The Cantaloupe Thief (10 page)

He sighed. “I got up around eight. Mother had that yappie chihuahua, Dollie. She woke me up. I took Mother to see Dr Arnott for her high blood pressure. He was having a hard time getting it under control.”

“Go back a minute,” she said when he paused. “What about breakfast? Did you see your sister Amanda and the girls — let's see, your daughter and your niece — before you left?”

He nodded. “Tabitha, Mother's housekeeper, made her special blueberry pancakes, and Amanda cut up some grapefruit or apples or something. I remember Ashley and Caroline loved Tabitha's pancakes and asked her to make faces with the blueberries, though they were really too old for that.” He looked bemused. “Surprised I remember that.”

Branigan nodded encouragingly. “What did you talk about?”

“Not much. Mother's doctor's appointment. Ashley and Caroline's plan to go to the club to swim. I wouldn't remember at all if I hadn't gone over it so many times with the po...”

They were interrupted by the loud jangle of bells, then a strident, “Ramsey!”

“That's my brother,” he said, then raising his voice, “Heath?”

“There's a woman down here robbing you blind!” the disembodied voice called. Ramsey Resnick started out of his office door.

Heath Resnick had a raggedy woman by the collar, holding her distastefully, as if she might infect him. She was dirty and wrinkled, her skin sunburned. She wriggled to get free of his grasp, her snarled mouth opening to reveal one third of the teeth she should have. Branigan was ten feet away and could smell the competing odors of liquor and urine. Two packs of feminine pads lay at the woman's feet.

“Rita,” Ramsey murmured. “Not again.”

Branigan looked away, embarrassed for the woman. She appeared too old to need the pads, but as Branigan got closer, she realized she was younger than she looked. Her blue eyes were filmy and unfocused; the wrinkled skin could be the result of long years exposed to the sun. The backpack gave her away: she was homeless.

Heath Resnick finally let her go with a disgusted harrumph, and she sagged to the floor. “You know her?” he asked his brother incredulously. Ramsey and Branigan each took an elbow and helped her up.

“Rita sometimes eats at Marshall's,” Ramsey said with a nod toward the diner next door.

Heath continued to look disbelieving. “From Marshall's dumpster, you mean?”

“Okay, Heath, that's enough,” said his brother. “Rita, you need to go now. Take one of these packages with you.” He propelled her toward the door. Rita never said a word.

When she was outside, there was a tense silence between the brothers. Branigan took her cue to leave. “I'll get back to you,” she murmured, eager to escape.

She met Rita on the sidewalk, where she was stuffing the sanitary pads into her backpack. “Are you all right?” Branigan asked. “Can I get you something?”

“Sure, lady. Five dolla be fine.”

“I'm sorry, but I don't give money,” Branigan said, parroting the words Liam had taught her. “But I'll be glad to buy you a hamburger or take you to Jericho Road.”

“Well, ain't you just the fines' ol' church lady?” Rita slurred. “Y'might wanna stop stickin' your nose where it don't b'long.”

She straightened, settling the backpack between her shoulder blades, and lurched down the sidewalk.

Branigan wondered how Rita had managed to open the front door without ringing the dangling bells. And she wondered how much of her conversation with Ramsey the woman had overheard.

Her interview cut short, Branigan decided to see if Davison had made any progress on getting into a rehab facility. She left Main Street heading west and drove the short distance to the dilapidated mill village that surrounded the Michael Garner Bridge. The bridge bisected Randall Mill, once known as “the jewel in Grambling's textile crown”. Each mill village once sported its own baseball and basketball teams, with good players recruited to work cushy jobs. Each village developed its own personality, and Randall was known as the finest of them all — the most athletic, the most stable, the most affluent.

Years before, Branigan had written a story conjecturing that Grambling's growing Eastside owed homage to its Westside, this crescent of dilapidated mill villages that had been the modern city's start.
The Rambler
wrote so many stories about the newer area that “Grambling's Growing Eastside” became shorthand for Chamber-of-Commerce-friendly stories. Reporters, always a snarky bunch, called it GGE. As in “I gotta do another friggin' GGE story”.

The
Style
section, especially, was a cheerleader for Grambling's Growing Eastside, its malls, its soccer teams, its book clubs, its cheerleading camps, its innovative kiddie parties, its prom seasons, its monied subdivisions rising endlessly from former cow pastures. Lord knows, Branigan had done her share. But the Westside was where the real stories were, as far as she was concerned. There was dignity to the farmer who grew eggplant and zinnias within a stone's throw of train tracks; to the lifelong millworkers who told shocking tales of the murderous Textile Strike of 1934; to the foster mother who defied the odds on losing children when crack moved in.

And boy, did crack move in. And heroin. And alcohol. And to some extent crystal meth, though the close quarters of these mill houses made brewing the noxious mix almost certain to grab the attention of neighbors — and police. Far more often, the meth lab busts occurred in the countryside south of Grambling, where a house might not have a neighbor for half a mile or more.

Randall Mill, once queen of the crescent, was now as bad as it got. Whereas some of Grambling's old manufacturing mills had become hot condominium properties — including a few owned by Heath Resnick — the Randall plant had burned. All that remained was a single blackened smokestack, surrounded by a massive swath of cracked concrete. Local skateboarders had built makeshift wooden ramps, but plans to make it a more commercial establishment failed repeatedly. Seems skateboarders weren't the most able businessmen.

Now Randall was broken, defeated, weary. The original residents had died, in many cases leaving their properties to children who no longer lived in Grambling. The mill houses with their distinctive four-room floor plans might be rented, or they might be abandoned. Crack dealers moved freely through both. Power and running water were optional. Boarded-up windows and signs announcing “condemned” were no guarantee that a house was empty.

It was depressing. Or it was, until Branigan entered the path toward the Garner Bridge that she and Liam had walked last night. Then “depressing” took on a whole new meaning.

She walked past a garbage heap, jumping back when she heard a hiss from its depths. A snake? A possum? She didn't wait to find out.

Hurrying past in unsuitable sandals, she reached the leafy river birch that made a feeble attempt to conceal the opening to this city under the bridge. Once she rounded the tree, the view opened — numerous tents, open fire pits, another garbage pile and a stack of firewood left over from winter. A pit bull the exact color of the packed red mud was chained to a wooden doghouse. That house always raised the eyebrows of Liam's visitors:
So the dog has a house, but his owners don't?
The dog opened one eye in the afternoon heat, but decided Branigan wasn't worth a bark. He closed it again.

She was already inside the camp when she realized she didn't know what she was doing. Did these people know Davison? She peered over a tent and saw three men sitting in rusting beach chairs around a cold fire pit. To her relief, she recognized Malachi.

She walked over, speaking softly, aware she was entering someone's home.

“Mr Martin? I'm Branigan? From breakfast at Jericho Road?”

Malachi looked up and gave, if not a smile, at least an acknowledgment. “Yes, ma'am. I remember.
Gramblin' Rambler
.”

“I'm here looking for my brother. Davison Powers?”

If the men were surprised, they didn't show it.

“Skinny white dude? Look kinda like you?”

“Yes. Do you know where he is?”

“Rita let him stay in her place,” Malachi said, swiveling to point to a rickety plyboard structure at the top of the incline. “Guess he's still asleep.”

She looked at her watch: 3:45 p.m. Sheesh. And Rita? Could there be more than one homeless Rita?

“Um, how do I get up there?” Branigan asked, eyeing the incline.

“Well, not in those shoes,” said one of Malachi's buddies.

She laughed along with them. “Clearly you gentlemen haven't heard of Ginger Rogers. She did everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels and backwards.” To her relief, the men laughed again. All but Malachi, who sat with a bemused expression.

Branigan kicked off her sandals. She wanted to leave her purse as well, but thought it unwise. Gripping it under one arm, she started to creep up the concrete incline sideways, the way Liam had indicated that residents reached the ledge.

The men watched, snickering. Finally Malachi stood. “Ma'am, that's gon' take you all day. Lemme get 'im.”

Branigan was only a quarter of the way up, and looked at Malachi gratefully. He wore rubber-soled athletic shoes, and passed her quickly, his feet crossing and recrossing. If he'd been on level ground, he would have been line dancing.

He arrived at the structure with its cut-out window covered in plastic, and knocked gently on the door. “Dude,” he said, “your sister want you.”

The door opened almost immediately, and Davison's stubbled face appeared, slack with sleep. “Branigan?”

He took in Malachi, then his sister, barefoot, thirty feet below, and laughed. “I'll meet you down there,” he said, ducking back inside.

Two minutes later, Davison joined her on the ground, a worn, military knapsack slung over one shoulder. “What's up?” he said. She could smell alcohol, not on his breath, but through his pores. He hadn't been drinking today, she surmised, but had been drinking heavily in the days preceding.

“I want to hear about rehab,” she said.

“The gospel mission can take me Monday. They start a new group every week.”

It was only Tuesday. “Where are you going to stay 'til then?”

“You're lookin' at it. Liam didn't have an open bed.”

At that moment, the woman from Ramsey Resnick's drugstore stepped past the birch and into the shade provided by the bridge. She looked from Davison to Branigan. “Wha's ol' church lady doin' here?”

“Church lady? Branigan?” Davison looked bewildered. “Rita, this is my sister, Branigan. She's a reporter.”

Branigan closed her eyes, feeling physical revulsion at the thought of her brother and this woman.

“Yo' sistah?” she cackled. “Damn. She don't wanna stay with us too, does she?”

“No,” Branigan said emphatically. “You don't have to worry about that.”

“Liam says I have to be detoxed by Monday, or the mission won't let me in,” Davison said.

She looked at him, looked beneath the matted hair and the dirt-streaked face, looked past the stale scent of alcohol emanating from his pores, looked at the brother who, for so many years, had been her shadow self. Clearly he hadn't taken up Liam on his offer of a shower.

“Can you do that here?”

“I can try.”

She didn't know she was going to say it until the words came out. “Why don't you come back to the farm with me? We'll keep you sober 'til Monday.”

 

Davison and Rita had a whispered conversation before he left. She didn't look happy that he was leaving. She thrust a dirty finger at his chest several times, her face contorted angrily as she whispered and pointed to her shack. He finally shrugged and walked away.

Branigan needed to get back to work, so she dropped Davison at an outdoor table at Bea's with enough money for a sandwich and coffee. She dreaded telling her mom and dad what she was doing. After Davison dropped out of college, they had taken him in countless times. They paid $40,000 for a four-month rehab ranch in Utah, $60,000 for a six-month stay in New Mexico. After each, he moved in with them — and began using.

Finally, on a Saturday morning twelve years ago, they'd had enough of the heartbreak. “We will support you in recovery,” they told him in the language they'd all learned so well. “But we will no longer support your addiction. You cannot live here.”

He had gone to Branigan's apartment before hitting the road. She gave him all the cash she had on hand — $35 — but had little hope it would be used for anything other than beer or crack. After closing the door in his face, she went to her bedroom and cried off and on for twenty-four hours.

For weeks afterward, her chest felt tight, as if there were a vise squeezing her lungs. Or more likely, her heart. She refused her parents' invitations to dinner, regretful that she was adding to their hurt but unable to face her co-conspirators in this awful decision. The only time she didn't feel like crying was when she was working.

So she worked.

 

She got back to the newsroom and glanced at the large desk calendar she kept as a backup to her iPad. Only then did she realize what she'd done: the word BEACH was written in large capital letters across Friday, June 5. She wasn't even going to be at the farm this weekend.

“Oh, no!” she said, laying her head on her desk. “Now what am I gonna do?”

Could she leave Davison at the farm alone? No. To his mind the place was full of great drunken memories. Could she take him with her? She didn't want to. But maybe he and Cleo could stay at the beach house while she conducted interviews. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than leaving him under the bridge where the crack and alcohol flowed freely.

She updated an online story about a fundraiser for the public library. She answered email, confirming interviews with Mrs Resnick's daughter at nearby Lake Hartwell, then her granddaughters in Edisto and Isle of Palms.