Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron

peeled from stores, sheets of tin had kited down the center of Morehead City.
    “Lord, yes!” said one of the lawyers standing around the coffee urn. “Boats tore loose from moorings, the docks all along Taylors Creek were awash, and power lines?” He snapped his fingers. “Like two-pound test hit by marlins.”
    Much of the area was without electricity for more than a week, they told me, while power crews brought in from all over worked around the clock with local linesmen.
    Somehow, it embarrassed me that I hadn’t been aware of their ordeal, just as it bothered me that I hadn’t known doodly about the issues that now inflamed Barbara Jean and others who earned their living from the ocean sounds and estuaries.
    “You label the women of Harkers Island standoffish and aloof,” lectured my internal preacher, “yet when have you made more than self-serving perfunctory overtures?”
    Shamed, I thought about how I must look from their viewpoint. First as a child, then as a teenager, I’d come down with my cousins, played in the water, then gone juking and cruising around the Circle at Atlantic Beach. I treated their living space like a playground created for my personal pleasure. As an adult, I swam, water-skied, loafed, helped Carl and my younger cousin Scotty set gill nets out in front of the house so I could take home a couple of coolers of fresh seafood for my brothers and their families, then headed back inland to my comfortable life with less consideration than if those women were costumed characters in a theme park.
    “Oh, give it a rest,” fumed the cynical pragmatist, who usually starts jeering whenever I get any noble thoughts. “You think anybody down here really feels deprived because one more upstater didn’t try to be their best friend?”
    Okay, okay. Even so, just past Otway, I pulled in at a florist that was still open. The young woman behind the counter said she’d heard that Andy Bynum’s body had been released to a funeral home on the island and that the funeral was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. I ordered a basket of silk flowers to be sent: Dutch irises, buttercups, red poppies and lilies of the valley.
    “Credit card friendship, the easiest kind,”
whispered a voice inside my head.
    Preacher or pragmatist?
•      •      •
    When I got back to the cottage, the Bynum house already had a closed-up look to it. His sons live further down the island, near the ‘fish house, and I guessed the wake was probably being held at the funeral home.
    I’d barely stepped through the door when the phone began ringing. Yeah, it could’ve been a dozen different people—I would even have welcomed somebody selling aluminum siding—but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
    Actually, it could have been one of the mouthier ones. Could have been Andrew or Herman or Will or Jack. Instead, it was only Seth, five brothers up from me, and the brother who always cut me the most slack.
    “Hey, Seth,” I chirped. “You want me to bring you and Minnie some clams Friday?”
    He didn’t even bother to answer that. “What’d you go and get mixed up in now, Deb’rah?” he asked sternly.
    At one time or another, most of my brothers had used this cottage or gone fishing with Carl, so Seth had met Andy and he listened without fussing as I explained the situation and how I was only tangentially involved. “How’d you hear so quick, anyhow?”
    “Some SBI agent down there recognized your name and told Terry and Terry told Dwight and Dwight called me.
    “I swear, you’d think SBI agents and deputy sheriffs would have better things to talk about. I hope nobody’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