The Marsh Read online

  Harley already had a huge chunk of quesadilla in his mouth but muttered, “And I had the ten bottles arranged on the bar just like those things in a bowling alley—”

  “Pins?” interrupted Charles.

  “That’s it, pins,” said Harley. “Where was I? Oh yeah, the bottles were sitting there all nice and pretty. And this big ol’ tall-drink-of-water, Nazi-looking loser walked up and took his hairy arm and swept the bottles off the bar. Said I was in his space.” Harley stuffed another bite in his mouth and grabbed the Bic and started to get up. He was on his way outside for a smoke.

  Charles wasn’t going to have that. “Whoa, big H! What happened?”

  Harley glared at Charles but lowered his ample rear back into the booth and took a deep breath. “I politely told Adolf where he could put my ten beer bottles, offered to help him since he’d have a hard time reaching the spot, and then grinned.” Harley demonstrated the grin. “Now, how much more hospitable could I have been?”

  “And?” I said. Charles was a bit slow.

  “And a big ol’ switchblade appeared in the bugger’s left hand. I didn’t think he was going to use it to shell the tin bucket of peanuts parked beside his beer. I removed the blade from his hand, sent his left elbow in a direction it hadn’t been before, and helped his nose get better acquainted with the top of the bar.” Harley grinned. “Peanuts flew everywhere. Was one of my finer moments, if I say so myself.” He paused as his grin morphed into a frown. “And then the police had the nerve to arrest me. Seems that Nazi boy’s brother owned the bar. Nobody saw nothing except me attacking the poor, God-fearing Nazi boy.”

  “Eventually,” said Charles, “this is going to get back to why you don’t like lawyers. Right?”

  “Your mind rolls along on one track, don’t it?” said Harley, more perceptive than he will ever know. “Yeah. The PD they gave me—snotty-nosed kid, just out of law school, mail order, I’d bet—said I was guiltier than sin and I’d be lucky if he could save me from the gas chamber. Then the lawyer-baby wanted me to take a plea and go up the river for three years.” Harley picked up the salt shaker and pounded it on the table. His face was red, and he looked like he was ready to blow a gasket. “Three years! Can you believe that? Three years for defending my bowling alley.”

  “Well?” said Charles.

  “A friend told me I could demand another lawyer, and I damn well did. New guy actually spent more than five minutes on my case and learned that the bar had more red dots than any other drinking establishment within ten miles. Got the—”

  “Red dots?” blurted Charles.

  Harley stared at him. “I thought you were a detective.”

  “Don’t know everything, yet,” said Charles, the un-detective.

  “Red dots were put on a map at the cop-crib to show where crimes happened. Seems that Mr. Bar Owner and his Nazi, bowling-alley-wrecking brother are a two-man crime wave. There were no witnesses to my discussion with the Nazi except for his biased brother, so the judge gave me a fine—no death sentence this time.” Harley paused and then nodded. “Is this Aker lawyer guy like my first PD?”

  “I’ve known Sean for a dozen years or so,” said Charles. “He’s a good guy.”

  “He doesn’t practice criminal law,” I added. “He wouldn’t be like a public defender.”

  “So what’s he want with me?”

  Good question, I thought.

  There was only one other table of diners, and they were on the other side of the room. Amber caught a break in our conversation and returned to the table.

  “Learned a few things about the body they found. Interested?” Her sly grin showed that she knew the answer. She didn’t wait for a reply. “Seems it had been in the marsh for a few days; animals had already begun to feast on it.” Her grin turned to a grimace. “Cops think it was a guy but couldn’t tell much of anything from the body.”

  “Who found him?” asked Charles.

  “Young couple from New Jersey and their five-year-old daughter were taking one of those marsh tours with Captain Anton. Out to celebrate Memorial Day.”

  “It’ll be a Memorial Day to remember for those northerners,” said Harley.

  “Better story to tell their friends than about getting sunburned at the beach,” added Charles.

  Amber swore that that was all she had learned, and when Harley asked her his question of the day, she said that she didn’t know what Sean wanted with him. We let her get back to waitressing.

  Attending a friend’s funeral, learning about a body in the marsh adjacent to my island, watching another friend in deep conversation with the police, and being summoned to a lawyer’s office—what a way to begin June.

  The Lowcountry had been mauled by Hurricane Greta eight months earlier. It was the worst natural disaster to hit the area since the infamous Hurricane Hugo ravaged the Eastern Seaboard in 1989. Damage estimates from Greta, already in the hundreds of millions of dollars, were still escalating. But thankfully, adequate warning and Greta coming ashore slightly weaker than predicted had limited human loss. The death toll had peaked at seven in South Carolina: four as a direct result of the hurricane winds and three from subsequent tornados that spun off inland. Regardless of what the official statistics showed, I knew the death count was eight. The lady buried yesterday had been the latest victim.

  Seventeen houses had been leveled on Folly Beach, including the oceanfront boardinghouse owned by Mrs. Klein. Fifty or so other structures, including a massive nine-story hotel, received significant damage; the other older houses had survived Hugo, and most built since Hugo’s day had been constructed to withstand stronger blows than Greta and only suffered cosmetic damage.

  Mrs. Klein’s boardinghouse, the Edge, wasn’t one of the luckier pre-Hugo buildings. Charles, Harley, and I knew firsthand how it had been ripped apart by rain, wind, and the storm surge. We were in it at the time—in it saving its owner from the wrath of the hurricane and a killer who had been bumping off her residents with a most unlikely and terrifying weapon, a crossbow. She had survived the crossbow killer, Hurricane Greta, her beloved house collapsing around her, and being carried by Harley through raging, waist-deep waters, only to fall victim to pneumonia, depression over losing everything, eighty-six years of life, and excessive quantities of Maker’s Mark. Pure stubbornness had kept her alive these last eight months.

  “Hey, Mr. Photo Man. We going to sell a herd of photos today?” Charles entered Landrum Gallery and cheerfully spouted off these words, words similar to those he began each day with. It was an endearing but increasingly irritating habit.

  Charles was my unofficial—and unpaid—sales manager, helper with everything that needed to be done, and eternal optimist. After I had taken early retirement from a multi-national health care company in my hometown in Kentucky, I bought a small cottage a few blocks from the beach and rented a dilapidated former souvenir and T-shirt shop on Center Street, the figurative and literal center of commerce on Folly Beach. My lifelong passion had been photography, and my plan was to open a gallery of my work. I had made a couple of lucky real estate investments and received a substantial buyout from work, so I could retire while still in my late fifties. I didn’t have to make a profit at the gallery named after myself in a burst of egotistical non-creativity, but the last two years had been financial disasters. I thought photographs should be up there with bread, milk, toilet paper, and cell phones as human necessities, but the buying public had disagreed. I couldn’t continue to stay open. I had lightly broached on the subject with Charles, but he was a master of deflection, a trait we both shared. I needed to change my tack.

  “See anybody lined up outside?” I said. I wasn’t ready to have the conversation with him.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “When was there ever a line?” I asked.

  Charles rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. �
��Well, as President Buchanan once said, ‘There is nothing stable but Heaven and the Constitution.’”

  In addition to Charles’s grating optimism, he had an uncanny habit of quoting US presidents. I hadn’t had the energy or interest to verify the quotations, but the couple of times I called him on one, he had cited the source—chapter, page, and verse.

  “Whatever,” I replied—shy of articulate, but I had no interest in what the obscure president might have said.

  “So what does Sean want to see us about?” said Charles.

  I knew he had wanted to discuss it when we were at the Dog, but Harley had seemed antsy enough without more lawyer talk being thrown around. His previous encounters with the legal and law enforcement community appeared to lean toward the bad news side.

  We moved to the office/break/storage/goof-off room behind the gallery and took our traditional seats around the rickety kitchen table that was used for everything from matting photos to holding invoices that usually exceeded available cash to holding pizza boxes, beer cans, and wine glasses during impromptu parties.

  “I have no more idea than I did yesterday,” I said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Then what do you know about the marsh body?”

  “About as much as I know about what Sean wants,” I replied.

  “I could have learned that from from old Mr. Schmidt’s schnauzer tied up in front of the Dog.”

  “Yeah, but it wouldn’t get you coffee,” I said as I pulled two semi-clean ceramic mugs from the sink and filled them from the Mr. Coffee machine on the counter.

  I smiled as I returned to the table, but my stomach churned. There would never be a good time to tell Charles that I was closing the gallery. I needed to get it over with.

  “When I—we—opened the gallery, all I wanted was to not lose money,” I said. “I came close that first year.”

  Charles leaned back in his wooden chair, the mug in his left hand. “Because of your fantastic sales manager, of course,” he said. He set the mug on the table and nervously picked some lint off the sleeve of his University of Hawaii long-sleeved T-shirt.

  “Since then, I’ve been losing a boatload of money.” I tried to make eye contact but couldn’t manage it.

  “I guess a raise is out of the question,” he said.

  He was kidding, but he had on anything but a happy face. He knew what was coming. I hated it; he hated it.

  “I’m going to have to close,” I said. My head was down; I still couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye.

  He balled his right hand into a fist, shoved away from the table, inhaled, and pushed the chair back. “No,” he whispered. He walked to the door that led to the showroom, hesitated, and then returned to his chair but didn’t sit. He stood behind the chair and gripped the backrest. His knuckles were chalk-white.

  I hadn’t moved. “I’m sorry, but …”

  “Do what you have to,” he said. He grabbed his cane from the corner of the table, pivoted, and stomped through the door to the gallery. A moment later, I heard the front door slam.

  Truth be known, I should have closed two years ago. I wasn’t wealthy but could survive a no-frills retirement if the gallery had not been such a drain. Charles hadn’t held a tax-paying job since he moved to the island twenty-five years ago at the ripe old age of thirty-four. His only source of income was a few off-the-books jobs for construction companies, a handful of days a month helping local restaurants clean, and an occasional on-island delivery for the surf shop. The deliveries were in a limited radius because his mode of transportation was an immaculately maintained 1961 Schwinn bicycle. He owned a 1988 Saab convertible that hadn’t moved from outside his small apartment in the last two years.

  Money wasn’t an issue with Charles. He always found enough to squeak by. Landrum Gallery had given him a sense of pride. He had told me last year that it made him feel important, something he had never experienced before we met.

  Charles would do anything for me—in fact, he had come close to sacrificing his life on a couple of occasions to save my hide. I had never paid him a penny for his work at the gallery, and now I was slamming the door on his self-respect. I felt terrible.

  I stared at the hardwood floor and walked to the front window overlooking Center Street. I thought about the first time Bob Howard had showed me the “beach-aged, quality retail space,” his words to describe the worn-out storefront location. The floors still had the paths furrowed by thousands of feet, sandals, flip-flops, and clogs that had traipsed around display racks that cluttered the souvenir shop that had occupied the space before Landrum Gallery was born.

  The bell over the front door jarred me out of my pity party. A middle-aged couple entered and gave me a vacationer’s grin. I put on my best retailer’s face and asked if I could help them.

  “Saw the sign and thought we’d come in,” said the man dressed in a baggy bathing suit and a Nike golf shirt. His bright-red flip-flops appeared new. “See anything you like, hon?” he said as he looked at his partner.

  “Nice stuff,” she said, her grin matching his. “Maybe.”

  There’s nothing like my fine-art photography being called “stuff,” but if they were going to buy any, they could call it anything they liked.

  I glanced out the window to see if Charles was anywhere around. The customers slowly looked at the larger framed pieces on the wall and then through the black, cloth bin in the corner holding matted images.

  I was thinking how ironic it would be if they made a large purchase when the doorbell chimed again. Charles bounded in with a smile on his face. He handed me his Tilley, asked if I could put it in the back room, and turned his attention to the potential buyers. I heard him tell them that he was sorry he hadn’t been there when they first came in; he said something about having to go on an errand for the owner.

  I stayed in back and let Charles play sales manager. Besides, I couldn’t find it in myself to put on a happy front. I knew I had hurt Charles, and hurt him deeply. He was one of the first people I’d met when I arrived on Folly Beach. He and I were about as opposite as two people can be. He was a voracious reader; his apartment was nearly filled floor to ceiling with books—fiction, nonfiction, biography, history, and a selection of cookbooks that the Food Channel would envy. He claimed to have read all of them, with the exception of the cookbooks. I, on the other hand, avoid reading anything. I took the more traditional route in life and actually had worked for a living; Charles gave up that pursuit decades ago. I had spent many years paying back loans to banks and mortgage companies; Charles didn’t have a bank account, a cell phone, or an operable gas-powered vehicle. He’s outgoing—nosy—and talks to everyone; I semi-avoid people. In one of the perplexities of life, we had become close, and I couldn’t imagine my world without him in it.

  Would my decision to close drive him away?

  I heard the doorbell ring, and seconds later, Charles peeked around the corner. His grin was wider than when he had returned. He waved three crisp one-hundred-dollar bills over his head and in one breath, told me how he had convinced the couple to buy one of the more expensive prints, how they had said it was great that there was a gallery on the island, and how they would return each year—he repeated, each year—and buy more.

  “Think we’ll be able to stay open?” he asked. It was clearly a question but sounded close to the border of begging.

  I shook my head and reminded him that several large sales wouldn’t come close to covering a month’s rent. “I don’t see a way. Sorry.”

  “Come on, Chris, please—I’ll do more to help sell the photos.” He paused and looked at the tin ceiling. “Please?”

  I shook my head. “You’ve been great. There’s nothing more you could possibly do. I don’t want to close either. There’s no choice.”

  Charles looked in my direction, but I didn’t t
hink he saw me. He was angry and hurt; and it was my fault. He started to say something but closed his mouth and opened the back door and looked out on the gravel lot. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat and waited. The veins in his neck throbbed, and his hand wobbled on the cane. After what seemed like an eternity, he turned back toward the room. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he slowly walked to the table, placed both forearms on the top, and rested his head on his arms.

  I didn’t say anything and walked back up front into the sales gallery. For the first time in three years, I prayed that no customers would come in.

  How could things get worse?

  I listened to the sounds of truck engines and children laughing along Center Street in front of the gallery and to the overworked, aging air conditioner roaring in a losing battle to keep the building comfortable. The outside temperature had already topped eighty-five, above average for this early in June. Sadly, I was used to standing by myself and watching the world pass by the large front window.

  “Time to head to Sean’s, isn’t it?” yelled Charles from the back room. He had rinsed his face and dampened and combed his mostly gray, thinning hair. His eyes were red, but no one would guess why.

  Sean’s law office was on the second floor of a two-story wooden building less than a block, and across the street, from the gallery. The first floor held Sweet Sue’s, the island’s only candy store. “Aker and Long, Lawyers” was stenciled in black on a florescent orange surfboard hanging horizontally above the first-floor entry to the stairs. I had thought the surfboard was strange during my first visit a few years ago. I didn’t give it a second thought now that I had been inoculated by the quirkiness of the island.

  Harley puffed on a cigarette as he leaned against the front of Sweet Sue’s. I knew he was as uncomfortable as he appeared. “What if we’re in trouble?” he said by way of a greeting.