The High Tide Club

“Oh.”

He looked at her, waiting, expectant.

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.

“Back in my day, it was called Good Shepherd Home for Boys,” C. D. said. “They changed the name along the way. But I didn’t get sent over to Good Shepherd until the nuns closed up the orphanage I’d been in. St. Joseph’s Foundling Home, it was called.”

“Never heard of it,” Gabe said flatly. “And I’m Catholic, and I was raised in Savannah.”

C. D. shrugged. “You probably never heard of it, ’cause like I said, the nuns closed it up a long time ago. It was on Habersham Street, right where there’s a grocery store today. They shut St. Joe’s down sometime in the fifties, but they kept on running the girls’ orphanage. I reckon they decided boys were too much trouble.”

“How does Josephine Warrick figure into all of this?” Gabe asked.

“How do you think? She got herself knocked up. And she wasn’t married, either, so she did what rich girls did back then. She paid somebody to take the kid—that’s me—off her hands. The nuns took me in, then when I was five, they shipped me out to Good Shepherd.”

C. D.’s mouth smiled, but his eyes were wary. “And that’s where I stayed, working on that damn cattle farm of theirs, until I got into trouble, and then I ran away before they could bounce me out.”

“How old were you when you left Good Shepherd?” Brooke asked.

“Sixteen.”

“And where did you finish high school?”

That smile again. “Who says I did? I was on my own, had to get a job, which I did. After a while, I was sick of Savannah, so I hitchhiked clear out to California and then back east. I ran into a recruiter in Baton Rouge, after an all-night bender, who promised me that I’d see the world if I signed up for the marines. Next thing I know, I’m at Parris Island, then right after that, I started seeing the world with the Third Marine Division in Vietnam.”

C. D. rolled up his shirtsleeve to display the tattoo on his bicep. “Semper fi, motherfucker.” He nodded at Gabe Wynant. “How ’bout you? Did you ever serve?”

“Nope. I turned eighteen in ’72, but I had a student deferment,” Gabe said.

“College boy,” C. D. said. “Figures.”

“I suppose you have some proof that Josephine Warrick was your birth mother?” Gabe asked. “Adoption records, birth certificate, something like that?”

C. D.’s smile dimmed a bit. “That ain’t how it worked back then. Everything was hush-hush.”

“Okay, what proof do you have?” Brooke asked. She couldn’t decide whether she was intrigued or horrified by C. D.’s unfolding story. A little of both, probably. “It’s not up to us, but a judge is going to want proof of the validity of your claim.”

C. D. leaned forward and brought out a worn leather billfold that was attached by a chain to his belt. He slid a packet of papers from the billfold and smoothed them out across his knees.

He held out a photocopy of a black-and-white newspaper photo of a small child of no more than two or three, dressed in cotton print pajamas and holding a toy truck, balanced on the knee of a woman who was looking away from the camera. “That’s me,” he said, tapping the image of the child. “And that’s Josephine.”