Shooting at Loons

expression on her face was that of someone caught in a lapse of good taste. “God forgive me, you know what my first thought was?”

“That now that boat storage facility next to Jill won’t be built?”

Barbara Jean gave a bleak smile. “I didn’t know I could be this unchristian, this callous.”

“It’s not being callous. You guys weren’t exactly best friends, she wanted Neville Fishery and she was threatening the peace and quiet of your daughter’s home. It’s only human to be relieved that those things will go on hold now.”

She sighed and started asking for more details: when exactly did Quig Smith think she’d been killed? Had there been any witness?

“Midge? Midge was there?”

“Evidently he’s been back a couple of weeks, holed up in his rooms, drinking steadily. He says he was standing in the sunroom and saw it happen. That someone out in a boat aimed a shoulder gun at Linville while she was down on the dock, but he was so drunk at the time, Smith’s not sure he’s a credible witness. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the rescue truck’s siren.”

“No, I was—no, I didn’t.”

She set down her glass of iced tea and headed for the wet bar just inside the door. “I need something stiffer. Fix one for you?”

“No, thank you,” I said, but I did stir an extra spoon of sugar into my tea.

When she returned, she carried an old-fashioned glass with two inches of something amber over a couple of ice cubes.

“Is that Chet coming in?” I asked, as a boat slowly peeled off from the channel.

We took our glasses and went down to meet him at the landing. As with most people who live on the water, he had cut his motor at the precise instant needed to lift it before the propeller blades scraped bottom, yet still had the momentum to carry him in to his dock.

Before he could even throw her a line, Barbara Jean began to tell him about Linville Pope’s murder and made me finish.

“What?” Chet stood in the boat to listen before handing out a bucket of fish and getting out himself with a couple of rods. He was still walking stiffly from his pulled muscle and he shook his head. “My God, Deb’rah. You really stepped in the middle of it this week, didn’t you, girl?”

Back at the house, he dumped the three fish he’d caught into a chest of ice—“Not much to show for a whole afternoon”—rinsed off his hands and took the drink Barbara Jean had fixed him.

“Poor Linville,” he said. “And poor Midge. Half his problem is that he could never give her what she wanted.”

“She wanted to be Queen of Beaufort,” Barbara Jean said sharply. “Let’s not forget that.”

“De mortuis, honey.”

“I’m not speaking ill of the dead,” she argued. “Only the truth. She wanted to close Neville Fishery. She never knew what it was like before. No sense of history, no—”

She turned to me abruptly. “Did you ever hear them singing on the water, Deborah?”

“The chanteymen? No. I have one of the tapes though, and I can imagine how it must have sounded.”

“You can’t!” she said passionately, and I don’t think it was the bourbon speaking. “When I was a little girl, we still had one boat that didn’t have a power block, and my daddy used to let me go out with them once in a while. They’d let down the two little purse boats to circle a school of menhaden and the men had to pull the heavy nets by hand. That’s why they sang those long slow chanties, to synchronize the hardening of the fish against the main boat. And the sound of those black voices floating across the water from one boat to the other—the leader would sing out the first words and the men would heave away as they echoed the strong slow beats—I’ll never hear anything as beautiful again in my life.”

Tears spilled from her eyes.

“Ah, honey,” said Chet, taking her in his arms and patting her tenderly on the back.

“And that’s what Linville Pope wanted to destroy.”

“I thought the chanteymen were replaced by hydraulic net-pullers twenty years ago,” I said, remembering how Linville had taunted her on that point. “She didn’t have anything to do with that, did she?”

“But some of their sons still work for me. They link back into that heritage and continue the work their fathers did and she would have destroyed that link. And taken something precious from me as well.”

She laid her head on Chet’s shoulder. “I didn’t wish Linville Pope dead, Deborah, but I can’t say I’m sorry that I don’t have to keep fighting her off.”

I had to admit that given Linville’s persistent techniques, there might well be a lot of similar feelings all around this part of Carteret County when the news got out.

Chet and Barbara Jean invited me to stay for supper, but it was getting too heavy for me.

“Sorry,” I told them, “but I’ve got a bunch of reading to do and I’d better get to it.”

“Andy’s papers?” asked Barbara Jean.

“Papers?” said Chet.

“I told you about them this morning,” she said. “That research Andy was doing on Pope Properties.”

“Oh yeah. Find anything yet, Deborah?”