The Sand Castle

The Sand Castle

Other books by Rita Mae Brown:

Wish You Were Here

The Tell-Tale Horse

Puss'n Cahoots

Sour Puss

Cat's Eyewitness

The Hounds and the Fury

Whisker of Evil

The Hunt Ball

The Purrfect Murder

Starting From Scratch

Full Cry

Hotspur

Pay Dirt

Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

Murder at Monticello

Loose Lips

Outfoxed

Murder, She Meowed

Hand that Cradles the Rock

Catch as Cat Can

In Her Day

Southern Discomfort

Ruby Fruit Jungle

Six of One

Sneaky Pie's Cookbook for Mystery Lovers

Songs to a Handsome Woman

High Hearts

Claws and Effect

Riding Shotgun

Alma Mater

Venus Envy

Pawing Through the Past

Bingo

Sudden Death

Murder on the Prowl

Dolley

Rita Mae Brown

Copyright © 2008 by American Artists, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

First published in the German language in 2007 by Mare Buchverlag, Hamburg, Germany

Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada

FIRST EDITION

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4845-3

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com

Semper Fi
In Memory of Uncle Ken

The Sand Castle

A white-hinged sign with a big red crab painted on it loomed out of the thinning fog.

“Jesus.” Mother swerved to the right.

Her sister, Louise, replied sharply, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.”

“I didn't, you twit, I took his son's.”

“The Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Same.”

“This is supposed to be a trip to the Bay. If I want religious instruction I'll go to church.”

“Well, that's just it, isn't it?” Louise was smug. “You're a Lutheran, which is God's punishment. Otherwise you'd worship at the One True Church.”

Mother, sidestepping the bait for a fight dangled by her older sister—just how much older also a ripe subject for contention—shrugged. “God will forgive me, that's His trade.”

Louise, pretty in what she deemed her mid-forties, crossed her arms over her chest. She was closer to fifty-two or fifty-three.

Awakened by the swerve, I piped up, “How long till we get there?”

“Not long.” Mother avoided being specific.

“Forty-five minutes. If this fog would lift we'd get there faster.” Louise feared driving in fog, which was sensible.

Mother feared nothing. At least that's what I thought at seven. Although Mother drove, we rumbled along in Aunt Wheezie's new black Nash with the dull gray interior. I hated the car but kept that opinion to myself. Why would anyone want to drive a car that looked like a cockroach? Even at seven I was a gearhead, which delighted my father and amused my mother.
Leroy, still asleep next to me, evidenced no interest in motors even though he was a boy. He'd turned eight in June. I wouldn't reach that advanced age until November, so those extra months pleased him even if cars did not.

“I love the Chesapeake Bay.” Mother smiled as the first sliver of pink appeared on the horizon, the fog thinning in places. “Wheeze, remember when Aunt Doney and Uncle Jim took us down here for the Fourth of July? I must have been Nickel's age.”

Louise smiled broadly, “Aunt Doney wore so much linen and gauze she looked like an Arab.”

“She was so fair,” Mother remarked.

“I'll never forget when you and I got tan and she had a hissy. Said we looked like field hands.”

“Better field hands than cadavers.” Mother felt like someone had told her what to do and how to do it every step of her life and Aunt Doney was no exception.

“She had a point, I guess, but we were in our teens then and Coco Chanel started the fad for white clothes in summer, and a tan. Oh, remember that French boater striped top I wore? Blue and white. I just thought that was the most beautiful thing.”

“It was.”

“And that's why I never let you borrow it. You'd have torn it or spilled something on it. Juts, you're so rough sometimes. Just watching you dance is exhausting.”

“Mother, when were you and Aunt Wheezie here with Aunt Doney and Uncle Jim?”

“I think the first time was 1912. Took forever to get here. There used to be a spur line so you could take the train to St. Mary's. We stayed a whole week.”

Aunt Louise, to remind me of what I already knew—because I really liked history—said, “A few rich people owned cars as toys. You took
a trolley, a train, or a horse-drawn buggy. Didn't Mrs. Chalfonte get the first car in Runnymede?”

“No, her brother did. The brother was killed in the war,” Mother replied.

“Same war as PopPop?” I asked.

“Same war,” Aunt Louise affirmed. “I pray to God there will never be another one. It was the war to end all wars.”

“We know better.” Mother slowed for an S curve. A truck with wooden panels on the sides to hold in its load of hay was lurching toward us from the opposite direction.

“World War Two is still World War One.” Aunt Louise stared out the window, the lifting fog now bright pink.

“Why?”

“Didn't settle the issues the first time.” Aunt Louise, not a keen student of history, paid attention to current affairs and for her these had been current.

“War will always be with us. People like to kill each other,” Mother stated flatly.

“If the peoples of the world accept Christ, war would end forever.”

“Aunt Wheezie, how can they accept Christ if they have their own God?”

“They're wrong.” This was said with finality and conviction.

“Oh.” I didn't press it mostly because religion fascinated me much less than horses, cars, and history.

“Let's go back to that place for lunch,” Mother suggested.

“It's forty-five minutes from St. Mary's.” Aunt Louise named the county at the southern tip of southern Maryland. The little town there was called St. Mary's City.

“You're right. Okay, Nick, you keep your eyes peeled for another sign like that and we'll stop for lunch on the way home. We can't stay here all day, which is why we started so early. Anyway,
I love to see the Bay when the sun comes up and the birds are flying around and talking to one another. And you know it's August and the coots will be flying in for a rest.”

Coots were a type of duck that migrated. In wintertime other types of ducks stayed on the Bay, over a million of them.

“Juts, birds don't talk to one another.” Louise shook her head at her fanciful younger sister.

“They do. We don't understand it, that's all.” She breathed in, quickly changing the subject because Louise could be contrary and she was edging on it today. “Think Aunt Doney could make the trip?”

“To St. Mary's County?”

“Well, yes. We could fix up the back seat and she could sleep. There are folding wheelchairs.”

“No matter. They won't push in the sand.”

Mother sighed. “You're right.”

These words, more than any other, guaranteed happiness for Louise.

“How old is Aunt Doney?” I asked.

“Ninety-eight,” Louise replied.

“Oh.” I couldn't fathom this but I did know that the maternal side of our family routinely lived a long time. We had Bibles going back to 1620 and written in various beautiful hands were the birthdays and death days of our forebearers. A lot of the men died in wars but those women who survived childhood seemed semi-immortal. As it was, Aunt Doney's brother was still alive and he'd fought in the War Between the States, being not much older than myself at the time. He was in a wheelchair, too. It made me wonder if you could live too long.

Mother checked the rearview mirror. “That boy can sleep through a thunderstorm.”

“He sleeps a lot since Ginny died.” Louise's voice lowered.

Ginny, her daughter, had died in February 1952, six months back, at age thirty-three. Leroy cried a lot. Everyone did, including
Leroy's father, a marine with the Sixth Division, who had been a war hero at Okinawa. That shocked me, and scared me, too.

“Children are made of rubber. He'll bounce back.” Mother kept a positive outlook.

“I don't know, Juts. I hope so. It takes a lot of living to understand death. He's eight. Imagine if we'd lost Momma at eight.”

“We would have had each other.” Mother stopped herself from making light of it. “But I expect we would have cried ourselves to sleep for a long, long time.”

“And the poor little guy has to live up to Ken. How can he do that? How do you live up to a father who won the Distinguished Service Medal for conspicuous bravery?”

“Sis, Leroy isn't the first one of our family to have a hero father. One of us has been in every war or uprising since the Jamestown Massacre. If they managed, so can he.”

The Jamestown Massacre occurred in 1622,
on Good Friday, along the James River in Virginia.

“That's Chessy's family not ours. Never forget, Julia,” she used Mother's full name, “We're Marylanders.”

“Still. There's always been someone in a war somewhere. There will always be war.” She cut off Louise's protest. “You know yourself that Americans don't all follow the word so why would you think someone in the Ukraine will? It's just the way it is.”

“Makes me sick.” Louise meant it.

“I guess it would make me sick if I had to see it and smell it.” Mother glanced to the left, the east. We were nearing the point of St. Mary's County and the sun was breaking over where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Potomac River at Point Lookout. Virginia reposed to the west and the other chunk of Maryland to the east. Islands had broken off eastern Maryland and sat in the Bay like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

“You tickle me.” Louise smiled.

“Why?”

“You'd clap your hands when the sun came up when you were little. Momma would laugh and you'd clap more.” She sighed.

“What's better than a new day?” Mother beamed.

Their mother, Cora, died in 1947. I was almost three. I remembered everyone crying. That was my first brush with someone leaving Earth. Next came one of my cousins when he was five, and then Ginny. It worried me. If they were going to a better place then why was everyone crying?

Louise rolled down the window and the still-cool air rushed in, “I know the sun's coming up in the east but I don't know what's coming with it.”

“Good times.” Mother beamed.

“I don't know.”

“Sis, good times.” Mother smiled.

When Ginny took sick both Mother and Aunt Louise nursed her. Mother bore the full brunt
of her sister's grief and she grieved, too, for Ginny was an exceptionally lovable person.