Shooting at Loons (4 page)

Yes, they kept a pair of glasses by the kitchen window, said Jay Hadley. “Ever since that trouble last month, we’re sort of in the habit that whoever’s passing’ll take a quick look.”

Detective Quig Smith nodded as if “that trouble last month” was old news. “You see Andy get here?”

“He was just stepping out of his skiff when we got back from church about twelve-thirty,” she said. “Once I knew it was him, I didn’t have to keep looking. I figured he’d be a couple of hours and things’d be fine long as he was here.”

Her faint island accent turned
fine
to
foine
.

“Next time I remembered to look, there worn’t a sign of Andy, just his boat. I thought maybe he hitched a ride outside with one of his boys or something. Then the next time, it was her and one of the Davises. I saw them get out and mess around and then he took off back to the island by hisself, and that’s when I decided I’d come out and see what was going on.”

“How come your husband or son didn’t come out?”

“Hes had to go to Raleigh and Josh—”

A call on the police radio interrupted her and Smith had to go forward into the cabin to pick up. Whoever was calling had such a thick accent I could only catch scattered phrases and Andy Bynum’s name.

“Durn!” said Jay Hadley when Smith came back down to the stern with a grimace on his face.

“What?” I asked.

“Some fool put it on the air,” he said in disgust.

“It’s Andy’s boys,” Jay Hadley told me. “They’re both outside, probably halfway to the Gulf Stream, can’t get back for hours. They didn’t ought to have to hear about their daddy over a shortwave. Who was the blabbermouth?”

“Probably Guthrie,” Smith guessed. He sighed. “Might as well let you ladies get back to shore for now.”

I pointed out that I no longer had transportation.

Smith and Miz Hadley locked eyes a moment, then she nodded. “She can ride with me.”

The trip back was more leisurely than I’d expected from her breakneck speed out. She leaned back in the blue vinyl seat with one hand on the wheel. The wind barely ruffled our hair. We might have been riding around Dobbs in a convertible.

More to make conversation than anything else, I asked, “When did they start renting out parcels of the sound?”

“You mean when did the great state of North Carolina realize fishermen need to earn a living off the water even though sportsmen and developers and so-called conservationists keep trying to put us out of business?” Her tone was dry, but not actively hostile at the moment.

“Is that what they’re doing?”

She shrugged. “We seem to get all the rules and regulations. Turtle excluders, bycatch limits, size limits, equipment limits, right-to-sell licenses—leased bottoms are ‘bout the only thing we’ve got back and now they’re even having second thoughts about that.”

“Can you just pick wherever you want? That used to be a pretty popular spot when I was a girl.”

“You might’ve gone digging back there when you were a girl,” she said, turning the wheel so that we were angling across the empty channel toward the cottage, “but that sandbar’s pretty near clammed out. For me and Hes to lease it, a Marine Fisheries biologist had to certify that it’s no longer a productive natural shellfish bed. That means it worn’t producing ten bushels a year.”

“So how do you farm it? Strew seed clams right into the sand?”

“We could. Some folks do. What me and Hes do’s more costly to start with, but gets us a higher return. We load mesh bags with eight to twelve hundred seed clams and stake them on the bottom. Takes about two years to grow them out at least an inch thick.”

As she warmed to her subject, the woman was downright chatty.

“Mesh bags? Like potato bags?”

“Onion bags’re what we use when we harvest them. We grow them in big nylon bags about five feet square.”

“Makes ‘em easy to pull up,” I guessed.

“Yeah, but mostly it’s to protect the clams from crabs and rays and conchs. They’ll wreck a regular shellfish bed.” Jay Hadley gazed back over her shoulder at the staked area of water receding behind us. “We expect to harvest a thousand clams a bag next year.”

I was never any good at mental math, but it didn’t take an Einstein to realize that with three acres of bags staked down out there and each clam selling for nine to twenty cents apiece depending on the season, it was like leaving bags of money lying around for the taking.

“Sounds like an easy way for other people to go home with a quick bucket of clams,” I mused.

“Tell me about it.”

“So that’s why you keep such a sharp eye on that spot.” And why she came out with a gun? “Had much poaching?”

“Not bad as some folk.”

If poaching was part of last month’s trouble, she wasn’t going to elaborate.

The yellow cottage loomed up ahead of us and the tide was now high enough that she could come in fairly close.

“Here okay?” she asked, wallowing in until the lifted propeller almost scraped bottom.

“Foine,” I told her.

The sun was just sinking below the live oak trees beyond Mahlon Davis’s boat shed at the water’s edge and several gray-haired men were standing over there talking to him as I squished up the path to the cottage. I nodded gravely. Equally grave, they returned my nod but didn’t speak or call over a question though they had to be curious about what had happened out there.

Guthrie’s skiff was moored to the end of Mahlon’s dilapidated dock, near where Jay Hadley dropped me off, but of Guthrie himself there was no sign. Carl’s two clam rakes were propped on the edge of the porch next to the bucket.

Empty, of course.

Just as well. I certainly didn’t feel like messing with clams at this point.

Instead, after changing into dry sneakers and a pair of jeans, I fixed myself a stiff bourbon and Diet Pepsi and dumped a can of Vienna sausages onto a paper plate. Saltines were in an airtight tin and I added them to the plate, then carried everything out to the porch and one of Sue’s slat-bottomed rocking chairs.

I might not be eating chowder and Andy Bynum would never again perch over there with a cold beer in his hand and regale us with tall tales of island living, but nothing was going to stop me from sitting here as the Cape Lookout light got brighter and brighter in the distance, remembering how things used to be.

The men with Mahlon dispersed and all was quiet for an hour or two.

Guthrie came over at first dark. He stopped out in the yard and said, “Grandpap brought home some oysters today and Granny says do you want some since you didn’t get clams?”

“Thank her for me, but I don’t think so.”

He started back.

“Guthrie?”

“I can’t stay,” he called over his shoulders. “Granny said come right back.”

It was full dark, the wind was blowing straight in off the sound, and I was half sloshed when they materialized at the end of the porch, two shapes silhouetted against the security light out at the east edge of the yard.

It’d been so long since I’d seen them to know who I was looking at, that I wouldn’t have recognized them.

“Evening,” I said. “It’s Drew and Maxton, isn’t it?”

“Evening,” said Andy’s older son. “They say you’re a judge now.”

“Yes.”

“They said you found him,” said the younger.

“Me and Guthrie.”

“Yeah, well.”

“We’d rather hear it from you,” said Maxton.

“If you don’t mind,” Drew added.

So again I told them exactly how we’d gone out to the sandbar and how we’d found their father lying in the water, stone dead. “I’m really sorry,” I told them, when I’d finished. “I didn’t know him very well, but what I knew, I liked. Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

“But we thank you for asking.”

And then they were gone.

Without going on over to talk to Guthrie.

Inside the phone began to ring. I got up unsteadily and followed the trill to Sue and Carl’s bedside table.

“Judge Knott?” asked a quietly cultured voice. “Judge Deborah Knott?”

“Yes?”

“Oh I am so glad I caught you! This is Linville Pope of Pope Properties? Judge Mercer is a real good friend of mine and he said for me to look after you. Could you possibly stop by on Tuesday after court for cocktails? I have asked some friends in and I know they would just love to meet you.”

I looked down at my empty glass. My daddy used to lecture me about drinking alone.

“Why certainly,” I said, putting on my own cultured voice. “How kind of you to ask me.”

From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strand,
Where Afric’s sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error’s chain.

—Reginald Heber

After Bath in Beaufort County and New Bern in Craven County, Carteret County’s Beaufort is the third oldest town in North Carolina, established in 1721. (And that’s B
o
-fort, with a long
o
, thank you very much; not B
u
-fort like that other coastal town so far down the shores of South Carolina that it’s almost in Georgia.)

For years our Beaufort was just a sleepy little fishing village on the Intracoastal Waterway. Then in the late seventies they tore down most of the ramshackle fish houses alongside Taylors Creek, rebuilt the piers, painted everything on Front Street in Williamsburg colors and now boats from all over the world—fishing boats, yachts, sailboats, even occasional tall ships—tie up at its docks and come ashore to drink in its bars and rummage through its self-consciously quaint shops.

Retirees have drifted in from all over, wealthy businessmen have built themselves second homes along the quiet coves and sheltered inlets, developers started calling our shoreline the Crystal Coast, and now tourism’s a year-round industry.

Back away from the waterfront, the town itself hasn’t changed all that much from what it was in my childhood except for the historical markers on more of the old white wooden houses. The courthouse still stands foursquare in a shady grove of live oaks a few blocks inland. It was built in 1907, red brick with tall white Doric columns on both its east-and south-facing porches. As with the old Colleton County courthouse back in Dobbs, modern courtrooms have been grafted onto the old building here and a new jail complex is rising out back.

A bailiff was waiting for me at the east porch. He gestured me toward an otherwise illegal parking space beneath one of the live oaks, took my briefcase and robe, and ushered me inside.

“Miz Leonard’s office is down there on the right,” he told me diplomatically.

Though she’d been elected on the Democratic ticket, Carteret’s Clerk of Court wasn’t terribly political and I knew her only by sight and reputation.

Her small reception room was empty; but as I approached the open inner door to her office, I was nearly knocked over by a short, very angry, barrel-shaped man. He pushed past with a muttered apology and I caught an expression of perplexed dismay on Darlene Leonard’s face.

It changed to a warm smile as she stood to welcome me from behind a desk cluttered with manila folders, computer printouts, pictures of children and grand-children, and a cut-glass vase of pansies. The office wasn’t much wider than the desk, but tall windows stretched toward an even taller ceiling and lent a sense of spacious amplitude.

Things were slow enough back in Colleton County that when District Court Judge Roydon Mercer suddenly underwent emergency bypass heart surgery three days ago, my chief judge, E Roger Longmire, volunteered me for a substitute. “They’ve never had a woman sit on a Beaufort bench,” Roger said when he asked me to go. “Should be an interesting experience.”

I forgot to ask him who was expected to find it interesting.

Evidently Darlene Leonard did.

“I’ve given you the judge’s chamber that has its own private washroom.” The sparkle in her eye announced an amused sensitivity to one of the biggest grumbles I hear from some of my male colleagues. They claim they’re getting gun-shy about using any bathroom that has a connecting door because sometimes I forget to knock. We chatted a minute or two about inconsequentials—if she’d heard of the murder off Harkers Island, she didn’t seem to connect it with me. Her assistant interrupted to say an expected phone call was on the line, and Mrs. Leonard said, “Now you be sure and let me know if there’s anything you need.”

I said I would.

Superior court was in session, too, the bailiff told me as we crossed into the modern section of the courthouse. “Insurance fraud. It’ll probably go to the jury today.”

In fact, I was zipping up my robe when Superior Court Judge Chester Amos Winberry tapped at my door and poked his head in without waiting for me to answer.

“What if I’d been standing here in my slip?” I asked sternly.

“I’d say when did you start wearing slips?” he grinned.

He had me there. I only own one: a black lace thing that keeps my black silk dress from clinging too tightly when I wear it to funerals; but I never thought anybody’d noticed the other times. Guess I’m going to have to start checking my silhouette against a brighter light.

Chet’s a competent enough jurist. Some of us feel he goes a little too easy on white collar crime and a little too hard on blue collars, but that’s not an unpopular mix down here. He’s getting some gray now and the laugh lines no longer go away when he stops laughing; nevertheless, at fifty he’s still a sexy man, knows it, and loves to act the cowboy. Most of the time, his wife, Barbara Jean, keeps him reined in; but she’ll never break him from calling every female “darlin’,” “honey,” or “sugar.”

“Heard you were down,” he said. “Also heard you found Andy Bynum shot dead out by the banks. Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Did you know him?”

“Hell, everybody knew ol’ Andy.” He shook his head. “Bad, sad thing. Barbara Jean’s all torn up about it. He was one of the few people that everybody listened to.”

“About what?” I rummaged in my briefcase for a legal pad and a pen in case I needed to make notes to myself.