The High Tide Club

“Looking better and better for our buddy C. D.,” Felicia muttered. “First Josephine bought a new wing at St. Joseph’s, and then a new cottage here. Some guilt trip, huh?”

“Keep flipping those pages,” Lizzie said.

Two-thirds of the way through the book, they found a section devoted to black-and-white group photos of boys, organized by cottages.

“Here!” Felicia stabbed a slightly out-of-focus photo of eight young boys posed in front of a small brick house. “These kids look to be the right age.”

The boys stared into the camera, squinting in the sunlight. They were dressed in dungarees mostly, with two of the smallest ones wearing knickers and high socks. Their clothes were rumpled, and some wore baseball caps. A small balding man who wore pince-nez glasses stood behind the children, his hand on the shoulder of a dour-looking woman in a dark print dress.

The handwritten caption on the page read: “Cole Cottage, 6–8 yrs.”

“Do any of these kids look like C. D. to you?” Lizzie asked, peering down at the photo.

“I’ve only laid eyes on him a couple of times, so I can’t imagine what he looked like over seventy years ago,” Felicia said. “One thing catches my eye. They’re all white kids, right? What happened to black children who had nobody to look after them?”

“There used to be a home for black children in Savannah, according to my mom, but I don’t know too much about it. As for recognizing C. D., I’ve seen him and talked to him several times, but I’ve got no clue either,” Brooke admitted. “But look. You can see some writing on the back.” With a fingernail, she worked at the glued-down corners at the bottom of the photo. A moment later, she carefully turned the photo over to find a handwritten list of the children.

“Dicky Abbott, Buck Anthony, Frank Armour, Sid Babcock, Bobby Bass, Mickey Beaman, Chick Garber, Timmy Potts.”

“Buck Anthony,” she repeated. “That’s gotta be our guy. Bingo.”

“Which one?” Lizzie asked, leaning down to get a closer look.

Brooke shook her head. “I don’t know. It looks like they listed the kids’ names alphabetically, but there’s no telling if they’re lined up that way.”

Lizzie reached for her cell phone and snapped a photo of the list, then flipped the photo over and shot one of the picture itself.

They leafed rapidly through the rest of the scrapbook but found nothing else that showed a boy who could be C. D. “Buck” Anthony.

“Now what?” Brooke asked, looking at her watch. “We’ve only got ten more minutes before closing. That’s not really enough time to go through any more scrapbooks.”

“We’ve got a list of the boys who lived with him in that cottage,” Lizzie said.

“And we know at least one of them is still living, or he was as of a few months ago, when C. D. ran into him at that reunion,” Brooke said. “But which one? And how do we contact him?”

“Through the alumni association,” Felicia said. “That’s how my alma mater always reaches out to put the squeeze to me for donations.”

They heard the door open, and Don Smalls popped his head inside. “All set, ladies? I need to set the alarm and lock the place up now.”

“But it’s not five yet,” Lizzie protested.

“Sorry. I can’t be late for that board meeting,” Smalls said.

“Can you do us a huge favor?” Lizzie asked, walking rapidly toward him. “We found a picture of my dad, along with the rest of the boys who lived in his cottage in 1948, the year he came here. And we found a list of the names of the boys on the back. I took a photo with my phone. Maybe you could take a look and see if you recognize any names? Dad said he ran into one of his pals at the last reunion, but he couldn’t remember the name because of the dementia. But it’s likely this man belongs to the alumni association if he came to a reunion, right?”

“Maybe,” Smalls said.

Lizzie scrolled through her camera roll until she found the photo, and then she enlarged it.

Smalls read the list aloud. “Hmm. No, never heard of Dicky Abbott or Sid Babcock. Dowling, Garber, Potts, I’ve seen their names in old alumni newsletters, but I believe they’re all deceased. But Mickey Beaman, yeah. Mickey’s still active in the association. His son drives him to all the meetings and functions.”

Brooke’s heart leaped. “Do you by chance have contact information for Mickey Beaman?”

“No, but this time of day you can usually catch him at his son’s business. He likes to hang out there and chat with any old-timers who wander in. Mickey’s pretty loquacious. He’ll talk your ear off if you give him half a chance.”

“What’s the business?” Lizzie asked eagerly.

“Mr. B’s Quality Beverages,” Smalls said. He jangled his key chain to signal that their time was up.

51

Mr. B’s was a liquor store on West Broad Street, on the fringes of the Savannah College of Art and Design campus.

“We used to try to use fake IDs to buy booze here when I was in high school,” Brooke remarked after she’d parked.

An electronic doorbell rang as they entered the store, which was dark and cramped with narrow aisles built of liquor cartons, the walls lined with shelves of cut-rate wine. A glass partition separated the cashier stand from the rest of the shop, and behind it, an Asian woman with white-streaked dark hair was counting back change to a college kid with a case of beer tucked under his arm.

“I don’t think this place has been cleaned since the last time I was in here,” Brooke muttered to Lizzie. “And that’s definitely the same lady who called the cops on us.”

She waited until the store’s sole customer had departed and stepped up to the counter and gave a friendly smile to the cashier, who remained stone-faced.

“Hi. I’m looking for Mr. Beaman?”

“My husband’s out,” the woman said. “What do you want? Not another charity donation, I hope. You people are bleeding us broke with all these silent auctions and wine dinners.”

“I’m actually looking for Mickey Beaman,” Brooke said.

“Why?” The cashier looked over Brooke’s shoulder, regarding Lizzie and Felicia, who were loitering near the door, with growing suspicion.

“Well, uh…,” Brooke stammered, caught off guard by the woman’s hostility.

“We’re trying to find somebody who lived at Good Shepherd at the same time as a relative,” said Lizzie, stepping into the fray. “We just came from there, and a man in the development office suggested we talk to Mr. Beaman.”

The woman rolled her eyes and turned toward a partially open door behind her. “Dad!” she hollered. “Dad! Some people wanna talk to you out here.”

She waited a moment. “I’m warning you, once you get him talking about that place, he’ll never shut up.”

The door opened, and an old man shuffled out of the back room. His thinning gray hair was combed across his balding head. He wore a Budweiser-logoed golf shirt stretched tightly over a massive stomach.

“These ladies want to ask you some stuff about one of your Good Shepherd cronies,” the woman said.

Mickey Beaman’s eyes lit up at the mention of his alma mater. “What do you want to know?” he asked, leaning against the counter.