Conley’s cell phone dinged to signal an incoming email. Maybe all those emails and résumés she’d sent out were triggering a job offer.
She tapped the email icon and her hopes sank. Again. Not a job offer, she saw. Just an email from Kennedy McFall from the funeral home: “Here’s the Symmes Robinette obituary. We’ll send over the photos the family requested to run with the obit later today. Let me know if you need anything else. Enjoyed seeing you today.”
Resting in the arms of his Savior: The Honorable U.S. Representative C. Symmes Robinette was taken, suddenly, from this earthly plain on Thursday near Varnedoe. Symmes, a lifelong Floridian, was a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, a war hero, an attorney, and an elected public servant, first as a state legislator and then as an eighteen-term member of Congress. But he would be the first to say that his most important role in life, and the one he cherished most, was devoted husband to Vanessa and father to C. Symmes “Charlie” Robinette Jr.
Born in 1943 to Marva Franklin and Clyde D. Robinette, Symmes was an only child whose father died tragically young. Later, Marva, who went to work at the Varnedoe Denim Assembly Mill, married Gordon Pancoast, the manager who raised Symmes as his own. Symmes enlisted in the Marines at twenty-two, served honorably in Vietnam, and was awarded the Bronze Star for heroic service in a combat zone. Symmes became the first member of his family to attend college, at Florida State University, where he went on to earn a BA in government. He graduated from Florida State University College of Law in 1974.
Symmes opened his private practice in Silver Bay immediately after law school, and it was not long before leaders in the community recognized his intelligence and deep commitment to public service. He was first elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1978 and was later tapped to run for Congress from the Thirty-fifth District. Among his notable achievements over many years of service to his community was the awarding of over $40 million in earmarked public funding for local highway improvements, water treatment facilities, and, in 1999, completion of the C. Symmes Robinette Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Bronson County, which he regarded as his crowning achievement during a lifetime of public service.
An Eagle Scout, Symmes was awarded many honors over his lifetime, including Florida Rotary Man of the Year, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Friend to Business Award, Christian Family Values Ambassador, and Florida Bar Association Award of Excellence.
Symmes was a member of the VFW, the American Legion, the Silver Bay Rotary Club, the Seminole Boosters Club, the Silver Bay Country Club, and Silver Bay Presbyterian Church.
Following a memorial service in the U.S. Capitol, there will be a celebration of life at Silver Bay Presbyterian Church on Saturday at 2:00 p.m. Reception to follow at the Baptist church gymnasium. Family visitation hour will be Friday night at McFall-Peeples Funeral Home.
Resting in the arms of the Savior. The phrase made her chuckle. At her first reporting job at the Belvedere Bugle in Louisiana, Conley’s weekly responsibilities included gathering, rewriting, and editing the obituaries submitted by local funeral homes. The paid death notices, which were priced according to word length, were a lucrative revenue stream for the paper, so funeral homes and the bereaved were encouraged to get as flowery as possible.
She’d been given a list of sappy death euphemisms to use when writing the obits and invested much time and energy into padding them as colorfully as possible.
Angels carried her away, Joyfully singing with Jesus, Promoted to glory, Fell asleep in the cradle of death, Advanced to eternal life, and Breathed her soul into her Savior’s arms were some of the more popular euphemisms she employed in her carefully crafted death notices, but her favorite euphemism was one that she’d seen only once, when the grieving family of a bayou fisherman had written that their beloved father had “slipped anchor.”
Slipped anchor, she thought, had a nice, simple ring to it, although it had not been a big moneymaker for the Belvedere Bugle, circulation 2,617.
Conley drove around the square and parked in front of the former Silver Bay Savings and Loan building. The 1920s-era art deco, two-story building had been painted a tasteful light gray and transformed into offices for the Robinette Law Firm.
She sat in the car for five minutes, trying to find a reason not to go inside and confront a part of her personal history she’d just as soon forget. And that was the thing about being back in Silver Bay, she realized. For every happy memory, like watching a Gulf sunset from the porch of the Dunes or sipping a Cherry Coke at the lunch counter at Kelly’s Drugs, there was also the reality that with every block she turned in this town, it seemed, she bumped up against a sharp corner of her painful past.
A somber wreath of white lilies with trailing white satin ribbons hung from the law firm’s plate glass doors. The door was locked, but there was a discreet intercom button on the casing.
She pressed the button, and a moment later, a man’s voice answered, “Who’s that?”
She was so startled, it took a moment to gather her composure.
“Uh, hi. It’s Conley Hawkins. With the Beacon?”
There was a pause. “Come on in.”
The intercom buzzed, and she heard the lock click. The bank’s former lobby, where, accompanied by her father, she’d opened her first savings account at the age of eight, had been turned into a reception area.
Charlie Robinette was waiting for her just inside the door. He looked like an ad agency’s idea of a young lawyer; straight blond hair brushing his eyebrows, horn-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses, untucked blue oxford cloth dress shirt, skinny jeans, and polished oxblood loafers.
“Here,” he said, handing her a piece of paper.
It was a copy of the obit she’d just read in her car.
She tilted her head and waited. Nothing. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Should I? Connie something, right? With the paper?”
“Not Connie. Conley,” she said, enunciating slowly. “Sarah Conley Hawkins.”
He let out a slow exhalation of breath. “Holy shit. Sarah!”
“That’s me.”
Charlie ran a hand through his hair. “Man! This is crazy. I never would have recognized you. I mean, you look awesome. Really. I like your hair like that. How long has it been?”
She straightened her shoulders. “Let’s see. I believe it would have been the summer before my senior year of high school.”
His face colored, and he laughed uneasily. “Well, that accounts for my memory lapse. I don’t know about you, but most of my summer that year was lost in a haze of Jägermeister and cheap weed. Up in smoke, right?”
“My memory of our last meeting was probably more vivid than yours,” Conley said coolly. “Let’s see. I went out with you two or three times at the beginning of the summer, when I got home from boarding school. I thought you were funny and cute. But when I refused to ‘put out,’ as you phrased it, for revenge, you told everybody in town that I’d—what’s that graphic phrase for group sex you used? ‘Pulled a train’? So cute and colorful.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “Kids, huh? If I really did that, I’m sorry.”
“You really did do it. And more.” Conley said. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, willing herself not to go batshit postal on Charlie Robinette. Batshit was not why she was here. She had a job to do. The past was the past. Ancient history.
Until the guy who’d ruined your teenage life didn’t even recognize you as an adult or have the grace to acknowledge the damage he’d done to your life.
He shrugged. “I’d do a lot of things differently now, if I had the chance.”
“Would you?” she asked.
“Hell yeah. Look, you can’t judge somebody by the stupid shit they did at the age of eighteen.”
Her head was starting to throb. She had to let it go, had to put the past firmly in the past, where it belonged.
“I didn’t come here to talk about this stuff,” she said. “Let’s start over, shall we? First, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Whatever.” He was obviously annoyed that she’d dredged up ancient history. “You came for the obituary, for the Beacon? Now you’ve got it.”
“Thanks, but Kennedy McFall just emailed it to me. I was actually hoping to speak to you about a story I’m writing about your dad for the paper.”
He sighed dramatically. “There’s not much I can tell you. We’re still in shock. It hasn’t really sunk in yet. What else do you need?”
“For starters, I was wondering if you have any idea why the medical examiner hasn’t released the body or determined the cause of death.”
“Who told you that?”
“The funeral home.”
His pleasant face reddened. “They had no business telling you something like that. We don’t know why there’s a holdup. Typical bureaucratic incompetence. The kind my dad battled his whole career.”
She nodded.
“My father was killed in a single-car wreck,” he went on, growing animated. “He was basically incinerated. Nothing else matters, okay? We don’t need this shit.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she repeated. “It must be incredibly painful. When I spoke to Sheriff Goggins over in Varnedoe—”
“Why would you talk to the sheriff?” he cut in.
“Because that’s part of my job. Your father was a prominent figure in this community, Charlie. In this state. Given the nature of his death—”
“Given the nature of his death, I find it totally inappropriate for you to show up at my office asking these kinds of questions,” Robinette said. “And since when does a crappy weekly like the Beacon run this kind of shit?” He took a step toward her, his fists balled up. “What the hell are you trying to insinuate?”
Conley stood her ground. “I’m not insinuating anything.”
“I think you need to leave here now,” Robinette said. “Despite the fact that I’ve tried to apologize, you’ve obviously still got some kind of personal ax to grind with me. I’m warning you, Sarah, if you come up with some kind of bullshit story about my dad’s death, I will grind you and that pathetic excuse for a paper into dust.”
She smiled. “Good to see you again, Charlie.”