“We gotta get her a schedule and teach her some rudiments of marine biology,” Quig told Kidd. “And that reminds me. You gonna be at the clean water hearing tonight?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Kidd.
Quig grinned. “Naw, I didn’t think you would.”
While Kidd walked out to the car with him, I called Chet’s number.
“Deborah!” he said. “You just missed Barbara Jean. She’s gone antiquing with a friend over near Goldsboro.”
Was his tone a little too hearty?
“That’s good,” I said evenly, “because it’s you I’m coming to see.”
• • •
Kidd rode over with me.
The light on the Earl C. Davis Memorial Bridge went from green to yellow and I accelerated across before it could draw up to let a tall-masted boat through.
“Who was Earl C. Davis anyhow?” I wondered aloud when I was safely on the other side.
“Huh?”
“That’s what they used to say down here when I was a boy. Right after the moon landing. I guess Owen Fulcher and Earl Davis were supposed to be sharp traders.”
“Like Linville Pope?”
“Don’t know, shug.”
We rode in silent thought through Bettie, then across North River, and south on Highway 70. When we neared the outskirts of Beaufort, Kidd said, “What are you going to do with those papers?”
“What should I do with them?”
“Not for me to say, Ms. Judge.”
• • •
I left Andy’s papers locked in the trunk.
Chet seemed not to have heard of the morning’s events and I was too edgy to tell him. He was surprised to see Kidd with me, but made a smooth recovery as he showed us out to the sunlit terrace and said, “Get anybody a drink?”
I refused and Kidd allowed as how maybe he’d walk down to Chet’s landing. “Give y’all a chance to talk.”
“He knows, doesn’t he?” Chet asked, sitting heavily in one of the Adirondack chairs beneath the purple wisteria.
“Yes, but no one will ever hear it from him.”
“What about you?”
“Chet—”
“Look, I’m not going to beg. Just try to understand, okay? Between Jill starting to date and the fishery, too, Barbara Jean had her hands so full that she didn’t have any time left over for me.”
“And Linville did?”
“She was the one who encouraged me to get into politics. My career was going nowhere till then. I was just a small-town attorney, tending to the legal needs of my father-in-law’s business. Hell, Deborah, half my outside clients were court-appointed.”
He got up and freshened his drink. “Sure I can’t—?”
“No.”
“You don’t make it easy, girl.”
“News flash, Chet: not every ‘girl’ is in your world to smooth things over for you.”
He sighed. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Nobody got hurt. The Janson estate got every penny it had coming. If I hadn’t let Mr. Janson sell it to Linville—”
I arched my eyebrows. “Let him sell? A man in a coma?”
“Then you do know everything,” he said, with a sick look on his face.
“I think so. Yes.”
“All the same,” he argued, “the old inn was falling down. It couldn’t stand to wait another year while the heirs finished bickering. By that time, the roof would have fallen in and they’d have gotten a lot less than Linville paid.”
“A preservationist
Chet flushed. “You think I haven’t kicked myself a hundred times since then? Especially when Linville started after Neville Fishery. She’d never put the screws to me. That wasn’t her style. But just knowing that I was the one who gave her the start that she built on has been pure hell these last six months.”
“I can believe that,” I said.
