Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (20 page)

“I’ve been working a pretty big case.”

“Oh?”

“You’ve probably heard about it. Ten moose were killed on Elizabeth Morse’s land in Washington County. It’s been all over the news.”

“I must have missed it,” he said. “I’ve had other things on my mind.”

“It’s the worst wildlife crime in Maine history.”

“I’m sure it is,” he said.

He was going to make me ask, I realized. I took a swig of beer for courage. “Neil, what’s going on with Mom?”

“She has something she’d like to speak with you about.”

“What is it?”

“It would be better if she told you herself. Can you come down here tomorrow?”

“Can’t she just tell me over the phone?”

“It would be best if you came to the house.”

“I’m working this major investigation,” I said. “I’m not sure I can get away.”

He paused a long time, as if counting to ten. “I think this takes precedence.”

“Now you’ve got me worried. I can drive down tonight if it’s that important.”

“Tomorrow morning would be best. I haven’t told her that I’ve been in contact with you. We’ll look for you around nine o’clock, all right?”

Living in Greater Portland with few reasons to venture north except to ski, Neil had no idea how big Maine was: roughly the size of all the other New England states combined. He seemed to have no clue that I was practically based in Canada here and facing a four-and-a-half-hour drive to get to Scarborough.

“All right,” I said. “But I wish you’d tell me what this is about.”

“We’ll see you at nine, Mike.”

By the time I’d hung up the phone, I had given up any idea of climbing onto the roof to prevent any more incursions by the local squirrels. I wasn’t sure what excuse I would give Rivard about taking a personal day in the middle of his career-making investigation, but with Morse away in New York, the lieutenant probably wouldn’t care about my whereabouts. I didn’t imagine I would be missed.

21

The next morning, I awoke before dawn, dressed myself in jeans and a flannel shirt, and began the long drive in darkness to the suburban town I had spent years trying to escape.

My 1970 Ford Bronco was as mulish on the road as my patrol truck. I’d purchased it from a classified ad I’d seen in
Uncle Henry’s Weekly Swap or Sell It Guide.
The guy who’d sold it to me said he’d brought it up from Jacksonville himself, where it had spent the previous four decades sheltered from the elements inside grandma’s barn, rarely ever venturing out onto the smooth, unsalted highways of North Florida. At first glance, the vintage truck was a thing of beauty: full cab, original green-and-white paint job, uncut rear fenders. It drove well at first, too, although it took a while to get used to the “three on the tree” shift. Only slowly did the vehicle reveal its hidden flaws: its balky transmission, which had already needed to be replaced, its desperate thirst for coolant, and, worst of all, its alarming tendency to develop rust spots that appeared, seemingly overnight, like acne on a teenager’s face. I’d bought the Bronco as a treat to myself, but it had become the gift that kept on taking.

My journey took me along Route 9, nicknamed “the Airline” for its ridge-back views of peat bogs and pine woods, through the Bangor “metropolitan” area, where my division was headquartered, and then south along four-lane I–95, which was the closest thing we had in Maine to a superhighway. I listened to music the whole way—classic rock—to keep my mind off my mother’s mysterious condition, and also because I needed a mental break from Elizabeth Morse and her dead moose. I pulled into my stepfather’s driveway at nine o’clock sharp.

Landscapers were busy in the yard. One of the men was chasing leaves off the wide lawn with a hose attached to an enormous blow-drying contraption he wore strapped to his back. Another was furiously raking and bagging the leaves to take away to an undisclosed location. As a teenager, I had been responsible for these same sweaty tasks.

Returning to my parents’ cul-de-sac after having spent nearly three years living in assorted backwoods shacks, trailers, and cabins, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I had forsaken the world my mother had fought so hard to give me. Was it any wonder we had drifted apart?

The person who opened the door was someone I scarcely recognized. My mother’s beauty had been her defining trait. As a dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman, she had turned heads every time we entered a restaurant or store together. My teenage friends had joked about her desirability in a lascivious way that had nearly brought us to blows on occasion. Now she stood in front of me with hollow eyes and a grayish tone to her skin. Her hair looked brittle and badly dyed. Always skinny, she had lost pounds her petite body could not afford to lose.

“Hello, Michael,” she said.

I was afraid to embrace her, until she held her arms out. It was like hugging a bag of sticks. “Mom, what happened?”

“I’m not doing too well,” she said, hanging on tight.

“Are you sick?”

When she backed away, I saw her eyes gleaming with tears, but she was fighting to maintain a brave smile. She was wearing a fancy pink tracksuit made out of some soft synthetic material. At the base of her throat hung a gold crucifix, the symbol of her abiding faith. My mother still attended Mass weekly. “I thought we could take a drive.”

I looked past her into the house. “Where’s Neil?”

“I sent him away when he told me you were coming here. I wanted to visit with you alone. He’s at his office in Portland for the morning.” She picked up a puffy down coat that looked too heavy for a day that was already warm. I helped her get her arms into the sleeves, as I always did. My mom had taught me good manners as a boy because, she said, “Women prefer gentlemen.” I’d wondered how she reconciled this statement with her marriage to my rakish father.

“I thought we might go to the beach,” she said.

“Sure, Mom. Whatever you’d like.”

“Do you need to use the bathroom?”

“No. I’m fine.”

In fact, I did need to use it, but I was desperate to learn the nature of my mother’s illness. I walked her out to the Bronco and opened the passenger door. She looked at the truck with amusement.

“This is new,” she said, reaching for a pair of Gucci sunglasses in her coat pocket.

“Actually, it’s pretty old.”

It was a very short drive to the water. My parents lived in a newish neighborhood at the throat of Prouts Neck. You could smell the sea from their back porch, and at night in the summer, salt fogs would drift in from the invisible, unheard ocean. The painter Winslow Homer had immortalized the rocky cliffs at the end of the peninsula, a mile or so away. Between his studio and my parents’ development was a strip of sand and marsh through which passed a single slow-moving road. Scarborough Beach drew lines of traffic during the hottest days of the year. The summer we’d moved in with Neil, my mom and I had gone there nearly every day, she to brown her body in the sun and celebrate the miraculous new life she’d made for herself, I to sneak glances at the half-naked girls whose existence I was suddenly recognizing.

“Do you remember when we used to do this?” she asked.

“You’d make me get up early so we could be sure to get a parking space.”

“You liked to sleep.”

“I was a teenager, Mom.” I shifted into second. “So what’s wrong with you?”

“I want to wait to talk until we get to the beach.”

The lot filled up fast in the summer, but with Columbus Day behind us, and it being midweek, we had no trouble parking, although there were more people than I had expected. We had to park in the outermost of the two lots. An older couple was getting into a Volvo station wagon beside us.

“Good morning,” said my mother.

“Good morning,” said the woman. “You won’t be needing that coat.”

“It’s a bluebird day,” said the man.

As we walked away, heading across the sand toward the little gatehouse where you paid your admittance fee in the summer, my mother whispered, “I don’t know what that means. Is it because the sky is very blue?”

“I’ve always assumed so.”

There was a dirt road that led from the outer lot across a bridge that spanned the brackish pond. We paused, as we always did, to take in the view. Herring gulls floated at the far end, white specks against the blue-brown water. The pond was edged by spartina grass and a towering invasive plant called phragmites, which one day would probably take over the entire place. The rangers who maintained the park kept spraying it with poison, chopping it back, and burning the roots, but still the weed returned, undead, intent upon its conquest.

“What was the story you told me about this pond?” my mom asked.

“There was a massacre here,” I said. “Nineteen English settlers were ambushed by Indians during King William’s War. There’s a plaque near the beach with the details. The story around school was that the Indians threw the hacked-up bodies into the pond. Kids said that on moonlit nights, you could see the white faces of the dead men beneath the surface of the water. My friends and I used to sneak down here at night to look for them, but we never saw anything.”

I hadn’t thought about Massacre Pond in years. Now I feared the name was going to stick in my head all afternoon: an unwelcome echo of the very different massacre I was investigating hundreds of miles to the north.

“That’s a horrible story,” she said. “They should change the pond’s name. What’s the point in remembering something so awful so many years later?”

“Some people think it’s important to remember history,” I said.

“I’ve never seen the point of it.” She continued on toward the beach.

We passed through the inner lot to the boardwalk, which climbed over a ridge of grassy sand dunes. My mom paused to remove her shoes, but I kept my Bean boots laced. We could hear the crashing waves before we could see them. Except for the dead grass, you could have fooled yourself into thinking it was the height of summer. The warm air smelled of brine.

The beach was busy for an autumn day. A number of people had spread out blankets and put up umbrellas and those tentlike beach shelters that enable you to hide from the sun. There were young kids splashing around at the surf line, although no one was actually swimming. The water was too cold and the surf was too high. Enormous whitecaps were racing in at a southeasterly angle to the beach. The waves would build and build until they came to the drop-off; they would seem to pause for half a second, and you could see into the translucent water as if through green glass, and then they would crash down with a loud
boom.
I remembered reading online about a hurricane that had passed close to Bermuda without making landfall. These waves had traveled a very long way to get here.

“I hope those parents are keeping an eye on those little kids,” my mom said. “The ocean looks dangerous today.”

“The waves are from a storm down south,” I said. “There’s a high-surf warning for the Maine coast.”

“Is it supposed to come this way?”

“No.”

“That explains why so many people are here. Everyone likes to see the big waves.” She spread out her arms, her sneakers dangling from one hand, and tipped her head back into the sun. She looked a little unsteady. “This used to be my favorite place in the world.”

I remembered her saying so. This beach seemed to represent the place where she could stop running from the past. It was here that she finally escaped her childhood as the youngest daughter of a Franco-American mill worker, her impoverished and abusive marriage to my father, and the gypsy years afterward, during which she had worked as a bar waitress and office temp. Marrying Neil, a partner at one of the biggest law firms in the state, she felt she had won some kind of lottery. Later, like most lottery winners, she would conclude that the prize wasn’t all it had promised to be. But that first summer in Scarborough, she had been happier than I’d ever seen her before.

“Why have you been sending me those quotations?” I asked.

She turned to face me. “I think you know.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“I have cancer, Michael.”

Even before I had gotten that first voice mail from Neil or seen her wan face this morning, some part of me had sensed that she was in danger. And yet, for reasons I didn’t understand, I had refused to admit this knowledge into my consciousness. I went out of my way to avoid thinking about her. “What kind?”

“Ovarian. Stage three.”

I had a hard time speaking. “Is that bad?”

“There are four stages.”

“When did you find out? What can they do? Can they operate?”

She dropped her sneakers to the sand and reached out for my hands. “Neil and I have been back and forth to Boston all week. The doctors say I have two tumors the size of golf balls, one next to my spleen, the other near my stomach.”

“Can’t they just remove them?” I heard my younger, teenaged self in the pitch of my voice.

“No.”

“What are they going to do, then?”

“I start chemo tomorrow. I forget the names of the drugs. Neil could tell you if you’re interested.”

“I
am
interested,” I said. “I want to know everything about this.”

“Knowing doesn’t help.” She let go of my hands suddenly and lunged at me, wrapping her frail arms around my chest and pinning herself to it. “This is the punishment I get.”

“Mom, Mom.” She was so much shorter than me. I found myself looking down at the gray roots in her dyed hair. I rubbed her back. “Why do you deserve to be punished?”

“For killing that baby.”

At the end of her marriage to my father, my mom had left me with some kindly neighbors and disappeared for a couple of days. When she returned to our backwoods shack, she seemed unusually weepy. She would break into tears while doing dishes at the sink or hanging laundry on the clothesline that ran from the side of the house to a moose maple at the edge of the dooryard. She’d never come out and said what she’d done, but over the years I had deciphered the cryptic comments she’d made, and I deduced that my mother—my practicing Catholic mother who still said the Rosary each morning—had felt so despairing of life with my father that she’d had an abortion.