Shooting at Loons

by Margaret Maron

  He handed me a stainless steel bowl with all the shrimp offal. “You’d better get rid of this before it starts to smell.”

  I took the bowl without arguing, but only because I had ulterior motives. “Don’t wait up,” I said and stepped out on the porch in time to see Mickey Mantle go sailing by in his pickup, headed for the road.

  Luckily, all I have to do is judge ‘em; I don’t have to catch ‘em.

  • • •

  Mahlon and Guthrie were out working on the trawler as I dumped the shrimp heads and shells for the minnows and crabs to feed on. Back into the water from whence they came, I told myself. Ashes to ashes, sea to the sea.

  Guthrie called a greeting and I didn’t need a second invitation to walk over and see what they were up to.

  They had almost finished getting all the juniper strips on the hull and the bow was an elegant flare that would soon be sanded smooth to receive its first coat of paint. The cabin was nearly ready for fitting out, but tonight their attention seemed centered on a large greasy piece of machinery that sat beside the boat on concrete blocks.

  “Hey, you got your engine!” I said. “Andy’s boys?”

  “Yeah,” Mahlon grunted as he secured a heavy chain around the thing.

  “Drew and Maxton brought it just a little while ago,” said Guthrie, with a face-splitting grin. “They were there when Andy first promised Grandpap, and they said they wouldn’t go back on his word.”

  A trestle had been rigged over the open hole in the deck and now they were waiting for Mickey Mantle, who’d gone off somewhere to borrow a block and tackle so they could hoist the engine into place tonight.

  In all the years that I’d been coming down, I’d never seen Mahlon work this steadily in one sustained effort. It was almost as if he believed that getting this boat completed and into the water would somehow put things back the way they were before so many rules and regulations began to endanger the different freedoms that gave meaning and substance to his life.

  I could have told Kidd that the reason he hadn’t caught Mahlon shooting at loons was because he was too busy shooting for something more important: his last chance at shaping a destiny for himself and Mickey Mantle and Guthrie, a chance for the two adults to get out from under, a chance for one more generation to live independent and unfettered.

  The only fly in Guthrie’s ointment that evening was worrying about how they were going to shift the boat off Linville Pope’s property before she served them with papers for trespassing.

  “We’ll do it ‘fore that time comes,” Mahlon said gruffly as he picked up his hammer and fitted another strip of cypress to the hull.

  “Didn’t you hear?” I said. “She was killed this afternoon.”

  Even Mahlon quit work for that. They listened intently as I described what had happened; and as with Barbara Jean, Guthrie’s first reaction was purely personal. “That mean them garbage men won’t be back tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Good! Right, Grandpap? Now we don’t have to shift her till she’s done, do we?”

  “Hand me them nails,” Mahlon grunted. “You keep talking and not working and we’ll never get her finished.”

  “Yonder comes Daddy,” Guthrie said.

  The truck headlights jounced down the rutted drive and Mickey Mantle made a skidding three-point turn so that the back of his truck was in position.

  “Hey-o there, Judge!”

  “I thought you had your license pulled,” I said.

  He grinned. “Judges don’t write tickets, do they?”

  “Daddy!” Guthrie interrupted. “Did you hear?” His changing voice squeaked in his excitement. He clambered up into the truck bed and handed out the block and tackle, chattering the whole time to his father about Linville’s murder.

  “Yeah, I just heard it. Sammy said it was on the news.”

  “Y’all here to talk or get this motor in?” said Mahlon.

  When they had the block and tackle attached to the trestle and a heavy cable fixed to the chain around the engine, they hooked the other end to the pickup. I volunteered to crank up the truck and pull the cable slow and steady for them while the three of them guided the heavy engine up over the side of the boat. Then I backed up so they could lower it into the hold.

  “Damned if I don’t feel like busting a bottle of beer over that engine right now!” Mickey Mantle said when the chains and cable were removed and the engine sat squarely where it was supposed to.

  “Time enough for beers when we bring in our first catch,” Mahlon said sharply. “Hand me my saw and let’s get these last strips on ‘fore midnight.”

  “Before I go,” I said, “I need to ask you. Any of y’all see somebody break in over there this afternoon?”

  That got their attention.

  “Naw,” said Mickey Mantle.

  “I was fishing,” said Mahlon.

  “What’d they take?” asked Guthrie.

  “Nothing, so far’s I can tell,” I admitted. “But they messed up Carl’s lock and strewed my things around.”

  “I worn’t here,” Mahlon said again and revved up his Skilsaw with a conversation-stopping roar.

  I waved goodnight and started back to the cottage, but as I circled the boat shed, I heard my name called in a voice so low that the noisy saw almost drowned it out.

  It was Mahlon’s wife. White-haired and half-crippled with arthritis, the reclusive Effrida beckoned to me from a darkened side window.

  “I heared what you asked them,” she said in an urgent rush of island speech. “I seen him, the man what broke into Carl’s this evening. It was a few minutes after five.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “I seen him before. Lives over to Beaufort, I think, but I couldn’t call his name.”

  She then proceeded to describe Chet Winberry right down to the white fishing cap and navy-blue windbreaker he’d been wearing when Barbara Jean and I met him at their landing.

  No wonder he’d caught only three fish all afternoon.

  12

  There is a land of pure delight,

  Where saints immortal reign;

  There everlasting spring abides,

  And never-withering flowers...

  But tim’rous mortals start and shrink

  To cross this narrow sea, And linger, trembling on the brink,

  And fear to launch away.

  ...Could we but climb where Moses stood,

  And view the landscape o’er,

  Not Jordan’s stream nor death’s cold flood

  Should fright us from the shore,

  —Isaac Watts

  “A navy-blue windbreaker with attached hood,” I raged to Kidd Chapin. “Remember how you thought last night’s prowler was wearing a hooded jacket? The lying bastard! Pulled a muscle jogging for his newspaper this morning, did he? Too bad he didn’t break his goddamned leg last night.”

  “Now hold on,” said Kidd. “Just because he broke into your place doesn’t mean he was the one you chased. Think about it. Why would he look for the papers over there if he thought they were here?”

  “Because he didn’t know they were here till this morning. Jay Hadley discussed it with Alliance members at Andy’s funeral, but Chet was talking to someone else when they went into their huddle. Barbara Jean told him at breakfast that I had Andy’s papers, and I bet he worked the conversation around to find out naturally so she doesn’t suspect a thing. He must have searched the trunk of my car at noon and when he didn’t find them there, he rode his boat over here.”

  I was furious when I thought of Chet’s nice helpful offer to look over the papers for me because, quote, “I know most of the players.”

  Didn’t he just, the bastard?

  “Well at least he saved me some time,” I told Kidd. “I was going to start with Linville’s latest deals and then work back to the earliest. Now I’ll start with the Ritchie House transaction.”

  While I retrieved the relevant documents from
their hiding place between the newspaper sections and started laying them out in chronological order on the kitchen table, Kidd puttered quietly between refrigerator and sink and fixed me a shrimp salad.

  It was delicious. “I didn’t know I’d brought lettuce,” I said.

  “You didn’t,” he answered. “You also didn’t bring the green peppers or the tomatoes. Or the pint of ice cream in the freezer.”

  “Ice cream?”

  “Fudge Ripple.” He cocked his long homely face at my interest. “If you’re nice to me, I may let you have a spoonful.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” I said, feeling oddly comforted.

  • • •

  An hour later, I knew why Chet had tried so desperately to steal those papers.

  It wasn’t hard to find once I knew what I was looking for, although I still might have missed the significance if Andy hadn’t practically drawn an arrow.

  Twelve years ago, Linville Pope had bought from Ritchie Janson the waterfront property that later became the Ritchie House. She had put up her husband’s dilapidated Morehead motel as part of the security. The rest was secured by the title to the Washington Neville, put up by Chester Amos Winberry with his power of attorney for Neville Fishery when he co-signed for the balance of the loan. The bank officer who approved the loan was probably one of Chet’s good ol’ buddies.

  All done with a wink and a nod, no doubt.

  “What’s illegal about that?” asked Kidd.

  “The thing is, he had a fiduciary interest in the property because he was also Ritchie Janson’s attorney. Even if he were scrupulous about the actual sale—which, in point of fact, he wasn’t—that would certainly get a jaundiced look from the Bar Association if it came out, although he does seem to have made Linville pay a fair price.”

  “How was he unscrupulous about the sale?”

  “Look at the date Ritchie Janson’s supposed to have signed the bill of sale.”

  “December fifth. And?”

  “Now read his obituary notices from the local newspaper.”

  “Died December twenty-second after a lengthy hospital stay. Oh, so he let her take advantage of a really sick old man?”

  “Not just sick, Kidd. Look at this letter to the editor where somebody wrote an appreciation of his life. See where she says that he lingered a month after his last stroke, but never regained consciousness? Not too many unconscious men sign bills of sale that I know of.”

  Kidd gave a low whistle. “Judge Winberry forged his signature?”

  “He wasn’t a judge back then.” I leaned back in my chair, fitting all the pieces together. “What really must be tying a knot in his tail is that he used Barbara Jean’s boat to start Linville Pope on a fast track that eventually threatened the things Barbara Jean values most.”

  “He must have been sleeping with her,” said Kidd.

  “Yes,” I agreed slowly. “But he’s so crazy about Barbara Jean.”

  “Not always a contradiction,” he reminded me wryly.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Except for Mahlon Davis—and he thinks everybody’s out to get him, so it doesn’t count—people say Andy was one of the most law-abiding men on the island. He wouldn’t touch anybody’s clam beds, they say, or take a scallop or oyster out of season, but he might bend the rules to protect members of the Alliance. Quig Smith says Andy made a phone call Sunday morning from Cab’s and was looking at his watch like he had an appointment. What if he threatened to tell Barbara Jean what he’d found if Chet didn’t get Linville to quit lobbying against commercial fishing? And what if he set up a meeting out on the water to hear Chet’s answer?”

  “And ol’ Chet just happened to bring along a .22? Quig told me all his long guns were stolen.”

  “So he says. Very convenient theft, a day or two before Andy gets shot. And something else, Kidd—he was out on the water today when Linville was killed. If these documents were destroyed, who else would know or care enough to go back through all the public records and reassemble the proof that he was involved with her twelve years ago?”

  “That’s an awful big assumption you’re making there, Ms. Judge. Maybe Bynum kept checking his watch so he’d know when the tide was low enough to dig clams.”

  I pushed away from the papers, overwhelmed with something close to nausea. I liked Chet and Barbara Jean. But I’d liked Andy and Linville, too, and it sickened me to think that one friend could kill another.

  For a moment I felt like taking the advice given to Odysseus: I should put an oar on my shoulder and march inland until I got so far from the ocean and fishing and all these self-absorbed coastal conflicts that people would ask me what strange object I carried on my shoulder.

  As if from far, far away, I heard Kidd’s voice. “Ms. Judge?”

  Abruptly, I stood and looked straight up into his hazel eyes. Our lips were only inches apart. “My name is Deborah.”

  “I knew that,” he said, and bent to kiss me.

  The kiss went on and on until it seemed we both must drown in Homer’s wine-dark sea. Our lips parted for a moment and his breathing was as ragged as mine before he drew me to him again. Automatically, I started toward the bedroom, then hesitated. We weren’t stupid teenagers any longer.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, “but we can’t. I don’t have any protec—”

  He laid his fingers on my lips and gave a lopsided smile. “Now I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but lettuce and peppers and tomatoes and ice cream weren’t all I brought with me this evening.”

  Delighted laughter suffused me. “I bet you were an Eagle Scout.”

  “And a member of the Optimists,” he said solemnly.

  • • •

  It is absolutely true what they say about men with long thin fingers, but his hands were so gentle and so slow that I was roused to a frenzy before I finally found out for sure.

  Afterward, when we lay tumbled and satisfied against the pillows and against each other, his hands lazily wandered across my body. “Anybody ever tell you what beautiful breasts you have?”

  I gazed down at them in the semi-darkness of the room. “Eight-cow breasts,” I said smugly.

  “Huh?”

  “There’s this huge stack of National Geographics in our attic. When I started to develop, I got really self-conscious about it because all my friends were getting these little round scoops of ice cream and I was getting cones. Then I came across one of those pseudo-sociological studies of some African tribe—you know the kind of thing they used to do where they’d show the native women half naked, but the men were only photographed from the navel up so that you never got to see their manhood?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, according to the article, round-breasted women averaged six cows in the marriage market, but the fathers of cone-breasted women could get eight cows.”

  He cupped both of my breasts in his hands and kissed them. “These are worth at least ten.”

  “Are you saying I’m fat?” I asked, letting my own hands begin to wander.

  “Not fat. But I do like knowing it’s a woman in bed with me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  • • •

  The nicest thing about the cottage’s bathroom was that Carl had salvaged from somewhere an old claw-footed tub that was deep and wide and long enough for two. We ran it full of hot water, dumped in some bubble bath Celeste or Carlette must have left here once, and soaked for an hour, talking lazily about this and that. I knew that I’d have to go to Quig Smith tomorrow with what I’d found, but for tonight...

  The telephone beside the bed rang sharply at eleven-ten.

  “Deborah?” said my Aunt Zell. “Was that you I saw just now on the news, leaving the house where that Beaufort woman was murdered?”

  I admitted it was and made light of my involvement. Aunt Zell doesn’t fuss, but she does worry and she wasn’t happy to think I�
��d stumbled into a second shooting.

  “You take care of yourself, you hear?”

  “I will,” I promised, then told her goodnight and reached for Kidd.

  I usually try to take Aunt Zell’s advice whenever I can.

  Besides, he was much, much better than Fudge Ripple ice cream.

  13

  Throw out the Life-Line to danger-fraught men,

  Sinking in anguish where you’ve never been:

  Winds of temptation and billows of woe

  Will soon hurl them out where the dark waters flow.

  Throw out the Life-Line! Throw out the Life-Line!

  Someone is drifting away;

  Throw out the Life-Line! Throw out the Life-Line!

  Someone is sinking today.

  —Edward S. Ufford

  Every morning, by the time I got vertical, Kidd Chapin had been gone, so when Mickey Mantle’s banty roosters woke me at seven-thirty Friday morning, I was amused to turn over in bed and find his head still on the pillow beside me. Along with the rooster crows, a cool breeze drifted in through the open windows.

  “No coffee in bed?” I asked, snuggling down under the quilt.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he yawned. “I’ll take mine black.”

  I hit him with my pillow. “Just because you were top oyster last night doesn’t mean I’m going to turn into Henrietta Hausfrau.”

  He let out a muffled yelp and wrapped those long skinny legs around mine.

  “On the other hand,” I said, wriggling free, “fair is fair, I suppose.”

  “And even in the morning, you’re more than fair.” He caught my hand and pulled me down for a long kiss that started at my lips and wound up on my breasts. “In fact,” he said huskily, “I’ll up my offer to twelve cows and a bushel of clams.”

  “Throw in a peck of oysters and I’ll put in a good word for you with my daddy.”

  “Oysters are out of season,” he murmured and began to do such entrancing things with my body that it was another twenty minutes before I got out of bed and said “Coffee” with much more firmness than I felt.

  Jeans, sneakers and a Carolina sweatshirt, then out to the kitchen where I filled the coffee maker with cold water and measured out four scoops of a Kenyan blend I’d found in the freezer.