The sun was edging toward the treetops when I awoke to the smell of cigarette smoke and opened my eyes without otherwise moving.

Heavy brogans. Long skinny legs. Faded chinos that had been washed so many times they were soft as handkerchief linen and more white than khaki colored.

A feeling of well-being suffused me as I looked up, up, up into eyes as blue as cornflowers. Stretching like a sleepy child, I forgot that we weren’t talking to each other.

“Hey, Daddy,” I yawned.

“Hey, shug.” Any wariness that might have been there a moment earlier was now gone. He flicked his cigarette away, squatted on the grassy bank beside me, and looked out over the pond. “Catching much?”

I pushed myself upright and hugged him so hard that his white straw planter’s hat almost went into the pond.

“Here now, what’s this all about?” he said, but he didn’t offer to pull away.

“I was hoping you’d bait my hook,” I grinned. “Icky crawly worms.”

He laughed, pushed his hat back on the crown of his head, reached for a pole, and said the same thing he always said when I was a little girl. “Gonna fish with me, you’re gonna bait your own hook.”

I took a night crawler from the bait box and passed half of it over to him, then put the rest on my own hook and threw out the line.

No sooner had the line touched water than something immediately grabbed the worm and pulled my red plastic bobber down into the brown depths. The cane pole bent nearly double, and I quickly flicked the tip to set the hook and began easing back on the pole. It fought but I kept the pressure steady and soon a chunky wriggling shape broke through the surface. I flipped him up on the bank, and a moment later, I was removing my hook from the mouth of a thrashing half-pound crappie.

Before I could get him in the bucket, Daddy had a slightly bigger one ready to join him.

“Hungry little boogers aren’t they?” he said as three, four, and five elbowed one other aside to be next in our bucket.

“That’s all I feel like cleaning,” I said. “You want any?”

“Nah. Maidie’s making me chicken pastry.”

“Oh?” Chicken pastry was one of my favorite suppers.

“With chopped broccoli salad.”

Another of my favorites. Minnie or Seth was probably on the phone before I left their yard.

“You asking me to stay to supper?”

“Just saying there’s plenty.”

“You always did have a pretty way with words,” I teased.

With one accord, we pushed our bobs down the line so that our hooks would be set too shallow to attract the big fish. Then we baited up with a generous hand. Dozens of little fish swarmed up as soon as the worms hit the water, and our bobbers dipped and bounced till the hooks were picked clean.

We kept it up till all the bait was gone and shadows began to lengthen over the water. The air was golden all around. I felt utterly at peace.

“Shug?”

“Hmm?”

“Who wrote them ugly letters?”

“I don’t know, Daddy.”

“Well, who do you think?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Then how ’bout I throw you a big pig pickin’?”

I twisted around to stare at him. He’d been angry when he heard I’d filed for judge and had tried to get me to withdraw. We’d both said ugly things.

“I still don’t see why you need to be a judge,” he said, “but if that’s what you want-”

I could feel myself stiffening up. “You’re going to buy it for me?”

“I just don’t want to be the cost of you losing it,” he said, more humbly than I’d ever heard him speak.

Into the silence came raucous screams. The red-tailed hawk had drifted down almost to the treetops and three crows had banded together to fly at him and hector his passage.

“I pure-out hate a crow,” said Daddy. “A hawk’ll maybe take a biddy or two in the spring, but a crow’ll get your corn all summer long and strip your pecan trees in the fall. Look at ’em chasing after that hawk, too much a coward ’cept when they can gang up on him.”

His fierce blue eyes followed the birds. Eighty-two years old, yet he still knew what it was like to live as a hawk and feel the sharp beaks of cowards on your back.

“How ’bout I stay for supper?” I said.

17 didn’t expect it to go down this way

Saturday morning found me braced for the worst. Those first two flyers were distributed God knows how widely, the Ledger had been out since Friday noon with its story, and my whole family had its collective hackles up.

So what happened?

Not one damn thing.

Every time we start thinking we’re the center of the universe, the universe turns around and says with a slightly distracted air, “I’m sorry. What’d you say your name was again?”

Oh, a few friends called to ask what was going on, but for the most part, silence. A runoff contest between two local judicial candidates is small potatoes compared to the one shaping up between Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte out in the western part of the state, and Mike Easley, a white district attorney from Southport down at the coast.

At least there’d been no more flyers.

Haywood’s Stevie had organized his cousins into teams and they’d cruised Cotton Grove and Black Creek until nearly two a.m armed with notepads to jot down license plates or comments on suspicious cars, sneaky-acting users of News and Observer boxes, or anything else that seemed worth noting.

“And nobody saw anything?” I asked when he reported in that morning.

Stevie laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that. It was Friday night. Funny what you can see when you really start looking.”

“Keep it clean,” I told him and went off to work a senior citizens’ lunch in Widdington, then an Arts Council meeting in Cotton Grove where I had to field only three mostly friendly questions about the flyers.

After the meeting, I was approached by someone with a vaguely familiar face, a bustling sort of woman who’s on the Possum Creek Players board of directors. She trotted over with a flourish of silver bangles on both wrists and an arty paisley scarf so carelessly draped over the shoulder of her flounced dress that she had to keep clutching at it. “I’m Sylvia Dayley, Miss Knott. You probably don’t remember me from our production of Who Killed the Darling Mrs.?, but I hope you won’t mind if I ask you?”

She was another of those who end every other sentence on an upward inflection.

I waited warily. “Yes?”

“Since you’re a friend of Denn McCloy? When you saw him last night, did he say anything about Michael and him maybe going somewhere for the weekend?”

She misread my blank look. “I’ve been clerking out at the Pot Shot on the weekends-Saturday mornings, ten till two; Sunday afternoons, one to five? It’s only eight hours and I mostly do it as a favor for the boys. So hard for them to find reliable help. I have a key, of course, but Michael and Denn always let me know when they’re going to be gone so I’ll feed Lily if they leave her home, only this time they didn’t say a word to me and I’m not sure what to do with the money?”

She finally ran out of breath and her bracelets jingled as she rearranged her scarf.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have misunderstood something. I didn’t see Denn last night.”

“But Cathy said Denn called you yesterday afternoon to meet him at the theater last night?”

“Cathy King? One of their potters?”

Sylvia Dayley nodded so vigorously that her scarf slid all the way down her arm until one end trailed on the floor. “I called her when I got in and that’s what she said.”

I shook my head. “He may’ve left a message on our answering machine, but we closed early yesterday and I didn’t get it. Sorry.”

She hitched up her scarf and looked perturbed. “I hate to just leave the money at the shop. Not that it’s all that much, but still… And what if they don’t come back till Monday? Sundays are such a big day, you know? And what about Lily?”