Shooting at Loons

by Margaret Maron

  “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 you
rs?” 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.”

  7

  Launch out into the deep,

  Oh, let the shoreline go;

  Launch out, launch out in the ocean divine,

  Out where the full ticks go.

  But many, alas! only stand on the shore

  And gaze on the ocean so wide;

  They never have ventured its depths to explore,

  Or to launch on the fathomless tide.

  —A. B. Simpson and B. B. McKinney

  “Now let me get this straight,” said Lev. “This Andy Bynum was a fisherman, right?”

  “A fisherman, the owner of a fish house and the president of the Independent Fishers Alliance,” I said, nibbling at a shrimp from my Mate’s Plate (coleslaw, hushpuppies and three seafood choices from a list of eight; the Captain’s Plate lets you choose four; the Admiral’s, five).

  “And your friend Barbara Ann—”

  “Barbara Jean.”

  “Whatever. Her husband’s a judge and she owns a fishmeal plant, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So how do fishing interests conflict with Pope Properties?”

  We were sitting in a candlelit booth at the Long Haul, one block off Front Street, but for a moment it was like being back in that old fourth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, sharing Chinese takeout while Lev helped me clarify the facts of a case for next day’s class.

  He lifted his empty beer bottle when the waitress passed and she nodded. “Another for you, ma’am?”

  My glass of house “blush” was still half full, so I shook my head and went back to explaining a situation I didn’t fully comprehend myself even though I’d asked a lot of questions and listened to a lot of polemics the short
time I’d been down.

  “The way I understand it, there are four major interests pulling at the coastal waters here in North Carolina: environmentalists; commercial fishing—that’s workers on and off the water; recreational fishing—motels, piers, marinas, boat sales, tackle shops, and all the other tourist-support businesses; and finally the developers who seem to want managed growth as long as it’s everybody else who’s being managed.”

  “So what else is new?” Lev asked sardonically.

  “Trouble is, it doesn’t stay that simple. Depending on what’s being discussed, alliances seem to switch back and forth with the tides. Environmentalists will ally with either or both groups of fishermen against the developers. Fishermen ally with them because they’ve seen what pollution does to the estuaries and they’ve already lost too many shellfish beds. Now the conservationist wing—”

  “Aren’t they the same as environmentalists?”

  “I don’t think so. Not exactly. At least not the way they define it down here. Conservationists want to save the water, too, but their main interest seems to be endangered species, especially turtles. They give the trawlers grief because nets have to use excluder devices to let the turtles escape. Or the size of the net mesh has to be big enough to let certain species through, stuff like that. And they irk sportsmen because they’re always pushing size and catch limits and they’d like to keep all recreational vehicles off the beach during nesting season. Come to think of it, the fishermen hate the turtle excluders, but they line up beside the conservationists to keep surf fishers from making such deep wheel ruts on the sand that baby turtles can’t get back to the sea in time.”

  Lev laughed. “Do they really care, or is it tit for tat?”

  “Well, if sportsmen would support getting rid of the TEDs, the fishermen probably wouldn’t be stressing themselves overmuch on baby turkles.”

  “Turkles?”

  “That’s what Islanders say when they talk about turkle stew,” I said, thinking of the loggerhead shell I’d seen rolling in the surf by Mahlon’s landing the night before.

  “Wait a minute. You just said they’re an endangered species.”