Page 144 of Hello, Summer
“Yay.” Conley was slumped down in her chair. She looked around the office. Michael had clocked out an hour earlier at Grayson’s insistence, and Lillian was long gone. Now it was just the Hawkins sisters, in a room littered with grease-stained pizza boxes, empty Diet Coke and Red Bull cans, and trash bins overflowing with multiple discarded drafts of stories prominently featured in the digital edition ofThe Silver Bay Beacon.
Conley felt as grimy as the office. She wanted to go home, take a bath, walk on the beach, drink an entire bottle of wine, and then sleep for a week. But all of that would have to wait. She stood up, yawned, and stretched.
Grayson slung an arm around her sister’s shoulder. “We should do a victory dance, don’t you think?”
“Too tired,” Conley said. “But we did good tonight, right?”
“We did awesome. All of us. Even Rowena, in her own way, bless her heart.” Grayson squeezed Conley’s shoulder. “I’m so proud of you, Conley. I know I never tell you that, but I really am.”
“Thanks,” Conley said. “I’m pretty proud of what we achieved together these past few days.”
“Okay, then get out of here. Go home and get some sleep.”
“And what about you? You can’t keep sleeping on that ratty sofa. And you can’t keep on living here in the office, Gray. It’s not healthy. I’m not driving all the way out to the beach tonight. I’m too tired. I’ll stay over at Felicity Street. I can use the Wi-Fi there to finish my freelance piece and sleep in my old room. At least come over there with me tonight. Okay?”
“Maybe I will.”
The response surprised Conley. “For real? I was sure you’d tell me to shut up and mind my own business.”
“I’ll be over after a while. It’s only nine out on the coast. I want to call Tony.”
“That’s great. What will you tell him?”
“That the grass needs cutting. And my back needs scratching. And that I want us to take another shot at making this marriage work and maybe even have a baby.”
Conley raised an eyebrow. “All that plus cutting the grass? That’s a lot to ask, Gray.”
“I know. I miss the guy, And even if you don’t stay here at theBeacon, I know now that we can make it work, somehow. I got a good piece of advice recently, about asking for help when you need it. And accepting that help, with grace. I’m gonna work on that.”
Conley hugged her sister. “That sounds like a great plan. Guess you really are the smarter sister. Okay, I’ll head over to G’mama’s now. I have absolutely got to have a shower.”
Conley called her grandmother from the car and left a message on her voice mail, knowing Lorraine probably would have left her cell phone plugged in on the kitchen counter.
“Hi, G’mama. Sorry to call so late, but we finished putting out the special edition, so I’m going to spend the night at Felicity Street and try to get some work done. I’ll see you in the morning.”
The air inside the house was stale and overly warm. Conley felt only slightly guilty about turning the thermostat down before trudging upstairs to her old bedroom. After digging around in the closet anddresser, she found a pair of hot-pink gym shorts, an oversize Silver Bay Beach Club T-shirt, and some panties whose elastic had given up the ghost sometime earlier in the decade.
She stayed in the shower until every inch of her flesh was scrubbed and scoured and shriveled and pink, then toweled off and slathered herself with lotion before dressing.
Winnie had done a depressingly thorough job of cleaning out the fridge and pantry before decamping for the beach, but Conley rummaged around the kitchen and the dining room sideboard until she found an overlooked box of saltines and a bottle of Wild Turkey with a Christmas gift tag addressed to her grandfather still attached to a red ribbon around the bottle’s neck.
She dropped four ice cubes in one of G’mama’s cut glass old-fashioned tumblers and poured two fingers of bourbon over the ice. Sipping her drink, she made her way to the dining room, where she’d dropped her backpack.
Her cell phone rang, and she reached for it but didn’t answer when she saw the wordsUNKNOWN CALLERon the phone screen.
Conley opened the waxed paper sleeve of crackers and dipped one in the bourbon. It tasted surprisingly good, but the trick was to remove the cracker from the liquid before it disintegrated in the bourbon.
She was munching on her second cracker and thinking about how to take theBeaconstory she’d written earlier and recast it for theAJCwhen her phone rang again. She shook her head and opened her laptop.
The third call from an unknown caller came less than a minute later. It was nearly 1:00 a.m. Annoyed, she stood up and went to the living room window, peering out at the driveway. Where was Grayson? Conley wasn’t afraid of being alone in the house, but she was irritated that her sister was apparently choosing to sleep on the sofa in the office for another night, and annoyed at the string of nuisance calls.
Still, she walked around the house, double-checking that all the doors were locked. Then she picked up her phone and dialed the Silver Bay Police Department nonemergency number. Instructed to leave a recorded message to be answered during office hours, she did so.
“Hi. This is Conley Hawkins. I’m staying with my grandmother, Lorraine DuBignon Conley, at 38 Felicity Street, and I want to report that I’ve been getting harassing and threatening anonymous phone calls. The calls could be coming from a disgruntled reader, since I’m a reporter atThe Silver Bay Beacon.Just now, there were three from an unknown caller in the space of five minutes. Please have a detective call me at this number as soon as possible.”
A vintage white Corvette with Working Press tags was never meant for covert ops, Buddy realized, as he crept along behind the black pickup. Luckily, the truck’s driver seemed oblivious to the fact that he was being tailed. The truck had parked, briefly, on Felicity Street, just down the block from the house where Conley Hawkins had parked her Subaru. Buddy breathed a sigh of relief when, about five minutes later, the truck pulled away from the curb. Just in case, he continued trailing the truck. The driver made two stops, one at a drive-through ATM downtown, and a second at the Toot ’n’ Tote convenience store.
Buddy had parked the Vette on the other side of the gas pumps in order to stay out of his quarry’s sight. He shifted uncomfortably in the cracked red leather seat. He needed to take a leak, but he didn’t want to risk entering the store. In the end, he jumped out, sprinted over to a dumpster, and relieved himself.
