Page 95 of The High Tide Club
She sighed and went for her pocketbook. He took the money without comment.
The woman slumped with exhaustion. He considered her, considered his surroundings. He knew the owner of this house, had even socialized with him, in long-ago, happier times. Money would not be an issue for this family. If he could provide the answers to nosy questions, perhaps everybody’s problems would be solved.
“I know a couple,” he said slowly.
When he left, he took the sleeping infant with him, bundled in a wicker shopping basket. She went into the bedroom and began gathering up the soiled linens. Carlyle’s gin bottle stood on the nightstand, empty now.
39
Gabe Wynant was getting accustomed to the unexpected that day at Shellhaven. But nothing could have readied him for the story he was about to hear in the library-turned-bedroom so recently vacated by Josephine Bettendorf Warrick.
Brooke caught him as he took the last stair. He was dressed and ready to leave, his briefcase again tucked under his arm.
“What now?” he said, noting the grim expression on her face.
She glanced upward, toward the second floor. “Where are the others?”
“I heard lots of cursing coming from Lizzie’s bedroom. And the cat was yowling, so it’s a good guess they’re getting ready to leave. I think Felicia and Varina went out somewhere with Louette.”
“I think you’d better come with me,” she said.
***
C. D. had seated himself in the recliner and was idly leafing through a leather-bound book he’d picked at random from one of the bookcases.
“You remember C. D.,” she told Gabe.
“Yes?” Gabe said, leaning against the doorjamb.
“C. D., could you please tell my colleague what you just told me?”
“You mean the part where I tell him I’m Josephine’s son?” C. D. seemed pleased to have a story worth telling and retelling.
Gabe blinked and looked at Brooke for her reaction. She nodded. “Yes. And start from the beginning, please.”
“Which beginning? You mean how she dropped me off at the orphanage in Savannah when I was just a baby? Not even a month old? And bribed them nuns to keep me and not tell anybody she’d had a bastard? Or do you want me to begin when I got too old to stay with the little kiddies, so they packed me off to Good Shepherd Home for Boys?”
“Whoa. Whoa!” Gabe exclaimed. “She? You are referring to Josephine Warrick?”
“Who else?” C. D. asked.
“You’re telling me you are Josephine Warrick’s son?”
“And only living heir,” C. D. said. He picked up a pen and extended it toward the lawyer. “Write it all down if you want, ’cause it’s all true and I can prove it.”
40
C. D. folded his sunglasses and placed them in his breast pocket. His pale blue eyes flickered around the library, taking inventory, finally resting on the side-by-side oil portraits of Josephine and Preiss Warrick.
Preiss was posed casually in a tweed jacket, sitting on a tree stump, with a shotgun propped in the crook of his elbow. His left hand rested on the head of a black-and-white English setter who had a dead bird clenched between its jaws. Preiss had been a handsome man, with a narrow, bony face, deep-set eyes, and full lips. The painting’s backdrop was a romanticized version of Talisa with moss-draped oaks, blue sky, and puffy cotton-candy clouds.
Josephine appeared to have been costumed for a fancy dress party in her portrait, in a floor-length emerald-green satin dress, triple strands of pearls, and a full-length mink tossed artfully around her shoulders. The backdrop matched the portrait of her husband, right down to the tree stump and the trailing Spanish moss. But in Josephine’s portrait the setter was curled up, asleep at her feet.
C. D. drummed his fingertips on the leather-bound book cover.
“We’re waiting,” Gabe said, tiring of the dramatics.
“You were raised at Good Shepherd? In Savannah?” Brooke asked. Like most in Savannah, she knew that the former children’s home, founded in pre–Revolutionary War times, was considered the oldest child-caring institution in the country.
