"I swear, you'd think SBI agents and deputy sheriffs would have better things to talk about. I hope n.o.body's worried Daddy with it."

"Not yet," Seth said. Concern was still in his voice. "You sure you haven't stepped in the middle of something, shug?"

I promised him that it was sheer coincidence and he promised that he'd do what he could to keep Daddy from hearing; and yeah, long as I was coming back Friday, a mess of clams might be right nice.

a a a There was still no sign of Guthrie when I carried a gla.s.s of tea out to sit on the porch and unwind, but Mark Lewis and Makely Lawrence, two more of the neighboring youths, were headed up the path from the water, each with a bucket of clams they'd dug.

"You wouldn't want to sell me a half-dozen, would you?" I called.

Mark grinned. "No, but I'll give you six if that's all you want."

"I only want to make a small chowder."

"You give her three and I'll give her three," said Makely, not to be outdone by his cousin.

They set their buckets on the porch and each picked out their three biggest. The clams had been dug out of the mud, but they were the size of coffee saucers. As I should have suspected, the boys didn't want money, so much as they wanted details about Andy Bynum's death.

"Didn't Guthrie tell you?" I asked.

"Yeah, well-" said Makely.

"How come everybody says that?"

Makely looked at Mark, who said, "He got into trouble for taking his granddaddy's skiff out."

"What? I thought it was his."

"Ain't," Makely said tersely.

I let it pa.s.s and told them about going out with Guthrie, finding Andy lying dead, then Jay Hadley's arrival, followed by the police boat.

"Who do you think could have shot him?" I asked, curious to know what their elders were saying.

Again the shrugs.

"Drugs," Makely grunted. He was younger and almost as imaginative as Guthrie.

Mark was more thoughtful. "I don't know," he said slowly. "Lots of people were mad at him 'cause he was for making everybody buy a license to sell their fish. Like, if that happens, we wouldn't be supposed to sell you a mess of crabs or anything unless we had a license."

"Yeah," said Makely. "Heard tell shrimpers wanted to burn his house down."

"Just talk," said Mark, dismissively.

Perhaps. But as I was scrubbing the clams later, I thought about the island's reputation for settling its own scores. Even outsiders like me remembered the bitter anger and deep, deep hurt when Shackleford Banks was declared a wilderness area under the US Park Service.

Shackleford was the ancestral home of most islanders until the hurricanes of 1896 and 1899 forced them to relocate, and almost every island family maintained a rough fish camp over there. Unfortunately, few had clear deeds to the land. The two or three who did were given lifetime rights, but they fared no better than those with no deeds. When the unt.i.tled cabins were confiscated in 1985, some of the dispossessed went over and torched all the camps.

Had Andy Bynum angered some hot-tempered islander so thoroughly that a simple house-burning was not enough to settle the grudge?

a a a The telephone rang as I finished gutting the clams and chopping them into small pieces. This time it was Carl, wanting to know if I found everything okay.

"Yeah, once Guthrie and I figured out your new water pump system."

"Same system it's always been," said Carl.

I sighed. "That Guthrie's got himself a reality problem, hasn't he?"

Carl laughed. "He been stretching the truth on you, too?"

He was startled to hear about Andy and I had to go through all the details again.

"Say it was out at Hes Hadley's leased bottom?"

There was a significant silence.

"What?" I asked.

It took some prodding, but eventually he repeated some gossip he'd heard from Mahlon Davis: "Said Hes warned Andy off his wife."

"Andy?" I was astonished.

"Oh, heck, yeah. Andy Bynum liked the ladies almost as much as Mahlon does. He just wasn't as crude about it.

He told me to be careful and not to go sticking my nose into anything that wasn't my business, a piece of advice every man in my whole family feels free to give, then he put Sue on so I could get her to go over the recipe for Core Sound cornmeal dumplings. ("One part plain flour to four parts cornmeal.") "Did Andy ever make a pa.s.s at you?" I asked.

"Well, sure he did," she drawled. "I'd have been insulted if he hadn't, the way he used to flirt with every grown woman. Didn't mean anything. It was just his way of being polite. Now if it'd been Mahlon Davis..."

There was no need to elaborate.

She told me there was a little piece of salt pork in the freezer if I wanted it for my chowder and rang off without giving me any advice at all. Yet, paradoxically, it was her words that left me disoriented. Nothing sends you straight back to childhood quicker than getting an unexpected insight into how things-relationships-really were when you lived in Eden, a child oblivious to the Serpent.

a a a While the clams simmered on the stove's lowest setting, I carried the sh.e.l.ls and wastes down to dump at the water's edge. The fresh sh.e.l.l of a loggerhead turtle floated in the wash. Somebody not far away was probably enjoying a hot turtle stew at the moment-hot in more than one sense, because loggerheads are a protected species.

Almost twilight, yet gulls still came shrieking over, pushing and shoving and elbowing each other aside to be first at whatever was going down.

A line of brown pelicans flew by on their way to roost, as indifferent to the gulls as the sandpipers further down the sand.

Like their human counterparts, each had their own agenda for the water. Netters, tongers, dredgers or trawlers-according to Barbara Jean, the Alliance Andy Bynum had started wasn't so much a cooperative effort as a self-serving attempt to hang on to the particular niche each group considered a personal birthright.

Out in the channel, an expensive late-model sports boat headed for the Beaufort marina, and its running lights gleamed a rich red and green in the gathering dusk. A few moments later, its wake broke against the sh.o.r.e, scattering gulls and rocking the little homemade skiffs moored close in.

I turned and saw Mahlon's new trawler. More than half-finished now, it stood outside on blocks and dwarfed the small house. There was nothing sporty about it, but its lines were clean and solid, and the empty utilitarian cabin rose starkly against the dying light of the western sky.

And there was Mahlon himself, a gaunt wiry form half-hidden by the end post of his boat shed, standing motionless in the twilight as he stared at me. When he realized I'd seen him, he stepped forward. A caulk gun was in his hand and his fingers were coated with the yellow adhesive.

"Still like to feed the birds, do you?" His thick accent turned like to loike.

"How you doing, Mahlon?" I said, with more geniality than I felt.

"Just fair. Carl coming down?"

"Not this time."

"Ain't seen you down for a while. Staying long?"

"Just till the weekend."

He had to be over sixty now, and he'd lost weight since that shirt and work pants were new; but his corded forearms were still muscular and he still made me uneasy, Mahlon did. Only once had he ever acted out of the way with me and I'd never actually seen him hit his wife or deliver more than a casual swat to Guthrie's backside, yet I knew the violence his easygoing, laid-back exterior belied. His mother, Miss Nellie Em, seemed to be the only one who could face him down.

There were tales of monumental drunks, of neighbors' set nets deliberately torn or their boats rammed; his own boats wrecked through reckless misuse; and in the water straight out from his house, you could still see the last rusty remains of a car that had so angered him back in the early sixties that he'd driven it out as far as he could and then attacked it with his steel adze, smashing every piece of gla.s.s on the thing.

"Oi wore that mommicked," Mahlon would say whenever anyone asked him about it.

Men usually told these things with humorous zest and with the sneaking admiration a law-abider sometimes has for an outlaw.

Women were usually less amused.

Take that midsummer day. My cousins and I were thirteen or fourteen, and we were frolicking in the sound, enjoying our newly developing bodies, when Mahlon Davis staggered down to the sh.o.r.e on unsteady legs and stood on the sand to watch. For several minutes he swayed in the warm breeze and laughed to see us splash and dive and then erupt from the waves several yards away.

"Mermaids!" he suddenly bellowed. "Here's your king of the sea!" Next thing we knew, he was wading in to join us-fully dressed, leather shoes and all. We were astonished because we'd never seen an adult islander play in the water. He made a clumsy lunge for Carlette, who was the oldest and prettiest, but she easily eluded him; and his feet slid out from under him. He sat down up to his chest, then his head tilted backward and he was laughing so hard that we saw half-rotted teeth and gaps where several were already missing.

As one, we dived and swam away into deeper water until he finally staggered back to sh.o.r.e, retrieved the bottle he'd dropped on the sand, and disappeared around the corner of his house.

Later that evening, I had gone down alone to feed the gulls when I heard an incoherent roar of anger from inside his house. I heard Mahlon's wife cry, "No, don't!" Then the screen door flew open and a white cat slammed into the side of the new boat Mahlon was building and fell to the ground like a broken bottle of b.l.o.o.d.y champagne.

Horrified, I fled back to the cottage.

Yet when he was sober, his skill fascinated me.

He might not be the equal of Brady Lewis, great-grandfather to both young Mark Lewis and Makely Lawrence and a boat builder of undisputed genius-he originated the unique Harkers Island flared bow-but Mahlon Davis was still a skilled craftsman.

When he wanted to be.

Trouble was, most of the time he didn't want to work that steadily.

I looked at the keel of the forty-foot trawler he was building now. Hundreds of pieces of juniper wood, two inches wide, no two curved exactly the same, yet each edge lay snugly against the other, nailed on the face to the heart pine ribs and again through the edge.

Mahlon's lot was too narrow to accomodate house, boat shed and a boat this big and still have room to maneuver, so he'd hacked away some of the weedy trees that covered the property west of his. Mickey Mantle's c.o.c.kerel pens were already there-each wire cage held a feisty-eyed bantam rooster, and now the trawler's bow extended eight or ten feet into the clearing.

"You're working late," I observed.

"Just caulking. Don't need daylight for that." He turned back with the caulk gun. A bare low-wattage light bulb hung next to the side where he was carefully waterproofing each nail head.

I followed, unable to resist the lure of watching something so beautiful and so practical take shape under his rough hands. No blueprints hung from the back wall of the shelter, not even any photographs. He didn't need a drawing to look at; it was all in his head. If I scrabbled around through the sc.r.a.ps of juniper, I might find a board with two columns of numbers scribbled on it, one for the dead rise and the other for the center, each figure accurate to the thirty-second of an inch so that she'd ride centered and true as long as she was cared for.

"Who you building this one for?" I asked.

"Me. Me'n my boys." He dotted a row of nail heads with the yellow caulk, then smoothed each dot with his fingers. "I hear tell you're a judge now."

"Yes."

"Tell me this, if you would. Say somebody didn't like my mess on their property. Can they have it all hauled off and make me pay for it?"

"Somebody doing that to you?"

"Yeah, some b.i.t.c.h over to Beaufort that bought that field." He nodded toward the overgrown, debris-littered field. His debris. Behind the chicken cages, there was a broken-down pickup full of junk that'd been there at least eight years. Sticking up from the scrubby bushes were piles of building sc.r.a.ps, aluminum siding, and old pipes and barrels. Further out, a yaupon tree grew straight up through a cast-off stove.

"She says if I don't get my mess off, she'll pay somebody twenty-five hundred dollars and put the law on me if I don't pay it. I ain't got twenty-five hundred dollars. This boat's taking every penny and I still got to get the diesel engine for her. Andy was going to let me have one off a old truck of his, but now, I don't know if his boys'll still do it or not."

"Well, she can't have you hauled off to jail like a criminal," I a.s.sured him, "but she could file in civil court and get a judgment against you."

"What would that mean?"

"It might mean a forced sale of your house if you didn't pay up after a certain length of time."

"I knew it!" he said angrily. "That's what she's after. She's already got t.i.tle to two or three pieces along here. If she'n get mine and maybe Carl's-"

"Carl and Sue would never sell," I said.

"It ain't been in his family a hundred years," Mahlon said shortly. "Wave enough money under people's noses and you can't tell what they'd do."

He smoothed on some more caulk dots. "Well, it don't signify. With this boat, me'n my boys're gonna get ourselves out'n the hole for good and all this time."

"How is Mickey Mantle?" None of us ever knew whether or not to ask, but since Mahlon had mentioned him first...

His sun-leathered face crinkled with a gap-toothed grin. "Doing a lot of walking these days."

"Oh?"

He smoothed another row of nail heads. "Yeah. Got his license pulled again. For a year this time. If he can't get there by boat or thumb, he has to foot it."

"So you figure that'll keep his mind on fishing for a while?" I laughed.

"Should do," he answered dryly. "If I'n get her done by the time shrimping season starts, the money'll keep 'em both in line."

I hesitated. "I hope I didn't get Guthrie in trouble yesterday, asking him to take me out for clams?"

Mahlon scowled. "Worn't your fault. He knowed better'n to take my skiff 'thout asking."

"That was pretty awful about Andy Bynum getting shot."

"Yeah." He laid aside the caulk gun and began to peel the gummy stuff from his fingers.

"I guess you're in that Alliance he started?"

"h.e.l.l, no!" He saw my puzzlement. "Oh, they tried to sign us all up, but I ain't never joined nothing yet and I'm sure not going to start with something that don't give a d.a.m.n about me."

"But I thought it was to help the independent fishermen."