by Paul Doiron
“Get the fuck out of here,” he said.
“And if I don’t?”
He couldn’t speak the threat out loud, but I had seen murder in enough eyes to recognize a warning. “Don’t come here again.”
Tough guys always need to have the last word.
22
Fifteen miles west of Presque Isle, I nearly drove off the road.
I was passing through green fields planted with what looked like broccoli when I spotted an enormous black shape, grazing with its head down among the plants. A horse that had escaped his corral? No, it was too tall and ungainly.
Slowing down, I spotted another, then another, then another. Moose don’t travel in herds, but that was what I saw: twelve moose, ranging in size from new calves to enormous bulls, all happily dining on some hapless farmer’s crop.
Take that, Everglades, I thought. You don’t have a monopoly on natural wonders.
I stopped the Scout and got out with my iPhone to get pictures of the moose herd. My photographic skills were adequate for the purposes of recording evidence at crime scenes, but I lacked Stacey’s eye for composition and light.
The big animals didn’t seem to notice my presence. Moose have notoriously poor vision (I once avoided a charging bull by simply stepping behind a tree trunk and kept it between us until he calmed down), but their hearing is keen, as is their sense of smell, so they knew I was there. They just didn’t care.
Each of the animals was surrounded by a swarm of blackflies. The insect clouds were visible from fifty yards away. And soon the heat-seeking bugs had homed in on me, too. I retreated back inside my vehicle.
I needed to make a phone call anyway.
I reached Nick Francis’s voice mail.
“Nick, it’s Mike. I found the young woman who sold the badge to John Smith. Her name is Angie Bouchard, and I’m pretty sure she’s from St. Ignace. Her mother’s name was Emmeline Bouchard. I had expected Charley to have found her before I did, but she didn’t react like an angry geezer had recently knocked on her door. The big surprise was her boyfriend. He’s one of Pierre Michaud’s sons. He overheard me asking Angie about the badge, and I got the feeling he didn’t know she’d sold it and was ripshit to learn what she’d done. That worries me for her sake.”
I had hoped Nick was screening his calls. I watched the moose for ten more minutes until they drifted one by one into the trees across the field. The phone didn’t ring. I started off again.
* * *
Past Haystack Mountain, the landscape changed from farm fields to hills bristling with timber. A visitor might mistake these forests for wilderness, but they were just another cropland. The trees comprised plantations of softwoods—spruces and firs, mostly—that grew fast and could be harvested at the earliest opportunity to turn into paper for magazines and toilet tissue.
During the era of the river drives, when cut logs were transported on highways of water during the spring floods, the Maine North Woods had been largely unbroken by roads. The practices of the old-time loggers had caused many environmental problems, but they had left the boreal forest more or less intact. Bigfoot could have been hiding here, and no one would’ve been the wiser.
Now you could drive the length and breadth of Aroostook County on dirt and gravel roads. From the air, the North Woods was crisscrossed with innumerable scars.
“This used to be good country once,” Charley would sometimes grumble when we were airborne, “but now it’s nothing but a bunch of damned tree farms, owned by New York bankers who wouldn’t know a maple from a magnolia.”
“And you accused me of being a young old fart! What does that make you?”
“Somebody who’s lived past his expiration date.”
“I won’t tell Ora you said that.”
“Thank you.”
I had noticed that my friend had gotten crankier and more backward-looking since Stacey had left for Florida. His favorite daughter had shared some of her youthful energy with the old man and kept him focused on the future. Without her, Charley had begun to drift, like so many people his age, into reveries of lost days.
No wonder Duke Dupree’s badge had affected him so profoundly.
Knowing that Angie Bouchard had been responsible for the shield resurfacing was interesting but unhelpful without context. What was her connection to Scott Pellerin? She would have been a child when he disappeared.
I was banking on Stan Kellam filling in some of the missing puzzle pieces. He had been Pellerin’s commanding officer and handler, and Ora made it sound as if he’d taken the young investigator’s death as hard as Charley had. But when I thought of Kellam—commanding, conniving, brilliant—I was reminded of the specific language in that letter to me:
There’s a man out there who’s kept quiet all these years, waiting for me to wise up to my foolishness, a man of patience and guile. He’s been expecting me, I fear, and taken precautions.
I didn’t associate patience with Stan Kellam. The man had had a reputation for routinely exploding at his subordinates in red-faced rage. But guile? Absolutely. The way he’d tried to maneuver Kathy Frost into leaving the service after her husband’s death.
Ora had told me that the former lieutenant had purchased an old sporting camp on Moccasin Pond in a vast swatch of Maine referred to as the Unorganized Territories. A few minutes with The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer located the pond by latitude and longitude, but the map was less helpful in plotting a course. The dotted lines indicating roads might be passable or not, and forget about GPS in that untraveled tract of woods. Kellam had chosen to retreat from the world in a place where no one actually lived. Population: zero.
These unincorporated townships were so remote, they didn’t even have true names but were marked on the atlas by letters and numbers: T13 R17, T12 R9, and so on. Not all the dotted lines leading to Moccasin Pond on the map even had names. I would be lucky to find Kellam’s compound and luckier to find my way out of the woods if darkness fell before it was time to leave.
The Rocky Brook Road headed west from Portage through the heart of the state’s commercial timberland to the Québec border outside Saint-Pamphile. Instead of asphalt, or even sand, it had been surfaced with shards of granite. The sharp stones were famously fond of slicing tires to shreds. I never traveled the North Woods logging roads without at least two spares.
I drove at a good clip, knowing that poking along wouldn’t spare me from getting a flat. Nevertheless, a speedster in a silver Jeep Wrangler came racing up behind me, then swerved past before I could give him room. The license plate was so mud-plastered the digits were unreadable.
In the old days, when I had worked as a patrol warden, I would have chased down the Jeep to write the driver a citation. There was no law against being an asshole, but he had cut in front of me so aggressively he’d nearly forced me off the road. But I was trying to control my temper.
I half hoped I would catch Speed Racer at the Fish River Checkpoint, where recreational visitors to the North Woods were required to stop, register, and pay an entrance fee. By the time I came upon the little gatehouse, however, my friend in the Jeep had already blown past the stop sign and continued through.
The checkpoint belonged to a nonprofit organization that acted as the de facto watchmen for the private owners of large tracts of land in northern Maine. The little building was more vertical than horizontal, painted a soft mint green, and steepled with two antennas.
The ironic thing was that, as a state game warden, I had carte blanche to pass through the gate without explanation, but my visit would have been captured on hidden cameras, and might have set into motion a chain of events whose outcome I couldn’t predict. If at all possible, I didn’t want the higher-ups in the Warden Service asking questions about what I was up to.
A buzzer sounded as I entered the cabin. I crossed to a counter and waited, then called into the room beyond. Instead a telephone rang. It was an old-fashioned Bakelite model with a dial and curly cord. I picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Good afternoon,” said a female voice. “That’s a honey of a Scout you’re driving! What year is it?”
I looked up to see a camera winking at me from the corner. There must have been another aimed at the lot where I’d parked.
“It’s a 1980.”
“Wicked cool. Where are you headed today?”
I had decided not to mention Kellam, lest he have standing orders refusing all uninvited visitors.
“I thought I’d do a little small-stream fishing.”
“Where?”
“Anyplace that looks promising.”
I might have imagined the note of suspicion that crept into the voice of my watcher. “We don’t get many anglers coming in to fish the brooks here with the Fish River and the Allagash so close. What time are you coming out?”
“I figured I’d fish until dusk, then drive out after twilight.”
“You need to fill out the sheet in front of you. Put it in an envelope with seven dollars and slide it through the slot in the box to your right.”
Clipped to a clipboard was a form no less comprehensive than an application for United States citizenship. I didn’t lie but fudged the details—used my middle name, John, instead of my first. Anyone looking to identify me could do so, but I didn’t want to make it child’s play.
As I was about to leave, the phone rang again.This time it was a different woman’s voice. “Any problems with the form?”
“No.”
“Make sure you’re out by dark. We’d rather not have to send someone looking for you.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Do you know how many times we’ve heard that before?”
23
The forest along the Rocky Brook Road had been logged so hard there was hardly a tree left standing taller than a telephone pole. The state had outlawed wholesale clear-cutting years ago, but you never would’ve known it from the wanton devastation stretching as far as the eye could see.
Vast fields, consisting of stumps and deadfalls, tangled puckerbrush, and a few worthless cedars, extended for miles along both sides of the thoroughfare. Poplars and willows were so splattered with mud from the logging trucks that they seemed nearly sculptural. If you had told me brutal battles had been fought here with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, I would have believed you.
Following the highlighted route I’d drawn on the map, I eventually left the gravel road for a series of poorly maintained jeep trails that delved into the as yet uncut forest. The farther I went, the narrower and rockier these roads became. Raspberry bushes scraped paint from the sides of my vehicle with their scratching fingers.
Someone had come through ahead of me, and recently, too. Tire marks showed in the muddy dips between the ups and downs. The prints belonged to a Jeep. It had to be Speed Racer, I thought. There was only a single set, meaning that my lead-footed friend hadn’t yet departed, at least by this route. It seemed an odd coincidence, to say the least, that the two of us would have followed the same twists and turns in the maze.
The Jeep had finally turned down a trail so narrow a moose would have caught his antlers in the branches on both sides. So he hadn’t come here to visit Kellam, it seemed. I wondered what lay down the secret path he had taken.
It began to rain again, just enough to require that I turn on my wipers.
The lieutenant’s land was protected by a steel gate, which I was startled to find standing open—as if I were expected. I looked in the treetops for a security camera but saw nothing but the roughly rectangular holes made by pileated woodpeckers. Kellam guarded his privacy; I took it as a testament to his bushcraft that he could hide a spy cam from me.
Descending the hill, I caught the first dull flashes of the lake, metallic gray beneath the heavy overcast. I swung around a curve, pulled as much by gravity as by the engine.
And nearly ran over a man in the road.
He was black-skinned. He had a shaved head. His limbs were long and thin, and the ranginess gave him a misleading appearance of being tall when he was only lanky. He wore a red kerchief knotted around his neck, a rain-dappled shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, and baggy jeans rolled above bare ankles. His shoes were dirty brogues.
In his hand, he held a long tree-pruning tool with a curved, serrated blade at the end. At first glance I mistook it for a medieval polearm.
I unrolled my window. “I’m sorry! I almost hit you.”
“Bon apre-midi. I took you by surprise, yes?”
“I was going too fast.”
“You did not expect me, too.”
The accent spoke of some island blown by the trade winds. Based on the French greeting, my first guess was Haiti. But for all I knew, he could have been a resident of New Orleans’s Fifth Ward or even a visitor from Montreal.
And I had thought Presque Isle felt foreign.
“Is this Stan Kellam’s place?”
“You are his friend, no?”
“We know each other, but I wouldn’t call myself his friend.”
“No? He told me to open the gate because he was expecting a visitor.”
“That wouldn’t be me.”
“You are just here by hazard, then?” As he approached, I saw that his skin was welted with insect bites. A cloud of mosquitoes, blackflies, and deerflies hung over his shining head, but he seemed unbothered by this personal plague.
“Coincidence would be a better word,” I said. “Did he tell you the name of the person he’s expecting?”
“Michael, he said.”
“That’s my name. But I prefer Mike.”
“I am called Edouard. But he knew you were coming, no?”
I couldn’t fathom how, but I put on a smile for the benefit of the man at my window. “Where are you from, Edouard?”
“Port-au-Prince. You know Haiti?”
“I know the name.”
“You have no need to know more! It is a long way from here. A long way from Maine.”
I couldn’t argue the point, least of all at that moment. “Do you work for Stan, Edouard?”
“For two years, I am his—how you say?—his handyman.” Then he broke into a broader grin. “He is a generous personality. My sister never asked him to give me a job. But Stan is tres généreux.”
“Your sister?”
“Vaneese. You will meet her next.” He beckoned me forward. “Drive that way, and you will see the big house. If you see Ferox, stay in the truck unless you want to get bitten. He killed a bear, that dog! Bon chance.”
Edouard continued up the hill with that cruel-edged tool over his shoulder.
Whatever I had expected from Kellam, it hadn’t been this. Where had he acquired a Haitian factotum? Edouard had mentioned a sister. Was she the cook?
Before me, Moccasin Pond spread out into the hazy distance. Its surface was stippled by light rain. To my left stood several outbuildings. There was a barn for construction equipment and a garage for snowmobiles, a humming structure that seemed to contain the generator that powered the compound, and assorted toolsheds. Down at the water’s edge, a long dock extended from a boathouse into the lake.
To my right was the “big house.” The design, more hotel than home, showed the property’s history as a sporting camp. It had the long porch of an inn, complete with rocking chairs, larger plate glass windows on the first floor, and a row of smaller windows on the second story that suggested multiple bedrooms.
But the cream siding looked new, and the green trim had just been painted, as had the doors, and the roof was fashioned of bright steel for the snow to slide off.
I stepped out of the Scout and heard the breeze sighing in the tall pines and water spilling from the gutters. I breathed deeply to fill my lungs with the wet, balsam-scented air. Then I turned toward the house and saw something that made my heart seize up like a stuck motor.
Bounding toward me came a charcoal-black dog with a square head, a muscular chest, ears clipped to points
, and bared fangs. It hadn’t uttered a sound until it saw me turn toward it. Then it let loose with a series of barking growls that made me dive toward my vehicle. My hand reflexively found the grip of my handgun under the hem of my shirt.
Fortunately, a woman’s voice intervened. “Ferox! Pfui! Was machst du!”
The effect on the coal-colored dog—some sort of mastiff seemingly—was immediate. The huge animal slid to a stop as if it had reached the end of a chain. We were less than fifteen feet apart; a single leap would have bowled me over. Spittle flew from its black lips.
I was terrified to look away or remove my hand from my gun, but out of the corner of one eye, I saw the shape of a woman rushing toward us.
“Schlecht hund!”
If the language wasn’t German, I didn’t know what it was.
“I am so, so sorry!” she said in an accent that wasn’t remotely Teutonic. “He got past me when he heard your vehicle. He wasn’t supposed to be loose. He could have killed you!”
Still focused on the dog’s eyes, I watched a slender brown hand take hold of his collar. Then the woman was kneeling beside the animal, fastening a muzzle over his still snarling jowls.
Only then did I really see her. She was, by any standard, one of the most striking people I had ever come across—in part because of the contrast between her mocha-toned skin and her caramel-colored eyes.
I would have put her age in her late twenties, maybe her early thirties. She was dressed as if on a modeling shoot for the L.L.Bean catalog: gingham shirt, canvas pants, and boat shoes that exposed her slender ankles.
“Don’t apologize. Your brother warned me about the dog.”
“You met Edouard?”
Her own speech bore a much fainter Creole accent than her brother’s. It made me think she’d spent significantly more time in the United States than he had, even though she appeared to be at least a decade younger.
“We spoke on the way in,” I said. “What kind of dog is this?”