Sand Sharks (15 page)

“Naw, we’re staying till Wednesday. Wendy Nicole found us a good deal on the Internet. Bet you pay as much for your room as
I’m paying for a whole suite.” His eyes suddenly narrowed. “You with that bunch of judges down the hall from me? Sixth floor?”

I pled guilty.

“Y’all sure are noisy. Kept Tiffany Jane awake till after midnight.”

“They were talking in their outdoor voices,” the child said disapprovingly.

“Not me,” I said. “Not last night anyhow.”

Allen cut his eyes at me and white teeth flashed an amused smile beneath his dark beard. “Examining a witness in another room,
darlin’?”

“What’s a witness?” his daughter asked.

Before I could tell Allen that my comings and goings were none of his business, he grabbed my left hand.

“Is that a wedding ring?” he asked in astonishment. “Don’t tell me you went and married that rabbit sheriff after all?”

The last time our paths crossed, I had indeed been involved with a game warden from further up the coast, but he was ancient
history.

“No.”

“That SBI guy who was always hanging around?”

“Dwight Bryant,” I said. “Last Christmas.”

I didn’t have to explain who Dwight was. They’ve known each other off and on since childhood. Whenever Allen ran away from
home and fetched up at a neighbor’s house, he and his cousin became part of the gang of boys that hung out at our house to
play whatever ball was in season at the time. Too, he had been a “person of interest” when our paths last crossed and Dwight
had called him in for questioning.

“Well, I’ll be damned! Ol’ Dwight? Maybe if I’d had a badge on my shirt, you and me’d still be married.”

“We were never married,” I reminded him. “And the only badge anybody’d ever give you is maybe a dogcatcher’s.”

Tiffany Jane sat back on her heels. “Did you catch dogs, Daddy? And put them in jail?”

“Naw, honey. She’s just joking.”

At that moment young Tyler’s face brightened and the little girl cried, “Aunt Sally!”

Both children ran toward a bone-skinny woman who carried a large white plastic bag from one of the hamburger chains. An inch
or two over five feet, she had lemon-yellow hair gathered up into a topknot tied with a peach-colored ribbon. Her sun visor
was lime-green and so were her scoop-necked tank top and the frames of her oversized sunglasses. With her peach-colored slacks
and stacked orange sandals, she was a walking fruit salad.

From a distance, with that sassy walk, she looked forty. As she got closer, I saw that she was past fifty. Her skin had the
leathery look of someone who had either worked out in the sun all her life or else had her own tanning bed. “Time for lunch,”
she called. “Y’all hungry?” Her voice had the husky timbre of an addicted smoker.

As the children danced around her, she sat down under Allen’s umbrella and spread the towels for a picnic.

The children immediately tore into the bag of food and the smell of french fries, onions, and pickles floated toward me and
made my mouth water despite my full breakfast only two hours earlier. She unwrapped the hamburgers and poured juice into a
sippy cup for the toddler, then paused to give me a quizzical look over the top of her colorful sunglasses.

“Hey there,” she said, reaching out a hand that felt like thin dry twigs. “I’m Sally Stancil.”

“I’m sorry,” Allen said “Sally, this here’s Judge Deborah Knott.”

“Judge? Really?” Her sunglasses slipped further down her thin nose and she looked me up and down. I automatically straightened
my shoulders and sucked in my tummy, aware that my red bathing suit showed every extra ounce that I must have gained this
weekend. Allen’s second ex-wife (and the woman he’d still been married to when he married me) lifted a well-plucked eyebrow.
“Idn’t she the one almost cut off your balls?”

Happily, the children were too involved with their food to pick up on her question and Allen said, “Aw, that was just a little
misunderstanding.”

Sally Stancil gave me a friendly smile of solidarity. “He’s a hound dog, idn’t he? You want a hamburger, honey? I got extra.”

“No thanks,” I told her and stood to walk back to my own umbrella. “Nice meeting you,” I said and waved goodbye to the little
girl. The boy was carefully lining up french fries on his paper plate.

Allen jumped to his feet and followed me down the beach. “Sally’s gonna take ’em on up to her room for a nap soon as they
finish eating, so how ’bout we go someplace where we can set down and have a real lunch? Ain’t no reason we can’t be friends,
right?”

I looked up into his hopeful brown eyes. His neatly trimmed beard and mustache had almost as much salt as pepper these days,
but if you overlooked the scars and tattoos, he still exuded a rough-hewn sexy charm and he really did seem to have finally
settled down to a law-abiding life. I mean, how much more respectable can you get than installing seamless rain gutters?

“Friends? Yes,” I said and shook his work-hardened hand, “but I already made plans for lunch. Sorry.”

It was a lie, of course, but he pretended to believe me.

“Okay, then, darlin’. Catch you later, maybe.”

Inside the hotel, I stopped by the registration desk in the lobby to pick up my name tag and the thick packet of conference
material.

Counting everyone who’s come out of retirement to take up the slack when emergencies arise, North Carolina has around three
hundred district court judges, all of whom are required to attend at least one educational conference a year. Some go only
to the fall conference up in the mountains, others only to the summer one here in Wrightsville, while still others opt for
offerings at the School of Government in Chapel Hill. But the beach is usually pretty popular and the elevator I rode up in
was jammed with colleagues who had just checked in. I knew most of them by sight, but none were special friends, so it was
“How’s the beach?” and “How was your drive over?”

It reminded me that this was, after all, a professional conference and I was glad I’d pulled on a shirt and shorts over my
bathing suit before leaving the beach. Back in my room, I showered and shampooed all the salt out of my sandy blonde hair,
then lay down across the bed intending to look through the packet and familiarize myself with the issues that would be discussed.
After a morning of sun and surf, though, good intentions fought with a pleasant inertia and inertia won hands down.

It was almost two o’clock before I was vertical again and ready to put on one of my favorite summer dresses. Made of soft
blue cotton, the peasant skirt was topped by a matching tunic with bands of white embroidery around the keyhole neckline and
along the edges of the three-quarter-length sleeves. I cinched my waist with a white straw belt and fastened a bracelet around
my wrist that Mother had given Aunt Zell to keep until my wedding. Each slender gold link held a tiny blue enameled forget-me-not.
As if I would ever forget her, with or without the bracelet.

“Sue said it could be your something blue,” Aunt Zell had told me.

Mother had loved Dwight and I would never stop wishing she could have known that we would wind up together. That last summer,
when she was telling me all her secrets, I had asked how she had come to marry Daddy.

“It was his fiddle,” she said. “He played himself right into my heart.” Then she clutched my hand and said, “Oh Deborah, honey.
Try to marry a man who can make you laugh.” She paused and looked at me thoughtfully. “I wonder if you’ve met him yet?”

Well, of course, I thought I had, but that little romance went bust before the leaves turned. Dwight was in the Army back
then, stationed overseas when Mother died, and nowhere on my radar.

I brushed my hair, dabbed moisturizer on my face, then applied lipstick and mascara with a light hand. My skirt had such deep
pockets that I could do without a purse. Keys (car and room), lipstick, a thin wallet, and I was ready to roll.

… If calculated deceit is involved, an action for fraud is in order.

—Ulpian (ca. AD 170–228)

T
he door to Room 628 was once again on the latch, but the voices and laughter were more subdued. Everyone using their indoor
voices. I wondered if Allen or his ex-wife had come down and asked for quiet during the children’s naps. Like me, some twenty-five
or thirty people were skipping lunch for a handful of nuts, chips, the fruit tray, and a soft drink. A few were nursing beers
or a glass of wine, but the hard stuff sat unopened on the sideboard.

Hard politics had been abandoned, too. I had spotted Roberta Ouellette, the judge from Jeffreys’s district, out on the balcony
in conversation with Addie Rawls from District 11 and some man who had his back to the door, so I circled past various animated
groups, exchanging smiles and handshakes as I went. The snatches of conversations I overheard seemed to be about vacation
plans, children and their college applications, the speeding ticket one judge had gotten while passing through the district
of his mortal enemy, and an impassioned defense of her beloved Cleveland Indians by Shelly Holt, who will quit the bench in
a heartbeat and run for baseball commissioner if it ever becomes an elective position.

Becky Blackmore, also from Wilmington, was using a ballpoint pen on Mark Galloway’s hand to illustrate the symbols certain
gang members tattoo on their knuckles while Joe Setzer and Hank Willis wished him luck in washing them off before he had to
pass sentence on a Crip or Blood.

Just as I was about walk through the open French doors, I recognized the other judge who was talking to Roberta.

Last spring, a year ago, while still reeling from my breakup with the game warden, I was specialed into Asheboro to adjudicate
the equitable distribution of marital property between two high-profile couples, a pair of prominent attorneys and two well-connected
potters from nearby Sea-grove.
^*
I was invited to the local bar association dinner and it was there that I met Will Blackstone, a newly appointed judge. No
relation to the famous jurist of the eighteenth century, he quickly told me. We were both at loose ends and when he asked
me to dinner a few nights later and followed it up with an offer to show me his pottery collection, I accepted even though
I figured that showing me his pottery would be the Seagrove equivalent of showing me his etchings.

Three minutes after he left to slip into something more comfortable, he was back wearing nothing but his brand-new judicial
robe and a bronze-colored condom. I told him I’d get my own robe from my car and we could do the kinky judge-on-judge scenario
he had planned. While he mixed us another round of drinks, I hopped in my car and drove away as fast as I could. I do have
some judicial standards, thank you very much, and I knew I’d never be able to wear that robe again had I gone along with that
session.

I decided that I could catch Roberta later. No way did I want to make small talk with Will Blackstone.

Steve Shaber was restocking the ice buckets when I reached the door. “Hey, didn’t you just get here?” he asked. “Was it something
I said?”

“Something you didn’t say,” I told him. “Like where you and Judge Cannell stashed the caviar and smoked salmon.”

He gave a look of mock indignation. “You mean you didn’t see them right beside the goose-liver pâté and the Dom Pérignon?”

“Well, I did see the champagne, but those plastic flutes are so tacky I couldn’t bring myself to pour any.”

He laughed and told me to come back later. “We’ll have room service send up a case of Baccarat crystal just for you.”

Down in the lobby I had paused to watch some children play with the creatures in the touching tank when Chelsea Ann, Rosemary,
and Dave strolled in.

“Oh, good!” said Rosemary. “We were going to come find you. See if you wanted to come to Airlie Gardens with us.”

“Airlie Gardens?” asked Martha Fitzhume, who was seated in one of the overstuffed lobby chairs. “May I come, too? I’ve never
visited it and Fitz is meeting with the other chief judges this afternoon, so it would be a good opportunity. Unless five
of us are too many for one car?”

“Not a bit,” said Rosemary. “Dave’s already begged off. Gardens always bore him.” Her husband gave a what-can-I-tell-you?
shrug.

“There’s a tearoom I’ve been wanting to try, as well,” Rosemary said. “So why don’t we do the garden, get tea, and then plan
to be back here when the chiefs’ meeting breaks up around six?” She glanced at her watch. “That’ll give us almost three hours.
You don’t mind, do you, darling?”

“Not a bit, honey.” He leaned in to give her a husbandly peck on the cheek. “Y’all have fun and don’t worry about me. I’ll
find something to do.”

Airlie Gardens is one of Wilmington’s jewels. Like many public gardens, this one started as the hobby and playpretty of a
rich woman. Originally part of a huge estate, the gardens now cover sixty-seven acres, ten of them in freshwater lakes and
water gardens. One bed of typical Southern perennials flows beautifully into another. Despite the late spring, most of the
azaleas had finished blooming, but enough blooms were left to let us imagine the massed glory of a month earlier. Dark green
camellia bushes with their shiny leaves formed a backdrop for daylilies of every size and color except blue. I made a mental
note not to ever bring Dwight here. Bad as he is for planting trees and bushes, he’d go nuts for the huge, centuries-old live
oaks that punctuated the wide lawns, and I could see him enlisting my brothers and their backhoes and trucks to try and transplant
a couple to our place.

What really caught our fancy though was the Bottle Chapel, a whimsical gazebo-like structure built of stucco and hundreds
of colored glass bottles as a tribute to Minnie Evans, a visionary artist who once worked at the gardens as a gatekeeper and
who sold her pictures on the side for a few dollars each. They go for thousands today. Cobalt blue, ruby red, and funky shapes
of clear glass caught the sun in an exuberant brilliance.