royce, or to
Lianna
-

   
She curtails the chilling thought with an oft-repeated reminder that she's endured her share of sorrow.

    Nothing will happen to her husband or daughter.

    They're both safe.

    There will be no more tragedy in Charlotte's life.

    Nagging fear is a natural result of all that's happened to her, and to Royce.

    She can let it consume her, or she can ignore it.

    
I've got to ignore it
, she thinks resolutely, lifting her Remington chin with conviction.

    "Where are we going?"
Lianna
asks Kevin
Tinkston
when they reach the fork of the plantation road.

    From here, there are only two choices: go pretty much straight west toward the northernmost of the two causeways leading to the mainland, or veer to the left toward the island's commercial district down at the southernmost tip.

    
All that lies north and east of
Oakgate
, beyond acres of alligator- and rattlesnake-infested marshland, is a narrow strip of sea oat-covered dunes and the Atlantic Ocean.

    But why head south? Kevin knows they can't risk being seen in public on the island, hanging around at the boardwalk T-shirt and surf shops, or the ice-cream place or cafe.

    
Which leaves the wide, miles-long stretch of sand along the southeastern coast.

    She hasn't set foot back on that beach since that awful Labor Day weekend when Royce's son drowned. Though Theo was a stranger-and
Lianna
and her mother could never have known that his father would become a part of their lives-witnessing a tragic incident that echoed of her own family's worst nightmare left an indelible mark on her.

    "Are we going to the beach?" she demands, trying to keep her voice from rising in panic.

    "No."

    T
don't
believe you."

    Kevin turns his gaze away from the road just long enough to wink at her and drawl, "It's a surprise. You'll see."

    Some surprise. He's probably taking her to his family's ramshackle house down on the southwest canal, where they're among a handful of year-round residents. Most of the others are fishermen and Northern retirees.

    
Lianna
has yet to meet the
Tinkstons
and she isn't sure what, exactly, Kevin's parents do besides drink beer and squabble with each other and their sons, according to local gossip.

    "Local gossip" being her friend Grace, whose family has a summer house out on the island. It was Grace who first had the crush on Kevin, and dragged
Lianna
to meet him at the Mobil station, where he was pumping gas. But it was
Lianna
he noticed.

    That was in June and he's been her secret boyfriend ever since. Her friendship with Grace is officially over.

    She hasn't had any regrets about the whole thing really…

    Well, not until now.

    "So are we going to your house?"

    "What, are you sick? No!" 'Then where?"

    
Silence.

    "I don't want to go to the beach," she warns Kevin. "If that's what you were secretly planning."

    "No one will be down there to see us. Not where we're going."

    Her pulse quickens. "So? My mother finding out isn't the only reason I don't want to go to the beach."

    "Yeah, well, the sun's not out?"

    
Right.
Now what? She's been using a fake sun allergy to avoid meeting him there during the day these last few weeks.
That, and the threat that her mother might find out about it.

    But she can't use either of those excuses now.

    And she'll have to go back to the beach sooner or later, won't she?

    Besides, anywhere is better than gloomy old
Oakgate
, especially tonight, with everyone moping around after'
Grandaddy's
funeral.

    Which is why
she
text messaged Kevin earlier and asked him to come get her. She didn't even have to tell him where to find her. After a few nights of sneaking out to meet him, the routine is set. He always picks her up just beyond the plantation gates, where she; waits in her usual spot in the shadows of a towering live oak.

    As far as her mother and Royce know, she's locked safely and sullenly in her room.

    As far as
Lianna
knows, nobody-other than
Kevin
,of
course-is aware of the concealed panel leading to a secret door beside the fireplace. Nobody alive today, that is.

    "The wipers on the bus go swish
swish
swish
," Mimi Gaspar Johnston sings for perhaps the twentieth time today. "Swish
swish
swish
. Swish
swish
sw
-"

    "Babe, have you seen my keys?" Unlike her son, Mimi welcomes the interruption. "On the hallway table," she tells her husband, who's standing in the doorway of the baby's room, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and clutching his travel mug.

    Tow-headed, blue-eyed Cameron, who inherited his mother's coloring and his father's energetic personality, squirms in Mimi's arms as she tries to jam his arms into his blue and white striped pajama top.

    Jed is speaking, but whatever he's saying is drowned out by Cameron shouting, "Sing, Mommy! Sing!"
'Just a second, Cam.
What did you say, Jed?"
"I said, I already checked there."
"Milky, Mommy!"

    "I promise you can have milk and cookies as soon as you're dressed, but you have to let me and Daddy talk," Mimi admonishes her son, then asks her husband, "Did you look under the pile of mail on the hall table?" "No, but-"

    "Look under the pile of mail," Mimi says above Cameron's howl as, top on at last, she attempts to stick °ne of his chubby, wriggling legs into the pajama bottoms.

    "I don't think they're there."

    She shoves aside a sweat-dampened tendril of blond hair that has escaped her ponytail. 'They are."

    "I don't think so." Jed turns on the heel of his steel, toed boot and leaves the room.

    "Sing, Mommy!"

    With an inner sigh, Mimi obliges. 'The wheels of the bus go-"

    "No. Wipers! Swish
swish
, Mommy!" orders the mini!
tyrant
who has
recendy
possessed her sweet-tempered child.

    Mimi sings about wipers swishing while getting his legs into his pajamas and his feet into the little suede soled blue
Padders
. As she lets him squirm out of her grasp at last, she ruefully notes that Cam is rapidly out-: growing both the slippers and the pajamas.

    How the heck are they going to squeeze more out this month's already-exhausted budget? Mimi can't her mother to stretch her fixed income again-she ready paid for Cam's last checkup at the doctor's.

    "Vail really
need
medical insurance," she recently admonished Mimi, as she often has. "If we hadn't had it when your father got sick…"

    She always trails off at that point, but Mimi knows the rest of the story. Mimi knows her father had the best care possible after being diagnosed with lung disease knows that the doctors bought him more time. Tim enough to see his only daughter married and his first grandchild born.

    "We'll get insurance, Mom."
Yes, and someday, we'll get to Europe, too.
'Just as soon as Jed finds a regular job with benefits."

    God only knows when that will be. Jed is back, standing in the doorway dangling his keys. "You were right." She interrupts her singing and her private budge worries with a satisfied, "Told you so."

    "Do you have to say that?"

    "Yes," she replies with a grin as Jed steps over scattered DUPLO blocks to embrace her, "I do."

    Her son tugs on the hem of her homemade cutoff denim shorts as her husband pulls her close.
"Milky, Mommy."

    
"Hmmm?"
Exhausted, Mimi rests her head on Jed's shoulder. She can't help wishing she was already in bed, rather than facing household tasks she's been meaning to get to all day-and wishing that Jed was in bed with her, instead of heading out to start the overnight road-crew shift he's been working since last October, when a hurricane all but destroyed the southernmost of
Achoco
Island's two causeways.

    Now there's only one way on and off the island, whose burgeoning population makes for frequent traffic tie-ups, particularly during beach season. Jed and the crew are under a lot of pressure to finish the job.

    "Milky, Mama," Cameron persists, tacking on an adorable, "
Pwease
?"

    Stifling a yawn, Mimi recalls a line of an old Robert Frost poem:

   
But I have promises to keep,

  
 
And miles to go before I sleep…

    "Hungry, Charlotte?" Royce asks, as they emerge on bustling River Street not far from the restaurant. The warm air is thick with the tantalizing aroma of deep-fried shellfish.

    "Hungry-and homesick," she replies, longing for their new home on a leafy block facing Colonial Park Cemetery not far from here.

    
"Me, too.
It won't be long now."

    "Maybe we can come back home by the end of July," she tells Royce hopefully-though even if that's possible, she'll be facing almost a month at
Oakgate
without her grandfather… or with his ghost, depending on one's willingness to suspend disbelief.

    "I doubt we'll be in before August. Even if the interior work is done, they'll still have to paint and paper, and finish the woodwork-" Catching sight of her expression, he adds reassuringly, "But I'm sure we'll be home before school starts, like I promised
Lianna
."

    "I hope so." There will be hell to pay if the tempera* mental thirteen-year-old faces even another day of being driven forty-five minutes from the plantation to Savannah Country Day School by Stephen,
Grandaddy's
longtime chauffeur.

    
Lianna
is embarrassed by the long black town car and, infuriatingly, by kindly old Stephen. She's conveniently forgotten that the chauffeur was her hero when he supplied her with pockets full of bubblegum back id the early days after the divorce, when they were first living at
Oakgate
.

    These days,
Lianna
finds fault with everything about Stephen-from his being hard of hearing to his European formality.

    "Does he have to wear that stupid uniform?"
she
fre-quendy
grumbled throughout the school year, always followed by her daily plea, "Why can't you just drive me, Mom?"

    Because you'd have me so upset by the time we got to town, that's why
.

    But Charlotte would always manage to summon every bit of maternal patience she possessed and keep her thoughts to herself. She just shrugged and told
Lianna
that Stephen would be driving her for as long as they were staying at
Oakgate
, period.

    Now, strolling along River Street, with its row of brightly lit restaurants and shops housed in former cotton warehouses, Charlotte so longs for her old life back that she's tempted to launch into a
Lianna
-style whine.

    This, not
Oakgate
, is her home now.

    
Savannah,
and the nineteenth-century architectural gem she and Royce bought this winter, with its dormered mansard roof, bracketed cornices, and lush gardens now fragrant with summer blooms.

    It isn't far from where she grew up. But sadly, that Beaux Arts mansion on Abercorn Street-like its final owners-didn't live to see the turn of the millennium. A bank now stands where Charlotte's girlhood home once was; her parents lie miles away, in the cemetery at
Oakgate
.

    Daddy went first: cirrhosis of the liver, courtesy of the same lifelong passion for Southern bourbon, of which his staunch Southern Baptist father didn't approve.

    Alcohol probably had a hand in his own mother's death as well.