Christmas in Hawthorn Bay

Living in the South Carolina lowlands meant your feet weren’t ever quite dry. Thousands of acres of spartina marshland, endless blue miles of Atlantic coastline, haunted black swamps and twisting ribbons of tea-colored rivers—that was what Jack saw when he dreamed of home, not the antebellum columns and jasmine-scented porches of Sweet Tides.

And certainly not the gold.

Almost every major incident in his life was tied to the water. He’d been four the day they’d dragged his grandmother out of the river behind Sweet Tides, where she’d unsuccessfully tried to drown herself. He’d been nine the day he’d broken his fibula learning to water-ski behind their new boat—Killian luck never lasted long, and that boat had been sold, dime on the dollar, before the cast had come off Jack’s leg. He’d been sixteen the day his mother, lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, had sent him to find his father, who’d been drinking malt liquor at a shanty on the edge of Big Mosquito Swamp. It was the first time Jack had driven a car alone.

And, of course, he had won Nora Carson on the water—the day they’d wandered away from a high school science trip to a loblolly pine hammock, and he’d kissed her beside a cluster of yellow water lilies.

He’d lost her on the water, too, the day he’d taken her filthy cousin Tom out to a deserted spoil island, beat the crap out of him and left him there to swim home on his own. He hadn’t realized that he’d broken Tom’s arm, rendering the jerk unable to swim an inch, but the cops had decided ignorance was no excuse.

Jack had escaped an attempted murder charge by the skin of his teeth, and by a timely enlistment in the United States Army.

He hadn’t been home since. Until today.

He drove his Jaguar around back, between the house and the river. In Jack’s lifetime, no one but the sheriff had ever entered Sweet Tides from the fancy front, where gray, peeling Doric columns guarded the portico like ghosts from a long-lost world.

Yeah, the front of Sweet Tides was pure Greek tragedy, but the back was merely pleasantly ragged, with mossy oaks, leggy camellias, crooked steps and weathered paint that all needed a lot more tending than they ever got.

Jack’s brother, Sean, stood at the back porch. When Jack killed his engine, Sean loped down the uneven steps, arms open, a huge grin on the face that looked so eerily like Jack’s own.

“You made it! I thought surely the minute you hit the marsh flats you’d break out in hives and make a U-turn back to Kansas City!”

Jack folded Sean in with one arm and ruffled his unkempt black curls with the other. They both still wore their hair a little longer than other men—it was Jack’s one rebellion against the establishment. But while Sean clearly still cut his own with the kitchen scissors, Jack paid a small fortune to someone named Ambrosia, who knew how to keep the uptown-edgy-lawyer look from revealing its roots as backwoods bad boy.

“I thought about it,” he admitted. “But curiosity got the better of me.”

Sean raised one eyebrow into a high, skeptical arch, a favorite Killian trick. “You managed to keep your curiosity under control for twelve long years.”

“Yeah, but this time you sweetened the pot. I couldn’t pass up the chance to thwart the evil plans of that lowlife Tom Dickson and his cronies.” Jack popped the trunk, exposing a suitcase and a garment bag. “Give me a hand with these, okay? I brought some extra suits, in case the bastard puts up a fight.”

Sean smiled. “Oh, he’ll fight, especially once he realizes you’re his opponent. Somehow I don’t think he’s ever forgiven you for trying to kill him.”

Jack hoisted one of the black leather cases and extended the other to his brother. He held onto the handle an extra second.

“Just for the record. If I’d ever tried to kill Tom Dickson, he’d be dead.”

“Point taken.” Sean chuckled as he led the way into the house. “Though I’m not sure that logic will cut much ice with Tom.”

Given the dilapidated state of the exterior, Jack was surprised to see how neat and clean—if somewhat Spartan—the interior of the mansion had been kept. The rooms had all been painted recently enough to shine a little, and the heart-of-pine floors were freshly varnished.

There wasn’t much furniture. Their dad—Crazy Kelly, his friends called him—had sold all the antiques years ago, in his attempt to set the world record for butt-stupid poker playing. He’d lost the grand piano betting on a pair of tens.

But the few pieces Sean had scattered around were sensible and high quality. Even Kelly Killian hadn’t found a way to sell the marble off the walls, or the carvings off the cornices, so the interior still made quite an impression.

As they walked past the elaborate painted-brick archway that led to the living room, Jack realized he was tensing up instinctively. Their mother had kept her collection of miniature glass unicorns in there, and it still made Jack cringe to remember how he and Sean had occasionally joined in their father’s mocking laughter. “Unicorns! Are you daft in the head, Bridey, or just a goddamn fool?”

When she’d fallen that day, she’d hit the case and broken every one. Jack didn’t look into the living room as they passed, but out of the corner of his eye he imagined he still saw the twinkle and glitter of shattered glass.

So, he thought. Not all the ghosts had moved out.

But overall, the place had definitely changed for the better. It didn’t smell damp and defeated anymore, as if it stood in a stagnant bog of booze and tears.

“I put you in your old room,” Sean said. “But let’s have a drink first, okay? There’s some stuff I probably ought to fill you in on.”

They dropped the cases at the foot of the wide, curving staircase and headed toward the smoking room, where the liquor cabinet had always been kept. Jack didn’t wonder, even for a second, what kind of drink Sean intended to offer him. Neither of them had ever drunk liquor in their lives—except for that one night, the night before Jack had joined the Army. Jack had gotten plastered that night, and it had scared the tar out of him. There was no nightmare more terrifying than the fear that they’d turn into their father.

“Soda? Or iced tea?” Sean had obviously tossed out the cherry-inlaid liquor cabinet, with its front scarred from Kelly’s fury when Bridey had dared to try to lock him out. Instead, Sean had installed a handsome modern marble wet bar. “I’ve got water in six flavors. The chicks love it.”

“I’ll take a Coke,” Jack said. He parked himself on one of the bar stools and looked around the mostly bare room. “I have to tell you, buddy. For a junk dealer, you have remarkably little junk.”

Sean handed over the cold can and shrugged. “Yeah, well, I buy to sell. I don’t keep. I don’t care much about stuff, you know? All these people, they accumulate these expensive trinkets, hoping the stuff will define them, or save them, or…whatever. Bull. If material things had any power, then Mom…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. A hundred crystal unicorns, and not enough magic in the lot to stop a single tear from falling.

Jack’s apartment in Kansas City was equally spare.

“Anyhow,” Jack said to cover the silence. “Fill me in. You said that the city council has let you know they want to buy Sweet Tides. And that they’ve hinted that, if you don’t sell willingly, they’ll find a way to claim eminent domain. Somebody wants to put up a shopping plaza or condo complex or something like that, right?”

“Yeah. They brought it up earlier this year, but I thought they were just trying to rattle my chains, you know? I thought they’d back off, because it’s such a stupid idea. Unless they can claim that Sweet Tides is a blight, it’s going to be hella hard to assert eminent domain. But they haven’t let go of the idea. They’ve already tried, informally, of course, to talk numbers with me.”

“And what kind of number did they suggest?” Jack knew that, unfortunately, the people displaced by eminent domain often ended up taking less than their property was worth, just because they didn’t have the savvy to know how to fight back. “Was it even in the ballpark?”

“That’s what made me nervous. They offered top dollar. Does that make sense to you?”

Jack shook his head slowly. “Not as a first offer. They have to know they need bargaining room.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So what’s going on? You know these people better than I do. Do they really want to put a shopping plaza out here that bad? Didn’t look to me as if the commercial area had spread out this far yet anyhow.”

“It hasn’t. And no, they don’t want that blasted shopping center. They couldn’t. The one they built last year doesn’t have full occupancy yet.”

Jack sighed. “So. Can I assume this is just a new case of Killian fever? Someone has decided that the trashy Killians can’t be allowed to live this close to decent folk?”

“Maybe.” Sean looked thoughtful. He came out from behind the bar and stood at the picture window, which looked out toward the river. “Or maybe it’s a different kind of fever. Maybe it’s the gold.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sean. No one really believes that anymore. Everyone knows that, if there had been gold on this property, dad would have found it and bet it all on a pair of tens.”

Sean was quiet a long time, just staring out the window, as if he was hypnotized by the moss swaying from the oaks. Finally he turned around.

“But what if there is? We used to think we’d find it, remember, Jack?”

Of course he remembered. The two of them had sneaked out almost every night for a year, right after their mother had gotten sick, and had dug holes until they’d been so tired and dirty all they could do was lie on their backs and stare at the stars. And whisper about what they’d do with the gold when they found it.

Sean, who was two years older and much nicer, had always listed a detox center for their dad first. Jack had called him a moron. Betting that Kelly Killian could get off the bottle? You might as well throw the whole treasure away on a pair of tens.

“I remember,” Jack said. “That’s about a thousand hours of our lives we’ll never get back, huh?”

Sean shrugged. “Another piece washed up last month. We got six inches of rain in two hours. When it stopped, there was a Confederate coin out on the South Forty.”