Anyone else I’d have accused of chauvinism. In Lev’s case, I figured it must be the alien corn he was standing in.
We had a good view from where we stood and the shooters now were two Jaycee types, Barbara Jean and Linville Pope. After another four rounds, only the two women were still in. Chet said they’d had four guns stolen and now I realized at least one of them must have been Barbara Jean’s. Linville barely came up to Barbara Jean’s shoulder, but her barrel followed the arc of the clay pigeon just as smoothly as she shattered her fifth in a row.
It was so incongruous. Barbara Jean in pearls, heels and a slinky dress, the late afternoon sunlight turning her blonde curls strawberry as she killed her sixth “bird” in a row; Linville in a floral silk cocktail suit, carefully tucking her hair behind her ears and out of her eyes before she loaded and fired a sixth time.
As the eighth round began, Barbara Jean missed.
“Pull,” said Linville and, without glancing at the ceramic disc, shot her gun straight up into the air.
The crowd clapped her show of good sportmanship and Barbara Jean shook her head, but her smile was just a little too bright as she handed her gun over to Chet, who had stepped up for the next round of competition.
With the shooting making coherent conversation almost impossible, we stepped back inside the house and made for the bar. Both barmen were down helping with the guns, so Lev poured himself a whiskey and soda and I refilled my glass of ice water, then we passed through the opposite set of French doors onto a narrower terrace completely walled on all three sides with head-high azaleas that dazzled the eye with clear pinks and corals, vibrant reds and cool whites.
Muffled gunshots and massed azaleas.
Lev shook his head and chanted, “And that’s what I like about the South!”
As our eyes met, we heard the clink of glassware, then voices in the room behind us.
“I don’t need any fucking concessions from you,” a woman said angrily. I recognized Barbara Jean’s voice.
“No? But you will take them from everyone else?” came Linville Pope’s quiet silky tones.
A questioning sound.
“The way you play the beleaguered benefactor to twenty-three black families—that is how you put it every time anybody tries to regulate your trawlers? Twenty-three black families who could not buy even a gallon of milk if not for the paychecks you sign? So easy to play the race card when it suits you, but I have done a little research on Neville Fishery. What happened to all the black families that were cut loose when your father switched over to hydraulic winches to pull the nets and started using hoses to suction the fish out of those nets?”
“You leave my daddy out of this.”
“Look, Barbara Jean—” Her voice was that of a patient adult reasoning with a fractious child. “The tide is running out. Fishing was a wonderful way of life. Last century. Menhaden generate what? Four million a year? Tourism brings in half a billion. Face it, honey, you are history. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but it is coming. That little factory of yours sits squat in the middle of—”
“I’d die before I’d sell it to you,” Barbara Jean snarled.
“No one is asking you to,” Linville soothed. “My principals are the ones who want it bad enough to offer you more than it is worth.”
“My granddaddy built that factory and my grandsons—”
I missed the rest because Lev put his lips close to my ear and whispered, “There has to be a path somewhere through those flower bushes. Maybe there at that corner?”
I hesitated.
“Knowledge is power,” the pragmatist reminded me, straining to hear what was being said just inside those open doors.
“And you were accusing HIM of lapsed standards?” the preacher lectured.
Reluctantly, I tiptoed after Lev, across the terrace and through the bushes.
Eventually we broke through that floral barrier to a green lawn of billiard table perfection.
“Have dinner with me?” asked Lev.
“You mean just leave quietly without telling anybody and go find a place where the only discussion of fish is whether to have it grilled or fried? You got it!”
We crossed the grass to the circular paved drive where eight or ten shiny cars were parked.
“Which one’s yours?” he asked.
I might have known it wasn’t going to be that simple.
Lev quirked his eyebrows at me as I stood laughing beneath a live oak tattered with Spanish moss. “What’s so funny?”
“I came by boat. You, too?”
He nodded. “With Catherine, Jon and Claire.”
“I came with Barbara Jean and Chet Winberry,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Barbara Jean’s the one having that, um, discussion with our hostess?”
“‘Fraid so.”
“Hm-mm-m.”
• • •
It took us a few minutes to work our way through the front hall and out onto the seaward terrace without going near the sunroom wing. Somehow I doubted that Linville Pope would notice if I didn’t go thank her for inviting me. I spotted Barbara Jean heading for the dock and hurried after her with only a “See you” flung over my shoulder for Lev.
Out on the driveway, we had decided that if we could prod our respective ferrymen into leaving early, we would each return the way we’d come, then meet at one of the restaurants off Front Street as soon as we could politely disentangle ourselves.
Judging by Barbara Jean’s purposeful stride, I wasn’t going to have to do much prodding. I saw her speak to Chet, who put his arm around her, then looked back toward the house for me. I waved that I was coming and soon joined them at their mooring.
Barbara Jean was so furious she was almost crying with barely controlled rage. “That bitch!” she kept saying. “That bitch. That absolute bitch!”
Chet made placating noises and threw me an apologetic glance as he cast off.
“Something wrong?” I leaned my forearms on the back of their seat and gazed from one profile to the other.
“That—that—”
“Bitch?” I offered helpfully.
Chet laughed and even Barbara Jean gave a rueful smile.
“Yeah,” she said.
She twisted around in her seat so that she faced both of us and said, “First she said my factory’s history and now she’s trying to blackmail me into selling it to her.”
“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.”