Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (21 page)

“You didn’t bring this on yourself,” I whispered in her ear. “You’re a good person. God wouldn’t do that to you.”

“I’m not a good person.” She was crying now. “You might have had a brother or sister, Michael.”

I stroked her hair, warm from the October sun. “I had you.”

“Then why did you go away? Why did you disappear from my life? Everything I did was for you.”

I found myself unable to answer the question. Saying that we wanted different things seemed too simple. After years of living in trailers and shopping for day-old bread at the Nissen bakery outlet in Skowhegan, she’d found herself suddenly rich—by her standards, if not Elizabeth Morse’s—and married to a gentle, handsome man who didn’t get drunk while he cleaned his guns at the kitchen table. But I had found myself unable to exorcise my father’s spirit so easily. I missed my early life in the deep woods. And I needed to go back.

I hadn’t felt as though my mom cared. She had been disappointed in my decision to become a game warden—she made her feelings clear enough on that point—but she seemed content with her tennis friends and her vacations with Neil to Paris and Rome. She’d never made me feel that in my long silences I was denying her anything valuable.

A young woman, the mother of two small children, was watching us from a blanket nearby. You could see the curiosity and concern on her face. When I caught her eye, she looked away at her little boy and called his name out of reflex: “Matty, come here!” He must have been two years old. He was naked, his pink flesh speckled with sand.

“Do you want to walk along the beach?” I asked.

She let go of me and wiped her eyes with her coat sleeve. “Neil said you were working on a big investigation. Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?”

“Right here,” I said.

22

I spent the rest of the day with my mother. We walked on the sunstruck beach until she began to feel tired, and then I drove her home to have lunch. She prepared a turkey sandwich for me but made nothing for herself, then sat across from me on the sunporch while I ate. Later, I would feel the sting of a sunburn along my unprotected neck and cheeks, but I was oblivious to the damage that distant star was doing to my body.

In the afternoon, my mom asked if she could take a nap. Except for her weariness and the gaunt look about her, I had noticed no signs of serious illness. She didn’t rush to the bathroom or display any symptoms of physical pain in my presence. I told her it would be fine if she slept, that I would stay until she awoke again. This made her smile.

While my mother curled up with a blanket on her enormous bed, more than twice the size of my own stained futon back at the cabin, I peeked inside my former room. They had cleaned out my bed and desk, removed all traces of me except for a few dozen of my old books, which they had left on the shelves. I studied the titles along the spines, remembering the days when I used to rush home to pitch myself headlong across the bed to read the new paperback my mom had bought for me. I found
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
and the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe,
The Hobbit,
and the Hatchet series I had loved so much as a boy. There were other novels from the later years of my adolescence, too:
A Farewell to Arms, Red Harvest,
and
A River Runs Through It.

The title that caught my eye, though, was a moldy history of Scarborough I had picked up at a used-book sale. I turned to the chapter on the founding of the town in the seventeenth century and thumbed through the water-warped pages until I found the section I was looking for:

By October 1676, Scarborough, a town with three settlements of more than 100 houses and 1,000 head of cattle, had been destroyed, some of its people killed, and others taken captive by Indians. These inhabitants tried repeatedly to rebuild but peace with the Indians was impossible. In 1690, the town was abandoned due to Indian uprisings, with inhabitants going to Portsmouth and other settlements farther south.

The second settlement of Scarborough is regarded as dating 1702. A fort was erected on the western shore of Garrison Cove, Prouts Neck. Other stockades were at Spurwink and Blue Point. The Hunnewell House was known as the “outpost for the defense of Black Point.” The Indian fighter, Richard Hunnewell, and eighteen other men were killed in 1703 at Massacre Pond. This incident took place after peace negotiations had been made with the Indians.

There was nothing here about the men having been mutilated by tomahawks or the corpses tossed into the muddy waters to bloat and rot. There was no mention of ghosts. If Massacre Pond was haunted, it was only in my imagination.

I hadn’t attached any special meaning to this passage before. But places like Massacre Pond proved that my new hometown wasn’t as boring as it seemed; it had a mysterious history worth getting to know. As a child recently uprooted from his past, I had been desperate to find a place where I could belong again, and this blood-soaked landscape captured my morbid imagination. Elizabeth Morse had been right about me, I realized. I had lived just as many years on the fogbound marshes as I had in the wooded foothills. I was my mother’s son, perhaps even more than my father’s. Why had I spent so long trying to deny it?

After a while, I wandered back out into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. Fastened by magnets to the sleek Sub-Zero refrigerator was a picture and a clipping. The photograph was three years old and showed me with my arm around Sarah Harris. She looked blond and beautiful in the snapshot, and I remembered the winter’s day it had been taken, the last visit we had paid as a couple to this house. I used to feel a pang whenever I stumbled across a picture of Sarah, but now I was surprised to realize that the first image to jump into my head was of Stacey riding beside me in my patrol truck.

The clipping came from the
Portland Press Herald.
It was just a scrap of yellowing newsprint.

MAINE WARDEN SERVICE ACADEMY GRADUATES FIVE

VASSALBORO
, Maine—Five new Maine game wardens graduated on May 22 from the Maine Warden Service Advanced Academy in Vassalboro. The training first includes attending the Maine Criminal Justice Academy for the Basic Law Enforcement Training Program to become certified as police officers. Then, game wardens attend the Advanced Warden Academy to continue with specialized training and learn skills pertaining to enforcement of recreational vehicles, crash investigations, search and rescue, public relations, and many other essential skills related to game warden work.

Graduating were Jenn Scott, assigned to Bucksport; Jeremy Bard, assigned to Princeton; Patrick Flynn, assigned to Sanford; Jason LaMontagne, assigned to Caribou; and Mike Bowditch, assigned to Sennebec.

I’d had no clue my mom had even marked this momentous occasion in my life. She and Neil had been traveling in California and were unable to attend the graduation ceremony, but she had belatedly sent me a card with a check for a hundred dollars inside. And yet she had kept this clipping pinned to her expensive fridge for the past three years. My mother had always shown an amazing capacity to surprise the hell out of me.

The only thing I knew about ovarian cancer was that it was one of the scariest ones. If surgeons couldn’t remove the tumors, then how did they hope to treat her? The thought of chemotherapy being able to shrink two growths the size of golf balls seemed like an empty hope. Was my mom really going to die?

Out on the porch again with my glass of milk, I checked the messages and e-mail on my cell phone. The only item of importance was a text from my former supervisor, Sgt. Kathy Frost, asking if I’d caught Elizabeth Morse’s appearance on the
Today
show that morning:

That woman is a force of nature! By the end of the interview, she’d even sold me on her cockamamie park. Heard through the grapevine that Rivard has made you her sheepdog. Good luck with that. How are things going in the wilds of Down East Maine, Grasshopper? I worry when you go into your silent running mode.

Kathy knew me pretty well, I had to admit.

My cell phone rang as I was tucking it back into my pants pocket. “Hello?”

“Bowditch?” It was a woman’s stern voice. “Where are you?”

“Sheriff Rhine?”

“Rivard told me that he’d embedded you with the Morse family.”

“It was at her request. She seems to enjoy debating with me. What’s going on?”

“Someone shot up her house last night while no one was home. Broke most of the windows facing the lake. I figure he was in a boat out on the water. I’m not sure if he knew that the house was unoccupied. It was like a scene out of one of the
Godfather
movies.”

“Who called it in?”

“The housekeeper. She arrived this afternoon to get the place ready. I can’t believe they didn’t have a security system installed, but then nothing that woman does surprises me anymore. Morse and her entourage are due back from NYC this evening. I thought you might want to come over and take a look at the carnage.”

“Who’s handling the investigation into this shooting?”

“The staties. Given the death threats she’s received, we all agreed it would be best if they took point here.”

“Michael?” My mother stood at the sliding door, rubbing her sunken eyes.

“I’m still here.” I smiled to reassure her. “But I’m on the phone with the Washington County sheriff.”

“Bowditch?” said the sheriff.

“Sorry,” I told Roberta Rhine. “I’m taking a personal day. I’m at my mom’s place in Scarborough, but I can be back in Wa-Co in four hours or so.”

“That might be wise. Something tells me the queen is going to be ready to chop some heads. Call me when you get here, and we’ll send someone down to get you.”

Always abrupt, the sheriff signed off without so much as a good-bye. I stood up from the glass-topped table and jammed the BlackBerry into the front pocket of my jeans. “Sorry about that.”

“Is anything wrong?” my mother asked.

“Some idiot shot up Elizabeth Morse’s windows last night.”

“Was she home?”

“She was in Manhattan, filming the
Today
show.”

“So you know her, then? I’ve always wondered … is she as attractive in person as she looks in photographs?”

My mom had a tendency to judge people entirely on their surface appearance. She had disapproved of my Rubenesque high school girlfriend for that reason alone. I’d grown used to this flaw in her character, even if it still drove me bananas. “She’s a handsome woman.” I decided not to mention that her daughter was also attractive, lest it give my mother ideas. “You couldn’t sleep more? It seems you should be resting.”

“I was having bad dreams about haunted ponds.” She stepped aside so I could place my empty glass in the dishwasher. “So you need to leave, then?”

“I’m afraid so. When do you expect Neil to get home? I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“He’s waiting for me to call him. I’ll be all right, Michael.”

“I feel like the three of us should talk,” I said. “We need to make a plan.”

She laughed and some of the old light came back into her eyes. “Father Campbell says, ‘If you want to see God laugh, tell him your plans.’”

“I think that’s a quote from John Lennon,” I said. “Why don’t you plan on my calling tonight. I’d like to talk with you again before you go to Boston.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she said with a dry chuckle.

She walked me outside to the Bronco. We embraced for a long time in the driveway, neither of us saying anything. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right here by yourself?” I asked.

“I’ve been alone more than you think,” she said, kissing me on the cheek with her cracked lips.

I didn’t think she was making an existential statement. But she had spent days alone during her first marriage, tending to me as a baby, while my dad went off on a bender or one of his weeklong deer hunts. And then there were the years when she was a single mother in Portland, working two jobs to pay the rent on our third-floor walk-up. I’d also detected a lack of intimacy in her marriage to Neil; the two of them rarely touched each other in my presence. At no time had I ever thought about her loneliness or how I might help assuage it. I felt like the shittiest son on the planet.

Driving back through the spreading subdivisions of Scarborough, I saw kids skateboarding along a paved sidewalk where once there had been an overgrown field at the edge of a second-growth forest. I had shot my second deer there, amid the alders and sumac, using a twelve-gauge that left a bruise on my shoulder when I fired it. Even then, I had been aware of the new houses crowding in on my hunting grounds and felt a sense of anger at what I stood to lose when the bulldozers and builders began their inevitable work.

Was this the same anger that had driven someone to fire his rifle through Morse’s plate-glass windows? Instead of developing her woodland holdings, she had banished all hunters from the hardwood ridges and cedar swamps where they and their ancestors had hunted for more than a century, and the result was the same. I rolled down the window, because the Bronco lacked air conditioning, and let the warm wind swirl about the cab, tickling my ears and sending gasoline receipts fluttering like moths.

First there had been the anonymous death threats against Elizabeth Morse. Then came the attack on her cedar gate. Afterward, two men had sneaked onto the property to slaughter ten defenseless animals in an act of bloody vandalism that horrified even Maine’s most hardened game wardens. Were they the same men who had chased Briar Morse along the dark roads outside Grand Lake Stream? Now someone had fired a barrage into the house itself. Had the waterborne sniper known the mansion was vacant for the night, or had he hoped to hurt the residents, whom he believed to be inside? Laying out the chronology like this, it was hard to escape the fact that the violence was escalating. I had a bad feeling that I knew what the next step would be.

23

I didn’t bother stopping at my cabin to change into my uniform or swap the Bronco for my patrol truck. Instead, I drove in street clothes directly to the Sixth Machias gate and arrived as the afternoon was fading to evening. As I rolled to a stop on the soft pine needles, I saw a black SUV in the deepening shadows on the other side. A broad-chested man in dark glasses climbed out of the vehicle and moved with surprising speed toward my Bronco. The first thing I noticed about him was his shaved head, which was glistening with perspiration. He wore a loose black shirt with epaulets and black cargo pants over combat-style boots. The military bearing and the untucked shirt made me think he almost certainly had a handgun hidden inside the waistband of his pants.