Wilmington, NC 05 - Murder On The ICW

today. All that pasta I'd had in Italy was filling out my waistline. Instead of lunch from now on, I'd come here to walk. Walk away my extra pounds. By my wedding day I would be as svelte as Melanie. And with a lover in my life again, I wanted to give him something special to hold on to. I didn't know what Nick's new girlfriend looked like, but when it came to the figure department, I decided, no one was going to look better than me.

23

    I opened the door to my house as lively voices drifted from the library. A silky Southern drawl, like warm marmalade drizzled on toast. Aunt Ruby's voice. Melanie's light laughter, followed by a male's deeper voice. Binkie was here too.
    I rushed into the library to say hello, to be exclaimed over and smothered with hugs and kisses.
    "What are you two doing here?" I asked. "Not that I am not thrilled to see you," I hastened to assure them.
    "We've come to take care of dear Melanie," Aunt Ruby replied as she and Binkie resumed their seats in wing chairs across from the leather sofa where Melanie lay. "And to help you girls in whatever way we can."
    "Darling Cam was able to return to running Gem Star Studios," Melanie explained, "now that Binkie and Aunt Ruby are here."
    Darling Cam? Oh, that endearment was music to my ears.
    Our mother's family, the Chastains , had settled in Savannah in the eighteen hundreds. Our father's family, the Wilkeses , were old time Wilmingtonians . Aunt Ruby still lived in the Chastain family home. She and Binkie divided their time between Savannah and Binkie's snug bungalow on Front Street.
    During World War Two my maternal grandfather -- Mama and Ruby's father -- had moved to Wilmington to work on the Liberty ships. As Aunt Ruby had once explained the move to Melanie and me: "During the war years Daddy -- your granddaddy -- was valuable to the war effort as a shipyard foreman. Of course, we had naval yards in Savannah too, but Daddy went where he was needed. And where Daddy went, Mama went, and we girls too."
    Aunt Ruby was a retired registered nurse, in her early seventies, but a role model for us all. She was vibrant and active -- laced up her Reeboks every day, rain or shine, and walked for two miles, wore make-up and colored her hair.
    She and Binkie had been married over the Labor Day holiday weekend. And from the way he couldn't take his eyes off her, he was as smitten with her now as he had been then, indeed had been for all of his life. Theirs was an unusual love story which dated back to childhood days.
    Binkie smiled at me encouragingly, his fair skin crinkling, his seventy-year-old blue eyes as bright and keen as a seventeen-year-old. He still dressed with his own inimical flair: a favorite brown and cream herringbone tweed jacket that I remembered well; brown corduroy slacks that looked soft and comfortable; brown suede Hush Puppies.
    He reached out and cradled my hand in both of his. His hands were worn like everything else about him, but offered reassurance and comfort. After Daddy died, Binkie stepped into my life and I leaned on him. He seemed to need someone to need him, for he had never married and had no family. Until Aunt Ruby re-entered his life.
    "I've missed you, Ashley dear," he said now.
    Binkie is Benjamin Higgins, Professor Emeritus at UNC-W's History Department. No one knows more about the history and folklore of the Lower Cape Fear region. He has authored many a scholarly book on the subject. With his friends -- with everyone -- he was kindly and gracious, a Southern gentleman of the old school, living a solitary life with his books and his legends.
    And then last spring Aunt Ruby had been visiting us here in Wilmington and she and Binkie had rediscovered each other. They'd learned that neither had married anyone else. The sixty years that they had been separated drained away as smoothly as sand in an hourglass.
    And now as if remembering their childhood, they began to speak of Lumina, the famous dance pavilion on Wrightsville Beach where they had met.
    "I shall never forget that magical place," Aunt Ruby said. "Will you, Benjamin?"
    "Never," he replied. "That's where I met you."
    "Oh, the music," Aunt Ruby reminisced. "Jimmy Dorsey, Kay Kyser , the great band leaders all came to Lumina. And local talent was featured too.
    "And once a week, there would be a children's dance," she said in a hushed, honeyed drawl, recalling her youth, and her favorite dancing partner. "On other nights, we children would be allowed to play