Shooting at Loons

11

Whether the wrath of the storm-tossed sea,

Or demons, or men, or whatever it be,

No water can swallow the ship where lies

The Master of ocean and earth and skies;

They all shall sweetly obey My will;

Peace, be still! Peace be still!

They all shall sweetly obey My will;

Peace, peace, be still!

—Mary A. Baker

Clasping the bloody phone to his chest, Midge Pope slowly slumped to the floor, moaning over and over, “Linvie, Linvie.”

I stepped over his outstretched legs and moved cautiously through the house.

No one in the public rooms, no one in the kitchen.

At the end of a curiously austere hall, I heard a low radio and when I pushed the door open, I saw a muscular young man, fully dressed, stretched out on a double bed, sound asleep. The radio beside him was tuned to easy rock.

“Hello?”

His eyes blinked open when I spoke and he stared at me blankly for a moment, then jumped up guiltily.

“Oh Jeez!” he said, “I must have dropped off. You won’t tell her, will you? I—”

An open door connected to the next room and he glanced inside and groaned, “He’s gone! She’s gonna kill me!”

He turned and almost slammed into me. “Sorry, but I’ve got to find him and—”

“Try the front door,” I suggested.

It was clear to me that he’d been hired to baby-sit Linville Pope’s alcoholic husband and that he was so shook at losing his charge, I’d get nothing out of him till he’d found Midge Pope again.

“Where’s Mrs. Pope?” I asked as he rushed across the entry hall to help Pope to his feet.

“Down at the landing, probably. She said she was—”

At that moment, he saw both the telephone and Pope’s bloody hands. “Oh Jeez!”

I didn’t wait to hear more. Already I was running through the wide sunroom. The locked French doors hindered me a moment, but once I was through them, I raced across the wide terrace, over the grass, and out to the landing.

Linville Pope’s crumpled figure lay near the end of the long planked dock. She was still wearing the black-and-white checked shirt and full black skirt she’d had on when I saw her earlier. She’d fallen backward and strands of ash-blonde hair half-hid her face. I knelt to touch the pulse points in her neck and wrists.

Nothing. Already the living warmth had drained from her skin.

It was too much like finding Andy Bynum—the swirling hair, the bright red stain that blossomed through her shirt, the lifeless pallor. At least her eyes were closed. Numbed though I was, somehow I found myself thinking how much bigger she looked lying there dead than she had when erect and full of life.

For a long moment, her death filled every interstice of awareness until finally, as if from a far distance, the sound of an outboard motor penetrated my ears and I turned to see a small dinghy headed for a boat moored a few hundred feet out in the channel.

The Rainmaker.

Benumbed, I watched Lev Schuster secure a line and pull himself aboard. He glanced back and seemed to hesitate upon seeing me there on the dock. At this distance, I wasn’t sure if he could recognize me; but whether or not he did, he quickly disappeared below. At the moment there seemed to be no other boats in the immediate vicinity, but I suppose the expanse of marshy hummocks that lay between Lennox Point and Harkers Island could have concealed whole fleets of small skiffs or dories.

Footsteps thudded down the dock behind me. Midge Pope’s baby-sitter.

“Is she—?”

“Go back,” I said sharply. “It’s too late to help her. Just stay there at the end and don’t let anyone out here. I’m going to call the police.”

He was too young to argue with me and I hurried past and into the sunroom where I remembered seeing a phone during the party on Tuesday.

I got through to Quig Smith almost immediately.

“Hey there!” he said jovially. “Our desk officer bet me I’d be gone ‘fore you called again. You’re just lucky my new ecology journal that came in today had an article on estuarine pollution and fish nurseries or I’d be—”

I cut through and he listened in silence to what I had to say. When I’d finished, he said, “How ‘bout you make sure the door’s unlocked so we can get in, then go on back out and keep a watch. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Out in the hallway, Midge Pope had blacked out and was lying curled in a fetal position around the cordless phone. No need to shift him since he was no longer blocking the entrance. I left the door on the latch and hurried back down to the dock, where the young man stood with a sick expression on his face.

“Not much longer,” I told him. “I’m Deborah Knott, and you’re—”

“Simon McGuire. What happened here, ma’am?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, shaking a thatch of reddish-brown hair that was still rumpled from his stolen nap. “She said some judge was coming and for me to keep Midge—Mr. Pope—in his room. I finally got him to bed and I just lay down to rest a couple of minutes myself and the next thing I knew, there you were.”

He had a pronounced lantern jaw, square shoulders, and a dazed expression on his open face. In his jeans and sneakers, he looked no more than twenty or twenty-one and could be any student from East Carolina or Carteret Community College.

Before I could ask him when he’d last seen Linville alive, I saw that Lev was back in his dinghy and heading straight across the water toward us.

“Stay here,” I told McGuire and went down to the end of the pier.

As Lev cut the motor of his dinghy and readied a line to tie up, I called, “Stay back. Linville Pope’s been shot.”

“I know.” He looped the line around a post. “I found her.”

“You might be destroying evidence.”

“I told you—I tied up here ten minutes ago. This won’t make any difference.”

He secured the boat and stepped up onto the dock. “I called nine-one-one and they’re sending someone.”

“Called?”

“Cellular phone on the boat,” he explained.

“Why didn’t you call from the house?”

“The doors were locked and I thought it’d be quicker to call from the boat than try to hunt up the neighbors. God, this is awful! That poor woman.” He moved restlessly from one side of the dock to the other.

I’d forgotten what a pacer Lev was. Whenever something upset him, whenever he was working out the elements of a complex case—it’s as if his brain can’t function under stress without his legs moving. He paced now, back and forth, with that old familiar urgency.

I drew back at the sight of a blood smear on his khakis and said, “Who shot her, Lev?”

He followed my eyes and brushed at the smear. “When I tried to get a pulse, I must have—” He gave me a sharp look, then in a level voice said, “I don’t know, Red. She was like that when I got here just a few minutes ago.”

I was puzzled as to why he’d even be here since Linville had invited me and she hadn’t struck me as someone who invited confrontations. “Was she expecting you?”

“Not really. She marked some places on my chart along the straits back of Harkers Island for me to look at today.” He gestured vaguely across the marshes toward the east. “I was on my way back to Beaufort, and thought I’d swing by here to ask if she could show me one of the properties tomorrow. When I first saw her—”

His eyes were snagged by movement behind me. I turned and saw Quig Smith striding across the terrace, accompanied by another detective and a couple of uniformed Carteret County sheriff’s deputies.

“That was quick,” said Lev.

I glanced at my watch. Smith had said ten minutes.

It had only been eight.

• • •

The rescue squad, summoned by Lev’s 911 call, arrived almost immediately after Smith and his men and had, at first, mistaken Midge Pope for the victim since they thought the blood on his shirt came from his body when they found him curled in the entry hall.

Now it was déjà vu time.

Watching the two teams out on the dock was uncannily like last Sunday afternoon when I’d watched these same people go through the same motions around Andy Bynum’s body. Only, instead of rocking in a boat to answer Quig Smith’s questions, this time we sat around a table on Linville Pope’s terrace as we each gave our accounts of the afternoon.

The base of the table was three bronze dolphins that had weathered to a soft green; the top was a thick round slab of glass with dozens of seashells embedded just below the surface. I recognized sand dollars, scotch bonnets, tulips, tritons, olives and snails. It seemed unreal that only an hour before I’d been happily racing hermit crabs in similar shells and now I was back in the middle of another murder.

Smith questioned me first, then Simon McGuire. I was not surprised to hear that the young man was indeed between semesters. After two years at Cullowhee up in the mountains, he was taking a year off at the beach to earn more tuition money while trying to figure out what he really wanted to be when he grew up. Linville had hired him only two weeks ago when Midge Pope checked himself out of a sanitarium up near Asheville and came back to Beaufort to start drinking again.

“My girlfriend’s mother is office manager for Mrs. Pope and she knew I had experience working as a hospital orderly for a couple of summers, so when Mrs. Pope said she was looking for somebody right away, Mrs. Abbott told her about me.”

On his first day there, he told us, Midge Pope was present when Linville Pope outlined his duties.

“She told him she wasn’t going to try to keep him from drinking anymore. If he was determined to kill himself, she knew she couldn’t stop it, but she couldn’t watch and she couldn’t be with him every minute. She said if he’d agree to let me help him so he didn’t drive drunk or get out on a boat drunk or walk in the road where somebody might run over him, then she’d see that there was a case of bourbon in his sitting room from here on out.”

She was half-crying when she said it, McGuire told us. And Midge had taken her hands and there were tears in his own eyes when he told her how very sorry he was that he was such a poor excuse for a husband. “She said she’d rather have him like he was than any other man in Beaufort and then they went off together to her rooms down at the other end of the house and I thought maybe they weren’t going to need me after all,” said McGuire. “But by that evening, Midge was blind out of his mind drunk and I swear I don’t think he’s been cold stone sober fifteen minutes since then.”

Hardly more than a boy, Simon McGuire seemed thoroughly shaken by Linville’s death, and as it all sank in, he was now ravaged by guilt. “If I wasn’t asleep,” he castigated himself, “I might have—”

“I doubt it,” Smith said kindly. “It’d be nice if you’d been a witness so you could describe who shot her, but hell, son, you might’ve been shot then, too. Who knows? Now when did you actually last see Miz Pope?”

“Between three-thirty and four,” he hazarded. “She came into Midge’s sitting room to say she’d asked some judge to come by for a drink about five—” He looked around as if expecting a black-robed figure to suddenly come strolling through the French doors.

“That was me,” I told him.

“You’re a judge?”

Under different circumstances, I might have been nettled by his excessive surprise. Now I let it pass with a nod.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “she said she was going to go check on the boat—she just bought a new little runabout—and then freshen up. When she was expecting company, I was supposed to keep Midge in his wing of the house. That was another part of their bargain, but today he was sort of ornery about it and wouldn’t settle down. I thought he’d finally passed out but for some reason he must’ve got out while I was asleep and then Miss—the Judge woke me up.”

His long square jaw tightened convulsively and Smith patted his shoulder.

As Smith turned in his chair, Lev sat back warily.

“And you, Mr. Schuster?”

Again, Lev explained about spending the afternoon cruising around back of Harkers Island looking at various pieces of property and then his decision to drop in on Linville.

“You happen to notice any other boats around as you turned into the channel?” asked Smith.

“I wasn’t paying too much attention,” Lev admitted. “According to the chart, when you swing around the point here, the channel goes from seventeen feet of water to seven quite rapidly and if you don’t keep your eyes on the channel markers, you can run aground because it’s only two or three feet deep on either side.”

Quig Smith nodded. “All the same, Mr. Schuster, weren’t there any other boats in the channel?”

Beneath the deep ledges of his brow, Lev’s eyes narrowed as he tried to remember. “As I started my turn, there was a speedboat going straight in to Taylors Creek, back toward Beaufort. I guess I noticed because it’s a no-wake zone and the guy hadn’t cut his speed yet. Once I got around on this side though, the channel ends just a few hundred feet on and there was nothing as big as me there.” Absently, he twisted a tuft of his short beard as he concentrated. “I think I might have passed some small open boats when I skirted the marshes, but I was concentrating so hard on the channel I couldn’t begin to say for sure.”

“So you moored out there in the channel about when, would you say?”

“About a quarter to five,” Lev answered promptly. “I remember thinking it wasn’t quite time to splice the mainbrace but that maybe Mrs. Pope would offer me a beer anyhow. I got the dinghy into the water and as I motored over, I saw something white and black lying on the pier, but it wasn’t till I got out of the dinghy that I realized it was her. I thought maybe she’d fallen or something and then I saw all the blood and couldn’t get a pulse. I ran up to the house, but the doors were locked and nobody came when I pounded on them, so I ran back down and took the dinghy back to my boat because I had a cellular—”

His voice faltered and we all became aware that Midge Pope had appeared in the doorway. His bloody shirt was half off, he now wore thonged sandals on his sockless feet, his hair was damp as if he’d held it under a stream of cold water and he looked ghastly. But though his hand held a half-empty bottle of Early Times and though his hand shook as he pointed it at Lev, his voice was strong when he roared, “You Jew bastard! You killed my wife!”

“Hey, now, Midge,” said Smith, grabbing Pope before he could swing that bottle at Lev.

“He did, Quig. I saw him. I was standing right at those windows and I saw him. Bastard sat right out there in his boat and took aim at Linvie with his rifle and dropped her like a beautiful loon. You know how beautiful they are, Quig?”

“I know, Midge. I know.”

“I told Linvie, I said, ‘Honey, you look cuter’n a loon today in your black-and-white checked feathers,’ and she laughed and time I got to her, she was gone, Quig. Gone.”

Rage dissipated into grief.

“What’d you do then, Midge?” Smith asked gently.

“Tried to call you, but the damn phone wouldn’t work,” he sobbed. “And he followed me up to the house, but I saw him coming,” he said with drunken craftiness, “and I locked the doors so he couldn’t get in, but the phone...“

He pulled away from Smith and shambled toward the dock.

“Aw now, Midge, you don’t want to go out there,” said Smith. “How ‘bout you let ol’ Simon here take you inside and get slicked up first? Linville wouldn’t want people to see you looking like this, now would she?”

McGuire sprang up and Midge Pope allowed himself to be led away.

Silence enveloped the terrace.

“Now just a damn minute here,” said Lev. “You’re not going to believe an anti-Semitic alkie that hasn’t drawn a sober breath in two weeks, are you? Red?”

Smith raised his eyebrows at that. Until then, he hadn’t realized that we knew each other, but he didn’t let that deter him. “No, sir, I’m not saying I do; but just because Midge is drunk don’t mean he can’t see. You admit that you followed him here to the house.”

“No, I do not admit that. When I pulled in at the dock, I did not see anybody except Mrs. Pope lying there alone. I’m not saying he didn’t go out and touch her, not with all that blood on his clothes, but he sure as hell wasn’t there when I got here. How do you know he wasn’t the one who shot her and then went out to check that she was dead?”

“Yes, that’s a possibility,” Smith admitted, “and that’s why I’m going to ask Judge Knott here if she’ll sign a probable cause warrant for me to search this house for a recently fired gun, even though it could be lying off the end of the dock out there in the mud somewhere for all I know.”

I nodded mutely and he summoned one of the uniformed deputies to go out to the car and get him a couple of search warrant forms.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Mr. Schuster, but I’m gonna ask to search your boat, too.”

“You don’t need a warrant, Detective Smith,” Lev said hotly. “I’ll waive my Fourth Amendment rights and you can go take a look right now.”

“Lev,” I said warningly.

“I’ve got nothing to hide, Red.”

“Well, now, if it’s all the same to you and the Judge, I’d just as soon do it by the book,” said Smith.

“I quite agree,” I said crisply.

In the ensuing awkward silence, Lev suddenly seemed to notice the scratches beneath my makeup. “You hurt yourself.”

“It’s nothing. I wasn’t watching where I was going,” I said, but my injuries reminded me that I’d wanted to tell Quig Smith about Andy Bynum’s papers. This wasn’t the time or place though.

The officer returned with the forms and Smith filled them out in scrupulous detail, affirming that the only object he would search for would be a recently fired shoulder weapon. “‘Cause Midge does know guns,” he told me, “but at that distance, it could’ve been a single-barreled shotgun or a rifle.”

He passed the forms over to me and I signed and dated them both.

“You mind if one of my men uses your dinghy, Mr. Schuster?” Smith asked.

“You sure you don’t want her to sign a form for that, too?”

“Well, now—”

“Oh, go ahead!” he said tightly.

Smith instructed his officers, then told me I could leave if I wanted.

“I’ll wait,” I said.

“Not on my account, I hope.” Lev’s voice was bitter.

“If you like, I can call Catherine Llewellyn to come,” I offered.

“You honestly think I’m going to need professional counsel?”

“No, but you were the one who used to say anybody that represented himself had a fool for a client.” I tried to make my tone light and I got a ghost of a smile beneath his beard.

“I didn’t shoot her, Red.”

“I know you didn’t.”

For the first time since Midge Pope had leveled that accusation, Lev seemed to relax. “For a minute there—”

The rest of his words were drowned out as a helicopter suddenly appeared from nowhere and hovered over the pier where Linville’s body was being loaded onto a gurney. It bore the logo of a Raleigh television station and must have been filming another story in the area to have arrived so quickly. Smith’s men tried to wave it off, but it settled gently in a cleared space on the far side of the house and a cameraman quickly swept the whole area with his camcorder.

Soon as I realized what he was doing, I turned my face. All I’d need at this point was for my family back in Colleton County to see that I was involved in two separate murders down here in Carteret and I’d have to take my phone off the hook if I wanted to sleep tonight.

“We’re going indoors,” I called to Smith, but two seconds after we stepped inside I realized we’d avoided Scylla only to run afoul of Charybdis.

Local news reporters had arrived, along with cameramen from Greenville and New Bern. (We later learned a general had called a news conference to discuss whether or not Cherry Point would be affected by this newest wave of congressional base closings.) They swarmed through the open door as Linville’s body was taken out to the ambulance, and strobe lights and microphones seemed to be everywhere. Fortunately, no one seemed to recognize me or to connect me with Andy Bynum’s death. They were too interested in trying to get to Midge Pope or to get a statement from Quig Smith.

Simon McGuire had blocked access to Midge’s wing and Smith was promising he’d take questions just as soon as he knew a little more himself.

The violent death of a woman this prominent was let’s-go-live news in this area, of course, and if they hurried, they might even slide in a bulletin before the six o’clock report ended, so the first wave of questions was quick and dirty; and by the time they were ready for greater in-depth “details-at-eleven” interviews, Quig Smith had sent someone to escort us behind the yellow tape barrier.

The dinghy returned to the dock and the officer who’d searched the Rainmaker reported that he’d found no guns. Another had found Linville’s gun case, but all the slots were filled and none of the weapons seemed to have been fired that day.

Smith announced we were both free to go and Lev said, “Come with me, Red? I can bring you back for your car after the feeding frenzy’s over.”

“Thanks, Lev, but I really think I’d rather run the gauntlet and go on back to Harkers Island.”

He studied my face a long moment, then his own face cleared. With an air of relief (and surprise at that relief?), Lev gently touched the scratch on my cheek. “Take care of yourself, Red.”

“You, too, kid.”

Then he was gone and I tackled Smith myself. “Are these two murders connected?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he told me candidly. “One thing though. No exit wound, so the bullet’s probably still inside her. We should know by tomorrow night if it’s the same gun or not.”

While he was talking to the reporters, I managed to slip away with only minimum attention.

Linville’s house was on the north side of the point, on North River; Chet and Barbara Jean were on the south side, on Taylors Creek; but their driveways were less than a quarter-mile apart, on opposite sides of Lennoxville Road.

Impulsively, I pulled into the Winberry drive, wound through the tall shrubs and live oaks that shielded them from public view and circled up to the front door.

“Deborah! What a nice surprise,” said Barbara Jean when she answered the bell. There were tired circles under her eyes, but her smile was warm. “Chet said you were going home today.”

“I was, but then Roger Longmire told ‘em I could stay another week.”

“Great. I just made a fresh pitcher of tea. Come on out to the porch and join me.”

We went through the house to a sunny south-facing terrace that wasn’t much smaller than Linville Pope’s. Half of Barbara Jean’s was covered, though; and where the porch roof ended, trellises of weathered cypress continued across the bricked terrace to provide filtered shade in the summertime.

“Oh, Lordy!” I breathed. The beauty was almost enough to ease the horror of finding Linville’s body.

Barbara Jean’s face lit up. “Don’t you love this time of year?” she said.

Her azaleas had taken salty blasts from last month’s bad storm and the leaves still showed large patches of brown although the white, pink and lavender blossoms gamely tried to cover; but her wisteria was drop-dead gorgeous. The thick ropy vines that covered the trellises were in full bloom and dripped with huge heavy clusters of purple blossoms that mingled with the cool salt air and late afternoon sunshine to fill the porch with a bewitching fragrance. Off to one side, an eclectic mixture of Adirondack and wicker chairs circled a wide low table and I sank down into one of them and breathed in deeply.

“How can you bear to go off to work every day and leave this?”

“Sometimes I don’t,” she confided. “I’ve been playing hooky all afternoon. Chet’s off fishing somewhere so I borrowed a friend’s runabout and got out on the water myself for an hour or two. I just needed some time alone for a change.”

“I’m sorry I disturbed you then.”

“No, no, I was ready for company.”

I was overflowing about Linville but waited till she had poured me a glass of tea and assured herself that I had everything in the way of lemon, sugar, napkins, or cookies that a guest could want before I told her.

“Shot? On her own pier?”

She listened in total silence until I finished, then slowly shook her head. “Oh, shit, Deborah!” The embarrassed expression on her face was that of someone caught in a lapse of good taste. “God forgive me, you know what my first thought was?”

“That now that boat storage facility next to Jill won’t be built?”

Barbara Jean gave a bleak smile. “I didn’t know I could be this unchristian, this callous.”

“It’s not being callous. You guys weren’t exactly best friends, she wanted Neville Fishery and she was threatening the peace and quiet of your daughter’s home. It’s only human to be relieved that those things will go on hold now.”

She sighed and started asking for more details: when exactly did Quig Smith think she’d been killed? Had there been any witness?

“Midge? Midge was there?”

“Evidently he’s been back a couple of weeks, holed up in his rooms, drinking steadily. He says he was standing in the sunroom and saw it happen. That someone out in a boat aimed a shoulder gun at Linville while she was down on the dock, but he was so drunk at the time, Smith’s not sure he’s a credible witness. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the rescue truck’s siren.”

“No, I was—no, I didn’t.”

She set down her glass of iced tea and headed for the wet bar just inside the door. “I need something stiffer. Fix one for you?”

“No, thank you,” I said, but I did stir an extra spoon of sugar into my tea.

When she returned, she carried an old-fashioned glass with two inches of something amber over a couple of ice cubes.

“Is that Chet coming in?” I asked, as a boat slowly peeled off from the channel.

We took our glasses and went down to meet him at the landing. As with most people who live on the water, he had cut his motor at the precise instant needed to lift it before the propeller blades scraped bottom, yet still had the momentum to carry him in to his dock.

Before he could even throw her a line, Barbara Jean began to tell him about Linville Pope’s murder and made me finish.

“What?” Chet stood in the boat to listen before handing out a bucket of fish and getting out himself with a couple of rods. He was still walking stiffly from his pulled muscle and he shook his head. “My God, Deb’rah. You really stepped in the middle of it this week, didn’t you, girl?”

Back at the house, he dumped the three fish he’d caught into a chest of ice—“Not much to show for a whole afternoon”—rinsed off his hands and took the drink Barbara Jean had fixed him.

“Poor Linville,” he said. “And poor Midge. Half his problem is that he could never give her what she wanted.”

“She wanted to be Queen of Beaufort,” Barbara Jean said sharply. “Let’s not forget that.”

“De mortuis, honey.”

“I’m not speaking ill of the dead,” she argued. “Only the truth. She wanted to close Neville Fishery. She never knew what it was like before. No sense of history, no—”

She turned to me abruptly. “Did you ever hear them singing on the water, Deborah?”

“The chanteymen? No. I have one of the tapes though, and I can imagine how it must have sounded.”

“You can’t!” she said passionately, and I don’t think it was the bourbon speaking. “When I was a little girl, we still had one boat that didn’t have a power block, and my daddy used to let me go out with them once in a while. They’d let down the two little purse boats to circle a school of menhaden and the men had to pull the heavy nets by hand. That’s why they sang those long slow chanties, to synchronize the hardening of the fish against the main boat. And the sound of those black voices floating across the water from one boat to the other—the leader would sing out the first words and the men would heave away as they echoed the strong slow beats—I’ll never hear anything as beautiful again in my life.”

Tears spilled from her eyes.

“Ah, honey,” said Chet, taking her in his arms and patting her tenderly on the back.

“And that’s what Linville Pope wanted to destroy.”

“I thought the chanteymen were replaced by hydraulic net-pullers twenty years ago,” I said, remembering how Linville had taunted her on that point. “She didn’t have anything to do with that, did she?”

“But some of their sons still work for me. They link back into that heritage and continue the work their fathers did and she would have destroyed that link. And taken something precious from me as well.”

She laid her head on Chet’s shoulder. “I didn’t wish Linville Pope dead, Deborah, but I can’t say I’m sorry that I don’t have to keep fighting her off.”

I had to admit that given Linville’s persistent techniques, there might well be a lot of similar feelings all around this part of Carteret County when the news got out.

Chet and Barbara Jean invited me to stay for supper, but it was getting too heavy for me.

“Sorry,” I told them, “but I’ve got a bunch of reading to do and I’d better get to it.”

“Andy’s papers?” asked Barbara Jean.

“Papers?” said Chet.

“I told you about them this morning,” she said. “That research Andy was doing on Pope Properties.”

“Oh yeah. Find anything yet, Deborah?”

“Haven’t had a chance. And I probably won’t recognize it if it’s there.”

“Maybe you should let me take a look. I know most of the players. By name, anyhow, if not by person.”

“If I don’t spot anything tonight, maybe I will,” I said.

“Why waste your time?” asked Barbara Jean. “Linville’s dead now, remember? Nobody needs that ammunition anymore.”

• • •

It was heading for twilight when I stopped at a store on the outskirts of town and picked up several sets of cheap underwear and two packages of panty-hose. If I was going to stay over another week, I’d have to find a laundromat, but not tomorrow, thank you. I planned to sleep in and then spend the day skimming through Andy Bynum’s papers.

• • •

The smell of steamed shrimp hit my nose the instant I walked into the cottage. Indeed, I walked in through a door that was not only unlocked, but which could no longer be secured at all except by a padlock that I hadn’t bothered with since I got to the island. Someone seemed to have put a foot against the door and shoved hard enough to tear the dead bolt right off the old brittle door casing.

“Good,” said Kidd Chapin from somewhere in the dim interior. “You’re back. I was beginning to think I’d have to spend the whole evening in darkness.”

“So now the Wildlife Commission’s into breaking and entering?”

“Believe it or not, it was like that when I got here about forty-five minutes ago. Everything was tossed, but you’ll have to check it out to see what’s missing. The TV’s still here and the lock’s intact on the pump house. This got anything to do with those files in your newspapers?”

“How the heck did you find them?” I asked, yanking down the shades so I could turn on the lights and see his expression when I threw him out.

He did have an embarrassed look on his thin homely face. “Well, when I came past and saw the lock was smashed, there was a bucket with some shrimp in it right by the door and you know you can’t leave shrimp out too long. I couldn’t head and shell them outside, so I grabbed up some of those newspapers and spread ‘em over the table and out dropped a bunch of Xeroxes. You ever read The Purloined Letter?”

I had to laugh. “What did you do with the shrimp after you cleaned them?”

“I saved you some,” he said virtuously. Then, in an abrupt change, he said, “I was in Quig’s office when you called about the Pope woman. You okay?”

I nodded.

“Hey,” he said gently. “Your face seems to be healing nicely.” Then he took a closer look. “Better take the makeup off though and let it breathe.”

Shaking my head, I went and changed into jeans, washed my face, put peroxide on my scratches, then called Telford Hudpeth and thanked him for the shrimp. “You didn’t happen to notice anything about the front door here, did you?” I asked.

“No, ma’am. Why? Something wrong with it?”

“Someone broke in while I was gone. They didn’t take anything, but I was just wondering if you saw them.”

“Sure didn’t, but all I did was set the bucket down and leave. If you don’t have a way to lock your door, I can bring some tools and maybe scare up a new lock and—”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Thanks anyhow, but there’s a padlock and a hasp I can still use.”

“You’re sure now?”

“I’m positive,” I said firmly.

Kidd had blatantly eavesdropped on the whole conversation and he was smiling broadly. “More cavalry to the rescue, Ms. Judge?”

“Don’t you have a home?” I asked.

He handed me a stainless steel bowl with all the shrimp offal. “You’d better get rid of this before it starts to smell.”

I took the bowl without arguing, but only because I had ulterior motives. “Don’t wait up,” I said and stepped out on the porch in time to see Mickey Mantle go sailing by in his pickup, headed for the road.

Luckily, all I have to do is judge ‘em; I don’t have to catch ‘em.

• • •

Mahlon and Guthrie were out working on the trawler as I dumped the shrimp heads and shells for the minnows and crabs to feed on. Back into the water from whence they came, I told myself. Ashes to ashes, sea to the sea.

Guthrie called a greeting and I didn’t need a second invitation to walk over and see what they were up to.

They had almost finished getting all the juniper strips on the hull and the bow was an elegant flare that would soon be sanded smooth to receive its first coat of paint. The cabin was nearly ready for fitting out, but tonight their attention seemed centered on a large greasy piece of machinery that sat beside the boat on concrete blocks.

“Hey, you got your engine!” I said. “Andy’s boys?”

“Yeah,” Mahlon grunted as he secured a heavy chain around the thing.

“Drew and Maxton brought it just a little while ago,” said Guthrie, with a face-splitting grin. “They were there when Andy first promised Grandpap, and they said they wouldn’t go back on his word.”

A trestle had been rigged over the open hole in the deck and now they were waiting for Mickey Mantle, who’d gone off somewhere to borrow a block and tackle so they could hoist the engine into place tonight.

In all the years that I’d been coming down, I’d never seen Mahlon work this steadily in one sustained effort. It was almost as if he believed that getting this boat completed and into the water would somehow put things back the way they were before so many rules and regulations began to endanger the different freedoms that gave meaning and substance to his life.

I could have told Kidd that the reason he hadn’t caught Mahlon shooting at loons was because he was too busy shooting for something more important: his last chance at shaping a destiny for himself and Mickey Mantle and Guthrie, a chance for the two adults to get out from under, a chance for one more generation to live independent and unfettered.

The only fly in Guthrie’s ointment that evening was worrying about how they were going to shift the boat off Linville Pope’s property before she served them with papers for trespassing.

“We’ll do it ‘fore that time comes,” Mahlon said gruffly as he picked up his hammer and fitted another strip of cypress to the hull.

“Didn’t you hear?” I said. “She was killed this afternoon.”

Even Mahlon quit work for that. They listened intently as I described what had happened; and as with Barbara Jean, Guthrie’s first reaction was purely personal. “That mean them garbage men won’t be back tomorrow?” he asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“Good! Right, Grandpap? Now we don’t have to shift her till she’s done, do we?”

“Hand me them nails,” Mahlon grunted. “You keep talking and not working and we’ll never get her finished.”

“Yonder comes Daddy,” Guthrie said.

The truck headlights jounced down the rutted drive and Mickey Mantle made a skidding three-point turn so that the back of his truck was in position.

“Hey-o there, Judge!”

“I thought you had your license pulled,” I said.

He grinned. “Judges don’t write tickets, do they?”

“Daddy!” Guthrie interrupted. “Did you hear?” His changing voice squeaked in his excitement. He clambered up into the truck bed and handed out the block and tackle, chattering the whole time to his father about Linville’s murder.

“Yeah, I just heard it. Sammy said it was on the news.”

“Y’all here to talk or get this motor in?” said Mahlon.

When they had the block and tackle attached to the trestle and a heavy cable fixed to the chain around the engine, they hooked the other end to the pickup. I volunteered to crank up the truck and pull the cable slow and steady for them while the three of them guided the heavy engine up over the side of the boat. Then I backed up so they could lower it into the hold.

“Damned if I don’t feel like busting a bottle of beer over that engine right now!” Mickey Mantle said when the chains and cable were removed and the engine sat squarely where it was supposed to.

“Time enough for beers when we bring in our first catch,” Mahlon said sharply. “Hand me my saw and let’s get these last strips on ‘fore midnight.”

“Before I go,” I said, “I need to ask you. Any of y’all see somebody break in over there this afternoon?”

That got their attention.

“Naw,” said Mickey Mantle.

“I was fishing,” said Mahlon.

“What’d they take?” asked Guthrie.

“Nothing, so far’s I can tell,” I admitted. “But they messed up Carl’s lock and strewed my things around.”

“I worn’t here,” Mahlon said again and revved up his Skilsaw with a conversation-stopping roar.

I waved goodnight and started back to the cottage, but as I circled the boat shed, I heard my name called in a voice so low that the noisy saw almost drowned it out.

It was Mahlon’s wife. White-haired and half-crippled with arthritis, the reclusive Effrida beckoned to me from a darkened side window.

“I heared what you asked them,” she said in an urgent rush of island speech. “I seen him, the man what broke into Carl’s this evening. It was a few minutes after five.”

“Did you know him?”

“I seen him before. Lives over to Beaufort, I think, but I couldn’t call his name.”

She then proceeded to describe Chet Winberry right down to the white fishing cap and navy-blue windbreaker he’d been wearing when Barbara Jean and I met him at their landing.

No wonder he’d caught only three fish all afternoon.