Rising Tides. Emilie Richards
on why you want to know. Me, I can’t figure why a nigger’d be looking for Senator Gerritsen’s house after dark, unless he’s got something on his mind he shouldn’t.”
Ben stood in the doorway and watched the other man—a man who, at thirty-seven, hadn’t been a boy for two decades—react to the storekeeper’s words. Ben recognized him. He waited for his reaction.
Phillip Benedict leaned across the counter. “Now if I wanted to kill Senator Gerritsen, coon ass, you think I’d stop here first so you could remember exactly what I looked like?”
The storekeeper cranked himself up to a full five-foot-four, but he needed an additional ten inches to be Phillip’s equal. Actually, Ben concluded, he needed a whole lot more than inches.
“Get out of my store! Go on. Get! And watch your back while you’re on the island. Might find yourself riding the waves facedown if you don’t!”
Phillip had beautiful hands, long-fingered and broad. One of them gathered the material of the storekeeper’s shirt and twisted it so that he couldn’t move away. “It would take a very quiet man to sneak up on me, coon ass. You don’t have that kind of quiet. You got a big mouth. I’d hear it yapping a mile away. So you be careful, ‘cause while you’re yapping, I might just sneak up on you. And you wouldn’t hear me.” He let go of the shirt and pushed the man away from the counter. Then he turned. His eyes met Ben’s. For a moment, he didn’t move.
“Coon ass?” Ben asked.
“Wish I’d coined the phrase.”
Ben looked past Phillip to the storekeeper, who was edging toward the wall. “He’s a mean son of a bitch,” he told the man. “Eats white folks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now, I’d be careful. All that, and a friend of the Gerritsen family, too. He’s a good man to stay away from.”
“Both of you get out!”
“Bad for business to be so rude.” Ben picked up a candy bar and fished for some change, which he laid on the counter. “Want anything, Benedict?”
“Yeah. A head on a platter.”
“Next store down the road.” Ben draped an arm around Phillip’s shoulder. “Let’s see what we can do.”
They exited that way, although Ben kept his eye on the storekeeper until they were safely out the door. “About now is a good time to make tracks,” he said at the bottom of the steps. “Do you have a car?”
“Sure as hell didn’t hitchhike.”
“Let’s go.”
When they were both in the car, Phillip pulled onto the road, and they were quiet until he’d taken one of the turns off the main route and parked in front of the is land’s Catholic church. Phillip was the first to speak. “Sun’s going down, white boy. Ain’t safe for niggers or agitators on a backass Looziana road.”
“What in the hell are you doing here?”
Phillip lifted a brow. “I could ask the same.”
Ben tried to imagine how he could explain something he didn’t understand himself. In the meantime, he examined the other man.
Phillip Benedict was a journalist of note. He was widely praised for his insight and biting commentary, but it was his color and his convictions about prejudice and freedom that set him apart from other Ivy League—educated newsmen. From jailhouse interviews with Martin Luther King to his assessment of the achievements of the late Malcolm X, Phillip had reported the struggle for civil rights like a war correspondent. More times than not, he had been right in the thick of battle.
The two men had liked each other from their first encounter, years before. They had been covering the same story in New York, Ben as a young reporter right out of college and Phillip as a seasoned journalist. They had spent a long night together in a Lower East Side bar along with half a dozen other newsmen, waiting for someone to emerge from a building across the street. Phillip had taken Ben under his wing, and with hours to kill they had traded their personal stories. But over the years they hadn’t spent much time in each other’s presence, and over the past year none at all. Their lives and their careers had taken them in different directions.
“I’m not exactly sure why I’m here,” Ben said. “But I was invited to the reading of a will. You?”
“Seems I’ve been invited, too. Aurore Gerritsen was one interesting old lady.”
Ben shifted so that his back was against the car door. He had known from the conversation in the store that Phillip’s presence on Grand Isle had something to do with the Gerritsen family, but he hadn’t really expected this. He had guessed that Phillip was looking for a story.
Or feeling suicidal.
Raindrops glistened in Phillip’s hair and on the dark hollows of his cheeks. He didn’t look any the worse for his confrontation with the storekeeper. In fact, he looked like a man waiting for new challenges. “This is getting stranger by the moment,” Ben said. “Why you?”
Phillip smiled. “You told the man. I’m a friend of the family.”
“I was just trying to keep your ass in one piece. What’s the real reason?”
Phillip shifted, too, trying to make room for his long legs. “Are you entertaining theories?”
“Yeah, and you could entertain a whole lot more than that by coming to a place like Grand Isle and manhandling the locals.”
Phillip took his time looking Ben over before he spoke again. “Do you know why you were invited?”
“How much do you know about the Gerritsens?” Ben reached into his shirt pocket for the Butterfingers he’d bought at the store. He ripped it open and broke it in two, offering half to Phillip.
Phillip declined with a shake of his head. “I just know what I’ve been told.”
“How much do you know about Father Hugh Gerritsen?” Ben asked.
“I know he was killed last year. Over there in Bonne Chance.” Phillip hiked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Yeah. A short sail, or a hell of a trip by car. I was born there, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m there again. I can feel the heat and the damp settling all over me, and I’m back in Bonne Chance.”
“You were there when he died, weren’t you?”
Ben wasn’t surprised that Phillip knew. They had never talked about it, but the story had been covered in the national media. “I was there. But there’s more to it than that. His niece and I…” He shrugged. “Dawn and I were close.”
“That right?”
“All I really know is I’m here, and I’m planning to stay.”
“So am I.”
“You’ve avoided telling me why you were invited.”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“But you could guess if you had to?”
“I got to know Mrs. Gerritsen at the end of her life. My being here has something to do with that.”
“Do you know anybody else who’s coming?”
Phillip gave a half smile that Ben could have interpreted a hundred different ways. “My mother and step father.”
Ben gave a low whistle. He had never met Phillip’s family, but he had heard Phillip’s mother sing a thou sand times. She was Nicky Valentine, a world-famous jazz and blues singer who owned a nightclub in New Or leans.
“Got their invitations the same day I got mine,” Phillip said.
Ben had a hundred questions, but Phillip had a journalist’s natural reticence. Ben would get his answers when they all gathered back at the cottage. “This is