Well, he’d liked an occasional beer. Had never said no when Carl offered him one. “Just don’t disfurnish yourself,” he’d say, making sure Carl wasn’t handing over the last one in his cooler.
And he liked to make people laugh with tales of his younger, roguish days. Even though it’d been years since he’d aimed a gun at a loon or turtle, Andy had once hunted both endangered species with enthusiasm.
“But I shot my last loon twenty years ago,” he told us. “There’d been a piece in the paper about how they was dying out and I’d been feeling right bad about it even though we all knew them Canadians was the ones really hurting the loon population. They used the eggs for glue or something. Didn’t even give the babies time to hatch out. Anyhow, it was March and me and some fellows was over on Shackleford freezing our own tailfeathers off and I had this fancy new Winchester I give a man in Portsmouth three hundred dollars for. Raiford and me, we was ‘way down the dune ready to fire when we heard two gunshots, then nothing. It’d commenced to rain a little and Raiford walked up on the sandbank and looked over to see what was happening, and there was the game warden writing everybody out a ticket. Raiford sort of slithered back down the sandbank and commenced scooping us out a hole and we buried both guns ‘fore you could say ‘magistrate’s court’ three times.
“Then we got back in my skiff and was sitting there all innocent like when the game warden come around that hummock of grass. ‘Y’all part of this loon hunt?’ he yells out to us. ‘Loon hunt?’ says Raiford. ‘Ain’t that against the law?’
“‘Bout then, that drizzle started getting serious and game wardens always did make Raiford nervous, so he started the motor and we come on back to the island and waited till it slacked off and the game warden was gone. And don’t you know we couldn’t remember exactly where we’d buried them two guns. Took us three days ‘fore we scratched ‘em out again.”
Like many a reformed rogue, Andy had become a staunch upholder of the law, even game laws. Nevertheless, the last time I was down, he ruefully admitted it was still hard for him to refuse an invitation to pull up a chair when the table held a dish of stewed loon.
As water ballooned his shirt, I saw a moon snail emerge from beneath the collar. It must have been trapped when we turned the body. As soon as it pulled itself free, it dropped down into the green undulating grasses that intertwined with his hair. Small dark shapes scuttled across Andy’s chest.
The crabs were back.
Without a watch, there was no way to know how long Guthrie had been gone. Ten minutes? Twenty?
As my eyes strained for shore, they were suddenly caught by a speedboat that was heading straight out toward me from a point further down the island. One person, a slender figure in a blue shirt, stood at the wheel and held a fast course that implied intimate familiarity with this particular stretch of the sound. Guthrie had already cut his engine by the time he was this far beyond the channel, but this boater was either suicidal or else knew to the precise second how long to keep the propeller down.
The motor cut off just as I was expecting to see churned sand and fouled blades, and the continued impetus carried the boat across the shallows to end up less than thirty feet away.
It was a woman about my age, mid-thirties, in white shorts, short blonde hair and those mirrored sunglasses that I hate because you never get a reading on the person’s eyes. I particularly hate them when the wearer’s carrying a .22 rifle like this unsmiling woman was. She held it loosely, with a casual ease that implied the same expertise as she’d already shown with her boat handling.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing out here?”
“Waiting for the police,” I answered, in case she decided to start pointing that thing. I gestured toward Andy Bynum’s body, but his skiff blocked her view and she didn’t immediately grasp the situation.
Although the volume was turned way down, I could hear the staticky chatter of a CB radio from the dashboard as she propped the rifle on the seat of her boat, swung over the edge into thigh-deep water that would have had me flinching and moaning, and pulled her boat over to tie up at a marker stake near me.
“What’s the law got to do with Andy’s—” That’s when she saw him.
“Good Lord Jesus! What happened?”
She waded nearer. Tiny minnows darted in and out of the dead man’s white hair and an ooze of red continued to flower from his chest.
“Looks like someone shot him,” I said.
“So that’s why Mahlon Davis took off so fast and left you out here by yourself.”
“That was Guthrie, not his grandfather.” I eased down from the piling and faced her. “Mind telling me how come you were watching us so closely?”
She gestured toward the line of stakes that enclosed most of the sandbank. “My husband Hes and me, this is our leased bottom.”
Before I could ask why that required an armed investigation, she splashed back to her boat, pulled herself in and reached for her CB mike. “Hadley to base. Over.”
Through the static, I heard a female voice. “What’s happening, Mom? Over.”
“Call Marvin Willitt. See if he’s heard he’s needed out here. Out.”
She replaced the mike and those mirrored glasses reflected my image. Well, two could play that game. My sunglasses were perched up in my hair and I pulled them down over my eyes like a mask as I asked, “Who’s Marvin Willitt?”
“Sheriff’s deputy for down east. Assigned to Harkers Island. You staying on the island?”
“Yes.”
“You knew Andy?”
“Yes, I knew him.” My feet were starting to go numb again. “Look, you mind if I sit in your boat?”
“Help yourself.”
