Shooting at Loons

by Margaret Maron

  “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.”

  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.”