Chapter 10: Notebook

"Try it," I said to her. "Try it on the courthouse steps."

Vespera smiled with peach juice on her lip.

"Not here, darling. I'm a professional. Sunset."

She dropped the pit in my hand, walked down the steps between the reporters and was gone around the corner before Jasper reached the bottom.

The pit was warm.

I threw it in the gutter.

Ida made a wedding supper anyway.

Fried flounder, okra and tomatoes, hush puppies, a pound cake from the freezer with a candle stuck in it.

The crew came, and the man from the seafood shack, and two shrimpers whose boats Corbett had trapped.

They toasted us with sweet tea and beer in the yard under the crane.

I watched the sun go down over the marsh and didn't hear a word anybody said.

Jasper sat close enough that our shoulders touched.

"Maybe she's bluffing," he said.

"She doesn't bluff. She bargains."

The sun touched the trees.

The water at the end of the dock moved.

Nobody else saw it.

Vespera's head rose out of Shem Creek, black hair floating out around her.

She was holding a pink conch shell.

My conch.

The one I'd dropped outside Corbett's study the night before the wedding and left on my bedside table at the Battery house.

She put it to her lips and sang one note.

It went through me.

I felt my voice leave.

Not from my throat. From lower down, under my ribs, where my pearl used to sit.

It came up through my chest and out of my open mouth in a thin silver thread.

It went over the water and into the shell.

Vespera tucked the conch under her arm, winked at me, and sank.

I tried to say Jasper's name.

Nothing came.

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