Sand Sharks (6 page)

District court judges are warned not to lobby members of the general assembly, but we’re allowed to “educate and inform” and
I had no doubt that those two representatives were getting a raft of informed statistics about how badly we need more judges
to help with our caseloads. I’m pretty sure they were also being educated about the widening gap between superior court salaries
and ours. That’s the price you pay if you want to press the judicial flesh.

And don’t think they don’t. Every election, judges get asked, “Hey, who should I vote for in this race?” Even though we can’t
officially endorse anyone, candidates know that our words can influence a bunch of voters.

Beth Keever, chief judge in Cumberland County, was deep in a discussion with some others about how best to shelter the children
of high-conflict divorces and how to protect domestic violence victims from their batterers when exchanging children. Beth
waved her diet soda to make a point as she gave facts and figures about the feasibility and logistics of visitation centers.
It’s an ongoing discussion—a good idea that probably won’t get funded.

When the pretzel bag came around again, I snagged a couple to ease the hollow in my stomach and joined a group that included
Roger Longmire and Cynthia Blankenthorpe, who had not looked particularly shocked when I described finding Jeffreys’s body.

She had changed into a pair of white duck walking shorts that emphasized her muscular thighs and calves and reminded me of
Tour de France cyclists. Those could have been Lance Armstrong’s legs. If they’d been mine, I’d have tried to disguise them
in a long skirt or looser pants, but she sat like a man, with her left ankle resting on her bare right knee. Her unpolished
nails were cut short and there were raw-looking red scratches on her right hand. Her bangs and the ends of her shoulder-length
hair looked sun-bleached, as if the rest of her light brown hair had been protected from the sun by a helmet or cap. Maybe
she really was a cyclist. Face, arms, and legs were certainly well tanned. No worries about skin cancer here.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said.

“Did they say if it was quick?” she asked as Roger shifted over to make room for me on the couch. She had an easy air of confidence
that probably came from growing up a Blankenthorpe in Mecklenburg County.

“I would imagine it was,” I said, with more assurance than I felt. “I’ve been told it only takes a few seconds for the brain
to shut down.”

I tried not to think of those few seconds. It’s all relative, isn’t it? As Einstein pointed out, an hour passes in an instant
when you’re sitting with a lover. When you’re sitting on a hot stove, a few seconds stretch into eternity.

“His car’s still there,” I said. “Didn’t you ride over with him?”

“I did,” she said, reaching for the bowl of cashews on the coffee table. “But when I was ready to leave, I couldn’t find him,
so I hitched a ride back with the Fitzhumes.”

“What time was that?”

She shrugged. “Around ten or so. Why?”

“The police are asking who saw him last.”

“I doubt that was me.”

“Did you know him long?”

“Not really.” She took a hefty swig of whatever was in her glass. “I have to run this fall and to give him his due, he was
willing to introduce me to his donors and to the other judges here.”

“Sounds like you didn’t care for him all that much,” I said.

She shrugged. “He came on a little strong. For some reason, he decided he was going to be my mentor… give me advice on how
to run my campaign, show me the ropes, he said.”

The short man perched on the arm of her chair rolled his eyes and said, “Yeah, I just bet he did.”

He was built like a bowling ball—round and solid, with the same amount of hair. I felt as if I should know him, but I couldn’t
put a name to his pudgy little face.

“Bernie Rawlings,” he said, intuiting my lapse. “From the mountains of Lafayette County. You covered court for my brother
last fall. Almost got yourself killed, I hear.” He described the outcome of a murder investigation from my time up there in
Cedar Gap. As I expected, a lack of evidence had kept one of the culprits from being charged even though everyone was pretty
sure he was the killer.

As we talked, others had come and gone, mostly gone until there were only a half dozen of us left. Steve and Julian began
to gather up the empty cans and bottles and to store the cheese and olives in the small fridge. It wasn’t exactly here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry,
but yeah, it was pushing two a.m. and well past time for respectable judges to call it a night.

I always ask for a room near the elevator, which means that I’m also near the ice machine and vending area. When I said good
night to the others and exited at my floor, I heard someone filling an ice bucket. Martha Fitzhume emerged from the alcove
with an ice bucket and a can of Coke and seemed surprised to see me.

“I didn’t realize we were neighbors,” I said.

Her white hair was rumpled as if she’d slept on it wrong. In lieu of pajamas, she wore gray knit pants and an oversized purple
T-shirt from Fitz’s last election. A sheen of moisturizer glistened on the bony angles of her patrician face.

She was equally observant. “You look like hell, sugar. I heard about Jeffreys. You all right?”

“Just tired,” I said, key card in hand. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

“Not me, Fitz.” She shook her head ruefully. “Those damn crabs. He ate all of his and half of mine, too, and now he has indigestion.
I thought maybe a Coke would settle his stomach. You reckon there was something wrong with them? I heard you got sick, too,
or was that because of finding Pete Jeffreys?”

“Probably the margaritas,” I admitted.

“I suppose the police questioned you about this evening?”

I nodded.

“You didn’t find it necessary to repeat what I said about him, did you?”

“No.”

“Good. Fitz is always telling me I run my mouth too freely at times.”

“But why
did
you dislike him, Martha?”

“Just stuff,” she said with a vague wave of the Coke can. “You know how word goes around.”

“What stuff?” I persisted.

“Don’t get me started.” She moved past me toward a door down the hall that had been left on the latch. “It’d probably take
an hour and I need to get back to Fitz. Don’t you worry though. I didn’t kill the bastard. Fitz wouldn’t’ve let me.”

I couldn’t help smiling as I swiped my key card in the lock. No way could Martha have strangled Pete Jeffreys and dumped him
into the river, but there was also no way Fitz could’ve stopped her from trying if she’d set her mind to it.

Moonlight spilled through the windows of my dark room, and without switching on the lamps I crossed over to the balcony doors
and stepped out into the humid night air. Beyond the multilevel pool decks, the gazebos, and the deserted pool lay the ocean.
No whitecaps and almost as calm as a millpond. The tide was dead low and what waves there were rolled gently onto the sand
and quietly dissolved in white foam. The moon was three or four nights from being full and it sparkled on the slowly undulating
water like a handful of golden sequins tossed by a careless mermaid.

The moon, the stars, the thick brine-ladened air—I had stood gazing out to sea like this on dozens of other summer nights
and memory held me in its grip, sending kaleidoscopic images coursing through my head of weekends with Mother and Daddy and
my brothers back when I was a child: musty summer cottages borrowed from a more affluent aunt or uncle, pallets of quilts
on the floor, sand underfoot no matter how often the floors were swept.

A week at the beach for high school graduation, chaperoned by my brother Seth and his new bride: beach music and shagging
the night away on the boardwalk at Atlantic Beach and sneaking sips of beer when Seth’s back was turned, trying to forget
for a few hours at a time that Mother would be dead by the end of that summer.

Then, after I was grown, that heady mixture of freedom and abandon, and yes, the mild flirtations with a colleague or two
here in this very hotel during summer conferences.

But I had never been to the beach with Dwight. No memories of kissing him with salty lips, of making love to him in the moonlight
on a deserted stretch of sand.

I sighed and stepped back into the air-conditioned room, switched on the lights, and drew the curtains. My cell phone lay
amid a clutter of tissues and lipsticks where I had unthinkingly left it when I changed purses earlier in the evening. I’m
not quite as bad as Daddy about talking on phones, but the fact is that I don’t like being tethered to one and the older I
get, the more often I seem to forget to carry mine or to switch it on. It exasperates the hell out of Dwight, who never turns
his off. I flipped it open and saw that I had missed several calls. Chelsea Ann’s number was there, along with my friend Portland’s,
and several I didn’t recognize, but Dwight’s?

Nada.

Augustus took care that no persons should hold office who were unfit or elected as the result of factious combinations or
bribery.

—Dio Cassius (ca. AD 230)

D
espite my late night, I was wide awake by 8:30. Reid had left his riverfront table long before I did, so if I was up, he might
be, too.

He answered on the fourth ring and did not sound all that happy to hear my voice. “Do you know what the hell time it is?”
he asked.

“Sorry,” I said unrepentantly, “but I wanted to catch you before you left for your first session.”

“First session?”

“Isn’t today the opening session of your conference?”

“Yeah, but we don’t plan to get down there till this afternoon.”

“You mean you’re still in Wilmington?”

“Yeah, why?”

I heard him yawn, which made me yawn, too, of course.

“Deborah? You still there?”

“I’m here.” Another yawn overtook me. “How about we have breakfast together? Where are you?”

“At my friend Bill’s house. Bill Hasselberger. You met him last night, remember? He said I could stay with him this week.
Save on hotel bills.”

“Ask him where’s a good place to get breakfast.”

“It’s too early for breakfast,” he grumbled, but after a muffled conversation on his end, he said, “Bill says for you to come
on over here. He claims he makes an awesome frittata.”

I got directions and we agreed I’d be there within the hour after I’d showered and dressed. From his lack of questions, I
gathered that neither of them knew about Pete Jeffreys’s death. Good. Maybe I’d get to see their faces when they heard. Not
that I suspected either of them. All the same…

Forty minutes later I turned off Market Street, counted three blocks, turned left, and pulled up in front of a modest white
clapboard bungalow with dark red shutters and a porch that was shaded by a large mimosa tree covered in thousands of puffy
pink flowers. Only a few miles from the ocean and not quite 9:30 in the morning, but the white-hot sun shone fiercely in a
sullen blue sky and the air was already muggy when I opened the car door. My antiperspirant gave up the fight before I could
make it up the front walk to the shady porch.

Hasselberger’s rolled-up Sunday paper lay by the steps where his delivery person had thrown it.

Reid met me at the door, along with the odor of bacon, basil, and sauteed onions. A night’s growth of stubble darkened his
jawline and he was still in a faded T-shirt and loose knit pants. Like all my male Stephenson relatives, he’s tall and good-looking
and he loves women. With his broad shoulders, curly brown hair, and clear hazel eyes, they love him right back, which is the
main reason his marriage fell apart. He still acts like a kid in a candy shop with an unlimited allowance, but it cost him
the love of his life and the mother of his son.

He didn’t notice the newspaper and I didn’t call his attention to it. Instead, I followed him into the air-conditioned coolness,
past a pullout couch in the living room where he had slept last night and into the kitchen, the source of those entrancing
aromas. Except for the unmade sofa bed, the house was tidy enough, but it had the temporary air of a bachelor’s place—mismatched
furniture, odd lamps, clashing colors.

Reid may have been a member of Hasselberger’s wedding party, but evidently that marriage had gone the way of Reid’s. Clearly
no woman lived here. Had ever lived here. Not with these furnishings anyhow. The severely tailored couch was cranberry verging
toward plum, the overstuffed recliner next to it was a gold-and-brown plaid, while the three floor lamps were modern chrome-and-steel
rods and were more suited to an architect’s office. It looked to me like the leavings of a bad divorce settlement.

Not that I was there to criticize any man who would immediately hand me a mug of strong fragrant coffee. Not when I could
see the frittata that had my name on a wedge of it almost ready to emerge from the broiler of his electric oven.

“Glad you could come,” he said, wiping his bony hands on a pink dishtowel before shaking mine. Once again, his smile split
his face from ear to ear. The warmth of that smile lit up his long thin face and brown puppy-dog eyes.

“Thanks for asking me,” I said. “Y’all got away last night before I could tell Reid to meet me at a pancake house this morning
somewhere between here and Sunset Beach. This is much nicer.”

“Is something up?” my cousin asked. “We see each other almost every day back home. Why down here?”

“Does there have to be a reason? We haven’t really talked in ages. And then you left early without coming over last night.
One minute you were there, the next minute you were gone.”

He shook his head at me. “I’m surprised you noticed. You looked well on your way to getting smashed.”

“I was just tired,” I said defensively.

His lifted eyebrow showed me just how much he believed
that
, but he didn’t push it. Instead, while Hasselberger poured us glasses of juice, we talked generalities and about the agenda
before the Trial Lawyers this weekend. One of the main pieces of business was to vote on changing the association’s name to
Advocates for Justice.