“Okay,” Grayson said, emerging barefoot from her office. “I just hit the Send button on issue 2 of The Silver Bay Beacon digital edition.”
“Yay.” Conley was slumped down in her chair. She looked around the office. Michael had clocked out an hour earlier at Grayson’s insistence, and Lillian was long gone. Now it was just the Hawkins sisters, in a room littered with grease-stained pizza boxes, empty Diet Coke and Red Bull cans, and trash bins overflowing with multiple discarded drafts of stories prominently featured in the digital edition of The Silver Bay Beacon.
Conley felt as grimy as the office. She wanted to go home, take a bath, walk on the beach, drink an entire bottle of wine, and then sleep for a week. But all of that would have to wait. She stood up, yawned, and stretched.
Grayson slung an arm around her sister’s shoulder. “We should do a victory dance, don’t you think?”
“Too tired,” Conley said. “But we did good tonight, right?”
“We did awesome. All of us. Even Rowena, in her own way, bless her heart.” Grayson squeezed Conley’s shoulder. “I’m so proud of you, Conley. I know I never tell you that, but I really am.”
“Thanks,” Conley said. “I’m pretty proud of what we achieved together these past few days.”
“Okay, then get out of here. Go home and get some sleep.”
“And what about you? You can’t keep sleeping on that ratty sofa. And you can’t keep on living here in the office, Gray. It’s not healthy. I’m not driving all the way out to the beach tonight. I’m too tired. I’ll stay over at Felicity Street. I can use the Wi-Fi there to finish my freelance piece and sleep in my old room. At least come over there with me tonight. Okay?”
“Maybe I will.”
The response surprised Conley. “For real? I was sure you’d tell me to shut up and mind my own business.”
“I’ll be over after a while. It’s only nine out on the coast. I want to call Tony.”
“That’s great. What will you tell him?”
“That the grass needs cutting. And my back needs scratching. And that I want us to take another shot at making this marriage work and maybe even have a baby.”
Conley raised an eyebrow. “All that plus cutting the grass? That’s a lot to ask, Gray.”
“I know. I miss the guy, And even if you don’t stay here at the Beacon, I know now that we can make it work, somehow. I got a good piece of advice recently, about asking for help when you need it. And accepting that help, with grace. I’m gonna work on that.”
Conley hugged her sister. “That sounds like a great plan. Guess you really are the smarter sister. Okay, I’ll head over to G’mama’s now. I have absolutely got to have a shower.”
Conley called her grandmother from the car and left a message on her voice mail, knowing Lorraine probably would have left her cell phone plugged in on the kitchen counter.
“Hi, G’mama. Sorry to call so late, but we finished putting out the special edition, so I’m going to spend the night at Felicity Street and try to get some work done. I’ll see you in the morning.”
The air inside the house was stale and overly warm. Conley felt only slightly guilty about turning the thermostat down before trudging upstairs to her old bedroom. After digging around in the closet and dresser, she found a pair of hot-pink gym shorts, an oversize Silver Bay Beach Club T-shirt, and some panties whose elastic had given up the ghost sometime earlier in the decade.
She stayed in the shower until every inch of her flesh was scrubbed and scoured and shriveled and pink, then toweled off and slathered herself with lotion before dressing.
Winnie had done a depressingly thorough job of cleaning out the fridge and pantry before decamping for the beach, but Conley rummaged around the kitchen and the dining room sideboard until she found an overlooked box of saltines and a bottle of Wild Turkey with a Christmas gift tag addressed to her grandfather still attached to a red ribbon around the bottle’s neck.
She dropped four ice cubes in one of G’mama’s cut glass old-fashioned tumblers and poured two fingers of bourbon over the ice. Sipping her drink, she made her way to the dining room, where she’d dropped her backpack.
Her cell phone rang, and she reached for it but didn’t answer when she saw the words UNKNOWN CALLER on the phone screen.
Conley opened the waxed paper sleeve of crackers and dipped one in the bourbon. It tasted surprisingly good, but the trick was to remove the cracker from the liquid before it disintegrated in the bourbon.
She was munching on her second cracker and thinking about how to take the Beacon story she’d written earlier and recast it for the AJC when her phone rang again. She shook her head and opened her laptop.
The third call from an unknown caller came less than a minute later. It was nearly 1:00 a.m. Annoyed, she stood up and went to the living room window, peering out at the driveway. Where was Grayson? Conley wasn’t afraid of being alone in the house, but she was irritated that her sister was apparently choosing to sleep on the sofa in the office for another night, and annoyed at the string of nuisance calls.
Still, she walked around the house, double-checking that all the doors were locked. Then she picked up her phone and dialed the Silver Bay Police Department nonemergency number. Instructed to leave a recorded message to be answered during office hours, she did so.
“Hi. This is Conley Hawkins. I’m staying with my grandmother, Lorraine DuBignon Conley, at 38 Felicity Street, and I want to report that I’ve been getting harassing and threatening anonymous phone calls. The calls could be coming from a disgruntled reader, since I’m a reporter at The Silver Bay Beacon. Just now, there were three from an unknown caller in the space of five minutes. Please have a detective call me at this number as soon as possible.”
A vintage white Corvette with Working Press tags was never meant for covert ops, Buddy realized, as he crept along behind the black pickup. Luckily, the truck’s driver seemed oblivious to the fact that he was being tailed. The truck had parked, briefly, on Felicity Street, just down the block from the house where Conley Hawkins had parked her Subaru. Buddy breathed a sigh of relief when, about five minutes later, the truck pulled away from the curb. Just in case, he continued trailing the truck. The driver made two stops, one at a drive-through ATM downtown, and a second at the Toot ’n’ Tote convenience store.
Buddy had parked the Vette on the other side of the gas pumps in order to stay out of his quarry’s sight. He shifted uncomfortably in the cracked red leather seat. He needed to take a leak, but he didn’t want to risk entering the store. In the end, he jumped out, sprinted over to a dumpster, and relieved himself.
He’d just slid back into the seat when the truck’s driver emerged from the convenience store. He was drinking a forty-ounce bottle of beer and held a paper sack with his free hand.
The driver was a bulked-up white dude, dressed, like Buddy, in all black—black tactical pants, motorcycle boots, and a black T-shirt whose fabric strained over the guy’s outsize biceps. Unlike Buddy’s shirt, the front and back of the truck driver’s shirt had SWAT printed in bold, four-inch-high yellow letters.
“Shit,” Buddy whispered. It was the cop, the same one he’d seen at Waffle House. He wasn’t a local cop, because Buddy made it his business to know every cop who worked for either the city or Griffin County.
And now the truck was on the move again. Buddy waited until the cop pulled onto the road and followed, hoping his past-midnight vigil would come to an end soon. He needed to get back to the apartment, pick up Hi-Fi and his stuff, and hit the road. With any luck, he’d be rolling into Daytona Beach by sunrise. He’d find a cheap motel room, get some sleep, and, in the morning, start looking around for a new gig.
Shortly before two, Conley dragged herself—and her laptop—to bed. She’d rewritten her piece for the Atlanta paper, focusing more on the national angle and the bizarre ongoing Robinette family feud, and throwing in, for good measure, some of the backstory on Symmes Robinette’s role in defending the railroad against cancer claims in Plattesville.
Once this funeral story died down, she vowed to take a trip over to Plattesville and then to the county courthouse to dig into whatever records she could find about the lawsuits arising from the chemical waste dump there.
She couldn’t resist checking the Beacon’s Facebook page. Michael had posted links to the digital edition, as well as some of the video footage he’d shot outside the church. It had only been a few hours, but the story had already gotten nearly 800 views, 120 likes, and 40 comments. Tomorrow, she thought, she’d read the comments.
Her eyelids felt like concrete blocks. She set the laptop on the nightstand and turned off the lamp.
Sleep came immediately. When her phone rang sometime later, she fumbled for it in the dark and groggily answered without checking the caller ID.
“Hello?”
No answer. Just heavy breathing. And then that voice again. “You’re dead, bitch.”
Her scalp prickled, and her pulse quickened. She sat up in bed and looked wildly around the room.
For what? Conley thought. This anonymous caller was obviously trolling her, hoping to get a reaction out of her. And it was working. Because she was scared.
This time, she dialed 911 and got another recording. “You’ve reached the Silver Bay Sheriff’s Office. If this is a nonemergency, please hang up and call back during office hours. If you do have an emergency to report, stay on the line, and a dispatcher will be with you momentarily.”
“Shit,” Buddy whispered when he realized the cop was headed back toward Felicity Street. This was not good. As the truck approached the house with the Subaru in the driveway, the driver cut the headlights. He drove slowly past the house. The front porch lantern was lit, but no other lights burned from inside the house.
Buddy cut the Vette’s headlights and pulled into the driveway of a cottage with a FOR SALE sign in the driveway. Unlike the other homes on the block, this one had no outside lights. The lawn and shrubbery were overgrown, and a handful of yellowing newspapers still encased in plastic bags poked out from a rusted mailbox.
“Now what?” he wondered aloud. The truck hadn’t stopped at the reporter’s house and hadn’t circled back. So where was it? And what should he do now?
“Nine-one-one,” the female dispatcher said. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
Conley hesitated. “I’m alone, at my grandmother’s house, and I’ve been receiving harassing, anonymous phone calls all evening. Just now, a man called and said, ‘You’re dead, bitch.’ And then he hung up.”
“Address and name?”
“Conley Hawkins, 38 Felicity Street. In Silver Bay. I called earlier and left a message on the nonemergency line, asking that a detective call me, but this feels different.”
“Do you feel threatened?”
“I do,” Conley said, her voice tightening.
“And you don’t know the caller’s identity?”
“No.”
“Okay, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “I’m going to send a patrol unit over there, just to check things out.”
“Thank you,” Conley said fervently. “Thanks so much. I feel kind of silly.”
“You’re not being silly. You’re being cautious,” the dispatcher said. “What’s your name again?”
“Conley Hawkins.”
“Well, Conley Hawkins, you sound like you might be the age of my daughter, so I’ll tell you what I always tell her. Stay inside. Don’t open the door to anybody unless it’s an officer. And you call me right back if you need me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Conley said meekly, blinking back tears. “I will.”
She sat very still, crouched in the dark, in the middle of her childhood bed for a minute or two, feeling vulnerable, even cornered, two emotions she despised with all her heart.
“Fuck this,” she said finally. “This asshole doesn’t get to do this to me.” She shoved her feet into a pair of flip-flops. She glanced out the bedroom window. The street below was deserted. She turned on the overhead light, then went out into the hallway. Moving rapidly, she opened every door on the second floor, flipping on lights as she went.
When she came to the last door, she stopped and leaned her forehead against the white-painted doorjamb. She hadn’t been in this room in years. Six years, to be precise.
It had been a warm summer night like this one. G’mama and Winnie were already out at the beach. Grayson and Tony were newly married and living in Tampa. She’d come home to Silver Bay because she was worried about her father. He hadn’t been answering her phone calls, and he’d lost a lot of weight, according to her grandmother.
“I don’t think things are going well at work. That big bank from Charlotte swallowed them up, and now they keep sending consultants down here, telling Chet how to run a bank he’s been running all his grown life,” G’mama said. “He hardly eats, and I know he’s not sleeping, because I see lights from under his door at all hours of the night.”
She’d timed the surprise visit for Father’s Day, taking extra care picking out his gifts—a biography of Franklin Roosevelt that he’d mentioned wanting to read, a box of his favorite chocolate-covered cherries, and, as an inside joke, the most hideous necktie she could find, a puke-green satin number with a repeating pattern of purple armadillos.
That Saturday, she’d parked behind her father’s Chevy and used her key to unlock the front door. The house was unusually quiet—no radio playing in the kitchen or television playing in the den. She walked through the downstairs rooms, calling for her father.
“Dad? Daddy?” He wasn’t in the backyard either. She climbed the stairs, wondering if he was napping, which would have been totally out of character for her father, who claimed he was unable to sleep during daylight hours.
She stood outside his bedroom door. For it was his now. Some of Melinda’s clothes still hung in the closet, and the room still held the king-size bed they’d shared, but everybody knew Mrs. Chet Hawkins was not coming home again.
“Dad?” she called, tapping on the door. “Are you asleep?” When there was still no answer, she’d turned the knob. He was stretched out on the bed, his face turned away, toward the window, the empty bottle of pills still clutched in his now cold, stiffened fingers.
Conley clenched her teeth together, opened the bedroom door, glanced around, and flipped the light switch. The room was empty except for some boxed-up books and old bank files.
She closed the door again and ran downstairs, moving through the rooms, switching on lights. In the den, she turned the television on, comforted by the high volume. She went into the kitchen and rechecked the back door.
Her phone was tucked into the pocket of her shorts.
It had been ten minutes since she’d called 911. Plenty of time for a police cruiser to be dispatched from anywhere in the city. What was taking so long? She could feel the tension ratcheting up.
This was stupid, she decided. Skelly was two doors away. Yes, it was a ridiculous time to call somebody, but Skelly cared about her. If she called, he would come, and it wouldn’t matter what time it was.
She scrolled through her contacts until she came to the Ks.
When the doorbell rang, it startled her so badly she dropped the phone. She ran toward the door, peeped out the window, and saw the cop. He wore wraparound aviator sunglasses, and a baseball cap shaded his face. He was holding a leather badge holder in front of the window.
Relief swept through her body, and her hands shook as she began to unbolt the door. As soon as the tumblers on the lock clicked, the door slammed violently open. Her mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out.