Part 10 (1/2)
”What?” said Chet.
”Blackmail?” I said. ”That's a pretty strong term.”
She gave an impatient flip of her hand. ”Not blackmail. What's the term? Coercion? That's what she's trying to do, coerce me.”
”But how?” Chet and I asked together.
”Jill,” she said, and her anger abruptly dissolved into tears that spilled down her cheeks.
”Honey?”
”Oh Chet, she's bought Gib Epson's place!” she wailed. ”She says she's already got the permits and that I have till the first of June to decide, then she's going to start building a launch ramp and boat storage for a hundred boats. There'll be cars in and out, day and night, all year long!”
Chet hit the wheel with his fist. ”But Epson swore he'd never sell.”
”She made him a fat offer and let him think it was a conservancy group that wanted it. He probably thinks he was doing us a favor.” She reached into Chet's pocket for his handkerchief and blotted her eyes in pensive silence.
We were moving a little faster around the point than when we'd come. The wind ruffled our hair and felt cool enough to make me wish for a sweater now that the sun was dropping down behind the trees.
”How does your daughter come into it?” I asked.
”My mother was from Harkers Island,” Barbara Jean explained, ”and she inherited the home place over there. The original part of the house dates from the 1890s. She really loved it and she always wanted to go live there, but Daddy had the factory over here and what with one thing or another, they never got to restore the house the way she wanted. She used to take Jill over and tell her all the old family stories and Jill was wild about it, too, so when Mother died, she willed it to Jill and she and her husband have put every nickel they have into fixing it up. They've just finished.”
More tears pooled in her eyes and she dashed them away angrily. ”And now that b.i.t.c.h-!”
”I take it that the b.i.t.c.h's new property abuts yours?”
”Even curves around one side,” Chet said grimly.
”But surely your zoning laws-?”
Chet shook his head. ”Harkers Island is like the rest of Down East. They're so adamantly opposed to any kind of growth or government interference that they won't allow any zoning of any kind.”
”That's crazy,” I said. ”Zoning's the only way a community can control growth and have a say in what's built.”
”Well, why don't you just run on over and tell them that if you get a few minutes off from court?” Chet said with asperity. ”You think people haven't tried? Every time the county planners try to hold a hearing on the subject and explain how zoning would protect them, they're lucky to get away with their lives.”
”Down Easters don't think they need zoning,” Barbara Jean said as Chet throttled back on the motor and headed in toward their landing. ”My cousin over in Marshallburg said that if somebody ever tried to build something the rest of them didn't want, they'd just burn it down. They would, too.”
”Maybe we'll sic your cousin on to Linville's boat storage,” Chet said.
”Hey!” I objected. ”I'm an officer of the court and I didn't hear a thing you just said, okay?”
Chet nosed us in next to the dock and secured a line to the piling. I scrambled out and Chet reached out a hand to Barbara Jean, who hadn't moved. ”Honey?”
She took his hand and stood up slowly. ”All of a sudden, I remember something Andy said.”
”Andy Bynum?”
”Remember how he was rooting around in the courthouse all this month? And last week at the Alliance meeting-you remember when you came to pick me up and I was standing out front with Andy and Jay Hadley and her son?”
Chet nodded.
”You must have heard him. Andy said he'd found something that was going to fix Linville Pope's little red wagon once and for all and-oh my G.o.d!”
She clutched Chet's arm hard. ”What if Andy really did find something illegal? What if he threatened to tell if she didn't back off? She's got a boat, she's got a gun and she's got the conscience of a sand shark-maybe she's the one who shot him out there in the sound.”
7.
Launch out into the deep,
Oh, let the sh.o.r.eline go;
Launch out, launch out in the ocean divine,
Out where the full ticks go.
But many, alas! only stand on the sh.o.r.e
And gaze on the ocean so wide;
They never have ventured its depths to explore,
Or to launch on the fathomless tide.
-A. B. Simpson and B. B. McKinney ”Now let me get this straight,” said Lev. ”This Andy Bynum was a fisherman, right?”
”A fisherman, the owner of a fish house and the president of the Independent Fishers Alliance,” I said, nibbling at a shrimp from my Mate's Plate (coleslaw, hushpuppies and three seafood choices from a list of eight; the Captain's Plate lets you choose four; the Admiral's, five).
”And your friend Barbara Ann-”