Locked Doors (Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series 2)

Barry Mullins had taken his son, Patrick, out for barbecue after winning the cross-country championship last night. They were both in the hospital this morning with food poisoning so Vi would be interviewing the Kites on her own.

A little boy came and stood beside her. She noticed him watching and asked if he’d like to feed the seagulls. When he nodded she handed him a piece of bread.

“Just lift it up like this. They’ll come right down and steal it.”

The boy lifted the fuzzy-blue bread and gasped when a gull snatched it. He looked up at Vi and grinned. She gave him the rest of the loaf and walked to the bow.

It was near dusk now and when she looked west she could no longer see the mainland. Eastward, the Pamlico Sound stretched on into a horizon of gray chop with no indication of the barrier islands that lay ahead.

Again she thought of the woman who’d been hanged at the Bodie Island Lighthouse. The image had been with her all day thanks to a tasteless photograph she’d seen on the front page of a tabloid. She wondered if praying for the dead made any difference.

Clutching the railing, she stared down at the water racing beneath the boat.

The engine clatter, the cry of the gulls, the briny stench of the sound engulfed her. On the assumption that prayer was retroactive, she closed her eyes and prayed for the fifth time that day that the woman hadn’t suffered.

The sun sank into the sound.

Vi checked her watch, saw that she’d been on the water now for more than two hours. The village couldn’t be far. As the sky and sound turned the same sunless shade of slate, she imagined Max or even Sgt. Mullins standing here beside her in the mild headwind. She wouldn’t mind her sergeant’s patronization right now and she thought, I was doing fine until the sun went down. Just like staying with Mamaw and Papaw when I was ten and the homesickness that set in after dark and the crying on the phone begging Daddy to come get me and him saying no baby you’ll feel better in the morning.

A light winked on in the east—the Ocracoke Light.

Vi turned away and walked back to the Jeep.

In her briefcase in the backseat there were photographs to memorize—bearded, bald, fat, skinny, mustached, and cleanshaven—the mugs of Luther Kite and Andrew Thomas.

30

ONE of the stewardesses on my flight into Charlotte was a North Carolina native and her southern accent moved me to tears. I hadn’t heard a true southern drawl in years. It isn’t the backwoods sheep-fucking twang Hollywood makes it out to be. A real North Carolina accent is sweet and subtle and when you haven’t heard one in seven years, it sounds like coming home.

My flight landed in Charlotte-Douglas International Airport just before midnight and by 1:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning I was hurtling north in a 5-speed Audi with I-77 all to myself. I thought being home again would flood me with nostalgia but as I cruised through the piney piedmont darkness my only sensation was the ulcer that had burned in my gut since leaving Haines Junction.

At Exit 28 I left the interstate, and driving the familiar backroads toward Lake Norman, started catching glimpses of the water through the trees. When I finally saw my mailbox in the distance and the tall pines that lined my old driveway like sentries, I pulled over onto the side of the road and turned off the engine.

I walked along the shoulder of Loblolly Lane until I reached the mailbox. My gravel road had been paved and two hundred yards away at the end of the drive, cars were parked in front of my house, their chrome reflecting the warm illumination of a porchlight. It astounded me that someone had the gall to take up residence in the home of a suspected serial murderer. How did they sleep at night? Did it never occur to them that Andrew Thomas might one day come home? I’ll bet they got my place for a steal.

I jogged a ways down the drive but then thought better of it. Stopping on the smooth blacktop, I inhaled the scent of pines and remembered walking up this drive with Beth and Walter ten Decembers ago, placing luminarias in preparation for a Christmas party.

As I stared at my old home, part of me thought, Fuck this place. I’m not that man anymore. But the other part of me wanted to stand on the deck and see Lake Norman again and the blue light across the water at the end of Walter Lancing’s pier; wanted to pretend he could just stroll into 811 Loblolly Lane and climb the staircase up to his old bedroom. And when he woke in the morning maybe he’d be that writer again. Maybe he’d have his name back. Maybe his mother and Walter would be alive and the events of seven years ago nothing more than the plot of his latest novel.

He’d just wanted the sensation, however fleeting, of being Andrew Thomas the Almost Famous Writer, when that name was the best thing he owned.

In the morning I took I-40 through Raleigh, then Highway 64 into eastern North Carolina and the flattening coastal plain, through towns called Tarboro, Plymouth, and Scuppernong. At sunset I crossed the Alligator River, then the sounds of Croatan and Roanoke. The eastern fringe of North Carolina had softened into marsh and swamp as it dissolved into the Atlantic.

Sixty-four ended at the Outer Banks in the town of Whalebone, and from there I glimpsed the Bodie Island Lighthouse to the south poking up out of the pines. Coupled with Orson’s journal entries, the fact that my former fiancée was found hanging from that lighthouse erased any doubt I may have had about whether Luther Kite was currently in operation somewhere on the Outer Banks.

I took Highway 12 south for seventy miles through the beach communities of Rodanthe, Little Kinnakeet, Buxton, and finally Hatteras Village, the end of the line.

I caught the 9:00 p.m. ferry to Ocracoke Island and as the noisy engines gurgled through the water I walked up to the starboard.

I’d never been to Ocracoke. According to a brochure I’d picked up at a gas station in Buxton, it was a skinny island, sixteen miles long, less than half a mile wide in places. Its seven hundred residents inhabited a village at the south end on a small harbor that faced the sound. The brochure had bragged that it was the quaintest remotest village in all of the Outer Banks.

In light of Karen’s very public execution, an unsettling possibility occurred to me as the ferry crossed Hatteras Inlet and the full devastating reality of what I was doing set in: What if my coming to the Outer Banks isn’t a surprise at all for Luther but precisely what he wants me to do? What if those murders were for me? What if they were bait?

Now the ferry neared the tip of Ocracoke, the wind whipping cold and salty in from the sea.

I leaned against the railing and stared out into the soundside darkness.

O C R A C O K E