Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (18 page)

Like most cannabis aficionados I had met, Leaf was a talkative character. I let him ramble.

“I had this herb garden back then,” he continued. “And I used to dry and sell my stuff at various farmers’ markets—parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, as the song goes. But one day, Betty heard two guys at the next stall talking about medicinal plants, and she suddenly got all interested in growing milk thistle and chickweed and nettle leaf. She started making tinctures and extracts and teas. I thought it was kind of fun at first, experimenting, but Betty was all business from the start. She got one of our artist friends to draw up the EarthMother logo to put on the packages. Then she took over a barn down the road and hired these local women to help her brew everything. The next thing I knew, she was driving all over New England to co-ops and head shops to sell her herbal products. I don’t know why it surprised me when she told me she wanted to move out of the shack to a real farm, where she could have a bigger operation. But I wasn’t interested in moving, and so she asked me to sign a paper giving up my rights to the business, and I did because it was always her thing and not mine, and we peacefully parted ways. Eight months later, she sent me a letter telling me she’d had a baby girl she’d named Briar.”

“Briar’s your daughter?”

“Betty’s never told me for sure, and I’ve never asked. We were into free love, man. What can I say?”

I didn’t have a clue how to respond to this. “Isn’t that strange for all of you? Briar doesn’t want to know who her father is?”

He pushed his glasses back higher on the bridge of his nose. “I’d say that anyone who has Betty Morse for a mom doesn’t need another parent. I think that’s how they both feel. But looking at Briar does make me smile, I have to say.”

We passed the dry meadow where we’d found the first moose. A small flock of migrating sparrows that was feeding along the roadside took off, each bird flying away in its own crazy direction. When I’d first driven onto Elizabeth Morse’s woodland estate, I’d had the feeling of entering a different world. Now it seemed like more of an alternate universe.

“After all that,” I said, “how did you ever end up working as her personal assistant?”

“I got busted for growing dope—it was a game warden pilot who spotted my little plantation, actually—and then the IRS took my shack for nonpayment of taxes. Betty somehow heard I was in trouble, and she asked if I wanted a job, and I didn’t have a whole lot of options, you know?”

His muscles had tensed up when he mentioned being arrested for marijuana cultivation, and for the first time during this conversation, I remembered that he’d been a soldier in the Mekong Delta long ago. I wondered what roiling emotions the harmless old stoner might be keeping at bay through regular hits from the bong. Leaf had been Elizabeth’s business partner, but now he was merely her assistant. He was seemingly Briar’s father, but Morse had denied bestowing that status on him, as well. I couldn’t imagine how the man lived with himself.

“If you had kept your share of the business, you could have been rich,” I said.

“That’s true. But I’ve never needed a whole lot to be happy.”

We entered the thick stand of evergreens, then a minute later rolled to a stop in front of the Sixth Machias gate. As he reached for the door handle, I couldn’t help but ask, “The situation doesn’t make you feel bitter at all?”

“Sometimes, yeah, it does.”

“How do you deal with it?”

Leaf Woodwind shook his head and giggled again, as if the answer were staring me in the face. “I get high, man. I get high.”

19

With the rest of my afternoon free, I decided to pay a visit to the home of Billy Cronk. I figured I would give myself a couple of hours before I alerted anyone that I had been temporarily dismissed as Elizabeth Morse’s personal liaison. And I wanted to have a frank talk with my friend about his strange behavior over the past forty-eight hours.

On the way, I stopped to use the outhouse at the rest area where Route 9 crossed over the babbling East Machias River. Given what a beautiful day it was, I would have expected to see picnickers at the raised grills and red cedar tables, but there was only a single vehicle in the paved lot: a black Sierra Denali. The truck was brand-new, recently washed and waxed. I didn’t recognize the plate number, but I had a vague sense of having seen the expensive pickup around town. The driver was probably fishing on the river. I decided to have a look at him.

Wardens spend a lot of our time spying on people. If your intention is to catch someone taking too many trout, there is no better substitute than watching him from behind a bush. The anglers we arrest—or “pinch”—for these misdemeanor offenses complain that our methods are sneaky and unfair, but most law-enforcement officers aren’t prone to worrying whether the ends justify the means.

I made a semicircle away from the river and then back again, heading for an upstream pool where fishermen liked to dunk worms. Whirlygig samaras spun down from the sugar maples on their rotary blades: the seeds of future giants.

Eventually, I heard voices and spotted a flash of movement through the alders that hugged the riverbank. I crept close to the water, getting lower and lower as I went, until I was crawling on my hands and knees through the puckerbrush.

Out in the river, a man was trying to teach a very small boy how to cast a fly line. My first thought was that it was a father and son. Both were dark-haired and on the skinny side. The man wore a fishing vest and khaki waders; the boy was dressed in a white T-shirt and bathing trunks, and he was having a hard time managing the long fly rod. His fluorescent yellow line just flopped on his head when he tried to throw it forward into the current.

“
No trate de forzarlo, Tomás,
” the man said.

It was Matt Skillen and his “little brother,” I realized.

“
No puedo hacerlo,
” said the boy.

My college Spanish had gotten rusty, but I didn’t need a translator to understand that the kid was feeling frustrated.

“Watch me,” said Skillen in English. He took the rod from the boy’s hand and executed a beautiful roll cast that fully extended the leader and dropped a bushy dry fly in the eddy behind a boulder. Just as the fly hit the water, a fish rose to bite it. I knew at once that it was a brook trout because of the glimpse of orange I saw on its underbelly, and I knew that it was big.

Skillen set the hook and then handed the rod back to the boy, who seemed reluctant to take it. “Reel it in, Tomás! Keep the line tight!”

Tomás had a hard time keeping the tip of the rod up and working the reel. I was certain that the trout would escape, but Skillen leaned over and guided the boy’s hands, almost the way a father would teach a young child to pedal a bicycle. The man was doing all the work, but the boy was the one laughing.

After a few minutes of playing the fish, Skillen maneuvered the trout into the net. It was a beautiful male brookie, more than a foot long, with an impressively hooked jaw. Skillen unhooked the fly from the fish’s lip and lifted the dripping net for the boy to see.

“Wow, Tomás! Look how beautiful he is. Your first fish on a fly rod. We need to take it home to show your mama.”

“
Pero lo agarro.
”

“No, no,” Skillen said, putting the fish into an old-fashioned wicker creel. “You caught this one. I just helped. Come on, let’s see if we can catch an even bigger one.”

On the boy’s face was the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

I could have made my presence known to them; I could have congratulated Tomás on his magnificent trout. But the scene seemed so private, I felt almost embarrassed to be watching, especially from behind a bush. Tomás would never forget this moment. My own father had never taught me how to fish like this. Never once had he shown me such patience and kindness. And so, as much as I wanted to resent Matt Skillen for being the man Stacey had chosen over me, I found myself unable to dislike him.

As quietly as I could, I crept away through the alders and left the two of them alone on the sun-spangled river.

*   *   *

When I arrived at Billy’s house, I found Aimee stringing wet sheets along a clothesline between two trees. The Cronklets were nowhere in sight, but Billy and Aimee seemed to worry less about their children’s safety than did parents in more urbanized areas. At first, I had viewed the Cronks’ approach to parenting as something like negligence, but over time, I had watched the eldest boy carrying the youngest girl up and down stairs, seen a younger child chastising his twin for climbing atop the picnic table when he’d clearly been told not to, and I’d realized that child care was more of an art than a science, and that I should be careful about making judgments on a subject I knew nothing about.

“Hey, Mike,” Aimee said, pushing a red strand of hair out of her eyes and gripping the clothesline with her other hand, as if for support. “Billy’s taken his bow and gone turkey hunting.”

“That answers one of my questions,” I said. “How long was he in jail?”

“The sheriff let him out yesterday morning. I think she was only holding him overnight to make a point. But she’s the law, so whatever. Billy’s still facing a trespassing charge.”

“The DA isn’t charging him with assault on Khristian?”

“Threatened to,” she said, “but everyone seems to agree it was more like self-defense than Billy kicking the shit out of that old dwarf.”

I glanced around at the second-growth forest that clustered at the edges of the Cronks’ dooryard. The oaks had held on to their tattered brown leaves, but the limbs of the maples, birches, and beeches had mostly been stripped bare by the autumn winds. An old skidder trail led up through the woods to an overgrown field where I knew Billy liked to hunt.

“Is he up that way?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said. “But you won’t find him unless he wants to be found.”

I started off around the house, feeling the Indian summer heat on my neck, wondering when it would finally break. By the time Moosehorn National Park ever received its official designation, Elizabeth Morse’s dreams of creating a sanctuary for boreal flora and fauna would be foiled by global warming. Instead of observing woodland caribou and timber wolves in their natural habitat, visitors would see feral pigs and opossums; rather than wandering beneath the boughs of hemlocks and jack pine, they would pass through sapling thickets of dogwoods and blue ash. The scorching weather might or might not be a harbinger of climate change, but it was definitely turning my thoughts in morbid directions.

As I came around the corner, I heard the shouted voices of children, overloud, as kids always are. Then, all at once, they fell silent. I raised my shaded eyes at an ancient red oak in which Billy had constructed a ramshackle tree house, with irregularly carved windows and a dangerous-looking ladder that would undoubtedly snap beneath the weight of an adult. Several blond heads poked out through the haphazard windows and doors. The kids were all gathered inside like a nest of raccoons, and like baby animals, they knew to be quiet when an unknown presence approached.

“Hey, guys,” I said.

The Cronklets watched me silently. As soon as I had passed by up the hill, the urchins resumed their raucous play.

Billy had cut wood from his hillside lot the previous winter and brought it down the skidder trail. The machinery had flattened the alders and poplars that had been threatening to overtake the path, but the resilient little trees had spent the summer rebounding, and so I had to push through some scratchy vegetation in places. The fallen leaves on the ground—a pattern of red and silver—reminded me of a Persian carpet. Every now and then, I came across one of Billy’s big boot prints, but I knew that his wife was right that he could vanish into the foliage whenever he chose. My friend wasn’t as expert a woodsman as my father—no one was—but I always learned a trick or two whenever I followed him into the forest.

Aimee said he was bow hunting for wild turkeys, which meant he was probably decked out in full camo. Most turkey hunters liked to set up decoys and then settle down to call the birds into shooting range. Billy preferred to stalk them, which was a pretty good way to get yourself shot by another hunter, in my opinion. My friend scoffed at the dangers.

“If I don’t spot another hunter before he can take a crack at me, then I deserve to die,” he’d said.

After wandering aimlessly along the trail for a while, I decided to make things easy on myself and stood in place and started hollering his name at the top of my lungs.

Billy appeared after a few minutes, carrying his bow over one arm, and with a dead jake turkey slung over the other.

“That’s another stupid thing to do,” I said.

He removed the camouflage hat and face mask he had been wearing. “What is?”

“Toting a dead turkey on your back. There are crazy hunters who will see a flash of what looks like a moving bird and open fire.”

“I’ll take my chances.” His pale irises were even more humorless than that night at Khristian’s. “What do you want?”

“You’re not going to thank me for helping Aimee pick up your truck?”

“Thank you.”

“The last time I saw you, you were telling me what a good friend I was. What the hell happened?”

“I spent a night in jail.”

He lowered the turkey to the ground. It was a simultaneously handsome and disgusting creature; its iridescent brown feathers shined in the sunlight as if oiled, but its bald, misshapen head had blotches of venous blue and arterial red that made me think of a diseased old man.

“Well, I just spent the day with your former employer,” I said. “Rivard made me Betty Morse’s personal liaison with the moose investigation.”

“Did you talk to her about me getting my job back?”

“Frankly, I think you’re better off that she fired you.”

“Tell that to the power company when they come to cut off our electricity.” He ran his hand across his tanned, sweaty face. His beard needed trimming. “I’m sorry I’m in such a piss-poor mood. I just can’t see the bright side of anything today.”

“Well, you bagged a turkey,” I said.