Chapter 5 - ASHES ON HIGHWAY 17
"What did you do, Russell?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, yet it carried to every corner of the hushed banquet hall.
Russell backed up a step, his hands raised palms-out in front of his tuxedo jacket. The sweat on his forehead was running down into his collar now. "I didn't do anything! The gas main out on Highway 17 has been corroded since the nineties! I told the foreman to shut off the municipal valve before they started pulling down the boiler room wall!"
"You sent a crew in there tonight?" Arthur Vance demanded, stepping around the table with an agility that belied his seventy-two years. "On a Saturday night, without a demolition permit from the city?"
"I owned the building!" Russell shouted back, his voice cracking with panic. "I had the right to clear interior fixtures!"
"No, you didn't," Beatrice Hale said, pulling her cell phone from her coat pocket and already dialing the county prosecutor’s after-hours line. "Because at 4:45 this afternoon, Judge Holloway signed a temporary restraining order freezing all physical alterations to the Sea Breeze property pending an audit of the 1998 Vance mortgage."
I looked down at Leo Gadsden. The boy’s face had gone white under his freckles, his small hands clutching the lapels of his blue wool coat.
"Mrs. Martha," Leo whispered, his chin trembling like the twelve-year-old child he was. "My uncle Marcus is on the salvaging crew for Miller Demolition. He’s the one who called my granddad this morning to warn us they were going into Room 12 after dark."
My blood turned to ice. Marcus Gadsden—Eli’s youngest son, a single father who had helped me patch the motel roof after every tropical storm for the past ten years without ever charging me full price.
"Come on, Leo," I said, grabbing the brass bell, the 1978 survey map, and the yellow marine invoice from the table before Russell could reach for them. "Arthur, don't let either of them leave until the sheriff’s investigators get here."
"They aren't taking a step outside this building, Martha," Arthur promised grimly, gesturing for the two uniformed deputies to move directly behind Russell and Kimberly.
Kimberly sank into her chair and buried her face in her hands, sobbing loud, ragged breaths as the pearls around her neck clicked against the edge of the table. She had thought she was playing a clever game of extortion with a crooked developer; she was just now realizing she had tied herself to a man willing to burn down buildings with people inside them to cover his tracks.
Twenty minutes later, Beatrice’s sedan pulled onto the gravel shoulder of Highway 17, half a mile north of the Ravenel Bridge ramp.
The night sky above the salt marsh was bruised orange and thick with black, oily smoke. Three Charleston County fire engines blocked the two-lane highway, their red and blue strobe lights reflecting off the wet asphalt and the shallow puddles in the parking lot of my mother’s twelve-room motel.
I didn't wait for Beatrice to put the car in park. I threw open the passenger door and ran toward the yellow fire line tape, with Leo right behind me.
"Ma'am, stay back! The natural gas line hasn't been fully capped yet!" a firefighter in heavy turnout gear shouted, catching me by the shoulders.
"The man who was inside—Marcus Gadsden!" I cried out, looking past him toward the collapsed cinderblock wall at the far end of the single-story motel, where Room 12 had stood for sixty years. "Is he alive?"
"Uncle Marcus!" Leo yelled from beside a white ambulance fifty yards to our left.
I turned and saw a tall, broad-shouldered man sitting on the rear bumper of the paramedic unit with an oxygen mask over his soot-streaked face and a thermal blanket draped over his torn work shirt. His left arm was heavily bandaged from wrist to elbow, but he was sitting upright.
Leo bolted under the yellow tape before the firefighter could grab him and threw his arms around his uncle’s good shoulder. Marcus pulled the boy close, burying his soot-blackened face against the blue wool coat, his chest heaving beneath the oxygen mask.
Beatrice and I hurried over to the ambulance as the paramedic finished wrapping gauze around Marcus’s forearm.
"Mrs. Martha," Marcus rasped, pulling the plastic mask down to his chin as I reached out and gripped his uninjured hand. "I’m sorry about your mama’s place. We weren't trying to tear it down. Mr. Bennett called the boss at six o'clock and offered five thousand cash bonus if we took a sledgehammer to the back boiler wall tonight and hauled the rubble to the barge before midnight."
"How did the fire start, Marcus?" Beatrice asked, holding up her phone to record his statement while the fire marshal approached from the wreckage.
Marcus shook his head, his eyes dark with anger. "That wasn't a gas leak, Miss Beatrice. I smelled kerosene the second my crowbar broke through my daddy’s old cinderblock wall. Somebody had rigged a glass carboy of kerosene and an old toaster heating element to the spring hinge on the floor safe door. If I hadn't seen the copper wire glinting under my flashlight and yelled for my partner to jump out the window, we’d both be dead."
I felt my knees weaken, and Beatrice caught my elbow to steady me.
A booby trap wired to the safe door. Russell hadn't just hired a demolition crew to clear the site; he had gone out to the motel himself earlier this week, drilled through the back exterior vent, and rigged the safe to incinerate whatever was inside the moment anyone opened it.
"Did everything inside burn?" I asked softly.
Marcus reached under the silver thermal blanket with his good hand and pulled out a flat, rectangular steel firebox, blistered black from the flash heat and still smelling of scorched paint and marsh mud.
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"The kerosene burned the rafters down, Mrs. Martha," Marcus said, setting the heavy metal box into my arms. "But your mama didn't keep her things in cardboard. When the wall blew outward, this landed right in the drainage ditch behind the oleander bushes."
The brass latch on the steel box had melted halfway shut from the blast, but the seam was popped open an inch. Inside, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth that had kept the ditch water out, I could see the edge of a blue leather bound booklet—and sitting right on top of it was my mother’s gold wedding band, which Russell had told me was lost at the hospital the night she died in 2004.
