Shooting at Loons

6

Jesus calls us o’er the tumult

Of our life’s wild, restless seas...

In our joys and in our sorrows,

Days of toil and hours of ease.

—Mrs. Cecil F Alexander

“Red?” asked Barbara Jean. “But she’s a blonde.” She gave my hair a critical look. “Sort of. Sandy anyhow. So why Red?”

You’d have to be thicker than a creosoted piling not to sense the waves cresting around us, and Barbara Jean’s not thick.

Her question gave me time to find breath enough to steady my voice—I think it was steady—before I took his outstretched hand and said, “Hello, Lev.”

“It’s short for Redneck,” Lev told Barbara Jean. My hand was swallowed up in his. I’d forgotten how big his hands were. He was only one and three-fourths inches taller than me, yet each hand would make almost two of mine. Hands that had picked me up when I slipped on those icy steps, hands that later pulled me down upon him, hands that guided my—

“Enough of that now!” warned the preacher.

Abruptly, I pulled my hand free.

“Redneck?” Linville Pope was prepared to be amused. “I am sure there is a story here.”

“She was the only one in my ethics class,” he explained.

“Lev was a graduate assistant when I was in law school at Columbia,” I said. “And redneck wasn’t the only category I filled.” I was back in control now and glibly prepared to amuse. “I forget exactly what the point of it was—demographics maybe, or the insularity of urban ethnicity—anyhow, this was one of those huge lecture sessions when Lev was subbing for the professor. He asked everybody who was Jewish to raise a hand and about two-thirds of the class did. Then he asked all the Catholics and another third of the hands went up. Then he asked for all the Protestants and four hands went up: me, one black guy, and two Asians, which meant I was the only WASP as well.”

“So never having seen that many WASPs up close, I naturally made her stay after the class,” Lev said, bending the truth like one of his Aunt Ida’s homemade pretzels. “And here she is, a judge.”

“And here you are, a—what are you now, Lev?”

“A potential investor in a very nice project I am putting together,” Linville Pope said smoothly.

“If the details can be worked out,” he agreed, looking at me with half-tilted head.

“But not tonight,” said Linville Pope. “Not now that you have found an old...student?”

She must know him well, I thought, to pick up on that undercurrent in his voice. Either that or she had a natural talent for sensing when to plant the hook and when to give more line, because she backed off without a hint of the frustration she must be feeling if she’d hoped to talk money with him tonight.

Assuming it was money.

(Assuming it was talk?)

Instead, as Barbara Jean pressed Lev for more details of my student days in New York, Linville patted her arm gracefully. “If you two are going to monopolize my escort, I shall just go find Chet and make him an offer he cannot refuse.”

“That won’t be hard,” laughed a sturdy brunette who was evidently an old friend of the Winberrys and who had paused on the edge of our conversation. “Come on, honey, let’s you and me go jump him while Barbara Jean’s got her back turned.”

If Linville Pope was half as subtle and deliberate as she appeared to me, I couldn’t picture her jumping a man. Even in fun. Nevertheless, she went off with the brunette.

As they melted through the crowd, an ex-assemblyman from Goldsboro who’d once known my mother immediately claimed my attention, and I let myself be swept away by one of those little eddies of movement that swirl through all big parties.

Evidently I still wasn’t over my compulsion to put distance between myself and Lev Schuster.

The airy room through which we moved projected in a wing off the main house and had opposing windows and French doors on the two long sides. The furnishings were casually eclectic and reflected their proximity to the water. Seascapes framed in bleached driftwood hung upon the pearl-gray walls, the deep turquoise carpet had probably been woven to order in Burlington, the white wicker chairs and couches were capacious turn-of-the-century originals with modern cushions of blue and sea-green canvas. Shells filled the clear glass bases of the table lamps, and a collection of old iron tools hung above the gray stone fireplace. I recognized an adze and mallet that would have been used in boat building, a saw, C-clamps, brace-and-bit, even an old froe, plus several more I couldn’t identify.

At the opposite end, glass shelves held a stunning collection of handmade decoys, everything from a redheaded duck carved from wood to an old swan with a wooden head and painted canvas-and-wire body that should have been in a museum.

(“What does stewed swan taste like?” I’d once asked Andy Bynum.

“Well, I personally don’t like it as much as stewed loon,” he’d answered in all seriousness.)

The elderly assemblyman murmured pleasantly about knowing Mother and my Aunt Zell when they worked at Seymour Johnson Air Field near the end of World War II. He professed himself unable to get over “how very like little Susan Stephenson you are.”

Normally I’d have hung on every syllable. My mother died when I was eighteen and though she’d told me most of her secrets, I knew there were things about her Seymour Johnson days that she’d left unsaid. Yet I couldn’t concentrate on his words.

“May I come talk to you when we can speak more freely?” I asked above the dull roar of so many conversations going at once.

“Why certainly, my dear. Only don’t leave it too long. I’m eighty-three,” he warned.

We exchanged cards just as Micah Smith came up with my Bloody Mary, “Lost you there for a few minutes,” he said by way of apology for the delay.

“No problem.” I sipped my drink gratefully and made for the open French doors on the sea side of the room, only half-attuned to the waves of talk that washed over my ears as I passed.

“—’course my daddy always said a scalloper won’t nothing but a fisherman with his brains knocked out.”

“—so figuring seventy percent occupancy, that’s still more than sixty million dollars right here in Carteret County alone, and if you factor in the motels alone from here to Dare—”

“Yeah, well let the so-called ‘private sector’ stay private instead of grabbing their profits and passing the real costs downwind and downstream to the public taxpayers.”

“The people of this state have an obligation—a duty, dammit!—to bring a vision of what this area is to be.”

“—but I don’t see why the whole of Taylors Creek’s got to be a no-wake zone. Why shouldn’t water-skiers have the right to ski where they want? One of my customers—”

“Oh, they’ll say a menhaden’s the soybean of the ocean, but try asking for the same subsidies those crybaby farmers get and see if—”

“—one thing to stick up for your constituents but for Basnight to bring the legislature into it when—”

“Yeah, but if Marine Fisheries would just use the power they already have—”

I stepped back to let two chamber of commerce types pass (green blazers, plaid pants) and landed myself between a passionate young social scientist and the owner of a tackle shop.

“Commercial fishing’s had its day,” the tackle man was saying. “Carteret County gets a hundred times more money from tourism than—”

“Only because upstate pollution’s killing the estuaries and the recreation industry’s driving traditional watermen off the water,” the sociologist interrupted. “If you’re an uneducated black or white blue-collar worker, your only slice of the tourism pie’s going to be cleaning motel rooms or clerking at the local Seven-Eleven for minimum wages. We’ve got to have better-paying blue-collar jobs if we’re ever—”

She paused to snag a glass of white wine from a passing tray, and the tackle shop owner jumped back in. “Look, if they’re so almighty anxious to work, how come the crab houses have to hire Mexicans to pick the crabmeat?”

“Don’t you reckon that’s because Mexicans’ll work like slaves under slave-like conditions?” drawled a tall white-haired man who looked like he just stepped off a plantation veranda.

Goes to show you about stereotypes.

I edged past and out onto the terrace, which was less crowded. The air was cooler, but laced with cigarette smoke and something else.

“Uh-oh, the wind’s shifting,” someone said, as the homely smell of cooking fish drifted lightly across the grounds.

It wasn’t an unpleasant aroma, but I had to admit that it did take away something of the bucolic sophistication of Linville Pope’s cocktail party.

I hadn’t yet seen the Llewellyns, Mr. and Mrs. Docksider; but down by the water, Claire Montgomery sat on the grass like Alice in Wonderland, with her full-skirted blue dress spread out around her. From this distance, it appeared that her hand puppet was also dressed in blue and it seemed to be carrying on a lively conversation with some of the younger male guests.

Across the terrace, raucous laughter centered around the wildlife officer who’d testified in my court this afternoon. I recognized a couple of attorneys and one of the ADAs, but as I began to thread my way over, I was delayed by a man who gave a friendly smile of recognition. “Judge.”

“Good evening, Mr.—um—”

“Hudpeth,” he reminded me. “Willis Hudpeth. And this is my brother, Telford.”

The family likeness was unmistakable. Both men appeared to be late thirties or early forties. Dark brown hair and the tanned faces of outdoorsmen. Rather handsome faces now that I looked twice. (Never hurts to check.)

Telford Hudpeth’s handshake was nicely firm as his brother said, “Those bounced checks—the guy from Kinston that bought two rods and then came back the next day and gave me another rubber check for a sixty-dollar reel? Judge Knott here heard the case today and got me a little justice.”

Now I remembered. Hudpeth owned a fishing pier over on Atlantic Beach.

“I guess it’s hard to remember every case,” said Willis Hudpeth.

“No, I remember yours. I gave the defendant a suspended sentence conditional upon his working out a repayment plan with you and paying a fine. You must get a lot of that in season.”

“Not as much as you might think. Most sportsmen are pretty honest.”

I shook my head. “Practically all I’ve heard since I got down here is the controversy between recreational and commercial fishermen. I suppose you want to get rid of netters, too.”

“Well, no, ma’am, not particularly,” he answered, surprising the hell out of me.

“But I thought pier owners—”

“Look,” he said patiently. “Drive onto Atlantic Beach and the first pier you come to, Sportsman’s Pier, the first thing you see is that big sign, ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday.’ The reason it’s there’s because fishermen always grumble when they don’t catch fish. Maybe they don’t have the right rigs, maybe they don’t know the first thing about fishing, or maybe the fish just aren’t biting that day. You spend a couple of hundred to come down to the coast and you don’t catch anything but pinfish, then you can get mad at yourself or mad at the fish or mad at the pier owner. But if the pier owner says, ‘Hey, pal, it’s them netters out there that’s catching all your fish,’ who you going to blame?”

“But stop nets do stop fish,” I said, enjoying the novelty of his position enough to play devil’s advocate.

“Well, of course they do. But if they stopped all the fish, crews on the east would be richer’n Midas and those working the westernmost part of Bogue Banks would be poorer’n Job’s house cat.”

“You’re a most unusual pier owner, Mr. Hudpeth. I’m surprised you’re here this evening.”

“Because I don’t agree with Linville Pope’s solution to every problem? Know thy enemy’s what they preach in my church.”

“Is she the enemy?”

“Not Willis’s,” said Telford Hudpeth. “And not mine either particularly. No, he means she’s the one wants to know who’s thinking what. That’s why she invites people from all walks.”

“And what’s your walk?” I asked him.

“Oh, I’m one of those independent fishermen the other pier owners grumble about.”

I’d already picked up on their “hoi toide” accent, yet it wasn’t just their measured views that intrigued me. Maybe I was stumbling over stereotypes again, but Telford and Willis Hudpeth in their well-cut jackets, oxford cotton shirts, and tailored slacks seemed a far cry from a Harkers Islander like Mahlon Davis.

“So fishing really can compete with a shore job?”

He nodded. “Beats flipping hamburgers by a fair bit.”

His brother laughed. “Buys a brand new car every few years, takes his boys to Europe every summer—yeah, it’s a fair bit.”

“But how can you make money when so many others complain that sportsmen are running them off the water?”

“I treat it like a business and I fish the whole cycle,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I shrimp in the spring, long-haul in summer, sink-net in the fall, scallop in the winter.”

Willis Hudpeth nodded approvingly. “Most islanders, they’ll wait on a shrimp set and wait and wait till they get the gold mine and maybe they’ll bring in two or three hundred pounds. Set out there two or three nights, sometimes longer, and make four or five hundred dollars in just one good night.”

“So?”

“So then they won’t go back out again for maybe a week or ten days. Not till their money’s all gone again. Telford here’ll channel-net every night. Maybe only get forty or fifty pounds some nights, but he’s averaging a hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars every night, five nights a week during shrimping season. His hours are just as regular as mine. Just as regular as yours maybe.”

Telford looked a little embarrassed by his brother’s bragging. “Willis works just as hard. Nobody gave him that pier. It’s how we were raised. And we’re not the only ones living on Harkers Island that have something to show at the end of the year. It’s just that Down Easters have always been sort of independent and—”

“Independent?” I snorted. “Bunch of anarchists is what I’ve heard.”

He smiled. “Well, it’s true we don’t like anybody telling us what to do—not a boss man, not the government, and sometimes not even our own good sense. That’s mainly why a lot of Islanders won’t work as regularly as they could. They say they’d as soon punch a time clock over to Cherry Point if they can’t fish when they want to and lay out when they don’t want to.”

Some people nearby vacated a set of white canvas lawn chairs and we claimed them. The ice was starting to melt in my Bloody Mary, but I was too interested in this different view of the water to go looking for a fresh drink. Besides, their words had triggered Mahlon’s.

“Where do you sell your catch?”

“Might be any one of several places,” Telford Hudpeth said. “Whoever’s giving top dollar.”

“Bynum’s?”

“That’s right,” Willis remembered. “You were the first out to Andy, weren’t you? Wonder if they’ll ever catch who did it?”

“Why would a fisherman call him the man?”

“Depends on who he is,” said Telford. “Everybody that runs a fish house gets called that at one time or another. See, a fish house can’t survive if it doesn’t have people out there fishing for it, so some of ‘em might weight the nets a little in their favor—stake a man to new nets, give him gas on credit, maybe even help him buy a boat and let him fish on shares.”

Willis Hudpeth agreed. “‘I’ll just take ten percent till you work out the boat,’ he’ll say.”

“Only you’ve got to sell your ninety percent to him at his price,” said Telford Hudpeth.

“And his price is lower than what other fish houses might be paying?”

“Some people owe the man all their lives,” Telford answered soberly. “I don’t want to live like that myself.”

Micah Smith paused with a tray of hot crab puffs and we all three took a couple. “May I get you another one of those, Judge?” he asked, pointing to my glass.

I shook my head. “But I sure could use a big glass of ice water.”

“Coming right up. Gentlemen?”

Both indicated that they would nurse the drinks they had.

I bit into the luscious morsel of creamy crabmeat and delicate crust.

“One thing my brother didn’t mention,” said Telford as he downed his crab puff in one mouthful, “is if the man’s a flat-out cheat and his scales are off. In his favor, of course. Because half the time you don’t know what you’ve made till he pulls up on Saturday morning with your money. He tells you what your catch weighed out to. What you get depends on the price the wholesaler pays him and some weeks there’s such a glut of fish you don’t even make your gas money back if you’re working for the man.”

“Was Andy Bynum dishonest?”

Willis looked uncertain, but Telford shook his head. “Never did wrong by me that I know of, but I didn’t have to sell my fish to him, see? A lot of people did.” He paused and added cryptically, “And a lot of people always think it’s the man’s fault when things don’t shake out the way they think it ought to.”

“You must be a member of the Alliance.”

“Yes, ma’am. I don’t know how much seiners have in common with tongers, but all watermen are under pressure, no matter what Willis says. That’s where we’re going to really miss Andy. He could near ‘bout talk a hermit crab right out of its conch shell.”

Micah Smith returned with a large goblet of water and Telford passed it over to me with a troubled look in his clear blue eyes. “You asked me if Andy was dishonest. Not with money, maybe, and not by cheating with his scales, but I have to say that if he knew he might help the Alliance by twisting something around, I believe he’d do it, don’t you, Will?”

Willis Telford’s answer was lost beneath the sudden blast of a shotgun. I jumped up, heard a woman cry, “Pull!” then another crack of the gun and a clay pigeon exploded in midair over the water.

Unnoticed by the three of us, most of the party had drifted out to the landing.

“Trapshooting?” I’ve hunted quail and rabbits with my brothers, but I’d never done any fancy shooting.

“Part of the entertainment,” said Telford Hudpeth. “She’s got a bunch of guns and most people like to shoot, but this is usually where we cut out. Besides, we wait any longer, I’m going to miss the tide.” He held out his hand. “Been a pleasure, ma’am. You’re staying down the island in that little yellow house next to Mahlon Davis, right?”

I nodded, unsurprised that he should know. Fishermen and farmers have a lot in common.

“Maybe I’ll drop you off some fresh shrimp,” he said.

I walked with them as far as the landing so that I could watch the trapshooters who stood on the dock and shot out over the marshes beyond.

There were a couple of men and two women, each with shotguns that our hostess seemed to have provided. One of the women was Barbara Jean and she called, “Come on, Deborah, let’s see how good your eye is.”

I made weak protests. Truth is, it looked like fun and she only had to urge me twice to take her place.

Even a twenty-gauge can give a nice little kick, but I was used to a sixteen so it didn’t bother me. This was a simple contest. Several yards downshore and out of the line of fire, one of the men operated a small mechanical trap thrower, and the four of us fired in rotation till we missed.

I know it’s not politically correct to enjoy shooting, and given the option I’d certainly vote for much stricter gun control; but we all know it’s not a constitutional issue no matter what the NRA says. Why else would so many men use gun images to describe sex?

“Hotter’n a two-dollar pistol.”

“Shot my wad.”

“Firing blanks.”

All that power, all that force and all you have to do is pull a trigger.

To my delight, I hit my first ceramic disk square in the middle. And my second. In fact, I didn’t get put out till the fourth round. It helped my ego that two of the other three missed their fourth rounds, too.

As I surrendered my gun and was heading for the house for another glass of water, I heard Lev’s taunting voice behind me. “Shotguns? You went totally native, didn’t you, Red?”

“Absolutely.” I turned and let my eyes rake the length of his body, from his expensively barbered head to his Italian shoes. “Haven’t you?”

His smile faded. “Touché.”

“I didn’t even recognize you in court today,” I said accusingly. “And it wasn’t just the beard either.”

“I recognized you.”

Despite the blasting guns, an uneasy silence stretched between us as we each examined the other for changes. There were flecks of gray in his dark hair, more gray in a beard that was new to me, lines around those intense deep-set eyes that hadn’t been there when we lived together, an unfamiliar attention to clothes.

And what was he seeing?

My hair—light brown or dark blonde depending on the season—was shorter these days, I was probably five pounds heavier, and my face showed similar signs of the passing years, though I now disguised the lines with makeup I once scorned as completely as he’d scorned name-brand labels.

Then he gave me that funny little scrunch of a shrug and all at once, he was just Lev again.

“Truce?” he said.

“Truce.” Almost against my will, I felt my lips curve in a smile of pure pleasure. “How are you, Lev? And what are you doing in Beaufort with that weird Montgomery gal?”

“Pleasure, mostly. Some business. And Claire’s not really weird.”

“Somebody who can only talk through a hand puppet?” A thought crossed my mind. “You’re not married to her, are you?”

He laughed. “God, no! No, she’s my partner’s sister. They were in court today, too.”

“I saw them,” I reminded him dryly. “I also saw that disgustingly vulgar boat. Rainmaker? Yours or Llewellyn’s?”

He looked embarrassed. “Ours. It was in lieu of some fees actually.”

I remembered now that he hadn’t answered my earlier question. I rephrased it. “What sort of practice are you in that you get boats like that for fees?”

A burst of laughter from the crowd drowned out his answer.

“What?”

“We handle divorces.”

“You’re kidding. That’s your whole practice?”

Okay, we’ve all gotten older, more cynical, more interested in security maybe, less interested in ethics, but to sell out so completely? “Somehow I never pictured you as part of the Me-Me-Me decade.”

Again that quirky shrug. “I thought we had a truce.”

“Sorry.”

“The paper said you found a body Sunday night?”

“Yes.” I didn’t want to discuss it; didn’t want Andy Bynum’s death and the way I’d found him to be part of idle cocktail chatter.

As if he could still read my mind, Lev changed the subject yet again. “Your friend also tells me you’ve been a judge almost a year?”

“Since last June, yes.”

“You like the view better from that side of the bench?”

Another round of shooting began and Lev flinched with distaste. “I’ve heard that every damn pickup in the south has a gun rack in the back, but I didn’t know women got off on guns, too.”

Anyone else I’d have accused of chauvinism. In Lev’s case, I figured it must be the alien corn he was standing in.

We had a good view from where we stood and the shooters now were two Jaycee types, Barbara Jean and Linville Pope. After another four rounds, only the two women were still in. Chet said they’d had four guns stolen and now I realized at least one of them must have been Barbara Jean’s. Linville barely came up to Barbara Jean’s shoulder, but her barrel followed the arc of the clay pigeon just as smoothly as she shattered her fifth in a row.

It was so incongruous. Barbara Jean in pearls, heels and a slinky dress, the late afternoon sunlight turning her blonde curls strawberry as she killed her sixth “bird” in a row; Linville in a floral silk cocktail suit, carefully tucking her hair behind her ears and out of her eyes before she loaded and fired a sixth time.

As the eighth round began, Barbara Jean missed.

“Pull,” said Linville and, without glancing at the ceramic disc, shot her gun straight up into the air.

The crowd clapped her show of good sportmanship and Barbara Jean shook her head, but her smile was just a little too bright as she handed her gun over to Chet, who had stepped up for the next round of competition.

With the shooting making coherent conversation almost impossible, we stepped back inside the house and made for the bar. Both barmen were down helping with the guns, so Lev poured himself a whiskey and soda and I refilled my glass of ice water, then we passed through the opposite set of French doors onto a narrower terrace completely walled on all three sides with head-high azaleas that dazzled the eye with clear pinks and corals, vibrant reds and cool whites.

Muffled gunshots and massed azaleas.

Lev shook his head and chanted, “And that’s what I like about the South!”

As our eyes met, we heard the clink of glassware, then voices in the room behind us.

“I don’t need any fucking concessions from you,” a woman said angrily. I recognized Barbara Jean’s voice.

“No? But you will take them from everyone else?” came Linville Pope’s quiet silky tones.

A questioning sound.

“The way you play the beleaguered benefactor to twenty-three black families—that is how you put it every time anybody tries to regulate your trawlers? Twenty-three black families who could not buy even a gallon of milk if not for the paychecks you sign? So easy to play the race card when it suits you, but I have done a little research on Neville Fishery. What happened to all the black families that were cut loose when your father switched over to hydraulic winches to pull the nets and started using hoses to suction the fish out of those nets?”

“You leave my daddy out of this.”

“Look, Barbara Jean—” Her voice was that of a patient adult reasoning with a fractious child. “The tide is running out. Fishing was a wonderful way of life. Last century. Menhaden generate what? Four million a year? Tourism brings in half a billion. Face it, honey, you are history. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but it is coming. That little factory of yours sits squat in the middle of—”

“I’d die before I’d sell it to you,” Barbara Jean snarled.

“No one is asking you to,” Linville soothed. “My principals are the ones who want it bad enough to offer you more than it is worth.”

“My granddaddy built that factory and my grandsons—”

I missed the rest because Lev put his lips close to my ear and whispered, “There has to be a path somewhere through those flower bushes. Maybe there at that corner?”

I hesitated.

“Knowledge is power,” the pragmatist reminded me, straining to hear what was being said just inside those open doors.

“And you were accusing HIM of lapsed standards?” the preacher lectured.

Reluctantly, I tiptoed after Lev, across the terrace and through the bushes.

Eventually we broke through that floral barrier to a green lawn of billiard table perfection.

“Have dinner with me?” asked Lev.

“You mean just leave quietly without telling anybody and go find a place where the only discussion of fish is whether to have it grilled or fried? You got it!”

We crossed the grass to the circular paved drive where eight or ten shiny cars were parked.

“Which one’s yours?” he asked.

I might have known it wasn’t going to be that simple.

Lev quirked his eyebrows at me as I stood laughing beneath a live oak tattered with Spanish moss. “What’s so funny?”

“I came by boat. You, too?”

He nodded. “With Catherine, Jon and Claire.”

“I came with Barbara Jean and Chet Winberry,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Barbara Jean’s the one having that, um, discussion with our hostess?”

“‘Fraid so.”

“Hm-mm-m.”

• • •

It took us a few minutes to work our way through the front hall and out onto the seaward terrace without going near the sunroom wing. Somehow I doubted that Linville Pope would notice if I didn’t go thank her for inviting me. I spotted Barbara Jean heading for the dock and hurried after her with only a “See you” flung over my shoulder for Lev.

Out on the driveway, we had decided that if we could prod our respective ferrymen into leaving early, we would each return the way we’d come, then meet at one of the restaurants off Front Street as soon as we could politely disentangle ourselves.

Judging by Barbara Jean’s purposeful stride, I wasn’t going to have to do much prodding. I saw her speak to Chet, who put his arm around her, then looked back toward the house for me. I waved that I was coming and soon joined them at their mooring.

Barbara Jean was so furious she was almost crying with barely controlled rage. “That bitch!” she kept saying. “That bitch. That absolute bitch!”

Chet made placating noises and threw me an apologetic glance as he cast off.

“Something wrong?” I leaned my forearms on the back of their seat and gazed from one profile to the other.

“That—that—”

“Bitch?” I offered helpfully.

Chet laughed and even Barbara Jean gave a rueful smile.

“Yeah,” she said.

She twisted around in her seat so that she faced both of us and said, “First she said my factory’s history and now she’s trying to blackmail me into selling it to her.”

“What?” said Chet.

“Blackmail?” I said. “That’s a pretty strong term.”

She gave an impatient flip of her hand. “Not blackmail. What’s the term? Coercion? That’s what she’s trying to do, coerce me.”

“But how?” Chet and I asked together.

“Jill,” she said, and her anger abruptly dissolved into tears that spilled down her cheeks.

“Honey?”

“Oh Chet, she’s bought Gib Epson’s place!” she wailed. “She says she’s already got the permits and that I have till the first of June to decide, then she’s going to start building a launch ramp and boat storage for a hundred boats. There’ll be cars in and out, day and night, all year long!”

Chet hit the wheel with his fist. “But Epson swore he’d never sell.”

“She made him a fat offer and let him think it was a conservancy group that wanted it. He probably thinks he was doing us a favor.” She reached into Chet’s pocket for his handkerchief and blotted her eyes in pensive silence.

We were moving a little faster around the point than when we’d come. The wind ruffled our hair and felt cool enough to make me wish for a sweater now that the sun was dropping down behind the trees.

“How does your daughter come into it?” I asked.

“My mother was from Harkers Island,” Barbara Jean explained, “and she inherited the home place over there. The original part of the house dates from the 1890s. She really loved it and she always wanted to go live there, but Daddy had the factory over here and what with one thing or another, they never got to restore the house the way she wanted. She used to take Jill over and tell her all the old family stories and Jill was wild about it, too, so when Mother died, she willed it to Jill and she and her husband have put every nickel they have into fixing it up. They’ve just finished.”

More tears pooled in her eyes and she dashed them away angrily. “And now that bitch—!”

“I take it that the bitch’s new property abuts yours?”

“Even curves around one side,” Chet said grimly.

“But surely your zoning laws—?”

Chet shook his head. “Harkers Island is like the rest of Down East. They’re so adamantly opposed to any kind of growth or government interference that they won’t allow any zoning of any kind.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Zoning’s the only way a community can control growth and have a say in what’s built.”

“Well, why don’t you just run on over and tell them that if you get a few minutes off from court?” Chet said with asperity. “You think people haven’t tried? Every time the county planners try to hold a hearing on the subject and explain how zoning would protect them, they’re lucky to get away with their lives.”

“Down Easters don’t think they need zoning,” Barbara Jean said as Chet throttled back on the motor and headed in toward their landing. “My cousin over in Marshallburg said that if somebody ever tried to build something the rest of them didn’t want, they’d just burn it down. They would, too.”

“Maybe we’ll sic your cousin on to Linville’s boat storage,” Chet said.

“Hey!” I objected. “I’m an officer of the court and I didn’t hear a thing you just said, okay?”

Chet nosed us in next to the dock and secured a line to the piling. I scrambled out and Chet reached out a hand to Barbara Jean, who hadn’t moved. “Honey?”

She took his hand and stood up slowly. “All of a sudden, I remember something Andy said.”

“Andy Bynum?”

“Remember how he was rooting around in the courthouse all this month? And last week at the Alliance meeting—you remember when you came to pick me up and I was standing out front with Andy and Jay Hadley and her son?”

Chet nodded.

“You must have heard him. Andy said he’d found something that was going to fix Linville Pope’s little red wagon once and for all and—oh my God!”

She clutched Chet’s arm hard. “What if Andy really did find something illegal? What if he threatened to tell if she didn’t back off? She’s got a boat, she’s got a gun and she’s got the conscience of a sand shark—maybe she’s the one who shot him out there in the sound.”