Shooting at Loons (23 page)

“How was he unscrupulous about the sale?”

“Look at the date Ritchie Janson’s supposed to have signed the bill of sale.”

“December fifth. And?”

“Now read his obituary notices from the local newspaper.”

“Died December twenty-second after a lengthy hospital stay. Oh, so he let her take advantage of a really sick old man?”

“Not just sick, Kidd. Look at this letter to the editor where somebody wrote an appreciation of his life. See where she says that he lingered a month after his last stroke, but never regained consciousness? Not too many unconscious men sign bills of sale that I know of.”

Kidd gave a low whistle. “Judge Winberry forged his signature?”

“He wasn’t a judge back then.” I leaned back in my chair, fitting all the pieces together. “What really must be tying a knot in his tail is that he used Barbara Jean’s boat to start Linville Pope on a fast track that eventually threatened the things Barbara Jean values most.”

“He must have been sleeping with her,” said Kidd.

“Yes,” I agreed slowly. “But he’s so crazy about Barbara Jean.”

“Not always a contradiction,” he reminded me wryly.

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Except for Mahlon Davis—and he thinks everybody’s out to get him, so it doesn’t count—people say Andy was one of the most law-abiding men on the island. He wouldn’t touch anybody’s clam beds, they say, or take a scallop or oyster out of season, but he might bend the rules to protect members of the Alliance. Quig Smith says Andy made a phone call Sunday morning from Cab’s and was looking at his watch like he had an appointment. What if he threatened to tell Barbara Jean what he’d found if Chet didn’t get Linville to quit lobbying against commercial fishing? And what if he set up a meeting out on the water to hear Chet’s answer?”

“And ol’ Chet just happened to bring along a .22? Quig told me all his long guns were stolen.”

“So he
says
. Very convenient theft, a day or two before Andy gets shot. And something else, Kidd—he was out on the water today when Linville was killed. If these documents were destroyed, who else would know or care enough to go back through all the public records and reassemble the proof that he was involved with her twelve years ago?”

“That’s an awful big assumption you’re making there, Ms. Judge. Maybe Bynum kept checking his watch so he’d know when the tide was low enough to dig clams.”

I pushed away from the papers, overwhelmed with something close to nausea. I liked Chet and Barbara Jean. But I’d liked Andy and Linville, too, and it sickened me to think that one friend could kill another.

For a moment I felt like taking the advice given to Odysseus: I should put an oar on my shoulder and march inland until I got so far from the ocean and fishing and all these self-absorbed coastal conflicts that people would ask me what strange object I carried on my shoulder.

As if from far, far away, I heard Kidd’s voice. “Ms. Judge?”

Abruptly, I stood and looked straight up into his hazel eyes. Our lips were only inches apart. “My name is Deborah.”

“I knew that,” he said, and bent to kiss me.

The kiss went on and on until it seemed we both must drown in Homer’s wine-dark sea. Our lips parted for a moment and his breathing was as ragged as mine before he drew me to him again. Automatically, I started toward the bedroom, then hesitated. We weren’t stupid teenagers any longer.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “but we can’t. I don’t have any protec—”

He laid his fingers on my lips and gave a lopsided smile. “Now I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but lettuce and peppers and tomatoes and ice cream weren’t all I brought with me this evening.”

Delighted laughter suffused me. “I bet you were an Eagle Scout.”

“
And
a member of the Optimists,” he said solemnly.

It is absolutely true what they say about men with long thin fingers, but his hands were so gentle and so slow that I was roused to a frenzy before I finally found out for sure.

Afterward, when we lay tumbled and satisfied against the pillows and against each other, his hands lazily wandered across my body. “Anybody ever tell you what beautiful breasts you have?”

I gazed down at them in the semi-darkness of the room. “Eight-cow breasts,” I said smugly.

“Huh?”

“There’s this huge stack of
National Geographics
in our attic. When I started to develop, I got really self-conscious about it because all my friends were getting these little round scoops of ice cream and I was getting cones. Then I came across one of those pseudo-sociological studies of some African tribe—you know the kind of thing they used to do where they’d show the native women half naked, but the men were only photographed from the navel up so that you never got to see their manhood?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, according to the article, round-breasted women averaged six cows in the marriage market, but the fathers of cone-breasted women could get eight cows.”

He cupped both of my breasts in his hands and kissed them. “These are worth at least ten.”

“Are you saying I’m fat?” I asked, letting my own hands begin to wander.

“Not fat. But I do like knowing it’s a woman in bed with me, okay?”

“Okay.”

The nicest thing about the cottage’s bathroom was that Carl had salvaged from somewhere an old claw-footed tub that was deep and wide and long enough for two. We ran it full of hot water, dumped in some bubble bath Celeste or Carlette must have left here once, and soaked for an hour, talking lazily about this and that. I knew that I’d have to go to Quig Smith tomorrow with what I’d found, but for tonight...

The telephone beside the bed rang sharply at eleven-ten.

“Deborah?” said my Aunt Zell. “Was that you I saw just now on the news, leaving the house where that Beaufort woman was murdered?”

I admitted it was and made light of my involvement. Aunt Zell doesn’t fuss, but she does worry and she wasn’t happy to think I’d stumbled into a second shooting.

“You take care of yourself, you hear?”

“I will,” I promised, then told her goodnight and reached for Kidd.

I usually try to take Aunt Zell’s advice whenever I can.

Besides, he was much, much better than Fudge Ripple ice cream.

Throw out the Life-Line to danger-fraught men,
Sinking in anguish where you’ve never been:
Winds of temptation and billows of woe
Will soon hurl them out where the dark waters flow.

Throw out the Life-Line! Throw out the Life-Line!
Someone is drifting away;
Throw out the Life-Line! Throw out the Life-Line!
Someone is sinking today.

—Edward S. Ufford

Every morning, by the time I got vertical, Kidd Chapin had been gone, so when Mickey Mantle’s banty roosters woke me at seven-thirty Friday morning, I was amused to turn over in bed and find his head still on the pillow beside me. Along with the rooster crows, a cool breeze drifted in through the open windows.

“No coffee in bed?” I asked, snuggling down under the quilt.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he yawned. “I’ll take mine black.”

I hit him with my pillow. “Just because you were top oyster last night doesn’t mean I’m going to turn into Henrietta Hausfrau.”

He let out a muffled yelp and wrapped those long skinny legs around mine.

“On the other hand,” I said, wriggling free, “fair is fair, I suppose.”

“And even in the morning, you’re more than fair.” He caught my hand and pulled me down for a long kiss that started at my lips and wound up on my breasts. “In fact,” he said huskily, “I’ll up my offer to twelve cows and a bushel of clams.”

“Throw in a peck of oysters and I’ll put in a good word for you with my daddy.”

“Oysters are out of season,” he murmured and began to do such entrancing things with my body that it was another twenty minutes before I got out of bed and said “Coffee” with much more firmness than I felt.

Jeans, sneakers and a Carolina sweatshirt, then out to the kitchen where I filled the coffee maker with cold water and measured out four scoops of a Kenyan blend I’d found in the freezer.

Andy Bynum’s papers were on the table right where I’d left them last night and the sight of them rolled such a heavy black stone over my lighthearted mood that I grabbed up a bag of stale bread and told Kidd, “Let’s go feed the gulls while the coffee’s making.”

“You do remember I’m supposed to be staking out loon hunters, don’t you?”

“Mahlon won’t know you’re Wildlife. He’ll just think I’m a loose woman.”

He laughed. “You go ahead. I’ll shave and start breakfast.”

As I started out the door Kidd said, “Listen, Ms. Judge. You know what I said about oyster season? It really did close the thirty-first of March.”

“So?”

“So maybe we ought to talk about it when you get back. Scrambled eggs or over easy for you?”

“Over easy,” I said and went out into the bright April sunshine. The seriousness of his tone brought back that sinking feeling. Was this his tactful way of telling me that it’d been fun, but now the season was closed on any further relationship?

“One of these days you’re going to remember that it’s
caveat emptor,”
said the preacher.

“Nothing wrong with
carpe diem,”
comforted the pragmatist.

I was already into a Scarlett O’Hara mode on Chet, so I added Kidd to the things I’d think about later and surrendered myself to the delight of feeding gulls on the wing.

One or two are always cruising the shoreline and as soon as the first gull swooped to catch a bread morsel, a dozen more appeared from nowhere until the bright blue air around me was filled with flashing white wings. Playing the wind, they hovered over the water like hummingbirds in midair as I tossed the broken pieces high above me, then they wheeled and dipped and soared again until all my bread was gone.

As I turned back to land, Mahlon Davis greeted me from his porch with a smile that turned to a scowl when two large white trucks pulled into the lot beside his.

They were from that Morehead waste removal service that Linville Pope had hired to clear Mahlon’s debris from her property. One had side railings for hauling, the other held a pint-size yellow bulldozer.

Mahlon’s thin shoulders stiffened angrily as three muscular workmen got out of the trucks and began letting down a steel ramp to off-load the dozer.

“They must not know Linville Pope’s dead,” I said.

Mahlon gave a threatening growl and struck off across the lot. I followed, sensing the beginning of a brawl. And wasn’t I a judge? Didn’t I know how to arbitrate?

By the time I picked my way through the junk and brambles, things had already begun to escalate. Mahlon’s accent was too thick to let me distinguish his stream of angry threats, but evidently the workmen were understanding every abusive term. One of them had grabbed a shovel from the back of the truck and looked as if it wouldn’t take much more before he swung it at Mahlon’s head.

As I approached, Mahlon said to me, “Them bastards’re saying if I don’t move my boat they’re going to push it off.”

“We got our orders from the property owner,” said the beefiest of the three men. He had a clipboard in his hand and he thumped the flimsy yellow top sheet.

“From Linville Pope?”

“That’s right, lady.”

“But she was killed yesterday,” I said.

“See?” said Mahlon. “And she’s a judge. She knows the law.”

“You really a judge?” asked the man.

I nodded.

“And Mrs. Pope really is dead?”

“Yes.”

The man with the shovel lowered it and the other workman loosened his clenched fists. It looked for a moment as if that might be that, but their boss stood firm and said, “Well, ma’am, I’m real sorry to hear she’s dead and all, but she put a deposit down and we signed a contract and far as I’m concerned, that’s something him and the lawyers can work out. I need this job and I’m going to do it less’n you want to serve me with papers to quit.”

He had me there and he knew it. He looked at Mahlon. “We’ll start on the other side, but when we get to this side, mister, if you ain’t moved that boat, I promise you we’re going to move it for you.” Again he thumped his clipboard. “She made a particular point of that boat in this contract.”

“The hell you say!” howled Mahlon. As he stormed across the lot back to his shed, he was cursing so loud and so viciously that I was glad Guthrie was at school and not around to hear or get cuffed in his anger.

“Now listen,” I said to the boss. “Can’t you—”

“Uh-oh!” said the youngest workman and he quickly headed for the near truck, just as a shot rang out.

I whirled and there stood Mahlon at the front of his boat shed with a rifle in his hands and I could only watch in stunned horror as he fired again. As if in slow motion, I heard it hit the truck behind us. Another sharp crack and the boss worker crumpled beside me. Blood splattered across the yellow contract on his clipboard and jerked me back to real time.

“Mahlon, my God! What are you doing?” I screamed and ran toward him. “Stop!”

He banged off another shot at the other two men who were diving for cover, but as I got to him, he suddenly swung the .22 to point straight at me. Such hot rage blazed in his eyes that it hit me I was looking down the barrel at Andy and Linville’s killer.

Oysters,
I thought inanely. That’s what Kidd meant. A week into April, on a tide-washed sandbar where oysters don’t grow, yet I’d seen a half-dozen scattered there near the body of a man who would never take a shellfish out of season. And that night Guthrie had come across in the twilight to say “Grandpap brought home some oysters today and Granny says do you want some?”

“Don’t do this, Mahlon,” I pleaded, but even as I spoke, the barrel swung to the right and he fired toward the road. Almost deafened by the explosion, I looked back in time to see Kidd duck down behind a Carteret County patrol car that had pulled up beside the cottage. The shot spiderwebbed its windshield.

Then I felt the hot barrel between my shoulder blades and Mahlon yelled, “Y’all keep away from me! Y’all don’t get back, I’ll shoot her. I swear to God I will.”