Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (25 page)

Mack took a sip from a Styrofoam cup filled with steaming black coffee. “You don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

He showed me the front page of the
Bangor Daily News.
The headline couldn’t have been much bigger:

SNIPER TARGETS HOME OF ELIZABETH MORSE

No One Injured in Nighttime Attack

An accompanying photograph, taken from the lake, showed Moosehorn Lodge on its piney point, but no signs of damage were evident. My guess was that it was a file photo the editors had used in a pinch.

“And then there’s this one,” said Mack, pointing to a smaller article beneath the lead item:

STILL NO LEADS IN MOOSE MASSACRE

Wardens Continue to Seek Answers

“Has the lieutenant seen this?” I asked.

“We just got off the phone. I think he broke one of my eardrums.”

“What do the stories say?”

“Basically, that we’re all a bunch of fuckups. The L.T. keeps saying we expect to make an arrest ‘imminently.’ But after five days without a bust, the reporters are starting to smell the horse manure. There’s a twenty-thousand-dollar reward out there, and we can’t make a case? How do you think that’s playing in the governor’s office?”

“So we’re not getting anything good from Operation Game Thief?”

McQuarrie removed a tin of chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and unscrewed the lid. He pinched out a few brown threads and tucked them inside his cheek. “We’re getting a shitload of calls, but nothing useful so far. That kind of money always brings out the crazies. Yesterday I was on the phone with a psychic from California! She said she was in touch spiritually with the souls of our dearly departed moose.”

“What about the evidence we collected at the kill sites?”

“No DNA matches on the cigarettes. No prints on the candy wrappers. None of those twenty-two shells you collected were worth a damn, either, by the way.”

I tried not to think of the hours I’d spent on my hands and knees collecting them. “Bilodeau seemed to be excited about the shell casings and bullets he collected at Morse’s house.”

“Bill’s got some trick up his sleeve, same as always. But who knows? Maybe this time he’s cracked it.”

“You don’t sound very confident, Mack.”

Using both hands, he wadded up the newspaper into a softball-size projectile and hurled it at the top of the nearest garbage can. He missed by a mile. “There goes my second career with the Celtics,” he said. “I’m probably gonna need a new job after next week.”

“So what do you want me to do today?” I asked. “I can run down some of those OGT calls.”

“Maybe,” he said. “The L.T.’s talking about having another strategy session tomorrow. He wants to bring in the state police, which shows you how desperate he is. He’s got Tibbetts at a checkpoint way the fuck out on the Stud Mill Road, like that’s going to do anything. Devoe’s been hanging around gun shops, trying to see who bought twenty-twos recently. Bayley and Sullivan are visiting the local sporting camps
for the second time.
As if the guides are suddenly going to remember they had a couple of sports last week boasting about slaughtering moose.”

McQuarrie had a reputation as a company man; he might crack wise occasionally about the lieutenant or some of the other officers up the chain of command, but he never displayed any lack of confidence in the decision-making ability of his superiors. What I was witnessing from him—this outburst of exasperation—was surprising, if not completely shocking.

I hesitated before asking my next question. “What about Bard?”

“He’s doing a surveillance detail on Chubby LeClair.”

“Yeah, I know. Chubby’s been calling me, bitching about him. I’m not sure how he got the idea we were friends. Have you talked with Jeremy recently?”

He spit tobacco juice into his half-filled coffee cup. “Just before you got here. Why?”

So Bard hadn’t told Mack about my trip to Talmadge or our confrontation in the gravel pit. That seemed strange. It went completely against my sense of the man as a whining kiss-ass. “I was just wondering.”

“Speaking of friends,” said McQuarrie, “the lab guys found your buddy Cronk’s prints on a can of Budweiser in the road where Moose A was shot. Bilodeau’s been out to see him a few times. You talk to Billy recently?”

“Couple of days ago,” I said. “He asked me if he was eligible to receive Morse’s twenty grand if he helps catch the guys who shot the moose.”

“That’s all we need—a mountain-man vigilante.” The sergeant’s knees made a creaking sound as he rose to his feet. “If you want to make yourself useful, keep an eye on him. Billy Cronk on the rampage is a scary thought.”

27

Mack told me to “go do warden stuff” for the rest of the day. If Morse changed her mind and decided she needed me, I should drive over to Moosehorn Lodge and seek to calm the troubled waters. Otherwise, I should patrol my district and catch up on the calls that had come in while I’d been preoccupied with the moose massacre.

A woman with a heavy New York accent had reported an injured bald eagle in the backyard of her waterfront estate in East Machias. I drove over to have a look. It turned out to be a seagull, which took off on two strong wings when I approached. Two guys were fishing illegally on Mopang Stream, which had closed for the season on the first of the month. I wrote them summonses and confiscated the two brook trout they had caught on jigs. The fish were beautiful: fat and orange-bellied, with hooked jaws and brilliant yellow dots along the sides. Another woman—a wizened lady in Dennysville, whose house smelled of cigarettes and gin—had a problem with a saw-whet owl that had flown down her open chimney and taken roost atop a bookcase. After chasing the bird around the house for half an hour, breaking a Hummel figurine in the process, I managed to capture it in my stinky salmon net. The little owl, which was no bigger than a pigeon, seemed no worse for wear, but I put it in a box and drove it to the house of the local wildlife rehabilitator. He inspected the bird’s primary and secondary flight feathers, found no signs of damage, and tossed the bird into the sky above my head. It winged away, making a direct line for Dennysville, as if intent upon returning to its roost atop the bookcase.

Out of curiosity, I made a detour past Karl Khristian’s walled compound. He’d hoisted a new Confederate flag on a pole—an ironic choice for a man whose ancestors had almost certainly fought for the Union—but otherwise I saw nothing noteworthy at the castle. The bald little man seemed to have gone into his bunker.

Late in the day, I called Mack one more time, telling him I was headed over to Charley and Ora’s house for dinner. “So we’re on tomorrow for another strategy meeting at the IF&W field office at eight,” he said. “The L.T. wants to go back down the suspect list one more time. By the way, he’s ripshit about an interview Maine Public Radio did with Queen Elizabeth’s new chief of security. He doesn’t say nice things about our investigative efforts. Don’t be surprised if Rivard unloads his anger on all of us.”

Nothing the lieutenant did or said surprised me anymore. I wasn’t sure if I’d grown a thicker skin or was past the point of caring. This time, I didn’t intend to bring doughnuts.

*   *   *

When I’d first met them, Charley and Ora Stevens lived in the western Maine mountains in a lakeside house that reminded me of a woodcutter’s cabin in a medieval German folktale. They’d owned their cottage for thirty-odd years, but in an arrangement unique to the Maine North Woods, the land beneath their home had been leased from the Atlantic Pulp & Paper company. When a new corporation—Wendigo Timber—purchased the property, along with thousands of surrounding acres of forestland, it evicted the Stevenses and their neighbors in order to build expensive waterfront developments they could market as vacation homes to wealthy out-of-staters.

Charley and Ora had fled east, to a pond near Grand Lake Stream, where they’d found a ramshackle home they could repair and a big-enough boathouse to store both Charley’s motorized Grand Laker canoe and, more importantly, his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. They’d spent a year fixing up the rambling red building before Elizabeth Morse breezed into Washington County, announced she was canceling leases on the lake properties she’d just bought, and began talking up her grandiose plan for a new national park. Charley and Ora must have felt a disorienting sense of déjà vu. Fortunately for them, they’d made certain to buy the land this time, along with the house. Not all their neighbors on Little Wabassus Lake had been so wise.

After searching all day for a way through the ashen clouds, the sun had finally made its escape, just in time for dusk. It hung above the tops of the old-growth pines that surrounded the Stevenses’ house, as round and orange as a Halloween pumpkin. I’d turned on my headlights to see beneath the trees in the failing light. When I snapped them off, the woods became suddenly dark and gloomy. A slight chill was rising from the still-damp pine needles that carpeted the forest floor.

As I climbed out of the truck, I glanced at the guest cabin Charley had weatherized for Stacey. The windows were dark, and her Subaru was gone, leaving a rectangular dry patch where it had been parked on the leaves. I doubted that a woman as independent as Stacey relished living with her parents. But decent rentals were hard to come by in this part of the world, as evidenced by my own rodent-infested cabin.

There was a handicapped-accessible van parked beside Charley’s Ford Ranger and a ramp leading up to the front of the building. I rapped at the door, feeling that familiar sense of homecoming I always experienced when I visited the Stevenses. The old couple had taken me under their wings during the lowest point in my life. They’d fed me and counseled me and given me hope. Standing on their welcome mat, I couldn’t remember why I’d stopped visiting them.

After a minute or so, the door opened and I found myself looking down at the radiant face of Ora Stevens. She was seated, as always, in her wheelchair: a beautiful woman with Scandinavian cheekbones, snow-white hair brushed back from her face, and eyes as green as her daughter’s. She reached out with both hands for mine.

“Oh, Mike,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you.”

I bent down to kiss her warm cheek. “Thanks for inviting me, Ora. I’m sorry I kept canceling our dinners.”

She was wearing a patterned Icelandic-style sweater that I was sure she’d knit herself and white denim pants and tennis shoes. “You don’t need to apologize. Charley is out with Nimrod collecting mushrooms for dinner, and he told me to send you after him. Otherwise, he’ll be out there till the owls go to sleep.”

I glanced off into the gathering gloom. “How will I find him?”

“Just walk south along the tote road. He’ll hear you coming.”

“I guess I will see you soon, then.”

As I turned away from the glowing doorway, she called after me. “Mike?”

“Yes.”

“Stacey will be joining us. I hope that’s OK.”

The knot that formed in my throat made it hard to get the words out. “That’s great.”

The emerald light that came suddenly into Ora’s eyes told me that she understood exactly what I felt for her daughter.

*   *   *

The last minutes of daylight are my second-favorite time to be in the woods—right after the first minutes of daylight. In the morning, there is an atmosphere of expectancy. Finches and sparrows begin to sing in the darkness, as if summoning the sun to appear. Then the first beams of light begin to filter through the evergreens, strands of gold amid the green, and the sudden warmth causes a mist to rise in the places where the sun touches the ground. Every leaf and blade of grass is wet with dew, and you emerge from the woods into a shocking brightness, with your pants soaked to the knees and a chorus of birdsong in your ears.

But at dusk, the shadows move. The sun sinks down into the treetops and then slides along the trunks until you are only catching furtive glimpses of it through the understory. The wind, if it was blowing throughout the day, might suddenly die completely, and a stillness surrounds you that makes every stray sound—every acorn dropping, every chipmunk peep—seem overly loud. The birds go quiet. Sometimes you’ll hear a distant crashing that makes your heart stop; a buck has caught your scent and gone leaping off into the brush before you can spot the white flag of his tail.

I followed the tote road south along the shore of Little Wabassus Lake. Alders and poplars and birches were growing up from the old ruts, and the weeds were as high as my knees. Wilting ferns curled like witches’ toes. Loggers hadn’t used the trail in many years. The tips of the low bushes showed signs of having been chewed recently by deer. In a few weeks, Charley would be hunting here with that lever-action Marlin he’d owned forever.

As Ora predicted, her husband surprised the hell out of me by suddenly stepping out from between two spruces, right into my path. “You surely make a racket,” he said.

“That’s because I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you.”

He was dressed entirely in green, except for his Bean boots and moose-leather belt, and on his long head was perched a green cap with the red logo of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. In one big hand he was carrying a mesh bag already stuffed with mushrooms. A hatchet hung from a looped rope he’d tied to his belt. The look on his craggy face was one of unalloyed happiness.

“It’s always good to practice creeping along,” he said. “You need to put your heel down first and then your toe. Try to push the leaves down softly instead of crushing them flat.”

“You sound like the last of the Mohicans.”

“I’m the last of something all right.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder, his traditional greeting. “It’s good to see you, young feller.”

I pointed at the mesh bag. “I seem to have missed the mushroom hunt. What have you got there?”

He loosened the drawstring and opened the top of the sack. The gloom made it hard to see anything inside beyond a few bright orange bulbs. “The rain brought out a bunch of these buggers,” he said. “I found some chanterelles and a few matsutakes down in that stand of old hemlocks along Curtis Cove. There were some nice hedgehogs in those birches up along the hillside above the house. But I’ve been saving a real beauty for you. I wanted you to see it in its natural habitat before I went at it with the hatchet.”