The Final Victim(15)

"Milky, Mama," Cameron persists, tacking on an adorable, "Pwease?"

Stifling a yawn, Mimi recalls a line of an old Robert Frost poem:

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep…

"Hungry, Charlotte?" Royce asks, as they emerge on bustling River Street not far from the restaurant. The warm air is thick with the tantalizing aroma of deep-fried shellfish.

"Hungry-and homesick," she replies, longing for their new home on a leafy block facing Colonial Park Cemetery not far from here.

"Me, too. It won't be long now."

"Maybe we can come back home by the end of July," she tells Royce hopefully-though even if that's possible, she'll be facing almost a month at Oakgate without her grandfather… or with his ghost, depending on one's willingness to suspend disbelief.

"I doubt we'll be in before August. Even if the interior work is done, they'll still have to paint and paper, and finish the woodwork-" Catching sight of her expression, he adds reassuringly, "But I'm sure we'll be home before school starts, like I promised Lianna."

"I hope so." There will be hell to pay if the tempera* mental thirteen-year-old faces even another day of being driven forty-five minutes from the plantation to Savannah Country Day School by Stephen, Grandaddy's longtime chauffeur.

Lianna is embarrassed by the long black town car and, infuriatingly, by kindly old Stephen. She's conveniently forgotten that the chauffeur was her hero when he supplied her with pockets full of bubblegum back id the early days after the divorce, when they were first living at Oakgate.

These days, Lianna finds fault with everything about Stephen-from his being hard of hearing to his European formality.

"Does he have to wear that stupid uniform?" she fre-quendy grumbled throughout the school year, always followed by her daily plea, "Why can't you just drive me, Mom?"

Because you'd have me so upset by the time we got to town, that's why.

But Charlotte would always manage to summon every bit of maternal patience she possessed and keep her thoughts to herself. She just shrugged and told Lianna that Stephen would be driving her for as long as they were staying at Oakgate, period.

Now, strolling along River Street, with its row of brightly lit restaurants and shops housed in former cotton warehouses, Charlotte so longs for her old life back that she's tempted to launch into a Lianna-style whine.

This, not Oakgate, is her home now.

Savannah, and the nineteenth-century architectural gem she and Royce bought this winter, with its dormered mansard roof, bracketed cornices, and lush gardens now fragrant with summer blooms.

It isn't far from where she grew up. But sadly, that Beaux Arts mansion on Abercorn Street-like its final owners-didn't live to see the turn of the millennium. A bank now stands where Charlotte's girlhood home once was; her parents lie miles away, in the cemetery at Oakgate.

Daddy went first: cirrhosis of the liver, courtesy of the same lifelong passion for Southern bourbon, of which his staunch Southern Baptist father didn't approve.

Alcohol probably had a hand in his own mother's death as well.

At least, Charlotte assumes it contributed to her paternal grandmother Eleanore's decision to kill herself. The topic of her death has always been as forbidden within the family as liquor was at Oakgate.

The official story is that Grandaddy's wife died in her sleep of some undiagnosed illness.

But local gossip, which invariably reached Charlotte's ears courtesy of insensitive childhood peers, claimed that one night, Eleanore tucked her two small sons into bed, then fixed herself a lethal cocktail spiked with barbiturates.

It was her younger son who reportedly found her the next morning, though Charlotte's father never affirmed that. No, Norris just wandered through life wearing a Perpetually haunted expression that grew even more haggard when he was self-medicated with bourbon. The only time Charlotte ever really saw him looking at peace was the day she kissed him good-bye on one unfurrowed brow as he lay tucked into the white satin lining of the finest casket money could buy.

Mom followed him soon after, giving in to the cancer that had been recently diagnosed, and which she was prepared to battle valiantly as long as she had some thing to live for.

Without her husband, Connie June Remington apparently had nothing left to live for. He was her whole world. Raised on the island a stone's throw from Oakgate Charlotte's mother was a spoiled, pampered only child. Her parents were middle-aged when she came along, and) had thought they were infertile. Their daughter was the center of their world for the rest of their lives. The indulgent, laid-back Norris took over where they left off coddling his wife until the day he died.

Nothing could fill the emptiness in the orphaned and widowed Connie June's life. Not even a daughter, no matter how Charlotte tried.

Not that she tried all that hard.

Her mother was never the doting parent Daddy was. Norris Remington showered his only child with both affection and material goods.

Now they're all gone, Charlotte thinks bleakly. Not just her father and her mother and Uncle Xavy, but her grandfather, too.

Yet none of those losses has had the shattering impact of another loss, the one that weighs most heavily on her heart.

The one she almost didn't survive at all.

You're supposed to bury your parents and grandparents.