The Final Victim(5)

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.