Sand Sharks

walking around with a very suspicious black eye.”

“Oh?”

“Will Blackstone. From 19-B, I think she said. I don’t know him. Do you?”

“We’ve met,” I admitted. “And he really does have a shiner. I heard he slipped and fell in the bathroom.”

“Not what I heard,” she sniffed. “Jane Harper said John Smith saw him come off the beach the other night with a bloody nose.”

“Maybe he ran into a piling. Or a pelican.” I dribbled some dressing over my salad and pushed back from the table. “I think I want some grated cheese. Bring you anything?”

“Well, as long as you’re going, a few bacon bits would be nice.”

By the time I got back to the table, she had forgotten all about Will Blackstone and his black eye.

After lunch, we drove a few short blocks to McAllister and Solomon, a used- and rare-book store on Wrightsville Avenue near 44th Street. If you’re a book lover, this is probably the place for you. Certainly it was the place for Judge Audrey Hamilton, whom we met leaving the store with a half-dozen vintage mystery novels in her arms. I myself would rather see the movie than read the book, but Dwight’s mother always has two or three books going at the same time and whenever we drive into Raleigh for lunch or shopping, she wants to stop by Reader’s Corner or Quail Ridge Books and Music and look at every title on the shelves. I usually kill time stocking up on CDs and greeting cards.

While Martha cruised biography and history, I went looking for the children’s section. My brother Zach had been mildly dyslexic, so Mother made him read aloud every night. I remember being transfixed by Old Yeller. Cal’s a reader like his grandmother, and I thought he might enjoy it even though we could probably rent the video.

I didn’t really expect to find a copy, but there it sat on a lower shelf. Unfortunately, it was a first edition and carried a seventy-dollar price tag. I sat down on a nearby stool and opened the pages to refresh my memory of Travis and his irritating younger brother, Arliss. Naturally I had identified with Arliss back then. My brothers thought I was a tagalong pain in the ass and didn’t hide their opinion much better than Travis did. I flipped to the heartbreaking ending and found myself choking up as if I were four again and about to sob, “No, no, NO! He can’t shoot Yeller!”

I had been aware that there were two people on the other side of the shelves from me, but the male voice was halfway through a quietly emotional reading of a poem before I came up from Yeller’s death scene and registered his words:

… And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core…

His voice broke then and after a moment the woman said, “ ‘I will arise now and go to Innisfree.’ Yes, I can see why she loved it.”

A moment or two later they came around the corner. He was in jeans and a faded Obama T-shirt; she wore hip-hugging white shorts that showed off the jeweled ring in her navel and a bright pink bandeau that matched her hair. Their eyes were suspiciously moist as if the poem he’d read had moved them both to the brink of tears. They seemed startled to see me sitting there and I was equally startled to recognize them.

“Oh, hey,” the young man said. “Did you ever find your earring?”

“Hank, right?” I slid the book back into its slot and stood up.

“Yes, ma’am.” To the girl with him, he explained, “The judge here lost an earring the other night but no one turned it in.”

“Deborah Knott,” I said, extending my hand.

“Mel Garrett,” she replied. “I work at Jonah’s, too.”

“I know. You waited on the Stone Hamilton table.”

“Wow! Wicked good memory.”

“Well, it was Stone Hamilton,” I said. Not that her fuchsia-streaked hair wasn’t also memorable. “I guess y’all heard about Kyle Armstrong?”

Both faces turned sober and Mel Garrett said, “I feel like the woman who worked alongside that serial killer— what was his name? The guy that killed all those sorority students?”

“Ted Bundy?”

“Yeah. Not that Kyle killed thirty women, but still. Two judges?”

From behind me, Martha said drily, “Only one judge. My husband’s banged up, but he’s going to live. Hello, Hank. How nice to see you again.”

“It was your husband Kyle ran down?” asked the Garrett girl. Martha nodded and the girl tsk’d in commiseration. “I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too, sugar.”