Winnie stood at the huge, old, cast-iron kitchen sink peeling shrimp, with Opie directly underfoot while Lorraine sat at the kitchen table working a crossword puzzle. The turquoise transistor radio was perched on the windowsill, and they were listening to the news on NPR.
“Hey, shug,” G’mama said when Conley walked into the kitchen with her laptop. She pointed at the radio. “Buddy Bright just announced that Symmes Robinette was killed in an accident in his home district. But ‘no further details are available.’”
“That was fast,” Conley said. “Hey, do we not have Wi-Fi here? I’ve been upstairs trying to get online.”
“No Wi-Fi, no cable television, no dishwasher,” Winnie grumbled. She pointed at the rust-tinged water trickling from the kitchen faucet. “Might as well be living in a covered wagon out here.”
“I meant to ask you what’s going on with the water after I showered this morning,” Conley said. “There’s hardly any water pressure upstairs, and what water there is looks kinda weird.”
“It’s an old house with old pipes,” Lorraine said. “You’ve gotten spoiled living in Atlanta.”
“You want some supper?” Winnie asked, ignoring her employer. “I was just fixing to holler up at you.” She placed a plate with sliced hard-boiled eggs, shredded iceberg lettuce, and a mound of shrimp in the center of the table, then spooned pale coral remoulade sauce over the salad.
“I guess.” Conley took a seat across from her grandmother and poured a glass of iced tea from the pitcher in the center of the table.
Lorraine set aside her puzzle book and watched as Conley spooned salad onto her plate and began eating.
“Are you mad at me for making you work for your sister?”
Conley edged some of the shrimp salad onto a saltine cracker and chewed before answering. “A little bit. Yeah. Grayson resents me. She resents my success. I really think working for her is a terrible idea.”
“I know,” Lorraine said calmly.
“You do?”
“Yes. Your sister also resents the fact that she’s been stuck here in Silver Bay all these years, doing a job she never wanted, trying to keep a family business afloat and having to look after a cantankerous grandmother instead of having power lunches—whatever those are—and working for a white-shoe law firm anyplace but here.”
“Cantankerous? That’s putting it mildly,” Winnie remarked, joining them at the table.
“Hush,” Lorraine said. “Look,” she went on. “I didn’t want to burden you with this, but now that you’re here and between jobs, as it were, you might as well know. This is make-or-break time for the Beacon. For all of us in this business. We—that is, Grayson and I—could really use your help.”
“How bad is it?” Conley asked, shocked to hear her grandmother asking for help.
Lorraine nibbled at a bit of shrimp. “Our circulation has never been this low before. Ever. Grayson’s done everything she knows to do, but she tells me this new generation doesn’t read newspapers. That’s not how they get their news.”
“I know,” Conley said sadly. “Print journalism seems to be a dying form. Digital is the future. Or at least, it was supposed to be.”
“Advertising is the one thing that keeps us going,” Lorraine said. “Of course, it’s nowhere near what it used to be. Green’s is long gone, and we don’t have the used-car advertising we used to get, thanks to that damn Craigslist, but we do have a few loyal longtime advertisers. The IGA, the hardware store, and there’s the new Dollar Holler, and they buy the occasional preprint ad inserts, so that helps.” She pointed a finger at her granddaughter. “Anyway, since you’re here, what’s the harm in writing a few stories for the Beacon?”
“You really think Grayson is going to like anything I write?” Conley asked, scowling.
“Yes. She may resent you, but your sister is a pragmatist. She’ll never admit it to your face, but she knows how good you are. She read every word of that series you did for the Atlanta paper.”
“She did?”
“We both did. We have an online subscription to the AJC. Or we did. Sarah, we were both so proud of the work you did, and winning that Polk Award, well, I kept wishing Pops were still alive.”
“Think he would have put it on the front page of the Beacon?”
Winnie scoffed. “That old man? You were always his little pet. He woulda put out a whole special edition.”
“Okay,” Conley said, resigned to her fate. “Enough with the flattery. I don’t really have a choice here. Since we don’t have Wi-Fi, and the word’s out about the congressman’s death, I guess I’d better get busy. I’m gonna run into town and use the Wi-Fi at the house. Okay?”
“That’s fine,” G’mama said. “Just promise you won’t stay out until three again.”
On the way into town, Conley made a detour to the Bronson County Sheriff’s Office.
Varnedoe, the county seat, was an even smaller town than Silver Bay, with two stoplights and a business district that consisted of a single block of stores and office buildings that clustered around a courthouse square dominated by a Civil War–era cannon and a marble plinth serving as a memorial to the county’s soldiers killed in the two world wars. The streetlights were on, bathing the empty landscape in a melancholy yellow glow.
The sheriff’s office was a single-story, tan-brick building on the east side of the courthouse square, dwarfed by a magnolia tree that seemed to have swallowed up half the building.
A lone police cruiser was parked on the street out front. Conley found the deputy on duty sitting behind a counter separated from the lobby entrance by a sheet of bulletproof glass.
He looked up from the computer monitor he’d been staring at. “Can I help you?”
He was in his early forties, with blond hair fading to gray. The nameplate fastened to his khaki uniform shirt said he was J. DuPuy.
“Yes,” she said, her manner crisply professional. “I’m Conley Hawkins, from the Beacon, and I’d like to see the incident report for Symmes Robinette’s accident yesterday.”
He tilted his head and frowned. “The Beacon? What’s that?”
“The Silver Bay Beacon.”
“Y’all still got a paper over there?” He chuckled at his own joke.
“Just the oldest weekly newspaper in the state,” Conley said. “And I’d like to see that incident report. Please.”
“I’d have to ask the sheriff if that kind of thing is authorized,” DuPuy said. “You can check back tomorrow.”
“Police reports are a matter of public record in Florida,” Conley said. “The sheriff’s office is required by law to make them available—and in a timely manner.”
“That so?” He raised one eyebrow.
She was doing a slow burn, trying not to let him bait her. “Look, we both know the law here. Why do you want to hassle me? I’m like you. I’m doing my job.”
“How’d you hear about the congressman?” he asked.
“It was on the radio. And as it happens, my friend and I were the first ones on the scene. We called 911 and tried to get him out of the car, but it was already smoking when we got there.”
That piqued his interest. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Conley Hawkins,” she repeated. “From the Beacon.”
He began typing on the computer’s keyboard. After a moment, he nodded and silently read the document on the screen.
“Okay. I see here that the patrol officer interviewed you and your friend. Kelly?”
“Yes. Sean Kelly.”
“Three fifteen in the morning? What were y’all doing out running around that time of night?”
She chewed the inside of her cheek. “What was the congressman doing out running around at that time of night? He’s what, in his seventies?”
“The sheriff’s looking into that,” DuPuy said. “Now what about you?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m a member of the media, and I’ve requested that report. Which you are obliged to hand over to me.”
“You got any ID? I mean, how do I know you’re who you say you are?” Deputy DuPuy was really enjoying himself now.
Conley passed her driver’s license through the small slot in the window.
He studied it like it was a blood-spattered knife instead of a laminated driver’s license. “This says you live in Atlanta.”
“I did. Until this week. Now I live in Silver Bay. Can I get that incident report, please? I’m on a deadline.”
He gave her a stern look. “You’ll need to get yourself a Florida driver’s license, you know. Now that you’ve moved here.”
Haven’t had a Florida license since I was twenty-one, and I ain’t getting one anytime soon again, she thought.
“I won’t be here that long, but thanks,” she said impatiently. “This is sort of a … temporary arrangement. I really need to get back to work now. Okay?”
“Says here your name is Sarah,” DuPuy passed the driver’s license back to her.
“It’s my first name, but I go by my middle name.” She looked over at him. “How about you, Deputy DuPuy? What’s the J stand for?”
Jerk? Jerkwater? Jerk-off? she wondered.
“James. Not Jim or Jimmy. Just James.”
“Okay, James. I really need that report.”
“It’s Deputy DuPuy to you, Sarah.”
He tapped some keys, and she heard the whir of a printer coming from beneath the counter. He stapled four sheets of paper together. “There’s a fee for copying. A dollar a sheet. Think your paper can afford it?”
Probably not.
She handed over the bills, and he handed her the incident report. There was a wooden bench bolted to the wall opposite the counter window. Conley sat on the bench and skimmed through the report.
Not much here she didn’t already know. The Escalade, or what was left of it after the body was removed and the fire was extinguished, had been towed to Wiley’s Garage. Symmes Robinette’s body had been transported to Gulf Regional Hospital, and then to Apalachicola, to the regional medical examiner’s lab.
Her own name and contact information—and Skelly’s—were part of the report’s narrative, which was signed by good old W. R. Poppell.
Conley went back to the front counter. “I’m going to need to speak to your sheriff. When will he be available?”
DuPuy didn’t look up from the computer. “The sheriff doesn’t like to talk to reporters as a rule.”
“Well, he’s gonna have to make an exception this time,” she said. “This is a national story. Symmes Robinette was a public figure.”
DuPuy shook his head. “Sheriff Goggins will be in tomorrow at eight. You can leave your number, and I’ll pass it along. That’s the best I can do.”
Conley hadn’t covered the police beat since her early days working for a crappy weekly in Belvedere, Louisiana, but things hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. Cops were still notoriously closemouthed, even antagonistic to members of the press. She had no doubt that she’d be calling the sheriff, repeatedly, starting first thing in the morning.
She stopped at the Silver Bay Police Department on her way back from Varndoe to skim through the week’s incident reports, before driving back to G’mama’s house on Felicity Street. When she unlocked the door and stepped inside, the only sound was the loud ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the dimly lit front hallway.
As soon as she’d set up the laptop, she anxiously skimmed her email entries, hoping to find responses to her job queries. Nothing.
Too soon, she told herself. Don’t be so pathetic. Don’t be so needy. Don’t be so desperate.
She opened her browser and began to immerse herself in the life and times of Charles Symmes Robinette, which, up until two nights ago, had seemingly been made up of a remarkable combination of good fortune, good timing, and shrewd friendships. Some details she already knew; others were a revelation.
As Grayson had pointed out, Symmes’s story had the makings of a small-town fairy tale. According to his official congressional biography, he’d been born in 1943 and grew up in Griffin County. His father was a World War II vet who’d worked as a long-haul trucker.
Conley did some quick math. Symmes Robinette had been seventy-seven. She scrolled back and scrutinized his most recent campaign photo with a now-jaundiced eye. He’d obviously started dyeing his hair sometime in the last couple of decades and, in the portrait anyway, augmented it with an artfully arranged toupee. Maybe, she thought, he’d also had some work done? Plastic surgery, she knew, wasn’t just for fading movie stars.
Young Symmes was only ten when his father died of heart disease. His mother, Marva Robinette, went to work as a secretary in a local textile plant, and when Symmes was sixteen, she got remarried to the much-older manager of the plant.
Symmes played high school football and baseball and graduated at age eighteen. He worked in a textile mill and at other menial jobs and took some classes at a junior college before enlisting in the Marines in 1964. He’d served two tours in Vietnam, then returned to Florida in 1968. He went to college and eventually law school, both at Florida State University in Tallahassee, on the GI Bill.
He’d won a Florida senate seat in 1978. According to what she’d read in the Tallahassee Democrat, he was already being touted as a potential gubernatorial candidate when, conveniently, the U.S. representative for the Thirty-fifth District dropped dead shortly into his fourth term in office—which was how Symmes earned the unfortunate statehouse nickname “the Symmes Reaper.”
She found an old feature story from The Washington Post’s Lifestyles section, showing photos of the Robinette family at a White House Easter Egg Roll during the Reagan administration.
Symmes had to have been nearly forty-five in the photo, and Conley noted, not for the first time, how much younger Vanessa Robinette appeared to be—maybe half her husband’s age?
Conley scowled down at the image of the adorable, towheaded Charlie Robinette in his mama’s arms.
“Behold, the Little Prince,” she muttered.
She read on for another hour, making notes of Robinette’s career in the U.S. House—he’d served on the Appropriations, Agriculture, and Veteran’s Affairs committees and, she discovered, his name had been briefly mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate for George H. W. Bush.
Symmes had excelled at bringing home the bacon for his district, managing to snag tens of millions of dollars of federal funding for military bases, interstate improvements, and even an agriculture research station at his alma mater, which had been named in his honor.
A sterling citizen, she thought, yawning. It was nearly midnight, and the lack of sleep was starting to wreak havoc with her concentration.
She was powering down her laptop when she heard a light knock at the front door. Peeping out from behind the dining room curtains, she recognized the man standing on the doorstep, holding a bottle of beer in each hand.
“Is this the Silver Bay version of Uber Eats?” she asked, opening the door.
“I was taking out the trash at my mom’s house when I saw the light on over here,” Skelly said, looking slightly embarrassed. “You said y’all were moving out to the beach today, so I thought I’d just check up, make sure Miss Lorraine’s house wasn’t being burgled.”
“Do you always serve beer to the burglars on this block?”
“Just the cute ones.” He handed her one of the bottles. It was icy to the touch.
“Wanna come in?”
Skelly stepped back toward the edge of the porch and looked out at the deserted street. “Maybe we could sit out here?” he asked, gesturing at the rocking chairs. “If Mom wakes up and I’m not there, she’s liable to get confused and wander outside looking for me.”
They sat on the rockers and uncapped the beers, clinking the bottles together in a silent toast.
“She’s that bad, huh?” Conley asked.
“Oh yeah,” Skelly said. “It’s weird. Some days, she’s fine. Insists on going to the store with me, putting on her lab coat. She greets old customers, even talks about their prescriptions. She still thinks she’s running the store. Other days, she doesn’t recognize me, can’t figure out how to put on her own shoes. Some days, she thinks I’m my dad. Other times, she thinks I’m her own father.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Conley said.
“Nothing to say.” He tipped his bottle to his lips and drank.
“Hey, did you hear about Symmes Robinette?” he asked. “He was the guy. In the wreck.”
“I did. In fact, Grayson and G’mama ganged up and browbeat me into doing a story for the Beacon. That’s why I’m here tonight. We don’t have Wi-Fi at the Dunes, and I needed to start doing research for the obit.”
Skelly rocked backward, crossing one leg over the other. “Too bad you can’t talk to my mom. She went to high school with Toddie, you know.”
“Who’s Toddie?”
“Toddie Robinette. Symmes’s first wife.”
“For real?” Conley sat up straight. “I’ve been in there doing research on Symmes for a couple of hours. I never saw anything about a first wife.”
He shrugged. “I think they kept the split real quiet when it happened. I don’t know much about her, just that Mom used to cuss every time anybody mentioned Symmes’s name. She was never interested in politics, but after the divorce, she by God made sure she went to the polls and voted against him every time he ran for reelection.”
“Verrrry interesting,” Conley said. “Fascinating.”
“See?” Skelly said. “Silver Bay’s got all kinds of shit going on, if you just know where to look.”