Page 35 of Hello, Summer
He tapped some keys, and she heard the whir of a printer comingfrom beneath the counter. He stapled four sheets of paper together. “There’s a fee for copying. A dollar a sheet. Think your paper can afford it?”
Probably not.
She handed over the bills, and he handed her the incident report. There was a wooden bench bolted to the wall opposite the counter window. Conley sat on the bench and skimmed through the report.
Not much here she didn’t already know. The Escalade, or what was left of it after the body was removed and the fire was extinguished, had been towed to Wiley’s Garage. Symmes Robinette’s body had been transported to Gulf Regional Hospital, and then to Apalachicola, to the regional medical examiner’s lab.
Her own name and contact information—and Skelly’s—were part of the report’s narrative, which was signed by good old W. R. Poppell.
Conley went back to the front counter. “I’m going to need to speak to your sheriff. When will he be available?”
DuPuy didn’t look up from the computer. “The sheriff doesn’t like to talk to reporters as a rule.”
“Well, he’s gonna have to make an exception this time,” she said. “This is a national story. Symmes Robinette was a public figure.”
DuPuy shook his head. “Sheriff Goggins will be in tomorrow at eight. You can leave your number, and I’ll pass it along. That’s the best I can do.”
Conley hadn’t covered the police beat since her early days working for a crappy weekly in Belvedere, Louisiana, but things hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. Cops were still notoriously closemouthed, even antagonistic to members of the press. She had no doubt that she’d be calling the sheriff, repeatedly, starting first thing in the morning.
She stopped at the Silver Bay Police Department on her way back from Varndoe to skim through the week’s incident reports, before drivingback to G’mama’s house on Felicity Street. When she unlocked the door and stepped inside, the only sound was the loud ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the dimly lit front hallway.
As soon as she’d set up the laptop, she anxiously skimmed her email entries, hoping to find responses to her job queries. Nothing.
Too soon,she told herself.Don’t be so pathetic. Don’t be so needy. Don’t be so desperate.
She opened her browser and began to immerse herself in the life and times of Charles Symmes Robinette, which, up until two nights ago, had seemingly been made up of a remarkable combination of good fortune, good timing, and shrewd friendships. Some details she already knew; others were a revelation.
As Grayson had pointed out, Symmes’s story had the makings of a small-town fairy tale. According to his official congressional biography, he’d been born in 1943 and grew up in Griffin County. His father was a World War II vet who’d worked as a long-haul trucker.
Conley did some quick math. Symmes Robinette had been seventy-seven. She scrolled back and scrutinized his most recent campaign photo with a now-jaundiced eye. He’d obviously started dyeing his hair sometime in the last couple of decades and, in the portrait anyway, augmented it with an artfully arranged toupee. Maybe, she thought, he’d also had some work done? Plastic surgery, she knew, wasn’t just for fading movie stars.
Young Symmes was only ten when his father died of heart disease. His mother, Marva Robinette, went to work as a secretary in a local textile plant, and when Symmes was sixteen, she got remarried to the much-older manager of the plant.
Symmes played high school football and baseball and graduated at age eighteen. He worked in a textile mill and at other menial jobs and took some classes at a junior college before enlisting in the Marines in 1964. He’d served two tours in Vietnam, then returned to Florida in 1968. He went to college and eventually law school, both at Florida State University in Tallahassee, on the GI Bill.
He’d won a Florida senate seat in 1978. According to what she’d read in theTallahassee Democrat,he was already being touted as a potentialgubernatorial candidate when, conveniently, the U.S. representative for the Thirty-fifth District dropped dead shortly into his fourth term in office—which was how Symmes earned the unfortunate statehouse nickname “the Symmes Reaper.”
She found an old feature story fromThe Washington Post’s Lifestyles section, showing photos of the Robinette family at a White House Easter Egg Roll during the Reagan administration.
Symmes had to have been nearly forty-five in the photo, and Conley noted, not for the first time, how much younger Vanessa Robinette appeared to be—maybe half her husband’s age?
Conley scowled down at the image of the adorable, towheaded Charlie Robinette in his mama’s arms.
“Behold, the Little Prince,” she muttered.
She read on for another hour, making notes of Robinette’s career in the U.S. House—he’d served on the Appropriations, Agriculture, and Veteran’s Affairs committees and, she discovered, his name had been briefly mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate for George H. W. Bush.
Symmes had excelled at bringing home the bacon for his district, managing to snag tens of millions of dollars of federal funding for military bases, interstate improvements, and even an agriculture research station at his alma mater, which had been named in his honor.
A sterling citizen,she thought, yawning. It was nearly midnight, and the lack of sleep was starting to wreak havoc with her concentration.
She was powering down her laptop when she heard a light knock at the front door. Peeping out from behind the dining room curtains, she recognized the man standing on the doorstep, holding a bottle of beer in each hand.
“Is this the Silver Bay version of Uber Eats?” she asked, opening the door.
“I was taking out the trash at my mom’s house when I saw the light on over here,” Skelly said, looking slightly embarrassed. “You said y’all were moving out to the beach today, so I thought I’d just check up, make sure Miss Lorraine’s house wasn’t being burgled.”
“Do you always serve beer to the burglars on this block?”
