Page 7 of The High Tide Club
Louette paused outside a closed door at the end of the hall. “This used to be the library, but she can’t make the stairs no more, so me and Shug fixed her up a bedroom in here. She don’t hear so good, so you got to speak up when you talk, and she’s been pretty sick lately, so you need to make sure she don’t tire herself out. But don’t go thinking because she’s nearly a hundred years old she’s weak-minded or something. No, ma’am! Not Miss Josephine. She don’t miss a trick.”
She rapped loudly on the door, waited a moment, then poked her head inside. “Miss Josephine? You ready to see your company?”
“Is that the lawyer I sent for? Bring her in, Louette.”
***
The library at Shellhaven had been a grand room once. But now the dark mahogany paneling was dull, the draperies at the windows faded and tattered. Three walls of the room were lined with bookshelves, crammed with books and rows and rows of the distinctive bright yellow spines ofNational Geographicmagazines. Every flat surface was littered with items; birds’ nests, sun-bleached seashells, chunks of coral, even a huge set of yellowed shark jaws. A stuffed bobcat sat on a pedestal near the window, muzzle open in mid-snarl, his molting yellow fur drifting onto the dark pine floor. A five-foot-long intact skeleton of an alligator stretched across the top of one of the built-in bookcases, and tall apothecary bottles were filled with sharks’ teeth, sea glass, and what appeared to be tiny bird skulls.
A hospital bed had been set up in the far corner of the room, partially hidden by an ornate three-panel chinoiserie screen.
A box fan whirred in one of the two open windows, doing little to dispel the heat or the scent of antiseptic soap.
The lady of the house was ensconced in a brown vinyl recliner. Brooke had been expecting a slightly diminished version of the defiant mink-wrapped, shotgun-toting heiress she’d seen inSouthern Living, but the passing of years had been as cruel to Josephine Warrick as it had been to her home.
The flowing white mane was gone, replaced by a navy-blue baseball cap that did little to conceal the nearly bald head beneath it. Pale skin blotched with vivid brown liver spots stretched over skeletal cheekbones and a pointed chin. Her lips were thin and bloodless. But a pair of bushy white eyebrows arched over large, dark eyes behind oversized yellow-tinted glasses that carefully studied Brooke as though she were another museum specimen.
In the quick research she’d done, Brooke had seen dozens of photos of Josephine Warrick. She’d been a striking—if not beautiful—woman, a slender, serious-faced debutante with the short, wavy hair of the period, then a dewy-faced bride in the fifties, turned into a rangy, imposing force to be reckoned with in later years. The society pages of the newspapers in Savannah, Atlanta, and Palm Beach showed her dressed in golf togs, tennis wear, and expensive designer gowns, as well as hunting gear, standing with one foot atop a massive buck.
The woman sitting in the cracked vinyl recliner weighed less than ninety pounds and was wrapped in layers of knitted afghans and throws. An oxygen tank stood beside the chair, and a pair of thin plastic cannulas snaked toward the transparent breathing apparatus on her face.
“Hello, Mrs. Warrick,” Brooke said, after the momentary shock of the old lady’s appearance had worn off. “I’m Brooke Trappnell.” She took a step toward the chair, then stopped abruptly.
“Grrrrrr.”
She hadn’t noticed the dogs, they were so small, and nearly the same beige as the afghan.
“Grrrr.”
A pair of miniature Chihuahuas sprang into defense mode; the fur on their necks bristling, teeth bared.
“Hush, Teeny. Hush, Tiny.” The old woman stroked their backs, patted their heads. “Don’t mind the girls,” she told Brooke. “They won’t bite. Unless I tell them to. Sit down over here,” she said, pointing to a faded chintz wing chair. “And you needn’t call me Mrs. Warrick. Josephine will do just fine, and I’ll call you Brooke, if I may. The doctors keep saying I’m going deaf, but I’m not really. It’s just that people these days mumble and fail to enunciate properly.” She gave Brooke a sharp look. “You’re not one of those types, are you? I can’t abide a mumbler.”
Brooke sat down in the chair and balanced her briefcase across her lap. “No, ma’am,” she said loudly. “I’ve got a lot of faults, but that’s not one of them.”
“You didn’t tell anybody why you were coming over here today, did you?”
“No, because you never actually explained why you wanted to see me.”
The old lady chuckled. “But you were curious about me and this island, so you decided to come anyway. Is that correct?”
“Something like that.”
“Then we’d better get to it, hadn’t we? As you can tell by my wretched appearance, I don’t have a lot of time these days for social niceties.”
“Your housekeeper mentioned you’d been ill. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Louette likes to fuss. I smoked too much and for too long, and I’ve had COPD for several years, but it’s lung cancer now, and that’s a different matter. I did the radiation, but I draw the line at chemo. So that’s that. Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know anything about this island, Brooke?”
“I did some reading after your call, and I was here briefly as a child, on a campout.”
“On the other end of the island, which my wretched cousins’ heirs sold to the State of Georgia in 1978 for pennies on the dollar,” Josephine said. She shook her head. “If they’d offered me the same deal, I would have bought it myself.”
“Why didn’t they?”
