“Guthrie?”
“I can’t stay,” he called over his shoulders. “Granny said come right back.”
• • •
It was full dark, the wind was blowing straight in off the sound, and I was half sloshed when they materialized at the end of the porch, two shapes silhouetted against the security light out at the east edge of the yard.
It’d been so long since I’d seen them to know who I was looking at, that I wouldn’t have recognized them.
“Evening,” I said. “It’s Drew and Maxton, isn’t it?”
“Evening,” said Andy’s older son. “They say you’re a judge now.”
“Yes.”
“They said you found him,” said the younger.
“Me and Guthrie.”
“Yeah, well.”
“We’d rather hear it from you,” said Maxton.
“If you don’t mind,” Drew added.
So again I told them exactly how we’d gone out to the sandbar and how we’d found their father lying in the water, stone dead. “I’m really sorry,” I told them, when I’d finished. “I didn’t know him very well, but what I knew, I liked. Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
“But we thank you for asking.”
And then they were gone.
Without going on over to talk to Guthrie.
Inside the phone began to ring. I got up unsteadily and followed the trill to Sue and Carl’s bedside table.
“Judge Knott?” asked a quietly cultured voice. “Judge Deborah Knott?”
“Yes?”
“Oh I am so glad I caught you! This is Linville Pope of Pope Properties? Judge Mercer is a real good friend of mine and he said for me to look after you. Could you possibly stop by on Tuesday after court for cocktails? I have asked some friends in and I know they would just love to meet you.”
I looked down at my empty glass. My daddy used to lecture me about drinking alone.
“Why certainly,” I said, putting on my own cultured voice. “How kind of you to ask me.”
3
After Bath in Beaufort County and New Bern in Craven County, Carteret County’s Beaufort is the third oldest town in North Carolina, established in 1721. (And that’s B
For years our Beaufort was just a sleepy little fishing village on the Intracoastal Waterway. Then in the late seventies they tore down most of the ramshackle fish houses alongside Taylors Creek, rebuilt the piers, painted everything on Front Street in Williamsburg colors and now boats from all over the world—fishing boats, yachts, sailboats, even occasional tall ships—tie up at its docks and come ashore to drink in its bars and rummage through its self-consciously quaint shops.
Retirees have drifted in from all over, wealthy businessmen have built themselves second homes along the quiet coves and sheltered inlets, developers started calling our shoreline the Crystal Coast, and now tourism’s a year-round industry.
Back away from the waterfront, the town itself hasn’t changed all that much from what it was in my childhood except for the historical markers on more of the old white wooden houses. The courthouse still stands foursquare in a shady grove of live oaks a few blocks inland. It was built in 1907, red brick with tall white Doric columns on both its east-and south-facing porches. As with the old Colleton County courthouse back in Dobbs, modern courtrooms have been grafted onto the old building here and a new jail complex is rising out back.
A bailiff was waiting for me at the east porch. He gestured me toward an otherwise illegal parking space beneath one of the live oaks, took my briefcase and robe, and ushered me inside.
“Miz Leonard’s office is down there on the right,” he told me diplomatically.
Though she’d been elected on the Democratic ticket, Carteret’s Clerk of Court wasn’t terribly political and I knew her only by sight and reputation.
Her small reception room was empty; but as I approached the open inner door to her office, I was nearly
