Sand Sharks

CHAPTER

14

Under the name of things personal are included all sorts of things moveable… by the common law, of all a man’s goods and chattels… But things personal, by our law, do not only include things moveable, but also something more.

—Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780)

Monday dawned blue-skies bright with crystalline air that for June was almost humidity-free. Sunlight sparkled on the turquoise water and turned the soaring gulls a dazzling white. Another day in paradise, made even more beautiful by calling Dwight as soon as I awoke. We talked for almost an hour. He planned to go on to his seminar this morning while Cal went camping with Paul Radcliff and his boys. Paul and his wife Sandy had known Dwight and his first wife from their tour of duty in Washington. Paul is now chief of police in Shaysville, which was how he and Dwight have kept in touch over the years.

“What about the house?” I asked.

“There were some family pieces that Jonna’s mother wanted back,” he said, “and you remember Eleanor Prentice, Mrs. Shay’s cousin?”

The only normal member of that whole family? Of course I remembered her.

“Her daughter will take the china. It’s been in the family a couple of generations and I didn’t think we wanted it.”

“God, no,” I said. In addition to the casual dinnerware we’d received as wedding gifts, we also had my own mother’s Royal Doulton in enough place settings to serve a formal dinner to twenty.

“How’s Cal handling things?” I asked.

“Okay. He cried a little when we got to Jonna’s room, but Eleanor had emptied out all her closets and drawers and stripped the bed so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I guess. About the only thing he really talked about was that the house and yard looked smaller than he remembered.”

Time does that, I thought—magnifies in memory the well-loved places of childhood.

“Will’s on his way back with a truckload of things he’ll put in his next auction. The housing market here’s a lot worse than ours, but the real estate agent’s going to try renting the house to someone with an option to buy. With gas prices what they are, she thinks people are going to want to live in town again instead of miles out in the country.”

“There was nothing in the house Cal wanted to keep?”

“Not really. We pretty much cleaned out his room when we moved him down in January. There was a little wooden box that Jonna used to toss her spare change in and a souvenir mug from Six Flags, stuff like that. None of the furniture. So how’s your conference going?”

“It doesn’t officially start till this afternoon,” I said, stalling as I tried to decide how to tell him that there might be a murderer among us. “The chief judges meet at three and there’s a reception tonight in honor of Judge Fitzhume.”

In the end, because there was no way to avoid it, I told him as calmly and unemotionally as I could about Pete Jeffreys’s death.

He was concerned that I was the one who had discovered his body in case Jeffreys had been someone I liked and respected. Not that my likes or dislikes would ever affect the way he works his cases.

“Who’s in charge?” he asked.

“The lead detective’s a guy named Gary Edwards. He says he’s met you and to tell you hey when I talked to you.”

“Tell him I said hey back if you happen to see him again. He struck me as pretty solid. You aren’t messing around in his case, are you?”

Before he could tell me to stay out of Edwards’s investigation or start worrying that I might be in danger, I said, “Too bad you’re not here. They’ve remodeled the hotel and there’s a Jacuzzi in every room now.”

He chuckled. “Well, damn! If I didn’t have to teach that class, I’d be right down.”

“On the other hand,” I said, tossing another ball into the air, “I don’t know as I’d want to expose you to so much temptation. Guess who Chelsea Ann and I had drinks with last night? Jill Mercer and the director of Port City Blues.”

The distractions worked. The rest of the phone call was devoted to last night’s filming of a hit-and-run scene and that yes, Jill Mercer seemed to be as nice as she was beautiful. I didn’t tell him about the push-up bra and padding. Some illusions should not be shattered, I decided, smugly aware that I hadn’t needed padding since I was twelve.

* * *

After the call, I indulged myself by going back to bed for another hour, then called room service for a pot of coffee, a bowl of fruit, and a flaky croissant with blackberry jam, which I ate on my balcony while reading The Star-News’s update on the investigation. The story had moved off the front pages, shrunk to two short paragraphs, and was captioned “No Leads in Death of Judge.”

True or not, I had no reason to call Detective Edwards. No startling revelations had been whispered into my shell-like ears in the last twenty-four hours. There was that bit about Jamerson Labs, but that was old news. Yes, Martha Fitzhume was still carrying a grudge because her cousin’s daughter was screwed when Jeffreys bribed a lab tech to alter her ex’s paternity test. Once that tech came clean in my court, though, all her cases were reexamined and, so far as I knew, new tests had set everything straight.

Bill Hasselberger was a possibility if he was emotionally close to his godson. Say he had brooded excessively over the child’s burn injuries to the point that the sight of Jeffreys was enough to push him over the edge into murder. That missing half-hour certainly gave him enough time. It couldn’t have taken more than five minutes to follow Jeffreys to his car, loop that leash around his neck, then throw him into the river.

I still thought it was odd that neither he nor Reid had mentioned the boy when they were cataloging Jeffreys’s sins on Sunday.

Of course, the murder didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Jeffreys’s bungled court decisions. Maybe it played out on a more basic level. Judges have a certain amount of power and more than one old, fat, ugly man has proved that power is an aphrodisiac. I might have been turned off by Jeffreys’s smirk, but I’m willing to bet that he saw plenty of action around his district. Maybe it was time to talk to Roberta Ouellette again and see if I could pry loose some names that would link back to the trial lawyers who were meeting forty minutes away.

Only not now. This was my last day of hedonistic freedom and I was going to put Pete Jeffreys out of my mind and enjoy it.

A half-hour later I was sitting under a coral umbrella out on the sand. A warm breeze blew in from the water that gradually retreated as I smoothed sunscreen on every bare area I could reach. According to the lifeguard when I passed his stand, high tide was at ten and it would be at its lowest around four. Castles built at the waterline now would last for many hours, but nobody was working on one and my yellow sand bucket and red plastic shovel were thirty years gone. I don’t quite understand the allure of a pool at the beach, but the SandCastle’s was crowded with kids and adults while the ocean went begging.

I waded out till I was hip-deep, then dived into the next wave as it was cresting and swam out beyond the breakers so that I could float on the gentle swells without being dumped back on the shore. The water was as warm as a bath and the salt was sweet on my lips.

After almost a hour, when my fingers had turned to prunes, I paddled back toward the shore and wound up a bit further from the hotel than I had started. As I emerged from the water, there sitting on the sand at play with his children was Allen Stancil.

“Hey, darlin’,” he called, holding out a towel to me. “Come and meet my young’uns.”

Useless to tell him not to call me darlin’. And churlish to walk past the little girl who was giving me a shy smile.

Instead I took the towel, dropped to my knees and smiled back. “You must be Tiffany Jane.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said, ducking her blonde head. She wore a pink bathing suit printed with green and yellow starfish.

“And this little man’s Tyler,” Allen told me.

The toddler looked to be about sixteen months old and his disposable swim diaper sported starfish and seashells. He was having a grand time knocking over his sister’s sand towers as soon as they were built.

I finished drying my hair and handed the towel back to Allen. “I thought you were only here for the weekend.”

“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.