Christmas Bliss (16 page)

She was rattling off a list of potential shows, but I’d been looking out the window while we chatted, on the lookout for Harry’s truck. Now a car with blue flashing lights was pulling into the Breeze parking lot.

I got out of bed and stared out the window. Our visitor was a Tybee police car. And there, silhouetted in the front seat, was a familiar-looking wayward black-and-white dog.

“Jethro!” The words were out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying.

“What? What’s he done now?” Weezie asked.

“Not a thing,” I said with a grateful sigh. “He’s just a very good dog, that’s all.”

Chapter 18

BeBe

James Foley was not a happy camper. We were in his car, in a convenience store parking lot opposite the long unpaved drive that led to Oak Point. I was wearing a big floppy hat and using Harry’s binoculars to watch for Cindy Hodges’s van; he was fidgeting and using his smart phone to look up sentencing guidelines for breaking and entering.

“Do you see this?” he demanded, brandishing his phone. “We could get eighteen months to five years! And that’s assuming we get a friendly judge.”

“Relax. We’re not really going to break in. I was just here yesterday. That house is so old and rickety, we can probably just pull back a board and crawl inside.”

“I should never have let you and Weezie talk me into this. I’m an officer of the court! I could get disbarred as well as imprisoned.”

“You didn’t have to come,” I pointed out.

“Weezie would never let me hear the end of it if I’d let you do this alone. What if something happened? What if somebody caught you breaking in, or God forbid, you went into labor?”

“For Pete’s sake! Why does everybody keep expecting me to go into labor? The baby is weeks away. And nobody is going to catch us.”

“John will never speak to me again if we get caught. What if somebody in the DA’s office finds out you roped me into this caper of yours? It could ruin his career. And I hate lying to him. He thinks I’m playing bridge tonight. What about you? Where did you tell Harry you were going?”

I sighed. I’d hated lying to my partner as much as James hated lying to his. “Harry thinks I went to do some last-minute Christmas shopping.”

James shook his head and tsk-tsked some more. Just then, the mini-van pulled onto the road opposite us. I raised the binoculars and liked what I saw.

“See there? That’s Cindy driving, and that’s Richard’s aunt Opal sitting in the front seat right beside her. Aunt Opal is hard-shell Baptist, and they’re going to Wednesday-night prayer service. They won’t be back for at least an hour or more.”

James started the car but he didn’t stop fussing. “What if they’re skipping church? What if they’re just running out to get a carton of milk?”

“Cindy wouldn’t go to the trouble of loading Opal and her walker into that van just for a trip to the store. They’re going to church. Now, can we pleeeease get moving? I hate to mention it, but I need to use the bathroom again.”

I glanced over and saw his ears had turned crimson.

*   *   *

“Kill the headlights,” I said as we rolled up to the house.

“I thought you said the coast was clear,” James said.

“It is. But there’s no reason to take chances.”

He switched off the headlights.

“Park with the car facing out toward the road. Just in case we have to make a fast getaway,” I said.

“Dear Lord!”

I traded the floppy hat for a black knit ski cap and handed him a matching model.

We got out of the car, and it struck me what a very odd-looking couple we made. James Foley was dressed in baggy black faded slacks and a long-sleeved black shirt that looked like relics from his priest days. His thinning silver hair glowed in the moonlight. I’d tucked my hair up under the cap, but there was no way I could tuck away the baby. I wore black maternity leggings, one of Harry’s oversized navy blue sweatshirts, and a pair of black flats. I carried a flashlight. James carried a lifetime of Catholic guilt.

“Look,” he whispered, pointing to a dilapidated shed on the east side of the house. “There’s a car under there! Somebody’s home. Let’s get out of here.”

“Shh.” I walked as quickly as I could toward the shed, with James a couple of steps behind. The car was an old beat-up blue Honda Accord. I played my flashlight over it. The hood and trunk were covered with dust, spiderwebs, and pine needles.

“It’s a junker,” I said. “Probably been here for years and years. Come on, let’s go take a look at the house.” I had a dim memory of a wide back porch that ran the width of the old farmhouse, with a glass-paneled door leading into the kitchen.

“This way,” I said. We made a wide berth around the front porch and picked our way through overgrown shrubs and foot-high weeds. Each time a twig snapped underfoot, James froze.

“Relax,” I muttered.

The undergrowth was so dense here, I felt sure nobody could spot us even if they’d been looking. I switched on my flashlight and we followed a faint footpath that had been beaten through the brush.

In a few minutes, the back of the farmhouse loomed before us. If the front of the house looked bedraggled, the back looked worse—forlorn, even abandoned. As I played the light over it, it appeared that the roof had caved in on an ell that curved out from the porch—a room I remembered had once been Richard’s grandmother’s laundry room. Most of the paint on the house was long gone, and the brick steps leading up to the porch were broken and crumbling. But the kitchen door was right where it should have been.

“Come on.” I gestured toward the porch. As we got closer, I could see that it was in bad shape too. The floorboards were warped and rotten—a large sheet of plywood had been clumsily placed atop what must have been a particularly questionable spot on the floor.

I started toward the steps, but James grabbed my arm. “Let me go first. If one of those boards gives way beneath you…”

Was he making a crack about my weight? I didn’t care. It was a sweet gesture, and I wasn’t exactly eager to test just how sturdy the floorboards were.

I handed him the light, and he climbed the steps slowly. He put one foot on the first board and tested it, then another, then another. I followed close behind, until we were now standing in front of the kitchen door.

He played the light over the door, which had pale blue blistered paint. “Just so you know, I’m not picking any locks. I draw the line at that.”

I reached around him and turned the knob. Rusty hinges rasped, but the door swung slowly open by a few inches and then stopped. I stepped around James and gave the weather-warped door a shove with my hip and almost fell into the kitchen.

*   *   *

Not much had changed on the inside of the house. The olive green linoleum floor was faded and worn—but clean, as was the rest of the kitchen. The dark pine cabinets and red Formica countertops were as I remembered them. There was a wire dish drainer in the sink, with a dish towel placed neatly atop the still damp dinner dishes.

“Be back in a minute,” I told James. I found the downstairs bathroom with no trouble, and afterward, dried my hands on a prim monogrammed linen hand towel that screamed faded fortune.

James was standing in the living room. A lamp on an end table gave off a weak light, but it was enough to see what we needed to see. An old-fashioned lumpy brown sofa stood on a threadbare Oriental rug. A leather recliner faced the television, with duct-tape repairs on the arm and a crocheted afghan neatly folded on the chair back.

I leafed through a stack of magazines on the coffee table, unsure of what I was looking for—some sign, I guess, that Richard was in residence. But there were no back issues of
Hustler
, just some well-thumbed
Reader’s Digest
s, a five-year-old copy of
Guideposts
, and the December issue of
Southern Living
.

“What now?”

I pointed toward the dining room. A massive antique banquet-sized mahogany table was too large for the room, and the ornately carved Chippendale chairs looked out of place in such a simple farmhouse. The furniture had probably come from Richard’s parents’ home—a beautiful circa 1910 house on the bluff at Isle of Hope where our engagement party had been held—and which had been sold shortly after the end of our ill-fated marriage.

There were three place mats at one end of the table, and the other end held neat stacks of papers and file folders—as though it were being used as a makeshift office.

“I’ll go through the papers to see if there’s any mail for Richard, or any other signs he’s been here,” I said. “Why don’t you go check in the bathroom and bedrooms?”

“Check for what?” James glanced uneasily around the dining room and checked his watch for the tenth time since we’d entered the house.
Note to self—never invite a priest, even a former priest, along for any extra-legal outings
. James made the world’s worst accomplice.

“Signs that a man is living here,” I said. “You know, like men’s clothes or a shaving kit or pornography—if you find any smut, give a holler. That means Richard is either living here or hanging out here.”

Rifling through the mail was a depressing project. Lots of bills, most of them marked past due, final notice, etc. If the sad condition of the house hadn’t been enough to convince me that Cindy and Aunt Opal had fallen on hard times, reading their mail did the job.

At the bottom of a thick stack of catalogs and junk mail I found a tidy package of mail bound tightly together with rubber bands—all of it to Richard Hodges and sent to this address.

I held my breath as I unsnapped the band and looked through the envelopes. None of it was particularly interesting. There were bank statements, credit card offers, even, ironically, half a dozen unopened solicitation pleas from various nonprofits, including the American Heart Association, the World Wildlife Fund, and Richard’s alma mater, William & Mary.

Naturally, I checked the bank statements. Richard had a checking account with a local bank, and the October statement showed a balance of less than $200. Not surprising, but it did make me wonder if he’d been able to find a job after his release from prison.

I thumbed through the mail a second and third time, hoping to find something like a pay stub or any indication of employment, but I found nothing.

“BeBe?” I turned to see James standing in the doorway from the hall. “Something down here you might want to see.”

I followed him down the hall, past two small but tidy bedrooms, to the last door at the end of the hall. The door was ajar, so I peeked in.

The room was starkly furnished. There was a single narrow four-poster bed, with a heavy woolen blanket stretched taut over a sagging mattress, and two wafer-thin pillows in white cotton cases. On the wall opposite the bed was a chest of drawers with a mirror. A wooden kitchen chair had a neatly folded stack of white bath towels. The closet door was open. Wordlessly, I walked in and thumbed through the garments hanging on wire hangers.

I pulled out a heavily starched white cotton dress shirt. The label was from John B. Rourke’s men’s shop. It was a long-sleeved white oxford cloth button-down, size 14½/36. Richard had shopped at Rourke’s since his freshman year at Savannah Country Day. He never wore anything but white oxford cloth button-downs, and he had an unusually thin neck and long arms.

I held the shirt up to my nose and sniffed, then dropped the shirt as though I’d been burned. My hands were shaking and my heart was beating a mile a minute. I sank down onto the bed.

James sprung into action. “BeBe? Are you all right? Talk to me. What’s going on? You’re not going to faint, are you?” He was patting my hand and fanning my face at the same time.

“He’s here,” I said finally, nodding toward the closet. “Those are his clothes. His shirts. His aftershave. Richard’s, I mean.”

I had a fresh crop of goose bumps on my arms.

James sat down on the bed beside me. “You’re sure?”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. Somehow I felt Richard’s presence pressing in on me, sucking the breath out of my chest. And then I was right back in that dark place again, in a marriage to a man who’d managed to hide his true self from me for months and months, until I was forced to face the awful truth of who he truly was.

And then I felt a tiny little butterfly kick to my rib cage. And I remembered, somehow I’d managed to survive that time. Richard was the past. I’d rebuilt my life from the ground up, in a new place with a new man, and there was a new life force just waiting to make an entrance into this world.

I took a deep breath and the darkness receded.

“I’m fine,” I said, squeezing James’s hands. I looked around the room one last time. “Really. Now I know he’s living here, I’ll come back. I’ll make him sign the divorce papers. Then I never have to see Richard Hodges or deal with him. Ever again.”

“Do you want to wait around for a while? See if he shows up?”

“Better not.” I stood up and took one more look around the room. “It’s nearly nine now, and Harry worries about me. If we hurry, we can stop at Target and do a little Christmas shopping.”

“Sounds good,” James said. “You don’t happen to play bridge, do you?”

Chapter 19

Weezie

By my third day in the city, I was starting to feel like an old pro. I’d successfully managed to ride the subway to and from Central Park without getting lost or mugged; I’d window-shopped down Fifth Avenue and eventually found my way to Rockefeller Center to admire the Christmas tree.

I’d even slipped inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sat for a few minutes in a pew, admiring the magnificent vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows. Uncle James, I thought, would love this place. Not long after moving home, James met Jonathan McDowell, a dashing, ten years younger assistant district attorney. To my parent’s astonishment and my own delight, he and John had become a couple only weeks after meeting.

James had given up his collar, and although his church would never recognize or approve his relationship with Jonathan, he still attended mass every Sunday, often picking my parents up at home and ferrying them to Blessed Sacrament Church and then out to lunch afterward at their favorite all-you-can-eat buffet. It was the high point of their week—especially Daddy’s, since I knew it was likely to be the most edible meal of the week.