I twisted in the boat and peered between the piling and the stake over to the far edge of the leased area where the bullet had struck, but I saw nothing. “Where?”
“Guess I missed. Don’t see it now.”
She stowed the rifle on a pair of hooks under the dash and pointed to a sleek white cruiser heading toward us from the northwest, the direction of Beaufort and Morehead City.
“Yonder comes the rescue boat.”
• • •
Since becoming an attorney, I’ve observed the processing of more than one crime scene; and although this was the first time I’d watched police officers do one out on an ocean with the tide coming in, I felt I could mention a few things, even though Dwight Bryant, the sheriff’s deputy back in Dobbs, always acts like I’m meddling instead of helping when I suggest things to him.
“Before you move the body,” I said, “hadn’t you ought to take a picture of how he’s lying?”
The detective in rolled-up chinos and sports shirt ignored me as he felt for a pulse we all knew was lacking, but the uniformed Marvin Willitt said, “Guthrie told me y’all turned him over soon as you found him.”
“We did,” I agreed. “But we didn’t shift him around much, just rolled him straight over from his stomach to his back.”
“You didn’t try to resuscitate him?” asked the detective who’d waded over from the rescue boat. It was too big to come in all the way and was anchored out from the sandbar.
I shook my head. “His skin was cold and it felt like rigor was already beginning when we turned him,” I explained.
They gave me an odd look.
“She’s a judge,” said Jay Hadley.
That got me another odd look and I could sense an us versus her line being drawn in the water; but the detective splashed back to the boat and got a Polaroid camera. While another uniformed officer helped Willitt pull a tape measure from Bynum’s body to the fixed pilings, the detective measured the temperature of the water and then started sketching a rough diagram of the things he’d just photographed. He drew the position of the heavy rake, the empty bucket, the smooth clams and razor-rough oysters, the position of the anchor, and, of course, Andy’s body.
By this time, Jay Hadley’s boat had been shoved over beside the rescue boat, the two of us still in it, and a second detective, Quig Smith, hitched her line to one of his cleats so he could question us easily.
Guthrie had not returned, but he’d evidently given the broad outlines to Willitt when he phoned from the local quick stop. Mostly I just confirmed what Guthrie had already told them: no, I hadn’t noticed Bynum’s skiff till we were nearly on it; no, I hadn’t seen another boat leaving that area; no, I wouldn’t say that the body was rigid with rigor, merely beginning to stiffen.
Thank you, Judge, and now for Miz Hadley.
Yes, they kept a pair of glasses by the kitchen window, said Jay Hadley. “Ever since that trouble last month, we’re sort of in the habit that whoever’s passing’ll take a quick look.”
Detective Quig Smith nodded as if “that trouble last month” was old news. “You see Andy get here?”
“He was just stepping out of his skiff when we got back from church about twelve-thirty,” she said. “Once I knew it was him, I didn’t have to keep looking. I figured he’d be a couple of hours and things’d be fine long as he was here.”
Her faint island accent turned fine to foine.
“Next time I remembered to look, there worn’t a sign of Andy, just his boat. I thought maybe he hitched a ride outside with one of his boys or something. Then the next time, it was her and one of the Davises. I saw them get out and mess around and then he took off back to the island by hisself, and that’s when I decided I’d come out and see what was going on.”
“How come your husband or son didn’t come out?”
“Hes had to go to Raleigh and Josh—”
A call on the police radio interrupted her and Smith had to go forward into the cabin to pick up. Whoever was calling had such a thick accent I could only catch scattered phrases and Andy Bynum’s name.
“Durn!” said Jay Hadley when Smith came back down to the stern with a grimace on his face.
“What?” I asked.
“Some fool put it on the air,” he said in disgust.
“It’s Andy’s boys,” Jay Hadley told me. “They’re both outside, probably halfway to the Gulf Stream, can’t get back for hours. They didn’t ought to have to hear about their daddy over a shortwave. Who was the blabbermouth?”
“Probably Guthrie,” Smith guessed. He sighed. “Might as well let you ladies get back to shore for now.”
I pointed out that I no longer had transportation.
Smith and Miz Hadley locked eyes a moment, then she nodded. “She can ride with me.”
• • •
The trip back was more leisurely than I’d expected from her breakneck speed out. She leaned back in the blue vinyl seat with one hand on the wheel. The wind barely ruffled our hair. We might have been riding around Dobbs in a convertible.
More to make conversation than anything else, I asked, “When did they start renting out parcels of the sound?”
“You mean when did the great state of North Carolina realize fishermen need to earn a living off the water even though sportsmen and developers and so-called conservationists keep trying to put us out of business?” Her tone was dry, but not actively hostile at the moment.
“Is that what they’re doing?”
She shrugged. “We seem to get all the rules and regulations. Turtle excluders, bycatch limits, size limits, equipment limits, right-to-sell licenses—leased bottoms are ‘bout the only thing we’ve got back and now they’re even having second thoughts about that.”
“Can you just pick wherever you want? That used to be a pretty popular spot when I was a girl.”
“You might’ve gone digging back there when you were a girl,” she said, turning the wheel so that we were angling across the empty channel toward the cottage, “but that sandbar’s pretty near clammed out. For me and Hes to lease it, a Marine Fisheries biologist had to certify that it’s no longer a productive natural shellfish bed. That means it worn’t producing ten bushels a year.”
“So how do you farm it? Strew seed clams right into the sand?”
“We could. Some folks do. What me and Hes do’s more costly to start with, but gets us a higher return. We load mesh bags with eight to twelve hundred seed clams and stake them on the bottom. Takes about two years to grow them out at least an inch thick.”
As she warmed to her subject, the woman was downright chatty.
“Mesh bags? Like potato bags?”
“Onion bags’re what we use when we harvest them. We grow them in big nylon bags about five feet square.”
“Makes ‘em easy to pull up,” I guessed.
“Yeah, but mostly it’s to protect the clams from crabs and rays and conchs. They’ll wreck a regular shellfish bed.” Jay Hadley gazed back over her shoulder at the staked area of water receding behind us. “We expect to harvest a thousand clams a bag next year.”
I was never any good at mental math, but it didn’t take an Einstein to realize that with three acres of bags staked down out there and each clam selling for nine to twenty cents apiece depending on the season, it was like leaving bags of money lying around for the taking.
“Sounds like an easy way for other people to go home with a quick bucket of clams,” I mused.
“Tell me about it.”
“So that’s why you keep such a sharp eye on that spot.” And why she came out with a gun? “Had much poaching?”
“Not bad as some folk.”
If poaching was part of last month’s trouble, she wasn’t going to elaborate.
The yellow cottage loomed up ahead of us and the tide was now high enough that she could come in fairly close.
“Here okay?” she asked, wallowing in until the lifted propeller almost scraped bottom.