The Final Victim by Wendy Corsi Staub Page A

that?”
    â€œYes,” she replies with a grin as Jed steps over scattered DUPLO blocks to embrace her, “I do.”
    Her son tugs on the hem of her homemade cutoff denim shorts as her husband pulls her close. “Milky, Mommy.”
    â€œHmmm?” Exhausted, Mimi rests her head on Jed’s shoulder. She can’t help wishing she was already in bed, rather than facing household tasks she’s been meaning to get to all day—and wishing that Jed was in bed with her, instead of heading out to start the overnight road-crew shift he’s been working since last October, when a hurricane all but destroyed the southernmost of Achoco Island’s two causeways.
    Now there’s only one way on and off the island, whose burgeoning population makes for frequent traffic tie-ups, particularly during beach season. Jed and the crew are under a lot of pressure to finish the job.
    â€œMilky, Mama,” Cameron persists, tacking on an adorable, “Pwease?”
    Stifling a yawn, Mimi recalls a line of an old Robert Frost poem:
    Â 
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep . . .
    Â 
    Â 
    â€œHungry, Charlotte?” Royce asks, as they emerge on bustling River Street not far from the restaurant. The warm air is thick with the tantalizing aroma of deep-fried shellfish.
    â€œHungry—and homesick,” she replies, longing for their new home on a leafy block facing Colonial Park Cemetery not far from here.
    â€œMe, too. It won’t be long now.”
    â€œMaybe we can come back home by the end of July,” she tells Royce hopefully—though even if that’s possible, she’ll be facing almost a month at Oakgate without her grandfather . . . or with his ghost, depending on one’s willingness to suspend disbelief.
    â€œI doubt we’ll be in before August. Even if the interior work is done, they’ll still have to paint and paper, and finish the woodwork—” Catching sight of her expression, he adds reassuringly, “But I’m sure we’ll be home before school starts, like I promised Lianna.”
    â€œI hope so.” There will be hell to pay if the temperamental thirteen-year-old faces even another day of being driven forty-five minutes from the plantation to Savannah Country Day School by Stephen, Grandaddy’s longtime chauffeur.
    Lianna is embarrassed by the long black town car and, infuriatingly, by kindly old Stephen. She’s conveniently forgotten that the chauffeur was her hero when he supplied her with pockets full of bubblegum back in the early days after the divorce, when they were first living at Oakgate.
    These days, Lianna finds fault with everything about Stephen—from his being hard of hearing to his European formality.
    â€œDoes he have to wear that stupid uniform?” she frequently grumbled throughout the school year, always followed by her daily plea, “Why can’t you just drive me, Mom?”
    Because you’d have me so upset by the time we got to town, that’s why.
    But Charlotte would always manage to summon every bit of maternal patience she possessed and keep her thoughts to herself. She just shrugged and told Lianna that Stephen would be driving her for as long as they were staying at Oakgate, period.
    Now, strolling along River Street, with its row of brightly lit restaurants and shops housed in former cotton warehouses, Charlotte so longs for her old life back that she’s tempted to launch into a Lianna-style whine.
    This, not Oakgate, is her home now.
    Savannah, and the nineteenth-century architectural gem she and Royce bought this winter, with its dormered mansard roof, bracketed cornices, and lush gardens now fragrant with summer blooms.
    It isn’t far from where she grew up. But sadly, that Beaux Arts mansion on Abercorn Street—like its final owners—didn’t live to see the turn of the millennium. A bank now stands where Charlotte’s girlhood