by Paul Doiron
“How’s the weather out there?” DeFord asked.
“Fogged in.”
“That’s what the forecast said. Temps in the forties. Calm winds, seas two to three feet, relative humidity near one hundred percent. Conditions should persist for the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours. It’s this southerly front that’s moved in.”
My knowledge of meteorology was more practical than academic, gained from working outdoors, day in and day out, in all seasons and all weather. But I knew enough about the science to understand what DeFord was telling me. All planes and helicopters would be grounded in the fog. And since the only ferry was scheduled to leave Mount Desert Island within hours, it meant that Steve Klesko would need to find a boat if he hoped to return to Maquoit.
It also meant that I would not be leaving the island in the near future.
* * *
When I was a rookie, my field training officer, Sergeant Kathy Frost, had told me that if you wanted to get to know a small, secretive community, you should explore the local cemetery. From the comparative sizes of the monuments to the groupings of graves, you could learn which families were prominent or had once been prominent. Long-standing grudges manifested themselves in segregated burial plots. Enemies in life were almost never interred near one another in death.
From the Olde Island Burying Ground, I learned that Maquoit’s earliest settlers had been the Pillsburys and the Washburns, many of whom had died (most often in childbirth or at sea) in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Reeds seemed to have been relative latecomers. The first marker I found with that name was a small block of granite belonging to a Harold Reed, who died in 1921. Tellingly, the sizes of the Reeds’ tombstones increased over the decades. The largest of them all, a towering marble obelisk, bore the name of Horatio Reed, undoubtedly Harmon’s father.
Then, in a curious reversal of this progression, came a small stone in the family plot dedicated to Heath Reed. The inscription said he’d died five years earlier at the age of twenty-eight: LOST AT SEA.
Strange that Harmon would have commissioned a monolith to mark his father’s gravesite and yet barely acknowledged his son with a stone no bigger than a cinder block.
There was a wrought-iron fence around the cemetery with a gate that someone had kicked halfway off its hinges. I did my best to close it behind me, then set off down the hill, into town.
I hadn’t gotten more than ten yards before I heard a crunching noise ahead of me in the fog.
“Hello?” I said.
There was no answer.
I took a step forward and raised my light. The beam caught the obsidian eyes of a deer. A spike buck, a yearling, stood before me in the gravel road. The cracking I’d heard was the deer chewing a flattened rat someone had run over. I’d never seen such a thing before: a deer driven by hunger to become carnivorous.
The roadkill dropped from the buck’s mouth. Deer have no top front teeth, just a hard plate of bone to grind vegetation against. No wonder it was having trouble masticating the rat.
“Hey there, little guy,” I said softly.
His white-fringed tail flagged when I spoke.
I took another step forward, and he stamped his front hoof but didn’t bolt. I took another step, then another.
I was close enough now to see the pinkish translucence of his ears and to have touched his mist-beaded nose. I could feel the thin heat rising from his gaunt body. Up close I could see that his bulging eyes were sunken and red around the edges. His teeth were worn and as yellowed as those of a smoker dying of emphysema. For an instant, I considered scratching his forehead, but I feared he might snap at my delicious, flesh-covered fingers.
Instead I passed him by. A moment later, I heard a scraping sound in the fog behind me. The deer was endeavoring to pick up the rat again with his stained, ineffectual teeth.
* * *
I had gone perhaps another hundred yards down the hill. I had passed a dozen more houses, most boarded up for the winter, a few showing signs of habitation, when I heard a wolf whistle. I peered through the mist and saw Joy Juno standing outside the one-room schoolhouse. Her own truck was nowhere to be seen, but a flesh-toned Datsun pickup was parked beside the swing set.
“What are you doing up this early?” I asked.
“I’m always up with the roosters. Besides, Beryl texted me this morning asking me to tell you she’s home sick. She had to cancel school. That Lyme disease has really kicked her ass.”
I made a mental note to check on the teacher later.
Joy was bundled up in a Carhartt work coat and was wearing a matching duck-colored cap. I couldn’t imagine worse colors to wear during deer-hunting season, but it spoke to how unafraid the islanders were of being shot, despite what had happened the day before to Ariel Evans.
“What’s the deal with Mrs. Wight? She wasn’t there when I checked in, but she must have come by during the night because she’d left me another note. And she signed her dead husband’s name on it, too.”
Joy Juno was the only person I’d met whose laugh could be accurately described as a guffaw. “Ellen is no ghost, if that’s what you’re worried about. The thing about signing Elmore’s name, I think it’s just habit. You’ll run into her if you stay long enough. Any sense of how long that’ll be? Oh, right. You’re not allowed to tell me. But I’m allowed to guess where you’re headed, aren’t I? You’re going down to Graffam’s to talk with the breakfast club.”
“No comment.”
“Ha! I knew it. Well, at least you can arrive in style now.” Like a game-show hostess unveiling a prize, she swept her arm toward the Datsun. “Old Mr. Blackington is back onshore getting both of his knees replaced—the poor bastard—but he said you were welcome to use this ‘monster’ truck of his.”
“He’s expecting to be reimbursed, I imagine?”
“You happen to be in luck. Mr. Blackington’s a big booster of law enforcement. He was the island constable out here for ages, and his oldest boy is a state trooper in Vermont.”
The ancient Datsun wasn’t tan so much as speckled. It was dotted from end to end with so many rust spots it reminded me of a person with a terminal case of the measles.
“As long as it works.”
“He says it does—he just put in a new tranny—but he suggests you don’t go off mudding in the hayfields.”
She tossed me the keys. The ring was attached to a fob shaped like an American flag. I opened the driver’s door and was impressed by the pine-scented cleanliness of the cramped cab. The truck had no backseat at all, not even a place to stash a jacket. But when I turned the key in the ignition, the engine purred to life.
I cranked down the window. “You’re going to need to share Mr. Blackington’s address with me so I can send him a thank-you.”
“He’d prefer a gallon of Allen’s coffee brandy.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “So what are you up to today?”
“I’ll be dealing with stuff from the ferry most of the morning. But I might be able to get in some painting later. You should stop at my studio if you have a minute. It’s the second-to-last house on John’s Point, right after Andy’s place. There’s a sign out front.”
I doubted I would have time to make social calls. But I was curious to see her art. And we were both aware that, despite our easy banter, we hadn’t yet addressed her feelings about Ariel Evans. The truck driver spent her days carrying cargo around the island, talking with people, noticing who was doing what—all of which made her potentially an important witness. Sooner or later, I would need to sit down with Joy Juno for a formal interview and press her to dish her neighbors’ secrets. When I did, I had a feeling she would end up liking me a lot less than she did now.
16
Daytime on Maine waterfronts always begins in the dark. It didn’t surprise me to pass lit kitchen windows on my drive into the village center or to find Graffam’s open for business at this ungodly hour.
Four pickups were parked in front
, driven there no doubt by men who resided less than a stone’s throw from the store. One of the things I knew about Maine islanders was that they drove their vehicles at every opportunity. Even if it was just a hundred yards to fetch a pack of smokes. They were even worse than their landlubbing counterparts.
Inside, five men glanced up from a picnic table. The only one I recognized was Harmon. But all of their faces were windburned and sun damaged.
“Warden Bowditch!” the harbormaster said. “The boys and I was wondering when we’d see you this morning.”
“Good morning, Mr. Reed.”
“How was your beauty sleep up there at the House of the Seven Gables?”
“I slept fine, thank you.”
“Pour yourself a cup of coffee and order yourself some fish hash. You can squeeze in here with us. Chum, make room for the warden!”
The market was like others I had visited on working waterfronts; it was a combination grocery (stocked almost entirely with prepared foods), agency liquor store, counter-service restaurant, and ship’s chandlery. The air was close and warm, and it smelled of brewing coffee and burned bacon. I felt a pang of nostalgia for that single teenage summer when I had worked on a boat and had counted myself a lobsterman.
“So have you figured out who done it yet?” said the old man Reed had addressed as Chum.
“How can he?” another man said. “He ain’t even checked our alibis yet. Where was you, Chum McNulty, when the fateful shot was fired?”
“Ask your missus.”
Laughter broke out as I proceeded to the counter with my coffee. The middle-aged, potbellied man behind the register had a shaved head but a full beard. He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt bearing the slogan I’M NOT GAY BUT $20 IS $20.
“Coffee’s on the house,” he said.
“Thank you, but I can pay. I will try some of your fish hash, though.”
“What are you doing, Sam?” said yet another member of the breakfast club. “Trying to bribe him with coffee? Don’t you know the going price for wardens is a case of beer.”
“That ain’t funny, Shattuck,” said Harmon Reed in his captain’s voice. “You apologize now.”
“Aw, I was just pulling his chain.”
“Apologize.”
Shattuck was the youngest of the group, and his voice became a squeak. “Jeez, all right. I’m sorry.”
But Reed’s mood had turned. “I told you to move your ass cheeks, Chum, and make room for our guest.”
I removed my knit cap and stuffed it in my pocket. “I’d rather stand.”
“So is the detective coming back on the ferry this morning?” asked Reed. “No way anyone’s flying out here today in this pea soup.”
Sam Graffam addressed the room from the grill where he was preparing my fish hash. “Now here’s some interesting trivia!” The men at the table groaned, but it had no effect on the grocer. “I saw a show on the History Channel th’other night. About London in Victorian times and Jack the Ripper really being the Prince of Wales.”
“Oh, jeez,” said Shattuck with a theatrical eye roll. “Here it comes.”
Graffam was undeterred. “The term pea soup applies to smog, you see. Not fog like we have out here. It was on account of all those coal fires burning. It turned the air thick and yellow like pea soup. That’s where the expression comes from.”
“Pea soup is green,” said Chum McNulty, as if this disproved the store owner’s thesis.
“Not the French-Canadian kind,” countered Graffam.
“You said the TV show was about London!”
The etymological debate might have continued to rage if Reed hadn’t broken in. “What about it, Warden? Will we be seeing Detective Klesko on today’s ferry or not?”
There was no point in playing coy since the ferry would arrive soon enough, and they would all know who was on board and who wasn’t. They might already know if they’d gotten a call from someone at the boat-line office in Bass Harbor. Harmon struck me as the kind of man who would want advance warning if an invasion of police officers was approaching his fiefdom.
“I’m flying solo today, Mr. Reed.”
The old man stroked one of his muttonchops with the back of his hand. “When you call me Mr. Reed, it reminds me of the last time I was in front of a judge. Can’t say it was a pleasant experience.”
“What did you do, sink someone’s boat?”
The room went as silent as if someone had shattered a glass on the floor.
I wasn’t sure what had made me provoke the island patriarch. Maybe I was tired of his trying to dominate every single person in sight. It had obviously been a long time since anyone had dared to challenge Harmon Reed.
His face didn’t flush, his voice didn’t rise. If anything his tone became quieter, more menacing for being little more than a whisper. “In actuality it was my boat that was sunk. But I expect you know that already. I expect you know all about my misadventures in the criminal justice system. Maybe you were just pulling my chain, the way Shattuck did yours.”
“I meant no offense.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.” Harmon crumpled into a ball the aluminum foil that had enfolded his breakfast sandwich. “So what’s the order of business today? You’ll be conducting interviews, I would assume?”
“That’s right.”
“And I’m at the top of your list, I expect.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because if I’m not at the top of your list, then you’re a poor excuse for an investigator.” He arose from his place at the table, and all the other men followed suit. “Sam, would you mind us using your office?”
The shop owner waved his spatula. “Harmon, you don’t even need to ask.”
I followed the harbormaster’s broad back through the kitchen. The deep fryer had left a greasy film over every surface including the warped wooden floor.
Reed seated himself at Sam Graffam’s cluttered desk and folded his hands over his impressive chest. He’d put on a long-sleeved chamois shirt, unbuttoned, hanging open, over his T-shirt but was otherwise dressed the same as the day before.
No other chairs were in the room. I took out my iPhone and pointed the video camera at Harmon.
The tiny machine seemed to amuse him. “That thing come with a lie detector, too?”
“That’s the deluxe model.”
“I was home with my wife, Martha, when the Evans girl was shot, and she’ll testify to that effect. Martha, I mean. Her sister Ellie was there, too. The ladies were planning the big Thanksgiving dinner we Reeds always put on for the island. What else have you got?”
“It might save us time, Mr. Reed, if you waited for me to ask the questions before you answered them.”
The old man removed his pipe from his shirt pocket and clamped the stem between his teeth while he prepared his tobacco. I stood watching him while he went about his ritual. Charley had said that Harmon Reed fiddled with his pipe when he was playing for time.
“Ask away then,” he said.
“What time did your nephew appear at your house yesterday?”
“Ten oh seven.”
“How can you be so precise about that?”
“Because when a scared young man knocks on your door saying he found a dead girl, you can expect that sooner or later, a police officer will ask you what time he showed up.”
I have never been a smoker, not of cigarettes, not of cigars, not of marijuana. Certainly not of pipes. But Reed’s tobacco had a surprisingly pleasant, woodsy aroma.
“Andrew Radcliffe claims you only called him at eleven o’clock. Why did you wait for fifty-three minutes to telephone the constable?”
“It took some time to calm the boy down.”
The man lied with real confidence, I had to hand it to him. “And what did your nephew tell you at ten oh seven? Be as specific as you can please.”
“That he was hunting over near Gull Cottage and came across the Evans woman lying facedown under her clothesline. The sight
of all the blood shocked him so hard he nearly pissed his britches.”
“Did you have reason to believe Mr. Crowley might be lying?”
“About pissing his britches?”
“About having come across Ariel Evans after she was already dead. Did it occur to you that he might have shot her himself?”
“It occurred. That’s why I asked to look over his gun. I wanted to check if it had been fired. It hadn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I was a coastie back in the sixties. I know what a firearm that’s been discharged smells like.”
Sam Graffam appeared at the door with my plate of fish hash. I thanked him, set it on a stack of marine supply catalogs, and closed the door. Almost immediately the room turned hazy with pipe smoke.
“Tell me about your nephew.”
“Would you like his whole biography or the Reader’s Digest?”
“You don’t have much respect for authority, do you, Mr. Reed?”
“It depends on who’s demanding the respect.” He spoke with the pipe clenched between his molars. “You should eat your breakfast before it gets cold.”
I made no attempt to do so. “Tell me about your nephew.”
“Kenneth is my wife’s nephew actually. He’s not Ellie’s boy. He’s her other sister’s. Mary’s in the state mental hospital in Augusta. Has been for the past eight years. No one knows who Ken’s sire was, not even Mary. It sure as hell wasn’t an immaculate conception. That’s why he’s a Crowley.”
“Your wife’s maiden name is Crowley.”
“A-yup. That’s how we Maine lobsterman say yes. Don’t you know.”
By now, Harmon understood I had no intention of taking any of the bait he kept tossing in my direction. He went on, “Ken’s sternman on Nat Pillsbury’s boat, the Sea Hag. I suppose Nat knows the boy better than anyone. You might ask him for a character reference if you feel the need.”
The sight of the hash provoked a grumble from my stomach. I ignored my hunger. “What else did your nephew tell you when he came to your house yesterday?”
“That he’d heard a shot in the orchard before he saw the cottage.”
“Does Kenneth usually hunt down that way?”