The High Tide Club

“Okay,” Marie said. “You’ve got me on pins and needles. What’s so important that you had to drop everything and drive up here today? Is it something about Josephine? Have the DNA results come back on C. D.?”

Brooke sipped her iced tea. “Yes, it’s definitely about Josephine. But this isn’t about C. D., Mom. It’s about you. And Millie. And Gardiner.”

“Oh yes,” Marie said. “The pilot. He was killed in the war, right?”

“That’s right.” Brooke handed her mother the packet of letters. She’d had Farrah make photocopies of everything before leaving the office, but she wanted Marie to read the originals.

“Before I forget, your dad wants you to call him.”

“Why? What does he want?”

“He’d like to speak to you. Could you just do me a favor and call him, please?”

“No.” Brooke abruptly set her glass down on the table. “I’m not calling him. He can call me if it’s that important.”

Marie handed the letters back. “I’m not looking at these until you call your father.”

“Mom! This is really important. It’s why I drove all the way up here today.”

Her mother folded her arms across her chest. “What your dad has to say to you is important too. So I’d say we’re at a stalemate.”

“Okay, fine. You read the letters while I call Dad.”

“Good idea.” Marie picked up the first letter and adjusted her reading glasses.

Brooke was too jittery to sit and watch her mother read Millie’s letters to Gardiner Bettendorf anyway. She walked slowly up the stairs and without really thinking about it pushed open the door to her old bedroom.

It was a small room, with a low, sloping ceiling and pink-and-green-striped wallpaper, last decorated when Brooke turned fourteen. Marie hadn’t gotten around to redecorating it yet, for which Brooke was thankful.

She sat on the white-painted canopy bed and scrolled through her contacts until she found Gordon Trappnell’s cell number. She checked the time. Not yet five. With luck, he’d still be at his office and out of earshot of Patricia, his second wife.

Gordon and Patricia had been married for five years now, but Brooke still refused to refer to her as her stepmother. Once, Patricia and her first husband had been close friends with Gordon and Marie. They’d been members of a neighborhood supper club, and Patricia had been part of Marie’s book club. But the divorces had shattered both those groups, not to mention Brooke’s own fondest notions about her parents’ “perfect marriage.”

She tapped his number, silently hoping he wouldn’t pick up. But he did, on the first ring.

“Brooke? Is that you?”

“It’s me, Dad. Mom said you wanted to talk to me. What’s up?”

“Oh. Well…” Her father seemed to be at a momentary loss for words. “How are you? How’s that boy of yours?”

Fifteen seconds. She was only fifteen seconds into a call with her father and already doing a slow burn.

“His name is Henry, Dad. H-E-N-R-Y. And he’s fine.”

“I know his name, Brooke. Your mom keeps me up to date on everything. Is his arm healing? Maybe next time you come up, we could get together. I’d really like to see him.”

An acid, sarcastic response was on the tip of her tongue, but she chose to let the moment pass. “That would be nice. His arm is totally healed. I’ll see what I can do about a get-together. In the meantime, what’s so important that you needed to talk to me about?”

“Marie tells me you’ve started seeing Gabe Wynant. Actually dating?”

“Don’t start on me about the age difference, Dad,” Brooke warned. “We’ve seen each other socially a couple of times. It’s no big deal, and besides, we’ve known each other for years.”

“Actually, you don’t really know him at all,” Gordon said. “This isn’t about that, although it’s ridiculous for a man his age—”

“Whoa! I’m thirty-four years old, you know. A little past the age when I want dating advice from my daddy.”

“Listen to me, damn it! Patricia says Gabe is a charlatan—”

“Okay, just stop right there. I’m not going to listen to your new wife’s character assassination of a man I’ve known and admired for the past decade.”

“If you’d just let me finish,” Gordon said.

“Nope. Not interested. Nice try. Bye, Dad.”

Brooke disconnected, still fuming. She stared at the assortment of framed photos on her old white-painted dresser, Brooke laughing into the camera with her best friend, Holly, on the beach at Tybee Island. There was Brooke in her cap and gown after her graduation from Savannah Country Day. She picked up the oldest photo, a three-generation snapshot of her grandmother Millie seated on the sofa next to an impossibly young-looking Marie, who held an eighteen-month-old Brooke in a frilly white Easter dress.

Millie was gazing adoringly at the baby, and Marie was beaming proudly.

Brooke’s memories of Millie, her granny, were hazy now. She remembered a crystal lidded dish, always placed on the coffee table and filled with pink jelly beans for her visiting granddaughter. She remembered stacks of library books and record albums, mostly classical music, that Granny played on a bulky turntable in what she called her “hi-fi cabinet.”

She took the photograph, left the bedroom, and walked slowly downstairs, where her mother was still seated in the sunroom.

“Mom?”

Her mother’s beautifully composed face was in ruins. She stared numbly at the letters. “Where did you find these?”

“Lizzie found them. In Gardiner’s footlocker, which was shoved way in the back of a closet in the library at Shellhaven. The military shipped it there to Josephine after he was killed.”

Marie scowled. “That horrible, horrible woman.”

“Who? Josephine?”

“Yes.” Marie tossed the stack onto the table. “She read these letters, then hid them. She knew Mama was in love with Gardiner, was having—I mean, had—his child. Mama was her oldest, dearest friend. And Josephine just cut her out of her life. No wonder she wanted to make amends with us.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Brooke said. “Maybe that’s why Josephine quit talking to Ruth too—because she knew Granny had confided in Ruth but not in her. Of course Josephine read all the letters. She must have been furious at her best friends.”

“Why? Why, after Pops died, didn’t she reach out to Mama? The secret wouldn’t have mattered so much then, not between the two of them, anyway.”

“I don’t know,” Brooke admitted. “There’s so much I didn’t understand about Josephine. After Preiss died, she was essentially alone for the next forty years or so. All those years, she had no family, and she isolated herself from her oldest, closest friends. But she did have family—she had us, and we were what? An hour and a half away, in Savannah? A phone call, that’s all it would have taken. Instead, she waited until she knew she was dying.”

“Mama never said a word,” Marie said, twisting and untwisting the napkin she held in her hands.

Brooke sat down in the chair opposite her mother’s and gripped her hands in hers.

“Do you think Pops knew?” It was a question that had haunted Brooke since she’d read Millie’s last letter to Gardiner.