by Paul Doiron
At this latitude, there should have been two more hours of daylight, but the low ceiling of clouds meant that darkness would arrive before civil twilight. Shadows would be seeping from every tree at the time of the meeting.
While I waited, I sent an email to Ora telling her I had seen her husband, that he was alive and well, but he had slipped away again. I told her I hoped to find him again soon. I also asked that she alert me when her daughter arrived from Florida.
The thought of my ex-girlfriend returning to Maine disquieted me. Even from two thousand miles away, Stacey had cast a shadow over my relationship with Dani. She still made guest appearances in my dreams, often in risqué scenarios. Despite my best efforts, I found myself drawing comparisons. Dani came out on the better end of most of the pros and cons. But not all of them.
Dani’s recent declaration that she would never have children had rattled me. I had always assumed I would be a father. I desperately wanted a son or daughter in fact. But I loved Dani. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I believed she was resolute in her desire to remain childless.
As I had feared, my body had begun to stiffen and ache from the crash. My shoulder hurt especially. I tried to clear my head and rest, but my worries wouldn’t leave me alone.
Eventually, I drew my hood over my head and left the shelter of my vehicle. Being outdoors was the only reliable way I knew to quiet my troubled mind.
The fort loomed in the failing light: a square, top-heavy structure, with a second floor that was greater in area than the first. The roof was shaped like a pyramid. The blockhouse might have looked like something out of The Last of the Mohicans if not for the lawn-mounted spotlights, shining up against the graffiti-carved, rough-hewn walls.
Beyond the fort, the land tumbled down to a lower parking lot with picnic tables and steel grills. Under the sheltering leaves of ancient maples, I wandered down the hill to the water’s edge. There, I stood upon the banks of the Fish River as it rushed to join the St. John.
Both rivers must have recently flooded, because there was mud smeared ten feet up the tree trunks, and everything on the ground—the dead leaves, the severed branches, even the discarded bottles and cans—was gunky with grime.
I took up a position behind a sugar maple as old as the fort itself and waited.
At fifteen minutes to seven, I spotted headlights coming down the one-way drive. The car did not turn in to the parking lot. Instead it continued on to the adjacent lumberyard. I had no view of the higher ground. I could only listen. I heard a car door being closed with care. No voices.
The park had become a patchwork of light and shadows. Illumination from the fort and the lumberyard lit up swatches between the trees, but there were just as many dark places. I watched for a flashlight beam to spark to life, but the driver seemed comfortable moving in darkness.
Finally, a silhouette rose atop the hill: a person in a hooded poncho.
He or she stood there a minute, and I suspected they were debating whether to wait for me in the light or find their own nest of shadows in which to hide themselves. They chose the shadows.
I watched the person in the poncho begin to pick their way down the hill. The leaves were slick and muddy, but my mystery visitor seemed as sure-footed as a goat.
They were halfway down when I made my move.
“Hold it!”
Startled, they lost their balance. They waved their arms like a flightless bird, then plopped to the ground. They slid on their backside down the rest of the hill.
I was on them fast. One hand rested on the grip of my Beretta. The other brought up the Maglite to shine straight into their eyes.
A brown face squinted up at me from inside the hood of a green poncho.
“Vaneese?”
She covered her eyes with the back of her arm. “Mike? Is that you?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I left you a note. Can you turn off the light, please?”
After I clicked the switch, the darkness flowed back in like water welling from the river. I moved my right hand away from my gun and extended it in her direction.
“Hold out your arm.”
She did, and I grabbed her thin wrist. She weighed next to nothing. When she had regained her footing, I guided her out from under the trees into a pool of misted light.
“What’s this about, Vaneese? Why all the secrecy?”
“I needed to warn you. It’s Stanley. I’ve never seen him like this before. I think he plans on hurting someone.”
39
We sat in her car to get out of the weather. It was a Subaru Crosstrek, late model, low miles. The absence of dog hairs on the upholstery told me Ferox was not permitted rides. Although the interior was as clean-smelling as could be, a tree-shaped air freshener hung from the rearview mirror.
Vaneese kept digging the nails of her right hand into her thigh, leaving scratches in the denim. Every stray car that passed, its headlights sweeping the inside of the Subaru, made her catch her breath.
I tapped the fragrant triangle of cardboard dangling before us. “Do you know what cops used to call these?”
She shook her head.
“Felony forests.”
“I don’t understand the term.”
“People carrying drugs think air fresheners mask the smell of narcotics in a car. All these things do is give the sniffer dogs sore sinuses. A person could write a thesis about criminals and their folklore. Maybe I should consider going back to school when I retire.”
She had no response to this digression, but as I’d hoped, it worked to put her at ease.
“I almost didn’t recognize your poor SUV,” she said in her lovely accent. “Were you in an accident?”
“I slipped off the road in the rain,” I said.
“Were you hurt?”
“Thank you for asking, but no, I’m uninjured—for once.” The windows began to fog. “What’s this about, Vaneese? Why do you think Stan is planning on hurting someone?
“After you and the other warden left,” she said, “Stanley went into the guest room and brought out the boxes of files. He spread the papers on the dining room table. He was trying to discover what you’d been looking for. It was early, but he had begun to drink heavily. I went to take a shower. When I came downstairs, I saw him outside, talking to Edouard. He seemed very angry, very insistent. I saw him give my brother the keys to the farm truck.”
I had a vision of a pickup roaring up behind me along the river road. I heard the crash of my bumper crumpling. “What does this farm truck look like?”
“It’s old and rusty. Edouard uses it to carry firewood when he cuts a tree.”
“Do you know what a monster truck is?”
“Like from a demolition derby?”
“Does the farm truck have big tires? Does it ride high off the ground?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
The thought of Kellam dispatching Edouard Delhomme to kill me was absurd. That wasn’t to say it was impossible.
“Where did Stan tell Edouard to go?” I asked.
“Le trou du rat. That’s Edouard’s name for the cabin. It’s a place he hides sometimes from the ICE agents. I have never been there. I don’t think Stanley wants me to know where it is in case I’m ever interviewed by the Border Patrol.”
“Did you believe him? Did you believe that’s where Edouard went?”
“At first, yes, but when I asked why Stan thought ICE was coming, he wouldn’t say. He went into his den and locked the door, and I think he called someone. When he came out, he was very red in the face. His safe is inside. It is where he locks up his guns. He took a pistol but tried to hide it in his raincoat. I could see the impression.”
“Did he tell you he was driving up here?”
“He said he thought he might be able to help the police catch the man who killed the girl. I asked him if he knew this Evangeline, and he said he met her a long time ago when she was a child. He knew her mother, he said.”
“Stan and I had lunch together this afternoon.” I resisted the urge to take her hand lest she misunderstand the intent of the gesture. “I can’t say he was in a good mood, but he didn’t seem like he was hell-bent on murder.”
“Stan is an expert at hiding his emotions.”
Not in my experience.
“You must’ve heard or seen something to make you so worried. You need to tell me what it was.”
She stared at the misted windshield.
“Vaneese?”
“When he was in his den, I put my ear to the door. He was trying not to be loud, but I heard him say, ‘He’s going to destroy me.’ And then he didn’t want me to see that he took a pistol. Stanley doesn’t hide his guns, because he is proud of them. He takes me target shooting.”
“You’re sure about the pistol?”
“I have the combination to the safe. It is a series of numbers. In case I need to protect myself while he is away. After he left, I went into the den to check, and he had changed the combination.”
“Might he have done that before and forgotten to tell you?”
“No, because he told me to get a pistol yesterday while you were out on the lake. He never explained why. It was as if he expected someone dangerous to come to the lodge while he was gone. It was the usual combination.”
I didn’t know what to make of this admission, that while we’d been fishing, Stan had told Vaneese to arm herself. It was hardly comforting.
“I have never seen him violent before,” she said. “But I have seen men before they commit violent acts.”
As a foundation upon which to build a theory—that Stanley Kellam had come to the St. John Valley to injure some unnamed person—I wouldn’t have called it rock-solid. But that was me thinking like a police officer. Vaneese knew and loved Kellam and understood when he was acting out of his worst impulses.
“What has Stan told you about Scott Pellerin’s disappearance?” I asked.
“That it was Scott’s own fault. That he was cocky and gave himself away. Because Stan was the supervisor, though, everyone blamed him. They said he should have gotten Scott out of the situation sooner. Your friend, the pilot, was the worst, Stan says.”
Kellam had expressed a similar sentiment to me. I couldn’t be certain if what he regretted was his misjudgments concerning Pellerin or the damage that the affair had on his career aspirations. He might have felt both emotions at once.
Vaneese started clawing at her thigh again. “It was Stan’s plan to send in all those men into town at night. The politicians and the newspapers called it a ‘raid,’ but Stan said it was a rescue mission. Michaud started the fire that burned those buildings. The wardens were not responsible. But still everyone blamed Stan. And he was mad at your friend for killing Michaud before they could find out where he’d hidden Scott’s body.”
That simmering resentment explained Charley’s reluctance to confront Kellam himself.
She reached for a tissue and dabbed the wad at her eyes. “Stanley said that his career ended that night. Before Scott, he was going to be the colonel. But the politicians made sure he would rise no higher.”
“I want to get back to the phone call you overheard. You don’t have any idea who he could have been speaking with?”
“No.”
“What about the person who wants to destroy him?”
“Your friend, I think. Is that true? Does your friend wish to destroy Stan?”
She had been honest with me, and I felt she deserved the respect of a truthful answer. “It’s possible he does.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure I can give you an answer that makes sense. Stan doesn’t know you are in Fort Kent, does he?”
“No.”
“What might he do if he finds out you came here to tell me these things?”
She reacted to this question by tensing the muscles in her face. Her eyes seemed overlarge in the dimness of the car. It was as if I had insulted her virtue.
“Stan loves me.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“He has never hit me. He is the first man I’ve been with I can say that about. He would never hurt me no matter what I did.”
As a law enforcement officer, you meet many women who are certain that their boyfriend or husband will never hurt them, not in a million years—until he breaks their arm.
For her sake, I hoped Vaneese was right about Stan.
* * *
When I returned to the Scout, I saw that the rain had found the weak point in the plastic that I had taped up as a makeshift window. I tried to reattach the tape, but the water had ruined the adhesive. I let the wet air seep inside.
Kellam hadn’t mentioned where he was going after lunch. I had assumed back to Moccasin Pond. What would he do when he found Vaneese gone?
It pained me not to talk this through with Charley. He had said he’d been watching me. I wondered if he—or his proxy, Nick Francis—might be doing so now.
I couldn’t leave the Valley, not yet. I hoped Dani would understand my decision. But until I knew Charley was safe, I couldn’t absolve myself of the promise I had made to Ora.
I drove directly to the nearest motel. It was the one with the mile zero marker in its lot. I recognized Zanadakis’s unmarked cruiser parked at the far end. It was a two-hour drive back to the nearest state police barracks, and no doubt the detective was as aware of the danger posed by night-wandering moose as I was.
Except for a nook with coffee and a rack of pamphlets advertising local attractions, the lobby felt like the living room of someone’s French-speaking great-aunt.
“Sorry, but we are full up,” said the awkward teenage girl behind the desk.
“Your sign says ‘Vacancy.’”
“We just sold the last room a few minutes ago. I haven’t had a chance to change it. I can call around and see if I can find a place for you.”
“Is something going on in town?”
“The muskie derby.”
Back in the 1960s, biologists in Québec had introduced muskellunges into Lac Frontière at the urging of local sportsmen. The fish are relatives of northern pike but are much larger and more aggressive, reaching lengths of nearly five feet and weighing as much as sixty pounds. They can live as long as thirty years. Their teeth are long and sharp enough to snip off your thumb.
Inevitably the super-predators got into the St. John watershed and made their way downstream into Maine, devastating every native species along the way. But at least the locals had found a way to cash in on the alien invasion. Maybe the people in the Everglades, plagued by pythons, needed to get creative with their economic development efforts.
“I thought the derby was in August,” I said.
“The chamber of commerce is doing two this summer because there are so many fish. Are you sure I can’t help you find a room? Where will you sleep?”
“My truck,” I said. “It won’t be the first time.”
But in the past, the Scout still had windows to keep out the mosquitoes and the rain.
I was just about to leave when a realization smacked me in the forehead. “You’re the girl who waited on me this afternoon at the Swamp Buck.”
Her smile told me she appreciated being recognized. “This is my night job.”
“It must keep you busy.”
“I like to work,” she said brightly. “But it does get hard during the potato harvest. I have to get up before dawn to get my hours in on the farm, too.”
“Three jobs is a lot,” I said.
“It is?” She seemed genuinely baffled.
I remembered seeing a drive-in campsite on the map of the Allagash River, just upstream of where it flowed into the St. John. Chances were that muskie fishermen had already “hoseyed” it, already laid a claim. The Valley wasn’t short of clearings in the woods where I could park my vehicle for the night.
Thinking about Allagash village made me recall Jon Egan. The red squirrel lived there, I remembered.
The
deep-woods hamlet was the terminus of one of America’s great canoe trips. The federally protected Allagash Wilderness Waterway was a ninety-eight-mile chain of lakes, streams, and rivers through the heart of the northern forest. Most paddlers took a week to complete the journey, camping along the way at some of the most scenic sites imaginable. The Allagash was a place people put on bucket lists. It attracted paddlers from around the world.
Stacey and I had done the trip in five days. Even though we were young and fit, the effort had exhausted us. When we’d reached Allagash, we’d slept twelve hours at McKinnon’s Lodge. The charming redhead who owned the place said the record had been set by a paddler who didn’t awaken for thirty-six hours. She had been tempted to call her cousin, the mortician.
I could claim that I had forgotten that Stacey was headed north, that she would presumably be arriving in the morning in her father’s borrowed plane, but it would be more accurate to say I had tamped down the thought. Seeing her again—and so soon—was more than I could deal with.
I needed to refocus on the problem before me.
Egan had stood up to hours of questioning after Pellerin went missing. He had done his full sentence in the prison Mainers nicknamed “Shawshank” after the Stephen King story and movie. He had never given up his secrets.
But Egan’s circumstances had changed. He had a family, a baby. He was out from under Pierre Michaud’s thumb, if not Roland’s.
And someone had brutally killed Angie Bouchard. Whatever alternate theories Zanadakis felt compelled to explore, I knew her death was a direct result of that telltale badge. She had been killed to shut her up. Her murderer would know that Egan was a potential squealer.
What would Charley do?
Wrong question: What was Charley doing?
My friend would have the same instinct about Egan that I had. He would be watching the redheaded man closely. He would be waiting for him to panic and reveal some long-held secret. He would be preparing for Angie’s murderer to come looking for blood.
40
The rain had stopped, but the temperature had risen. The clamminess made me remember something my father had told me about the war. In Vietnam, he had said, your uniform got soaked from two directions: from the mist seeping in and from your perspiration unable to escape.