my check.
“Nevertheless, it’s good we had this chance to meet, Deborah,” she said, with a gracious incline of her porcelain head. “I feel it’s helped me know Lev even better somehow.”
“I’m so glad,” I murmured. My mother taught me a few graces, too.
• • •
When I slid under the steering wheel of my car a few minutes later, I was dismayed to see the backseat half down and the contents of my trunk exposed. More than one of my brothers had lectured me on this possibility. “What’s the point of locking things in your trunk if you don’t lock the car itself?” they’d ask.
I got out and unlocked the trunk button to survey the damage.
Oddly, nothing was missing. Oh, it had obviously been tossed—my new books were now half under the tarp I keep there, my garment bag had a tiny bit of my black judge’s robe caught in the zipper—but my .38 was still locked in the tool box, and my briefcase hadn’t been taken.
Weird. Unless...?
A young man was perched on a nearby railing and I was in the middle of asking if he’d noticed anyone plundering my car, when I realized he was Jay Hadley’s son, Josh.
“Yeah, I thought I’d seen you before,” he said, his dark eyes darting away from mine. “They take anything?”
“Not that I can tell. But you didn’t notice anyone?”
He slipped down from his perch. “I was just waiting for my sister and yonder she comes.”
Before I could question him further, he’d threaded his way across the busy street and jumped into a pickup driven by his sister.
If Zeke Myers had still been around, I’d have asked him, but that stocky little man had vanished. And if Linville Pope had found a parking space in this parking lot, she had finished her business quickly and gone because her sleek black convertible was nowhere in sight either.
Was it possible someone knew I had Andy Bynum’s papers?
I found a pay phone, called Jay Hadley and, after swearing her to secrecy, told her that Andy’s desk had been ransacked last night, and my car searched today. “Who knows you gave me those files?” I asked.
“I may have mentioned it to some of the Alliance members that were at the funeral yesterday,” she admitted.
She rattled off a bunch of names, but the only ones I recognized were Telford Hudpeth and Barbara Jean Winberry and I rather doubted if either of them wanted to keep me from discovering any of Linville Pope’s possibly shady dealings.
As I returned to my car, something drew my attention to an upper balcony of the Ritchie House. There, lounging in a white wicker rocker, Claire Montgomery stared down at me. As our eyes met, the flaxen-haired hand puppet came up in an unmistakable gesture.
Damned if it didn’t give me the finger.
I resisted the impulse to reply in kind—conduct unbecoming,
“Sorry, Judge,” said the uniformed duty officer. “He was in, but now he’s gone again. Want me to have him call you when he checks in next?”
“No,” I decided. “I’ll stop by one more time before I leave Beaufort.”
Back on Front Street, I bought a floppy straw hat, sandals, and a pair of shorts and had the clerk bag up my skirt along with my heels and panty-hose. I also borrowed their restroom to remove every smidgen of makeup. The soap stung the scratches on my cheek and forehead, yet it seemed to me that some of the redness was beginning to fade from the edges. With sunglasses and hat in place, it was moot anyhow.
Five minutes later, I was driving across the causeway, through Morehead City and across another bridge to Atlantic Beach, where I took a left onto 58 and continued on to Fort Macon, now a state park.
The original colonial forts washed into the sea in the early 1800s and the current one of heavy masonry was built in the 1830s. Periodically, the fort is threatened by the sea, and statewide debates rage in the newspapers as to whether or not herculean methods should be used to save it. As far as I’m concerned, the sea giveth and the sea can taketh away. But then I’ve always been personally outraged by people who build their play places—retirement or vacation houses—on narrow sandbars and then expect the rest of us to pay higher taxes and higher insurance rates so that they can rebuild when the inevitable storms wipe the beaches clean again. If they want to take the risk, fine, but leave me out of it. And that goes for old forts, too.
Still, as long as it’s here, Fort Macon’s an interesting place to tour. I stood on the ramparts and gazed out to sea. If I didn’t look back at all the piers and high rises straggling down the sandy stretches, I could almost imagine what it must have been like to guard this point two hundred years ago against Spanish and British raiders.
Then a jet ski roared past, breaking the illusion.
I slipped off my sandals and strolled briskly along the wide beach, occasionally wetting my toes in the cool water, my mind blanked except for the rolling waves, the gleam of colored shells, the grace of sandpipers that ran across the clean white sand and left lines of tiny neat tracks like featherstitching on a crazy quilt.
There were very few people walking here since the surf wasn’t yet warm enough for swimming. The sandpipers and I had it mostly to ourselves.
At the water’s edge, I found a couple of hermit crabs, one in a lettered olive shell, the other in a moon snail shell, and suddenly remembered how my younger cousin Scotty used to love to race them. Feeling thirteen again, I drew a three-foot circle in the wet sand, placed both crabs in the exact middle and even let the bigger one be Scott’s.
At once, it all rushed back: how patiently we squatted down by the circle to wait till the crabs emerged: one
