Speak No Evil (5 page)

Augusta answered on the first ring. “What are you guys doing?”

Caroline tried not to sound annoyed, but her tone betrayed her. “We’re at the Shack, celebrating your birthday.”

On the other end of the phone, Augusta sighed heavily. “Sorry about earlier. It just took me by surprise, you know. Pissed me off.”

Caroline held her tongue, certain that anything she might say would only make matters worse.

“But I thought about it on the flight,” Augusta continued. “It’s not like either of you asked for this either.”

Savannah dug into the remaining oysters, searching for missed opportunities while she pretended to ignore their conversation.

“No, we didn’t.”

“Is Sav mad at me?”

Caroline glanced at Savannah, wondering from whom she might have inherited her unflappable patience. “No.”

Another belabored sigh sounded in Caroline’s ear. “Obviously I’m coming back.”

Caroline released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “That’s good. When?”

“I need maybe a week here.”

Caroline felt another surge of relief. Augusta hadn’t even taken her “list of rules” with her. She hadn’t so much as looked at them and as ridiculous as it seemed, there were stipulations about how long any of them could be away without prior arrangement. As always, their mother had considered every detail.

“Anyway, I just wanted you to know. I’m not happy about it, but I’ll be back next week. Tell Sav I said sorry, okay?”

“I will. She says to tell you happy birthday.”

Savannah eyed Caroline over the oyster she was inspecting, raising a brow.

“Tell her I said thank you.”

“Okay.”

“Talk to you soon.”

“Bye.” Caroline ended the call and took in a deep breath. “Holy shit, so she changed her mind in record time!”

Savannah twisted her oyster knife into one of the hinges in the cluster in her hand and popped open the shell, revealing her withered prize. “Yeah, well I knew she’d come around.” She fished out the shriveled oyster and held it up in disgust. “Twenty-seven million dollars can be quite persuasive. Hey, let’s order margaritas! We have celebrating to do!”

“If you can call it that.”

Savannah shrugged. “If you can call it that.”

The waiter came by and cleared their table, took their drink order and after a few moments, brought back two margaritas in thick blue-rimmed cocktail glasses.

Caroline raised her glass and proffered it to Savannah. “To Florence Willodean Aldridge,” she said.

Savannah raised her glass, clinking it against Caroline’s. “To Mother.”

T
he Chinese had a word for souls who were condemned to suffer an insatiable desire for more than they could consume:
ègu
, they were called. Hungry ghosts, depicted with protruding bellies and tiny mouths—teardrop-shaped entities with bottomless chasms in place of souls and eternally ravenous appetites that could never be appeased.

That was the only explanation for the endless yearning that seemed to exist before memory.

At times, there was nothing to be done but surrender to it.

Somehow, in the quiet moments after the very first slaughter . . . there had been peace from the yearning . . . but then the hunger resumed—long before the flesh from that first rib melted into the wet, putrefying ground.

Ten years crawled before the next feast, but it too failed to satisfy, and then the next and the next. The hunger came faster, sooner, stronger—the sacrifice always on the verge of being enough, but never quite.

Even now, the hunger was seeking stillness.

A stillness that was discoverable only in glimpses . . . on quiet mornings in the salt marsh . . . when the scent of death hijacked the morning breeze.

Early Tuesday morning, Caroline delivered a bouquet of sunflowers to Daniel’s room at St. Francis Hospital. She left Savannah at home staring at a blank page on her computer screen.

Daniel was alert enough to give her a bit of an overview about where the
Tribune
stood financially. While the company managed to pay the bills, it was losing money and distribution and she learned that, although she had inherited her mother’s titles, her mother hadn’t exactly placed blind faith in Caroline. She was expected to work hand in hand with Daniel in all business matters, and in all things editorial with the help of longtime editor in chief Frank Bonneau.

Bonneau had been running the
Tribune
’s editorial department for as long as Caroline could recall. He was a no-nonsense old-school journalist and George had already warned her he was more likely to go around her and take his grievances to Daniel, who, incidentally, also held a seat on the board—another reason George was apparently brought into the mix.

She wasn’t sure how yet, but she knew she had to find a way to win Bonneau’s respect and she was pretty certain that after her stint at the
Tribune
she hadn’t left him with the best impression—if, in fact, she’d left him with any impression at all, aside from the fact that she was the boss’s daughter.

Already, Caroline had a few ideas to implement once she settled into her role—something she felt compelled to do sooner rather than later as a show of confidence. It probably wasn’t kosher to begin working full-time right away as there was a certain propriety that must be adhered to in the Deep South. To run a daily paper she needed not just her employees’ respect, but the respect of the people of Charleston. Her mother had understood that well and she’d become their icon—their genteel princess.

The
Post
might be bigger, but the
Tribune,
with its unbroken lineage, was like a last bastion of Old World American journalism—and was becoming about as relevant as the Queen of England. If they continued down the path they were on, the paper was soon to become obsolete and her mother’s boast that they had survived even where Benjamin Franklin’s
Gazette
had not, would be moot. The newspaper business had come a long way since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Caroline had a lot of changes to make.

Born during the fall of the Confederacy, the
Tribune
’s history was deeply intertwined with that of the
Post.
Both papers could trace their ancestries to the
Charleston Daily News
and each quietly challenged the other, although by most standards, the
Post
had already won. With a distribution and staff that was more than twice the
Tribune
’s, they could afford not to acknowledge their oldest competitor. But the competition was there nevertheless—a nod here and there, reverently done, because both had a reputation for solid reporting and community service. Her mother had worked hard to continue that legacy.

After her visit with Daniel, Caroline spent the remainder of the day looking over ledgers with George at the King Street office. On Wednesday, Daniel was released from the hospital, and joined them, black eyes, bruises, stitches and all.

Neither she nor George brought up “the incident,” as Daniel’s misfortune was now being referred to, and Daniel didn’t bring it up either. Caroline thought maybe he didn’t care to hear lectures about where he conducted his business. But that was really none of her concern anyway. If he and George were content to investigate four
A.M.
break-ins every other week, it was their right to do so. Caroline’s only real concern was the
Tribune
.

She stared at the bottom line for the payroll. “Did Mother consider buyouts?”

“No,” Daniel responded at once. “We recommended it, but Flo was adamant the paper remain loyal to longtime employees. Some have been with the
Tribune
going on fifty years.”

“Like who? That makes them seventy, or near about!”

“Agnes, for one. Used to be a reporter and now she works classifieds. And Lila, who works in payroll.”

Caroline lifted a brow. “It
is
possible to take loyalty too far.”

Daniel eyed her disapprovingly. “I’m certain I’d not take too kindly to someone telling me I had to stop practicing law once I hit seventy.”

“Which is precisely tomorrow,” George interjected, and snickered.

Caroline stifled a smile, though she was pretty sure George wasn’t much younger than Daniel.

Daniel gave George a withering glance. “Sixty-three,” he clarified for Caroline’s sake, and he eyed her pointedly. Apparently, he wasn’t through with the lecturing. “Some would say thirty-three is too young to be placed in a position of influence to affect the welfare of others.”

Caroline refrained from pointing out that at thirty-five—just two years older than she was—one could be elected president of the United States and in a position to influence many more lives than those connected to a small-town newspaper. Lifting up the stack of papers in front of her, she tapped them on the desk to line up the edges and then set them aside. “We wouldn’t be forcing anyone to leave,” she argued. “A buyout would just be incentive.”

Daniel glowered at her. “A carrot for a pack of old mules?”

George chortled again and that seemed to annoy Daniel all the more. His lips thinned angrily.

Caroline frowned. “I didn’t say that.”

After a moment, George stopped chuckling long enough to come to her defense. “It’s smart business,” he asserted and peered meaningfully at Caroline. “I hate to say it, but your mother’s enduring loyalties weren’t helping the bottom line any.”

Caroline appreciated the pat on the back. And right now, she needed that more than anything.

Daniel muttered beneath his breath, and she realized he might be too tied up in her mother’s philosophies to embrace any changes she would need to make to keep the company afloat. She’d rather work with George, and Daniel might not like it, but she was in charge now.

Funny how everything—even something as inopportune as a random break-in—sometimes led to unintended but fortunate results. It was a sort of providence . . . except that Caroline didn’t believe in providence.

Around noon, Sadie interrupted their meeting to deliver lunch—as she had all week. But this time, Caroline kept her mouth shut and didn’t chide her for it, and she noticed something she’d missed before: it could be that Sadie was still trying to take care of Florence’s children . . . but just maybe she was using this as an excuse to see Daniel Greene. She watched the two flirt like awkward teenagers.

What else had changed during her absence?

But
that
too was no longer her concern—and why the hell she should even think about him at a time like this was beyond her.

 

Hours after sundown, the pavement was still warm beneath the girl’s bare feet.

A low fog swept in from the salt marsh, unfurling like a gossamer carpet over the blacktop. Carrying flip-flops in one hand, she hurried down the road, thickly lined with oak and blackgum trees.

On this part of the island, many of the houses were ancient, some were new, one dated back to when these wetlands were occupied by rice plantations tilled by gentlemen farmers. At the end of the road, through the wild scrub, you could almost see the burnt carcass of the original house, its brick framework imprinted with a visual memory of long-expired flames.

Oyster Point Plantation was one of James Island’s richest and most enduring legacies. Before it burned down, the original estate had served as a Confederate division field hospital, and nearby sat the unmarked graves of nearly three hundred soldiers who’d died at the battle of Secessionville. Local folks claimed the nearby estuaries were littered with the bones of the Confederate and Union dead.

At this hour of the night, she felt like a trespasser on Fort Lamar Road. Like bony, accusing fingers, the trees shook quivering limbs as she passed, their bent forms casting sinister shadows while the wind sighed with exasperation over her intrusion.

Her mind was playing tricks on her.

It was stupid not to tell anyone where she was going. She hadn’t even told her Realtor friend who’d listed the house on Backcreek Road. She was so certain he wouldn’t mind if she just sat on the dock and snapped a few photographs of the Morris Island lighthouse. Now both her car and her cell were dead and she didn’t much like the thought of knocking on strange doors to ask to use the phone.

Behind her, a pair of headlights appeared, two blinding high-powered beams that switched to low once the driver spotted her.

Instinctively, she moved to the right side of the road, avoiding the driver’s side.

The car—a brand-new, black Acura with a shiny coat of wax—slowed, and her heartbeat quickened. She heard the passenger window begin to whir and she turned to peer into the shadows of the car. The voice was male. “Need help?”

The girl kept walking. “No!”

“You sure? Where ya headed?”

“Gas station,” she replied and quickened her pace. As an afterthought, she added, “My car won’t start.”

He sounded incredulous. “You don’t have a cell?”

The girl cast him an annoyed glance and got a better look at his face. White, maybe in his late twenties, sinfully gorgeous. In fact, she had never met a guy so damned cute—not even her roommate’s jealous boyfriend who she secretly crushed on was that good-looking. She slowed her pace, thinking he couldn’t be much older than she was, and relaxed a little. “I do have a phone. It’s dead. No charger.”

He winked at her and gave her a slow smile. “Lotta good that’ll do ya.”

She returned a lopsided smile and gave him the full brunt of her sarcasm. “Gee, thanks for pointing that out.”

He brought the car to a sudden halt and the girl had the briefest inclination to keep walking. She stopped instead and turned to face the car and the driver.

“Well, you see . . . that puts me in a bit of a bind,” he said, but he made no attempt to open his car door and so the girl remained where she stood.

“Yeah? How’s that? I’m the one walking.”

“That’s just it,” he said. “Now that I know, I can’t just leave you here on this dark-ass road all by your lonesome.”

The girl shrugged. “I’ve walked longer distances.”

He seemed to think about her answer a moment and she thought he might actually leave as he gently revved his engine.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I could let you use my cell, but then I’d still feel obliged to wait with you until someone shows up to help . . . or I could take you to the station myself.”