Before We Were Yours(50)

CHAPTER 13


Avery

The cottage is quiet and filled with moonlight as I swing open the door. I fumble for the light switch and brace my cellphone against my shoulder as I wait for my Uncle Clifford to answer the question I’ve just asked. He’s put me on hold while he orders food at a drive-through window.

I’m consumed by the strongest memory of arriving here after dark for a visit, just my grandmother and me. The cottage was exactly like this, moon spears fanning over the floor in the shape of palmetto fronds, the air smelling of salt water, and sandy carpets, and lemon oil, and furniture that has lived long by the sea.

I wiggle my fingers. I can almost feel her hand wrapped around mine. I must’ve been about eleven or twelve—that awkward age when I’d quit holding her hand in public, but here in our magic place, it was okay.

Standing in the entry now, I reach for that sense of comfort, but this visit is pungent with opposing tastes. Bitter and sweet. Familiar and strange. The tastes of life.

Uncle Clifford comes back on the line. After a long walk along the beach and supper at the Waterfront Restaurant, I’ve decided that my uncle might be the only means of making progress in my quest, for now. Trent Turner ditched me by taking off in a jeep with the guy in the uniform. I waited around in my car, but the Turner Real Estate office remained closed all afternoon.

So far, this trip is looking like a bust.

“What was it that you needed, Avery? What about the Edisto house?” Uncle Clifford wants to know.

“So, I’m just wondering if you and Dad came here much with Grandma Judy? When you were little, I mean.” I’m keeping it casual. Trying not to tip him off to anything. Uncle Clifford was a federal agent in his younger years. “Did Grandma Judy have friends she met here or people she came to see?”

“Well…let me think….” He ruminates for a while, then simply says, “I don’t guess we went there all that much, now that you mention it. We visited more when I was young. Once we were older, we liked Granny Stafford’s place on Pawleys Island better. The house was bigger, and the sailboat was there, and more often than not, we had cousins around to play with. Usually, Mama went to the Edisto cottage by herself. She liked to write there. You know, she dabbled in poetry a bit, and she did the society column for a while.”

I’m momentarily dumbfounded. “Grandma Judy wrote a society column?” Otherwise known as the weekly gossip.

“Well, not under her own name, of course.”

“Under what name?”

“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”

“Uncle Clifford!” While my dad is straitlaced, Uncle Clifford has always been wild and a bit of a tease. He’s given Aunt Diana a full head of gray hair, which, as any good Southern lady would, she colors regularly.

“Oh, let your grandmother’s secrets stay secret.” For a minute, I think there’s a hidden message in that, but then I can tell he’s just toying with me. “So you’re down at the Myers cottage, huh?”

“Yes. I just decided to get away for a few days.”

“Well, drop a line in the water for me.”

“You know I don’t fish. Yuck.” Being saddled with girls, my poor father worked hard to form an avid angler from at least one of us.

Even Uncle Clifford knows it was a lost cause. “Well, now see, that’s one way you don’t take after your grandmother. She loved to fish, especially down on Edisto. When your dad and I were little, she’d take us there to meet up with somebody who had a little jon boat. We’d go up the river and spend half the day fishing. Don’t remember who it was we went with. A friend, I guess. He had a little blond-headed boy I liked to play with. Name started with a T…Tommy, Timmie…no…Tr…Trey or Travis maybe.”

“Trent? Trent Turner?” The current Trent Turner being Trent the Third, his father was a Trent too, and he’s around my uncle’s age.

“Could’ve been. There some reason you’re asking? Anything wrong?”

Suddenly, I realize I’ve gone one question too far and inadvertently unlocked the detective’s office. “No. No reason. Being on Edisto just started me thinking about things. I wish I’d come down here more with Grandma Judy. I wish I’d asked questions while she could still remember things, you know?”

“Well, that’s one of the paradoxes of life. You can’t have it all. You can have some of this and some of that or all of this and none of that. We make the trade-offs we think are best at the time. You’ve accomplished a lot for a girl—I mean, a woman just thirty years old.”

Sometimes I wonder if my family doesn’t see more in me than is really there. “Thanks, Uncle Clifford.”

“That’ll be five bucks for the session.”

“The check’s in the mail.”

After we hang up, I think through the conversation as I unpack the single sack of groceries I’ve picked up at the BI-LO, which I remember as the Piggly Wiggly.

Were there any clues in what Uncle Clifford said?

Nothing jumps out at me. Nothing that leads anywhere. If the little boy in the jon boat was named Trent, that tells me that my grandmother had some sort of personal connection to the elder Trent Turner, which I’d already guessed. But if they spent time out fishing together with the children, that also pokes holes in my blackmail theory. You don’t go fishing with a blackmailer, and you certainly don’t take your little boys. You also don’t bring children with you if you’re having an illicit affair. Especially not children who are old enough to remember the outing.