Shooting At Loons Part 18

"Would you visit the parents' iniquity upon their young?" chided the preacher "Surely even the rich are ent.i.tled to cus.h.i.+on 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.

a a a 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 b.u.t.ton 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

d.a.m.ned 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 uniformed 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 sungla.s.ses 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 sh.e.l.ls, the grace of sandpipers that ran across the clean white sand and left lines of tiny neat tracks like featherst.i.tching on a crazy quilt.

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 sh.e.l.l, the other in a moon snail sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l: "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 sh.e.l.l! 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.

a a a 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+p 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

"h.e.l.lo?"

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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 gra.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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.