“But otherwise, I haven’t met anybody down here that I’d want to date. And I haven’t felt the need to go looking, despite Farrah’s pleas to set me up with a Tinder account. Now. Turnabout is fair play, Gabe Wynant. What about you? Are you a Match.com guy, or are you more of an eHarmony type? Or maybe Christian Mingle?”
“None of the above. I swear. You know how it is in Savannah, though. For a while after Sunny died, I was fresh meat in the dating supermarket. Her old friends—hell, my old friends—all wanted to set me up, either with themselves or somebody they knew. And I’ll admit, it was lonely. I went out a few times, saw a couple of women for third or fourth dates, but there was never any real connection, so I just kind of gave up.”
“It’s much less stressful to stay home in my yoga pants, read a book, have a glass of wine, and enjoy my own company,” Brooke said.
“Bingo,” Gabe said. “The easy way out. But that gets old too, you know?”
She smiled noncommittally.
The waiter brought the check, Gabe presented his credit card, and he and Brooke drifted out of the restaurant. A breeze was blowing off the river, and as they walked to his car, which he’d had to park a block away, Gabe caught his hand in hers in an easy, natural movement.
“Nice night out,” he said. “Not even that humid.”
“For Georgia. In May,” she agreed.
“Want to take a walk?”
She hesitated, trying to estimate the time.
“Aw, come on. It’s not that late,” he said, reading her thoughts. “It’s not even ten.”
“Okay. But just down to the docks and then back. It’s a school night for me, and Henry’s up at six every morning.”
They swung their hands companionably as they walked along the waterfront. The air smelled of marsh mud and salt water and faintly of fish. The sky was pricked with stars. She thought if she squinted she could see the lights of shrimp boats headed out to sea.
“You look beautiful tonight, by the way,” Gabe said as they reached the municipal docks.
“Um, thanks,” she said. She’d deliberately dressed down for the occasion; white jeans, a simple V-necked navy cotton sweater, and a necklace she’d splurged on at a local boutique, white coral beads with an oyster-shell medallion in the middle.
“Nice to see you not swathed in your typical lady lawyer battle armor of a business suit and heels,” Gabe said.
“Not much call for business suits and heels down here,” Brooke said. “I’ll wear one if I’m in court, in front of a judge, but this is as dressy as it gets for me these days.”
“If you did feel the urge to dress up, I’d love to take you to dinner up at the Cloister,” Gabe said. “They’ve got a great new chef, and there’s an orchestra and dancing on Saturday nights.”
“Oh my gosh. They still have those? My parents used to take me to those when I was a teenager. Mom would make Dad dance with me, and it was total agony.”
“Oh.” He looked disappointed. “You don’t like to dance?”
“I love to dance. And so did he, but it was so damn embarrassing, dancing with your father, who was trying to be all hip and happening. I’ll never forget the night he tried to do the Macarena. The memory is permanently seared onto my brainpan.”
Gabe winced. “If I promise not to try to break out any new dance moves, would you consider coming to dinner with me Saturday night?”
“At the Cloister? But that’s like an hour away.”
“You could stay over,” Gabe said. “Not at my place. I mean, you could stay at my place. There’s room, and I swear I wouldn’t hit on you. But what I meant was I’d book you a room at the hotel. And I’d bring you home first thing in the morning.”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I’d have to see if Farrah is available to stay over. It’s a lot. And you saw how clingy Henry can be. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like fun, but…”
“Just think about it, okay?”
“I will. Now I’d better get home, or Farrah will have the state patrol out looking for me.”
The ride home took only five minutes. When Gabe pulled into the driveway, they saw a quick flick of the front window curtains.
“Told ya,” Brooke said. “She’s very protective of me.”
“Hmm,” Gabe said.
“But she totally approved of this car. Whatever happened to the Mercedes?”
“I still have it. The Porsche was a complete surprise. Turns out, Sunny bought it without ever saying a word to me. I found it covered by a tarp in the garage at the house at Sea Island the first time I came down after she died.”
“A Porsche 911? She just bought it on a whim?”
He shrugged. “More like on a toot. I’ll sell it eventually, when I sell the house, but for tonight, I thought maybe I’d impress a girl with it.”
“You totally did,” Brooke said.
And before she could say anything else, he leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips. “Don’t tell the babysitter,” he whispered.
46
“Brooke?” There was more than a note of panic in Louette’s voice.
It was Wednesday morning. She’d just walked into her office and hadn’t even had time to fire up the coffee maker or laptop before her cell phone rang.
“What’s wrong?” Brooke asked.
“Those cousins of Josephine’s, Dorcas and Delphine, they’re here! They just come riding up here in a Jeep with some man from the state park. I let ’em in, ’cause I didn’t know what else to do, but now they’re walking around, talking like they own the place. I think you’d better come quick.”
“How the hell did they even find out Josephine is dead?”
“They said there was a big piece in the newspapers yesterday. They already called a lawyer, and he told them they’re fixin’ to inherit this whole island, including the house.”
“What newspaper?” Brooke walked around the office, looking for her copy of the local paper, a weekly that was published on Wednesdays.
“I don’t know. Maybe the Savannah paper? Or Atlanta? We don’t get a paper over here. Shug reads the sports page online.”
“I’ll head over there right now. Can you have C. D. pick me up at the city dock?”
“We ain’t seen C. D. in a couple of days. I’ll send Shug over. He’s off work today.”
“Okay, see you soon. And try not to worry, Louette.”
Brooke flipped her laptop open and did a quick Google search on Josephine’s name. The first citation was an article from the previous day’s edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Talisa Island, GA. Josephine Bettendorf Warrick, the legendary heiress owner of this wildest of Georgia’s untamed barrier islands, died last week at the age of 99. Her death signals what is almost certainly the last chapter of private ownership of the 12,000-acre Talisa.
Mrs. Warrick’s father, Samuel G. Bettendorf, was a Boston shipping magnate who purchased the Carter County island more than a century ago with two cousins. He commissioned famed Gilded-Age architect Addison Mizner to design and build a pink stucco Beaux-Arts-inspired twenty-room mansion he dubbed Shellhaven.
Carter County sheriff Howard Goolsby confirmed Mrs. Warrick’s death, saying that the nonagenarian, who’d recently been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, died of a head injury last Saturday after a fall. There are no known survivors.
Bettendorf’s only son, Samuel Gardiner Bettendorf Jr., who was known as Gardiner, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force at the age of 23 and was killed when the Spitfire he piloted was shot down over Nazi-occupied France in early 1942. The senior Bettendorf died one year later, leaving his daughter as sole owner of much of the island, with the exception of a smaller tract of land on the northern tip of Talisa, which was retained by distant relatives who sold their land to the state for a park in 1978.
In 1949, Josephine Bettendorf married Preiss H. Warrick, a naval captain she met at a bridge party on Sea Island, Georgia. The couple, both amateur naturalists, made the protection of Talisa and its wildlife their life’s work. Preiss Warrick died in 1966 of renal disease.
The couple never had children, and Mrs. Warrick spent the remainder of her life as a fierce guardian of the island, mounting a thirty-year fight to fend off the state’s efforts to buy it.