Claudia and I had intended to go to the 7:30 A.M. meeting downtown, but in the morning we found Nadine ravaged. I never locked Nadine because her doors couldn’t be unlocked without a call to AAA, but I did raise the top and cover her every night, and Dockside was surrounded by an eight-foot wall. Also, she was parked within sight of the guardhouse.
Her beige canvas cover lay on the ground and her white top and leather seats had been slashed. She smelled strongly of urine.
“It must have been a crowd,” Claudia said, writing in her notebook. “How could they have gotten in here? The guard checked my pass when I came in.”
“Good question. And how do we know it wasn’t somebody who lives in the building? Some of those blue-haired United Daughters of the Confederacy?”
“Well, if it was those ladies, wouldn’t they have brought their kitty litter along? Then they could have put cat shit in here too.”
Over her shoulder I could see an elderly black guard meandering toward us. “Oh, oh, oh,” he said, rubbing his smooth hands together. “How did this happen? Oh, my stars.”
“This is my friend Claudia, Mr. Saunders. We seem to be having a little trouble, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to involve the police. Could you please call them for me?”
“I come on duty at seven this morning, Miss Burns, and I don’t see nothing amiss. Course I ain’t done all my rounds yet. And I never study with them reporters, I just do like Miss Estelle say.”
“Thank you, and I’m sorry to be making trouble for you.”
“Somebody else make this trouble, Miss Burns.”
It took over an hour for a young policeman to arrive, take a report, and photograph the car, so we missed the morning meeting. “I don’t suppose you’re going to dust it for fingerprints?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “We don’t do that for vandalism, but you will need to contact your insurance company.”
“Let’s just take my car,” Claudia said.
“No, we’d best take the one with the Confederate sticker on it.”
My mother’s vehicle remained undamaged inside the underground garage. Her HERITAGE, NOT HATE bumper sticker was proving to be a piece of luck. But the attack on Nadine meant that it was possible that even my mother’s car wasn’t a safe choice at the moment.
Claudia’s white Ford sedan had Georgia plates, and I didn’t think it could be connected to me yet. I got into the passenger seat, and we drove through the gate.
“Don’t you have your own place out at the Isle of Palms?”
“How exactly would you know that?”
“The point is, if I can find that out, won’t other people know it too? It’s not like you’ve been living in secret in Charleston.”
“Okay, we’d better ride out there. No. Let’s go to Beecher’s first. Jimmy’s going to be so pissed off. No, let’s go to the drive-through window at Hardee’s and get some sausage biscuits.”
We sat in the Hardee’s parking lot drinking coffee while Claudia took her sandwich apart, inspecting it. “What is distinguished about this sandwich? A fried egg, American cheese, and a mysterious piece of flesh.”
“The biscuit. This is part of your Southern education. You get real biscuits like these out West?”
“Yes, Ellen, we have real biscuits in New Mexico. Very good ones, in fact.”
“Well, they don’t have them up North. They don’t even have Hardee’s. I thought you’d be impressed.”
“Listen,” she said, “you’re sounding pretty rattled. Not that I blame you.” When I didn’t reply, she took a bite of her sandwich. “Okay, this is gross.”
“Saturated fat,” I said. “Might even be lard. Biscuits don’t taste this good unless they’re made with lard.”
“All of the Nogalu bread is made with lard. Did you see those big red clay ovens in a lot of the yards at the reservation? Loretta had one, but Ruby didn’t.”
Ruby and Lightman’s mobile home had rested on cinderblocks, and its metal exterior was painted a reddish color to make it blend in with the red dirt and houses of the reservation. Some dwellings in the village were made of dark mud brick, but many were simply painted trailers. Nothing distinguished Ruby’s dwelling, other than the crime scene tape.
The funeral parlor looked placid in the early morning heat. It had been built of red brick in the 1950s. Pious and smug. Morticians are required to be serene and sycophantic—an angry mortician is a contradiction—so maybe I did not seem aggrieved enough this morning. I had taken off my zinc oxide war paint and was wearing white jeans and a white shirt.
Jimmy said the plaques had been done overnight by special order and they would arrive in time for the burial tomorrow, but he was wringing his hands while he spoke. “I don’t understand why you ordered a plaque that says Tomb of the Unknown Racist. Do you really think that might not be Royce’s remains? I think that might have legal implications.”
“It’ll all be okay, Jimmy, I promise.”
“No, it won’t, Ellen. We had a bomb threat during the night, and the building had to be swept for explosives. My father built this building. We can’t have this kind of thing happening here. Visiting hours will have to be canceled.”
“Why wasn’t I called about a bomb threat? Why wasn’t it in the news this morning?”
“I think there’s some kind of agreement about not inflaming the situation you’re creating. It’s not fair for you to use my father’s funeral home to try to stir up racial trouble. Your niece isn’t the only decedent at Beecher’s.”
“So, did you have to evacuate the corpses?”
He looked dismayed. “What an ugly question. No, it wasn’t necessary. Could I please ask you to cancel the visiting hours?”
“Yes, of course. Certainly. We’ll just have to cancel.”
“Thank you.”
“Is Lucia ready for viewing? I mean privately. Just by me. And Claudia here.”
He led us down the hall to a closed double door and followed us in.