Deceived - Laura S. Wharton Page 0,15
beer. Tonight, the same “island” music blared from hanging speakers in rafters, and the smell of French fries and onion rings wafted throughout the small establishment. The owners were almost as famous as the food because of their generosity to the community when they closed shop every winter and headed south on a migration of their own. Each year, a different destination. A few nights before they left, they cooked all they had in the freezers, popped the kegs, and invited the town to a free dinner. No wonder they had the following they did, Sam noted, as he looked around at the tables that were filling up fast.
Sam ordered a Bass ale and grouper cheeks. His dinner companion was a snowy egret that landed on the rail and watched him intently. Without calling attention to his actions, Sam pulled the dry bag out of his pocket and unfolded the origami-like paper it contained. Just as Deloris had said, it was an incomplete grid with initials written in what Sam recognized to be Lee’s handwriting. There were four columns with a few scattered initials in each one: DS, AK, and CO were in the first column, with question marks and lines drawn from each to the second column’s only initials: LO. Another set of lines left LO and joined the next column, again with a single entry: JH. The fourth column contained words or names; Sam guessed them to be boat names: Firefly, Moonglow, Seawitch. Again, a question mark held court beside each word.
Whatever Lee had been learning, he was putting on the grid. Sam puzzled over it for a few minutes, then folded it tightly and returned it to the dry bag, which went into his pocket.
He watched the evening’s tide come in until dark. He saw several shrimp boats coming in to port, their tall riggings coming up as they got closer to Johnson’s, which stood only a stone’s throw from Provision’s.
Sam watched the crowd expand to overflowing on the dock jutting out into the small bay and marina. At low tide, the muck and mud held a faint tinge of sweet in the salty decay. A few of the smaller boats listed in their interior slips sitting on a soft bottom of mud and silt. Sam thought he might like to get out of his marina one day and cruise like the snowbirds he’d seen over the years. They’d anchor out in tranquil spots like this, close enough to a village like Southport and to a small bar like Provision’s. Their vessels became part of the scenery, fueling the dreams of every wanderlust-bitten soul and adding to the seaside town’s charm for the tourists.
“Picture postcard perfect,” Sam cynically thought as a brutally handsome deck jock rowed his buxom redheaded princess up to the dock for supper. Their boat was unscathed, uncluttered, and totally unlike his own. It was these yachties whom wannabes thought of when they breezed through a copy of Cruising World Magazine. Yet these sailors were the minority among the cruising community, and certainly only an abstract of the town they bestowed their presence on. They were merely passing through.
Sam finally relinquished his table to the bouncy waitress who zoomed past him as she tended to other customers. She stopped by his seat so frequently to ask, “Is everything all right?” that he knew she wanted to turn that table and that he had overstayed his welcome. He obliged, slipping a tip in a crammed tip jar resting atop a metal counter on the way out.
It was still early, so Sam did what most every other visitor to Southport does. He strolled the waterfront. The largest structure facing the water was Johnson’s Fishery, one of the town’s mainstays. Sam remembered reading about old man Johnson’s death a few years ago. A newspaper article said it was a freak accident that claimed the life of the expert seaman and one of his long-time drinking buddies, Hale Carouth. Sam recalled reading how the two made their way back to the channel of Cape Fear on a moonless night after a day of fishing. A shrimp boat running at full speed cut through the twenty-four-foot sport fishing vessel, and the shrimper claimed he never saw the boat. He said he didn’t see any running lights, either.
Sam had heard that shrimpers are notorious for running without their radios on, so it was quite possible that he never heard the warning call from Johnson, if there was one. The whole