by Paul Doiron
“He didn’t have a chance. He went straight from Ariel’s cottage to Harmon’s house in Marsh Harbor.”
I put aside the probability that Crowley might have lied about his movements. “Harmon doesn’t own a gun-cleaning kit he might have let his nephew-in-law use?”
Radcliffe reacted as if I had showed him a shocking photograph of a lady doing something unladylike. “Absolutely not! Harmon probably owns a cleaning kit. But he wouldn’t have assisted Kenneth in covering up a crime. You’re going to do ballistic tests, aren’t you?”
“If we can locate the bullet.”
When Radcliffe scratched his head, sawdust fell from his curls like dandruff. “The results will prove Kenneth’s telling the truth. The young man was actually being a good citizen, reporting what he found. I’d die if I thought I’d gotten him into trouble with the law through my own stupidity.”
How could Andrew Radcliffe not understand the import of his own words? If Crowley had only discovered the dead woman, it meant that someone else had killed her and was still roaming the island. I decided to tack my sails to approach the constable from a new direction.
“Tell me about Ariel Evans.”
“I can’t say that I knew her well enough to answer that question.”
“How long had she been on the island?”
“Since the beginning of September. It’s rare that people rent houses that late since so few of our buildings are winterized. She was staying at Gull Cottage, which is the last place before the Gut. That’s the channel between Maquoit and Stormalong.”
“Stormalong?”
“It’s a small island off the southwest end of Maquoit. More like a hundred-acre rock, actually.”
“Did you ever meet her yourself?”
“I ran into her a few times at Graffam’s Store and the dining room of the Maquoit Inn before it closed for the season. She was quite attractive. Beautiful by island standards. Outgoing, too. She seemed fun, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. How did she seem fun?”
“She used to go to the Trap House every night. We don’t have any bars here. The Trap is kind of an emptied-out warehouse where the lobstermen hang out and drink. It’s an ancient rule that outsiders aren’t permitted there. No exceptions—until Ariel, that is.”
“You said there were rumors about what she was doing.”
“We knew she was a writer. And she wasn’t shy about boasting about all the books she sold and the prizes she’d won.”
“Ariel never told anyone what she came here to write about?”
“Not that I ever heard. At first, we thought she was doing a follow-up on her Nazi book. There are two brothers here—the Washburns—who post a lot of filth online. But then we noticed she was spending her days over on Stormalong.”
“I thought you said it was an uninhabited rock.”
“I never said it was uninhabited. Someone lives over there. I guess you’d call him a hermit.”
Bella whined in her sleep as if she was having a nightmare. I reached out a hand to comfort her. “A hermit?”
“His name’s Blake Markman, and he’s lived alone there for twenty years, give or take. He came here from Hollywood. His father was a studio boss, and Blake was a producer or something. But there was some sort of accident involving his wife. She died in a fire at his beach house. Afterward, Blake bought Stormalong and moved out there for good. To look at the guy, you’d never know he was a multi-multimillionaire. His beard is long, and he raises Icelandic sheep and dresses in sheepskins. He almost never comes to Maquoit, and he hasn’t visited the mainland in decades. A writer for Vanity Fair tried for years to get him to talk, but it never happened.”
Bella had begun to snore peacefully again at my feet. “How did Ariel succeed?”
“She charmed him, I imagine. She’d row herself over there and spend hours talking with him.”
We swung a hard left along a deeply rutted trail that entered what had once been a cultivated apple orchard but had long been untended. The trees were crooked and twisted, almost human in their deformities. The branches badly needed pruning, and upstart shrubs were growing around the roots, eager to steal the sunlight away from the gnarled fruit trees.
Then I saw the deer in the road up ahead. Two does were grazing among some fallen apples the size of babies’ fists. The fruit looked brown and half-rotten. The deer were so gaunt I could see their ribs articulated through their grayish winter fur.
As the Tacoma rumbled past, the gracile animals trotted into the goldenrod. They flared their white tails in annoyance. But they didn’t spook the way normal deer would have. They waited patiently until both vehicles had passed, and the dust had settled, and then they returned to their beggar’s banquet.
I had been a hunter since my teens, and I had never seen whitetails behave this strangely.
With deer so clueless and so abundant, Maquoit should have been the last place in Maine where a hunting homicide would occur. And with so few hunters in the woods, what were the odds that one of them would happen to shoot the only stranger on the island?
4
Eventually, we emerged from the orchard, and there was Maquoit’s famous marsh stretched out before us. It was mostly sedge with tussocks of cattails scattered about, and here and there, muddy domes of rushes where muskrats had built their houses. A six-point buck raised his nose from a pool where he was drinking. His antlers seemed askew: asymmetrical in a way that suggested defects in the genome. He snorted and sprang away at our approach, but stopped to watch us from the edge of the alders, well within rifle range.
“That’s a good-sized deer for this island,” said Radcliffe. “In my hunting days, I would have—”
I perked up at that. “You don’t hunt anymore?”
He reacted to my question as if it contained a booby trap. “Not for years. I no longer even own a rifle.”
“Why’d you stop?”
He gave a sad laugh. “I happened to put a sheet under the last deer I hung from the meat pole. Within a few hours it was crawling with ticks. I burnt that sheet and never hunted again.”
I couldn’t blame him. “Can you give me an estimate of the number of hunters on the island?”
“Excluding poachers who’ll take a deer any time of the year?”
“I’m looking to identify everyone who might own a deer rifle and take it out in the woods.”
“Fifteen? Twenty? That’s out of a population of eighty-nine people, last time we counted. It’s hard keeping track of exactly how many folks are on the island on any given day.”
“Fifteen to twenty hunters seems low.”
“The deer are so skinny and sickly. There’s barely any meat left on them after you do the butchering. And they’re so tame. They’ll eat a peanut butter sandwich out of your hand. People say it’s like shooting one of your pets. The community is reaching a breaking point. Vaughn Brewster—he owns Westerly, the biggest place on the island—offered to pay two hundred thousand dollars for a professional sharpshooter to cull the herd, but the town voted against him. People said, ‘We know how to peel ticks off, thank you very much.’ We’ve had close to twenty cases of Lyme disease on Maquoit this year. That’s not counting the visitors who might have gotten sick. Now there’s that fatal Powassan virus to worry about. A tick bites you, and a week later you’re dead of meningitis or encephalitis. Have you heard about that one?”
“I’m a game warden, Andrew. Deer are my business.”
The constable gave me another of his blushing smiles. “I keep forgetting that you’re not a detective. It’s the way you’re dressed. I didn’t even know warden investigators existed until I spoke with you on the phone.”
I glanced at the sleeping dog so Andrew wouldn’t see me scowl. In the state of Maine game wardens are fully authorized officers of the law with all the same arrest powers as state troopers. Klesko and I had both graduated from the Criminal Justice Academy. We were both police officers. We just happened to have very different beats.
“We don’t get wardens out here that often,” Radcliffe continued. “There’s not even one assigned to the island at the moment. Hasn’t been for ages.”
He didn’t have to tell me that. The one person who could have helped me the most would have been the district warden. But the last man to have patrolled this remote island was enjoying his retirement on a Galveston beach.
“In fact, we don’t get many police officers at all.” Radcliffe smiled. “And when we do, there’s this sudden hush. All the ten-year-olds driving trucks immediately stop. Mostly we prefer to handle our own problems. No need to bring in outsiders.”
“I’m going to need a list of those fifteen to twenty names you mentioned.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“It’s nonnegotiable.”
Radcliffe fell into a funk.
I began to wish I’d spent more time studying a map of Maquoit. My inner compass told me that we were pointed nearly due south, taking a route parallel to the village. The Gut, which Radcliffe had mentioned, should be coming into view any second. Ariel Evans must have chosen her rental house to be as near as possible to Stormalong and its mysterious hermit.
Radcliffe confirmed my guess. “This is Gull Cottage up ahead.”
A golf cart was parked in the road effectively blocking the nonexistent traffic. Somebody had spray-painted the club car with psychedelic colors. Radcliffe had mentioned leaving a woman to watch the scene and, presumably, chase off busybodies. I’d made a note of her name: Beryl McCloud. I pictured a bosomy matron with gray hair.
We pulled to a stop, and I got my first look at the rental house. The quaint saltbox had a yellow porch, a yellow door, and yellow trim, and it stood alone in a field bounded by a perfectly rectangular stone wall. Someone had constructed a small dolmen, a stack of balancing rocks, in the weeds. A sign made of a cedar shingle identified the sculpture as LE PETIT MENHIR. A bicycle was leaning against the steps, a kayak was chained to a fir tree at the edge of the property, and two cords of firewood were stacked beneath wet blue tarps. The faintest trace of smoke was rising from the chimney.
This was an occupied house. Or it had been until a few hours ago.
A young, red-headed woman emerged around the corner of the building and came striding across the grass to meet us. “Andrew! Finally!”
Despite her baggy sweater, you could tell she was a beanpole. She walked with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, like a young girl self-conscious of her new breasts. She wore patched jeans, Birkenstock sandals, and cat-eye sunglasses that seemed deliberately ironic in their nod to Hollywood glamour.
Andrew Radcliffe whispered in my ear, “Please don’t say anything, but Beryl is one of the islanders with Lyme disease.” Then he grinned and waved to the approaching young woman. “How are you holding up, Beryl?”
“Not the best day of my life.”
“Thank you for staying. I know you and Ariel were close.”
“We only met a month ago. But I considered her a friend, I guess. Or maybe a potential friend.” Beryl’s voice had a creaky vibration somewhere in the back of her throat.
“Has anyone else come by while you’ve been here?” I asked.
She gave me a full-body appraisal. Her skin had an impressive tan that was rarely attainable among natural redheads. “I’ve been alone since Andrew left. People heard what happened and don’t want anything to do with it.”
Radcliffe said, “This is Mike Bowditch. He’s the warden investigator assigned to find out who shot Ariel.”
Beryl’s nostrils flared. “That shouldn’t be hard.”
I wanted to ask what she meant by that, but Harmon and the others were piling out of his truck. I decided my question was best asked in private.
“Andy, what were you thinking leaving this poor girl here with her dead friend?” Harmon Reed asked in his loud baritone.
The young woman said, “He didn’t leave me, Mr. Reed. I volunteered.”
“Well, that was brave of you, missy. Still seems wrong to me, if you’ll forgive my saying. Not a woman’s job to stand watch over a dead body.”
“And yet somehow I managed.”
She reached under her sweater, moved a hand around her breast, and came out with a pack of American Spirits. She shook a cigarette into her palm and fumbled in her pocket for a lighter, only to discover she didn’t have one. She waved the unlit smoke at us. “Can anyone here help out a lady?”
Harmon Reed produced a box of kitchen matches from his pocket. With a flick of his thumbnail against the tip, he produced a flame. Then he lit her cigarette. Beryl breathed out a fragrant cloud. “I didn’t want to smoke in the yard. I didn’t want to foul up the scene for the police.”
“We appreciate that, Ms. McCloud.” Klesko produced his badge for her. “I’m Detective Steven Klesko with the Maine State Police.”
The young woman removed her stylish sunglasses. Her auburn irises complimented her bronze complexion. She glanced back and forth between the detective and me with an almost flirty smile. “Wait a minute? Is this a hunting accident or a murder investigation?”
“That is to be determined,” said Klesko. “In part by what you can tell us about Ms. Evans.”
“I’m not feeling very well at the moment. I came here directly from school and have work to finish before I can even think of lying down.”
“Beryl is our teacher as well as our librarian,” said Andrew Radcliffe with almost fatherly pride.
“How long have you been on the island?” I asked.
She flicked her ashes to the ground. “I’m in the second year of my two-year contract. Before that I lived in Minneapolis. Teacher’s aide-slash-barista.” Beryl raised the cigarette in my direction. “I saw a job posting promising the adventure of a lifetime. And I thought I might be able to do some real good here, the kids being so isolated. Some role model I am, huh? Do you know that I stopped smoking before I came to Maquoit? I spent six months transitioning to a vape, then the patch, then the gum. Now look at me.”
The breeze shifted again and carried smoke into my face. I coughed, more in annoyance than distress. “We need to get a statement from you before you go, Ms. McCloud.”
She caught the hint and stepped downwind. “Andrew must have told you I have Lyme disease. Me and three of my students, and about twenty other people here. To be honest I’m having trouble even standing up at the moment. If you could swing by the school later, I’d be grateful.”
The detective and I exchanged glances. I assumed we both had the same thought, which was that she should sit down in the golf cart until we were ready to question her.
Klesko shocked me with his response: “Later will be fine, Beryl.”
“Thank you! I’ll probably still be at the schoolhouse—or the library—so you can look for me there.”
The detective was all smiles. “We do need to know if you touched anything—either in the backyard or in the house.”
“No, I didn’t touch a thing. I made sure to stay on the little path Andrew showed me. I never went inside.”
That was good to hear. The best forensic specialists in the world can’t save an investigation from a death scene that has been contaminated.
As Beryl said her goodbyes, I took a moment to reappraise my partnership with Klesko. How was it possible that I had become the bad cop in this scenario? I had never been the bad cop. But I had never been the primary on a hunting homicide investigation.
Ronette had removed a clipboard from one of her several bags. Pinned to it was the checklist we use in Major Case Investigations. The seventeen categories each had multiple action items. When she’d finished running down the list, she laughed until it turned into a coughing fit. “What do you think, Mike? The two of us should be able to handle this in three hours, don’t you think?”
“No sweat.”
Radcliffe beckoned us to follow him down the path that led to the hidden backyard. I noticed my bootlace had come undone and stopped to tie it. Behind me, I heard gravel
crunch. I glanced up at the imposing figure of Harmon Reed.
I rose to my full height. “You need to stay here, Mr. Reed.”
“And why is that?” He was half a foot shorter than I was, and forty years older, but his wide shoulders and barrel chest made him one of the most physically intimidating men I’d ever encountered.
“The scene needs to be confined to the professionals.”
Harmon jerked his thumb at Charley. “What about him?”
“Mr. Stevens is a retired game warden with decades of experience investigating hunting homicides.”
“Homicide!” Reed had eyes the color of pig iron. “I thought we agreed that this was an accident.”
The others had already disappeared around the corner of the cottage.
“It’s the legal term for what took place.”
“I know something about the law.” The island patriarch rose on his toes, but not enough to bring us to the same level. “Sounds to me like you’re already looking to pin this on one of my people.”
His people.
“Someone shot Ariel Evans. And if it wasn’t your nephew, it was someone else who hasn’t stepped forward to take responsibility. It’s my job to find out who he or she is.”
Harmon Reed snapped his suspenders with his thumbs. “I told Andy this would happen. It always does when someone from outside comes here to ‘solve a problem’ for us. A Maquoiter ends up getting railroaded or worse.”
“Mr. Reed, I understand you feel protective—”
“Don’t tell me how I feel, young man. You don’t know jack shit about me or this island.”
“If you want to be useful, you can call Kenneth Crowley and have him drive out here,” I said, no longer making an effort to hide my impatience. “We need him to walk us through the scene. It would go a long way if he made himself available to us now. Tell him to bring his rifle.”
“I suppose that’s reasonable. Like I’ve said from the beginning, the boy only wants to cooperate.”
Charley had been watching me confront the harbormaster. “How about I stay with Mr. Reed while he waits for his nephew? There isn’t anything that the three of you youngsters will miss that my old eyes would have caught.”