Okay, okay. Even so, just past Otway, I pulled in at a florist that was still open. The young woman behind the counter said she’d heard that Andy Bynum’s body had been released to a funeral home on the island and that the funeral was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. I ordered a basket of silk flowers to be sent: Dutch irises, buttercups, red poppies and lilies of the valley.
Preacher or pragmatist?
• • •
When I got back to the cottage, the Bynum house already had a closed-up look to it. His sons live further down the island, near the ‘fish house, and I guessed the wake was probably being held at the funeral home.
I’d barely stepped through the door when the phone began ringing. Yeah, it could’ve been a dozen different people—I would even have welcomed somebody selling aluminum siding—but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
Actually, it could have been one of the mouthier ones. Could have been Andrew or Herman or Will or Jack. Instead, it was only Seth, five brothers up from me, and the brother who always cut me the most slack.
“Hey, Seth,” I chirped. “You want me to bring you and Minnie some clams Friday?”
He didn’t even bother to answer that. “What’d you go and get mixed up in now, Deb’rah?” he asked sternly.
At one time or another, most of my brothers had used this cottage or gone fishing with Carl, so Seth had met Andy and he listened without fussing as I explained the situation and how I was only tangentially involved. “How’d you hear so quick, anyhow?”
“Some SBI agent down there recognized your name and told Terry and Terry told Dwight and Dwight called me.
“I swear, you’d think SBI agents and deputy sheriffs would have better things to talk about. I hope nobody’s worried Daddy with it.”
“Not yet,” Seth said. Concern was still in his voice. “You sure you haven’t stepped in the middle of something, shug?”
I promised him that it was sheer coincidence and he promised that he’d do what he could to keep Daddy from hearing; and yeah, long as I was coming back Friday, a mess of clams might be right nice.
• • •
There was still no sign of Guthrie when I carried a glass of tea out to sit on the porch and unwind, but Mark Lewis and Makely Lawrence, two more of the neighboring youths, were headed up the path from the water, each with a bucket of clams they’d dug.
“You wouldn’t want to sell me a half-dozen, would you?” I called.
Mark grinned. “No, but I’ll give you six if that’s all you want.”
“I only want to make a small chowder.”
“You give her three and I’ll give her three,” said Makely, not to be outdone by his cousin.
They set their buckets on the porch and each picked out their three biggest. The clams had been dug out of the mud, but they were the size of coffee saucers. As I should have suspected, the boys didn’t want money, so much as they wanted details about Andy Bynum’s death.
“Didn’t Guthrie tell you?” I asked.
“Yeah, well—” said Makely.
“How come everybody says that?”
Makely looked at Mark, who said, “He got into trouble for taking his granddaddy’s skiff out.”
“What? I thought it was his.”
“Ain’t,” Makely said tersely.
I let it pass and told them about going out with Guthrie, finding Andy lying dead, then Jay Hadley’s arrival, followed by the police boat.
“Who do you think could have shot him?” I asked, curious to know what their elders were saying.
Again the shrugs.
“Drugs,” Makely grunted. He was younger and almost as imaginative as Guthrie.
Mark was more thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Lots of people were mad at him ‘cause he was for making everybody buy a license to sell their fish. Like, if that happens, we wouldn’t be supposed to sell you a mess of crabs or anything unless we had a license.”
“Yeah,” said Makely. “Heard tell shrimpers wanted to burn his house down.”
“Just talk,” said Mark, dismissively.
Perhaps. But as I was scrubbing the clams later, I thought about the island’s reputation for settling its own scores. Even outsiders like me remembered the bitter anger and deep, deep hurt when Shackleford Banks was declared a wilderness area under the US Park Service.
Shackleford was the ancestral home of most islanders until the hurricanes of 1896 and 1899 forced them to relocate, and almost every island family maintained a rough fish camp over there. Unfortunately, few had clear deeds to the land. The two or three who did were given lifetime rights, but they fared no better than those with no deeds. When the untitled cabins were confiscated in 1985, some of the dispossessed went over and torched all the
