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"Help you with something, Miss?"

"Mr. Myers?"

Scottie stroked his dark mustache and cocked his head.

"Yes, why?"

"My name’s Violet King. I’m a detective from Davidson." She reached into her purse, flashed her credentials. "May I ask you a few questions?"

"Something wrong?"

"Oh, no sir. You haven’t done anything." She smiled and touched his arm. "Let’s sit down. Won’t take but a minute."

They sat down at the corner of the bar and Vi came right out and asked him if he knew Luther Kite. Scottie had to think for a moment, stroking his mustache again and staring at the impressive train of beer bottles, nearly two hundred strong, lined up on the glass shelves where the liquor should have been.

"Oh yeah," he said finally. "I remember him. He do something?"

"Well, I can’t really go into that, but… Do you know where he is right now?"

"Sure don’t. I hadn’t seen him in, God, ten years maybe. I didn’t even know him that well when I knew him. Know what I mean? He was one of those quiet, loner types. Me and him used to go crabbing with Daddy back in high school. That’s the only reason I knew him. Daddy gave him the job. We weren’t friends or nothing. Fact, I didn’t like him. That whole family’s strange."

"Mr. Myers, anything you could tell me about him would be a great help."

"I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know him any better than I know you. Who said I knew him so good?"

"His parents."

"Well, sorry I can’t help you."

Scottie glanced up at a nearby television. On the screen, an immaculately groomed couple stood in bathrobes kissing in lowlight before a fireplace. He looked back at Vi and grinned.

"So how old are you?" he said.

"Twenty-six."

"And you’re a detective already? You’re just a young’n. You get hit on a lot, Miss King?"

"Sometimes."

"I bet you do. Yes indeedy."

Vi noticed the shift in his eyes. What had been fear at first was now pursuit, lustful interest.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Myers." Vi stepped down from the barstool.

"I think it’s great what you’ve accomplished and all," Scottie said. "You’re good at your job. I can tell. Don’t you ever take any shit from a man, okay? We underestimate you. Had lunch yet?"

"No, but—"

"Then why don’t you have lunch on me. My treat."

"Oh, Mr. Myers, you don’t have to do that."

"No, I want to. I wish my little sister were here to meet you. Be good for her. She’s married to a real son of a bitch who don’t think women can do nothing. You like oysters?"

"Um, sure."

"I’m gonna go shuck a few and bring you an appetizer. Take a look at the menu and decide on a main course. See that string hanging from the ceiling over there?" He pointed to an alcove across the room. "There’s a ring on the end of it. What you do is you take the ring and stand back and try to catch it on the hook in the wall. Everyone who comes to Howard’s has to play ‘Ring on the Hook.’"

Scottie headed back to the kitchen and disappeared through the swinging doors. Vi glanced at her watch. She had almost two and a half hours until her second interview with the Kites and she’d been so excited this morning after taking the pregnancy test that she’d forgotten to eat.

So she walked over to the alcove and played "Ring on the Hook" while she waited for lunch. She didn’t feel guilty for loafing. The trail was frigid and it looked more and more as if Luther Kite hadn’t set foot on this island in a very long time. Besides, this was Ocracoke, the antithesis of haste, the sort of island where you stay indoors on a rainy autumn afternoon and turn idleness into a virtue.

38

THE waitress promised me that the oysters I’d ordered had been harvested from the Pamlico Sound early this morning. I asked for a double Jack Daniel’s, neat, and was informed that Hyde County was "semi-dry," in other words, no liquor-by-the-drink. So I settled for a glass of sweet tea and leaned back in my chair, relishing the radiant drafts from the space heater and this last interlude of solace.

I’d chosen a table on the screened porch of Howard