The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Kent Nelson Tides

From The Georgia Review

On a late afternoon in May, sun angles across the Intracoastal Waterway to the island and through the open doorway and high windows of the marina lounge. I maybe should have gone home, but I’d settled a case in Charleston that afternoon, and Edie and the children weren’t expecting me yet, so I stop in to see Billy and Purvis. My eyes adjust to the separating light and shadow, but in one corner it’s all sunlight where Billy Prioleau and Pope Gailliard are playing cribbage and drinking rum and Coke. Purvis looks on, silhouetted against the masts of sailboats beyond the open doorway. Pope and Billy are sixty-something, gray haired. Purvis is in his late forties now, though he stands old — askew and on one foot, his left hand always in his pocket. I’ve known them since I was a kid, from the early days of the island when my father was still alive.

Four crabbers with pitchers of beer eye the two women in shorts drinking margaritas at the bar. One of the women is brunette, maybe thirty, chewing gum a mile a minute. The other’s a curly blonde with wide eyes, halfway pretty. The way Donna, the bartender, is huddled with them, I assume they’re all friends.

I sit down a couple of stools away, between the women and the cribbage game.

“All I know is I don’t feel safe anywhere,” the brunette says.

“They haven’t caught the bastard, either,” Donna says. She comes over, but doesn’t say hello.

“Sam Adams draft,” I say.

“Hey, Scotty,” Pope says.

Purvis waves, and I wave back. Billy doesn’t look up from his cards.

Donna squints through her cigarette smoke as she tilts the enamel handle of the tap. “You hear anything about that shooting?” she asks.

“People are talking about it,” I say. “The family was from Illinois. I heard the boy was drawing a picture when he died.”

“You think it was a colored man did it?” Pope asks.

“You mean, do I think it was racial?”

“’Course it was racial,” Donna says. She sets my beer down and writes on my tab. “You saying it was an accident?”

“It could have been a stray bullet — someone hunting.”

“It ain’t hunting season,” Donna says.

“Nothing is an accident,” Billy says to Pope, “except your mother’s having you. It’s your goddamn crib.”

Pope turns over the crib cards and counts, “Fifteen two, fifteen four, and trips is ten.” He moves his peg, and Billy gathers the deck and shuffles.

Light shimmers across the water, and toward the city the sky yellows through sea haze and city smog. Just about ten years ago, after I finished law school, Edie and I rented a house here on the backside marsh. She was from Atlanta, and at first she thought the island too isolated, but once the children were born — Carla is eight now, and Blair is six — she liked it. She could walk them to the playground, and there were other young mothers with whom she traded babysitting. Of course I was from here, and when my practice took hold as expected, we bought a house on the beach — four bedrooms, a kitchen that looks out to the ocean, and a wraparound deck. Now she wouldn’t live anywhere else.

A noise draws our attention to the front of the lounge. The Rupert brothers, Shem and Marvin, jostle each other coming through the door. Marvin’s heavyset, jowly, gray-brown hair in a ponytail. Shem’s thinner and taller and has a gold chain around his neck. “Pour us two shots, Donna. Make it Jack Daniel’s. And give everyone a round, especially the pretty ladies.”

The Ruperts stride to the bar as if they own the place.

“And give Scotty two,” Marvin says. “Damn right.”

“Absolutely,” Shem says. “Two for Scott. Without Scotty we’d have been up shit creek without a paddle.”

“I just did my job,” I say, more to Billy than to the Ruperts.

Billy doesn’t look over.

“You saved us all that money on taxes,” Shem says. He looks at the brunette chewing gum. “Scotty’s the best lawyer in Charleston.”

Donna sets up two shot glasses on the bar and pours Jack Daniel’s.

The Ruperts are old-timers, too — odd-jobbers and boat painters. My father never liked them much — too pushy even then — but when they came to me, what was I supposed to do? Lawyers give advice.

Donna sets the shots in front of them and fills a pitcher for the crabbers.

“I don’t want a rum and Coke from them,” Billy says.

Shem nudges Marvin. “I told you he saw us,” he says.

Marvin nods. “He was awfully slow closing the bridge for us.”

Then Shem turns to me. “Hey, Scotty, you see our new Lincoln?”

“We got the Town Car,” Marvin says. “It’s out front next to Billy’s little bug.”

Donna tops off the pitcher and carries it around the bar. “What are y’all going to do with a Lincoln Town Car?” she asks. “Ride around like the Mafia?”

“We’re going to travel,” Shem says.

“Like where?” asks the curly blonde. “Maybe Janine and me’ll go with you.”

“Miami. Maybe the Bahamas. Where do you girls want to go?”

“How’re you going to drive to the Bahamas?” Janine asks.

“We’ll buy a boat.”

“Did you boys win the lottery or something?” the blonde asks.

“If it was the lottery,” Pope says, “Billy wouldn’t have a problem with that.”

Donna pours two glasses of Sam Adams and sets them in front of me.

The Ruperts slouch down with the women, one on either side, and Marvin swivels his stool toward Billy. “Your wife still taking the bus to town?” he asks. “She still ride with the colored maids and gardeners?”

There’s silence. Pope stops dealing the cards. Purvis looks over at me. I should step in, but instead I watch Billy as he turns slowly toward Marvin. Then he jumps up, and the cards and cribbage board go flying. Chairs clatter. He rushes Marvin like a mad dog. Purvis intercepts him, but only succeeds in throwing him off-target. Billy careens into the two women, who fly sideways and backward onto the floor with Billy on top of them.

Shem and Marvin laugh as Billy untangles himself and gets up swinging his fists.

It isn’t a fight, really, just that one lunge. Donna comes around the bar with a baseball bat, and I get hold of Billy and wrestle him out onto the terrace. I’m twice as big and half his age.

Outside, Billy shakes himself free of my grip. “You can’t solve anything by fighting,” I say, “especially not at your age.”

“What’s my age got to do with it?” Billy glares at me, his eyes sharp blue, his grizzled jaw shaking.

“What’ll Arlene say?”

“She isn’t going to know.”

“I could tell her.”

“You won’t,” he says. “You haven’t got it in you.”

“If I helped the Ruperts, I might do almost anything.”

“Bullshit,” Billy says.

“Calm down now, Billy. Just calm down.”

Purvis comes to the door as if to ask what we’re going to do. Billy turns away toward the marina. He doesn’t want to go in and see the Ruperts again.

“Why don’t we go out in the boat,” I say. “Let’s go see the fish camp.”

The johnboat is a sixteen-foot, snub-nosed piece of tin with dents and scrapes. Billy steps down and, without holding on, maneuvers over the fishing gear and the two coolers in the center — one with bait in it, one with beer we bought at Gruber’s. He sits in the stern, and I push off and hop in with the bow line. It’s my father’s old boat, but I don’t have the time to use it, so Billy does.

One pull on the Evinrude, and we’re under way. He steers around the moored sailboats toward the harbormaster’s office where Purvis is waiting with his hand in his pocket.

Purvis stopped talking at fourteen, when his father left for the Piedmont. He dropped out of school and worked on shrimp trawlers until he was thirty, when he caught his hand in a winch. He still lived with his mother then. A year later she died, and I helped him convert the crab shed in back of her house into an apartment so he could rent the main house and have an income.

Purvis squints into the sun, holds his good hand up to shade his eyes. His expression asks a question, yes or no, or maybe just says, please. Billy angles the boat in to the dock.

Purvis moves the fishing rods and sits on the bait cooler. Billy gives gas, and in a few minutes we’re out of the marina and heading up the inland waterway. Purvis twists two Pabsts from the six-pack in the cooler and passes one each to Billy and me. We drink beer and ride the choppy water, moving north.

The steel drawbridge where Billy works comes closer. It’s down, and the evening traffic from Charleston hums across to the island. To one side of the center is a pillbox lookout where the operator sits, and Billy pulls an imaginary horn as a joke for the operator to open the span for us. Billy waves, and the silhouette of the operator waves back.

We slide underneath, and traffic rumbles in the sky above us. Then we’re past, and the sound fades. The paling blue sky opens out again. No one says anything — Purvis because he won’t, and I because I don’t know what to say. Billy is a mystery.

For a half mile we beat against the outgoing tide, and then Billy veers the johnboat off the waterway into a side creek. Behind the pale green reeds, a new world takes hold — quieter, slower, as if we’ve gone back in time. Billy eases off on the gas, and the tin boat glides over the glassy backwater, past mudflats and oysterbanks exposed by the ebb. A mudhen croaks, and a breeze we can’t hear for the motor moves across the reeds. Around another bend, a white egret rises like an apparition from a tidal pool and throbs on rounded wingbeats low over the marsh.

“You think they were lying in wait?” Billy asks.

I know what Billy’s talking about — that boy who was killed.

“Whoever it was probably didn’t know a car was there.”

“They shot at the car for no reason.”

“Nobody knows that.”

“White people live out there, too,” Billy says. “Why would they shoot a kid?”

He cuts the engine farther, and we crawl up the winnowing creek. The headland in front of us is a scalloped dark green canopy of live oaks muted by the humid air, both close and far away in the evening light — a half mile, maybe, but longer by way of the serpentine curves. We pass a sailboat sunk in 1989 by Hurricane Hugo, and around another bend a night-heron on the bank watches us ease by.

Purvis looks at Billy. How far?

“All the way up,” Billy says.

Nearer the headland, the main channel splits into smaller rivulets. Billy squirms the boat across pluff mud into one last pool, then cuts the gas and tilts the Evinrude out of the water. We coast into the mud bank.

Billy finishes his beer and opens another, and we sit for a moment in the quiet. The wind is discernible now, keeping the gnats down, rattling the grass. Hermit crabs bubble and pop along the bank. Rails squawk farther away in the marsh.

“Is it low tide?” I ask.

“Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes,” Billy says.

Purvis looks at Billy again.

“You’re right,” Billy says. “We could have picked a better time.”

Purvis gets out in rubber boots and draws the boat higher onto the flat, then wades through the pluff mud toward the trees. The sky broadens with the low sun tinting the clouds orange. Billy looks as if he’s expended his last bit of energy getting here, and now he can’t move.

He seems to draw inward to memory, and though I can’t go with him, I’m pretty close. Maybe Billy’s thinking of how he camped here with his father every weekend and brought along my father, who was Billy’s age, and how later they brought Edgar and me. We fished from the dock, gigged flounder, and caught sheepshead and drum in the snags on the beach on the other side of the island. The remains of the old dock are still visible — parallel rotten posts two abreast in the reeds.

Billy’s father had got the land in 1926, before the island had a bridge to it, in exchange for hauling a bargeload of polo ponies to Palm Beach — sixty acres of shell mounds, palmettos, live oaks, and tick-infested underbrush. At the time, everyone laughed at Billy’s father, but now they don’t. The Ruperts just sold their abutting thirty-five acres for 2.8 million dollars.

“You want to walk up to the Indian mound?” I ask finally.

“I like the view from here,” Billy says.

“Me too.” I get two more beers from the cooler and hand one to him.

“Besides, we only got one pair of boots.”

I open my beer and sip.

“You know what I’d buy?” Billy asks.

“Is that what you’re thinking about?”

“Mixing bowls.”

“Mixing bowls?”

“Arlene wants mixing bowls. And a new bed. For forty years we’ve slept on a damned old mattress that sags in the middle.”

The sun lowers, and the orange in the clouds shades to pink. A warbler sings in the closest live oak, then forages in the Spanish moss that drifts in the breeze. Another egret flies over.

Billy throws his empty beer can into the bottom of the boat and cracks open the new one. “You wear the boots,” he says, and steps out into the mud in his tennis shoes.

Purvis is back in the trees somewhere, invisible as usual. Billy slogs away toward the headland, slop slop slop. I take off my wingtips, pull on the rubber boots, and get out of the boat.

Each step in pluff mud is a pull and a grunt. Ahead of me, Billy pauses and picks a burr from his jeans. Toward high ground the mud isn’t so deep, and walking’s easier. I know it’s there, but still it’s a surprise — the mound of oyster shells, ten feet high, where we always pitched the tent.

The Indians used the site the same way we did, as a fish camp, and over hundreds of years built that mound of shells. I say I haven’t been to this place for a long time, but that’s not true. I haven’t forgotten. My father and I sat here the last time we were alone together, and I still hear his voice. He was telling me I should take care of people and not want more than my share, and I hear my own voice saying, “What do you mean you’re going to die soon?”

“And you have to take care of Billy,” he says. “Arlene takes care of him at home, but that’s not the same.”

“You aren’t going to die,” I say.

But in two months he was dead. When I came back to Charleston, I tried to take care of Billy as much as Edie allowed, as much as Billy let me. Early on, before I got so busy at work, we took the johnboat to the jetty for bluefish or into the creeks for sea trout. We cast for shrimp in the shallows behind Mount Pleasant and put down crab pots off the dock at Purvis’s. Sometimes, with Pope Gailliard, we towed the boat to John’s Island, where Pope had friends.

Edie understood our excursions had a meaning she didn’t appreciate, and for a while she accepted my being gone. But after Carla and Blair were born, I couldn’t go out with Billy as often. And my law practice assumed a bigger portion of my time, too. I was absent as many hours as before, but with a more permissible reason.

Billy kicks mud from his tennis shoes and walks the last few yards to the tideline. Once we’re on higher ground and look back, the Intracoastal Waterway reappears beyond the marsh. Car headlights move through dusklight on the causeway; two TV towers blink red against the darkening sky.

Purvis emerges from the brush a little way down, and I give him a sign. We have arranged this moment without conspiring — getting Billy where he is now, by himself near the live oak. He drinks his beer, sets the can gently on the ground, and looks around at us, as if to make sure we’re still there. Then he steps forward under the canopy of the oak and kneels at the grave of his son.

On the way back I take the tiller — no problem with shallows with the tide coming in. In the waterway, the flashing markers guide me — red, right, returning. All the way, Billy drinks beer in the bow.

At the boat landing, I back the truck and trailer down, and Purvis, standing knee-deep in the water, hooks the cable onto the boat. I winch the boat up while Billy watches.

“The one thing I like about you, Scotty, is your truck,” Billy says.

“I’m glad there’s something.”

We leave the boat on the trailer in the lot and drive around to the lounge to get Billy’s car. The Town Car is gone, and there are more pickups. Donna’s making drinks for a younger crowd. I don’t see her women friends.

Purvis opens the door of the cab. “You better drive the VW,” I say.

“I can drive,” Billy says, but he hands Purvis his car keys and slides over to the open window on the passenger side.

Billy’s house is a yellow bungalow just off Coleman Boulevard in Mount Pleasant. Moss grows on one side of the roof. The lights are on inside, and I pull onto the lawn while Purvis drives the beetle into the carport. The street light throws out a purplish glow over the house and the empty lot next door.

We get the coolers from the back of the pickup, and while Billy puts the bait shrimp into the freezer, I hose the coolers out and turn them over on the lawn.

“We could at least have come home with some fish,” Billy says.

Arlene hears the commotion and opens the side door. “There you are,” she says.

She’s a small, plumpish woman with short hair. Barefoot. Her flowered dress is unbuttoned at the top, and in the carport bug light, her gray hair looks yellow-blue. I can’t tell whether Arlene’s relieved or angry seeing Billy.

He closes the freezer and gazes at her. He’s a sight — jeans caked with mud, hair sticking straight up from his head. He breaks into a grin and dances over to her singing, “Five foot two, eyes of blue, has anybody seen my gal?” He takes her hands, pulls her off the step and into his arms, and twirls her across the cement. “Could she love? Could she coo? Could she, could she, could she coo? Has anybody seen my gal?”

Arlene dances a few steps, then shakes him away. “You stop that,” she says.

Billy drops his arms and staggers a little.

“It’s my fault,” I tell her. “We bought some beer and took the boat out.”

“I got in a fight,” Billy says.

His words are a prideful variation on the truth. He and Arlene gaze at each other for a moment, and then she climbs back onto the step in front of the door. “It’s been a long day,” she says. “I’m tired.” She glances at me. “Should I call Edie and tell her you’re on your way?”

“That’s all right.”

Arlene opens the door.

“They weren’t shooting at him,” Billy says. “It was a stray bullet.”

Arlene pauses, holding the door open, and looks at me again. “What’s he talking about?”

I shake my head, shrug.

“How would you like some mixing bowls?” Billy asks. He dances out of the carport, sidesteps the truck, weaves across the grass. Halfway to the street, he loses a tennis shoe and his wet muddy sock dangles from the end of his foot. He pirouettes under the street lamp, still singing.

When I get home Carla and Blair are asleep. The house is dark. Edie’s in bed, too, though she must have heard the truck pull in. I mount the steps to the deck, but instead of going in I walk around to the ocean. The beach is pale in the half moonlight; the waves, visible as oblique white lines, rush against the sand. Beyond them, barely distinguishable from the sky, is the endless dark water.

I think of the boy riding in the back seat behind his mother and father. He’s drawing on a tablet, and suddenly there’s an explosion. He feels what? Pain? A numbness? Blood spurts from his leg. Maybe he screams, or cries. Maybe he faints. He loses blood fast. The parents look around into the back seat…

“Scott?” Edie comes out through the sliding door in a white nightgown.

“Right here.”

She crosses the deck to the railing several feet from me. The breeze lifts her nightgown around her bare legs. “Where were you?”

“With Purvis and Billy. We went up-island in the boat.”

“Fishing?”

“No, we didn’t fish.”

She stares straight out at the sea. “Where were you, really?”

“I’ve got pluff mud all over me. You can call Arlene, if you want.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Then she says nothing for a long minute. The half-moon drifts behind clouds miles out over the ocean.

“How are the children?” I ask.

“Fine. Carla went to soccer after school. Blair still wants a bicycle to ride in the dunes.”

“He can’t ride in the dunes.”

“I know, but try to tell him that.”

“I’m sorry I was late.”

Again there’s silence for too long.

Finally she turns toward me. “Come to bed, Scott. It’s cold out here.”

For several days after that, I prepare for a trial up in Myrtle Beach — depositions, interviews with witnesses, case research. Is a woman liable for a man’s illness allegedly caused by her breaking their engagement? Evenings on my way home I drive by Billy’s house, then across the causeway and under the drawbridge, past the marina lounge. Billy’s car isn’t at any of those places.

One evening late I stop by Purvis’s. It’s dark, but his door is open to the warm breeze. A small television on the counter flicks colors into the air. I say hello through the screen and knock after.

Purvis opens wide the screen door. Inside, there’s the smell of tomato and onion and garlic in the air. He’s cooking spaghetti and heating up sauce from a can. On the kitchen table is a foot-high stack of library books.

Purvis turns off the television and motions toward the pot of spaghetti on the stove.

“Edie’s expecting me,” I tell him. “I was wondering how Billy is. Have you seen him?”

Purvis shakes his head and stirs the sauce. He doesn’t know any more about Billy than I do. But the moment is more complicated than that. We’re used to not speaking, but there’s an awkwardness, as if we share a loss we refuse to recognize. He knows I’ll go home to my family and have crabcakes and salad, review the children’s day at school, maybe quiz them on arithmetic. Carla likes science and math, and Blair collects bird bones on the beach. And I know Purvis will read. I scan the titles of his library books — Hardy Boys mysteries, Daniel Boone, Boy Frontiersman, two of the Harry Potter series Carla reads. I envy his time, and he envies mine.

The next day, after a deposition, I stop in at Huguley’s on King Street where Arlene works. She’s in greeting cards, wall prints, and Southern cookbooks, and when I come in, she’s helping a customer pick out a picture of a plantation house with azaleas along the driveway. Edie’s birthday is two months off, but I sort through cards and messages.

When the other customer leaves, I bring a card to the cash register. “You look nice,” I say. “That dress is pretty.”

She’s wearing a brown smock with a gold-plated pin on her lapel. “Thank you.” She takes the card and scans the bar code. “Is it Edie’s birthday again already?”

“How’s Billy doing?” I ask.

“He’s all right. He’s been working nights so I’m asleep when he comes home, and he’s asleep when I leave.”

“I haven’t seen his car.”

“Two dollars and eleven cents,” she says.

She puts the card in a brown bag, and I give her a five. “He could call me,” I say.

“Scotty, he’s going through something. I don’t know what, but we have to let him. I learned that a long time ago.”

“I just want him to know—”

“He knows,” she says, and hands me my change.

That afternoon my trial’s postponed at the plaintiff’s request, so I stop at the marina lounge on my way home. Pope and Purvis are on the terrace watching a fifty-foot powerboat being wedged into a berth. The captain guns the engine and the boat creeps forward; then he revs it in reverse, then forward again. Diesel smoke pours into the air.

Donna comes out with a draft. “They just arrested somebody in the shooting of that boy,” she says. “It’s on the news.”

“Who was it?” Pope asks.

“The last person you’d ever imagine,” Donna says. “A twelve-year-old white girl.”

We all go inside and stand behind the barstools and look up at the television. A reporter is speaking into a microphone in front of the courthouse downtown. “It’s not clear at this time whether the suspect knew the rifle was loaded,” she says. “The girl’s parents were not home at the time of the shooting.”

Details are sketchy. The girl came home from school and found her father’s deer rifle and took it into the woods. The girl’s quoted as saying she “wanted to see whether it would shoot.” There’s nothing about intent — whether she loaded the rifle or aimed it at anything, whether she shot at the car deliberately, whether she meant to shoot anyone.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Donna says. “What the hell was she thinking?”

On the screen is a replay of the girl’s arrival at the courthouse — a police car drives up, an officer gets out, someone holds a coat up in front of the girl’s face. The girl has shorts on, and her skinny legs are visible under the coat.

“How did they catch her?” Pope asks.

“They were questioning people,” Donna says. “Even your friends only protect you for so long.”

The television switches to the area where the shooting occurred — a deserted rural road, paved, with a ditch along it and, just a few feet back, brush and pines. Then it shows the car — a late-model blue compact parked in a police lot — and a close-up of the bullet hole in the rear door.

“Weird shit,” Donna says.

“What’ll they do to her?” Pope asks.

“They ought to fry her,” Donna says. “And her parents, too.”

“We don’t know the facts,” I say.

They all look at me.

“You know, where she was standing in relation to the car, what she could see. Did she know how far a bullet would travel? Did she even see the car? We don’t know what really happened.”

“A kid’s dead,” Donna says. “We know that.”

Edgar Prioleau was eleven when he died. I was nine. We were at the fish camp on a Sunday. My father was making lunch, and Billy was taking Edgar and me to the beach to cast in the surf. I was carrying a rod and an empty pail, Edgar two rods, and Billy the bait cooler. It was warm and sunny. I don’t remember what we saw on the trail or what we said. Edgar walked ahead of me; Billy came behind, because the cooler was heavy. Everything was familiar — the palmettos, the vines, the overhanging live oaks dappled in sunlight. The only thing unusual was how the trail ended at the beach. I mean, it always ended there, but that day I noticed how dark the woods were and how bright the light was on the beach. I noticed the light because Edgar had on a red shirt, and when he ran out of the trees and up the dune, his shirt looked like a kite in the air.

I followed him up the dune, struggling for footing in the sand. Billy shouted, “Wait up, now,” but Edgar was already at the top, and he ran down the other side. I heard the wind in the sea oats and the sea behind the dunes, and then at the crest I saw the sea itself. I skittered part of the way down the steep sand and stopped, out of breath. Edgar had already put down the fishing rods and was racing toward the horizon.

That’s how I remember him — a boy caught against the whole ocean. He leaped into the froth of the waves and waded out into the sunlight. By the time Billy reached the top of the dunes behind me, Edgar had disappeared.

The next Monday around eleven, Billy shows up in my office wearing a blue suit. He’s shaved, and his hair is plastered down with something unspeakable. “I have a meeting with Latimer,” he says.

“Is that the only suit you have?”

“What’s wrong with it?” He brushes the lapel, the shoulder.

“It’s not ironed. It’s probably mildewed. What’s the meeting about?”

“Did you know the Ruperts bought a sailboat?”

“I heard about it.”

Billy examines my law degree hanging on the wall and, beside it, my admission to the bar. “Latimer has a permit to dredge for a new marina,” Billy says. “The Army Corps of Engineers caved in. Now he wants to build a second golf course.”

“What’s he going to do with two?”

“You can’t have enough golf courses.” Billy steps around the ladder and along the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books and gazes out the window at Broad Street. “If you were me, would you sell?”

“It isn’t my property.”

“If I gave it to you?”

“I can’t answer hypothetical questions. Where are you meeting Latimer?”

“The Mills House.”

“You want me to come along?”

Billy gives me a sidelong glance. “Do you know what it’s like to ride the bus to town every day?” he asks. “Sometimes I meet Arlene at the bus stop because she can barely walk from being on her feet all day.” He pauses. “If I sell, Arlene can quit her job.”

“You two can ride around together in a Town Car.”

“Don’t be smart with me.”

“Don’t wallow in self-pity.”

He looks at me and nods. “You can come with me if you want.”

But as we’re walking out of the office, a call comes in from a distraught client, so Billy goes ahead. When I get to the restaurant, he and Latimer are hunkered down like golfing buddies, drinking martinis. I make my way toward them through tables elegantly covered with white linen and set with silver and crystal. Next to Billy, Latimer looks like an altar boy — ruddy cheeks, short hair, wet shiny eyes — though I know from representing the Ruperts that he’s a sweet-talker who believes God is money. He’s dressed in a gray suit and gray tie, and he wears gold cuff links and a tie pin. He’s surprised to see me, though I don’t know whether Billy intended not to tell him I was coming or simply forgot.

“Scotty!” He stands and shakes hands.

“Hello, Kevin.” I sit down without being asked.

“Billy, do you know Scott Atherton?”

“Scotty’s my lawyer,” Billy says.

Latimer rolls with this. “Have a martini,” he says to me.

A waiter in black tie arrives from nowhere with a menu for me and another martini, which he sets on the white tablecloth in front of Billy. “The soup of the day is New England clam chowder,” he tells me. “Entree specials are grilled salmon with lobster sauce, and pork medallions served with shiitake mushrooms and a browned garlic. Would you care for a cocktail?”

“No, thank you.”

Latimer raises his glass to Billy. “Here’s to mutual success,” he says. He drinks, then turns to me. “I was just telling Billy the Ruperts might have sold early. The lots on the interior of the island are going faster than we’d anticipated, so we’re discussing accelerated acquisition.”

“You mean if they’d waited, they’d have got more?”

“Who knows? In any event, Billy’s land has become more valuable.”

The ghost waiter appears and takes our orders — salmon for Billy and Latimer, a seafood salad for me.

“And another martini,” Billy says.

During the meal, Latimer argues his case. His company, Coastal Amenities, owns every parcel — except Billy’s sixty acres — from the beach to the marsh. Plans for development have already been approved. The company has donated five acres for a new grade school to encourage age-group diversity. “Our marina goes in first,” he says, “so yachtsmen can access the restaurant and country club.”

“Billy can take his johnboat to the club for lunch.”

“And play golf,” Latimer says.

Billy sips his martini and sets down the glass. “If I sell,” he says, “I want three times as much money as the Ruperts.”

After lunch I leave Billy and Latimer in the lobby of the hotel. Billy wants to see the development plans — where the houses will be, the golf course, the swimming pool — and promises not to make any decision without consulting me.

I walk back to my office down Broad Street, crossing over into the shadow of St. Michael’s, whose white steeple shines above the gray and pastel storefronts. A gust of wind blows a newspaper along. The unfolding scenario goes through my mind — not the one between Latimer and Billy, but the whole future of the island. As trees are felled, roads cut, and houses built, the middle of the woodland becomes the edge. Trees once protected by other trees are made vulnerable to storms. The air changes. Birds requiring space and cover — sparrows, thrushes, warblers — give way to more adaptable grackles, mockingbirds, and starlings.

And even if Billy doesn’t sell, his land will abut a dozen houses. At the oyster mound, he’ll hear car doors slamming, golf balls teed off, domestic quarrels. At night, car headlights and street lamps will shine into palmettos and pines and oaks that have never known another light besides the moon and stars.

I tell my secretary “no calls,” and for the rest of the afternoon, because I can’t concentrate, I bill hours at half rate. All I can think of is Latimer’s arrogant assumption that Billy is a fool.

Around three, Sylvia looks in. “You said no calls, but it’s your wife. She says it’s an emergency.”

I click a button and say hello.

“Billy’s here,” she says.

“What for?”

“He wanted to see the view from our deck.”

“He had three martinis at lunch. Is he okay?”

“I think so. I gave him a Coke, and he’s been telling me about his sex life.”

“I hope you haven’t been telling him about ours.”

“What’s to tell? Anyway, he hasn’t asked. Did you know he and Arlene are almost seventy, and they still make love three times a week?”

“Did he say whether he’s going to sell the fish camp?”

“Are you listening to me, Scotty?”

“I’m listening.”

“He says, ‘You look beautiful, Arlene,’ and she says, ‘I think you’d better get to work.’ ”

“We need signals?” I ask.

“We need more than signals. Time goes by, Scotty. People change. What was good before is not necessarily what’s good now.”

“I’m coming home,” I say. “I’m leaving right now.”

I pack my briefcase and put on my suit jacket. On my way out, Sylvia asks whether I’ve finished the reply brief for the Ruisdale case. “I can take it by the courthouse when I leave,” she says.

“Oh shit, I forgot.”

“I assumed that’s why you didn’t want to be disturbed,” Sylvia says.

I retreat to my office, taking an hour to write the conclusion, and when I get the brief to Sylvia it’s after four.

“Arlene Prioleau called,” Sylvia says. “I told her you went home.”

“Did she say what she wanted?”

“No, but she sounded upset.”

“Call Huguley’s. See if she’s still at work.”

Sylvia dials, gets the manager, and hands me the phone.

“That woman,” the manager says, “she walked out the door as if we weren’t here. We’re a service company. She knows better than that.”

“Maybe she won the lottery,” I say, and hang up.

I drive north in traffic over the Cooper River Bridge. Behind a truck at the apex of the second span, a flock of white ibis flies in a V close above the girders, the birds’ down-curved red bills and the black tips of their white wings illuminated from beneath by the sun. The sudden beauty of their precise flight and their ignorance of themselves heighten my unease, as if the random moment of their passage mocks our tangled human relationships. I don’t believe in omens, but I’m sure Arlene’s leaving work early has to do with Billy.

In Mount Pleasant, I make the familiar right on Magnolia Street. Billy’s car isn’t at the bungalow. The shades are drawn on the windows, but I stop anyway and knock on the door. No one answers, so I circle the house. A couple of plastic chairs with rainwater on the seats face each other on the back patio. In the yard, blossoms of azaleas and roses wither, though Arlene’s recently weeded vegetable garden flourishes against the back fence.

I peek in the kitchen window. Inside there’s evidence of turmoil — a chair turned over, cabinets open, a skillet and two pots on the floor, along with boxes of cereal, lettuce, tin cans. A purse I assume is Arlene’s sits on the table.

The knob turns in my hand, and I push the door open.

“Arlene?”

The purse contains glasses, a hairbrush, a bus pass, but no wallet.

I step over the debris and into the dimly lit living room. Cushions from the sofa and cut-up newspapers are strewn around, along with a pair of tennis shoes and Billy’s jeans.

“Billy?” I pause. “Arlene?”

I edge to the bedroom, afraid of what I’ll find, but it’s empty, neat, the bedspread tucked over the sagging mattress. The only unusual item is a newspaper clipping, which I pick up off the bed and hold up to the window light: a child’s primitive drawing of a beach with the wide blue sea and the sun going down into the waves. The caption says,

The colors are blue, yellow, tan. The sun has no reflection on the water, and a single bird is drawn in brown at the tideline. There’s no erratic line indicating an interruption in the movement of his hand, no splotches of blood on the picture. Are these the boy’s last thoughts? Maybe he looked up an instant before he was shot and saw the dark woodland, or maybe he thought of a friend in Illinois. Maybe he remembered a harsh word his mother said to him ten miles earlier or wondered how to draw other birds at the shoreline. Who can know?

I backtrack to the kitchen, pick up the phone, and call Edie.

Carla answers. “Hi, Daddy. I thought you were coming home early.”

“Is your mother there?”

“What’s wrong?” Carla asks.

“Just get your mother.”

Edie comes on. “What’s going on, Scott? Where are you?”

“Is Billy still there?”

“No, he—”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“To work, I think.”

“Tell Carla I’m sorry I was short with her. I’ll see you later. We’ll talk.”

I take McCants to the causeway. At the intersection, a line of cars waits to merge with the commuter surge going toward the beach, but no one’s moving. Horns honk. A few cars squeeze through the traffic and turn left. On the main road, people crane from their car windows for a view ahead, but no cars are coming the other way from the island because the bridge is open.

I wheel around the dozen cars in front of me, inch through the congestion at the intersection, and instead of turning left toward the city, I turn right into the empty oncoming lane. A mile ahead the highway’s tilted into the air, and in front of the raised span police lights swirl across the tops of the waiting cars.

On either side of the causeway is salt marsh. A few cars turn around and come toward me, and I scrape the oleanders on the berm to get by, still paralleling the stopped cars on my right. Then, up ahead, I see Arlene behind two unmoving dump trucks. She strides along the pedestrian path with her arms pumping. She has on a print dress and a straw hat with a wide brim, and sturdy black shoes. She disappears behind a dump truck and reappears behind a Mercedes. I slow down, lean across the cab seat, and roll down the passenger window: “Arlene!”

She turns, sees me, and veers through the line of cars over to my truck. I snap open the door for her, and she gets in. “He’s up in the pillbox,” she says. “He won’t close the bridge, and he won’t come down.”

“How do you know?”

“His supervisor phoned me at work. I called you, but your secretary said you’d gone home.”

Then I notice the boats. On either side of the bridge dozens of masts stick up in the air — the bridge is open enough to block the cars, but not enough to let boats through.

Arlene says, “Did you see the boy’s drawing in the paper?”

“Just now at your house. He sure tore up the place.”

A policeman on foot ducks among the cars ahead of us, talking to the drivers. As we approach, he holds up his hand, and I stop.

He comes up to Arlene’s window and squats down. “You can’t go up there,” he says, looking up. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m Billy’s wife,” Arlene says.

“Billy who?”

“The man in the lookout,” she says, “Billy Prioleau.”

The policeman looks at me.

“Scott Atherton. I’m his lawyer.”

“We think the guy has a rifle,” the officer says.

“Billy doesn’t own a rifle,” Arlene says.

“It’s not hard to get one,” the officer says. “That’s what he told the newspaper, and we believe him. I was just alerting people to that fact.”

“It’s not fact,” I say. “It’s supposition.”

“Can we talk to him?” Arlene asks.

The officer gets on his walkie-talkie. “I’ve got the man’s wife here,” he says, “and his lawyer.”

Two navy helicopters roar in over the marsh, and the noise startles egrets and herons from the reeds.

“The sergeant says to come ahead,” the officer says. “If I were you, I’d keep down.”

The closer we get, the fewer the cars coming the other way. We pass more dump trucks and several suburban assault vehicles stopped in line. The raised roadway tilts up and away, a sloping stretch of ungainly metal against the blue sky. The sailboats are clearer, too — sloops, yawls, ketches, a trimaran — anchored in the waterway. The helicopters hover above the pillbox.

Billy’s Volkswagen is parked in the turnout at the foot of the bridge, along with the police cars and television vans. Four cruisers have their red lights whirling, and several marksmen crouch behind the fenders with high-powered rifles. I pull up beside the nearest car, where the sergeant is leaning against a rear tire. Up in the pillbox, the Venetian blinds are pulled down against the sun. Billy isn’t visible, even as a shadow.

Arlene gets out and stands in the breeze, holding the brim of her hat. “What’s this about a rifle?” she asks. She has to shout above the noise of the helicopters.

“Stay down,” the sergeant shouts back.

“I’m his wife,” Arlene says.

“He’s just as likely to shoot you as anyone else,” the officer says. “Maybe more likely.”

“Has he said what he wants?” I ask.

“You have to stay down,” the sergeant says.

Arlene takes off her hat and throws it into the truck cab, skirts the highway barricade, and heads toward the metal catwalk at the side of the bridge.

“Ma’am?” the officer calls. “Ma’am, stop. Please.”

A helicopter drops to the window level of the pillbox, a man poised with a rifle in the passenger seat.

Arlene doesn’t stop, and I go after her. I follow her along the grating of the catwalk.

“If he’s going to get himself shot,” she says, “I want to say goodbye.”

“He’s not going to get shot.”

“That boy did,” she says.

The waterway beneath us is choppy, and the breeze rocks the moored sailboats. Swallows dart around the bridge girders. To the north, past the sailboats, the waterway recedes in a wide blue triangle that narrows and evens out in the distance. The border of the waterway is marsh grass, and farther away on the headland, billowing trees.

At the end of the catwalk a metal ladder leads up to an anteroom beneath the pillbox. Arlene holds a rung in her hand and steps up. “Billy?” she calls up. “Billy Prioleau, you listen to me!”

The helicopters are so noisy, Billy can’t possibly hear a word.

“You go up there, Scotty,” she says.

She issues this instruction as if there’s no danger. It’s what she would do if she could.

“What should I say?”

“Just talk to him. What do you say when you’re fishing?”

I look up at the pillbox. “They should back off on the helicopters. Let him have some breathing room.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“Do you think he has a rifle?”

Arlene takes my two hands in hers and squeezes. “He loves you, Scotty. You bring him down.”

She turns and walks back along the catwalk.

The helicopters hover, but I climb the ladder to the windless anteroom.

The noise is still loud, though muffled, and I wait to see whether the helicopters move off. Beside the trapdoor is a keypad, but they’re just numbers to me. Finally I shout up, “Billy, it’s me, Scotty. Are you in there?”

A few seconds go by. Outside the reinforced storm windows, the sailboats loll on their anchors, hatches open, crews hidden below-decks. Another sloop, unknowing, motors toward the bridge with its sails furled. The captain in the cockpit holds in one hand what I imagine is a gin and tonic.

“Billy?”

He’s already dead is what I think. He opened the bridge and then keeled over from a heart attack. The police in their siege mentality have invented the scenario of a lunatic holed up with a rifle.

“Come on, Billy, open up. It’s me.”

Finally the roar of the helicopters diminishes, and an occasional car horn sounds in the distance.

I hear scraping above me. “Who?” Billy says.

“Let’s talk about Edgar.”

There’s another long pause.

I take a risk to say this, but it makes sense. I’ve drawn the same connections Billy has, though of course not in the same way. He cut out the boy’s drawing from the newspaper; he wanted to see the view from the deck of my house. I imagine what Billy saw that day when he was taking Edgar and me fishing — he climbed the dunes and saw the ocean and the beach spread out before him, but he didn’t see Edgar. He saw me.

The trapdoor hums open slowly, and the inside of the pillbox appears — space rather than detail — and then a wedge of Billy’s forehead, his blue eyes, gray hair. From so little, I can’t tell whether he’s drunk or angry or deranged.

“I’m alone,” I tell him. “Arlene—”

The door opens wider, and I climb into the pillbox.

The room is spartan, surprisingly cool. Except for the Venetian blinds on the west side, the windows are open, and a breeze flows through. There’s a control panel for the bridge hydraulics, a chair, a table with binoculars on it. Billy’s splayed out on the floor with a six-pack of Pabst — one left — and he’s holding a rifle.

“It’s a pellet gun,” he says. “I want them to think I’m serious.”

I slide down next to him and take the last beer. “Serious about what?”

“You know as well as I do.”

His eyes hold mine. He’s not deranged, but he’s had three martinis and most of a six-pack.

I kneel and crane my neck to look out over the sill. Light’s fading from the blue triangle of the waterway. The motor sailer is closer. To the east, beyond the island, the blue sea spreads wide and flat to the horizon. To the south, where the helicopters have retreated, the city skyline patterns the horizon in jagged shapes. Gulls fly leisurely above the houses on the island.

I pick up the binoculars and focus on a tern hovering over a tide pool, then swing the glasses to the marina lounge. “There’s Purvis,” I say. “And Donna and Pope and some other people watching us from the terrace.”

“They haven’t seen anything yet,” Billy says.

I scan the cars and trucks backed up along the causeway and in both directions on Center Street. The dump trucks on the island are empty. I follow the marsh up-island to the live oak tree, but from such a distance I can’t see the oyster mound.

“Did Latimer show you what he’s planning to do?”

“He’s started filling in the ponds,” Billy says. “That’s what gave me the idea. All these dump trucks are Latimer’s.”

I lower the binoculars. “So you stopped him by opening the bridge?”

“And one of the boats down there belongs to the Ruperts.”

“Which one?”

“I can’t remember,” Billy says. “How many are there now?”

“Dozens. And a Coast Guard cutter is bringing in reinforcements.”

I focus the glasses on the cutter entering the waterway from the harbor. The sun whitens the sky above the trees, and clouds drift across the blue. The air is humid; a sunset threatens.

“We need more beer,” Billy says, shaking his empty can. He pulls the phone toward him and dials a number. “We’ll get room service.”

“Maybe we should eat something.”

“Donna, it’s me, Billy. Listen, Scotty and I need a case of beer. Yeah, we’re up on the bridge. Sam Adams is good. A case. And a half-dozen corn dogs. What else have you got there? Some beef jerky and onion chips — put it on Scotty’s tab.” He listens a moment. “Purvis can deliver it, but he’ll have to take a boat to get across the waterway.” Another pause. “Now, yes, right now. We’re thirsty.”

He hangs up and hands me the phone. “You’re my lawyer,” he says. “Tell the police to let Purvis up here.”

The number for the newspaper is written on a pad in Billy’s scrawled hand, and I punch it in, figuring that if Billy called once they’ll have someone ready. Sure enough, they switch me to their mobile unit right away. “It’s Scott Atherton. I’m with Billy Prioleau in the pillbox. I need to talk to the police.”

I stand up, hold back the Venetian blinds, and see a man get out of a media van and run across to one of the police cruisers. In another few seconds, the sergeant comes on the line.

“It’s Billy’s lawyer,” I say. “Billy wants the dump trucks off the causeway.”

“He wants what?”

“He doesn’t like the dump trucks. And we’ve ordered some food from the lounge over at the marina. A friend of ours, Purvis Neal, will be bringing it from the island. And Billy wants to talk to his wife.”

“No, I don’t.”

“She’s right here,” the sergeant says.

I hand the phone to Billy.

“Hello, Arlene,” he says.

I’m close enough to hear Arlene’s voice. “Are you all right?” she asks. “What are you and Scotty doing up there?”

“Not much so far.”

“I want you to come home.”

“I can’t right now,” he says. “Maybe in a while.”

“You have to get to work, Billy.”

“I will,” he says. “You’re beautiful.”

She says something else I can’t hear, and then he hands the phone to me.

The sergeant is back on the line. “Are you making any progress?” he asks.

“Billy hasn’t offered to surrender his weapon yet,” I say, “but we’re talking.”

“We want to defuse the situation,” he says. “We want this traffic to get moving again.”

“Start with the dump trucks,” I tell him. “And the food. Let me have your cell phone number so I can be in touch when we have other demands.”

He gives me the number.

“Don’t do anything rash,” I say. I lay the receiver in the cradle.

In a few minutes the dump trucks start to turn around on the causeway. On the island, they disappear behind the Episcopal church on Center Street. It takes twenty minutes, and just about when the last truck disappears, Purvis comes out of the marina in a skiff. He maneuvers through the maze of anchored sailboats in the waterway and crosses to the bridge pilings. A police officer helps him offload the case of beer and the food.

“You still think it was an accident about that boy?” Billy asks.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s an accident?” Billy says next. “When you think about it, everything’s an accident. Life is an accident.”

“You mean Edgar’s drowning.”

“Up here I watch the seasons change, the years go by,” he says. “I watch the tides flow in and out of the creeks…”

“Is that what you think about?”

“It’s not thinking,” Billy says. “It’s feeling.”

We hear a noise below, and Billy opens the trapdoor slightly. It’s Purvis in the anteroom, and Billy opens the door wider. The beer’s still on the catwalk, but Purvis has looped a rope around it and tied the rope to his belt. He tosses up the food with his good hand, and I pull him up after into the pillbox. Then I hoist up the beer.

Billy passes me a Sam Adams and takes one for himself. “Help yourself, Purvis,” he says.

Purvis isn’t a drinker, but he takes one and sits down crosslegged beside Billy. Billy doles out corn dogs.

I pull up the Venetian blinds. The helicopters are poised off the end of the island, cars and boats in limbo wanting to get somewhere, the Coast Guard cutter at anchor near the marina. The sun’s in the trees now, and rays of pink shoot out into the clouds. Sky colors — all we can see — brighten everything around us.

I join Billy and Purvis on the floor. For a while we don’t say anything. Billy and I finish our beers and open two more. Purvis munches on his corn dog.

The beer loosens me up, and I like the new ground it takes me to. Billy will want immunity from prosecution, or at least a reduced charge if he agrees to counseling. He’ll need assurance the highway department won’t fire him. A transfer, maybe — they can’t be expected to let him back up here. These items are negotiable, but the other demands won’t be so easily met — to stop the dredging and filling, to end the cutting of trees and the building of roads, to purify the air, cleanse the water, keep the rich from getting richer. We want Edgar’s grave undisturbed.

The pink clouds fade to gray, and the pillbox darkens. I rock forward and look out again. The causeway is silent, nearly deserted now, except for the police and the media. Across the harbor, Charleston glimmers in the dusk. The horizon still burns, though the marsh is dark and the creeks and tide pools are silver-gray, tinged with red.

“They still there?” Billy asks.

“They aren’t going away,” I say. “I guess I should call Edie to let her know where I am.”

“She knows where you are,” Billy says. “You’re with me and Purvis.”

Billy opens another beer and passes it over. He chews a piece of beef jerky. “You know the oyster mound?” Billy says. “Guess what Latimer says that’s going to be.” He waits a moment. “The fifth tee.”

Billy laughs. Purvis grins and drinks his beer. Then we’re quiet again. The sun makes a last burst from the trees, dances into the clouds — its deep orange and red lighting up the pillbox, even as the darkness comes down over us.