Chapter 32

Ginger

 

 

1988

 

 

Night crept in a little earlier these November days in Bloodson Bay Beach. Standing at the kitchen window, I washed my brand-new CorningWare casserole dish from Woolworth, admiring the dainty blue cornflower logo, and smiling at what my mama always said: “a Southern household is not a home without at least one CorningWare dish.” An icy wind came howling in over the ocean, rattling the naked crepe myrtle trees. Jack Frost had painted an icy mosaic like thousands of leafy fronds on my Gremlin’s windshield; I didn’t look forward to scraping it in the morning before I headed off to work.

Benny had fallen asleep watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit for our Friday night movie together, his face smeared with Sno-caps chocolate that I had picked up at the new Blockbuster that had come to our town.

Glancing at the window, my reflection gazed back at me. For a moment I thought I saw Cole before I realized it was only my dormant longing for his return playing a trick on me. The police had officially told me he was no longer considered a missing person and had closed the case on the assumption that he had drowned. While Cole may not have been considered missing, I missed him day in and day out. My son still haunted my dreams and tortured my memories. I held the gaze in the window a moment longer, imagining my son out there fondly remembering his mother. Then suddenly the face in my reflection shifted; my heart raced as I stepped back, startled. A moment later, I heard a crack and felt the spray of glass as the window leapt out at me, wrapping me in a cape of shards.

I screamed and fell to the floor, covering my head with my arms.

“Mommy!” Benny shrieked.

Broken glass was scattered across the linoleum. My beautiful CorningWare dish splintered in half.

“Benny, stop! Don’t come in here!”

“Mommy, what was that?”

I slowly rose up, wondering the exact same thing. Beside me on the floor was a brick. I had heard on the news about kids bricking cars as pranks, but this felt so much more personal. I wasn’t a random car on the street. Someone had targeted my home. Where I lived. Where my little boy lived!

After shaking the glass debris off of my New Kids on the Block “Hangin’ Tough” sweatshirt, I told Benny to go play in his bedroom while I cleaned up. Once I heard his door click shut, I threw on a coat, grabbed my forbidden revolver, and headed out the kitchen door to the back porch, where I kept an outside light burning for security. As I scanned the yard, something scuttled out from behind my trash cans, scaring the living daylights out of me. I squeezed the trigger once, twice, three times—no blast, no recoil, nothing. It was only when I saw the possum boogieing through my euonymus hedge that I remembered I’d removed all the bullets after Benny, having watched way too many TV cop shows, started showing alarming curiosity in guns—mine in particular. I wasn’t about to lose my son due to my own carelessness.

I was feeling rather foolish about nearly perforating a possum when the next-door neighbor’s porch light flicked on and Mrs. Jenson wobbled outside wearing, as usual, a ratty housecoat and huge pink plastic curlers in her battleship gray mop. No one knew her actual age, but a cruelly funny local joke said the Jensons were one of Bloodson Bay’s founding families back in 1817…when Mrs. Jenson was a baby.

“Everything okay over there? I thought I heard a ruckus.”

It was a wonder she could hear anything over the volume of her television. The whole town could hear Alex Trebek when Mrs. Jenson sat down to watch Jeopardy each night.

I walked along the chain-link fence that separated our yards, rounding the edge of it until I came to her gate. It hung partly open.

“Did you see anyone run through here?” I asked.

“No, why?”

“Someone just threw a brick through my window!”

Mrs. Jenson waved me over with a tremoring hand. “Oh honey, did you get hurt?”

“No, but my checkbook did. I can’t afford to keep replacing stuff.”

She tsked several times. “It’s getting more dangerous by the day here. Ginger, you’re a young single mom with a little boy. You can’t risk staying here. Leave like the rest of us, while you can still make a profit on your house.”

“But my family built this house. It’s all I have left.”

“Honey, trust me when I tell you it’s not worth it.”

First the foiled robbery, now vandalism…what the heck was happening to our quaint little beach town?

“So you sold out too?”

She humphed, then said, “I can’t afford to live here anymore with the insurance rates going through the roof. And that investment guy, Corbin Roth, offered me a great price on the property. He even sold me a cute little house in his new development for a good deal. At some point you’ve got to let go of sentimentality and think practically.” She patted my hand. “Wait here one minute. Let me get you something.”

Mrs. Jenson wobbled back inside and returned a minute later carrying a paper flapping in the breeze. She handed it to me—and instantly I felt sick.

Smiling from the page was a black-haired man. Slight build. Beady untrustworthy eyes just like the man who had tried to rob me. And just like the man following me on the beach the night Cole disappeared. Across the top of the ad was this come-on:

 

Corbin Roth Investment Properties: We buy homes you can’t sell, and we sell homes you’ll love to buy!

Suddenly it dawned on me. It all made sense. He bought homes we couldn’t sell once the area became too undesirable to live in. The stalking on the beach, the attempted robbery, the brick through my window…the crime wave sweeping our streets. He was trying to scare us out of our homes so that he could swoop in and lowball us on the price so that he could build his condominium eyesores.

A broken kitchen window wasn’t going to scare me out of my house, but it was going to set me back financially. I was angry and tired of playing catch-up with all of my bills. I had already canceled my cable, and with Benny’s birthday coming up, I had promised him tickets to see Disney on Ice, which I wouldn’t be able to afford after replacing this window.

So it had all come down to this sorry state of affairs. Corbin Roth was going to win. He was going to take my home, take my life, because people like him always won. And people like me lost everything.

I made sure to close Mrs. Jenson’s gate as I left, feeling more dejected than ever. Benny met me at the top of the porch stairs, then placed his tiny hand in mine.

“Are you okay, Mommy?”

“No, honey. There’s a big, bad man named Corbin Roth trying to hurt us, so we’ve got to figure out a way to hurt him back before he steals our home.”

“He’s gonna steal our home?” Benny asked, his articulation near perfect. I was so proud of him after all our speech work together.

“He’s trying to, sweetie. And I’m not sure I can stop him.”

Benny held out his pinkie, hooking it around mine. “I pinkie swear to stop him, Mommy. I won’t let him hurt us anymore.”

Our pinkies locked, and I wished it was a promise my little superhero could keep.

“I know you won’t, bud.”

Little did I know back then that it was a pact Benny would take with him to the grave.