Snipe hunt

THE DISCOVERY OF AN OLD CORPSE DREDGES UP THE PAST FOR A SMALL TOWN WITH A LOT TO HIDEProfessor Simon Shaw wants nothing more than to spend a peaceful Thanksgiving with friends, staying in Perlie Beach, a small town on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But even as the turkey roasts, he finds himself embroiled in a fifty-year-old mystery of strange disappearances, suspicious deaths, and treasures lost and found.The holiday disruption begins when the body of a local man is dredged from the waters of Pearlie Beach. In his hand, several rare confederate coins; in his decaying ribs, the sharp blade of a knife. Soon Simon, aided by Julie McGloughan, a mesmerizing police attorney, discovers that secrets in this small town run as deep as the waterways that surround it.Simon knows that finding another cache of coins is about as likely as getting the guarded residents of Perlie Beach to talk.But he also knows that if he doesn't continue to investigate, a decades-old murder will remain unsolved-and another may be close at hand....AUTHORBIO: SARAH R. SHABER lives in Raleigh, North Caroline.Her first novel, SIMON SAID, won the 1996 St. Martin's Malice Domestic Award.

Chapter One "I'm not looking at the body," Simon said.     "You don't have to," Morgan said. "Besides, we don't know if it is a body."     Morgan steered his black Ford F-150 pickup truck onto the high-rise bridge that linked Pearlie Beach to the mainland. The truck camper creaked over Simon's head as they crossed the sound, while a line of brown pelicans flew across the horizon, fishing for breakfast. Docks projected into the sound from both its banks. They were nearly empty; many of the pleasure craft had been taken out of the water for the winter, and the fishing boats had left at dawn, making the most of the last week of fishing season. Later today the fishermen would unload their catch at the wharf at Captain Nance's seafood market, and about four o'clock everyone on the island would wander over and select dinner from the day's catch. Tonight Simon and Morgan would fry up whatever they bought at Captain Nance's on the deck in a cast-iron skillet over a propane stove. Morgan's luscious homemade hushpuppies would cook in hot peanut oil first, seasoning the pan for the fish that would follow. Fortunately the food police were not permitted past Benson, where the barbecue and seafood joints sprang up along NC 421 and lined the road all the way to Wilmington. Simon wished he was back at the beach house wrapped in a blanket on the porch reading and anticipating his dinner right now, instead of setting off on this gruesome errand.     Thanksgiving week was not the most popular time to visit Pearlie Beach, but there was never a bad time. Just driving over the bridge onto the island would lower anyone's blood pressure ten points, any time of year. When Simon's friend and colleague in the History Department of Kenan College, Marcus Clegg, had invited Simon to go with his family to their beach house for Thanksgiving break, Simon had accepted instantly. Then David Morgan, Simon's close friend and an archaeologist for the state of North Carolina, asked him for help with an archaeological impact report nearby. Simon arranged for the two of them to stay in the Clegg cottage while they worked on their project. Marcus, his wife, and their young daughters would join them Wednesday. Thanksgiving Day they would eat an enormous meal and spend the rest of the weekend watching football games, walking on the beach, and reading. Marcus had a fabled paperback book collection that occupied an entire interior wall of the beach house. Simon planned to delve into several Nero Wolfe mysteries he hadn't read yet.     Unfortunately right now Simon and Morgan were driving away from the Clegg cottage. Morgan drove his truck off the bridge onto the mainland and turned onto a side road paved with crushed oyster shells. Ahead of them was a low white cinder-block building with a green roof. Painted on the side of the building in faded red letters was the legend COASTAL REFRIGERATED TRUCKING, INC. A half dozen cars were parked outside. One was a blue Jeep Cherokee with the seal of the town of Pearlie Beach on both front doors and a blue light on the roof. Morgan pulled into the space next to it.     "I want to finish my cigarette," Morgan said.     "Don't hurry on my account," Simon said.     Morgan took a long drag on his Lucky Strike and flicked the butt out the open truck door.     "Have another," Simon said.     "I'd rather get this over with," Morgan said.     The receptionist inside the building didn't even look up at them as she spoke. She was too busy with a sausage biscuit and the Wilmington newspaper.     "You're early," she said, "but your load's ready to go. It's mostly shrimp. You'll unload at the State Farmer's Market in Raleigh."     "We're not truckers," Simon said. "We're supposed to meet Dale Pearlie and--"     "Oh! You're the guys to look at that thing!" She shuddered. "It's in the back icebox, down the hallway, last door to the left. Just knock. There should be some parkas hanging next to the door. Make sure you wear one. It's cold in there."     In sympathy, or maybe in apprehension, she drew her white cardigan tighter around her body.     "I wish they hadn't brought it here," she said.     "Not much point in sending it anywhere until we figure out just what it is," Simon said. "And this is the closest walk-in refrigerator--"     "Okay, okay," she said. She pointed down the hall. "Down there," she said again, and went back to her newspaper.     Morgan and Simon walked down the narrow hall and stopped in front of a large stainless steel door. They couldn't see anything through the small window fogged up with ice crystals. Several beat-up down parkas hung on hooks next to the door. Each man selected one and put it on. Simon chose the smallest, but still he had to push the sleeves up on his arms. Morgan had some difficulty zipping his over his beer belly.     "Let's do it," Simon said.     Morgan rotated the large wheeled latch on the icebox door, opened it, and the two men went inside. The day before, Simon and Morgan had been sorting happily through the debris scooped up by a dredge belonging to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the sound side of Pearlie Beach. The dredge was a huge ugly monster that looked like a Quonset hut mounted on a barge. It whined like a fire siren and vibrated oddly on the surface of the water. A wide orange flexible pipe exited its engine room and snaked under the water to vacuum up sand and debris from the floor of the sound. The sand was discharged onto the beach to replenish it, but the rest was hauled to the mainland for disposal. Morgan hoped to rescue some evidence from the trash that a large Tuscarora village had once thrived on the shore. He was concerned that most of the village had eroded into the sound and that large-scale dredging would scatter artifacts. So Morgan and Simon sorted and sifted. After hours they only had one Late Woodland period spear point.     "Disappointed?" Simon asked.     "Yes and no. It's true we haven't found my village, but it's good that the dredge isn't destroying a significant site."     Simon had a stabbing pain in his back from bending over and a headache from the bright sun. He stretched, bending backward and twisting to work out the kinks. Looking out across the water, he saw that seamen on the dredge had a log-shaped object caught in their equipment. They were disentangling it on the deck of the ship. Simon pointed it out to Morgan, and for a few minutes the two men were excited, thinking perhaps it was a prehistoric Indian canoe. They stood on the shore, with their hands shading their eyes, watching the crew loading the object onto a dinghy. As the dinghy crossed the short distance from the dredge to the dock where Simon and Morgan stood, the seamen on board the dredge were unusually quiet, and their captain stood watching their progress with his cap in his hand like a mourner in a churchyard. Somehow Simon didn't think the object was a canoe.     The boat tied up at the pier, and a sergeant climbed out.     "We have recovered the damnedest thing," he said. "I have never seen anything like it."     "Let's take a look," Morgan had said.     The object was completely covered with barnacles: tiny, hard, volcano-shaped growths that cement themselves to anything underwater. A colony of black mussels and clumps of lettucelike seaweed clung to it. Despite this the object seemed obviously and distressingly human. Simon and the sergeant watched as Morgan used a small mallet and chisel to chip away the concretions at what appeared to be the head. He carefully exposed the eyehole of an old diving mask.     "Damn," Morgan said.     "You don't suppose there's a person ..." the sergeant began, then stopped.     "We'd better call the police," Simon said. Simon and Morgan went into the icebox. Dale Pearlie, the mayor-for-life of Pearlie Beach, and the town police chief, Donnie Lee Keck, looked up from their work. They had-spent all night chipping years of encrusted ocean growth off the old diving suit with the tools Morgan had lent them. Pearlie put down a dental pick and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. His skin was green in the bad light of the refrigerator. The fluorescent lights in the chilly room popped and buzzed.     "This is the nastiest thing I have ever had to do in my life," Pearlie said.     "You should have let the medical examiner do it," Simon said.     The police chief put down his tools and stretched. He was about forty-five, thin, muscled, and still neat and composed despite the wretched night's work.     "Sure," Keck said. "Just send a big chunk of barnacles and who-knows-what off to the medical examiner and say that we think there might be a human inside it and he, or she, is probably dead, and would he mind letting us know? I don't think that's in his job description. I think we have to find out what it is first, then figure out where to send it. Might be it ought to go to the county landfill, after all."     Simon walked completely around the human shape on the table. Pearlie and Keck had done a good job of peeling off the encrusted layers of barnacles. The old rubber diving suit had a thick mask that enclosed the head like a balaclava. Two round eyeholes were opaque with algae. A circular metal snout covered the nose and mouth area. Two heavy rubber tubes hooked into the mask below the snout and led to a rusted metal and rubber box about the size of a shoe box fastened around the waist. A metal gauge with two knobs intersected with the box and one of the hoses. The feet were shod in weighted shoes. The diver had walked on the bottom, not swum. When Simon poked at the suit, it gave a little, like a flat bicycle tire.     "The equipment's a rebreather," Simon said. "World War II at the latest. Sometimes frogmen used rebreathers instead of those old heavy diving suits with air hoses that led to the surface. Navy divers used them to inspect the hulls of ships and check for mines in harbors. Pressurized air tanks weren't invented yet."     Rebreathers were extremely dangerous. Developed for wartime use, they eliminated the need for divers to stay in contact with an air pump above the surface by circulating pure oxygen through a closed system inside the diver's suit. Unfortunately, at depths greater than thirty-five feet, water pressure forced too much pure oxygen into the bloodstream, causing convulsions, drowning, or arterial embolism. Without knowing another thing about this corpse, Simon though it was likely the diver drowned when he strayed too deep underwater.     Morgan tugged at an object fused to the suit's right side. Then he used what looked like a putty knife to peel it away from the diving suit. He took the object to a sink and cleaned it off, prying its sides apart while he washed it. He shoved his fist inside the opening he had made, expanding the object to its original cylindrical shape.     "It's a rubber bucket," Morgan said. "For collecting stuff underwater."     "Poor bastard," Keck said.     "So," Pearlie said. "Who wants to take off the mask?"     "I'll do it," Keck said.     "I don't mind," Morgan said.     "I mind a lot," Pearlie said. "I'll wait outside."     "I'll keep you company," Simon said.     Outside the icebox door the two men shed their coats, tossed them on the floor, and sat on them with their backs up against the wall.     "I am so damn tired," Pearlie said.     Pearlie was a compact, balding, tanned man pushing sixty who managed Pearlie Beach Realty with his elderly mother, Inez. They either owned, or acted as leasing agents for, most of the resort property on the island. They were wealthy, but they were working people first, spending long days and weekends managing the business. Over many years their investment had weathered bad roads, ferry breakdowns, collapsed bridges, fires, wars, and hurricanes. Simon guessed from Pearlie's demeanor that this was his first corpse.     "You've had a rough night," Simon said.     "You said this guy, if there is a guy, was a navy diver from World War II?" Pearlie said.     "No," Simon said. "I said he could be."     "I had a cousin who was a navy frogman, stationed in Wilmington. He vanished in 1942. I never knew him--I was a toddler at the time. My family assumed he had gone AWOL until the navy told them his gear was missing, too. They never heard from him again, assumed he drowned. None of us have thought of him in years," Pearlie said.     Morgan and Keck came out of the icebox.     "We just slit enough of the suit, right where the mask met it, to see what we could see," Morgan said. "There's a skeleton inside, all right."     Pearlie groaned. "What now?" he asked.     "Call the medical examiner's office," Keck said. "We've done all we can here."     Simon and Morgan drove silently back to the beach house. It was a muggy, hazy morning, but the weather forecast for the rest of the week predicted clear skies and sunny, warm afternoons. Marcus's girls would be able to run barefoot on the beach and chase ghost crabs and dig for tiny multicolored coquina clams.     Pearlie Beach was a small island south and west of Wilmington on the North Carolina coast. It had a town hall, a police department with one chief and two officers, a chapel, a seafood market, a convenience store, a fishing pier, a small apartment building, and about three hundred beach cottages. Every single structure had been built since 1954, when Hurricane Hazel devastated eastern North Carolina, leaving nothing standing on the island. Across the bridge on the mainland, out of the jurisdiction of the conservative Pearlie Beach town council, were a dozen or so restaurants, a water slide, tourist shops, a miniature golf course, a bookstore, an A.B.C. liquor store, two large marinas, and a campground, all of which lined Pearlie Beach Road on both sides until it intersected with NC Highway 17. A few more businesses hugged the banks of the sound, including the Do Drop Inn, a bar housed in the old ferry building, converted when a drawbridge was built to the mainland in 1956.     The Pearlie Beach Sound was so narrow a strong swimmer could cross it easily. As they drove across the bridge onto the island, Simon could see the huge ugly dredge spewing sand onto the beach. Beach renourishment had its critics, but Simon selfishly supported whatever preserved the barrier islands of North Carolina, even if it was expensive and postponed the inevitable for just another generation or two.     "How about breakfast?" Morgan asked.     "I don't think my stomach's up to it," Simon said. "A Coke would be good, though."     They turned off the street into the parking lot of the Pearlie Beach Grocery Store and Beach Emporium. It was a small white concrete block building with a bright blue metal roof. A white sign with blue lettering that matched the color of the roof advertised, NOVELTIES AND GIFTS, DIP ICE CREAM, T-SHIRTS, BAIT AND TACKLE. The outside walls on either side of the door were lined with drink machines, three newspaper racks, a phone booth, a rack of propane gas bottles, an air pump for inner tubes and bicycle tires, and two ice dispensers. Leland Pearlie, Dale's brother and the proprietor, was plugging one of the two ice dispensers into the outside wall socket. He was taller and heavier than his older brother and combed long side hairs over his bald spot.     "Got a shipment of ice coming in tomorrow," he said to Simon and Morgan. "Last one of the season. Hope it gets us through the weekend."     He followed them into the store. Leland's watchful wife Darlene was at her usual post at the cash register. Gray roots showed through her bouffant hairdo. She wore no makeup, unfashionable glasses, and a blue polyester pantsuit. Simon's Aunt Rae, the materfamilias of his North Carolina mountain relatives, would say that Darlene looked like she had been "rode hard and put up wet." She was one of a vanishing race of southern women who worked themselves to the bone taking care of home, business, and family while trying to make their menfolks "do right." Since doing right meant staying away from cars, beer, and hunting and fishing, and included going to church and leaving enough money in the till to pay the bills before buying a new shotgun, they weren't often successful. Darlene never left Leland alone with the store receipts.     "Dale called me," Leland said. "He tells me you-all think that the corpse might be a navy frogman. He's wondering if he could be our cousin."     "Might be, I guess," Simon said. He picked up a twelve-pack of Coke.     "Any way to find out?" Leland said.     "The medical examiner can tell you, if he's got your cousin's dental records."     "But didn't you do something like this recently? I read about it in the newspaper. Aren't you the history professor who figured out who killed that woman in Raleigh? The one that disappeared so many years ago?"     Damn, Simon thought.     "Yeah, that's him," Morgan said. "You probably saw the big article the News and Observer did. They called him a `forensic historian.' A couple of national papers picked the story up off the wires and ran it, too." (Continues...)