Pawleys Island-lowcountry 5 by Dorothea Benton Frank Page A

bubbling over and couldn’t wait to show me what he had. “How am I? Great! You look fabulous! So tell me what’s going on with you? Where have you been?”
    “Everett? I’m gonna give you the Cliffs Notes version of my horrendous story, and then we are going to move on to other more pleasant topics.” I took Everett through the chain of death, and he was completely surprised and somber.
    “Good Lord, Abigail, I wouldn’t wish any of that on my worst enemy. I am so damn sorry.”
    “Thanks. I know. But I’m okay, really—I mean, as well as anyone would be in my shoes. What can you do? Life goes on, right?”
    “Yeah, I guess, but man oh man, that is too much.”
    “It is exactly as much as I could stand without losing my mind, and believe me, there are still moments when, if I think about it all too much, I might still go insane. That’s why it’s good for me to get busy. So tell me what you found.”
    “Okay, her name is Charlene Johnson,” he said, handing me a manila envelope. “And guess what? She works for Nat in his daddy’s business. Isn’t that a coincidence?”
    “Bloody convenient too. Tsk, tsk. Why does it always happen in the workplace?” I opened the envelope and removed two folders. The first one held a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. I began flipping through them. First there was a picture of them leaving the Bank of South Carolina on Meeting Street and another of them using an ATM machine at the Bank of America on Savannah Highway. Then there were pictures of them at Community Firstbank and Washington Mutual, and all I could think was, gee, they sure do go to the bank a lot. Not very romantic. At the bottom of the stack were a few pictures of them coming and going from the cosmetic surgery center on Calhoun Street. What was that about? Well, it looked to me like Charlene was just a regular girl in the first photograph but in the last one she had become Jessica Rabbit. Poor thing. Who would ever take her seriously?
    I opened the other folder. They were grainy and some were slightly out of focus, but one thing was obvious. Nat Simms knew Charlene Johnson in the biblical sense, and we’re talking in detail.
    “How did you get this picture of them?”
    “There’s a huge live oak across the street. I just shinnied up the trunk and positioned myself with my zoom lens…”
    Before I could stop myself I said, “Looks like Nat positioned his zoom as well.”
    Everett burst out laughing and I turned a thousand shades of red. “Abigail!”
    “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I just couldn’t resist.”
    That was the kind of joke I might have made with Huey, but never with someone from my professional life. Maybe I was mellowing after all. I continued to stare at the pictures, one after another, but I kept going back to one of them in the living room of Rebecca’s house. They were smoking what looked like a cigarette, but I knew it wasn’t a cigarette by the way they handled it.
    “Everett? Let me ask you something. In your professional opinion, does this look like they’re smoking pot to you?”
    “Yep. Absolutely. In fact, I could smell it across the street. I’d bet if I went back and hung around for a few days, I could figure out where he’s getting it or who he’s getting it from. I saw them getting high on several occasions, but this was the clearest photograph I had of them actually smoking. You say this guy got custody of their children?”
    “For the moment.”
    “Well, I don’t think family court would approve of this, do you?” Everett handed me another folder from his briefcase and grinned widely. “Take a look at this.”
    I opened the folder and nearly fainted from what I saw. There was Charlene Johnson spanking Nat’s bare backside with a hairbrush. He was lying right across her lap. But not to worry, it wasn’t like Nat was naked. He was wearing a Clemson football jersey.
    “I guess his panties got lost in the shuffle somewhere?” I was choking on