Read Online Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron - Free Book Online

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 shore 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 shore, 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 bloody 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 cockerel 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 scraps 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 bitch 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