“She’s asleep,” Winnie reported when Conley got back to the Dunes. The housekeeper had dragged a chair into the hallway outside Lorraine’s bedroom and was sitting there, looking half-asleep herself, with a battered Nora Roberts paperback novel open on her lap.
Conley opened the door and tiptoed inside. Her grandmother was propped up on her pillows on the bottom bunk bed, glasses perched on the end of her nose, softly snoring. The bruise on her cheek made an ugly dark stain on G’mama’s pale skin. Conley reached out and removed the glasses, placing them on the nightstand, then leaned down and lightly kissed her cheek before turning off the reading lamp and exiting the room.
“You go on to bed too,” Conley told Winnie, pointing at the small bedroom across the hall. She was already having second thoughts about driving back to town for the night, especially after G’mama’s fall earlier in the day. Skelly was right. The story would have to wait.
When she heard a slight knock at the front door, she flew down the steps and opened it.
Skelly stood there, holding the sandals she’d forgotten out on the beach.
“I figured Cinderella might need her slippers,” he said, handing them over.
She looked down at her sandy bare feet. “Whoops.”
“Want me to follow you back into town?”
“There’s been a slight change in plans. I’m staying here tonight,” she said, stepping outside. “If G’mama’s feeling okay in the morning, I’ll go in.”
“What changed your mind?” he asked, clearly surprised.
“I guess you did. There’s nothing I could do tonight that I can’t do tomorrow. And in the meantime, if something happened, if G’mama had another spell, I’d never forgive myself for not being here when she needed me.”
“You’ll want to call her doctor Monday and let him know what’s going on,” Skelly said.
“I will,” she promised. And then she placed both hands on his shoulders, stood on her tiptoes, and impulsively kissed him square on the lips.
He took a half step backward and looked at her quizzically.
“That’s for being my Prince Charming,” she said.
He bowed from the waist. “My pleasure.”
Conley changed into her pajamas and carried her things downstairs, noiselessly slipping into the boys’ bunk room and climbing into the top bunk using the wooden ladder her grandfather had built by hand.
The beds were probably relics from the fifties or sixties, she thought, with maple wagon-wheel headboards and footboards to fit in with the vaguely cowboy-meets–Beach Boys decorating theme. The wall-mounted sconce on the top bunk featured a brass horse head, but the slightly musty-smelling chenille bedspreads had a tufted design of seashells, waves, and anchors.
She switched on the light, and the brass chain pull came off in her hand. She shook her head, looking around the bunk room. This had been the hangout for generations of boy cousins, and she hadn’t been in here in decades.
In the dim light from the sconce, she could see that the ceiling was mottled with large water stains. The wheezy air-conditioning unit in the bedroom’s only window dripped water onto the floor, where the boards were beginning to warp.
The Dunes was showing its age, and the effect, even in the semidarkness, was not flattering.
She picked up her cell phone, and using the flashlight app, she began leafing through the book she’d chosen for her bedtime reading—the collected wit and wisdom of Rowena Meigs.
The paper was shiny and the print small. It was evident that the book’s publisher had merely photocopied Rowena’s old columns instead of resetting them in more readable type.
Conley flipped pages until one of the hundreds of boldfaced names caught her attention.
HELLO, SUMMER
OCTOBER 28, 1984
A good time was had by all last Saturday as friends and family of Toddie and the Honorable U.S. Rep. Symmes Robinette gathered for a delightful harvest-time “hoedown” at Oak Springs Farm, the family’s country estate in Bronson County.
Toddie, always the “hostess with the mostest,” transformed the farm’s rustic horse barn using hay bales, jack-o’-lanterns, and scarecrows aplenty, into a magical party setting, complete with square dancing and cocktails for the grown-ups and hayrides, a pumpkin-carving contest, face painting, and bobbing for apples for the kiddies.
In keeping with the party theme, Symmes, who is our handsome and outgoing congressman for the Thirty-fifth District, and Toddie wore fetching his ’n’ hers denim overalls and plaid flannel shirts, while their teens were dressed in dungarees and T-shirts emblazoned with VOTE FOR MY DAD. A little birdie informed your correspondent that Toddie, as talented with a needle as she is with a saucepan, designed and whipped up the entire family’s costumes herself.
Spotted among the partygoers were the cream of Silver Bay polite society, including George and Winkie Covington. George is chairman of the Symmes Robinette for Congress committee, and Winkie is a whiz on the tennis courts. Luther and DeeDee Najarian were among the square dancing set. Luther does important things for the railroad, and DeeDee owns a darling boutique in downtown Silver Bay called Shoe Business. Later in the evening, Symmes and Luther were seen outside the horse barn, “holding court” with the Honorable Judge Beckett Martin, no doubt plotting how to keep progress moving in our fair community.
A “frightful” event marked the fifth birthday party of your correspondent’s own great-niece, Tara Torrence, at the Piggy Park Bar-B-Q Ranch in downtown Silver Bay. Entertainment was provided by a skeleton-costumed bluegrass group who proclaimed themselves as the Crypty Kickers. (Don’t tell the kiddies, but your correspondent happened to recognize Tara’s talented daddy, Tommy Torrence, as the fiddle player.) The Piggy Park chefs departed from their usual fare and delighted the young guests with such Halloween-themed delicacies as “spaghetti and eyeballs,” and “Frankenweiners” franks and beans, “Ghoulish Green Punch,” and chocolate-covered “Black Cat Cupcakes.” At party’s end, Tara’s little guests were each given specially made pumpkin goodie bags full of take-home treats.
Conley read only a few more of Rowena’s columns before closing the volume. Oak Springs Farm, she’d learned, was in Bronson County. Bronson had been a mostly rural area in the Florida Panhandle when she was growing up, a place of quail-hunting plantations and cattle farms. She’d taken horseback riding lessons at a stable there as a preteen, in her horsey phase.
Earlier in the day, June Kelly had said Oak Springs might have been where Toddie Robinette and her children moved after her divorce from Symmes. Maybe, Conley thought, Toddie was still there.
And if she did still live there, would she have anything interesting to say about her recently deceased ex-husband? Would she have any light to shed on the circumstances surrounding Symmes’s death?
She stared up at the ceiling, pondering her next move.
G’mama’s breathing, from the bunk below, was steady and even, punctuated by muffled, snuffling snores. She felt her own breathing fall into rhythm with her grandmother’s. As a child, Conley loved slipping out of her own bed in the bunk room she shared with Grayson and tiptoeing upstairs, where she’d noiselessly slide under the covers, spooning up against G’mama. She’d loved the scent of her grandmother’s night cream, the feel of the pink satin pillowcase she always used to keep her hair from being mussed. Falling asleep with her grandmother’s breaths tickling the back of her neck, she’d felt safe, secure. Loved.