The High Tide Club
“You totally did,” Brooke said.
And before she could say anything else, he leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips. “Don’t tell the babysitter,” he whispered.
46
“Brooke?” There was more than a note of panic in Louette’s voice.
It was Wednesday morning. She’d just walked into her office and hadn’t even had time to fire up the coffee maker or laptop before her cell phone rang.
“What’s wrong?” Brooke asked.
“Those cousins of Josephine’s, Dorcas and Delphine, they’re here! They just come riding up here in a Jeep with some man from the state park. I let ’em in, ’cause I didn’t know what else to do, but now they’re walking around, talking like they own the place. I think you’d better come quick.”
“How the hell did they even find out Josephine is dead?”
“They said there was a big piece in the newspapers yesterday. They already called a lawyer, and he told them they’re fixin’ to inherit this whole island, including the house.”
“What newspaper?” Brooke walked around the office, looking for her copy of the local paper, a weekly that was published on Wednesdays.
“I don’t know. Maybe the Savannah paper? Or Atlanta? We don’t get a paper over here. Shug reads the sports page online.”
“I’ll head over there right now. Can you have C. D. pick me up at the city dock?”
“We ain’t seen C. D. in a couple of days. I’ll send Shug over. He’s off work today.”
“Okay, see you soon. And try not to worry, Louette.”
Brooke flipped her laptop open and did a quick Google search on Josephine’s name. The first citation was an article from the previous day’s edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Talisa Island, GA. Josephine Bettendorf Warrick, the legendary heiress owner of this wildest of Georgia’s untamed barrier islands, died last week at the age of 99. Her death signals what is almost certainly the last chapter of private ownership of the 12,000-acre Talisa.
Mrs. Warrick’s father, Samuel G. Bettendorf, was a Boston shipping magnate who purchased the Carter County island more than a century ago with two cousins. He commissioned famed Gilded-Age architect Addison Mizner to design and build a pink stucco Beaux-Arts-inspired twenty-room mansion he dubbed Shellhaven.
Carter County sheriff Howard Goolsby confirmed Mrs. Warrick’s death, saying that the nonagenarian, who’d recently been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, died of a head injury last Saturday after a fall. There are no known survivors.
Bettendorf’s only son, Samuel Gardiner Bettendorf Jr., who was known as Gardiner, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force at the age of 23 and was killed when the Spitfire he piloted was shot down over Nazi-occupied France in early 1942. The senior Bettendorf died one year later, leaving his daughter as sole owner of much of the island, with the exception of a smaller tract of land on the northern tip of Talisa, which was retained by distant relatives who sold their land to the state for a park in 1978.
In 1949, Josephine Bettendorf married Preiss H. Warrick, a naval captain she met at a bridge party on Sea Island, Georgia. The couple, both amateur naturalists, made the protection of Talisa and its wildlife their life’s work. Preiss Warrick died in 1966 of renal disease.
The couple never had children, and Mrs. Warrick spent the remainder of her life as a fierce guardian of the island, mounting a thirty-year fight to fend off the state’s efforts to buy it.
Brooke closed the laptop and called Gabe Wynant. The phone rang three times, and she got his voice mail.
“Hi, Gabe. Sorry to bother you, but Louette just called to say that Josephine’s long-lost cousins turned up at Shellhaven this morning and are already acting pretty possessive. I’m going over there right now, and I just wanted to give you a heads-up. Talk soon.”
* * *
Shug eased the boat away from the slip at the municipal dock. The water was calm, and seagulls wheeled and soared overhead as they crossed the river.
“How are Varina and Felicia doing?” Brooke asked, as they rode through the no-wake zone.
“Varina’s happy as a clam, but that Felicia, I don’t think she really takes to island life,” Shug said with a chuckle. “She spends most of her time on that computer, teaching her online classes and reading. And she doesn’t leave the house unless she sprays all over with bug spray. Still, she’s got a good heart, taking care of her auntie the way she does.”
“Have you started working on Varina’s house?”
“Oh yeah. We got all the vines and brush tore off outside, and cleared out a whole nest of raccoons that had been living in the chimney. The roofing shingles and insulation and windows and such I ordered should be here by Friday. And you ought to see that little old lady Varina, leaning on her walker and sweeping and mopping the inside of that house.”
“You’re a saint to house them and help them out this way, Shug.”
“Just doin’ what’s right,” he said. “Family’s family.”
“And what about Louette? How’s she holding up with all this stress?”
“Not so good,” he admitted. “Her blood pressure’s up, and she’s worried somebody’s gonna make us move off the island. I told her, ‘Honey, we got money, and we got a place to go,’ but we both know she’s true Geechee. Only place she’s ever gonna be happy is right there in that little house at Oyster Bluff.”
* * *
Louette met her at the front door at Shellhaven. She pointed down the hall toward the library. “They’re back there, and I’m afraid Lizzie is about to snatch ’em bald.”
“I’ll see if I can referee,” Brooke promised.
She heard raised voices as she approached the library’s open door.
“You can’t just ransack our family’s belongings this way,” a woman was saying.
“Hi!” Brooke said, stepping inside.
Two women whirled around to confront the newcomer.
The cousins looked enough alike that they could have been twins. They were skinny, probably in their mid- to late seventies, with dyed strawberry-blond hair so thinned that large patches of pink scalp showed beneath their matching golf visors. They wore T-shirts tucked into their elastic-waisted khaki slacks and sturdy, blindingly white tennis shoes, and they were both glaring at Lizzie, who’d constructed a makeshift office on a card table in the middle of the room.
“Hi, Brooke!” Lizzie looked profoundly grateful for her arrival. She gestured at the women. “These are Josephine’s long-lost cousins, Dorcas and Delphine. Or is it Delphine and Dorcas?”
“I’m Dorcas Fentress, and this is my cousin Delphine McElwain,” said the taller of the two, whose T-shirt was hot pink with a design of sequined kittens. “And you’re the lawyer our cousin supposedly hired to handle her affairs, despite the fact that she had a perfectly capable law firm in Atlanta?”
“That’s me,” Brooke said, extending her hand. “Brooke Trappnell. My grandmother Millie was one of Josephine’s best friends growing up.”
“And my grandmother Ruth Mattingly Quinlan was one of her other best friends,” Lizzie said. “They all went to boarding school together.”
“I never heard Josephine mention either of those names,” Delphine said. Her blue T-shirt had a motif of dancing dolphins, and her wire-rimmed glasses had blue-tinted lenses.