The Final Victim (12 page)

    "I'm not worried."

    Then why
, Charlotte can't help but wonder as a nagging uneasiness takes over,
am I
?

    
"How about a little more pudding, Jeanne?"
Melanie asks. "It's tapioca. You love tapioca."

    
Jeanee
hates tapioca, but what does it matter? They've been bringing it to her for years, assuming she enjoys it because she eats it all.

    She supposes she could ask for vanilla pudding instead, or even chocolate, but that would mean striking up a conversation, and potentially inviting other topics.

    It's much easier, much safer, to just eat the tapioca, and whatever else the nurse brings to her.

    Today it was sloppy
joes
, overcooked carrots, and pudding; yesterday, creamed beef, limp string beans the color of jarred olives, and stewed peaches.

    
Institutional food.
If you're hungry enough-and Jeanne invariably is-you'll eat it.

    Jeanne eats it, and she remembers…

    Remembers beans freshly picked off the vine: stem ends snapping easily beneath her fingers; their vibrant, grassy shade of green retained even after they were slightly steamed; delicious buttered and salted-the crisp burst of flavor on her tongue…

    Remembers peaches plucked from the orchard out back, so ripe your fingertips could rub the skin from the flesh at the slightest touch, revealing luscious, pink- tinged, orange-yellow fruit that always reminded Jeanne of a Low Country sunset…

    
"Jeanne?" Melanie persists. "More tapioca?"

    
She shakes her head vehemently.

    Now her peaches and her beans come from cans, plopped in compartments of thick beige paper trays and delivered by young women who speak to her with the measured simplicity of a preschool teacher and merely bide their time here, their thoughts on their otherwise fascinating lives.

    Petite blond Melanie is Jeanne's favorite by far of all the nurses who have come through here over the years; she, at least, doesn't seem particularly eager to leave when her shift is over. She doesn't seem to have much of a life away from
Oakgate
. Often, she arrives early or stays longer than she needs to, bustling around reassuringly, often humming.

    She's always, always cheerful.
Too cheerful, almost.
Never before has Jeanne ever encountered another human being who doesn't seem to have a bad day-or even a so-so day-
ever
.

    But she doesn't only sing and hum and, on occasion, whistle jauntily. She talks, too, ostensibly to Jeanne, but sometimes, it seems, to herself, often about herself. She reveals in disarming detail a childhood spent in one foster home after another, abusive parents who willingly signed away their rights. She spent years praying she'd be adopted, and realized in her teens that the prayer would never be answered.

    You'd think a person like that would grow up to be a glum, pessimistic adult.
But not Melanie.

    She even wound up on the streets for a few years, and has alluded to doing whatever was necessary to stay alive. Then, she said, along came a wealthy older gentleman who took her under his wing, got her an apartment, put her through nursing school.

    "If it weren't for him, Jeanne, who knows where I'd be?" she likes to ask. She also likes to answer. "I know where I'd be.
Dead
."

    Jeanne would be very interested to know more about the mysterious benefactor who saved her. Whenever Melanie mentions him, Jeanne notices that she fails to reveal even his first name-and senses that the oversight is deliberate. Jeanne can't help but sense an uncharacteristic reticence that hints there might be pertinent details Melanie isn't sharing. But asking about the man would open the door to reciprocal interaction-and perhaps, emotional complications-that Jeanne just doesn't need.

    
Certainly not now, when she has a difficult decision weighing on her mind.

    
Decision?

    What decision?

    You know what you have to do, Jeanne. You always knew what
you 'd
do if it came down to this…

    
But not yet.

    Not when there's still a chance.

    "Would you like to get back into bed now, and take a nap?"

    She shakes her head at Melanie's query, preferring to remain here in the window, where she can watch the driveway below.

    They all left a short time ago, separately, in pairs.
First Charlotte and her daughter, then
Phyllida
and
Gib
, followed shortly by
Phyllida's
husband whose name Jeanne can't recall, toting their young son and a beach umbrella.

    Charlotte's husband, Royce, left hours earlier in his silver Audi, dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase as he does most mornings-probably going to his office if it's a weekday.

    Is it a weekday?

    Where is Royce's office?

    What does he even do?

    If Jeanne ever knew, she can't remember.

    Nor is it important.

    "What day is it?" she asks the nurse, bustling somewhere behind her.

    "Did you say something, Jeanne?" Melanie is instantly at her side, eager to be engaged in conversation.

    "What day is
it?"Jeanne
is careful to maintain a monotone this time.

    
"The date?
Let's see, it must be July-"

    
"No, the day.
What day?
Saturday,
or…?"

    "Oh, it's Tuesday."

    
Tuesday
.

    
A weekday.

    Her grandnephew and both grandnieces were dressed in dark-colored, professional-looking suits.

    They're going to the lawyer's office
, Jeanne concludes, momentarily pleased with her detective work.

    Then, as she acknowledges what that means-Gilbert's will is about to be read-the tapioca pudding goes into a spin cycle in her stomach.

    In all his years as an attorney, Tyler Hawthorne has never faced the reading of a will with as much trepidation as he does now, as he paces his Drayton Street office.

    It isn't just because he and Gilbert Xavier Remington II had been friends since childhood. When they lost Silas Neville-the third member of the close-knit group formed in a boarding school dormitory almost eighty Septembers ago-Tyler was mostly just sorrowful.

    Then again, Silas's will was straightforward; no surprises there. He left everything to Betsy, his fourth wife, who spent more time fluttering around Savannah than she did at Silas's bedside during his last months on earth, after the stroke that paralyzed just about every function but his speech. As Betsy so eloquently phrased it, "I've always been a little squeamish. Those hospice nurses are much better at this kind of thing than I am."

    If Tyler had any anxieties about the prospect of reading Silas's will, they were based on the fear that Betsy might put her hand on his thigh beneath the table, as she was reputedly inclined to do even when her husband was alive.

    It didn't happen. The will was read without a hitch- and Betsy went on to get
rehitched
just six months later, to a man her own age-or perhaps a decade younger. As Gilbert dryly stated at the time, he probably needed someone to pay his college tuition.

    
I miss you already, Gilbert.

    And you, too, Silas
.

    This world seems to get lonelier with every passing week.

    Tyler is acutely aware of his status as a widower himself, and as sole survivor of a lifelong threesome referred to back in their boarding school days as the Telfair Trio. He sinks into his leather swivel chair behind the mahogany desk at which two previous generations of
Hawthornes
practiced law.

    The days of standing weekly golf games and lunches at the club with Silas and Gilbert were long gone well before his friends died. But despite having drifted with old age from their social and recreational rituals, the bond forged four score-give or take a year or two- ago, remained.

    The trio staged some risky schoolboy pranks and escapades in their days at Telfair Academy-always knowing they had each other's backs.

    That loyalty-that willingness to cover for each other, even if it meant lying to an authority
figure,
or a spouse- lingered into adulthood. They knew each other's deepest and, in some cases, darkest secrets.

    Thanks to Silas and Gilbert, Tyler's beloved Marjorie went to her deathbed never knowing of his foolish, youthful indiscretions.

    And thanks to Silas and Tyler putting their own careers as doctor and lawyer on the line, Gilbert's family fortune remains intact-and, perhaps even more importantly, the Remington name untarnished.

    Perhaps it was the Telfair Trio's final escapade, that ultimate test of their
allegiance, that
pushed them all too far. After that, things were never quite the same.
On the surface, yes.
But deep down, Tyler suspects, guilt had finally caught up with all three of them.

    
Perhaps Gilbert most of all.

    
But it all happened years ago.
Another lifetime, it seems.

    Tyler drums his fingertips on the green blotter and turns a nervous eye toward the swinging pendulum of the wall clock opposite.

    In about five minutes, Gilbert Remington
II's
descendants are going to walk through that door, fully anticipating that they will walk back out set for life, millionaires many times over.

    One won't be disappointed.

    "Remember, you need to be ready when I come back here to get you." Parked at the curb in front of Casey's house on Bull Street in Savannah's historic district, Mom taps the steering wheel of her white Lexus SUV with both hands for emphasis.

    
Lianna
almost wishes old Stephen had driven her into town instead of her mother. But the chauffeur has gone to visit his daughter in Atlanta for a few weeks, and Great-
Grandaddy's
shiny black car sits unused in the carriage house until he gets back.

    "I'm going to call your cell phone when I'm on my way," Mom goes on, "so you'll have plenty of warning, and I swear, if you're not
ready "

    "I will be,"
Lianna
says, wishing her mother would stop talking to her, and frowning over at her in the passenger's seat, as if she's a naughty little girl. It's enough to make her add, snippily, "Just don't call and say you're coming back a half hour from now and expect me to be happy to see you."

    "Don't use that tone with me." Mom's violet eyes darken ominously.

    
Lianna
can't help but notice, jealously, that her mother is strikingly pretty even when she's angry. It isn't fair. Why can't Mom look like a regular person, the way her friends' mothers do? Or, if she has to be so beautiful, at least
Lianna
could have inherited her looks.

    
Lianna
apparently resembles not her father, with his dark good looks, but his side of the family, though she doesn't know firsthand. Her paternal grandparents died long before she was born, and she hasn't seen her father's only sister in years. For that matter, she doesn't see a whole lot of Dad himself-but only because Mom won't let her. That's what he says, and
Lianna
believes it wholeheartedly.

    Mom wasn't even nice to Daddy at the funeral, after he drove all that way to offer his condolences.

    Too bad that he couldn't stay longer or that
Lianna
couldn't go home with him. He said his apartment is too small, but he's working on getting a bigger one, so she can start spending every other weekend with him, the way she's supposed to-and never has.

    "You heard what I said,
Lianna
." Mom is still glaring at her. "When I get back, you'll be ready to come home with me."

    "Yeah, well…
Oakgate
isn't home. Just so you know. In case you forgot."

    
Shut up
,
Lianna
tells herself.
Why are you making things difficult? Why don't you just get out of the stupid car before she decides to take you with her to the stupid lawyer's office?

    Why?

    Who the heck knows?

    She just can't seem to help herself. Lately, whenever she's talking to her mother, she opens her mouth and harsh, spiteful things fall out of it
To
her surprise, her mother doesn't have an angry retort. This time, anyway.

    "I know
Oakgate
isn't home,
Lianna
," Mom says, sounding almost sympathetic. "It really won't be much longer till we come back to Savannah. I promise."

    
Lianna
is tempted to point out that the new house in Savannah isn't home, either. Not to her. No place feels like home to her anymore.