Chapter 9

That night a storm swept through the lowcountry.

Fortunately, it held off until after last call and the bar was locked up tight. Sharp blasts of lightning flashed through his attic window, followed almost instantly by deep bursts of thunder that echoed through palmettos trees and reverberated off the sand. The wind rattled the spinnaker roof, and torrents of water poured from the corners onto the composite decking.

Connor lay in the dark trying to tune out the tempest as it unleashed its fury. As often happened on such nights his mind carried him back to the desert, the unsettling blasts of RPGs and mortar shells recoiling off the inside of his skull, each sudden burst compounding the flashbacks of death and blood and loss. Despite the cool June evening, his skin erupted in a cold sweat that he carried into his dreams, in which he repeatedly experienced the worst possible destruction ever conceived by the human mind.

At some point Clooney let out a pitiful yelp from where he was lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. He, too, hated nights like this, for reasons and irrationalities that came from his own genetic memory. Connor jolted upright at the noise, then slipped out of bed, dragging the comforter with him. He spread it out on the cold floor, then lay down and curled up with him, wrapping his arms around the dog’s chest until they both stopped shaking.

Eventually the cacophony faded into the distance and the weather passed. Connor no longer was taking fire in the ruins of a pulverized marketplace, where he had just taken the life of a kid who, had he been born in Michigan instead of Kirkuk, might have been preparing to take a date to the senior prom. Same age, same wide-eyed look of innocence mixed with anger that these foreigners had invaded his country, leveled his neighborhood and maybe killed his family.

A little past six the phone rang, a sweet Jamaican drum riff he’d recorded back when he’d played congas in a reggae band just a few blocks from The Sandbar. Connor grabbed it from the nightstand, saw it was a local number he didn’t recognize. Almost didn’t answer, knowing that good news usually slept in, but he hit the “answer” button anyway.

“I owe you an apology,” a voice said into his ear.

It took him a moment to place it, as he sat down on the edge of the bed. Then he replied, “Good morning, Mrs. Ronson.”

“I’m sorry. Sorry for calling you so early, and for the terrible things I’m sure I said to you yesterday. That wasn’t me. I mean, it was, but I was just so…well, I hope you understand. My mind was just…well, it was all over the place, and I wasn’t myself. I’d just been to the morgue to identify Will’s body, and I needed to blame someone.”

“Forget it, Mrs. Ronson.” The first hint of dawn was just beginning to seep through the cracks in the plantation blinds, but the room was mostly dark. “You’d just lost your husband, and you were angry and scared.”

“Doesn’t make what I said to you right,” she said. “Look…I’m sure I woke you up just now, but I’ve been thinking about this for most of the night. I’d really like to make it up to you.”

Connor wondered if Donna Ronson had started in early, maybe a swig of the hair of whatever dog had bitten her. “That’s really not necessary,” he told her, closing his eyes, thinking maybe he’d be able to drift back to sleep as soon as this call ended.

“It is to me,” she pressed. “Like I said, I know it’s early, but I’m hoping I can buy you a cup of coffee. Not now, of course. Nothing’s open. But maybe later, when you have a chance to really wake up.”

He glanced at the watch on his wrist. Yep, it really was as early as the clock on the nightstand was telling him. “Thank you, Mrs. Ronson, but I really don’t think—”

“Please, Mr. Connor. You’re the only connection I have to my husband…late husband now, I guess. I treated you wrong yesterday, and it’s the least I can do. Especially considering how I lied to you.”

Those last few words grabbed his attention. Was the woman astute enough to know they would instantly suck him in, or was she misleading him now, just to get him to agree to meet?

“Lied about what?” he asked.

“Not on the phone,” she said. “Coffee?”

How could he say “no”?

Any chance of sleeping in was gone.

How had Mrs. Ronson lied? Overtly? Falsehood by omission? Little white lie or a major fabrication? Had it contributed to her husband’s death, or was it totally unrelated to his no-show in court? Or just a slick contrivance designed to get him to meet up with her.

Connor’s normal routine was to get in a three-mile run that would take him along the sand of Folly Beach, but not this morning. Not since the accident. He’d overdone it yesterday, too much time behind the wheel, ignoring the stabbing pain in his ribs and the throbbing in his ankle and his head. He’d removed the bandage from his hand last night after closing up the bar, found that several stitches had pulled out. He couldn’t find any antiseptic in his bathroom, so he soaked the wound in well gin from the bar before using strips of adhesive tape to pull the edges of the wound together. Then he’d rewrapped the whole thing with new, sterile gauze and hoped it wouldn’t become infected.

Despite the coffee Mrs. Ronson had promised him, he took Clooney for a walk down to Gilbert’s, a breakfast joint half a block up the street. Everything was wet from the soaker the night before, and there was a fresh crispness to the air that always seemed to follow the tail end of a spring storm. Both man and beast walked slowly, each for their own reasons, and when they finally returned home—coffee and a biscuit sandwich in one hand, leash in the other—Connor set out a bowl of kibble. Clooney downed it all with the trademark gusto of a chocolate lab, then gave a side-eye glance at whatever smelled so good in the grease-soaked bag from Gilbert’s.

Thirty minutes later Connor was riding the elevator up to the ICU at the Medical University downtown. A phone call on the drive up had told him nothing, and he was determined to find out how Cherine Dupree had fared overnight. He fidgeted in a chair out in the waiting room, leafing through well-thumbed magazines and checking news on his phone until a nurse pushed her way through the automated double doors. She was clutching a tablet device in her hand and seemed to be headed toward some other part of the floor. An appointment, maybe a meeting.

He jumped to his feet and said, “Excuse me, ma’am. I was hoping you could help me with something.”

She clearly was in a hurry, as if she had somewhere to be. “And what might that be?” she asked.

Connor tried to get a good look at her ID badge, but all he could make out was the name Brenda. “I’m hoping you could tell me about the condition of a patient in the ICU is doing,” he said.

“And who might you be?” she asked.

“Jack Connor. I’m not a family member, and I understand your privacy policies and HIPPA rules and all that. It’s just that no one would tell me over the phone—”

“You said Connor?” she interrupted him.

“That’s right. The patient’s name is Cherine Dupree, and we were both involved in a car accident. I just want to find out how she’s doing.”

The nurse named Brenda no longer seemed to be in such a hurry. In fact, Connor sensed a wave of relief wash across her face. “You’re the one who let her down from her belt,” she said. “She was asking about you.”

“She was?”

“In the middle of the night. I wasn’t on duty, and no one who was seemed to know where to find you.”

“That means she’s okay?” Connor asked.

“Well, ‘okay’ is hardly the word I’d use. I really can’t share any specifics about a patient’s health because…well, you know. But if you’re willing to wait a bit, I’m sure I can find someone who can bring you back to look in on her.”

Five minutes later Connor was peering through the same window into the same dark room as yesterday. Cherine hadn’t seemed to have moved an inch, nor had the wires and tubes leading in and out of her extremities. The thick glass prevented him from hearing the monitors, which he figured were positioned so no one on this side of it could read her vital signs.

“Any change in her condition?” he asked the nurse who had brought him into the ICU.

Her name was Luna, a few years older than Connor, and considerably more hair. Latina, eyes the color of coffee, full lips painted with gloss that matched. “No, sir. Not much. Except she’s woken up a time or two.”

“I take it that’s a good thing?”

“Very good.”

“I was told she asked about me?”

“Don’t get excited,” Luna replied with a grin. “She wasn’t trying to arrange a date.”

Connor felt his skin go warm, and he tried not to blush. “I was just hoping she might be awake so I could have a word.”

“Only medical personnel and family are allowed in at the moment. Sorry.”

“What are the doctors saying?”

“It’s day to day,” Luna said. “She’s lucky to be with us.”

Donna Ronson had suggested they meet at a local coffee joint on James Island. No franchise dark roast, no cup sizes with Italian names. It was just a couple miles across the Ashley River from the hospital, not too far from the house she had shared with her husband until he’d moved out. Connor wondered if that was what she had lied to him about, and he figured he was about to find out.

She was waiting in her car, a blue Chrysler van at least ten years old with a few chips and scrapes that cars and people both acquire with the march of time. A window placard for one of the popular ride-share companies indicated she augmented her seamstress salary as a parttime driver. Connor suspected she’d taken a day or two off from work in order to deal with her husband’s death, but bosses could be hard-edged about things that cut into company time.

Connor had met with her once before, their initial contact coming after Willis Ronson had skipped bail and he’d been trying to ascertain the man’s whereabouts. The spouse was always the first person of interest, whether it’s a murder case or a no-show, and Donna Ronson had done a good job convincing Connor that she was concerned about her husband’s disappearance. She also was pretty damned pissed that she’d been foolish enough to post his bond with her previously pawned ring, eight hundred from savings, and the balance on her Mastercard. Soon to be maxed out.

Connor found a shady place to park under a magnolia tree and got out. She appeared to recognize him—maybe it was the tattoos and shaved head—and met him halfway across the parking lot. She had a dark intensity in her eyes and, when she raised her hand in a half-hearted greeting, it seemed as if she might slap him in the face. But he was wrong about that, because she just flung her arms around him and gripped him tightly as she sobbed into his shoulder.

She held him that way longer than felt comfortable, then let go and faded back. “I…I am so, so sorry, Mr. Connor. I’m just…I am such a Goddamned mess. Excuse me. I just don’t know what’s come over me.”

He touched a hand to her shoulder, and she stopped. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Mrs. Ronson. This has to be a devastating time for you.”

Tears were trickling down both her cheeks, and she used a bare arm to try to rub them away. She was wearing a yellow blouse and pale blue jeans, no jewelry, no make-up. Dark shades. Still in shock and appearing to be at a complete loss as to what to do next.

“Please…call me Donna,” she sniffed.

“Only if you call me Jack.”

She nodded at that but said nothing as she dragged a tissue out of a small clutch purse. She dabbed her nose with it, then said, “Let’s get some coffee. Tea. Whatever you want.”

The coffee joint had four outdoor self-serve tables that were spaced far apart, as if they were left over from days of social distancing. Because it was past breakfast and not yet noon, all of them were vacant and clean.

“I’ll go inside and order, while you stake out a place out here,” Connor suggested.

“I look that bad?”

“Not at all,” he lied. “But it’s a beautiful morning and the sun might do you good.”

She nodded again and handed him a ten from her purse. “I invited you, so I’m paying,” she said. “No argument.”

Five minutes later Connor returned with a cloud caramel macchiato and cranberry scone for her, and a medium Somali roast and muffin for him. Donna Ronson had selected a round table in the shade of a large crepe myrtle that was just beginning to explode with crimson buds. A nearby planter was thick with sweet-smelling alyssum and gardenias, which had attracted some bees, and a pair of mourning doves pecked at the pavement for crumbs left over from the earlier crush of customers. He sat across from her as she arranged her food and drink, then rearranged it again, as if not knowing how to begin, or what to say.

“Looks like you injured your hand,” she finally observed. Awkward and stiff, saying anything just to say something.

“Bullet grazed me in the accident,” he replied. “Nothing serious.”

“You were lucky.”

The implied message was that Will Ronson had not been lucky, and there was no turning back the clock. No alternate reality, no do-overs. Not for him, not for his widow. She was clearly in shock, telling herself over and over that she was going to wake up from this horrible dream and everything would soon return to normal. Whatever that was. Meanwhile, the sub-atomic collision of grief and anger was probably releasing highly charged particles of pent-up confusion.

“That was Will’s problem,” she went on. “Luck, I mean. Everything that man touched seemed to go to shit.”

Connor eyed his muffin, left it on the paper plate where it was. “He met you, didn’t he?” he reminded her.

His words brought a smile to her face, if only for a second. “He always said that the day he met me was the brightest spot in his entire life,” she told him. “Thing is, the next morning it snapped shut again when he was riding his Harley too fast around a turn and hit a raccoon. Totaled his bike, put him in the hospital for nearly a week.”

Connor nodded, thought back to what Burdette had told him yesterday about the truck that had tailed him out to the motel in Andrews. Not to mention the person who had tossed the room after he’d driven off with Ronson cuffed to the headrest in front of him.

He took a sip of coffee and said, “We were followed.”

“That’s what the cop told me,” she replied. “The one from SLED. Said a truck probably tailed you from that motel, and someone started shooting.”

“Right,” Connor agreed. “But what I mean is, we were followed out there to the motel. That means someone was watching me before I got there, knew I was going to pick up your husband. And I led them right to him.”

Donna Ronson glanced down at the scone sitting on a napkin in front of her. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Whatever I said yesterday, it’s not your fault. What happened to Will, I mean.”

“Water under the bridge,” he insisted. “But when you called me earlier, you said you lied about something?”

“Well, more like I wasn’t totally up-front about everything, the first time we talked.”

He took a sip of his coffee and let her words hang there. Meeting here was her idea, her show.

“The night he moved out, we had a big fight,” she finally said.

Connor remembered those well. His own marriage, years ago to his local sweetheart, had ended almost before it had a chance to begin. All because of the arrogance of youth, and the unwillingness to compromise. Along with all the empty screaming and closed minds that prevented any sort of concession or understanding.

“It happens,” he replied.

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t our first one,” Mrs. Ronson went on. “Plenty of others, in fact, usually on account of his drinking, Or gambling, although he wasn’t into that too much anymore, except for scratch-offs. Shit, did that man ever spend a ton on those fuckers. Anyway, the night he left, it was because I found out he’d been…well, reconnecting with someone from his past.”

“By reconnecting, I assume you mean a woman?”

“Yes, a woman.” She picked up her coffee drink but just stared at it, then set both elbows on the table and looked at him through her sunglasses. “Bastard was cheating on me.”

This was the last thing Connor expected her to be telling him. He had no idea what issues might have plagued their marriage, or why she was so certain—confident—she was right. Or why she felt it was any business of his.

Which was what he tried to tell her, as delicately as he could. “A grieving mind can play all sorts of tricks on you,” he said.

“Just hear me out,” she replied, her voice trembling. She had placed her clutch purse on the chair to her left, and now she opened it and removed two sheets of paper that were stapled together and folded, then folded again. Connor could see it was a print-out of some sort, but didn’t want to appear too inquisitive. “This is a record of his phone calls. I don’t think he knew I was smart enough to figure out how to get them.”

“When did you get this?” Connor asked her.

“The night he left. We never had a computer—no need—so I used my neighbor’s Mac. Figured out how to pull up our Verizon account and damn, there it was.”

“And you didn’t think this was important to mention when I was looking for him?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, about not being totally honest. If I’d said something, Will might still be alive.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You can’t torture yourself over what-ifs.”

“Easy for you to say.” She wiped the back of her hand across her nose, said, “Anyway, this print-out shows every phone call from the last month, right up to that final night. See that one, right there?”

She pointed at the last conversation on the print-out, which she had circled in red. The call had come in a few minutes past seven on a Friday morning from an area code Connor didn’t recognize, and lasted about four minutes.

“It was an incoming call, and you can see there were nine others from the same number over those last two weeks.”

“All incoming?”

“No, Will made three of them. See?” She pointed to all the other calls, highlighted in yellow.

“Any idea who he was talking to?” he asked her.

Mrs. Ronson wrinkled her nose as if the wind had suddenly brought a foul odor her way. “Oh, yeah. I know her. Never met the sleaze, but her name is Liz Morgan.” She pronounced it as if it were a highly contagious disease.

“And your husband had a history with this Morgan woman?” Connor asked.

“That’s a polite word for it,” she said. “But yeah, they met when he was in prison the first time, up in Bennettsville. She wrote to him, some sort of sicko inmate pen pal thing, and then when he got out, they carried on for a while. He called it quits when he moved to Florence, about the same time we hooked up. Or at least that’s what he told me.”

“How do you know it’s her number?”

“Because I fucking called it.” She must have realized she was getting overly heated about the whole thing, because she made a motion to zip her lips. “Sorry. It just goes up my ass sideways, just thinking about that whore.”

“She told you her name?”

“I got her voicemail. ‘Hello, you’ve reached Liz Morgan. You know what to do.’” Putting a nasal inflection to her voice. “Yeah, I knew what to do, all right.”

This was getting way too deep into Ronson marriage dynamics than Connor wanted to go, or needed to know. “Why do you think she had something to do with your late husband’s disappearance?” he asked.

“You didn’t know Will,” she said as she finally took a big bite of her scone. “Thing is, Mr. Connor…Jack…I think that slut was trying to wriggle her way back into his life, and she’s the one wound up getting him killed.”

“If p does not necessarily mean q,” Connor said, reciting one of the few things he remembered from high school back in Lansing.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Cause and effect,” he tried to explain. “One suspicious phone call does not make her a killer. Not even nine of them.”

She shook her head rapidly and said, “You don’t understand. If that woman told my husband to jump, he’d ask her which bridge. I’m telling you, she got him killed.”

“Do you have any proof?”

“I don’t need proof…I have this.” She tapped a finger to the side of her head, which Connor didn’t take as much reassurance. “Look…I probably shouldn’t have called you, if you’re not interested in getting to the bottom of this.”

Getting to the bottom of this was Burdette’s job, and Connor had already overstepped that boundary by a mile. “Have you told the detective from SLED about any of this?” he asked.

“That douchebag doesn’t listen,” she snapped. By the way her voice was getting all brusque and huffy, Connor figured she probably thought he was a douchebag, too. “He’s rude and offensive, just like all cops.”

“Do you have any idea where this Liz Morgan might be?”

“No, I don’t, and I damned sure don’t care. But whatever she’s up to, I hope she gets what she has coming to her.”

Whoever wrote hell hath no fury like a woman scorned was a master of understatement. Connor intuitively knew he was making a mistake, but something Donna Ronson had said about Liz Morgan struck a distant chord, one that was off-key and too dissonant to decipher at the moment. He suspected that would come later, when he was lying in bed late at night with the anxieties of the entire world boiling in his mind.

“How ‘bout you text me her number, and I’ll see what I can find?” he suggested.