Shooting at Loons

“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.