Shooting at Loons

2

Throw out the lifeline with hand quick and strong:

Why do you tarry, why linger so long?

See! he is sinking; O hasten today—

And out with the Lifeboat! away, then, away!

—Edward S. Ufford

For several minutes after Guthrie roared back toward Harkers Island, I continued to stand indecisively on the edge of the sandbar until my feet were nearly numb from the chilly water washing over them.

I’d heard so many horror stories about goof-ups messing over a crime scene that I really hated to touch Andy Bynum’s skiff. Reason said he’d probably been shot from another boat while he was standing on the sandbar digging for clams. Reason said that even if the killer had waded right up to the body, the incoming tide now covered every footprint. But reason could say till my feet fell off and I’d still feel skittish about getting into that skiff.

A creosoted piling stuck up like a sawed-off telephone pole near the corner of Heston Hadley’s boundary. Barnacles and mussels had cemented themselves all the way up to high-water mark. Once upon a time the piling’d probably had a flat top; now it had been gouged by storms and surging tides. Nevertheless, I scrambled up to sit with my legs dangling. My bottom protested as I eased myself down. It felt like sitting on a handful of uneven pencil nubs. The water was only a few inches below my wet sneakers and beginning to wash higher with each passing moment.

A variety of sea birds swooped past—every time I come down to the coast, I swear that I’m going to bring along a book next time and learn the names of the different gulls and terns. Channel traffic had dwindled off, and although it dried my shorts and still warmed my legs and thighs, the sun was starting its long slide down the sky.

A perfect lazy April Sunday on the water.

Except for Andy Bynum’s body.

The wavelets that lapped my piling, that were lifting the beached skiff from the sandbar, that emptied the bucket’s clams and oysters and banged it against the skiff with steady rhythm—those same wavelets were breaking against Andy’s body and I couldn’t not look.

When we’d first turned him over on his back, his face was out of the water. Now his white hair fanned out around his head like mermaid’s hair algae and only his mouth and chin were still clear. If help didn’t come soon, he’d be totally awash and the prospect horrified me. I’ve always had a fear of drowning. In my worst nightmares, I’m sinking down, down through fathoms of dark water, my lungs bursting with the need for air; and even though I knew Andy Bynum would never breathe again, it was all I could do not to go kneel beside him and lift his white head clear.

Except for those open blue eyes, his face was peaceful and serene, a face as weathered as this piling I was perched on. I hoped death had been instantaneous for him. That he’d been dead before he inhaled a single drop.

A good man. Someone liked and respected by his neighbors.

“So far as you know,” reminded the cautious preacher who lurked at the edges of my mind. “There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good and sinneth not.”

“True,” nodded the pragmatist that kept him company.

Okay. So what did I actually know of Andy Bynum?

Not much, now that I considered.

Probably in his early sixties. His wife had died eight or ten years ago and he’d lived alone since then in a sturdy, unpretentious brick house across the road from Carl and Sue’s cottage. Two sons who were both older than me. I’d never heard of any friction between father and sons; and the last time Carl had mentioned Andy to me, he said Andy’d turned his two big boats over to the sons and was cutting back on his hours at the fish house his own father had started back in the thirties.

What else?

Well, he’d liked an occasional beer. Had never said no when Carl offered him one. “Just don’t disfurnish yourself,” he’d say, making sure Carl wasn’t handing over the last one in his cooler.

And he liked to make people laugh with tales of his younger, roguish days. Even though it’d been years since he’d aimed a gun at a loon or turtle, Andy had once hunted both endangered species with enthusiasm.

“But I shot my last loon twenty years ago,” he told us. “There’d been a piece in the paper about how they was dying out and I’d been feeling right bad about it even though we all knew them Canadians was the ones really hurting the loon population. They used the eggs for glue or something. Didn’t even give the babies time to hatch out. Anyhow, it was March and me and some fellows was over on Shackleford freezing our own tailfeathers off and I had this fancy new Winchester I give a man in Portsmouth three hundred dollars for. Raiford and me, we was ‘way down the dune ready to fire when we heard two gunshots, then nothing. It’d commenced to rain a little and Raiford walked up on the sandbank and looked over to see what was happening, and there was the game warden writing everybody out a ticket. Raiford sort of slithered back down the sandbank and commenced scooping us out a hole and we buried both guns ‘fore you could say ‘magistrate’s court’ three times.

“Then we got back in my skiff and was sitting there all innocent like when the game warden come around that hummock of grass. ‘Y’all part of this loon hunt?’ he yells out to us. ‘Loon hunt?’ says Raiford. ‘Ain’t that against the law?’

“‘Bout then, that drizzle started getting serious and game wardens always did make Raiford nervous, so he started the motor and we come on back to the island and waited till it slacked off and the game warden was gone. And don’t you know we couldn’t remember exactly where we’d buried them two guns. Took us three days ‘fore we scratched ‘em out again.”

Like many a reformed rogue, Andy had become a staunch upholder of the law, even game laws. Nevertheless, the last time I was down, he ruefully admitted it was still hard for him to refuse an invitation to pull up a chair when the table held a dish of stewed loon.

As water ballooned his shirt, I saw a moon snail emerge from beneath the collar. It must have been trapped when we turned the body. As soon as it pulled itself free, it dropped down into the green undulating grasses that intertwined with his hair. Small dark shapes scuttled across Andy’s chest.

The crabs were back.

Without a watch, there was no way to know how long Guthrie had been gone. Ten minutes? Twenty?

As my eyes strained for shore, they were suddenly caught by a speedboat that was heading straight out toward me from a point further down the island. One person, a slender figure in a blue shirt, stood at the wheel and held a fast course that implied intimate familiarity with this particular stretch of the sound. Guthrie had already cut his engine by the time he was this far beyond the channel, but this boater was either suicidal or else knew to the precise second how long to keep the propeller down.

The motor cut off just as I was expecting to see churned sand and fouled blades, and the continued impetus carried the boat across the shallows to end up less than thirty feet away.

It was a woman about my age, mid-thirties, in white shorts, short blonde hair and those mirrored sunglasses that I hate because you never get a reading on the person’s eyes. I particularly hate them when the wearer’s carrying a .22 rifle like this unsmiling woman was. She held it loosely, with a casual ease that implied the same expertise as she’d already shown with her boat handling.

“Mind telling me what you’re doing out here?”

“Waiting for the police,” I answered, in case she decided to start pointing that thing. I gestured toward Andy Bynum’s body, but his skiff blocked her view and she didn’t immediately grasp the situation.

Although the volume was turned way down, I could hear the staticky chatter of a CB radio from the dashboard as she propped the rifle on the seat of her boat, swung over the edge into thigh-deep water that would have had me flinching and moaning, and pulled her boat over to tie up at a marker stake near me.

“What’s the law got to do with Andy’s—” That’s when she saw him.

“Good Lord Jesus! What happened?”

She waded nearer. Tiny minnows darted in and out of the dead man’s white hair and an ooze of red continued to flower from his chest.

“Looks like someone shot him,” I said.

“So that’s why Mahlon Davis took off so fast and left you out here by yourself.”

“That was Guthrie, not his grandfather.” I eased down from the piling and faced her. “Mind telling me how come you were watching us so closely?”

She gestured toward the line of stakes that enclosed most of the sandbank. “My husband Hes and me, this is our leased bottom.”

Before I could ask why that required an armed investigation, she splashed back to her boat, pulled herself in and reached for her CB mike. “Hadley to base. Over.”

Through the static, I heard a female voice. “What’s happening, Mom? Over.”

“Call Marvin Willitt. See if he’s heard he’s needed out here. Out.”

She replaced the mike and those mirrored glasses reflected my image. Well, two could play that game. My sunglasses were perched up in my hair and I pulled them down over my eyes like a mask as I asked, “Who’s Marvin Willitt?”

“Sheriff’s deputy for down east. Assigned to Harkers Island. You staying on the island?”

“Yes.”

“You knew Andy?”

“Yes, I knew him.” My feet were starting to go numb again. “Look, you mind if I sit in your boat?”

“Help yourself.”

Not the most gracious invitation I’d ever had.

She watched my ineffectual effort to hoist myself gracefully over the side, then grudgingly said, “Give me your hand.”

I was hauled up onto cracked vinyl seats of sun-faded blue with lumpy foam. After that rough-topped piling though, they felt like goosedown cushions.

“I’m Jay Hadley,” said the woman, suddenly pushing her glasses up into sun-streaked blonde hair. Sea-green eyes squinted in the sudden brightness and I saw that they were pooled with tears.

“Deborah Knott,” I said.

The radio crackled into speech.

“Willitt to Hadley. Jay? You out there, over?”

Her voice didn’t quaver.

“Yeah, Marvin. Over.”

“Guthrie Davis says there’s been a accident out by your bottom lease. He telling the truth, over?”

“Yeah, this time. Over.”

“Sit tight then. We’ll be right out. Out.”

A minute later, the same young woman’s voice spoke through the static. “Base to Hadley. Mom? Who’s hurt? Over.”

“Tell you later, Becca. Over and out.” She hung up the mike with finality.

“Your daughter?”

Again the brusque nod. “Where you staying on the island?”

“That yellow cottage across from Andy’s place, catty-corner from Mahlon Davis’s.”

She studied me openly. “I thought their names was Carlette and Celeste.”

“My cousins. You know them?”

“Not to know,” she said shortly.

I suddenly realized that this was about the longest one-on-one conversation I’d ever had with an island woman. The men might wander over when Carl was on the porch or out in the yard working on his lawn mower or fiddling with some maintenance chores, but seldom the women. If we happened to be hanging our bathing suits out on the line to dry or if we walked into the store when a wife or daughter we knew by sight was also there, they’d nod or speak, but never more than what was absolutely necessary for politeness. Sue had somehow endeared herself to Miss Nellie Em, Mahlon’s mother (and Guthrie’s great-grandmother), and the old woman will even come inside for a glass of tea; but she never visits unless Sue is there.

As for the other neighbor women, whether from pride or clannishness, they keep themselves to themselves so far as most upstaters are concerned; and Mahlon’s wife, Effrida {his only wife} is almost a pure-out recluse. The only time I ever see her outside is going to or from church or to hang out clothes.

“You knew Andy pretty well?” I asked.

“Whole island knows Andy. Whole sound, for that matter. Even up in Raleigh. He started the Alliance and he used to be on the Marine Fisheries Commission. He quit it though when it got took over too bad by pier owners and dingbatters.”

I was amused. “You mean sports fishermen from upstate?”

“Sportsmen.” She almost spat the word. “They’d run us right on off the water and out of the sound if they could.”

Andy Bynum’s face was totally awash now. Small fishes darted over his open eyes and explored his half-parted lips. Leave him here three days and there’d be nothing left but bones that would quickly pit and calcify and dissolve back into the ocean.

“Full fathom five thy father lies,” quoted Jay Hadley, unexpectedly paralleling my thoughts.

“Of his bones are coral made.

Those are pearls that were his eyes

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.”

Okay, I admit it: I stared at her in mouth-open astonishment.

She pulled those mirrored sunglasses back over her eyes. “We ain’t all totally ignorant down here.” Her voice was half-embarrassed, half-belligerent. “Or maybe you think William Shakespeare’s something else that belongs to just you rich upstaters?”

“Of course not,” I answered, stung by how close to the truth she was.

We rocked in the easy swells. A few miles over, the ferry was returning from Cape Lookout to Shell Point at the end of the island. She maneuvered our boat closer to Andy’s body and made angry shooing motions with her hands. The little fish scattered.

I tried to look dispassionately at his sodden shirt.

“Hard to tell if that blood’s caused by an entrance or exit wound,” I mused. “I hope the bullet’s still inside him, though, so they’ll be able to match the weapon.”

Now it was her turn to stare. “You something with the law?”

“A judge,” I admitted. “I’ll be holding district court in Beaufort tomorrow.”

Suddenly, Jay Hadley stood and, in one practiced motion, raised the .22 and cracked off a shot into the edge of her clam bed.

“Stingray,” she said blandly.

I twisted in the boat and peered between the piling and the stake over to the far edge of the leased area where the bullet had struck, but I saw nothing. “Where?”

“Guess I missed. Don’t see it now.”

She stowed the rifle on a pair of hooks under the dash and pointed to a sleek white cruiser heading toward us from the northwest, the direction of Beaufort and Morehead City.

“Yonder comes the rescue boat.”

• • •

Since becoming an attorney, I’ve observed the processing of more than one crime scene; and although this was the first time I’d watched police officers do one out on an ocean with the tide coming in, I felt I could mention a few things, even though Dwight Bryant, the sheriff’s deputy back in Dobbs, always acts like I’m meddling instead of helping when I suggest things to him.

“Before you move the body,” I said, “hadn’t you ought to take a picture of how he’s lying?”

The detective in rolled-up chinos and sports shirt ignored me as he felt for a pulse we all knew was lacking, but the uniformed Marvin Willitt said, “Guthrie told me y’all turned him over soon as you found him.”

“We did,” I agreed. “But we didn’t shift him around much, just rolled him straight over from his stomach to his back.”

“You didn’t try to resuscitate him?” asked the detective who’d waded over from the rescue boat. It was too big to come in all the way and was anchored out from the sandbar.

I shook my head. “His skin was cold and it felt like rigor was already beginning when we turned him,” I explained.

They gave me an odd look.

“She’s a judge,” said Jay Hadley.

That got me another odd look and I could sense an us versus her line being drawn in the water; but the detective splashed back to the boat and got a Polaroid camera. While another uniformed officer helped Willitt pull a tape measure from Bynum’s body to the fixed pilings, the detective measured the temperature of the water and then started sketching a rough diagram of the things he’d just photographed. He drew the position of the heavy rake, the empty bucket, the smooth clams and razor-rough oysters, the position of the anchor, and, of course, Andy’s body.

By this time, Jay Hadley’s boat had been shoved over beside the rescue boat, the two of us still in it, and a second detective, Quig Smith, hitched her line to one of his cleats so he could question us easily.

Guthrie had not returned, but he’d evidently given the broad outlines to Willitt when he phoned from the local quick stop. Mostly I just confirmed what Guthrie had already told them: no, I hadn’t noticed Bynum’s skiff till we were nearly on it; no, I hadn’t seen another boat leaving that area; no, I wouldn’t say that the body was rigid with rigor, merely beginning to stiffen.

Thank you, Judge, and now for Miz Hadley.

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.”