A Matter of Mercy by Lynne Hugo Page A

taste the cinnamon? There’s a stick of it in the pot. Not too much, I hope.” She sat down again. “Goodness, your neighbors are having a time of it with that lawsuit, aren’t they?”
    “Lawsuit?” Caroline asked. Good, sweet Elsie, talking about anything but death and dying now.
    Elsie pointed vaguely upward, out the side of the kitchen to the east, toward the bluffs. “The people up there suing the oystermen.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Oh, well, it’s been on the front page of The Times , and living right here, I thought you’d know. One of the people up on the bluffs is suing some of the oystermen because he says he owns the flats.”
    “I haven’t looked at the paper. I stopped delivery last month—I was picking it up and dropping it into the trash, and it was just a waste.” As she spoke, Caroline’s mind skipped ahead: Rid. Was he involved? “I don’t see how anybody up there can sue, though. I mean the town gives those grants. It’s town property.” Wasn’t that what Rid had explained to her?
    “I don’t know the details. Something about how the town doesn’t really own it. It’s quite a mess, anyway. It’ll put those oystermen out of business if they lose. And if it spreads to other upland landowners, it doesn’t just wipe out the fishing families, it wipes out a town.”
    That night, Caroline watched the local news on television but there was no mention of it. She called and had delivery of The Cape Cod Times resumed, but there was nothing about a lawsuit. Not for nearly a week. She thought about whether to call Rid, whether to walk down and ask him. She didn’t though. Something else took center stage: she awakened nauseated, ate lightly and promptly threw up. That made her pay attention to the missed period she’d attributed to stress and to the tender breasts she’d attributed to the missed period.
    * * * * 

    The damn lawsuit was consuming him. He had nothing to compare it to except maybe a hurricane warning: something you knew was coming, saw the sky darkening, frantically tried to defend against but realized could take everything you’d worked for. It was all they talked about on the flats, even those who weren’t being sued. It was eclipsing this weekend’s Oysterfest, something they all had fun with the middle of every October. Barb would probably win the oyster shucking contest again—he could’ve beaten her last year if he’d concentrated more—but now he wasn’t even going to enter. Too far behind on orders, having wasted time standing in the shallows with Tomas, looking up at the Pissario house. There was no sign of activity up there, which was, in itself, infuriating. He had to hold himself back around Mario to avoid inciting the hothead to some retaliation that could boomerang back on them all.
    “I’d like to know exactly how we can be such a terrible problem for Mr. High and Mighty,” Mario would rant bitterly, squinting up to where the sun glinted off the Pissario house like an ice sculpture. “Ain’t nobody there. Four friggin’ decks overlooking his friggin’ view that we working scumbags mess up but there ain’t nobody ever on one of ’em. Too busy out hiring lawyers, I guess. Now, if them plate glass windows of his was to get shot out mysteriously some night, I’m thinking he’d have a problem worth his time. I don’t see what choice we got. It’s not like we got help from our friends .” The others named in the suit had, one by one, opted out of a joint defense. They were trying to work out a settlement, they said. So far the upland owners above their grants were sleeping giants, and all they needed was to cross Pissario’s beach. Obviously, they thought Mario, Rid and Tomas had zero possibility of winning against Pissario and wanted to avoid going down with them.
    Rid stopped picking oysters out of a cage then, even though the tide was moving in and he didn’t have enough for his restaurant order yet. He stood