The Edge of the Gulf (24 page)

Chapter 37

“We need to talk,” he said to Libby. “Now. I wanted to call last night but knew you needed the sleep.”

“Same here. I’m just pouring coffee and was about to reach for the phone.”

“They’ll be here within the hour. I’m calling Camilla and will be right over.”

***

By seven-thirty they had been through one pot of strong coffee, and were working on another of decaffeinated, along with an assortment of fruit, Susie’s oatmeal cookies, and Victor’s cold quiche Lorraine. They sat in various chairs, they moved around, they went onto the screened porch and came back in. Their few hours of rest had only fueled their sense of frustration, and they fell onto the food and coffee as though girding for a fight.

They had been impressed and rather amazed at Hudson’s account of his odd late-night search but not, in the end, surprised.

“I have tried over and over to tell myself that they’re just shallow and that
that’s
why we just don’t like them,” said Libby. “At first I found myself fighting some feeling of prejudice about Chaz. I thought it was an unfair expectation. Peter Cullen was such a lovely man and he and Charlie cared deeply for one another.”

“All I can tell you,” said Hudson, “is that I think she is a rare actress, but that she
is
an actress, and that she’s acting now.”

But why? For what reason?

“They have their lives before them, shallow or not,” he reasoned aloud. “Chaz has kicked his addiction problems, they apparently love one another, have decent incomes, have some decent sort of inheritance no doubt from Chaz’s father, and were just given some substantial monetary gift by Charlie and the promise of one of the best houses on the Gulf Coast.”

***

In the course of their conversation, Camilla seemed to Hudson to have become somewhat withdrawn and, more than simply fatigued, preoccupied. When she finally spoke again, she reminded him of himself at midnight, her thoughts and her voice disconnected from her body. She was oblivious of the coffee cup she had been holding poised before her for the past three or four minutes.

“There’s just the one computer in the office,” she said quietly. I’m about to order a new one. Charlie took the old one home.” She smiled. “You know he went hi-tech kicking and screaming. He got competent at what he needed most but had become fond over the past year of joking, ‘Hey, I’m retired, I don’t have to learn that.’ He’d been disking the hard drive files he wanted to take home.

“Three or four weeks ago, I was doing some bills and correspondence. I wanted to check something in a note I’d trashed. Instead I pulled up a letter Charlie had trashed but not yet emptied. It was brief and I suppose I sort of took it in before I realized that it wasn’t what I was looking for, and possibly not for my eyes. I put it on a disk with a couple of other documents he seemed to have missed on the desktop and put it aside for him. I remembered it for the first time this morning when I was dressing to come over.”

She paused, finally taking a sip from her cup and putting it down. “I decided that, now, it
was
for my eyes. I stopped by the office on my way over and read it again. It’s only a couple of paragraphs, a few lines each, to his attorney, Daniel Gardiner, who’s been in London for six months on an exchange program with a firm his own does business with. It simply says that he hopes it’s been interesting and fun.”

She looked at Hudson and then at Libby. “And that as soon as he gets back in a few weeks he wants to get together and go over some changes to his will.”

“The house? Maybe something else along with what we all assumed was a nice check the other night,” said Libby. “I wondered if Charlie might not be setting up some sort of trust to supplement whatever Chaz may have from his parents.”

“That was my first thought,” said Camilla, but her tone sounded unconvinced.

Libby sat down on the sofa heavily. A suddenly old woman, thought Hudson, weary to the bone, the sides of her mouth drooping. She looked out through the tall floor-to-ceiling windows into her garden.

“None of which can possibly have anything to do with this Lukerson nut,” said Hudson.

Camilla nodded. “That was my second thought.”

Libby turned back to them, as though she had just remembered they were there.

“I know that Peter Cullen was in Charlie’s will. He mentioned something once. But I have no idea in what way. And I don’t know what he would’ve done about that since Peter’s death four months ago. And the only other thing I know is that he’s made a passing reference or two to the fact that he’s making really sizeable endowments to a couple of the organizations he’s worked with. The child abuse shelter and the literacy council. And to the outreach programs of the diocese.”

“And we know Chaz and Sydney are well provided for,” said Hudson. “And that you,” he said to Camilla, “and your group are buying the 26-A and the Blue Bar.”

“Yes. I’ll be the majority partner, Fentry and Victor together will hold thirty-five percent, and Charlie’s keeping five. Charlie’s been edging toward the door these past few months. We talked about it again just a couple of weeks ago and were planning to do the paperwork as soon as his attorney gets back.”

“Could any of that be in jeopardy now?”

“Certainly.”

“Was anyone unhappy about the plan?”

“I think Terry Main’s nose may have been a little out of joint when Charlie first told him. They’d never discussed it but I had the feeling that Terry may have had some notion that he’d have a chance at it. Charlie asked me if he could assure him that he could continue as manager.”

“And you said…?”

“I said yes. It might not have been my first choice. Oh, he’s a fine manager. I’ve just never, well, warmed to him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps that I never know what he’s thinking. Of course I haven’t had that much reason to get over to the bar very often. If he was disappointed, though, he seems to have gotten over it. When we are together, I don’t sense any personal resentment. It’s a perfectly
all right
professional relationship.”

They sat for a long while in silence.

Finally, Hudson got up and walked slowly to the end of the room and back.

“What about that land?” he asked.

“No idea,” said Camilla.

“No,” said Libby. “I suppose Brad and I have assumed for some time that that’s why he’s really retiring now. To make sure that it’s handled exactly the way he wants it. Something respectful and low-key. A small lodge, or a few really nice cottages, maybe. He wants people to enjoy it, but he doesn’t want it ruined. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t leave it as a conservancy or something like that.”

“And it’s worth millions?” asked Hudson.

“Brad has guessed the land could bring forty to sixty, but that if you had a major stake in some sort of heavy development that would easily increase to as high as a hundred.”

“Have you told Brad about Charlie?” asked Camilla.

“No,” said Libby. “No I haven’t. I wish he were here. But…” she shook her head, “you have no idea what these three weeks in Montana with his old buddies mean to him. I go gallivanting around all the time and he’s so wonderful about it. I want him to have this time. I just don’t have the heart to tell him. He’ll have to know soon enough.”

The three of them sat staring at one another for a very long time.

“So until Charlie made whatever changes he was planning for his will—who would inherit the property?” Hudson asked.

“Some of it, at least, would have gone to Peter,” said Libby. “For all we know, he may even have owned parcels of it or held some of it jointly. And Charlie very well may have already designated all or some of it as a preserve or wilderness trust or whatever.”

“We just can’t know, can we?” asked Camilla.

Libby rose from the sofa, slowly, leaning for support on the arm. Hudson noticed, however, that the glint was back in her eye.

“Let’s not say that
just yet
.”

She went over to her old burled walnut writing desk, situated herself in the chair, put on her half-glasses, and pulled a small book out of the drawer.

“Dan Gardiner’s mother was my best friend. He’s probably just about you all’s age and I can see him sitting right where you two are now about thirty-some years ago eating my peanut butter cookies.”

She called his firm in Destin and got a number. “There’s attorney-client confidentiality, of course,” she muttered to herself as she hung up the phone. Then she looked over her glasses at them. “But when Danny hears what’s happened to Charlie, he’ll tell his Aunt Libby what we want to know.”

“What time is it in London?”

Chapter 38

When Hudson arrived at the hospital he found the usually unemotive Victor in a virtually unrecognizable state. He kept watch over Charlie like a gentle giant, his large, muscular frame leaning ardently forward from the edge of the small armchair, Charlie’s hand completely covered in both of his own. As Hudson approached, he could hear the sonorous voice with its Aussie syllables approaching something like fervor.

“At’s it, my man, c’mon Charlie, c’mon, we’re waitin’ on ya.”

Hearing Hudson, his head turned quickly, the short blond pony tail swinging nearly horizontal for a moment. Almost always unrelievedly deadpan, Victor’s face was now ablaze like a six-year-old finding his heart’s desire on Christmas morning.

“He moved his hand!” he grinned. “About twenty minutes ago. I was reading the newspaper to him and I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was this hand—his left. It moved and then a few seconds later it moved again. It wasn’t a tremor. He moved his fingers and flexed a bit.” He leaned closer. “You
moved
it, right, Charlie?”

They talked for a few minutes until Victor rather reluctantly stood. Without ever having released it, he bent over and placed Charlie’s hand in Hudson’s as he might a small injured bird.

“Well, here you go.”

***

For the next four hours, Hudson held Charlie’s hand. Or rubbed it, or squeezed it, or gently manipulated the fingers. He stood from time to time and went to the other side of the bed to do the same with his right hand. Very lightly he massaged his forearms and shoulders, as much as the IVs and tubes and bandages allowed. He talked to him. He read to him. He read from magazines. An old
U.S. News and World Report
, the current
New Yorker
. He read some homework, Waugh’s
A Handful of Dust
. He read some poetry that he selected from an anthology, including one he’d never read before by Jorge Luis Borges titled “Plainness.”

When his voice became hoarse, he placed the lightweight headset on Charlie’s ears and played a couple of his favorite CDs.

As he watched his friend’s face, his arms and hands, hoping for the slightest sign, he went over and over again both the frustrations and the frightening progress of the morning’s conversations.

Just before he’d had to leave for the hospital, Dan Gardiner had returned Libby’s call. He was stunned to hear her news but wasted no time in telling her what he could.

He had received Charlie’s letter about a month before and had made a calendar note to call as soon as he got back. He had no idea what changes he intended to the will. As it currently stood, the entire tract of eighty-five acres east of Seagrove would accrue to the estate of his cousin Peter Cullen and, unless the will were altered before Charlie’s death, would pass to his heirs.

“He has one son, Charlie’s namesake, I believe?”

“Yes,” Libby had said. She had thanked him and cut short his baffled questions. “You know that you can trust me with this information, Dan. I won’t abuse your confidence and you can trust that Charlie would want me to know this. I promise I’ll be in touch soon. Thank you again.”

***

Camilla was to come at two, and Hudson grew anxious for her arrival.

He felt as though he might rip apart. Part of him seemed connected at least as directly to Charlie as any one of the tubes that webbed his upper body and pierced his wrists. But another part of him wanted to be out doing something. Exactly what, he wasn’t yet certain, but in his gut, he knew that this nightmare wasn’t over.

It had expanded.

How could Sydney and Chaz possibly know, if his own attorney didn’t, that Charlie intended any changes to his will beyond leaving them his house and some extremely generous financial settlement? People didn’t casually murder their relatives on the possibility that they might inherit quite substantially but not entirely. And even if they could, indeed, somehow know that he was planning to dispose of the land otherwise, perhaps, as Libby posed, as a low-development resort or even a wilderness preserve, what possible connection could the svelte young Cullens have to somebody like Lukerson?

***

When Camilla got there, he didn’t leave.

At 2:25, Hudson moistened Charlie’s lips with some crushed ice in a paper towel and then rubbed a little Carmex on them. Camilla sat holding his left hand, lightly scratching the palm with her fingertips.

Hudson walked across the room to throw the towel away and as soon as he turned back Charlie opened his eyes.

He looked first at the ceiling, then to the side at Camilla, and then over her shoulder, at him.

“
Charlie
,” she said, gripping his hand.

Hudson stood beside her. “We’re right here, Charlie.”

The lips trembled, not quite parting.

“Don’t try to talk right now,” Camilla said. “Just rest. You’re doing fine, now, okay? You can talk to us soon. Just rest and let your strength keep coming back.”

The eyelids drooped, closed, opened again.

But before they closed again, Hudson saw the sort of abject confusion and fear in them that he had not seen since the aneurysm had stunned them at the breakfast table and Kate had slumped toward him, and in four or five infinite seconds, away from him, forever.

He had been helpless, of course, to do anything then.

A sudden prayer shook him with the conviction that he wouldn’t be now.

***

Chaz called around three. He’d just heard from Victor about the morning’s breakthrough.

When Hudson hung up the phone, Camilla said quietly, “You didn’t tell him about…just now.”

“No,” he said, almost to himself. “No, I didn’t.”

***

They talked for nearly an hour, alternating between fits and starts of suppositions and silences. They took turns holding Charlie’s hands and, uncertain as to whether he might somehow hear them from his still, twilit space, they tried to keep the urgency from their voices.

They called Libby, who was ecstatic with the news and talked with them in turns to savor every possible detail and nuance.

The joy subsided quickly enough, however, and there was a long, heavily shadowed pause.

Hudson had the phone, and he finally heard Libby sigh, “Well, I have thought and thought and thought until my head feels like it’s just gonna come unglued…and I get absolutely nowhere. Have you come up with anything other than our instincts?”

“No. But I think we may just have to work with that for now.”

“But work
how
?
Where
?”

“Right here. We’re not budging. I don’t know what else to do.” He turned his back to the bed. “I don’t know why or how, but there’s a connection. I don’t know if there’s some bizarre link to some crazed right-wing organization or if it’s just as unbelievably personal. But there’s a connection.”

“What’s the plan? They’ll be there from ten till six.”

“So will you.” He lowered his voice even more. “Whoever or whatever wants Charlie not to come back has to make their move soon because he’s getting better. That’s all I know. It means you’ll have to be here from your regular gig at six until six in the morning and we hate that because we know how worn out you are already.”

“Oh, you know old people don’t need much sleep. So I just keep my eye on him?”

“Exactly. Nothing’s going to happen so long as one of us is there. All you have to tell them is that you just don’t want to leave. There’s nothing they can do about it. Can you play a willful old lady?”

“Ask Brad. What if nothing happens?”

“Then Charlie keeps improving and gets well and we figure the rest out as we can.”

“Have you talked with the ATF folks about what we know?”

“Not yet. Camilla and I are torn between alerting them or not right now. We don’t want to alert
them
. We’ll keep thinking about that. We’re going to my house from here and we may decide to call them tonight. I don’t know. I don’t know much. I just know I believe that if somebody’s going to try something it’s going to have to be in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

“I’ll be there before six.” She paused. “Put Camilla on, sweetie, before I go.”

Camilla took the phone and listened, looking across the bed at Hudson. “I think you must be right,” she said. “See you soon.”

She hung the phone up and Hudson lifted his eyes in question.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Camilla smiled. “She said ‘I told you he’s not just a pretty face.’”

***

The doctor came by at four-thirty. He was guardedly optimistic.

Then, their waiting resumed. Camilla read a magazine while holding Charlie’s hand. Hudson stretched and paced. His eyes roved the walls of the room, fitted with various and sundry metal plates and extensions and wires, as if looking for a means of escape. He distractedly examined the impersonal hardware, the monitors, machines, equipment, and tubes, what whirred and clicked, and invaded the body of their beloved friend, holding him back from the edge.

***

And then, just before five, as Hudson was mopping Charlie’s forehead with a damp cloth and Camilla was finishing up a bit of business with Fentry on the phone, a man they did not know knocked on the door and, with a modest smile, entered.

“My name’s Tim Faraday. I’m the administrator here at St. Andrews.”

He shook hands with Camilla and then Hudson as they introduced themselves. “Now, you’re not Charlie’s cousins, the newlyweds?”

“No,” said Camilla. “Old friends.”

“So am I.”

He walked to the bed and very gently touched Charlie’s cheek, and then stood for a moment, holding his hand. He was an attractive man. His very deep, husky voice seemed not to match his tall, thin frame. He was perhaps fifty, wore round wire-rimmed glasses, and had thick sandy hair that kept falling in a slant across his high brow.

He turned to them. “May I sit with you for a few minutes?” he asked, indicating the sofa. “Please,” said Hudson. Camilla sat beside him and Hudson drew over the chair.

“I’ve been at a conference in Richmond. Got back last night. I just learned today that Charlie was here.” He paused. “I’ve spoken with his doctors. They tell me he may be turning a corner.”

“We hope so,” said Hudson.

“I don’t get to the 26-A as often as I’d like, but haven’t I seen you there?” Faraday asked Camilla.

“Yes, you have. And now that you mention it, I believe I recognize you, too.” Over the next few minutes, she and Hudson reviewed their histories with, and their fondness for, Charlie.

Faraday nodded often, smiling. Occasionally they even allowed themselves to share a discreet laugh.

“I moved down here twelve years ago. A native of St. Louis. Didn’t know a soul. I met Charlie at a fundraiser for our new pediatric cancer unit. An interfaith tennis tournament sort of thing, actually. We played each other in the first round. July. Hot as hell. I remember him saying to me when I won that I hadn’t played too badly for a Yankee Lutheran.

“He invited us to be his guests at the restaurant. Introduced us to some very nice folks. Really took us under his wing.”

“Sounds like Charlie,” Hudson said.

Faraday’s face fell suddenly as he looked toward the bed. “Why?”

“Well…” Camilla began.

“No, no, sorry. That was rhetorical. I know you’ve been living with this for days now. Don’t repeat it for me. I think I know the basic outline.” He looked at the long brown suede oxford at the end of his long crossed leg. “Sick bastard.”

Hudson said, “There are official and unofficial theories.”

“Was he acting alone?”

“That’s the official theory.”

“But it’s never completely true, is it?” Faraday spoke with a soft intensity. He seemed to be making an effort to keep his resonant bass voice carefully leashed but it rushed ahead of his intention like a fierce rumble. “There are always people behind them aren’t there? They take all that ignorance and fear and twist it into hatred. And then when some poor idiot goes off, they’re nowhere in sight.”

Hudson nodded. “They’re safe behind their vitriolic patriotism and their pulpits and their radio stations and their websites and their well-stocked bunkers.”

“People like this are pawns.”

At this, Hudson froze. He seemed so lost to the conversation for a moment that Camilla looked at him as if he had physically left the room. When he reconcentrated his focus on them, Faraday was saying “…and he was there when my partner had a serious car accident later in that first year. It was a long recuperation and Charlie was a regular, driving all the way over here, always bringing food. He knew I’d just begun my job. Knew what my schedule was like. Knew that we didn’t have an extensive network of friends.…”

“I’m sorry,” said Hudson. “What you just said about pawns. It made me realize something. There’s a lot we don’t know about this.” He nodded toward Charlie. “But in just the past day or two, some of us have begun to put some things together…and…”

“Do the authorities have other leads?”

“Well, no. We don’t think so.”

Faraday sat his lanky frame straight up and brushed the hair from his brow. His eyes glimmered in their round glasses with a sort of adventurous intelligence. “But you do, don’t you?”

Hudson and Camilla looked at one another without speaking.

“Is there something I can do?”

Neither of them quite knew what to say.

“Sam and I have always felt that we’ll never be able to repay Charlie. In our lives he has defined the word ‘friend.’ We haven’t seen enough of him lately, and that’s our fault. Couples get in their own ruts. But I want to have the opportunity to correct that. I want him up and out of here. He’s one of the finest men I know. I respect him and I love him.”

He eyed them both.

“Short of breaking the law, I will do absolutely anything to help him—and you. Tell me there
is
something. I’ll do it.”

Hudson spoke slowly and softly, continuing to find his way as he went.

“Actually, yes. Yes, Tim. I think there is.”

***

When Libby arrived at five-forty-five they brought her up to date.

And an hour later, Faraday had rearranged schedules in order to double-shift two nurses whom he knew particularly well and trusted implicitly. He swore them to secrecy and promised them he would fill them in as soon as he could.