I usually try to take Aunt Zell’s advice whenever I can.
Besides, he was much, much better than Fudge Ripple ice cream.
13
Every morning, by the time I got vertical, Kidd Chapin had been gone, so when Mickey Mantle’s banty roosters woke me at seven-thirty Friday morning, I was amused to turn over in bed and find his head still on the pillow beside me. Along with the rooster crows, a cool breeze drifted in through the open windows.
“No coffee in bed?” I asked, snuggling down under the quilt.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he yawned. “I’ll take mine black.”
I hit him with my pillow. “Just because you were top oyster last night doesn’t mean I’m going to turn into Henrietta Hausfrau.”
He let out a muffled yelp and wrapped those long skinny legs around mine.
“On the other hand,” I said, wriggling free, “fair is fair, I suppose.”
“And even in the morning, you’re more than fair.” He caught my hand and pulled me down for a long kiss that started at my lips and wound up on my breasts. “In fact,” he said huskily, “I’ll up my offer to twelve cows and a bushel of clams.”
“Throw in a peck of oysters and I’ll put in a good word for you with my daddy.”
“Oysters are out of season,” he murmured and began to do such entrancing things with my body that it was another twenty minutes before I got out of bed and said “Coffee” with much more firmness than I felt.
Jeans, sneakers and a Carolina sweatshirt, then out to the kitchen where I filled the coffee maker with cold water and measured out four scoops of a Kenyan blend I’d found in the freezer.
Andy Bynum’s papers were on the table right where I’d left them last night and the sight of them rolled such a heavy black stone over my lighthearted mood that I grabbed up a bag of stale bread and told Kidd, “Let’s go feed the gulls while the coffee’s making.”
“You do remember I’m supposed to be staking out loon hunters, don’t you?”
“Mahlon won’t know you’re Wildlife. He’ll just think I’m a loose woman.”
He laughed. “You go ahead. I’ll shave and start breakfast.”
As I started out the door Kidd said, “Listen, Ms. Judge. You know what I said about oyster season? It really did close the thirty-first of March.”
“So?”
“So maybe we ought to talk about it when you get back. Scrambled eggs or over easy for you?”
“Over easy,” I said and went out into the bright April sunshine. The seriousness of his tone brought back that sinking feeling. Was this his tactful way of telling me that it’d been fun, but now the season was closed on any further relationship?
I was already into a Scarlett O’Hara mode on Chet, so I added Kidd to the things I’d think about later and surrendered myself to the delight of feeding gulls on the wing.
One or two are always cruising the shoreline and as soon as the first gull swooped to catch a bread morsel, a dozen more appeared from nowhere until the bright blue air around me was filled with flashing white wings. Playing the wind, they hovered over the water like hummingbirds in midair as I tossed the broken pieces high above me, then they wheeled and dipped and soared again until all my bread was gone.
As I turned back to land, Mahlon Davis greeted me from his porch with a smile that turned to a scowl when two large white trucks pulled into the lot beside his.
They were from that Morehead waste removal service that Linville Pope had hired to clear Mahlon’s debris from her property. One had side railings for hauling, the other held a pint-size yellow bulldozer.
Mahlon’s thin shoulders stiffened angrily as three muscular workmen got out of the trucks and began letting down a steel ramp to off-load the dozer.
“They must not know Linville Pope’s dead,” I said.
Mahlon gave a threatening growl and struck off across the lot. I followed, sensing the beginning of a brawl. And wasn’t I a judge? Didn’t I know how to arbitrate?
By the time I picked my way through the junk and brambles, things had already begun to escalate. Mahlon’s accent was too thick to let me distinguish his stream of angry threats, but evidently the workmen were
