Claudine had known him since they were children, in the way you know someone you have never once had a real conversation with. He was six years older. When she was nine and he was fifteen, at the crab boil where his mother gave her the Coca-Cola, he had stood off by his father's truck in a Spring Hill College Prep T-shirt with a friend, and the friend had said something and looked at her grandfather and laughed, and Lawson had not laughed, but he had not said anything either. That was what she remembered about him. That he had not laughed and had not said anything.
Three years ago he had made her an offer for slot 1. Ninety thousand dollars, which was more than twice what any other slip on C dock had sold for. Eighteen months ago he had made another, a hundred and forty. She knew why he wanted it. Everyone on the dock knew. Tillery Coastal Properties had spent five years quietly buying every deeded slip on C dock as it came up, one by one, through LLCs with names like Bayfront Holdings and Riverbend Partners, until there were twenty-three on the dock and twenty-two of them were his. He wanted to rip out the old fixed pier and the cheap floating fingers and build a T-head for yachts over eighty feet, the kind that came up from Destin and paid by the foot, and he wanted to put a two-story restaurant and bar on the old net yard behind slot 1, where her grandfather had tarred lines, and he could not do either. Because slot 1 came with the landing right. Because the landing right ran across the land. Because a dead Black oysterman had paid a widow four hundred dollars in 1958 and his granddaughter would not sell.
"Wiley," Lawson said, coming up to them. He put out his hand and Shuford shook it. "Thank you for getting out here. I know you've got a hundred other things today."
"Mr. Tillery."
"Lawson, please. Lord. We've been on a boat together." He turned to Claudine. "Claudine."
"Lawson."
He looked at her arm. He looked away from her arm. "Where is he?"
"In the restroom," she said. "Or close to it."
"Wiley, she's been saying that? He's not in the restroom. I just came past the dock house. I'd have seen him."
"Deputy's checking now," Shuford said. "You got the paperwork?"
Lawson opened the Ziploc and took out the folder and handed it over, and Claudine watched the sergeant read it standing in the rain with his body bent over to shield it, his thick fingers turning the pages carefully at the corners. Durable Power of Attorney, she could see from where she stood, the heading in bold. Then two letters on hospital letterhead.
"Two physicians," Lawson said. "Dr. Adeyemi and Dr. Bramlett. August twenty-second. He fell on the boat, in the engine room, of course, where else, and lay there for six hours before anybody found him. Dehydrated. Broken wrist. A urinary tract infection that had him seeing my mother in the hospital room. He didn't know what year it was, Wiley. He thought it was 1979 and he had to get the boat up Halls Mill Creek for Frederic. That's what activated the power of attorney. That's all in there."