Not What She Seems: A Novel, page 10
In the woods, cell signals and Wi-Fi were spotty on a good day and nonexistent during storms. The dense woods and swamps were bad enough, but when bad weather blew in from the Atlantic, the coastal towns were always the heaviest hit, the eroding man-made and natural seawalls sometimes serving their purpose and sometimes not. But that was coastal living. We were used to it. At least Brook Haven was a little more inland, suffering less than the many towns and cities right on the coast, like Charleston and Hilton Head.
I drove over the small bridge above the creek, and just before turning off the main road onto the single lane that would take me to the cabin, I sent off a text to Nick and Sawyer.
At my granddad’s to start cleaning then to MM to take pprwk to N’s new mama.
Nick replied with a middle finger emoji and Sawyer a thumbs-up.
See you later at the diner.
They agreed. Then my phone pinged with another incoming message.
Nick: Maybe we can talk later? One on one
I read it a couple of times, trying to glean deeper meaning from his few words. What did he want to discuss that couldn’t involve Sawyer, and did I want to deal with it right now? That night back then? Faye? Maybe she’d complained about me at the church service, and Nick was going to get on me about it. Or maybe it was something else. My stomach somersaulted at the possibilities. Then, the anticipation upended, becoming worry at those same possibilities. I put the Beetle in park and pressed the ignition button to turn the car off.
I surveyed my surroundings. The empty cabin still looked like I remembered, warm and welcoming, even though Granddad would never again open the front door with a creak to watch me make my way to him, as if I’d trip or get hurt in the few yards it took to get there.
As I walked the property, familiarizing myself with my old stomping grounds, I noted the overgrown grass and weeds that would have to be tended to. Maybe Nick could suggest someone. The toolshed was still locked tight, and when I opened it with the large ring of keys Granddad’s executor had given me, none of his equipment looked out of place. The large generator was there, ready for duty should the need arise. I hoped not. I might have grown up here, but I still didn’t want to be stuck out here when a storm hit.
I saved the side door, the one where they said he’d been found, for last. Purposely taking my time, knowing eventually I’d have to face it and my imaginings of how scared he must have been and in how much pain, if what I’d seen him go through at the hospital was any indication.
The side door looked as it always had. I climbed the few steps to it and slid the key in the lock. The door swung inward, and my eyes immediately went down to the doorway. I imagined Granddad lying there, half in and half out.
Granddad was facing up.
Pen’s voice slipped in, reading Patrick’s response. I took a big step inside, careful to avoid the area where I thought he’d been. In the short square of space.
Facing up.
I wasn’t sure why the words kept rattling around in my brain like that. Why they bothered me. I turned around, facing the open door. Grandma’s side table, the one she’d built during her woodworking phase. My fingers ran along the corner of the table. Dr. Weigert said Granddad had sustained a contusion and a concussion from a fall on the back of his head. From where Patrick had found him, Granddad must have hit his head on this corner. Ice-cold fingers reached inside my chest and squeezed as I touched the spot. Granddad had suffered, alone. Afraid.
I looked at the open door. My mind drifted to that night, to the steps he’d taken, wondering what had made him head out at that time of night. It had to have been late, because he was still alive, albeit barely, when Patrick found him.
He’d headed toward the door for whatever reason.
“Sorry, Granddad,” I mumbled, unable to avoid his spot anymore.
I stepped up to the door, leaning through and pulling it closed. Then I opened it again. Granddad was found half in, half out. That meant he’d had to step outside.
“And then what?” I said to the room. The room knew the answer. But it wasn’t talking.
I walked onto the step, looking out into the woods. Wondering what Granddad had been looking at. This was when the heart attack happened. Maybe. And then this was how he might have fallen backward.
I tried it. I was five foot six, and Granddad had me by a few inches. I moved back what I thought was four inches, then leaned as if I were falling.
Before I could lose my balance, I stopped. Reassessed my movements and tried again. It didn’t work.
The distance between being half in and half out of the doorway and the corner of the table where Granddad hit the back of his head was too far. My stomach tightened.
Maybe he’d been outside, and the heart attack hit, and then he staggered backward, hitting his head?
I shook my head. “No,” I said into the air.
Because even if he staggered backward, his body still wouldn’t have been half in and half out. And if he went backward into the house, he would have turned around to grab something to anchor him, something to help him. He wouldn’t have been lying flat, face up.
I ticked through as many probabilities as I could think of, just like Granddad had taught me when we were hot on one of his cold cases from his forum. Maybe Patrick had it wrong, and he wasn’t really half and half. Maybe he was farther inside, enough to be able to hit his head as he fell backward. Though Patrick was trained to pay attention to detail as a police officer, he wasn’t expecting to see Granddad lying there like that and could have gotten the distance wrong.
His first instinct would have been to save, try to resuscitate him. Call for help. Stay by Granddad’s side until EMS came. Not to check how far inside Granddad was. All he would know was that the door was open and Granddad appeared half in. Not partially. Not a little bit. It wasn’t a murder scene, and Granddad hadn’t been dead. There wouldn’t have been an investigation because they would have thought it was just an old man suffering a pacemaker malfunction, resulting in a heart attack.
I was making more out of it than necessary. I closed the door and went into the cabin, turning on the light. The house looked the same. A bedroom on either side of the main living room. Through the front door was a good-size enclosed porch. The desk was cluttered with Granddad’s books, notebooks, an empty plate of crumbs from when he’d had a sandwich. Just stuff. His computer was off but plugged in, just as Granddad had kept it all the time. I turned it on, and the sign-in screen came up.
I checked out the rest of the house, taking stock of the work I’d have to do. Not too much. Granddad was very tidy. And really, Pen should have been here . . . our cousin Kei too . . . to figure out what they wanted. For now, all our grandparents’ stuff would remain as it was.
Something was off with the large whiteboard. It took me a minute to realize what was wrong. It was too clear. It was wiped almost clean, which was odd because the board was never clean. Granddad was a scribbler and wrote notes everywhere, especially on it. Sometimes the board would contain a quick grocery list, but mostly it held the names involved in whatever cold case had piqued his interest and he’d decided to work on. Most people played Wordle or sudoku. My grandfather solved cold cases and true crime cases with his Armchair Detectives forum group. It was as exciting to him as watching football.
But the whiteboard wasn’t entirely clean. Someone had given it a quick swipe, leaving streaks of black marker around the edges. When Granddad was done with a case and about to start another, he would completely wipe down the board, leaving it spotless before he immediately started filling it up again.
Girl, if you’re gonna be my junior dick, then you’d better go over that board again. How many times had I heard that?
I stepped in closer, turning on another light. I saw two words in the middle, with an oval drawn around them. Someone had mostly wiped them off, but Granddad was heavy handed and the wipe job was half-assed, leaving the imprint of the words still there.
Colleton Girls.
A band? Or a family?
There was nothing I could see on his desk about Colleton Girls. Was it a case he’d started, then DNR’d? Had he solved it? If so, the board would have been wiped clean, and a new crop of case info would’ve taken its place. It certainly wouldn’t look as if the board had been cleaned in a rush.
I paused my physical search, sitting on the arm of the couch, checking my phone. Three bars. It was a good day. I wouldn’t have time to fire up Granddad’s computer for a deep dive because the thing was ancient and would take forever to load. Plus, I had to get those papers to Faye to sign, or Mama would have my head. My cell would have to do for now.
Colleton Girls.
A quick search of the term yielded a number of hits from Colleton County, South Carolina’s, high school JV and varsity basketball teams. There was also a prep school by that name.
My eyes went back to the erased words. He couldn’t have meant these schools. I scrolled down my screen, trying to see if there was a hit I could chase down. I tabled more thorough research for a later time.
Focus, Jac. I resumed my search, but for good measure, I traced the two words on the board.
The next place where he might have kept his open cases was in his cabinet. I tried several keys until one unlocked the black drawer. Nothing was there. I sat in Granddad’s creaky chair. It swiveled in a half turn until I faced the fireplace and the mantel that was . . .
I approached the mantel. Confusion ballooning, shifting to mild unease. Had Mama or Pen grabbed it to use during the funeral? Had they buried Granddad with it because they, too, knew how important it was to him? I slid my hands along the flat top of the mantel as if somehow my hands would find the object that wasn’t there and should have been. It was always there, for as long as I could remember. It was the ugliest, most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen in my life, but it was special to him.
“It’s a reminder,” he’d said when Pen had dared me to ask why he kept that stupid thing prominently displayed like it was fine china. “Of the one who got away.”
There was more than one case that my grandfather didn’t solve. Less than a handful. But for some reason, this one stood out to him the most. This one he’d held on to and kept a reminder of for all my life. Even Daddy had tried to get him to let it go.
“It’s okay if you can’t solve them all, Pops,” Daddy had told him. “You can’t get them all.”
“Yeah, I know, boy. But this one, I really should have. This one was no good.”
Even at Daddy’s big old grown age—with two young girls, a wife, military service under his belt, and a career rising up the ranks at the police department—MJ was always “boy.” And Daddy loved it.
“Keeps me grounded. I can get as big as the president,” he’d said. “But I’ll always be my dad’s ‘boy.’”
Whatever that case was that had haunted Granddad every day, he never told me about it, probably working it bit by bit throughout the years. There was no way that ridiculous memento would be gone. It was always here, a beacon sending out signals that hopefully one day would help the case be solved.
“There are two cases I always keep an eye on,” Granddad mentioned, bending down in front of a hidden black safe, its heavy cast-iron-like door gaping open, in his bedroom. I sat on the bed, dutifully waiting for him to finish, my legs swinging happily. I was with him because my parents were at work, and I’d thrown a fit at my after-school dance classes during our preparation for a recital. I hated those classes with a passion. They were all methods of antiquated proper southern-girl training. I wanted no part of that.
The instructors had called my emergency contact when they couldn’t reach my parents. Mama was with the doctor she worked for, on their rounds. Daddy was busy being a police chief. Granddad swooped in like the superhero he was and rescued me, bringing me here and putting me to work wiping down his board. Before he was to take me home, he was putting things in his safe.
“One of my two most important cases is the one attached to that reminder on that mantel. The other one’s attached to a place I need to keep an eye on.”
My legs swung back and forth, and I was hoping we’d get McDonald’s on the way back home after picking up Pen at day care. “Why do you keep an eye on it?”
“Because that’s the only case that should never get solved. And the one attached to my reminder is the one case that absolutely must get solved.”
Granddad’s safe. It was the last place his keepsake could be. I hurried to his bedroom, wedging myself between his bed and the wall with the cutaway hole where the safe had been built in. I stared down the dial on the combination lock. It took me back to my days at Richmond Regional, where I’d kick the locker doors, trying to remember the three numbers of Nick’s or Sawyer’s combinations. I needed my textbooks, and Nick’s locker was the closest to my lit class. Who wanted to carry heavy literature textbooks throughout that massive school? Not this Brodie.
I flexed my fingers like I was the dude in Mission: Impossible, determined to crack the safe and see what was inside. The decision to come to Granddad’s had reinvigorated me, giving me the purpose Mama had hinted earlier that I didn’t have. What would Granddad’s number be? The probabilities were endless, and the way my patience was set up . . .
The first four tries were a bust—birthdays for Daddy, his younger brother Jack, Pen, and me. Then I thought about who Granddad was and what was most important to him: family. I thought about who would have been the one to give him what was most important to him. Grandma. I put in her birthday. Another strike.
Then I thought, if she was the one to give him the most important thing to him, then their wedding anniversary would be the most important day to Montavious Brodie Sr. I spun the dial to the right—12. Went left for one full revolution, then again left—30, right . . .
I was stuck, my mind drawing a sudden blank at the year they were married. The month and day were easy. They were the same as Daddy’s birthday. Granddad had said that year he got the best anniversary gift from Grandma. With no rhyme or reason, the year came to me. I twisted the dial around.
—68
The lock clicked, and I pulled the safe door open with a swoosh, peering in.
I was so shocked that it had worked and I’d managed to get the safe open that all I could do was stare into it for so long my vision blurred and I had to blink to refocus, looking at the top shelf, then the bottom. Two files were on the top shelf. One, written in Granddad’s familiar script, was labeled Colleton, Nevada.
“Colleton, Nevada,” I said like I should have known. So much for my random internet search that had turned up absolutely nothing.
The other folder read Lake Worth. I quickly flipped through its contents; the first item was a printed news article about the lake. I rolled my eyes. Who printed out articles these days? Then I remembered whom I was dealing with and was surprised there weren’t multiple stacks of yellowed, cracking newspapers cluttering the house.
I wasn’t 100 percent certain, but I thought I’d heard the name on the news cycles on and off for the last few months. It took another moment for the recall to complete itself as I skimmed the article. The lake was evaporating, and objects that people had thrown in the water were resurfacing, like a barrel with a body in it. I shuddered. Fucking creepy. Could this case have anything to do with the missing memento?
At the bottom of the article was the contact person for the article about the barrel.
Contact roberta.lyken@yahoo.com with any news, comments, or questions.
I sent off a quick email, ignoring the still growing number of unread messages, especially the one from Conrad. I wouldn’t be surprised if his next communication attempt was by carrier pigeon.
The bottom shelf had rolls of rubber-banded money, which I knew Granddad had been siphoning away as emergency funds “just in case the banks go to hell.” Birth and death certificates of his wife and sons were there—guess he’d had copies of Daddy’s and Uncle Jack’s made.
The item I was looking for—a plastic quartz clock shaped like a handgun the color of tarnished steel (complete with faux bullets as hands) that had sat as a stoic reminder on Granddad’s fireplace mantel in his home since I was a little girl—was nowhere to be found. Granddad said this clock was given to him by the mother of a victim of what he said was an unsolved case that had haunted him for years. He said the clock was the key to cracking it, though he wasn’t sure how yet. And he said that the clock, like him, was waiting for the right time to reveal the truth. Whatever that meant.
I picked up the Colleton folder. It was thicker than the Lake Worth one and filled with pages of case notes and grainy images, from maybe twenty or so years ago, of five girls who looked about high school age. The pictures didn’t jump out at me. The girls looked like sweet all-American cheerleaders and track runners.
My mind swirled with my findings, too many things to pick through now because the main finding was that there was no finding . . . of the clock, that is. That was number one.
Number two: The two cases he’d held on to for decades. One from twenty years ago. The other even older—the barrel had surfaced a year ago, but the authorities guessed it could have been there for nearly thirty. Why these cases?
Number three: Granddad had said one case shouldn’t get solved and the other had to be. So, which was which? I drummed my fingers on my knee from my position on the floor.
Where the hell was his effing clock? I searched everywhere for it.
When Granddad talked about the clock, I figured he was being dramatic to ramp up the suspense. Or maybe he was trying to hide his penchant for ugly clocks. Who knew? Whether it was the key to cracking a case or hideous taste, it was not in the safe or anywhere else to be found in the cabin. I even braved the spiders and other bugs and checked the shed. Nothing. I might not have known much, but one thing I did know was that Granddad would never in a million years part with it, which meant someone had to have taken it. And they would have had to pry it out of his cold, dead hands.
