Outer Banks/When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home/Pastime/The Other Side of Love [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONEO.'n the Outer Banks of North Carohna there is a legend about the ships that have come to grief in the great autumn storms off those hungry shoals. Over the centuries there have been many; the Banks have more than earned their reputation as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Myths and spectres and apparitions lie as thick as sea fog over the Banks, but the one 1 have always remembered is the one Ginger Fowler told us all . . . Cecie, Fig, Paul Sibley, and I the September of my last year in college, in the early Sixties, when we were visiting her between quarters."They all say that whenever a ship is going to go down you can hear something like singing in the wind," she said. "Bankers say it's mermaids, calling the sailors. When you hear it, you have no choice but to follow it, and you end up on the shoals."We were sitting on the front veranda of the Fowlers' house on the dunes on Nags Head beach, watching the twilight die over the Atlantic. On either side of us hulked the great two- and three-story cottages the Bankers call the Unpainted Aristocracy, a long line of huge, black-weathered wooden summer houses built in the early days of the century by the very rich. 1 remember that 1 felt a small frisson that might have been night wind on sunburned flesh, and reached for Paul's hand. He squeezed it, but did not look at me. He was looking at Ginger's sweet, snub face, stained red by the sun setting behind us over Roanoke Sound and by the long, golden days in the sun. Autumn on the Outer Banks is a sorcerer's spell: clear and bathed in a light that is indescribable. We had stayed on the beach from dawn to sunset for the past four days, and all of us wore the stigmata on our cheeks and shoulders. But Ginger was bronze all over. The freckles on