Hurricane Adam made landfall at Cypress Point Plantation Island, southwest of Charleston, just after midnight on the first Sunday in September. Hurricane Bartolo was the weaker sister storm and it diverged north from Adam’s plowed pathway and made landfall seventy-two hours later up South Carolina coastal Route 17 at Bull Bay harbor near the small town of Mcclellanville, the second time that area had been in the direct path of a major hurricane event in twenty years. The first time was called Hugo. Mcclellanville did not have nearly the same level of estimated property loss as its tonier neighbors to the south. The fact that one-hundred and nineteen families were left without homes to return to could not compete with the massive outpouring of shock and grief attended to the extreme losses incurred by Adam’s wrath on the multi-billion dollar resort to the south. Adam was initially labeled a Category 4 storm, but in the days after the National Weather Service analysts reclassified it a Category 5. The designation mattered little to the storm. Or to the inhabitants of the resort. The effects were the same.
The resort, the grand hotel by the beach, the multi-million dollar vacation homes, the golf courses, the marina clubhouse, were ripped apart. Carrington Avila’s hacienda, his magnificent coastal and marshland retreat, demolished by wind and washed away by water. Cynthia’s greenhouse plants could not be rescued. Surviving alligators in the swamps vastly outnumbered the several wealthy idiots who stayed behind to protect their glorious properties and subsequently perished.
The storm surge flooded a widespread area that blanketed the farthest reaches of the Cooper, Stono, and Ashley Rivers, twenty-five miles north to Summerville and nearby Moncks Corner, and it covered the Charleston peninsula in water that reached the second story of some downtown buildings until it gradually receded to the pavement level, and then returned to the harbor. The water did not breach the second floor of the Avila mansion and so could not wash the two celebrated bodies that stiffened and stank there for the two and a half weeks before the state police, in cooperation with the overtaxed Charleston fire and rescue department, made the surprising discovery.
Bullet Train Cochran, with a lifetime measured by statistics, became a statistic, albeit the most notably recognizable of the statistics that came out of Adam-Bartolo. For that is how his death was characterized and lumped, muted by the overarching news of the wreckage, the costs, the harbinger of global environmental disaster, and the human tragedy of the storm. A mere footnote.
Unwanted, shamed, and unclaimed by his former wife, and with no other surviving relatives, his body was consumed by fire at a Charleston County crematorium and a small ceremony was hastily pulled together by some old friends and hangers-on from his baseball days. Trainers, drinking buddies, and radio guys came down from New York and camped out in a hotel up the coast in Myrtle Beach, away from the federal disaster area, for a destination funeral. They dumped Bullet Train’s ashes out into a stiff breeze on the Strand. “Somebody’s gotta do it,” was their signal, joking phrase for the trip. Afterwards the gang hit a pancake house, back-to-back 18 holes of golf, Hooters, and a massage parlor. A bittersweet, but nonetheless happy ending mixed with a long weekend getaway for the old gang.
Without a job to return to, Carrington Avila’s personal assistant, Christi Nicole, decided to move back to the familiar comforts of home in Asheville, North Carolina with the idea of getting a real estate license. It was there that she met up with an old high school boyfriend who was working as a chef at one of the trendy downtown restaurants serving shrimp, grits, and Po’ boys at expense account prices. He persuaded the lovely, curvaceous Christi to try her luck at a Playboy casting call in Charlotte. Within one breathless year she rocketed from Cyber Girl of the Week, to Cyber Girl of the Month, to Playboy’s Playmate of the Month. By then she had left her southern chef and was living with a photographer/cinematographer in L.A., narrowly avoiding a year of her life in indentured servitude on an upper floor of Hef’s Mansion.
Christi was loving the L.A. life, though hating the traffic. Despite the deaths she came close to encountering in the Lowcountry, she had no idea how lucky she was to be living with an entire country separating her from the opposite coast.
It was just short of two months after Adam fell that Gail Heinrich was able to clear all the obstacles within her reeling company and deliver payment on the term life insurance claim made by Cynthia Hairston on her now proven deceased husband. The women agreed to meet at Angel Oak, alone, on a gorgeously bright, sunny, and mild mid-day to settle their previously agreed-upon payment, and make the exchange of one cashiers check from Ms. Hairston to Ms. Heinrich. Ms. Heinrich scanned the check with a quick, but thorough and satisfied glance before depositing it in a cute, little handbag that she dangled from her wrist like a debutante.
“Strange circumstances these men get themselves into sometimes,” Heinrich said in that high voice of hers.
“I owe you so much more than this.”
“No, no. We’re fine. This is fine. It worked out just fine.”
“Thank you,” Cynthia said solemnly.
They walked the desolate grounds of the live oak.
“You can thank my company. And Nature,” Heinrich said. “They’re too busy with the hurricane damage claims to worry about investigating this case any further, which is a relief, despite any suggestions of attempted fraud by your husband and his old baseball friend. Less money to pay out than the alligator deal, but still. Pretty tidy sum.”
“I’m grateful for that.”
Heinrich marveled at the great tree.
“How about that? Adam makes land right at Cypress Point Plantation, just a short ways down the road, tears apart the resort, the hotel, that big ‘ole house you built. But this here. Around here. Spared.”
She slapped a thick tree root that snaked into the ground. Then she was reminded of something more.
“We’ll be talking again I guess.”
“Yes,” Cynthia said cheerfully.
“The island house and the hotel and the resort areas that you owned will take some time before the insurance coverage claims can be worked out.”
“Understood.”
“Our whole industry is in turmoil now…and we’re hoping for some divine intervention from Washington. But…I’m sure we’ll honor our commitments—,”
“—I’m sure.”
“With insurance…you win some and you lose some. We just have to win more than we lose.”
Cynthia smiled and said, “Do you feel like you have won more than you have lost, Gail?”
Heinrich shrugged and tugged at tree bark. “I’ll know,” she said, softly, reflectively. “I’ll know that with Venable gone…that will be a win for us. In the long run. I’ll know.”
She continued to work her fingers over the branch, until she looked up at Cynthia and noticed the awkward silence.
“But you wish others would know, too, perhaps?” Cynthia suggested. “Of your…effectiveness?”
Heinrich’s eyes widened and she shook her head.
“Oh, no, no, no. I’m not going there. Trust me.”
Cynthia smiled, and assured Heinrich by covering her busy, tiny hand with her own long and slender fingers. “Of course I do.”
Heinrich returned the smile, and the gesture. There was mutual dependence between them. She felt certain of that fact.
She did not know, and perhaps she could not know, that Cynthia felt much less certain. Far less convinced and assured.
Just yet.
In all of their prior dealings Gail Heinrich might have inquired about Cynthia’s brother. Might have been astute enough to pick up the curious vibe he gave off when they were together.
But then, who did?
Heinrich might also have been more attuned to the presence of a third person on the Angel Oak grounds. A watcher in the woods. The woods that he knew so well, that he grew up around, where he played, where he got himself into and out of mischief. A place he could easily hide and readily strike. In the lonely, deep woods.
Mateen watched the transaction between Cynthia and Gail Heinrich and he patiently waited for their conversation to conclude. The arrangements had been made. He knew an old friend, a long-time resident with a one stop shop, Monroe’s body shop it was called, in nearby John’s Island that could deal with the deposal of Ms. Heinrich’s vehicle. Among other outstanding items.
“Do you plan to continue with your expansion?” Heinrich asked Cynthia as she began her slow walk to her car. “After all that’s happened?”
“I’m not certain yet. “I’m conferring with my advisors.”
Mateen grabbed his mouth when he heard Cynthia say that to stifle the laugh that nearly left his lips.
Heinrich stopped and turned. She took in the whole of the picture. Of Angel Oak. Its tangled web of living branches, plunging in and emerging from the soil, reaching its tendrils to sky and ground at once.
“Whatever you do, don’t do a thing to this tree.”
Cynthia turned, too, to remark upon the natural sentinel that stood guard over her life.
“This old tree? It withstood the storm. It just bends…nothing breaks it.”
“Some things have a way of working out,” Heinrich offered blandly, to mask her eagerness to get going.
Cynthia stepped back and stood beside Heinrich, to keep the woman’s attention adhered to the tree, knowing the moment was near. And the words that Gail Heinrich heard, among the last she would ever hear in this world, were these words, said by Cynthia Hairston so many times before that they came to represent her own personal creed, her self-styled theme.
Whether she believed the meaning of the words or not was immaterial.
“My Pop would say me about this tree, he’d say, oldest living thing in our part of the world. Seen it all. Always steady with its deep roots. He’d say to me ‘some things will never change, precious. ‘Cause they weren’t meant to change.’”
The End