Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online Page B

made his way over to a table halfway across the room from us.
    It was occupied by a lone woman, another blonde (ash, this time), very petite, with oversized pale blue glasses that covered much of her face. Her hair fell in a loose pageboy along her chin line as she tilted her head toward the man, but her slender hand held its place in the papers she had been reading when he interrupted. No smile on her thin lips; no encouraging or conciliatory body language either. She sat absolutely motionless until he began to run out of steam, then turned back to her papers, clearly dismissing him.
    He glared at her, thick hands on his hips, and anger deepened his voice. Everyone quit eating and flat-out stared.
    “By God, I’ll sue you for criminal fraud!” he shouted. “You knew I was going to turn it into a party boat.”
    She turned those pale blue glasses on him again. “You bought the
Lucky Linville
as is,” she said calmly. “What you planned to do with her was not my concern.”
    She never raised her voice and if the room hadn’t gone so silent, I wouldn’t have been able to hear her. The manager and two hefty busboys surrounded the stocky man who by now was nearly apoplectic with rage.
    As they hustled him out, the rest of us pretended we hadn’t been staring. The woman returned to her reading completely unruffled. After an eternity, the usual flow of conversation ebbed back into the room with the tinkle of ice in tall glasses and the clink of utensils against china.
    “She sold Zeke Myers the
Lucky Linville?
” Barbara Jean asked Chet just as I asked, “What was all that about?”
    Chet shrugged, but suddenly I was remembering last night’s phone call. “Is that Linville Pope by any chance?”
    “You know her?”
    “Not really. She invited me for cocktails tomorrow night. Said she was a friend of Judge Mercer’s.”
    “I do hope you thought to pack a bulletproof vest,” Barbara Jean said sweetly.

4
    Will your anchor hold in the storms of life,
When the clouds unfold their wings of strife?
When the strong tides lift and the cables strain,
Will your anchor drift, or firm remain?
    —Priscilla J. Owens
    With daylight saving now in effect, the sun was still high as I left the courthouse that afternoon and drove toward Harkers Island through a countryside less green than in other years. Only last month, a late-winter storm had left whole stretches of coastal pines, yaupon, azaleas, and live oaks so coated with salt spray that their needles and leaves had turned brown on the seaward side. Branches had shattered off and in more than one yard women were piling brush and men were still busy with chainsaws on trees uprooted by the storm.
    Occasionally as I drove eastward, I spotted boarded-up windows, trailers that had shifted on their footings, and sheets of plastic tacked over gaping holes in the side of a house or roof.
    For the first time, it belatedly registered just how much damage the coast had sustained. I remembered hearing radio bulletins that the “storm of the century” was headed our way, but then it had skipped over Dobbs and Raleigh so gently that I’d almost immediately quit paying attention.
    True, Dwight Bryant, Colleton County’s deputy sheriff, had done a lot of mouthing about the snows up in western Virginia (his ex-wife and young son lived in Shaysville and had been snowed in for several days), but late snows aren’t uncommon in the Blue Ridge. If Channel 11’s “Eyewitness” weatherman ever called it a hurricane—hurricanes in
March?
—I’m sure I’d have noticed; yet listening to Chet and Barbara Jean Winberry describe how the bottom seemed to have dropped out of their barometer, the ninety-miles-per-hour winds, gusting to over a hundred, what else could it have been?
    At the courthouse, during our afternoon break, I heard of a nine-year-old killed when high winds snapped a pine over in Newport and sent it crashing into his family’s mobile home. Roofs were ripped from houses, siding