Shooting at Loons

by Margaret Maron

  There were very few people walking here since the surf wasn’t yet warm enough for swimming. The sandpipers and I had it mostly to ourselves.

  At the water’s edge, I found a couple of hermit crabs, one in a lettered olive shell, the other in a moon snail shell, and suddenly remembered how my younger cousin Scotty used to love to race them. Feeling thirteen again, I drew a three-foot circle in the wet sand, placed both crabs in the exact middle and even let the bigger one be Scott’s.

  At once, it all rushed back: how patiently we squatted down by the circle to wait till the crabs emerged: one cautious claw, then another, then a skittering run for the sea. My crab was smaller but less cautious than Scott’s and soon it began its rush for safety. Scott’s emerged, oriented itself, and scuttled after mine, and I could hear Scotty’s adolescent sports announcer voice in my ear like the ocean in a conch shell:

  “And it’s Lettered Olive coming down the home stretch and here comes Moon Snail moving up on the outside. Lettered Olive is digging and Moon Snail pulls to the right. Moon Snail making his move now. Lettered Olive holding on. Moon Snail jockeying for position and at the line—YES! It’s Lettered Olive by half a shell! And the crowd goes wild, folks, as both crabs tumble into the waves. Yea-aa-aa!”

  I stood up and brushed sand from my knees as Scott’s boyish voice faded.

  And now he was a father himself and by next summer, he would be racing hermit crabs with baby Arlie and the cycle would begin all over again.

  It was a lovely peaceful hour and not until I turned back toward the car was I reclaimed by the muddle of Lev and Catherine Llewellyn, Barbara Jean and her menhaden factory, Mahlon Davis and his seething resentments, young Guthrie, Jay Hadley, Linville Pope and her machinations, and over all, Andy Bynum’s murder and the push/pull feuding over water usage. The only unadulterated bright spot in the whole mess was Kidd Chapin and he was the only one I couldn’t count on seeing again.

  When I reached the car, I slipped my beige-and-turquoise skirt back on and slid off my shorts. At the bathhouse, I rinsed the sand off my feet and put on my new sandals. A splash of cool water on my face, a light cover of makeup, and I was ready to drop by for that “quiet drink” at Linville Pope’s.

  • • •

  My watch said it was a suitably five-ish 5:10 when I rang the doorbell at Linville Pope’s house.

  The man who opened the door was a physical wreck: barefooted, stained khakis, lank-haired and gaunt-faced. He reeked of bourbon and he held out a cordless phone that was smeared with blood.

  “Can’t make thish damn thing work,” he sobbed drunkenly. “Call them.”

  “Call who?” I asked, shrinking back from the gory object.

  “P’leesh. Somebody’s killed my wife!”

  11

  Whether the wrath of the storm-tossed sea,

  Or demons, or men, or whatever it be,

  No water can swallow the ship where lies

  The Master of ocean and earth and skies;

  They all shall sweetly obey My will;

  Peace, be still! Peace be still!

  They all shall sweetly obey My will;

  Peace, peace, be still!

  —Mary A. Baker

  Clasping the bloody phone to his chest, Midge Pope slowly slumped to the floor, moaning over and over, “Linvie, Linvie.”

  I stepped over his outstretched legs and moved cautiously through the house.

  No one in the public rooms, no one in the kitchen.

  At the end of a curiously austere hall, I heard a low radio and when I pushed the door open, I saw a muscular young man, fully dressed, stretched out on a double bed, sound asleep. The radio beside him was tuned to easy rock.

  “Hello?”

  His eyes blinked open when I spoke and he stared at me blankly for a moment, then jumped up guiltily.

  “Oh Jeez!” he said, “I must have dropped off. You won’t tell her, will you? I—”

  An open door connected to the next room and he glanced inside and groaned, “He’s gone! She’s gonna kill me!”

  He turned and almost slammed into me. “Sorry, but I’ve got to find him and—”

  “Try the front door,” I suggested.

  It was clear to me that he’d been hired to baby-sit Linville Pope’s alcoholic husband and that he was so shook at losing his charge, I’d get nothing out of him till he’d found Midge Pope again.

  “Where’s Mrs. Pope?” I asked as he rushed across the entry hall to help Pope to his feet.

  “Down at the landing, probably. She said she was—”

  At that moment, he saw both the telephone and Pope’s bloody hands. “Oh Jeez!”

  I didn’t wait to hear more. Already I was running through the wide sunroom. The locked French doors hindered me a moment, but once I was through them, I raced across the wide terrace, over the grass, and out to the landing.

  Linville Pope’s crumpled figure lay near the end of the long planked dock. She was still wearing the black-and-white checked shirt and full black skirt she’d had on when I saw her earlier. She’d fallen backward and strands of ash-blonde hair half-hid her face. I knelt to touch the pulse points in her neck and wrists.

  Nothing. Already the living warmth had drained from her skin.

  It was too much like finding Andy Bynum—the swirling hair, the bright red stain that blossomed through her shirt, the lifeless pallor. At least her eyes were closed. Numbed though I was, somehow I found myself thinking how much bigger she looked lying there dead than she had when erect and full of life.

  For a long moment, her death filled every interstice of awareness until finally, as if from a far distance, the sound of an outboard motor penetrated my ears and I turned to see a small dinghy headed for a boat moored a few hundred feet out in the channel.

  The Rainmaker.

  Benumbed, I watched Lev Schuster secure a line and pull himself aboard. He glanced back and seemed to hesitate upon seeing me there on the dock. At this distance, I wasn’t sure if he could recognize me; but whether or not he did, he quickly disappeared below. At the moment there seemed to be no other boats in the immediate vicinity, but I suppose the expanse of marshy hummocks that lay between Lennox Point and Harkers Island could have concealed whole fleets of small skiffs or dories.

  Footsteps thudded down the dock behind me. Midge Pope’s baby-sitter.

  “Is she—?”

  “Go back,” I said sharply. “It’s too late to help her. Just stay there at the end and don’t let anyone out here. I’m going to call the police.”

  He was too young to argue with me and I hurried past and into the sunroom where I remembered seeing a phone during the party on Tuesday.

  I got through to Quig Smith almost immediately.

  “Hey there!” he said jovially. “Our desk officer bet me I’d be gone ‘fore you called again. You’re just lucky my new ecology journal that came in today had an article on estuarine pollution and fish nurseries or I’d be—”

  I cut through and he listened in silence to what I had to say. When I’d finished, he said, “How ‘bout you make sure the door’s unlocked so we can get in, then go on back out and keep a watch. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Out in the hallway, Midge Pope had blacked out and was lying curled in a fetal position around the cordless phone. No need to shift him since he was no longer blocking the entrance. I left the door on the latch and hurried back down to the dock, where the young man stood with a sick expression on his face.

  “Not much longer,” I told him. “I’m Deborah Knott, and you’re—”

  “Simon McGuire. What happened here, ma’am?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, shaking a thatch of reddish-brown hair that was still rumpled from his stolen nap. “She said some judge was coming and for me to keep Midge—Mr. Pope—in his room. I finally got him to bed and I just lay down to rest a couple of minutes myself and the next thing I knew, there you were.”

  He had a pro
nounced lantern jaw, square shoulders, and a dazed expression on his open face. In his jeans and sneakers, he looked no more than twenty or twenty-one and could be any student from East Carolina or Carteret Community College.

  Before I could ask him when he’d last seen Linville alive, I saw that Lev was back in his dinghy and heading straight across the water toward us.

  “Stay here,” I told McGuire and went down to the end of the pier.

  As Lev cut the motor of his dinghy and readied a line to tie up, I called, “Stay back. Linville Pope’s been shot.”

  “I know.” He looped the line around a post. “I found her.”

  “You might be destroying evidence.”

  “I told you—I tied up here ten minutes ago. This won’t make any difference.”

  He secured the boat and stepped up onto the dock. “I called nine-one-one and they’re sending someone.”

  “Called?”

  “Cellular phone on the boat,” he explained.

  “Why didn’t you call from the house?”

  “The doors were locked and I thought it’d be quicker to call from the boat than try to hunt up the neighbors. God, this is awful! That poor woman.” He moved restlessly from one side of the dock to the other.

  I’d forgotten what a pacer Lev was. Whenever something upset him, whenever he was working out the elements of a complex case—it’s as if his brain can’t function under stress without his legs moving. He paced now, back and forth, with that old familiar urgency.

  I drew back at the sight of a blood smear on his khakis and said, “Who shot her, Lev?”

  He followed my eyes and brushed at the smear. “When I tried to get a pulse, I must have—” He gave me a sharp look, then in a level voice said, “I don’t know, Red. She was like that when I got here just a few minutes ago.”

  I was puzzled as to why he’d even be here since Linville had invited me and she hadn’t struck me as someone who invited confrontations. “Was she expecting you?”

  “Not really. She marked some places on my chart along the straits back of Harkers Island for me to look at today.” He gestured vaguely across the marshes toward the east. “I was on my way back to Beaufort, and thought I’d swing by here to ask if she could show me one of the properties tomorrow. When I first saw her—”

  His eyes were snagged by movement behind me. I turned and saw Quig Smith striding across the terrace, accompanied by another detective and a couple of uniformed Carteret County sheriff’s deputies.

  “That was quick,” said Lev.

  I glanced at my watch. Smith had said ten minutes.

  It had only been eight.

  • • •

  The rescue squad, summoned by Lev’s 911 call, arrived almost immediately after Smith and his men and had, at first, mistaken Midge Pope for the victim since they thought the blood on his shirt came from his body when they found him curled in the entry hall.

  Now it was déjà vu time.

  Watching the two teams out on the dock was uncannily like last Sunday afternoon when I’d watched these same people go through the same motions around Andy Bynum’s body. Only, instead of rocking in a boat to answer Quig Smith’s questions, this time we sat around a table on Linville Pope’s terrace as we each gave our accounts of the afternoon.

  The base of the table was three bronze dolphins that had weathered to a soft green; the top was a thick round slab of glass with dozens of seashells embedded just below the surface. I recognized sand dollars, scotch bonnets, tulips, tritons, olives and snails. It seemed unreal that only an hour before I’d been happily racing hermit crabs in similar shells and now I was back in the middle of another murder.

  Smith questioned me first, then Simon McGuire. I was not surprised to hear that the young man was indeed between semesters. After two years at Cullowhee up in the mountains, he was taking a year off at the beach to earn more tuition money while trying to figure out what he really wanted to be when he grew up. Linville had hired him only two weeks ago when Midge Pope checked himself out of a sanitarium up near Asheville and came back to Beaufort to start drinking again.

  “My girlfriend’s mother is office manager for Mrs. Pope and she knew I had experience working as a hospital orderly for a couple of summers, so when Mrs. Pope said she was looking for somebody right away, Mrs. Abbott told her about me.”

  On his first day there, he told us, Midge Pope was present when Linville Pope outlined his duties.

  “She told him she wasn’t going to try to keep him from drinking anymore. If he was determined to kill himself, she knew she couldn’t stop it, but she couldn’t watch and she couldn’t be with him every minute. She said if he’d agree to let me help him so he didn’t drive drunk or get out on a boat drunk or walk in the road where somebody might run over him, then she’d see that there was a case of bourbon in his sitting room from here on out.”

  She was half-crying when she said it, McGuire told us. And Midge had taken her hands and there were tears in his own eyes when he told her how very sorry he was that he was such a poor excuse for a husband. “She said she’d rather have him like he was than any other man in Beaufort and then they went off together to her rooms down at the other end of the house and I thought maybe they weren’t going to need me after all,” said McGuire. “But by that evening, Midge was blind out of his mind drunk and I swear I don’t think he’s been cold stone sober fifteen minutes since then.”

  Hardly more than a boy, Simon McGuire seemed thoroughly shaken by Linville’s death, and as it all sank in, he was now ravaged by guilt. “If I wasn’t asleep,” he castigated himself, “I might have—”

  “I doubt it,” Smith said kindly. “It’d be nice if you’d been a witness so you could describe who shot her, but hell, son, you might’ve been shot then, too. Who knows? Now when did you actually last see Miz Pope?”

  “Between three-thirty and four,” he hazarded. “She came into Midge’s sitting room to say she’d asked some judge to come by for a drink about five—” He looked around as if expecting a black-robed figure to suddenly come strolling through the French doors.

  “That was me,” I told him.

  “You’re a judge?”

  Under different circumstances, I might have been nettled by his excessive surprise. Now I let it pass with a nod.

  “Anyhow,” he continued, “she said she was going to go check on the boat—she just bought a new little runabout—and then freshen up. When she was expecting company, I was supposed to keep Midge in his wing of the house. That was another part of their bargain, but today he was sort of ornery about it and wouldn’t settle down. I thought he’d finally passed out but for some reason he must’ve got out while I was asleep and then Miss—the Judge woke me up.”

  His long square jaw tightened convulsively and Smith patted his shoulder.

  As Smith turned in his chair, Lev sat back warily.

  “And you, Mr. Schuster?”

  Again, Lev explained about spending the afternoon cruising around back of Harkers Island looking at various pieces of property and then his decision to drop in on Linville.

  “You happen to notice any other boats around as you turned into the channel?” asked Smith.

  “I wasn’t paying too much attention,” Lev admitted. “According to the chart, when you swing around the point here, the channel goes from seventeen feet of water to seven quite rapidly and if you don’t keep your eyes on the channel markers, you can run aground because it’s only two or three feet deep on either side.”

  Quig Smith nodded. “All the same, Mr. Schuster, weren’t there any other boats in the channel?”

  Beneath the deep ledges of his brow, Lev’s eyes narrowed as he tried to remember. “As I started my turn, there was a speedboat going straight in to Taylors Creek, back toward Beaufort. I guess I noticed because it’s a no-wake zone and the guy hadn’t cut his speed yet. Once I got around on this side though, the channel ends just a few hundred feet on and there was nothing as big as me there.” Absently, he
twisted a tuft of his short beard as he concentrated. “I think I might have passed some small open boats when I skirted the marshes, but I was concentrating so hard on the channel I couldn’t begin to say for sure.”

  “So you moored out there in the channel about when, would you say?”

  “About a quarter to five,” Lev answered promptly. “I remember thinking it wasn’t quite time to splice the mainbrace but that maybe Mrs. Pope would offer me a beer anyhow. I got the dinghy into the water and as I motored over, I saw something white and black lying on the pier, but it wasn’t till I got out of the dinghy that I realized it was her. I thought maybe she’d fallen or something and then I saw all the blood and couldn’t get a pulse. I ran up to the house, but the doors were locked and nobody came when I pounded on them, so I ran back down and took the dinghy back to my boat because I had a cellular—”

  His voice faltered and we all became aware that Midge Pope had appeared in the doorway. His bloody shirt was half off, he now wore thonged sandals on his sockless feet, his hair was damp as if he’d held it under a stream of cold water and he looked ghastly. But though his hand held a half-empty bottle of Early Times and though his hand shook as he pointed it at Lev, his voice was strong when he roared, “You Jew bastard! You killed my wife!”

  “Hey, now, Midge,” said Smith, grabbing Pope before he could swing that bottle at Lev.

  “He did, Quig. I saw him. I was standing right at those windows and I saw him. Bastard sat right out there in his boat and took aim at Linvie with his rifle and dropped her like a beautiful loon. You know how beautiful they are, Quig?”

  “I know, Midge. I know.”

  “I told Linvie, I said, ‘Honey, you look cuter’n a loon today in your black-and-white checked feathers,’ and she laughed and time I got to her, she was gone, Quig. Gone.”

  Rage dissipated into grief.

  “What’d you do then, Midge?” Smith asked gently.

  “Tried to call you, but the damn phone wouldn’t work,” he sobbed. “And he followed me up to the house, but I saw him coming,” he said with drunken craftiness, “and I locked the doors so he couldn’t get in, but the phone...“