Shooting at Loons

3

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 Bo-fort, with a long o, thank you very much; not Bu-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.

“About everything. How ‘bout you recess at twelve sharp and let me and Barbara Jean take you out for some of the best she-crab soup you ever dipped a spoon in?”

“Can we cram that much lunch into an hour?”

“Oh, I always give my juries ninety minutes,” he said magnanimously.

“Sounds about right to me,” I told him.

We walked down a maze of short hallways and I entered the front of my courtroom from a door beside the bench.

“All rise,” said the bailiff.

• • •

Most vehicular violations follow a predictable pattern across the state and Beaufort district court began no differently. There were the usual charges of speeding, driving under the influence, driving with suspended licenses, failure to wear a seat belt or to provide proper child restraints. (That last is something I take pretty seriously. It’s one thing to risk your own life, but you don’t want me on the bench if you’re caught risking the life of a child.) One after another came calendared cases that could be duplicated from the mountains to the sandhills.

About mid-morning though, I hit something that could only occur at the coast: Felton Keith Bodie and James Gordon Bodie. Brothers. Twenty-two and nineteen, respectively. Charged with driving while intoxicated, impeding traffic, and unlawfully discharging a firearm to the public endangerment.

In simple English, according to the trooper who testified against them, he’d come across a small traffic jam off Highway 70, heading for Gloucester, shortly before midnight last Tuesday night. I’m familiar with that road and I know that stretches of it can get pretty dark and deserted. Too, there are deep drainage ditches on either side, so if anything blocks the road, it’s hard to get by.

“Please describe to the court what you found,” said the assistant district attorney.

“Well,” said the trooper, referring to his notebook in a distinctive Down East accent, “these two were operating a 1986 F-150 Ford XL pickup. At the time I arrived on the scene, the pickup was skewed across the road and blocking traffic from both directions. Mr. Felton Bodie was trying to aim a spotlight mounted on the side of the truck and Mr. James Bodie was shooting at something on the edge of the road.”

“And did you ascertain what their target might be?” asked the ADA.

“Well, I didn’t have time to see anything at first, because as I was heading over to the driver’s side of the truck, Mr. Felton Bodie yelled, ‘You got him!’ and then he jumped out of the truck and ran over to where Mr. James Bodie was wrestling something out of the ditch. They’d just got it th’owed in the back of the truck when I stepped around to the side where they were and asked them what was going on.”

At that point, the trooper glanced at me and slipped into automatic pilot. “There was a strong odor of alcohol on and about the breath and persons of both suspects. Both were glassy-eyed, talkative, incoherent of speech, and unsteady of motion.”

I nodded encouragingly and the ADA said, “Then what?”

“Then I relieved Mr. James Bodie of his rifle and took them both into custody.”

“Did either defendant make a statement?”

“Mr. Felton Bodie said they were driving home to Gloucester when they saw an alligator on the side of the road and decided to shoot it. Mr. James Bodie said they were going to skin it out and sell the skin.”

The two Bodie brothers sat at the defense table with egg-sucking looks of embarrassment on their faces.

Puzzled, I asked, “Aren’t alligators a protected species?”

“Yes, ma’am, they sure are, Judge,” said the ADA, waiting for me to step all the way in it.

I ran my finger down the calendar. “Are they being separately charged for that offense?”

“No, Your Honor,” the trooper grinned. “‘Cause it worn’t a alligator they shot and put in the back of their truck. It was a four-foot retread off’n one of them big tractor-trailer tires.”

I was laughing so hard I had to pick myself up off the floor before I could gavel everybody else in the courtroom back to order.

“Put up a big fight, did it?” I asked when the two Bodies rose to speak in their own defense.

In the end, I judged them guilty of a level five offense and gave them sixty days suspended, a hundred-dollar fine plus court costs, and twenty-four hours of community service as punishment for trying to shoot a protected species to the public endangerment. “And you’d just better be grateful there’s no law against killing retreads,” I told them.

Another dozen cases of speeding, failure to stop at stop signs or flashing red lights, unsafe movements, inspection violations, and driving without valid licenses carried us to twelve noon and lunch recess.

• • •

By 12:08 Chet and Barbara Jean Winberry and I were seated at a window table in the Ritchie House, a lovely old nineteenth-century building that had been refurbished and modernized so sensitively that it retained all its original charm and seaside grace. Despite the pricey rates, the guest suites on the second and third floor stayed booked year-round, and reservations were recommended for lunch and dinner both. Our table overlooked the marina, where several million dollars’ worth of boats were moored. April sunlight sparkled off the water and glistened on gleaming white hulls and polished teak decks.

A waitress had brought our iced tea and a basket of hot and crisp hushpuppies as soon as we sat down, and Barbara Jean had already heard my account of finding her old colleague/ally/thorn in her side—I couldn’t quite get an exact fix on their relationship, but maybe that was because she didn’t seem to have one herself.

I’ve known and liked the Winberrys six or eight years even though they’re both more than ten years older than me. Barbara Jean had inherited her family’s menhaden fish-meal factory from her father; but she spent a lot of time running back and forth between Beaufort and Raleigh when Chet was appointed to a state commission during Governor Hardison’s first term of office. The happiest day of their lives was when the governor appointed Chet a superior court judge down here in the First Division so they could both get out of Raleigh and come back to Beaufort to live full time.

There was a married daughter living on the western edge of Harkers Island and a baby grandson named for Barbara Jean’s grandfather, the one who’d started the factory. Between all my older brothers and most of my friends, I’ve looked at an awful lot of baby pictures over the years. This one was still in the tadpole stage, but when Barbara Jean and Chet both brought out their wallets, I made appropriate cooing noises.

The restaurant was light and airy, pale pink cloths and nosegays of sea oats graced the tables, white paddle ceiling fans circulated the air overhead. The few suits and ties in the room were worn by lawyer types. Everyone else seemed to have on canvas deckshoes, white duck or khaki pants, and pullovers or silky windbreakers that featured broad bands of turquoise or coral. Surely they couldn’t all be sailing yachts back to Newport or Martha’s Vineyard?

Several tables over were a handsome fortyish couple that could’ve stepped out of a Docksider ad. Between them, with her back to me, sat what looked like their daughter. Next to the woman, a little boy of two or three sat in a booster chair. All four had thick, straight blond hair. The man’s was clipped short, as was the boy’s; the woman’s blunt cut brushed the shoulder pads of her white sweater, while the girl’s long ponytail ended halfway down her back. Amusingly, the girl had brought along a hand puppet that was her twin in miniature: same long blonde ponytail, same coral-and-white nylon jumpsuit.

“Isn’t she just precious?” agreed Barbara Jean, who’d followed my gaze. She bit into a crispy hushpuppy and said, “What’d you think of Jay Hadley?”

I cocked a cynical eye at Chet. “So now I’ll ask her how she knows Jay Hadley and she’ll tell me everybody down here knows Jay Hadley, right?”

“Well, most everybody who fishes for their livelihood.” He gathered up the menus the waitress had handed us and said to her, “We’re in sort of a hurry, darlin’, so why don’t you bring us each a nice bowl of your she-crab soup, then a big plate of fried oysters and side dishes of slaw all around. That okay with you, Deborah? Honey?”

Barbara Jean and I agreed it sounded delicious to us.

Her roots go way back to Beaufort’s beginnings, while Chet’s people were carpetbaggers who came south after the Civil War. Even though Chet teases her that she married down, both are still more boardroom and resort town than leased bottoms and clam rakes, and it surprised me that she’d know Jay Hadley.

“Jay’s real active in the Independent Fishers Alliance that Andy Bynum helped start. I’m a member, too.”

“See, what’s been happening down here,” said Chet, “is that tempers have been getting more and more frayed these last few years.”

“And with good cause,” Barbara Jean chimed in.

“Everybody wants a slice of the resources and everybody thinks his wants are more justified than anyone else’s.”

“Well, some are!” Barbara Jean said hotly.

Chet grinned at me. “See? And she’s one of the reasonable ones. Eat your soup, honey,” he said as the waitress distributed wonderfully fragrant bowls of hot ambrosia.

She-crab soup is something like New England clam chowder, only made with the yellow roe and luscious back fins of female crabs.

Barbara Jean obediently savored a spoonful before diving back into a recitation of the area’s conflicts.

“See, Deborah, for years the water here belonged to the people who worked it. We took out what we wanted, when we wanted, and as much as we wanted because fish and shellfish were plentiful and there weren’t many rules or limits. Fishing was the backbone of Carteret County’s economy. In fact, Beaufort was even called Fishtowne at one point. Then they started in with all the rules and regulations—”

“Because the water’s overfished and varieties are declining,” said Chet.

“For which we get all the blame. Never mind all the sportsmen coming down taking whatever they want, or developers destroying natural habitats, or the pier owners and the jet ski rentals and the tackle shop owners who don’t want any nets or big boats in the sound because they say we’re driving away the tourists. They particularly don’t want any trawlers. You won’t believe the propaganda they put out about us!”

I’d never seen her this vehement back in Raleigh.

“They’re going to kill our menhaden industry. Thank God Chet’s got a head for investments or we’d be out in the street. And what’s going to happen to the men we employ? Twenty-three black families and—”

“And she’s one of the reasonable ones?” I asked Chet.

“Maybe not as reasonable as Andy Bynum,” he conceded as he reached for another hushpuppy.

“The government calls it protection and management of the resources,” said Barbara Jean, “when it’s nothing in the world but meddling and restrictive and economic murder.”

“All the same,” said Chet, “when the state started Marine Fisheries—”

“Marine Fisheries Commission,” I murmured knowingly.

“—Andy made sure he was one of the commercial fishermen who got a seat on it. He was realistic enough to know that times really were a-changing. ‘Regulations are coming,’ he’d say, ‘whether you want ‘em or not.’ And he figured he’d rather be on the inside helping to shape those regulations than on the outside watching commercial interests get swamped. Some of the watermen thought he was a traitor to their cause.”

Barbara Jean nodded. “I was one of them at first. But some of what he had to say made sense. So many other interests are pulling at Core Sound now—developers, pier owners, the motels that cater to sportsmen, all those upstate surf fishers who say that trawling and netting interfere with their fun and then those Dare County millionaires with their pet legislators’ve got into it...” She shook her head in exasperation. “But Andy can—could—see all sides and most people on all sides would at least listen to him. I don’t know who’s going to take his place.”

“Jay Hadley?” I asked.

Barbara Jean snorted. “A woman? Honey, you’re talking the last bastion of male supremacy here. My daddy’s been dead twelve years but they still call my company Wash Neville’s plant.”

I savored a final spoonful of soup. “The Hadley woman seemed pretty much in control when she came roaring out there yesterday with a .22 to see who was messing ‘round their leased bottom. And what about that Alliance you mentioned?”

“Independent Fishers Alliance. That was Andy’s idea. Most watermen work alone or in one-or two-man operations unless it’s an established family business. I guess you’d call us a bit independent down here.”

“Independent?” Chet shook his head as he began to divvy up the huge plate of oysters the waitress had set down in front of him. “Prickly as sea urchins and suspicious as hermit crabs.”

“But Andy got us all together and gave us a coastal version of Abraham Lincoln,” said Barbara Jean. “A boat divided against itself could not sail: united we might float, divided we’d surely drown. Jay Hadley did a lot of the secretarial work when it was getting started a few years back; and I think she still goes in a few times a week to pick up the slack when Andy’s away. She’s bright, Jay is. If she could’ve gone to college, no telling where she’d be now. Her husband started out like a lot of the old-timer proggers—”

“Proggers?” I’d occasionally heard the word over the years but never given it much thought.

“That’s another of those Elizabethan remnants of speech,” said Chet. “Means folks who forage around the water’s edge, poking, or ‘progging’ at things.”

Barbara Jean nodded. “That was Jay’s husband all right—a traditional independent fisherman who thought he’d fish the cycle like his daddy and his granddaddy before him. It’s taken her five years to convince Heston Hadley that leased bottoms could work, but she finally talked him into selling his big boat two years ago and putting the money into seed clams and mesh bags. They’re going to make twice the money with half the effort if things keep going the way they have.”

The oysters had arrived in sizzling perfection—crisp on the outside, plump and meltingly tender on the inside—and the next few minutes were devoted to a proper appreciation of Core Sound’s continuing bounty.

“They’re growing oysters on leased bottoms, too,” Barbara Jean said between mouthfuls. “On ladders.”

She was prepared to go into more details, but I didn’t want to hear. “Will your Alliance continue without Bynum?”

She considered. “Who knows? Short-term? Maybe. Long-term? Till somebody’s oars don’t reach the water and Andy’s not here to lift the ocean for them. Till all commercial fishing gets pushed slam out of the sound and off the banks, or the trawlers hear that they have to keep using turtle excluders and shrimpers don’t. Jay can do the paperwork and maybe keep up with all the rules and regulations that keep rolling in till they can find some man to sit in Andy’s chair, but finding someone that everybody trusts—”

Barbara Jean’s words trailed off as her attention was diverted. I turned to see a stocky male stride through the crowded restaurant, jostling tables and diners and nearly causing a waitress to drop her tray. It was the same man who’d almost barreled me over at the Clerk of Court’s office and he seemed even angrier now than he had earlier as he made his way over to a table halfway across the room from us.

It was occupied by a lone woman, another blonde (ash, this time), very petite, with oversized pale blue glasses that covered much of her face. Her hair fell in a loose pageboy along her chin line as she tilted her head toward the man, but her slender hand held its place in the papers she had been reading when he interrupted. No smile on her thin lips; no encouraging or conciliatory body language either. She sat absolutely motionless until he began to run out of steam, then turned back to her papers, clearly dismissing him.

He glared at her, thick hands on his hips, and anger deepened his voice. Everyone quit eating and flat-out stared.

“By God, I’ll sue you for criminal fraud!” he shouted. “You knew I was going to turn it into a party boat.”

She turned those pale blue glasses on him again. “You bought the Lucky Linville as is,” she said calmly. “What you planned to do with her was not my concern.”

She never raised her voice and if the room hadn’t gone so silent, I wouldn’t have been able to hear her. The manager and two hefty busboys surrounded the stocky man who by now was nearly apoplectic with rage.

As they hustled him out, the rest of us pretended we hadn’t been staring. The woman returned to her reading completely unruffled. After an eternity, the usual flow of conversation ebbed back into the room with the tinkle of ice in tall glasses and the clink of utensils against china.

“She sold Zeke Myers the Lucky Linville?” Barbara Jean asked Chet just as I asked, “What was all that about?”

Chet shrugged, but suddenly I was remembering last night’s phone call. “Is that Linville Pope by any chance?”

“You know her?”

“Not really. She invited me for cocktails tomorrow night. Said she was a friend of Judge Mercer’s.”

“I do hope you thought to pack a bulletproof vest,” Barbara Jean said sweetly.