Sand Sharks

by Margaret Maron

  The diversion worked. She took the bottle with tightened lips. “I could throttle my stupid sister!”

  “Why? What’s happening?”

  “I think he’s trying to shaft her and she’s just going to stand there and let it happen.”

  “Huh?”

  “You didn’t know that he had an affair with one of the paralegals in his old law office?”

  “No. When?”

  “January.”

  “January this year?”

  “That’s when she found out about it. God knows how long it’d been going on.” She dabbed lotion on her nose and smoothed more on her arms. “Wasn’t the first time he’d cheated on her either, but she wouldn’t listen to me or anyone else. She was sure that his flirting was just a automatic habit and nothing to take seriously.”

  “She was wrong,” I said.

  “He’s hit on you, too?”

  “At your birthday party last year.” Although Dave had made light of it when he saw how outraged I was on Rosemary’s behalf, I knew, as any woman knows, that he would have had his hand up my skirt with the least bit of encouragement.

  “This last time, he was just a little too careless and Rosie heard about it at school.”

  I knew that Rosemary had named her older daughter after herself but I hadn’t seen the child in two or three years. “She’s what now? Thirteen? Fourteen?”

  “Sixteen, and the girl who told her is the niece of one of Dave’s former law partners. Rosie came straight home and threw up all afternoon. Seeing Rosie like that really shook her up. She made Rosie promise not to say anything to Dave till she could confront him herself, then she made a few phone calls and learned that it was true.”

  She capped the sunscreen bottle and handed it back to me. “When he wouldn’t move out, she applied for a divorce from bed and board. You didn’t hear about it? It was all over the courthouse in Durham.”

  I reminded her that Durham’s almost fifty miles from Dobbs and unless the details are particularly salacious, rumors about a colleague’s personal life don’t always travel outside that judge’s district.

  All the same, a “divorce from bed and board” constitutes a public and legal separation under North Carolina law. Rosemary would have had to prove that Dave had committed adultery, but that shouldn’t have been hard. If they stayed separated for a year, the divorce would be almost automatic.

  “So what are they both doing here this weekend?” I asked.

  “She asked if she could come down with me. Said we could have a girly weekend. Said Dave had told her he was going to skip the summer conference.”

  “But he’s here and she still stayed?”

  “I told you I want to wring her neck. You heard her last night. She lied to me. She knew he was going to be here, but he sweet-talked her into coming anyhow. He’s spent the last two months courting her like they were teenagers. Flowers, funny cards, presents. He’s convinced their daughters that it was a one-time aberration and they’re ready to forgive him. You remember how Rosemary took on Mom’s care when she broke her hip after Christmas?”

  I nodded.

  “He told the girls that the affair was partly Rosemary’s fault for neglecting him then.”

  “And they bought it?”

  “They’re not alone,” Chelsea Ann said angrily. “Rosemary’s buying it, too. I’m pretty sure she slept with him last week. And it’s not as if she doesn’t have a law degree.”

  As judges, we both knew what Dave Emerson knew and what Rosemary must surely know, too. If marital relations are resumed after a divorce from bed and board has been granted, that nullifies the divorce action.

  “Maybe he really does love her,” I said, remembering how my cousin Reid really had loved his wife even though that didn’t stop him from cheating on her time after time.

  “You think?” she asked cynically. “Or do you think that it’s because a fault-based action usually means that the cheating spouse gets the short end of the stick when it comes to alimony and property rights? If he can get her back to bed with him down here and enough of our colleagues realize that they’re sharing a room and cohabiting…”

  “Condonation,” I said, a term which means that the aggrieved party condones, i.e., forgives the adultery by resuming marital relations. That effectively erases the charges of adultery and levels the field if they later decide to divorce after all.

  “You got it.” Chelsea Ann’s tone was bitter. “And speak of the devil.”

  I followed her line of sight and saw Dave Emerson walk out onto the balcony of his room a few floors up. He was bare-legged, as if just out of the shower, and wore one of the hotel’s terry cloth robes so loosely tied that his hairy chest was exposed. Carrying a mug in one hand and newspapers in the other, he sat down on one of the chairs, set his mug on the small table, and began to read. He did not seem to see us and Chelsea Ann certainly did not wave.

  Just then Fitz and Martha spotted us and walked over to speak. Both were in flip-flops and green bathing suits and both wore white cotton sun hats. Fitz had a towel around his neck and looked trim enough for a sixty-five-year-old man, Martha wore a short white beach jacket and her legs were still good.

  “A police detective’s looking for y’all,” I said.

  “He can just keep looking,” said Martha. “We plan to get a swim in before lunch and the pool gets too hot.”

  As they started to move away after the usual pleasantries, Martha said, “Oh, look! There’s Rosemary and Dave.”

  Chelsea Ann groaned when she saw Rosemary join Dave on the balcony. She, too, wore a terry robe. Although her belt was tied tightly, it was clear that she had nothing on underneath.

  “I’m so glad they’re back together again,” said Martha, effectively squelching any hope Chelsea Ann might have harbored that none of our colleagues suspected that the marriage was in trouble or that they would witness anything that looked like condonation on Rosemary’s part.

  She looked so troubled that I jumped to my feet and tried to pull her up, too. “We’re paying beach rates for our hotel rooms here, so let’s get our money’s worth. I’ll get us an umbrella, you go change and meet me out there, okay?”

  “Okay.” She said it with all the enthusiasm of someone who darkly suspected there would be jellyfish.

  Ten minutes later, one of the cabana boys pitched my bright coral umbrella on a fairly empty stretch of sand. I tipped him, then spread out my towels and took off my jungle print skirt. I rolled both shirt and skirt into a rough semblance of a pillow and lay down to wait for Chelsea Ann to join me.

  The sand beneath my towels was warm and relaxing, and waves and gulls created a white sound that almost drowned out the squeals of laughter from the children who played in the shade of the lifeguard’s stand a few hundred feet away. I told myself that I was only going to rest my eyes till Chelsea Ann came, but last night’s late hours caught up with me.

  I’m not sure how long I had been sleeping when I became aware of footsteps scrunching on the sand as they approached. They stopped at the edge of my towel. Thinking it was Chelsea Ann, I turned my head and looked up into the face of the bearded man who had spoken to Jeffreys last night.

  “Well, hey, darlin’,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  9

  In cases of obscurity it is customary to consider what is more likely.

  —Paulus (early AD 3rd century)

  I sat up so abruptly that I banged my head on one of the umbrella’s wooden ribs.

  “Allen? Is that really you under all that face fur? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, darlin’. Enjoying the beach. It belongs to us’ns in the Triad just as much as y’all in the Triangle.”

  “Don’t call me darling,” I snapped.

  “Aw now, you ain’t still mad at me, are you, Debbie?”

  “And don’t call me Debbie,” I said, enunciating each word as forcefully as I could without actually snarling.

  “Well, I’
m sure as hell not gonna call you Your Honor. Not after all we’ve been to each other.”

  He squatted down on his heels next to my towel and I saw that his arms and legs were as muscular as ever despite more flecks of gray in his thick brown hair and beard than when we’d last crossed paths. His white swim trunks and dark blue golf shirt were too loose for me to tell if he was still built like a brick outhouse. Too, his shirt sleeves were too long to see the full-color American flag tattooed high on one deltoid and the pair of black-and-white checkered flags on the other, but I figured they were probably still there. Once upon a brief time I had known his body almost as well as my own.

  Ten or twelve years older than me, he had spent a lot of his boyhood at his uncle’s farm, a farm that touched our land on the southeast. The uncle was a roughneck shade-tree mechanic, but his wife had a kind heart for a boy who was being reared up by the scruff of the neck by a trashy woman who was more into men and booze than motherhood. When Allen got tired of being punched on by the string of “uncles” his mother kept bringing home, he would run away to his real uncle and stay as long as he could till he was hauled back to Charlotte, where he eventually grew big enough to punch back.

  His talent for repairing car engines was greater than his talent for drag racing, although he scraped together a living doing both at some of the state’s smaller racetracks.

  We had absolutely nothing in common, except that he was around the autumn after Mother died. I was mad with God that fall, mad with Daddy, not talking to eight of my brothers and six of my sisters-in-law, even mad with Mother for not finding a way to keep living. I quit college, ready to dance with the devil, and there was Allen Stancil, tapping his toe to the devil’s fiddle.

  We stopped by a Martinsville magistrate’s office for a two-minute ceremony before going over to the racetrack where he was crewing for one of the drivers. I knew I’d made a stupid mistake before the magistrate’s signature was dry on the marriage certificate, but by then I was so high on pot and tequila, I really didn’t care. About a week later, Allen called me Debbie one time too many while I had a rusty butcher knife in my hand. The racing friends we were crashing with got him to the hospital before he bled to death, at which point I took a saltshaker and crawled into a tequila bottle, hunting for the worm.

  Soon as I heard Allen was going to live, I headed north and stayed gone for two years. While I was “off,” Daddy and John Claude Lee, my cousin and eventual law partner, got the marriage annulled after paying Allen five thousand not to contest the action and to keep his mouth shut that it ever happened. When Allen turned up again two years ago, I learned that Daddy could have kept that money in his pocket. I was never legally married to him because he hadn’t bothered to divorce his second wife.

  “I guess that little girl I’ve seen you with is… what was her name again? Brittany?” I said.

  “Tiffany Jane,” he corrected me. “She’s a cutie, ain’t she? Gonna break a bunch of hearts some day.”

  “And the little boy?”

  “Tyler. And yeah, ’fore you ask, he was in the oven when me and Katie got married.”

  “Did she get a DNA test?” I asked sweetly, remembering that the last time I’d seen him, he had gone to extraordinary (and illegal) lengths to get out of paying child support for little Tiffany Jane.

  “Didn’t have to. Anybody can look at him and see he’s mine.”

  “So you and Katie are still together?”

  “Well, naw. Turns out she’s better at having babies than taking care of ’em. We split. Split legal, too. This time, I’m the one getting child support.”

  “You got custody?”

  “You don’t have to sound so damn surprised.”

  “What’d you do?” I said coldly. “Bribe a judge?”

  His laugh sounded hollow to me, but his words actually rang truthful when he said, “I didn’t want my kids growing up like I did. Besides, they ain’t got a Uncle Jap and Aunt Elsie to run to. I may not’ve done right by my first two young ’uns, but these here, they’re gonna have a daddy that takes care of ’em twenty-four/seven.”

  “Yeah? How you going to raise them when you’re off racing or crewing every weekend?”

  “I don’t do that no more. You’re looking a man on his way to being a millionaire.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s the gospel truth, Deb. I—Ow!” A handful of sand hit him in the mouth and sent him sprawling. “What the hell? Why’d you do that?” he sputtered, pushing himself up to a sitting position.

  “You call me Deb or Debbie one more time and you’re getting it in the eye,” I promised him. To show that there were no hard feelings, I handed him a bottle of water from my tote bag.

  He brushed the sand from his mustache and beard and rinsed his mouth several times till he had spat out all the sand, then gave a rueful shake of his shaggy head. “You always did fight dirty.”

  “And you were always a slow learner. So what’s this about getting rich?”

  “I got me a gutter business,” he said proudly.

  I was bewildered. “Street gutters?”

  “Naw, seamless aluminum rain gutters. On houses.”

  “What on earth do you know about rain gutters?”

  “Right much these days. See, what happened was, remember when me and Adam drove up to Greensboro so I could marry Katie?”

  I nodded. I might have been killed that night if he and my brother hadn’t come back to fetch Allen’s truck. They had both been too drunk to talk coherently, but their arrival had scared away my attacker. *

  “Well, we got in a poker game the night before and I hit an inside straight flush. It was double or nothing. Adam’s new car against this peckerwood’s gutter machine.”

  “Adam’s car was a rental,” I said.

  “Well, that peckerwood did’n know it belonged to Hertz, now did he? He just saw a brand new car against his ol’ beat-up van with a gutter machine in the back. My boy Keith, he’d been working with a gutter guy and he knowed how to run it, so I took him on to help me and I went and talked to a developer I knowed, used to race at Rocking-ham. He was building a passel of new houses out between Greensboro and Burlington and I give him such a good price—well, the short of it is, I’ve got a whole fleet of vans now with a big roll of aluminum and what we call a seamless gutter extruder in every van. I’m putting gutters on houses from Hillsborough to Hickory.”

  “I thought the housing market was slowing down.”

  “Not from where I’m standing, darlin’. Money’s coming in faster’n I can spend it. Bought Sally a big fancy double-wide and—”

  “Who’s Sally?”

  “That’s the one I was married to when you and me run off together, Wendy Nicole’s mama. She keeps Tiffany Jane and Tyler for me during the week and I got Wendy Nicole learning to be an accountant so she can do the books for me. Keep it all in the family.”

  “Does this mean you and Sally are back together?”

  “Oh, hell, no. I learned that lesson. Three times was enough.” He grinned. “Four if I count you.”

  “Don’t,” I said, even though I knew I was shoveling against the tide.

  “And what about you? You still going out with that game warden?”

  “No.”

  His grin widened beneath that bushy mustache as he glanced at his watch. “I gotta go pick up the kids at the playroom in a few minutes, but how about we get together after lunch?”

  “I don’t think so, Allen. Besides, there’s a police detective looking for you.”

  The grin disappeared and his eyes narrowed. No doubt a reflex from the old days. “What for?”

  “That judge you were talking to last night at Jonah’s.”

  He made an involuntary move backward. “What about him?”

  “You didn’t hear? He was murdered in the parking lot.”

  “No shit! Pete Jeffreys?”

  Enlightenment dawned like sunrise over a lighthouse. “Well, I’ll be damned. You did bribe a judg
e to get custody of your kids. You bribed Pete Jeffreys, didn’t you?”

  He looked at me anxiously. “Now you ain’t gonna go saying stuff like that to the police, are you? Besides, it won’t that big a bribe. In fact, it won’t even a bribe. It was more like a campaign contribution. I knowed most judges would look at my record and just because I pulled some jail time for them piddling little things I done a time or two ’fore I was full grown, they’d say Katie’s a better mama than I am a daddy even though she’s into the hard stuff and all I do’s drink a beer when I get off work. So if a little money makes a judge do the right thing by my young’uns, what’s the harm in that, darlin’?”

  “Don’t call me darling,” I said, and reached for a handful of sand.

  CHAPTER

  10

  To exercise a trade in any town without having previously served as an apprentice for seven years is looked upon to be detrimental to public trade, upon the supposed want of sufficient skill.

  —Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780)

  By now it was clear that Chelsea Ann must have changed her mind about a swim and the midday sun was too blazingly hot to tempt me any longer. I put on my shirt, buttoned my skirt around my waist, shook out the towels, and walked back across the sand to the pool area, where I dumped the towels in a hamper and climbed the stairs to the open terrace. I didn’t recognize any of the people who now occupied the rocking chairs, but when I walked on into the lobby, Detective Edwards called my name.

  “Talk to you a minute, Your Honor?”

  “Sure,” I said, following him over to a pair of soft leather chairs on the far side of the lobby. “In fact, I was going to see if you were still here. You haven’t found the bearded man Pete Jeffreys was talking to last night, have you?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t have a name for him yet.”

  “Allen Stancil,” I told him. “His uncle used to be a neighbor of ours. The beard’s new, though, so I didn’t recognize him last night.”