He studied my face a long moment, then his own face cleared. With an air of relief (and surprise at that relief?), Lev gently touched the scratch on my cheek. “Take care of yourself, Red.”
“You, too, kid.”
Then he was gone and I tackled Smith myself. “Are these two murders connected?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he told me candidly. “One thing though. No exit wound, so the bullet’s probably still inside her. We should know by tomorrow night if it’s the same gun or not.”
While he was talking to the reporters, I managed to slip away with only minimum attention.
Linville’s house was on the north side of the point, on North River; Chet and Barbara Jean were on the south side, on Taylors Creek; but their driveways were less than a quarter-mile apart, on opposite sides of Lennoxville Road.
Impulsively, I pulled into the Winberry drive, wound through the tall shrubs and live oaks that shielded them from public view and circled up to the front door.
“Deborah! What a nice surprise,” said Barbara Jean when she answered the bell. There were tired circles under her eyes, but her smile was warm. “Chet said you were going home today.”
“I was, but then Roger Longmire told ‘em I could stay another week.”
“Great. I just made a fresh pitcher of tea. Come on out to the porch and join me.”
We went through the house to a sunny south-facing terrace that wasn’t much smaller than Linville Pope’s. Half of Barbara Jean’s was covered, though; and where the porch roof ended, trellises of weathered cypress continued across the bricked terrace to provide filtered shade in the summertime.
“Oh, Lordy!” I breathed. The beauty was almost enough to ease the horror of finding Linville’s body.
Barbara Jean’s face lit up. “Don’t you love this time of year?” she said.
Her azaleas had taken salty blasts from last month’s bad storm and the leaves still showed large patches of brown although the white, pink and lavender blossoms gamely tried to cover; but her wisteria was drop-dead gorgeous. The thick ropy vines that covered the trellises were in full bloom and dripped with huge heavy clusters of purple blossoms that mingled with the cool salt air and late afternoon sunshine to fill the porch with a bewitching fragrance. Off to one side, an eclectic mixture of Adirondack and wicker chairs circled a wide low table and I sank down into one of them and breathed in deeply.
“How can you bear to go off to work every day and leave this?”
“Sometimes I don’t,” she confided. “I’ve been playing hooky all afternoon. Chet’s off fishing somewhere so I borrowed a friend’s runabout and got out on the water myself for an hour or two. I just needed some time alone for a change.”
“I’m sorry I disturbed you then.”
“No, no, I was ready for company.”
I was overflowing about Linville but waited till she had poured me a glass of tea and assured herself that I had everything in the way of lemon, sugar, napkins, or cookies that a guest could want before I told her.
“Shot? On her own pier?”
She listened in total silence until I finished, then slowly shook her head. “Oh, shit, Deborah!” The embarrassed expression on her face was that of someone caught in a lapse of good taste. “God forgive me, you know what my first thought was?”
“That now that boat storage facility next to Jill won’t be built?”
Barbara Jean gave a bleak smile. “I didn’t know I could be this unchristian, this callous.”
“It’s not being callous. You guys weren’t exactly best friends, she wanted Neville Fishery and she was threatening the peace and quiet of your daughter’s home. It’s only human to be relieved that those things will go on hold now.”
She sighed and started asking for more details: when exactly did Quig Smith think she’d been killed? Had there been any witness?
“Midge? Midge was there?”
“Evidently he’s been back a couple of weeks, holed up in his rooms, drinking steadily. He says he was standing in the sunroom and saw it happen. That someone out in a boat aimed a shoulder gun at Linville while she was down on the dock, but he was so drunk at the time, Smith’s not sure he’s a credible witness. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the rescue truck’s siren.”
“No, I was—no, I didn’t.”
She set down her glass of iced tea and headed for the wet bar just inside the door. “I need something stiffer. Fix one for you?”
“No, thank you,” I said, but I did stir an extra spoon of sugar into my tea.
When she returned, she carried an old-fashioned glass with two inches of something amber over a couple of ice cubes.
“Is that Chet coming in?” I asked, as a boat slowly peeled off from the channel.
We took our glasses and went down to meet him at the landing. As with most people who live on the water, he had cut his motor at the precise instant needed to lift it before the propeller blades scraped bottom, yet still had the momentum to carry him in to his dock.
Before he could even throw her a line, Barbara Jean began to tell him about Linville Pope’s murder and made me finish.
“What?” Chet stood in the boat to listen before handing out a bucket of fish and getting out himself with a couple of rods. He was still walking stiffly from his pulled muscle and he shook his head. “My God, Deb’rah. You really stepped in the middle of it this week, didn’t you, girl?”
Back at the house, he dumped the three fish he’d caught into a chest of ice—“Not much to show for a whole afternoon”—rinsed off his hands and took the drink Barbara Jean had fixed him.
“Poor Linville,” he said. “And poor Midge. Half his problem is that he could never give her what she wanted.”
“She wanted to be Queen of Beaufort,” Barbara Jean said sharply. “Let’s not forget that.”
“De mortuis, honey.”
“I’m not speaking ill of the dead,” she argued. “Only the truth. She wanted to close Neville Fishery. She never knew what it was like before. No sense of history, no—”
She turned to me abruptly. “Did you ever hear them singing on the water, Deborah?”
“The chanteymen? No. I have one of the tapes though, and I can imagine how it must have sounded.”
“You can’t!” she said passionately, and I don’t think it was the bourbon speaking. “When I was a little girl, we still had one boat that didn’t have a power block, and my daddy used to let me go out with them once in a while. They’d let down the two little purse boats to circle a school of menhaden and the men had to pull the heavy nets by hand. That’s why they sang those long slow chanties, to synchronize the hardening of the fish against the main boat. And the sound of those black voices floating across the water from one boat to the other—the leader would sing out the first words and the men would heave away as they echoed the strong slow beats—I’ll never hear anything as beautiful again in my life.”
Tears spilled from her eyes.
“Ah, honey,” said Chet, taking her in his arms and patting her tenderly on the back.
“And that’s what Linville Pope wanted to destroy.”
“I thought the chanteymen were replaced by hydraulic net-pullers twenty years ago,” I said, remembering how Linville had taunted her on that point. “She didn’t have anything to do with that, did she?”
“But some of their sons still work for me. They link back into that heritage and continue the work their fathers did and she would have destroyed that link. And taken something precious from me as well.”
She laid her head on Chet’s shoulder. “I didn’t wish Linville Pope dead, Deborah, but I can’t say I’m sorry that I don’t have to keep fighting her off.”
I had to admit that given Linville’s persistent techniques, there might well be a lot of similar feelings all around this part of Carteret County when the news got out.