The Final Victim (3 page)

    Deep in the thicket beyond
Oakgate
, broad stretches of marsh are broken by dense wooded clumps of maritime forest: oaks, pines, cabbage palms, and a tangle of native vines. Abundant Spanish moss threads its scaly tendrils over every living bough. Years ago, a good portion of this marshy acreage behind
Oakgate
must have been dry land.

    Dry enough, anyway, to house the row of slave cabins that are surprisingly well preserved after decades of neglect and encroaching tidal surges.

    Of course, the cabins aren't in the water-yet. Just surrounded by it, and well sheltered from human destruction by acres upon acres of wetlands and dense undergrowth.

    If there remains anyone on this earth who even remembers that the cabins exist, they certainly don't care enough to go to the trouble of paying a visit.

    The structures poke their sturdy crowns through the tangle of foliage, looking for
all the
world like something out of a nursery rhyme… except that all three are made of brick.

    Pity there's no door on the nearest, and most easily accessible of the three.

    
Yes, otherwise I could knock and say, "Little pig, little pig… Let me come in!"

    Only there's no one inside to hear…
Yet.

    Along with the roof, the wooden door has long since rotted away in the unforgiving, damp climate, leaving only a few scattered, spongy remains of hand-hewn timbers. But a door can easily be replaced.

    A cursory examination of the interior, courtesy of a handy
flashlight,
shows that there are no windows here, and no other doors. Where the ceiling used to be, a jungle of moss and leaves block out the light. The only thing that breaks the expanse of brick wall within is a shallow fireplace. There doesn't seem to be even a toehold, should a future prisoner want to escape the sturdy cell by scaling a wall.

    This will do. This will do quite nicely.

    It's obvious that no living soul has been out here recently, though a proliferation of webbing and a rustling in the overhead foliation indicates countless living creatures have made the old slave cabin their home.

    Bats, snakes, rodents, reptiles, bugs, spiders… It will be a daunting job to rid just one of the three cabins of its furry and creepy-crawly twenty-first-century residents.

    But one cabin is all that's needed.

    
One cabin that has been outfitted with everything that's needed for this…
project
.

    Yes,
project
is a good way to think of it. It makes it all sound very businesslike-which is precisely what this is, when you get right down to it.

    He had no idea about this part, of course. No reason for that.

    
No, this is strictly my own little scene
.

    
Time to roll up the sleeves-and get to work.

    The third floor is always stuffy at this time of year. Electric box fans in two of the windows do little to cool the sultry air.

    Perched beside the third window in her wheelchair, Jeanne Remington longs for a genuine breeze as she gazes down at the darkening grounds of
Oakgate
.

    Her late brother refused to have central air-conditioning installed in the old house, saying he didn't want to rip apart the walls to install the necessary ductwork. Nor would he even allow window units in the bedrooms; the wiring was so old the extra strain would be a fire hazard, and replacing it was, again, too much trouble.

    
Anyway
, he liked to say,
generations of
Remingtons
got through Georgia summers without air-conditioning. We don't need it.

    Maybe
he
didn't…

    
But up here in the attic, there are only three windows that open, all of them small dormer-style.
The others are even smaller: round bull's-eyes sitting high beneath the eaves, lacking even window treatments to block out the afternoon sun.

    Gilbert never did spend excessive time worrying about anybody else's comfort, though. He was a difficult, self-centered man, to say the least A challenging boy, too, from what Jeanne can remember-when she chooses to remember anything at all about her childhood.

    She was a few years younger than her
brother,
and frequently exasperated by his daring antics… when she wasn't feeling sorry for him as he endured his father's harsh punishment for sins real and imagined.

    She probably should have been grateful that she never had to endure being locked in her room, or having her mouth washed out with soap, or, far worse, being beaten with a leather belt.

    Oddly, though, along with pity, she felt a strange resentment whenever her brother suffered at their father's hands. Not just resentment toward the man who dealt the harsh punishment, but resentment toward her brother.

    Sometimes she could almost convince herself that any attention from the man she called Father would be better than none at all.

    But he ignored her.
Totally.
For as long as she could remember.
He didn't discipline her, barely spoke to her, never even pretended to love her.

    She didn't comprehend the reason until her eighth birthday, when she found herself in tears, once again, because of something Father said-or, more likely, failed to say. That was when her big brother told her the truth: Gilbert Remington wasn't her real father, and he knew it. In fact, everyone in the household knew it.
Everyone but Jeanne.

    In retrospect, she and Mother were probably fortunate that Father didn't throw them both out of the house. His old-fashioned pride kept the family intact, if only for appearances' sake.

    If Savannah was the most genteel of Southern cities, Father, with his impeccable manners, was the most genteel of its residents.

    The first Gilbert Xavier Remington was an expert at keeping up the public charade. But in private, he had no use for Jeanne or her mother, Marie. He saw to it that neither of them would inherit a penny of the family fortune, and stipulated that if his son died without heirs, he was to leave his estate to a public trust-not to his sister.

    That didn't happen. Gilbert II lost his wife and both of his sons years ago, but he has heirs: three grandchildren.

    
You can't resent them, or Gilbert, for that matter
, Jeanne reminds herself.
Your brother did more for you than you ever could have hoped or expected.

    Unlike his father, Gilbert II had a heart. He must have.
Because he clearly felt sorry for Jeanne.
Especially when her mind started to go, just as Mother's did so many years ago.

    Or so everyone believes.

    Father isn't the only Remington who's an expert at charades.

    "Let's go into town and have dinner," Royce
suggests
,giving
Charlotte's hand a squeeze.

    "Town," she knows, is not the
Achoco
Island's commercial strip but rather Savannah, about forty-five minutes' drive north of here.

    "Here" is
Grandaddy's
vintage red brick, black-shuttered, white-pillared mansion.

    Once a thriving plantation producing rice and indigo,
Oakgate
lies on the top third of the island, amidst the coastal marsh not far from the northernmost causeway. Its boundaries once encompassed several thousand I acres of the island's narrower upper end, including a rice mill and brick slave cabins that now lie in ruins deep in the marsh. When the rice industry waned following the Civil War, the
Remingtons
sold off the southernmost parcels of land, traded for a prosperous paper mill.

    Years before Charlotte was born, Remington Paper was swallowed up by an internationally renowned conglomerate, Global Paper Corporation; its operation moved to the Midwest, the paper mill was razed and a low-income housing development built on its site.

    
Grandaddy
reinforced his position as one of the wealthiest men-and the family name among the most prominent-in coastal Georgia. As the local newspaper's social columnist once wrote:
Boston has the Kennedys, New I York the Rockefellers, Delaware the
Duponts
, and Savannah the
Remingtons
.

    What the press failed to note is that unlike his Northern counterparts,
Grandaddy
wasn't exactly a philanthropist
The
world never knew-or at least the press refrained from mentioning-his frugality. His children and grandchildren were provided with perfunctory trust funds, but he was determined to control the family purse strings until he died. His sons, who had been content with their figurehead positions in the mill, were equally content to live off the profits as long as they could afford their bon vivant lifestyles.

    "What do you say?" Royce is asking. "Some seafood, a nice glass of Pinot
Grigio
…"

    "The Pinot
Grigio
is definitely tempting. I wish there
were a bottle
in the house, though… That way we wouldn't have to go out." But there's no liquor here at
Oakgate
.
Grandaddy
didn't imbibe, or condone it in outers, or allow the stuff to cross his threshold.

    "Oh, let's go. Maybe we can even catch a movie after we eat. It'll get your mind off things."

    "I shouldn't really be out socializing in public tonight,"

    Charlotte reminds her husband. "It doesn't look right."

    His brown eyes overcast with understanding, Royce nonetheless shakes his head and urges, "Come
on
,Charlotte
. We're not staying on the island."

    "
Grandaddy
wasn't exactly anonymous in Savannah, and neither am
I. People will
say, 'Look at her, out celebrating all those millions she just inherited.'"

    That disapproving comment was uttered by
Grandaddy
himself about the widow of Dr. Silas Neville, his lifelong friend, when she showed up at the hospital ball in a red gown just weeks after the funeral.

  
"Who cares what people think?" Royce asks.

 
 
"Not me, but…"

   
 
Oh, who are you kidding, Charlotte?

   
The magnolia blossom doesn't fall far from the tree, or so
Grandaddy
liked to say. The
Remingtons
have always played by the rules of polite Southern society. Charlotte was raised to be a lady at all times.

    That, in part, is why it took her so long to get out of her marriage to a man who was anything but a gentleman. If Vincent hadn't taken it upon himself to end it, she might still be with him.

    
What an abhorrent thought.

    "I'm just not in the mood to go out," she tells Royce. "But you go, take
Lianna
. And maybe you should see if anyone else wants to join y'all," she adds as an afterthought, remembering the Remington relatives currently staying with them at
Oakgate
.

    
"I barely know your cousins."

    "That makes two of us. They were much younger, and I only saw them when they visited down here in the summers, remember?"

    "Well, forgive me for saying this, but from what I do know, I'm not exactly anxious to spend the evening with them."

    She smiles briefly. "It's all right. I don't blame you. But
Lianna
-"

    "She won't come out of her room."

    
"Why not?"

    "Who knows? She's refusing to talk." Charlotte sighs.
"Again?"

    "She's probably just upset about your
Grandaddy
."

   
 
Charlotte shakes her head grimly. Her temperamental daughter took to barricading herself in her bedroom in stony silence well before her great-grandfather's fatal heart attack.

    If the doors in this old house had been updated in the last sixty years, Charlotte wouldn't hesitate to unlock her daughter's and barge in whenever she pulls this. But
Grandaddy
, whose parents reportedly used to lock him in his room for days as punishment, had all the two-way locks removed when he became head of the household.

    Now there are no keys; all bedroom doors lock only with latches on the inside. And Charlotte refuses to stand in the hall begging
Lianna
to open up, having endured that futile power struggle on more than one occasion.

    Although handling
Lianna's
recent transformation from docile child to tantrum queen pales in comparison to other, far more traumatic maternal experiences Charlotte had faced in the past,
it's
distressing nonetheless.

    With a rustle of her black-silk funeral dress, she stands and heads for the doorway.

    "I already tried to talk to her," Royce warns. "She won't even answer. I think she's locked in for the rest of the night."

    "I'm not going to try to talk to her. I'm going to change out of this dress so you can take me to dinner, just the two of us."