Page 79 of The High Tide Club
“Russell was absolutely livid after he saw Millie dancing with Gardiner,” Josephine said. “I wasn’t out in the garden where he attacked her, so I only know what we managed to coax out of her the next night.”
“I seen it all,” Varina said quietly.
Every head in the room swiveled to look at her. She was such a tiny figure, almost child-sized, against the bulk of the enormous chair she sat in.
“You did?” Josephine seemed taken aback. “You never said so, all those years ago.”
“Nobody asked,” Varina said, shrugging. “Anyway, I was just a girl. I was so shocked at first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing.”
“Auntie, how did you happen to see it?” Felicia asked. She reached over and gently removed a crumb of biscuit from her great-aunt’s blouse, which was when Brooke noticed, for the first time, that Varina was also wearing a High Tide Club pin.
“I’d finished up working in the kitchen, and Mrs. Dorris—she was the housekeeper back then—she told me to go ahead on home. I was supposed to wait for my brother to come fetch me and walk me home, but I knew he wasn’t coming for another hour, and anyway, I wanted to peek at all the fancy dresses in the ballroom. So I changed back into my pink party dress and heels, and I sorta snuck around to the back of the house so I could look in the doors from the veranda. About the time I got there, I saw that man hauling Millie out of there.” Varina looked over at Marie. “I’m sorry you have to hear this.”
“It’s all right,” Marie said. “It was a long time ago.”
“Millie was crying, telling him he was hurting her, but he didn’t care, and he didn’t slow down,” Varina said. “He drug her into the garden, way back where the camellia bushes were head-high. And that’s right near where I’d jumped into the bushes to hide.”
Varina closed her eyes as though she were reliving the scene from memory. “It was a full moon that night, so I could see things I wished I hadn’t. That man, he shoved her up against a tree, and he had his hands all up and down in her dress.”
She glanced over at Gabe, blushed, and looked away. “Millie was begging him to stop. She was afraid somebody would see them, like her mama or her grandmama, but he said he could do what he wanted because they were getting married. I saw him push her dress up, and then he unfastened his trousers…”
“Oh my God.” Lizzie breathed. “He raped her. The bastard raped her.”
Marie was clutching her napkin in both hands, twisting it into a rope, her face ashen. Brooke reached over and touched her shoulder, but her mother didn’t seem to notice.
“He didn’t get the chance,” Varina said. “Right about that time, Mr. Gardiner came busting in on them. I think he must have followed her out of the ballroom, because just before that, I saw him standing on the veranda, like he was looking for somebody. I guess he caught sight of Millie’s dress, because he ran right over to them. He yelled at that man to stop it, and the bad man told him to mind his own business because he could do what he wanted, and the next thing I knew, Mr. Gardiner yanked him clean away from Millie. They had a fight, and even though the other man was way bigger, Mr. Gardiner punched him in the face and the gut and knocked him clean off his feet.”
“Good for him,” Lizzie said. “What happened after that?”
“Mr. Gardiner had already told Millie to go on back to the house. So then he told that bad man he’d better leave this island. He told him if he was still there in the morning, he’d kill him. And then he left.”
“Gardiner really was a hero,” Josephine said, sighing. “Not just a war hero, although he was that too. He was all our heroes. The best brother a girl could ask for.”
Her face sagged, and her speech was slightly slurred. The pain meds, Brooke thought, must be kicking in.
“Did he… make it through the war?” Lizzie asked.
“No. He didn’t,” Josephine said. “His plane was shot down at Midway. Gardiner was a gun jumper, you know.”
“What’s that?” Felicia asked.
“He got tired of waiting for the United States to get into the war. He’d gotten his pilot’s license just about the same time he got his driver’s license. Gardiner hated what was happening in Europe. After Hitler marched into Poland and then Holland and Belgium, his mind was made up. He and Papa had terrible fights about it because my father was still an isolationist at that point. Anyway, Gardiner decided to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. The morning after the engagement party, he took the early ferry to the mainland, and from there he took the train to Canada.”
“You must have been so proud of him,” Marie said.
“At the time, I thought it was terribly romantic,” Josephine said. “And heroic. Of course, that was October, and in early December, Pearl Harbor happened, and the United States did get into the war.”
“Did you ever see Gardiner again?” Marie asked.
“Just once, and only for a few hours. He came home briefly, after training and before he was shipped out. By then, Papa had closed up this house. Most of the men on the island, including all the Shaddix boys, went off to fight the war, plus German U-boats were prowling the coast, and he didn’t think it was safe for us to stay.”
Gabe looked up from his glass of port. “I never heard that before.”
“Oh yes. In 1941, at least five Allied merchant ships were torpedoed by the Germans between here and Savannah, and I believe four or five U-boats were sunk, right off the coast here.” Josephine drained most of her port and, setting the glass down, tipped the rest onto the tablecloth, watching idly while the deep purple stain pooled on the white damask.
“I should really be getting to bed,” she said. Her eyelids drooped, and she slumped back in her chair.
“Oh no,” Lizzie objected. “You still haven’t told us how Russell Strickland disappeared.”
