Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (27 page)

Matt Skillen was dressed as if he’d just come from celebrating casual Friday at the office: crisp pink oxford shirt, open at the throat; unwrinkled chinos; wingtips. He, too, looked slim and athletic; you could picture them as one of those couples who run 10K races together on Saturday mornings. His hair was thick and wavy, as if he took pride in it and liked to leave it a little long. He was holding an open bottle of Grolsch beer.

“Hello,” said Stacey with a polite smile, neither friendly nor forced.

Skillen held out his hand, which was rougher than I would have expected. “Hi, Mike. Good to see you. I heard you were joining us for dinner.”

I had been under the impression it was the other way around.

“Did you see the bats?” Ora asked her daughter.

“Not tonight,” said Stacey. “I think we were too late.”

“Your dad and I ran into them coming up the tote road,” I said. “That was quite an experience, to be surrounded by them like that.”

“Tomás was telling me that in his village in Mexico there are vampire bats,” said Skillen.

“It’s so good of you to mentor him the way you do,” said Ora. “Those migrant families have such hard lives.”

“When you see the living conditions at those camps, it just turns your stomach,” said Skillen. “I’ve been really lucky in my life, and I think it’s important for someone in my position to help people who haven’t had the same breaks.”

If I hadn’t seen him fishing with the boy on Grand Lake Stream, I probably would have rolled my eyes at this high-minded speech. But Skillen actually seemed to care about the boy. I found myself both respecting his altruism and resenting it as yet another reason for Stacey to prefer him to me.

“Those farmworkers must be headed back south soon,” Charley said.

Skillen took a sip from his beer bottle. “Most of them have left already for Florida, but Tomás’s family stayed for the apple harvest.”

“He asked if he could join us for dinner,” said Stacey.

“I don’t think Tomás quite grasps the concept of date night,” said Skillen, wrapping his arm around his fiancée’s shoulders.

Ora peered at her daughter’s chest. “Is that a new necklace, dear?”

Stacey smiled and clutched at the black pendant. It looked like a piece of stone carved into the shape of a raven with outstretched wings. “Isn’t it gorgeous? Matt bought it for me in Belfast.” She turned to her fiancé. “How did you know to get me a raven?”

“The day we met, you told me they were your favorite birds,” he said. “I also brought you some good beer, Charley. There’s a store that sells imported varieties in Augusta.”

“Matt was testifying in front of the Land Use Regulation Commission today,” said Stacey, fondling the necklace.

That explained the business attire. “My dad and I also met with some legislators and lobbyists to discuss how we can promote woods products in Maine,” he said. “We need to do a better job of messaging if we’re facing a radical with the deep pockets of Betty Morse. I wish she’d invest her millions into helping out the poor people in this county instead of creating a wildlife sanctuary no one wants. So many people are suffering around here, and she’s totally oblivious to their desperation.”

Ora held up both hands. “Please, can we not get into that subject until
after
dinner?”

“You say that,” said her daughter with a smile, “but I know the only reason you invited Mike over here was to quiz him about Elizabeth and Briar Morse, what they wear around the mansion, and whether they’re as elegant in person as they look in photos.”

“That’s not the only reason,” said Charley, pulling on his nose.

“Well, you know what a gossip she is.”

“Stacey!” Ora said.

Skillen gave me a wink, for some reason. “My dad suggested that the solution to all our problems would be for me to marry Briar Morse.”

Stacey pushed herself away from his chest with mock violence. “And what did you say to that?”

He gave her a handsome grin. “I told him airheads aren’t my type.”

“She’s not an airhead,” I said.

Everyone looked at me, as if the statement was meant to be the start of a longer defense of Briar’s intellectual capabilities, instead of just a reflexive act of chivalry on my part.

“Actually,” I said, “she’s got a pretty wry sense of humor. They both do.”

Again, they all waited for me.

“So what’s for dinner?” I asked, as if I didn’t already know the answer to that question.

*   *   *

During the meal—pasta with wild mushrooms and a buttery sauce—I remembered my first dinner with Charley and Ora.

Two years earlier, I had gone to western Maine to assist in the manhunt for my fugitive father. I’d been in a state of wild desperation back then, willing to sacrifice everything to prove my dad was innocent of murder. Out of unexpected and unwarranted kindness, the Stevenses had invited me to spend the night at their cozy cabin overlooking Flagstaff Pond. I’d drunk too much at the table and ended up sleeping it off in Stacey’s childhood bed. I recalled seeing photographs of her as a girl, thin and tomboyish, with a natural confidence that leaped out at you from inside the picture frames. I never could have predicted that, one day, her physical presence would cause me such joy and misery.

Somehow we managed to steer clear of Morse’s national park through the salad and entrée courses, although everyone wanted me to share what I knew about the moose shootings. Ora couldn’t disguise her horror as I described the dead animals. Skillen put forth a new theory of the case; he suggested the massacre might have been an act of vengeance against the Warden Service for something we had done the previous week during the moose hunt.

“It’s no secret you guys are disliked in Washington County,” he said, refilling his and Stacey’s glasses of wine while Charley made coffee. “I’ve never understood it myself, but I guess it goes back to the history here. Have you ever read that book about the Down East Game War?”

“Yes, I have.” In fact, I still had the borrowed copy I had forgotten to return to the veterinarian who’d loaned it to me.

“At the mill, guys are always bitching about how they got pinched for this or that infraction,” Skillen said. “It seems to me like something a couple of pissed-off, drunk guys would do: drive around and kill stuff as a way of saying ‘fuck you’—excuse me, Mrs. Stevens—to the local wardens.”

“That’s not what happened,” I said. “This was all about Elizabeth Morse.”

“Right,” said Stacey, whose voice had grown a little wobbly after her second glass of wine. “Because there was that shoot-’em-up at Morse’s house, too.”

Skillen took a sip of wine. “Yes, but there’s no way to know if the two incidents were even connected. It doesn’t sound like they were. Or am I wrong about that, Mike?”

“Too soon to tell,” I said. “We’re still waiting for the ballistic evidence to come back from the state police lab.”

“I can’t imagine what makes a person so hateful,” said Ora, turning her napkin in her hands.

“I don’t know how you guys are ever going to solve this,” Skillen said. Both he and Stacey had drunk a fair amount over dinner, but he showed no signs of being intoxicated, except that he had grown progressively more talkative.

“We will,” said Charley, returning to the table with a tray of coffee.

Skillen set down his wineglass, spilling a little. “You talk like you’re part of this investigation, Charley.”

“Technically, I might not be,” said my old friend. “But I’m going to keep looking for the murdering bastards who did this, no matter how long it takes, and so is Warden Bowditch.”

“
Murder
seems a bit extreme,” said Skillen.

“You didn’t see those animals,” I said.

He nodded as if to cede the point. “From a legal perspective, I mean.”

Ora passed plates of pie around the table while Charley distributed mugs of coffee. We ate in silence for a minute or two. It was early yet, but I was feeling an increasingly strong desire to wolf down my dessert and leave.

“It’s because she’s a woman,” said Stacey out of nowhere. She leaned both of her elbows on the table. “If Elizabeth Morse was a man, people might disagree with her, but they wouldn’t be attacking her this … violently.”

I leaned back in my creaking chair. “I thought you didn’t like her.”

“I don’t! I think she’s nuts, but she’s a strong woman, and strong women make insecure men feel weak. That’s the story of my fucking life.”

“Language,” said her mother.

Skillen patted Stacey’s hand, the one with the engagement ring. “I guess that means I’m not insecure.”

She placed her free hand on his. “You have the opposite problem.”

Ora looked at my half-finished plate. “Mike, would you like some more pie?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “Can you excuse me for a second?”

I pushed my chair back from the table and went into the bathroom. The face in the mirror was fierce and uncompromising. I could stay here mooning over a woman I would never possess, or I could go back to work and find the men who murdered those moose. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a game warden, and sooner or later I would need to make that decision. But this wasn’t the time to play Hamlet. I had a job to do, and Charley was right that this case would haunt me for the rest of my life unless I did my part to solve the crime.

Somewhere in Boston, my mother was lying in a hospital bed, her body racked by disease and flooded with strange and potent chemicals. In my gut, I knew she’d been thinking of me as the doctors inserted the needle, thinking about my future. It seemed important tonight for me to act like the man she’d always wanted me to be. I owed her that much.

I flushed the unused toilet, ran water in the sink, and returned to the dining room table.

“I’m afraid I need to get going,” I said.

“So soon?” said Ora.

“I got a text from Sergeant McQuarrie. He wants me to meet him.”

Charley rose onto his overlarge feet. “Duty calls, then.”

“Yes,” I said.

Matt Skillen also stood up, but Stacey remained seated in her chair, studying me with an odd, confused expression. Her fiancé stuck out his arm, and we shook hands.

“It was a pleasure.” For the first time, I heard the booze in his voice.

I smiled tightly but didn’t speak. I kissed Ora on the cheek and thanked her for her hospitality, and she reached out to touch the side of my face. “You are always welcome in this home,” she said.

“Good night,” I said to the room.

Stacey didn’t reply. She sat at the table, looking at her empty wineglass, while Charley walked me out the door and down the ramp. The wind was changing direction, swinging around from the north. The air seemed colder than it had since springtime.

“Keep me posted about the investigation,” he said. “I depend on you to satisfy my boundless curiosity in these matters.”

I told him I would and opened my truck door. Then I looked back, unable to stop myself from asking the question. “Do you know what was the matter with Stacey just now? Did I say something to offend her?”

“We don’t have cell coverage at the house,” he said, stroking his long chin. “Something about the hills around the lake. I’m sure she was puzzled how you could have gotten a text message in the bathroom. Stacey can be willful as all get-out, and she doesn’t always see the light right away. But in the end, not much gets past that girl.”

29

There were two ways back to my cabin. The longer one looped through Grand Lake Stream, acquiring a coating of asphalt along the way, turned east for eight miles to Indian Township, and then veered south again along Route 1 through Princeton and Woodland before it joined up with the highway that would carry me back into the familiar confines of District 58 and, eventually, the long dirt lane that led to my cabin.

Then there was the direct route. Unpaved and frequently blocked by toppled trees, it tunneled through the forest without passing a single secluded residence. A driver could break down on that remote logging road and wait twelve hours, or longer, for another vehicle to pass by. If he was lucky, the vehicle wouldn’t be a truck full of pill smugglers.

I chose the road less taken because I needed to get my head together.

Charley and his daughter had seen through my fraudulent excuse for leaving. After I got over the initial embarrassment, I thought about her silent, sullen reaction. My presence hadn’t even seemed to register with her over dinner, so why had my abrupt departure caused her to act that way?

The question didn’t merit an answer. I’d just promised myself to stop obsessing over Matt Skillen’s future wife. Instead, I needed to focus on the things that truly mattered now: my mother’s cancer and the investigation that might yet determine whether I would decide to leave my job with the Maine Warden Service.

By choosing the forest route, I had put myself out of the reach of cell phones for a solid hour. I wouldn’t get a signal again until I intersected with Route 9 outside Wesley. In retrospect, this had been a dumb move, since I’d wanted to call Neil to check on my mom’s condition. In researching chemotherapy online, I’d read that many people didn’t experience any of the most-feared side effects—nausea, vomiting, fever—until twenty-four hours or more after their first injection. I found myself praying that my mother was sleeping soundly at the moment.

My lower legs were cold; I hadn’t realized it until now. The heat wave didn’t seem to be breaking so much as shattering like a sheet of dropped glass. I hadn’t turned the heater on for months, and the vents gave off the musty odor of an abandoned nest.

A pair of yellow eyes flashed in my high beams, and I stepped hard on my brakes. A coyote—gray and reddish brown—bounded across the dirt road at the edge of the light. In Maine, they grew as big as wolves, and this one was as large as any I’d ever seen. I let my heart return to its normal rhythm before continuing on again.

*   *   *

My BlackBerry chimed as I was cresting the ridge above the Chain Lakes. I stopped the pickup in the center of the dark road and checked the phone’s lighted display. I was still miles from civilization and couldn’t imagine the possible vectors of radio waves that would have allowed a transmission to reach this spruce-blanketed hilltop.