by Paul Doiron
There were no messages from Dani: no voice mails, no emails, no texts.
This was unusual for her. Unheard of would be the more accurate phrase. Charley had already dropped off the radar. I didn’t need my girlfriend following suit.
Ora phoned me back before I could call Dani.
“All I could find for Stanley was a post office box in Portage,” she said. “I thought the address must be out of date, so I made a call to Tim Malcomb.”
She was referring to the head of the Warden Service. “What did the colonel tell you?”
“Stanley’s back in Maine!”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“He purchased an old sporting camp west of Portage and turned it into his own private compound. It’s over on Moccasin Pond.”
“I think I know the old camp Kellam bought.”
I remembered seeing it advertised in The Maine Sportsman and the Northwoods Sporting Journal. It had been on the market for $1 million.
“I just wish Charley would let me know he’s OK,” said Ora.
“He is.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because of you.”
“Me?”
“If something had happened to Charley, you would have sensed it.”
“I’m not clairvoyant, Mike. I just get feelings.”
“Those are called premonitions. Have you had any about your husband?”
“No.”
“Then you need to trust yourself.”
“Since when have you started believing in premonitions, Mike Bowditch?”
“I’ve seen too many things I can’t explain,” I said. “Human mysteries are nothing compared to the mysteries of the universe.”
* * *
The air coming through the window screens was so saturated with moisture that it formed dew on the sills. I tried closing the windows and running the AC, but the unit made a sick, rattling sound that I feared would keep me up all night.
I sat down on the bed and found the mattress unforgiving. Then I made the call.
“Hi,” Dani said.
“I expected to hear from you. How was your day on the shooting range?”
“I qualified, but just barely. I think it was the heat. My face was brick red, the guys said.”
Dani was a natural marksman. Some people have to train and train, but her skills were as close to God-given as I had seen. It was as if she’d been born with the muscle memory of having fired thousands of shots: Annie Oakley reincarnated.
“Maybe it was heat stroke.”
“I just had a bad day.”
“You might want to take a cool bath—not too cold.”
“I don’t have heat stroke,” she said. “To top it all off, I picked up a tick somewhere. I found it attached to my thigh, full of blood, like it had been there awhile.”
“Was it a deer tick or a dog tick?” The question mattered because the former carried Lyme disease while the latter did not.
“Deer tick.”
“You need to get that checked out.”
“I will if I see a bullseye rash.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to get your doctor to prescribe some antibiotics anyway. Lyme isn’t something you can blow off.”
“Mike, I told you I’ll keep an eye on it. How many ticks did you used to find on yourself when you were a patrol warden? No offense, but I’m tired of talking about my sucky day. Has Charley reappeared?”
“No, but I think I am beginning to understand what this is about.”
“Let’s hear it.”
She listened quietly to my monologue. That, too, was atypical. Usually, Dani interrupted me with questions or theories whenever I told her about a case I was working on. She had the mind of a detective and couldn’t help herself.
When I had finished, she said, “Be careful of Stan Kellam.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kathy never told you about him? Stan the Man was her lieutenant when she was a rookie.”
“Please don’t tell me he sexually harassed her,” I said, thinking of Tom Wheelwright.
“Worse. He tried to persuade her to quit after her husband died in that car crash. He badgered her about it for weeks after she came back from bereavement leave. Like, because she was a woman, she must be suffering so bad she couldn’t do the job. He put her on a desk until she forced him to let her return to patrol.”
“Kathy never told me any of this.”
“That’s because you’re a man,” Dani said. “She’s your friend and all, but this is the kind of thing women have trouble sharing except with other women. She never came as close to quitting as during that stretch of time.”
“I’ll ask her about him.”
“If she even wants to talk—sorry, I’m not being the best listener tonight. I’ve got a wicked headache. I’m glad that son of a bitch Smith didn’t shoot you.”
“That makes two of us.”
“I’ll hit you back in morning,” she said. “I just need to get some sleep.”
“If you’re still not feeling well—”
“Good night, Mike. Love you.”
“Good night.”
21
The next morning dawned as hot as sunrise in the Congo. I stepped outside with a cup of coffee I had brewed in the little machine atop the bureau. The rhythmic thumping of truck tires on the bridge over Route 1 carried across the parking lot: the sound of commerce. House sparrows were picking dead bugs out of the grilles of the semis in the parking lot.
Logan Cronk, up early, had sent along pictures of Shadow to assure me my captive canine was alive and well. The black wolf must have slept beneath an evergreen because his fur had become coated with saffron pollen. The big animal appeared nearly phosphorescent. My very own Hound of the Baskervilles.
I ate breakfast in the diner—scrambled eggs, bacon, and a molasses doughnut—and gassed up my truck, knowing the length of the drive ahead of me. In the County, it paid to fill your tank whenever you could since opportunities could be few and far between. I was eager to get started.
Presque Isle is what passes for a big city in Aroostook County. I do not mean that as a slight. Nine thousand residents is significant anywhere in a state as rural as Maine. Presque Isle is home to three institutions of higher learning. It has an actual airport with commercial flights—only two a day, but it’s something. The first successful transatlantic balloon launched from Presque Isle and landed safely outside Paris in 1978.
But if you ask anyone up north about the city, they’ll say its real claim to fame is potatoes.
Prized above all others for making french fries, the Kennebec variety are harvested by tons in the fall, processed by factories that perfume the air with a pleasantly starchy aroma, and then trucked and shipped around the world.
I approached the city through vast fields of potatoes. Being June, there wasn’t much to see—just endless furrows of dirt stretching to distant tree lines. In a few weeks, however, the plants would begin to blossom until the city of Presque Isle was adrift in a sea of flowers. On windy summer days, petals would tumble along the ground: purple, pink, and white.
The sun was showing through the clouds, a blurred disk, when I turned onto a street of ranch homes with mowed yards and gardens bright with peonies and hydrangeas. Not having an address, a name, or even a description of the young woman (beyond her shapely breasts), it made no sense to guess which house might be hers. I was looking instead for a certain type of person that you will find in any neat residential neighborhood.
The busybody.
I found her soon enough. Noting the slowness of my vehicle, she opened her curtains to have a better look at me. When I reached the end of the street and doubled back, moving even more slowly now, she emerged onto her front porch.
I stopped the Scout when I’d drawn even with her tidy house and rolled down the window and hung my arm out. I shut off the engine.
“Hello! I’m wondering if you can help me.”
She was a
short wisp of a woman with rosy cheeks and a long gray braid. I doubt if she weighed ninety pounds. She wore a purple smock, linen pants, Birkenstocks, and reading glasses propped atop her head. A wedding ring hung on a chain around her neck. “Are you lost, then?”
“Not exactly. I’m trying to find a young woman who lives on this street. Mrs.…?”
“And what would her name be?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should put an ad in the newspaper, under Missed Connections.”
She had the accent I had come to associate with natives of northern Maine: flat vowels and hard r’s.
First-time visitors to Aroostook County often remark on how midwestern it feels. They don’t just mean the enormous blue skies and rolling farmland. They’re also taken aback by pronunciations, which don’t remotely resemble the Down East stereotype. The Aroostook accent sounds like something you might hear in a Milwaukee beerhouse or at a Nebraska Grange hall.
I produced my badge and identification card. She took her time bringing her reading glasses into position to read them. After a thorough review, she lifted the glasses off her nose and stared into my eyes with fierce intention.
“If she’s a poacher, you’re looking in the wrong neighborhood.”
“Actually, I think she’s a student at one of the colleges, living with a couple of other girls. They had a yard sale not too long ago. The girl I need to talk to has dark hair and is, um, buxom.”
Her eyes twinkled. “Buxom! Haven’t heard that expression since Jane Russell was on TV selling brassieres. That would be Angie Bouchard.”
“Can you point me to her house?”
“Only if you tell me why you need to talk to her.”
“Ms. Bouchard sold something at her yard sale. I’d like to ask where she got it.”
“Was it that badge?”
“You saw it?”
“Course I did. I was there with the other early birds before she opened up. Is she in trouble for selling that thing?”
“No.”
“Yah, well. Wouldn’t surprise me if she were. She and her friends threw the kinds of parties that attract men on motorcycles. I can’t say I’m sad she’s moving out. Blue house, white trim. Number eighty-four.”
“Thank you, Mrs.—”
“That badge of yours is real, I hope. You’re not one of those police impersonators.”
“The badge is real.”
I found a dog-eared business card in my wallet and handed it to her. She took it without a word. When I restarted my truck, she was standing on the front steps, trying to get a clear view down the street of what was about to happen.
* * *
There were no motorcycles parked outside the blue house, but there was a muddy pickup pulled up to the curb, someone’s old beater. More notable was the flashy Volkswagen Golf GTI in the open garage. The white hatchback still had the temporary cardboard plate the dealer gives you before you drive off the lot.
The new car might mean something or it might mean nothing. It might not even belong to Angie Bouchard.
I rang the bell, positioned the badge on my belt so that it was in plain sight, and stepped back from the door so I could be viewed from head to foot through the peephole.
The young woman who answered the door had hazel eyes and a rat’s nest of brownish-black hair. She was as voluptuous as Smith had claimed. She wore a T-shirt with the EarthMother logo, jeans with holes in the knees, and a fringe of loose threads at her bare ankles. I judged her to be older than most college students, midtwenties. She held an unlighted, hand-rolled cigarette pinched between two fingers.
“Angie Bouchard?”
“Yeah?”
I produced my badge for her. “I’m Mike Bowditch. I’m a warden investigator for the State of Maine.”
Her untrimmed eyebrows tightened. “What’s that?”
She had an entirely different accent from her busybody neighbor. The inflection was faint but undeniably French. What’s tat?
“I’m a detective who works for the Maine Warden Service, but still a police officer. Can I come in?”
“Fuck no. I don’t let strange men in my house. Cops included.”
“You had a yard sale here last month?”
“Yeah?”
She kept her voice neutral and face free of surprise, but she knew exactly why I had appeared at her door. The effect of my words was immediate. She stepped out onto the concrete stoop and closed the door behind her.
“Did you sell a badge like mine at your sale? It would have been smaller, older?”
“No.”
“A man in the county jail swears he bought a vintage game warden badge at a yard sale at this address.”
She produced a Bic lighter from her pocket and brought the cigarette up to her full lips. “My roommate had stuff for sale, too. Could have belonged to her.”
“Is she home?”
Angie Bouchard exhaled smoke from the corner of her mouth. Only then did I realize the cigarette was an expertly rolled joint. I made a coughing noise that brought an amused light into her eyes.
“Meg’s spending the summer back home in Connecticut.”
“Would you mind putting that thing out until we’re done?”
“It’s legal, and it’s my house,” she said. “If you don’t approve, you can leave.”
Her attitude told me she had dealt with cops before. People who seldom come into contact with the police are rarely so defiant.
Was she a bad girl? Or was she just pretending to be one?
I brought out my notebook. “What’s Meg’s full name?”
She told me. I pretended to write it down.
“What brought her all the way to Presque Isle?”
“Her family is from here originally. They moved to Connecticut after the base closed at Limestone. Went to work for one of the defense firms. Lots of people did. Meg wouldn’t have known it was illegal to sell a police badge.”
“It isn’t illegal. Unless it was stolen property. What about you, Angie? Where are you from?”
“Madawaska.”
It was an industrial town two hours north of Presque Isle in the St. John Valley. Madawaska was noteworthy for having a paper mill with a foot in two nations. The U.S. plant sent liquid wood pulp through a pipeline above the river to the New Brunswick factory to be made into toilet tissue, among other things.
“Does your father work at the mill?”
She exhaled marijuana smoke in my face. “How’d you guess?”
“There aren’t too many other jobs in Madawaska other than papermaking.”
“That depends on what side you’re on,” she said. “There are more opportunities on the Canadian side.”
“Which side are you on?”
“My mom was American. My dad is Canadian. I have dual citizenship.”
“Your mom is dead?”
The past tense had given her away, and she only now realized it. “She died over the winter. Breast cancer.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. Mine died of ovarian cancer. Your mother left you some money?”
“How did you—?”
“The car. Those GTIs are sweet. What was your mom’s name?”
“Emmeline,” she said. “My mom’s name was Emmeline Bouchard.”
“Was she from Madawaska, too?”
“Fort Kent.”
The town was twenty miles down the river from St. Ignace where Scott Pellerin had vanished.
“The badge you—excuse me, Meg—sold at the yard sale belonged to a man named Duke Dupree. I’m having trouble understanding how a college student from Connecticut got her hands on the badge of a Maine game warden who has been dead for decades.”
There was a touch of cruelty in her smile. “Too bad she’s not here.”
“You’re lying to me about the badge, Angie. I know it was yours.”
The door flew open behind her. A big, bearded man stood there, wearing jeans and nothing else. He had the heavy brow and
the powerful chest of a cartoon caveman. Unusual for a man his age in a place like this, he had no tattoos. He did, however, possess what looked like a cattle brand on one muscular shoulder. Raised scar tissue made a circular pattern. He appeared to be late thirties, older than I was, and significantly older than Angie.
“Who the fuck is this?” he said in the same faintly French accent.
“No one, baby.”
His eyes were like those of a nocturnal animal, dark brown, alert. A creature that preys upon weaker creatures.
“I know a cop when I see one.”
“I’m a game warden, actually. And you are?”
“A friend of mine,” said Angie quickly.
The man took the joint from her but was more careful about the direction he blew smoke. He looked so familiar, and yet I was positive we had never met before.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I was asking for tips on having a successful yard sale.”
The man angled himself in front of his girlfriend, assuming that’s who she was. I kept my eyes locked on his but used my peripheral vision in case he pulled out a weapon.
“I think it’s time for you to knock on someone else’s door, Warden.”
A realization took hold of me. Why had it taken so long for me to see the resemblance? From my back pocket, I removed the snapshot Ora had found in Charley’s cigar box and held it out for them to see.
The bearded man reacted as if I’d shown him a picture of his own gravestone. The question came out as a snarl. “What the fuck?”
My intuition had been proven correct. “I assume you know who this is, then.”
“Where did you get that?”
I put the photograph away before he could snatch it from me. “It doesn’t matter. So which of Pierre Michaud’s sons are you?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I already told Ms. Bouchard.”
Angie put her hand on Michaud’s muscled arm but directed her words at me. “I answered all your questions.”
That wasn’t anywhere near the truth. I had dozens more for Angie Bouchard and the son of Pierre Michaud.