The High Tide Club Read online

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  This one’s dedicated with love to Andrew Rivers Trocheck, whose love of Georgia’s wild places inspire me.

  Acknowledgments

  The setting for this novel is entirely fictional. Inspired by the beautiful and fragile Georgia coast, I created a barrier island called Talisa, a county called Carter, and its county seat, St. Ann’s, and inserted them into the real geography of the Georgia coast, just north of Cumberland Island, but South of Sapelo Island. I can’t offer enough thanks to Blaine and Jenna Tyler for sharing their love of that island.

  It’s always foolhardy to create a character whose work you know nothing about, but it’s a very good idea to have experts who are willing to share their knowledge. Many thanks go to Robert Waller, Sharon Stokes, Beth Fleishman, Mary Balent Long, and Kathryn Zickert for their legal expertise. Any misstatements of fact are due to my own ignorance and not the excellence of their advice.

  Savannah friends who contributed their knowledge of local history include Polly Powers Stramm and especially Jacky Blatner Yglesias.

  As always, my community of author friends lent their ears and advice during the process of brainstorming and writing The High Tide Club. The members of The Weymouth Seven: Diane Chamberlain, Margaret Maron, Katy Munger, Sarah Shaber, Alex Sokoloff, and Bren Witchger, were as always, essential to my process. Special thanks to my favorite low country ladies, Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe for their brilliant suggestions.

  I couldn’t do what I do without my dream publishing team: the best agent in the whole damn world, Stuart Krichevsky, and the gang at SKLA, marketing genius Meg Walker at Tandem Literary, and of course, my publishing house, St. Martin’s Press. There aren’t enough words to express my gratitude for editor extraordinaire Jen Enderlin, capo di tutti capi Sally Richardson, and the team who make it all happen: Brant Janeway, Erica Martirano, Jessica Lawrence, and Tracey Guest. Thanks again, Mike Storrings, for yet another gorgeous cover.

  I may wander far and wide in search of the next story, but at the end of every quest I’m blessed enough to have the love and support of my family, who know enough about me to leave me alone when necessary, and reel me back home to reality at just the right time. All my love goes to Katie and Mark Abel, Andy Trocheck, my darling grands Molly and Griffin, and most of all, best of all, my starter husband of forty-one years—and counting, Tom.

  Prologue

  October 1941

  The three young women stared down at the hole they’d just dug. Their gauzy pastel dresses were rumpled and slightly damp, and the heels of their dainty sandals made them teeter precariously on the rounded oyster shell mound. Their faces were flushed and shiny with perspiration. The fourth in the circle was a girl of only fourteen, dressed in a hand-me-down set of boy’s overalls and a pair of worn leather shoes, her eyes wide with terror in a smooth, toffee-colored face. The first shafts of sunlight shone softly through the thick intertwined branches of moss-hung live oaks.

  “Give me the shovel,” the tallest one said, and the girl handed it over.

  The blade of the shovel sliced into the crushed shells and sand, and she dumped the material onto the form at the bottom of the hole, then wordlessly handed the tool to the redhead standing beside her. The redhead shrugged, then did the same, being careful to distribute the shells and sand over the dead man’s face. She turned to her friend, a pretty blonde who now had both hands clamped over her mouth.

  “I’m gonna be sick,” the young woman managed, just before she leaned over and retched violently.

  Her friend offered a handkerchief, and the blonde dabbed her lips with it. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen a dead man before.”

  “You think we have?” the tall one snapped. “Come on, let’s get it done. We have to get back to the big house before we’re missed.”

  “What about him?” The redhead nodded toward the body. “When he doesn’t come to breakfast, won’t people start asking questions?”

  “We’ll say he talked about going fishing. He went out yesterday too, remember? Before dawn. Millie can say she heard him leave his room. His gun is right here, so that makes sense. Anything could have happened to him. He could have gotten lost in the dark and wandered into one of the creeks.”

  “There’s gators in the creeks,” said the young girl in the overalls. “Big ones.”

  “And there are snakes too,” the tall one volunteered. “Rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, coral snakes. And wild hogs. They run in packs, and if they get you…”

  “Good heavens,” the redhead said. “If I’d known that, I never would have snuck out in the dark last night. Snakes and gators?” She shuddered. “And wild hogs? Terrifying.”

  “We don’t know anything,” the tall one said emphatically. She searched the others’ faces carefully. “Agreed?”

  A tiny sob escaped from the blonde’s lips. “Oh my God. What if somebody finds out?”

  “Nobody’s going to find out,” the redhead said. “We swore, didn’t we?”

  “They won’t. Nobody ever comes here. They don’t even know it exists. Right, Varina?”

  The fourteen-year-old looked down at her dusty shoes. “I guess.”

  “They don’t,” the tall one said. “Gardiner and I found it by accident, when we were little kids. It’s supposedly an Indian mound.”

  The blond girl’s brown eyes widened. “You mean a burial mound? We’re standing on dead people?”

  “Who knows?” A single drop of water splashed onto the tall one’s face, and she glanced up, through the treetops, where the clouds had suddenly darkened. “And now it’s starting to rain. Come on, we’ve got to finish this and get back to the house before we all get soaked and ruin our shoes and have to answer a lot of questions about where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing.”

  Tears welled up in the blond girl’s eyes, and she unconsciously rubbed her bruised, bare arms. She was weeping softly. “We’re all going to hell. We never should have gone swimming last night. What if somebody finds out what’s happened? They’ll think it was us. They’ll think it was me!”

  The redhead, whose name was Ruth, was thoughtful. “It doesn’t matter who killed him. Any one of us could have done this. He was a terrible man. He’s the one going to hell for what he did. You never should have agreed to marry him, Millie.”

  “She did, though. And what’s done is done,” said their leader. “There will be a lot of questions, girls, when he turns up missing. There’s bound to be a search, and I’m sure my papa will call the sheriff. But we don’t know anything, do we?”

  The blonde looked at the redhead, who looked at the tall one, who looked expectantly at the young girl, who nodded dutifully. “We don’t know nuthin’.”

  1

  Brooke Trappnell rarely bothered to answer her office phone, especially when the caller ID registered “unknown number” because said caller was usually selling something she either didn’t need o
r couldn’t afford. But it was a slow day, and the office number actually was the one listed on her business cards, so just this once, she made an exception.

  “Trappnell and Associates,” she said crisply.

  “I’d like to speak to Miss Trappnell, please.” She was an older woman, with a high, quavery voice, and only a hint of the thick Southern accents that prevailed on this part of the Georgia coast.

  “This is she.” Brooke grabbed a pen and a yellow legal pad, just in case she had a potential real, live client on the other end.

  “Oh.” The woman seemed disappointed. Or maybe disoriented. “I see. Well, this is Josephine Warrick.”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Brooke didn’t know why. She quickly typed it into the search engine on her computer.

  “Josephine Warrick on Talisa Island,” the woman said impatiently, as though that should mean something to Brooke.

  “I see. What can I do for you today, Mrs. Warrick?” Brooke glanced at the computer screen and clicked on a four-year-old Southern Living magazine story with a headline that said “Josephine Bettendorf Warrick and Her Battle to Save Talisa Island.” She stared at the color photograph of a woman with a mane of wild white hair, standing defiantly in front of what looked like a pink wedding cake of a mansion. The woman wore a full-length fur coat and high-top sneakers and had a double-barreled shotgun tucked in the crook of her right arm.

  “I’d like you to come over here and see me,” Mrs. Warrick said. “I can have my boat pick you up at the municipal marina at 11:00 A.M. tomorrow. All right?”

  “Well, um, can you tell me what you’d like to talk to me about? Is this a legal matter?”

  “Of course it’s a legal matter. You are a lawyer, are you not? Licensed to practice in the state of Georgia?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It’s too complicated to go into on the phone. Be at the marina right at eleven, you hear? C. D. will pick you up. Don’t worry about lunch. We’ll find something for you to eat.”

  “But—”

  Her caller didn’t hear her objections because she’d already disconnected. And now Brooke had another call coming in.

  She winced when she glanced at the caller ID. Dr. Himali Patel. Was the pediatric orthopedist already calling to dun her for Henry’s ruinous medical bills?

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Brooke. It’s Dr. Patel. Just following up to see how Henry’s physical therapy is coming.”

  “He’s fine, thanks. His last appointment was this week.”

  “I’m so glad,” Dr. Patel said. Dr. Himali Patel was the soft-spoken Indian American doctor who’d treated Henry’s broken arm. Brooke shuddered when she thought about the thousands she still owed for the surgery. She’d rolled the dice on an “affordable,” high-deductible health insurance policy and came up snake eyes when Henry fell from the jungle gym at the park and landed awkwardly on his arm, leading to a trip to the emergency room, surgery, and weeks’ worth of physical therapy.

  “If he has any pain or his range of motion starts to seem limited, bring him back into the office. Other than that, he’s good to go.”

  “Thanks, Doctor.” Good to go. Easy for her to say. Brooke still needed to call the hospital’s billing department to set up a payment plan.

  * * *

  The Southern Living magazine article was timed to coincide with Josephine Warrick’s ninety-fifth birthday. Which would make her ninety-nine now. Brooke reached for the glass of iced tea and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’d brought from home and read the article, and half a dozen others she’d found online, catching up with the colorful life and times of Josephine Bettendorf Warrick.

  She already knew a little about Talisa, dating back to a brief, ill-fated Girl Scout camping expedition nearly twenty-five years earlier. Her memory of the place was hazy, because she’d gotten seasick on the boat ride across the river on the way to the island and then managed to get stung by a jellyfish and hike through a patch of poison ivy. The assistant troop leader had to arrange for a boat to take her back to the mainland a day early to await pickup by her parents, who were two hours away in Savannah. It had been Brooke’s first and last camping trip. The name Talisa called up memories of calamine lotion, burned marshmallows, and her sight line, from the backseat of the Cadillac, of her father’s neck, pink with barely suppressed anger at having to miss his Saturday golf game.

  Brooke jotted notes as she read and chewed her sandwich. Talisa, she learned, was a twelve-thousand–acre barrier island a thirty-minute ferry ride from where she now lived in St. Ann’s, Georgia. It had been purchased as a winter retreat in 1912 by Samuel G. Bettendorf and two cousins, all of whom were in the shipping business together in Boston. In 1919, Samuel Bettendorf and his wife, Elsie, had built themselves a fifteen-room Mediterranean revival mansion, which they named Shellhaven.

  In 1978, the cousins had sold their interest in Talisa to the State of Georgia for a wildlife refuge, which explained how Brooke’s Girl Scout troop had been allowed to camp there. Samuel Bettendorf had retained his property, which was on the southeast side of the island, facing the ocean.

  And Samuel’s daughter and only living heir, Josephine Bettendorf Warrick, had been engaged in a lengthy court battle with the state, which had been trying, in vain, to buy up the remainder of the island for the past twenty years.

  Was this why Mrs. Warrick wanted to see her? Brooke frowned. She’d spent the first three years of her career working at a white-shoe Savannah law firm, doing mostly corporate and civil work. But since fleeing to the coast as a runaway bride, she’d hung out a shingle as a solo practitioner. The and Associates part of Trappnell and Associates was pure fiction. There were no associates and only a very-part-time receptionist working in the one-story, wood-shingled office she rented downtown on Front Street. It was just thirty-four-year-old Brooke Marie Trappnell. In life, and in law, come to think of it. She did some divorce work, DUI, personal injury, and the occasional petty civil or criminal work. But she knew next to nothing about the highly specialized area of eminent domain law.

  Which was what she’d tell Josephine Bettendorf Warrick. Tomorrow. And why not? She had a 9:00 A.M. appointment to see a client who’d been locked up for assault and battery in the Carter County Jail for a week, following a run-in with a clerk at the local KwikMart who’d tried to charge her ninety-nine cents for a cup of crushed ice. But the rest of her calendar was open. Not an unusual occurrence these days.

  There were, by her count, nearly three dozen other attorneys practicing law in St. Ann’s, all of them long-term, well-established good ol’ boys, who gobbled up whatever lucrative legal work was to be done in this town of seventeen thousand souls. Brooke counted herself lucky to pick up whatever crumbs the big boys didn’t want.

  If the weather app on her phone was to be trusted, tomorrow would be another sunny, breezy spring day. Why not take a boat ride to reacquaint herself with Talisa on her own terms and meet the legendary Josephine Warrick?

  2

  She heard the music blaring from within the office as soon as she parked the Volvo out front on Friday morning. Twangy guitar, heavy drumbeats, some kind of party-hearty country music. Brooke dug a can of Mace from her purse and quietly moved toward the door, which was slightly ajar.

  She eased the door open with her foot and cautiously poked her head inside.

  The intruder was so intent on her task, she never even looked up. She was seated with her bare feet propped up on the receptionist’s deck, her head bobbing, singing along with the radio. “Play it again, play it again, play it again,” she repeated, drumming the desktop for emphasis.

  Brooke reached down and tapped the wireless speaker sitting atop the file cabinet.

  The girl, startled, jerked upright.

  “Jesus, Brooke!” she exclaimed, reaching for the bottle of nail polish she’d been applying to her toenails. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  “And you almost gave me a heart attack when I drove up
and heard that music and saw the door standing open,” Brooke said. She held up the can of Mace. “You’re lucky I didn’t spray first and ask questions later.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were supposed to go see Brittni in the jailhouse this morning,” Farrah said, glancing at the clock that hung over the office’s sole bank of file cabinets.

  “And I thought you were supposed to be in second-period English.”

  Farrah Miles was a high school senior who also doubled as Henry’s babysitter. Brooke and Farrah had met in September after Brooke had given a career-day talk about law at the local high school. Most of the teenagers had napped or stared at their phones during her talk. But the next day, Farrah, a petite blonde with a tiny gold nostril stud, blue-green streaks in her hair, and a penchant for cowboy boots and supershort cutoff jeans, showed up at her office and proclaimed herself interested in the law and a job.

  The girl was smart and efficient—when she wanted to be—so they’d struck a deal that Farrah would work five days a week after school and pinch-hit as a babysitter for three-year-old Henry, as needed.

  Farrah sat down and resumed her pedicure, dabbing a bit of purple polish on her big toenail. “Mr. Barnhart’s a prick. We’ve only got two more weeks of class before graduation, and I’ve already got a solid A, but he still won’t exempt me from taking the final exam like my other teachers.”

  “So you’re cutting class? Farrah, he could still flunk you. I thought we talked about this. You’ve got to keep your grades up if you want to get into Georgia.”

  The girl scowled. “They wait-listed me, Brooke. I’m not gonna get in. I’ll just go to Community College like everybody else. It’s no biggie.”

  Brooke rolled her desk chair over to Farrah’s desk and sat inches away from her. The girl lowered her head, pretending to concentrate on her toes. Brooke reached out and tilted Farrah’s chin, lifting it until they were eye to eye.