Shooting at Loons

by Margaret Maron

  The parking lot was nearly full as I threaded my way around cars to stick the books in my trunk. A gentle tap of a horn made me look around.

  “Hey, Deborah!” It was Linville Pope in a black convertible that I instantly coveted, sleek and sporty, with butterscotch leather interior. For me, I was probably looking at a whole year’s salary. For Linville, probably one commission on a sale.

  She slowed to a crawl. “You are not by any miracle leaving, are you?”

  “Sorry,” I said, slamming closed the trunk lid of my suddenly dowdy-looking car.

  “Listen, if you are going to be around later, why not stop by my house for a quiet drink? Say five-ish?”

  Without hesitating, I said, “Thanks, I’d love to.” I didn’t know what her ulterior motive was for asking, but I figured it might give me clues to whether Barbara Jean’s accusations had validity and whether Linville was the one I chased last night.

  Cars had begun to pile up behind her, so Linville gave me a wave and kept moving.

  The Rainmaker’s departure meant I no longer had to avoid the waterfront, and the deck at the Ritchie House looked so inviting with its pink umbrellas and white chairs and tables that I decided to have a late lunch there.

  The main lunch crowd had departed, but half the tables were still filled with boat loungers who lingered over coffee or early drinks.

  They are a class unto themselves, these rootless wanderers who have cut their ties to land and live year-round on the water, moving like schools of restless fish up and down the Intracoastal Waterway. Sit in any waterfront restaurant or lounge and you’ll see them drifting south in the fall, heading north in the spring. From huge sailing yachts to modest houseboats, they idle in on the changing tides, seldom straying further than a short stroll from the docks. The men in turtlenecks and gold-trimmed captain’s hats, the women suntanned and vivid in silk scarves and tailored slacks, like calls to like. They pull several tables together in saltwater camaraderie and speak of “the Vineyard,” Saint Croix, Hilton Head. Often they’re not quite sure whether they’re in North or South Carolina. The towns, the bars, the marinas must blend together over the years.

  They remind me of migratory birds and I was bemused by their chatter and pleased when the waiter seated me near the railing where I could watch their coming and going. As I peered around the edge of the menu, I was startled to see Mrs. Docksider, Lev’s partner’s wife, heading across the deck toward me.

  Did this mean that the Rainmaker was only out cruising around the sound?

  “Judge Knott.” She was very thin and conveyed such porcelain fragility that I was surprised by her deep voice and strong Boston accent. “I’m Catherine Llewellyn, Lev Schuster’s partner.”

  Automatically, I took the hand she offered. “Partner?” It wasn’t the first time I deserved a swift kick for making the same assumptions a lot of men do.

  She looked puzzled. “Lev didn’t tell you one of his partners was traveling with him?”

  “For some reason, I thought he meant your husband. Sorry. If it’s about my judgment Tuesday—?”

  “No, no,” she assured me. “You had no other option under the circumstances, but my sister was so sure she could convince a judge that I couldn’t talk her out of agreeing to testify.”

  Either I’ve got to start working on my poker face or she’s extraordinarily intuitive because even though I was wearing three layers of makeup and dark glasses, Catherine Llewellyn caught my skepticism.

  “Claire only needs the puppet when there are strangers, Judge Knott.” She glanced at my table and saw that it was set for only one person. “You’re lunching alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be an awful imposition if I joined you?” Her husky voice was urgent.

  Curious, I gestured toward the opposite chair. “Please do.”

  When the waiter returned, I ordered black bean soup and half a club sandwich; Mrs. Llewellyn opted for the crab-stuffed tomato plate.

  The breeze off Taylors Creek was warm and barely ballooned the pink canvas umbrella above us, but she drew a wisp of red silk from her pocket and tied it so her hair wouldn’t blow. As we waited to be served, she spoke of the charms of Beaufort, the beauty of the Carolina coast, the friendliness of the people, the four-star comforts of the Ritchie House and the pleasures of a rare vacation. Then she asked me to call her Catherine and kept tagging so many Judge Knotts onto every sentence that I finally surrendered just as our food arrived.

  “Please. Call me Deborah.”

  “Deborah.” She turned my name in her mind and smiled appreciatively. “How very apt. Did your parents expect you to be a judge from birth?”

  “Hardly.” Not with a father who had only grudgingly agreed to help pay for law school and who had been quite negative about my decision to run for district judge.

  She had been covertly studying me ever since we sat down, yet it was as if she didn’t see my cuts and scratches because she was looking even deeper. “Deborah, may we speak frankly?”

  That smokey voice, that prim Boston accent—I bet she did okay in the courtroom.

  “I’ve wondered a lot about you these past few years. I hope you won’t resent that?”

  I stiffened. “Resent that you wondered, or resent what you’re going to ask?”

  She reached into her tote bag and drew out a lumpy envelope. “I believe these are yours?”

  Inside were a dozen or more crystal beads. They flashed and sparkled against the stiff yellow paper like the prismed promises of the Crystal Coast.

  “They were on the Rainmaker yesterday morning. Lev wasn’t sure if you’d want them back.”

  Her indulgent smile invited me to share female solidarity over male obtuseness. I dug up a smile of my own and pasted it on my lips.

  “Thanks.”

  The tines of her fork toyed with the crabmeat. “I’m not trying to pry, Deborah. It’s just that I’m very fond of Lev.

  He’s like the brother I never had and I don’t want to see him hurt.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that from me,” I assured her.

  “No? You were together how long? A year? A year and a half?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Did you know you were the first?”

  “That he’d lived with? Yes.”

  “And the last.”

  I almost dropped my soup spoon. “You’re kidding!”

  She shook her head. “Oh, I’m not saying there haven’t been women. A couple of times there I even thought... but they always turn out to be unsuitable and he just can’t seem to commit again to a long-term relationship.”

  I was appalled. Then flattered. Then baffled. If we were all that wonderful together, how come we were apart.

  Apparently, Catherine Llewellyn wondered, too.

  Determinedly, I changed the subject. “Lev tells me y’all have a divorce practice.”

  She was willing to wait. “Divorce and marital, yes. There are four partners and two associates: two men, four women.”

  “You seem to be doing all right. Lev told me that the Rainmaker was part of a fee.”

  “Ah, that was fun. The wife was a medical secretary, who put him through med school, struggled beside him through the early years and then, once the practice was generating big bucks, he bought the boat he had yearned for all his life—custom fitted to his specifications.”

  “His dream boat?” I murmured.

  “Precisely. Right down to a sexy little first mate to swab the deck in a bikini. When the split came, we could have vacuumed his ass-sets, but she was willing to be equitable about it so long as she got the boat. Which she signed over to us almost immediately in lieu of fees since most of the settlement was in real property.”

  I was amused by the zest she seemed to take in that element of revenge. “Do you always represent the wife?”

  “Not always. And sometimes we go in as amicus curiae on behalf of the children involved. In a way, child advocacy is part of the
reason we’ve come to Beaufort.”

  “Another amicus case?”

  “Not exactly.” She snapped a piece of melba toast in half and put a dab of crab salad on it. “Perhaps I should fill in some personal background because that’s where it began.” She hesitated, choosing her words as carefully as she chose a speck of tomato to add to the salad.

  “Claire’s crazy about Lev, of course.”

  “Oh?” I said neutrally.

  “He’s like an uncle both to my son and to Claire.”

  Having only a couple of elderly aunts himself, Lev always did envy my large, and at times smothering, family. But Uncle Levvie?

  “As you’ve seen, my sister’s much younger than I. My father died, and Claire was by our mother’s second husband. He was a wonderful father, but not much of a husband, so when Claire was four, there was a bitter divorce and custody fight, which Mother won. The man our mother next married—” Catherine Llewellyn’s husky voice stumbled. “I’ll blame myself till the day I die even though I was already married myself and studying law and there’s no way I could have known. Claire blamed herself, you see, for her own father’s disappearance in her life; and she thought she deserved it when that—that—slime—”

  She took a deep breath. “By the time Jonathan and I realized, the damage was done. We took her to live with us, but my bright and bubbly, innocent little sister had withdrawn into borderline schizophrenia. When Lev came into our lives, he was gentle and perceptive. She had an old hand puppet—a kitten—and Lev talked to the kitten, not to her. The first time the kitten answered him, I wept. He brought a half-dozen more puppets the next time he came and Claire seized on the blonde-haired doll like a lifeline back to reality. I know Tuesday may have seemed ridiculous to you, but if you could only know what a giant step it represented for Claire.”

  “Then I really am sorry I had to rule against her.”

  “Actually, Lev thinks it might be better in the long run. Reinforces the idea that she must begin to speak for herself.”

  It was a sad story, but I didn’t see how it related to their being in Beaufort.

  “Since we began the practice, we’ve seen the trauma that divorce can wreak on children’s lives. Wealth cannot automatically insulate a child from the guilt and angst when a family breaks apart. Indeed, wealth often exacerbates the situation.”

  She seemed to hear her words and smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I get didactic on the subject. Anyhow, to put it simply, we have some funds and we hope to create a center for kids who’re involved in messy divorces and custody fights, a safe and interesting place where they can talk out their fears with children who’re in a similar situation, and get the counseling and decompression that they need to survive while their parents—and, yes, their parents’ attorneys—battle it out.

  “North Carolina gives very good tax incentives to locate here and Beaufort itself meets a lot of our criteria. The climate’s moderate, the water’s clean. The library’s adequate, the marine museum has good programs for youth, there’s a hospital in Morehead. Overall, Beaufort’s small enough, safe enough, and still cheap enough that we think we can create something quite special if we can find some commercial waterfront property within walking or bicycling distance of downtown.”

  “Ah,” I said, as the light broke. “Neville Fishery.”

  “Precisely. Land-use regulations make it simpler if we convert a commercial property already in existence than if we tried to get the permits to build new from scratch on undeveloped property.”

  Curious, I asked, “Those funds you mentioned. Are they like a grant or from private backers?”

  “Oh, it would be an investment opportunity,” she acknowledged.

  “So they’ll cleanse wealthy parents of their own guilt and angst and turn a neat profit, too,” said the pragmatist, busily punching figures into his calculator. “Lev baby really has come a long way from pasta and walk-ups.”

  “Would you visit the parents’ iniquity upon their young?” chided the preacher “Surely even the rich are entitled to cushion their children from hurts.”

  “That’s what I mean. And hey, betcha the Rainmaker gets to be a business deduction before it’s all over.”

  “Lev says you’re a friend of Neville Fishery’s owner,” Catherine Llewellyn said. “Tell me, do you think a personal appeal would help? If we explained to her what we planned for the site?”

  “I really doubt it,” I said honestly. “But who knows? Her husband would like it if she’d sell, but there’s been so much rancor and controversy over the future of the menhaden industry that she may well dig in her heels and tough it out. Aren’t there other properties?”

  “None quite like this one,” she said regretfully.

  At the next table over, a paunchy guy with Grecian Formula hair beneath his captain’s hat spread a chart across the table and began to give a lesson in navigation to a bubbly young thing half his age.

  The waiter tried to interest us in his dessert card, but we both turned him down. Nor would I let Catherine get my check.

  “Nevertheless, it’s good we had this chance to meet, Deborah,” she said, with a gracious incline of her porcelain head. “I feel it’s helped me know Lev even better somehow.”

  “I’m so glad,” I murmured. My mother taught me a few graces, too.

  • • •

  When I slid under the steering wheel of my car a few minutes later, I was dismayed to see the backseat half down and the contents of my trunk exposed. More than one of my brothers had lectured me on this possibility. “What’s the point of locking things in your trunk if you don’t lock the car itself?” they’d ask.

  I got out and unlocked the trunk button to survey the damage.

  Oddly, nothing was missing. Oh, it had obviously been tossed—my new books were now half under the tarp I keep there, my garment bag had a tiny bit of my black judge’s robe caught in the zipper—but my .38 was still locked in the tool box, and my briefcase hadn’t been taken.

  Weird. Unless...?

  A young man was perched on a nearby railing and I was in the middle of asking if he’d noticed anyone plundering my car, when I realized he was Jay Hadley’s son, Josh.

  “Yeah, I thought I’d seen you before,” he said, his dark eyes darting away from mine. “They take anything?”

  “Not that I can tell. But you didn’t notice anyone?”

  He slipped down from his perch. “I was just waiting for my sister and yonder she comes.”

  Before I could question him further, he’d threaded his way across the busy street and jumped into a pickup driven by his sister.

  If Zeke Myers had still been around, I’d have asked him, but that stocky little man had vanished. And if Linville Pope had found a parking space in this parking lot, she had finished her business quickly and gone because her sleek black convertible was nowhere in sight either.

  Was it possible someone knew I had Andy Bynum’s papers?

  I found a pay phone, called Jay Hadley and, after swearing her to secrecy, told her that Andy’s desk had been ransacked last night, and my car searched today. “Who knows you gave me those files?” I asked.

  “I may have mentioned it to some of the Alliance members that were at the funeral yesterday,” she admitted.

  She rattled off a bunch of names, but the only ones I recognized were Telford Hudpeth and Barbara Jean Winberry and I rather doubted if either of them wanted to keep me from discovering any of Linville Pope’s possibly shady dealings.

  As I returned to my car, something drew my attention to an upper balcony of the Ritchie House. There, lounging in a white wicker rocker, Claire Montgomery stared down at me. As our eyes met, the flaxen-haired hand puppet came up in an unmistakable gesture.

  Damned if it didn’t give me the finger.

  I resisted the impulse to reply in kind—conduct unbecoming, etc. Instead, since it was now almost three o’clock, I tried Quig Smith’s office again.

  “Sorry, Judge,” said the unifor
med duty officer. “He was in, but now he’s gone again. Want me to have him call you when he checks in next?”

  “No,” I decided. “I’ll stop by one more time before I leave Beaufort.”

  Back on Front Street, I bought a floppy straw hat, sandals, and a pair of shorts and had the clerk bag up my skirt along with my heels and panty-hose. I also borrowed their restroom to remove every smidgen of makeup. The soap stung the scratches on my cheek and forehead, yet it seemed to me that some of the redness was beginning to fade from the edges. With sunglasses and hat in place, it was moot anyhow.

  Five minutes later, I was driving across the causeway, through Morehead City and across another bridge to Atlantic Beach, where I took a left onto 58 and continued on to Fort Macon, now a state park.

  The original colonial forts washed into the sea in the early 1800s and the current one of heavy masonry was built in the 1830s. Periodically, the fort is threatened by the sea, and statewide debates rage in the newspapers as to whether or not herculean methods should be used to save it. As far as I’m concerned, the sea giveth and the sea can taketh away. But then I’ve always been personally outraged by people who build their play places—retirement or vacation houses—on narrow sandbars and then expect the rest of us to pay higher taxes and higher insurance rates so that they can rebuild when the inevitable storms wipe the beaches clean again. If they want to take the risk, fine, but leave me out of it. And that goes for old forts, too.

  Still, as long as it’s here, Fort Macon’s an interesting place to tour. I stood on the ramparts and gazed out to sea. If I didn’t look back at all the piers and high rises straggling down the sandy stretches, I could almost imagine what it must have been like to guard this point two hundred years ago against Spanish and British raiders.

  Then a jet ski roared past, breaking the illusion.

  I slipped off my sandals and strolled briskly along the wide beach, occasionally wetting my toes in the cool water, my mind blanked except for the rolling waves, the gleam of colored shells, the grace of sandpipers that ran across the clean white sand and left lines of tiny neat tracks like featherstitching on a crazy quilt.