Split Black /#Wattys 2021

Chapter Ten

John sank behind the wheel of his police unit and fought the urge to drop his forehead against the steering wheel, or perhaps just open the door and lose his coffee cake. Several uniformed officers stood talking outside their squad cars in the parking lot across the street. He didn't need an audience.

Get it together, man, he told himself. You're a detective, for Chrissakes. But still, he'd felt more comfortable at Vistas on the James with Tyler Greenhouse pointing a gun at him than he felt right now. Whatever he said to Ma about this was likely to go worse than their prior conversation. And it was awful to know that his mother felt this horrible about herself.

He started the car and decided to drive to the beach. Only six blocks from home, and practically right next door to the fire company he had volunteered for when he was a teenager and wanted to be a fireman, it had provided a place for him to slip away and walk when things with Ma boiled over. He could walk around there and think it over, then go home once he'd figured out what to say.

As he drove down East Pembroke, the sun faded to a weak white glare behind gathering gray clouds, and a few drops of rain pattered his windshield. God damn it. Can't a person even walk on the beach today?

He decided to go anyway. Since they'd torn the old amusement park down, the pavilion provided a place to stand, at least, if the weather was too bad to walk.

Buckroe Beach had a long and varied history dating back to 1619. From the end of the new fishing pier, John liked to think you could see the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, if the skies were clear enough. Unless the air held not even a touch of humidity, that wasn't possible in the daytime, but you could see Thimble Shoals Lighthouse and the ten-story Nansemond On The Bay condominiums in Norfolk across the water.

John remembered coming to Sunday school at the sprawling old church across the street and marveling at the amusement park when it was here. The little amusement park lighthouse still stood in sharp relief before the water, but the antique hand-painted carousel played its cheerful tunes downtown now, and the bright white rails of the roller coaster no longer brushed the sky. Instead, John parked in front of a huge manicured lawn crisscrossed with orderly sidewalks—the very lot that had started all his mother's problems with the paper.

The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees in the past fifteen minutes. The wind tore at his shirt. The fresh smell of salt water tingled his nose; beyond the little retaining wall, the bay rushed and foamed. It was too early in spring for the beach crowd, but several people cast lines off the fishing pier, huddling in slickers against the wind and approaching rain.

A fine mist dampened his shirt. John walked around to the back of the pavilion—really just a raised concrete platform with a tall roof. The front of it stood some three feet off the ground, but the back melted into a gentle uphill slope.

Under the shelter, a young black kid in cutoffs and a yellow jacket sat listening to an iPod. Several yards away, a black girl and a tall, plump, tow-headed white girl in thin summer tank tops sat discussing the white girl's suspension from school.

"My problem is I can't control my temper," she said.

Buckroe Baptist's tall white steeple rose over sidewalks graduated with lampposts that looked like lanterns. Over its long rooftop the mist blew in waves, sideways, like smoke instead of rain. Directly in front of the pavilion, two enormous rosebushes thrust dozens of little blossoms like tiny pink fireworks into the surrounding gloom. A soaking wet Stars and Stripes slapped the flagpole between them.