Boiled Over (A Maine Clambake Mystery) (12 page)

Outside Moore House, I started my car and opened the windows. The sun had heated the car to oven temperatures. I sat for a moment and thought about what to do. On the one hand, it was at least a two and a half hour ride north and east from Rockland to Columbia Falls. On the other, I was part way there, I had a car, and I didn’t know when I could steal another day off. If there was any chance Cabe was at the blueberry camp, I had to find out. I drove north and east on U.S. 1.

Being alone in the car, a rarity between family and work, gave me plenty of time to think, and my thoughts were much darker than the shimmering summer day outside. I’d thought Lieutenant Binder had made me an unofficial part of his team after I’d proved to him I could solve a murder last spring. I’d been sure all Sergeant Flynn’s glowering and harrumphing was because he objected to Binder taking me into his confidence.

But clearly, Binder had been playing me. Telling me things he wanted me to know. Using me to find out stuff, but keeping an awful lot from me. He must know about the previous murder that had touched Cabe’s life. That seemed like a pretty big thing for him to leave out of our conversations accidentally. The more I thought about it, the madder it made me.

Anger kept my right foot pressed down on the gas pedal, though my mother’s old car didn’t have much of its original power. Within the hour, I’d passed the stately homes of Rockport and Camden, and sailed over the beautiful Penobscot Narrows Bridge, which looked like twin schooners racing over the river hundreds of feet below. I stopped at the Dunkin Donuts in Bucksport to use the restroom and buy coffee, but didn’t think to eat. I fidgeted as I waited in the line to pay. I needed to press on.

I roared into Washington County, called “Sunrise County” because it’s the first place the sun hits the continental United States. On my right, tantalizing views of the Gulf of Maine appeared and disappeared as the road twisted.

By four in the afternoon, I was starting to lose steam. Blueberry fields appeared on either side of the road. I saw farm workers off in the distance. What now? Why had I thought I could find Cabe in this vast expanse?

I saw a barn-sized geodesic dome painted bright blue. It was surrounded by dozens of round marine buoys that looked like perfectly round boulders, a round water tower, and a fence with round post toppers the size of basketballs, all of them painted bright blue.
WILD BLUEBERRY LAND
the sign said. It seemed like the place to stop.

Inside Wild Blueberry Land, my mouth began to water. The shop was full of souvenirs—T-shirts, mugs, pie plates, with blueberries all over everything—but I was interested only in the goods behind the glass counter. I didn’t know what to choose—blueberry muffins, scones, pies, cookies, smoothies, milkshakes, ice cream.

“And they’re good for you,” the cheerful woman behind the counter said. “Loaded with antioxidants.”

I smiled back at her. Sure, they were good for you if they weren’t surrounded by pounds of butter, flour, and sugar, but I was way too hungry to point this out. I finally decided on a muffin and a cup of coffee to go with it.

“These berries are wild, right?” I asked, while she served up my coffee and muffin.

She cocked her head. “They’re not planted by the farmers. If you clear a field around here, it will fill in with blueberries. But the fields are rotated, harvested one year and burned the next. Fire kills the weeds, but not the bushes, which are mostly underground. The part the berries grow on is only six to eight inches high. That’s why they’re called low-bush blueberries. The cultivated ones are called high-bush.”

I nodded to show I understood. Maine blueberries were a lot like Maine lobsters. A native resource, not farmed, but carefully managed. I sat at one of the high tables in the shop. It was everything I could do not to gulp down the muffin. The sweet and tangy taste of the blueberries was delicious. I closed my eyes and focused on it, determined to savor their flavor, despite the rumblings in my stomach.

After I finished the last bite, I handed the woman a five to pay for my snack. “Can you give me directions to the Mi’kmaq camp?” I asked as she made change.

“The Mi’kmaq work Passamaquoddy land. There are five camps. The nearest one is about ten miles from here.” She drew a map on a napkin.

I needed to go back the way I’d come for a few miles, then turn inland. “Great. Thanks.” It was already late afternoon. I had a lot of searching to do before I headed back to Busman’s Harbor.

When I left Route 1, the scenery changed. Large fields of the low-bush berries were broken up only by single rows of tall trees and the tops of boulders that occasionally broke through the topsoil. Here and there, I saw clusters of cars and trucks and pickers working. I scanned for Cabe’s familiar form, but didn’t see him.

Farther on, the fields were posted with huge yellow signs. I stopped the car and read
PASSAMAQUODDY WILD BLUEBERRY COMPANY. NO TRESSPASSING. ACCESS BY PERMIT ONLY
.

What was I doing?

The paved road turned sharply to the left and in front of me was a dirt track. Beside another yellow
NO TRESSPASSING
sign was a smaller, hand-lettered sign with an arrow pointing to the camp. My car idled while my natural law-abiding, rule-following tendencies warred with my desire to find Cabe.

I’d always thought of myself as a good person. Someone who’d never lie to the cops or keep things from them. I never parked in handicapped spots. As a kid, I’d never filched so much as a pack of gum, and to this day I grew uneasy in conversations where it was assumed, “everybody did it.”

The
NO TRESPASSING
sign freaked me out. I would never, ever have passed it to get something for myself. But I had to help Cabe. I’d come so far. What if he was just beyond that sign? The story Emily Draper had told me about Cabe’s life pushed me forward. Someone should do something for that boy.

Finally, I depressed the gas pedal and pulled forward onto the dirt track, my heart pounding. I passed more fields and considered turning around several more times before the camp came into view.

A dozen or more rough wooden bunkhouses, looking like something out of the Depression, were clustered on a grassy verge. Children chased one another in the space between the houses, laughing and shrieking. Men played cards at tables on the grass. When there were more ruts than road, I steered into a space among the pickups and cars parked at the camp.

I got out of my car into the late afternoon heat. Even just a little bit inland, it was much warmer than on the coast. Was it too much to hope that I would spot Cabe in the crowd? He would stand out, for sure. Though I did see an occasional white person, and black person, and Asian person, almost everyone around me was Native American. The crowd hummed with the sounds of English, French, and another language I assumed belonged to the Mi’kmaqs.

A powerfully built, middle-aged man with a thick thatch of silver hair detached himself from a card game and came toward me. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Aren’t they all?” he muttered to himself. To me he said, “What’s your friend called?”

“Cabe Stone,” I answered, giving the only name I had, though I doubted Cabe was using it if he was here. “He’s about five foot ten, thin, dark blond hair, blue eyes. Nineteen years old.”

“What do you want with this Stone?”

“He’s my younger brother.” The lie slipped out almost before I knew I’d formed it. The Mi’kmaq man’s question gave me hope. Why ask, if my description of Cabe didn’t ring any bells?

“Will this brother be happy to see you?”

“Yes. I think so. I’m sure so,” I said with more confidence. Cabe had called, asking for my help.

“C’mon,” the man said. “Only the younger men are still out in the fields. The rest of us have quit for the day.” He headed toward a pickup truck so high off the ground, I wondered if I’d be able to climb into it. Sometimes I hated being short. But after the man opened the passenger side door, I boosted myself onto the running board, grabbed the frame of the open window, and swung myself inside. Despite a lifetime of lectures about stranger danger, I didn’t hesitate, even a little bit, to get into the man’s truck. He must know where Cabe was. My heart beat wildly.

“Joe Manion, by the way.”

“Julia Snowden.” We drove out of the camp back along the two-lane road through the blueberry barrens. In the far-off field of another farm, I spotted a hulking mechanical harvester moving slowly down a row of blueberries.

“We have a handshake agreement with the Passamaquoddy. As long as we come to pick, they won’t mechanize. Mi’kmaqs have migrated from Canada to pick blueberries for as long as anyone can remember. The last few years, your Feds have given us trouble at the border. Worried we’re illegal immigrants. ‘You’re the illegal immigrants!’ I tell them.” He laughed. “Though I’m sure it doesn’t help matters.”

We pulled to the side of the road. Large yellow plastic boxes of tiny blueberries, twigs, and leaves were piled at the edge of the field. “The trucks will be along to pick those up soon,” Joe said.

Only about half a dozen people were still working, all fit, young men. “We set our own goals. Number of boxes, dollars per day. When we’re done, we head back to camp. We’re independent, work for ourselves, make our own rules. That’s what we like about working for the Passamaquoddy. They understand our work ethic.”

Picking low-bush blueberries looked like unimaginably hard work. Wielding a blueberry rake that looked like a dustpan with a comb at the end, the pickers pulled their rakes through the bushes. The tines of the comb cleaned the berries off the bushes. Every few minutes, when the rake’s scoop was full, the pickers dumped the berries into a plastic tote. Then they moved up their row.

I looked for Cabe among the bent-over figures. The sun was hot, the air still. Sweat formed along my hairline, even though I wasn’t moving.

“Want to stand in the bed of the truck, see if you can spot your brother?” Joe asked.

I almost responded, “What brother?” but caught myself in time.

I climbed into the truck bed and scanned the field, searching for Cabe. Nothing. Something drew my eyes to a tall, well-built Native American man. In one fluid motion, he put down his blueberry rake and pulled a camera with an enormous lens from his bag. Pointing it in my direction, he began snapping pictures. In that moment, I was sure it was the photographer from the morning of the murder.

“Hey!” I jumped out of the bed of the pickup and ran. “Hey!”

The good-looking photographer stood, smiling politely, as I made my way through the blueberry field toward him. “Walk where the berries have already been picked,” he called, indicating a row marked with string.

Finally, I made it to the man’s side. “I’m so glad I’ve found you. I’m Julia Snowden.”

He shook my hand without hesitation, though he was clearly trying to place me. “Phillip Johnson. You’ve been looking for me?” He was in his late thirties or early forties, dressed in faded jeans and a sweat-soaked white T-shirt. The cut of his slightly long, black hair looked expensive to my Manhattan-trained eye and I couldn’t begin to guess the cost of his photographic equipment. Why was a man like this doing the backbreaking work of raking blueberries?

“That depends,” I responded. “Were you on the balcony of the Lighthouse Inn in Busman’s Harbor last Saturday morning, taking photos of the activity on the pier for Founder’s Weekend?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I am. I’m trying to help a friend.”

Johnson bent over to put his camera and lens back into their cases. “I think we’d better go somewhere to talk.”

I nodded, relieved that he wasn’t inclined to blow me off. He handed me his camera case and said, “Be careful. I have to finish my row. Once you start, you’re committed.” He indicated an area marked off with string.

I watched, fascinated, as he bent and dragged the big rake across the ground under the blueberry plants. “They’re beautiful,” I said, looking in the plastic tote at the tiny, glistening dark berries and soft green leaves.

“There are naturally fifty to a hundred varieties of blueberry plant in a field. That’s why there are different colors from black to light reddish-blue or even albino. They peak for harvest at different times, as well. It’s the variety in the type of berry and ripeness that packs them with so much flavor. The ones I’m picking now will go off to be cleaned and frozen tonight. Ninety per cent of them are sold frozen.”

He finished his row and picked up the plastic totes containing his blueberries, depositing them at the end of the row. A hundred yards away, two men in a flat bed truck moved along the road picking up the bins.

“Give us a ride back to camp?” Johnson asked Joe Manion.

Manion nodded and the three of us crowded into the front seat of the pickup. “How many boxes today?” Manion asked Johnson.

“Seventy-five,” Johnson grunted. “Got a late start and my shoulder’s been bothering me.”

“Not bad,” Manion allowed. The boxes were enormous, twenty or thirty pounds. I couldn’t imagine filling ten of them, let alone seventy-five. I thought the work at the Snowden Family Clambake was physically challenging. I wouldn’t have lasted an hour in these fields.

“How much do you get per box?” I asked.

“Two-fifty,” Joe Manion answered.

I did a quick calculation. A hundred and eighty seven dollars and fifty cents. A lot of money to many of the people in the camp, by the look of them, but I wondered if it was enough to even pay for Phillip Johnson’s haircut.

Back at the camp, Johnson, who asked me to call him Phil, sat me at a table in front of one of the bunkhouses and excused himself to get cleaned up. I still hadn’t told him why I was there, exactly. A moment later, the screen door slammed and Phil, towel slung over his shoulder, went off in the direction of the communal shower house.

While he was gone, I watched the people in the camp. There was plenty of evidence, in bent bodies and lined faces, of hard labor and hard lives. Yet the atmosphere was lively, camp-like. It was suppertime and meals cooked on grills and propane rings. I smelled fresh vegetables, meat, and fish.

Phil returned, his black hair still damp from the shower. “Time for you to tell me what this is about.”

“Did you know there was a murder that morning when you were in Busman’s Harbor?”

He shook his head. “When we checked out of the hotel, all that was known was there was a body in the clambake cooker. I hadn’t heard definitely it was a murder.” He spread his hands, calloused and covered with small cuts, on the rough wood of the table. “We don’t get much news up here.”

“That clambake cooker belongs to me. I’m an owner and the manager of the Snowden Family Clambake Company.”

“I’m sorry for your trouble, but how can I help?”

“Have the police contacted you?”

His expression went from mildly interested to alarmed. “No. Why would they?”

“How early in the morning did you start taking photos?”

He relaxed visibly. “I’m a photojournalist based in Montreal. I have a contract to do photos for a coffee table book on seacoast celebrations from Cape Cod to Prince Edward Island. At Founder’s Weekend, I’d hoped to capture the setup and celebration on the pier—shots from early in the morning when the vendors arrived until midday when there were hundreds of people eating lobster, listening to music, and having a grand time. But the minute the ruckus about the body started, I quit taking shots. For another photographer, a discovery like that might have been a big win. But it wasn’t the kind of scene I’d been hired to shoot. I’d wasted my entire trip to Busman’s Harbor. Once the body was found, nothing I’d shot was useable.”

“How early did you start shooting?”

“Around six-thirty. What time do they think the guy was killed?”

“They don’t know. The body was in bad condition due to the fire. In any case, the victim wasn’t killed on the pier. So you might have captured someone putting him in the woodpile early in the morning, but you probably don’t have photos of the murder.”

“Thank goodness. I’m Canadian.”

I wanted to laugh at that—like Canadians were too polite to get mixed up in stateside murders—but I knew what he meant. He didn’t want to be traveling back and forth to Maine for court appearances.

“I’m sorry about your business, but you haven’t actually told me why you’re here, or what you’re looking for,” he said.

“A young friend found the body that morning. He ran away. The police are searching for him as an important witness, but I’m sure they believe he’s more involved. I think they mean to arrest him as soon as they find him.”

“And you don’t think this friend is guilty?”

“I’m sure he isn’t. I can’t give you a rational reason. I just don’t believe he could kill someone.”

“Tough break,” Phil said. “I’ll help you if I can.” He stood, scraping the wooden chair across the grass. “I’ll get those photos for you.”

I was thrilled a stranger was being so kind. To me. To Cabe.

He went to his car, a silver BMW that had been drawing admiring glances from everyone who walked by it, and retrieved his laptop from the trunk. He came back and fired it up.

“Cabe is a white kid, nineteen or so, average height, slight build, dark blond hair. Have you seen him?”

Phil looked away and my heart leaped. For a moment, I thought he would say he’d seen Cabe, but then he turned back to me. “Nope. Sorry.”

A teenage boy spotted the laptop and called from the street. “Hey brother, can I check my Facebook?”

“You think we have Internet out here, bro? Go spend time with your family. Unplug yourself. Best thing for you.” Phil dismissed the boy with a wave. “Here are the photos from that morning.”

We scrolled through the images. They did, indeed, start early in the morning, but not early enough. In the first shot, Cabe was on the pier fussing with the Claminator, but Weezer was also there with his barbecue and Dan Small had his portable ice cream stand. Stevie’s body must have already been hidden in the firewood by that point.

Even uncropped and unedited, Phil’s photos captured the vibrancy of that glorious morning. The public works guys came to set up the stage and chairs. The sound people came with mikes and speakers. Sonny, Livvie, and Page pulled up in our Boston Whaler and Cabe helped them unload the lobsters and steamers, fresh from the lobster pound, along with more firewood, which they piled to the side. The bakers set out their wares. The members of the high school band trickled in.

“Wait! Stop.” I put my hand on Phil’s arm. “Can I see that one again?”

He scrolled back to the previous image. I studied it carefully. The pier was quite full at the time it was taken—the vendors, the band, and the tourists. At the edges of the photo, I saw two things that surprised me. The first was the young man with scraggily brown hair and a full brown beard I’d almost run into at the RV park. He looked like a hermit or a recluse. It was hard to imagine Founder’s Weekend was his type of deal.

The other thing I spotted was stranger still. In the lower right corner of the photo was the head and neck of a black lab wearing a bright red kerchief. Morgan? It had to be. But Morgan went wherever Bud Barbour went. And Bud was supposed to be at his camp avoiding the Founder’s Weekend crowds.

“Can you e-mail this photo to me?”

“It’ll be awhile before I’m anywhere where I can e-mail. I’ll put it on a memory stick for you.” Phil pulled a thumb drive out of his camera bag and moved a copy of the image to it. “Did you see something helpful?”

“Nothing big,” I admitted. “Your photos are beautiful, though. Thanks so much for showing me.”

We continued looking at the images. There was one of Sonny, face a mask of horror, pointing at the clambake fire, followed by one of the firefighters rushing toward Richelle’s prone body. Then the photos stopped. Not the type of heart-warming pictures of life on the North Atlantic seacoast Phil had been hired to capture.

“Anything else you want?” he asked.

I sighed and let my shoulders slump. It was too difficult to disguise my disappointment. “These photos start too late in the morning. I hoped to see what happened before the crowds arrived.”

Phil shut down the laptop. “It’s a long trip back to Busman’s Harbor. Let me get you something to eat.”

I protested, but feebly. The cooking smells in the camp were too enticing.

Phil disappeared and came back carrying two steaming plates of food and two wedges of coarse bread. “I hope you’re hungry. Dig in.”

The food smelled intoxicating, huge plates of the kind of rib-sticking goodness intended for people who’d done hard, physical labor. I dug into the beans.

“My God, these are delicious. They taste something like New England baked beans.”

“And who do you think invented those?” Phil smiled at me. “All the tribes in Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick cooked beans mixed with maple syrup and bear fat in clay pots buried with hot coals.”

“The beans in this are bigger than I’m used to.”

“Soldier beans. Now grown all over, but they’re native to this region.”

The bigger beans gave the dish a fuller texture. I took a forkful of the second item on the plate, ground meat mixed with celery, onions, mushrooms, and small pieces of bacon. I recognized tarragon and cinnamon in the seasoning, a distinctive combination common in French-Canadian cooking. The cultures constantly enriched one another, beans from the Native Americans, spices from the Quebecois.

I mopped up the food with a wedge of the bread Phil called lu’sknikn. Cooked at the camp in a large iron frying pan, it was crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. The closest thing I could relate it to was Irish soda bread. “Who made this?”

“My mom.” Phil gestured over his shoulder toward a short, sinewy woman with long gray hair, still cooking over a propane gas ring. She spotted me looking and waved.

“She is dying to know who you are.” Phil laughed.

I laughed, too. We ate in silence for a few moments. Then Phil looked up and caught me staring at him.

“You’re wondering why I’m here, raking blueberries.”

Had I been that transparent? Here was a successful photojournalist, the kind who got contracts for high-end coffee table books, bending, lifting, and sweating as he raked blueberries. Surely he didn’t need the work.

“I come because my parents came, and their parents and their parents. No one knows how long the Mi’kmaqs have come to pick blueberries in Maine. Probably since before there was a Maine.” He ran a hand through his black hair. “I come to reconnect with cousins and friends, people I don’t see enough of as I travel for work throughout the year. I spend two weeks unplugged from the Internet and away from my job and the stress of living in a world where I look different. Here I look the same as everyone.” He caught my skeptical look. “Well, maybe a little better off.”

And taller and handsomer.
But I left those thoughts unsaid. “I get why you come, but why do you rake berries?”

“Partly out of pride, to prove that at forty, I can still rake like a young man. But mostly because I want to be part of all this, a participant. I don’t want to stand on the outside and observe. That’s what I do for my job. Here I belong.”

“You weren’t away from the job. You were taking photos when I spotted you.”

“That’s another thing. Being in camp takes me back to when my photography was a hobby, not a job. No one’s paying me to take pictures of the people in the camps. I’ve been doing it since I was a boy.”

When we finished, Phil excused himself to return the plates to his mom. I stood to go.

Phil walked me to my car. “You really think this kid is innocent?”

“I really do.”

Phil hesitated, clearly considering. Finally he said, “The images on my laptop aren’t all there are. I’d hoped to do a video of time-lapse photographs to promote the book on the publishers’ website. Sort of a ‘day in the life.’ I had a stationery camera set up on the balcony taking photos all night. You know, moonrise, sunrise, the town wakes up and gets ready for its big party.”

“That’s fantastic!” I couldn’t believe the luck. “Can I see those photos?”

“I sent them home with my editor.”

His editor? The woman whose room he’d stayed in at the Lighthouse Inn?
“Can you get them?”

He considered. “Maybe. If I can get word to her. She’s coming to visit. But there are over ten thousand images. If you don’t know what time the crime occurred, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“That’s okay. I’ll figure it out.” I didn’t know how, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.