Murder on High (14 page)

“You’re right,” said Charlotte. “I think this is a modern-day version of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond.” She went on to explain about Thoreau’s famous experiment at living in a cabin in the woods. “His goal was to strip existence down to its bare essentials,” she said as she stepped down, feeling a little as if she’d broken into somebody’s house.

“Bare is right,” said Tracey, who was pacing the small area of flattened grass that served as a yard. “I wonder what he does for a bathroom.”

The answer to his question came from a man who had just emerged from the scrub that lined the path, pushing a shopping cart full of garbage bags. “I use the bathroom at work,” he said. “I work over there,” he added, nodding at the former railroad station. He parked the shopping cart. “Welcome to Heritage Farms,” he said, holding out his hand. “Mack Scott. What can I do for you?”

As Jeanne had said, he was a stocky man of average height—built like a fireplug was the description that sprang to Charlotte’s mind—with an unruly head of dark blond curls partly covered by a striped engineer’s cap, a full red beard, clear gray eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who spends a lot of time out of doors. He wore blue denim overalls over a faded red plaid flannel shirt. A red bandanna was tied around his neck, and he smelled strongly of stale beer.

After Tracey had introduced himself and Charlotte (as his anonymous “assistant”), he asked, “Do you work at the redemption center, then?”

“Not at, for,” he said. “I collect cans and bottles. Two garbage bags a day. I don’t get any benefits, but I’m my own boss and I get to take time off whenever I want. Also, it’s a short commute: seventy-five yards, to be precise. I don’t make a big salary”—the teeth that smiled through his beard were straight and white—“but I don’t need much, either. I live pretty simply.”

“So I see,” said Tracey with typical Yankee understatement.

“Is this your version of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond?” Charlotte asked.

“Actually, no. Thoreau’s cabin was ten by fifteen; this is only six by nine. But the idea came from
Walden
.” Mack raised a finger and quoted: “‘Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary.’ Thoreau suggested that the kind of box that railroad workers used to use to store their tools would be quite enough.”

“A tool storage box?” said Tracey.

Mack raised his finger again. “‘Every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and having bored a few auger holes in it to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night and hook down the lid, and so in his soul be free.’”

Charlotte was reminded of the boxes she had read about that could be rented for a few hours of sleep at Japanese airports, but she would hardly think of sleeping in one as a soul-liberating experience.

“How big was this box?” asked Tracey.

“Six feet long by three feet wide,” said Mack.

“Sounds more like a coffin to me.”

Mack shrugged. “My box is a little bigger. But the idea’s the same. I originally came down here in hopes that there might still be such a box here. The rest of the town’s left over from the nineteenth century, why not a tool box? But there wasn’t, so I took up residence in the horse trailer instead.”

“The rent’s cheap,” said Tracey.

“Exactly. To quote Thoreau again: ‘Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in a box such as this.’” He nodded toward the river. “What’s more, Heritage Farms even has a river view. When the railroad yard is bare, anyway.”

Tracey considered this idea for a moment, and obviously found some truth in it. “But why a horse trailer, when you have more spacious accommodations right at hand?” asked Tracey. He nodded at the Maine Central boxcars on the nearby siding, the doors of some of them standing wide open.

“Actually, I tried one of the boxcars first, but the cops told me to move along.” He smiled in acknowledgment of Tracey’s membership in the police fraternity. “Actually, they had no choice. The railroad had complained. They store their track equipment in those boxcars: cones, oil, salt for the tracks.”

“Who owns this?” asked Tracey.

“I don’t know who owns the trailer—Heritage Farms, whoever they are, must have junked it here—but the railroad owns the property. After I got kicked out of the boxcar, I got to know the trainmaster. He lets me stay here, and the police don’t mind as long as I don’t bother anybody.”

“How long have you been here?” Tracey asked.

“In the neighborhood for close to two years. Across the street”—he nodded at the line of boxcars—“for about three months, and here at Heritage Farms for about eighteen months.”

“Doesn’t the noise of the trains bother you?” Tracey wondered, nodding at a locomotive that was parked on one of the nearby tracks, its headlight on and its engine thrumming in readiness for departure.

Mack shook his head. “It’s not as bad as it used to be. The engineers are under orders not to keep the engines running while they’re picking up cars. The residents of the senior citizens housing complex were complaining.” He nodded at the buildings upriver. “But I never minded anyway.” He raised a finger.

“I sense a quote coming on,” said Tracey.

Mack nodded. “‘You can sleep near the railroad and never be disturbed. Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad whistle.’”

“Let me guess who said that,” said Tracey. “Could it possibly be Thoreau?”

“You’ve got it,” said Mack with a smile. He sniffed the air. “I don’t mind the railroad, but I do think the quality of the air could be improved upon.” He shrugged. “But you get used to that too.”

“What do you do about food?”

“I have a little camp stove. Don’t need anything more elaborate. I eat simply: rice and beans, mostly. No meat, no sugar, no coffee, no booze. I grow my own vegetables. A little fish: whatever I catch in the river. Bass, mostly.”

“It’s not polluted?” asked Charlotte.

“No. It used to be, but it’s come back. We even get a pretty good Atlantic salmon run. It’s not like the old days, when you could walk across the river on the salmon—the locals talk about just standing on the riverbank and spearing them with a pickpole—but it’s not bad.”

“They must be running now,” said Tracey.

“They are. I had salmon last night for dinner. I discovered a nice little salmon pool on the other side of the river.”

“With peas?” asked Charlotte, referring to the combination that was traditional in New England for the Fourth of July.

“Well, the peas aren’t quite in yet,” he said. “But I grow edible peapods, too, and they were ready. It was a pretty damned good meal.”

“What do you do for entertainment?” she asked.

“I hang out with the guys in the switch shanty.” He nodded at a dilapidated gray building in the middle of the rows of track. “I confess to being a bit of a F.R.N. myself, so their company suits me pretty well.”

“F.R.N?” asked Tracey.

“Effing railroad nut. That’s what the guys in the switch shanty call the railroad aficionados. Since this is a switching station, we get a lot of them hanging around here. Then there are the hobos and the canned heaters, some of them being one and the same.”

“Canned heaters?” said Charlotte.

“The guys who eat Sterno. Put it in a sock, and squeeze it out. There’s a regular gang of them who hang out on the river bank. They have a kind of camp down there.” He smiled. “Of course, they can be pretty limited company.”

“I would think so,” said Tracey.

“Would you like to have a seat in my living room?” Mack asked. He nodded at the lawn chairs under the tarp.

Charlotte and Tracey assented, and Mack headed down a path toward the tarpaulin shelter, pushing the shopping cart in front of him.

“How did you come by your interest in Thoreau?” Charlotte asked as he led them through the milkweed and thistle.

“From my father,” he said. “He used to read from Thoreau’s journals every morning before he went to work.”

“I used to know someone like that too,” said Charlotte, reflecting on Thoreau’s crazy-quilt constituency.

“One of the things I inherited from him was his old dogeared copy of
Walden
,” Mack continued. “He had underlined his favorite passages. I’d read them a lot over the years, and they made a lot of sense to me too.”

They had come to the tarp. Taking his hands off the bar of the shopping cart, Mack extended an arm toward the cluster of three rusted metal lawn chairs. Then he raised a finger. “‘I had three chairs in my house …’” he began.

Charlotte completed the quotation for him: “‘One for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.’”

8

When they came to the tarpaulin shelter, Mack again parked the shopping cart. Then he took out the garbage bags and dumped their contents out onto the grass. “I have some work to do,” he said, gesturing at the pile of cans and bottles. “Do you mind if I work while we talk?”

Charlotte and Tracey both shook their heads. The smell of stale beer was potent, and Charlotte realized that it wasn’t Mack who had smelled of beer, but the beer cans in the garbage bags.

Mack took a seat in the chair nearest the pile and gestured for Charlotte and Tracey to sit down in the other two.

“What are you going to do with them?” Charlotte asked.

“Separate,” he replied. “I get fifteen cents for wine and liquor bottles, and a nickel for everything else.”

“So I guess you look for wine and liquor bottles,” said Tracey.

“Not necessarily. They take up more space than cans, and they’re heavier to carry. I get five bucks for a bag of cans, but I only get two for a bag of bottles.” He smiled. “This business has its subtleties.”

“How much do you make in a day, then?” asked Charlotte, recognizing that the usual proprieties concerning questions about income did not apply in the case of someone who considered himself irrelevant to the IRS.

“About twenty-five dollars. I usually work three days a week. If I need more, I work more. If I need less, I work less.”

“Where do you find them all?” asked Tracey.

“This crop is from the town park, Indian Island, French Island, the airport, and the bars: the Shuffle Inn, the V.F.W., the American Legion. I alternate: one day I do this side of town, and the next I do the university and the fast-food places out on Stillwater Avenue.”

“So Old Town is your bean field and this is your harvest,” said Charlotte, referring to the honest labor by which Thoreau had earned the money he needed to support his modest lifestyle.

“This is a woman who knows her Thoreau,” said Mack as he separated the cans by brand name, the Budweiser cans in one pile, the Coke cans in another. “Yes, Thoreau was determined to know beans, I’m determined to know cans.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the squeal of brakes and clash of couplings from the railroad yard. For a moment they sat without speaking, waiting for the noise of the moving boxcars to stop.

“I didn’t realize that you had to separate them by brand name,” said Charlotte once the noise had ceased.

“Don’t have to. But it makes it easier for Richie”—he nodded in the direction of the redemption center—“which in turn makes for good business relations. Since I’m one of his main suppliers, I figure it’s sound business practice to keep him happy.”

“Indeed,” said Tracey. He leaned forward in preparation for getting down to business, his clasped hands resting between his knees. “As you may have guessed, we’re here to look into the death of Mrs. Richards.”

The engineer’s cap that was bent over the pile of cans nodded.

“How long had you known her?” Tracey asked.

“Close to two years. I met her when I took one of her trips up the West Branch, following in Thoreau’s footsteps. As I said, I was interested in Thoreau before that, but she’s the one who made me into the fanatic that I am today. She’s also the reason I settled down here.”

“How often did you see her?” Tracey asked.

“Every other day, usually. She usually came with me when I worked her side of town. I’d stop by the farm to pick her up on my way over. She liked the idea of having a purpose to her walk. She also liked the idea of recycling. She was concerned about economy, like Thoreau.”

“What did you talk about on your walks?” asked Charlotte.

“Thoreau, mostly. Or
Mister
Thoreau, as she called him. I liked her company. Also, she helped me with my work. She was terrific at spotting cans in the grass. She had a real eye for aluminum. I’m going to miss her.” He corrected himself. “
Have
missed her.”

“Miss Ouellette told us that you were on the mountain on the day that Mrs. Richards was murdered, and that you were planning to meet her at Thoreau Spring. We’d be interested in hearing about that,” said Tracey.

Mack nodded. “I went up with her last year too. Not all the way. She liked to do the stretch to the summit by herself. This year, though, I wanted to try the route Thoreau took. She didn’t want to go that way because it takes too long, and she wanted time to look at the
Diapensia
.”

“But you didn’t ride up there with her and Miss Ouellette.” It was as much a statement as a question.

“No. I went up on Thursday. I hitchhiked—got a ride from Old Town all the way to Millinocket, then another ride from there to the park.”

“Do you know the names of the people who picked you up?”

“My alibi, huh?” he said, and smiled. “The first ride was from a guy named Reggie from East Millinocket. He drove a blue Ford pickup. That’s all I can tell you about him. The second ride was from a young couple from Boston. I don’t know their names, but they drove a Volvo.”

Tracey nodded, and wrote down the information. “Where did you stay?”

“The first night I stayed at Roaring Brook. I climbed the Saddle Trail on Friday. That’s another reason I didn’t want to go up with Iris and Jeanne. I’d just done that trail. The second night I stayed at Abol Campground.”

“And did you meet Mrs. Richards at the Spring on Saturday?”

Mack nodded. “At about noon. But I wouldn’t know the time for sure. I threw my watch away a long time ago. I’m not interested in knowing what time it is. For that matter, I’m not even interested in knowing what day it is. Or what week, month, or year it is.”