These days he and Denn employed three full-time assistant potters at the kiln and a part-time sales clerk for the shop where they test-marketed new items and sold their culls and seconds on weekends. A department store in Atlanta took all the first-quality stuff they made. Even without Michael’s Dancy trust fund, Pot Shot Pottery seemed to be bringing in a very comfortable living.

Gayle and I got out of the car as Michael, trailed by Denn McCloy, came up to us with a friendly if slightly puzzled smile. This was probably only the fourth or fifth time I’d ever dropped by and each previous visit had been to see Denn about a costume or some stage business.

Like many attorneys, I have a large streak of ham in me and I’d even taken the prosecutor’s role in The Night of January 16th a couple of years back. Playacting was too time-consuming for me to indulge in it often, but I loved it. Part of the fun was Denn, of course. He may never have starred on Broadway or even on Off Broadway, but he was New York, and he brought an auro of bitchy backstage glamour and outrageousness that made our amateur theater feel connected to a worldlier tradition.

Today, both were in jeans (Denn’s still black leather, of course), lumber boots, and blue chambray work shirts, but whereas Michael’s shirt strained over well-developed biceps, Denn’s hung loosely on his small wiry frame.

“Congratulations,” said Michael. “Do I have to call you judge now? I hear you won.”

“Not by enough. It’ll be a runoff with Parker in June. Appreciate your vote, though. Yours, too, Denn,” I said, extending my hand to his for the ritual kiss he always gave his female friends. “Y’all both know Gayle Whitehead, don’t you?”

I wasn’t actually sure they did since she was so much younger. Michael nodded, but Denn openly stared. The tailgate of the pickup was down and he hoisted himself up to sit cross-legged while the setter nuzzled his ear. The years had not been particularly kind to his gamin looks. Whereas Michael had grown ever more handsome as he entered his midforties, I thought that Denn was beginning to look wizened and already fifty. His hair had been a tangle of long black curls the first time I saw him. Now it was nearly white and cropped to a quarter-inch stubble, which he usually covered with a flat black leather cap that matched his jeans. His skin had a grayish tinge and his dimples had deepened into wrinkles that creased his cheeks from eye sockets to jawline.

He pushed the dog away, adjusted the small gold earring that she had disturbed, and said, “Whitehead? Are you the baby that-?”

His head jerked toward the creek.

“Yes,” said Gayle. “In fact that’s why we’re here.”

She’d pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and her warm brown eyes gazed up at Michael Vickery. “I’m trying to find out how it all happened and Deborah said maybe you’d tell me about the day you-”

“No!” snapped Denn. “He doesn’t like to talk about it. It was too awful.”

Michael cut him off with a sharp gesture. “That’s okay.”

Their eyes locked with such tension that I suddenly realized they must have been fighting before we came.

“It’s okay,” he repeated in a quieter tone.

Denn stared off into the distance, his wrinkled face like a stony mantle over the lava boiling up beneath. “You hate it when people ask.”

“This is different,” said Michael. “She has the right.”

Denn flicked his shoulder impatiently. “It’s morbid.”

“Not to me, Mr. McCloy,” Gayle said.

“It’s okay,” Michael said again as the dog jumped down from the truck and began sniffing my hand.

I ruffled her silky ears and her wagging tail announced a friend for life.

“Gayle’s trying to put it all in perspective,” I explained, as much to Denn as to Michael. “We were going to the mill, but the lane’s been blocked off, so I thought we could cross over from here if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” said Michael, and Denn gave him an angry look.

“Did you know my mother?” Gayle asked diffidently. She was still child enough to be intimidated by Denn’s displeasure.

“Not very well,” Michael replied. “She was from Dobbs and I was out of the country when she and your father moved to the house back of my parents. I probably returned around the time you were born, so I didn’t see much of her. From what I remember though, you’re very like her.”

“You were one of the men that found us, weren’t you?”

“Not really.” Michael glanced at Denn; then, as if suddenly coming to a decision, he said, “You see, I had a couple of boys working out here that day and-”

“Holy shit! Do you hear yourself!” Denn exploded in rage, springing down from the tailgate. “Boys? You’re reverting all the way back to type, aren’t you, Massa Michael?”

Even after all these years, his accent was more Long Island than Southern.

“Stop it, Denn.” Michael’s fist clenched and unclenched and the ice in his voice chilled the warm May air. “You’re embarrassing our visitors.”

“Well exscuu-uu-uuse me!” said Denn in a deliberately swishy Steve Martin takeoff. “No ice cream for me tonight, girls.”

He started off toward the barn, then turned back in an abrupt change of tone that sounded conciliatory to me. “We still didn’t decide on which slip for the next rack.”

“Use whichever one you like,” Michael said coldly. “I’m going to walk these ladies over to the mill.”

Out of a corner of my eye as we passed through an opening in the fence, I saw Denn flip him the bird before slamming the barn door with a bang.

11 its been one of those days

If there were homosexual marriages,” observed Michael as we hiked down the slope to where Possum Creek sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight, “gays could then get legal divorces and there would be a clean ritualistic break when things go wrong.”

“You haven’t seen as many messy divorces as I have,” I told him dryly.

We paused instinctively when we reached the bank and watched the slow-moving water ripple over rocks in the shallow creek bed. The dog, Lily, splashed out ahead of us and looked back to see if we were going to throw her a stick.

Gayle had pulled her sunglasses back down over her eyes. “Even when divorces aren’t messy, they can be sad,” she said, and I knew she was thinking of Dinah Jean and Jed.

“In any event, my apologies for that scene.”

For a moment as we stood on the creek bank gazing down into the water, I thought Michael was about to add something more and looked at him inquiringly, but Dancy reserve pulled him back behind that glass wall. Once more he became an urbane guide.

“Were you told that the first couple of days after you and your mother disappeared, the National Guard and everybody else were out looking for you?” he asked Gayle.

She nodded and brushed at a dog fly circling her head.

“By the fourth day though, they were starting to slack off. People began to think you’d never be found because they’d looked in all the logical places. Including the mill.”

“You searched it?” I asked.

“Not I. I would have that Thursday afternoon on my way out to the barn, but a couple of your brothers were here before me. Didn’t you know?”

I did, but I hadn’t realized he did.

“Just as I started to turn in, I met them driving out. Seth and-I get them all mixed up. Which is the one that’s an auctioneer?”

“Will,” I said. Was I being sensitive or was he talking about my brothers as if they were a litter of dogs? Just as numerous and just as indistinguishable?

“They said they’d checked it out and I saw no reason to do it again.”

Something snotty in his tone reminded me of Scotty Underhill ’s insinuations, and I was again on the defensive when I said, “They searched both floors. The mill was empty.”

He nodded after a split second, then continued his narrative for Gayle. “By Saturday morning, there just didn’t seem anywhere else to look. The weather’d been too wet outside, and I’d had to be in Chapel Hill all day Friday. But it faired off on Saturday, and I’d hired two guys to clear off the underbrush along the bank here while I was stacking bricks for my first kiln on the other side of the barn.”