Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  “Those keys were in the ignition?” said Calhoun.

  “Yessuh. Could’ve been stolen.”

  When they parked in the woods, Lyle always locked up and tucked the keys under the left rear tire for whoever got back first. Even at the end of a long woods road, he never left the keys in the ignition. Lyle was not careless about things like that.

  “It’s not my vehicle,” he said to the woman. “It belongs to a friend of mine. The sheriff told me I’d find it here. Was it you who reported it?”

  She nodded.

  “When did you first notice it?”

  “I come back at seven-thirty last evening to set up for the meetin’, and I didn’t notice it then. When I come out—oh, it was close to midnight, after everyone had cleared out and I got the place swept up and the chairs put away—this old thing was here. Just this old bag of bolts and my truck. That’s when I first saw it. Midnight, I guess. I grabbed the keys and called the sheriff, just to be on the safe side.”

  “This was last night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was it here Tuesday?”

  She shook her head. “Didn’t notice it. Of course, I wasn’t here in the evening Tuesday.”

  “And you didn’t see who left it here.”

  “No.”

  “So he must’ve left it sometime between—what?—seven-thirty and midnight last night?”

  She nodded. “About that. During that meeting.”

  “My name’s Calhoun, by the way,” he said. He held out his hand.

  She took it. Her grip was firm. “Russo,” she said.

  “When you first saw this vehicle,” said Calhoun, “was it full of fishing gear?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. I looked inside, because if it had anythin’ in it I would’ve locked her up. Nothing worth stealing that I could see. Prob’ly should’ve locked her anyway, but like I say, South Riley ain’t exactly your high-crime area, and everybody’s sleeping by midnight.”

  “I’m wondering,” said Calhoun, “if yesterday, or the day before, Tuesday, you might’ve noticed another strange car parked out here. A white Taurus sedan, this year’s model.”

  Russo shrugged. “Not that I recall. Miss Wilhelm—she’s the music teacher—she drives a Taurus, but it’s blue and it ain’t that new.”

  “It might’ve been here until this Power Wagon showed up.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You mean someone decided to swap this old truck for a new Taurus?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t remember any Taurus. Don’t mean it wasn’t here. But I don’t miss much.”

  “I don’t doubt you.” He smiled. “Look, why don’t you lock it up and hang onto those keys. This truck belongs to a friend of mine named Lyle McMahan, and I expect he’ll be back for it eventually. He’ll appreciate your letting it sit here until he shows up.”

  She shrugged. “It ain’t doin’ any harm, I guess.”

  “Well, thank you, Mrs. Russo.” Calhoun turned to head back to his truck.

  “Miss,” she said. “It’s Miss. That book belong to you?”

  Calhoun held up Lyle’s gazetteer. “No, it belongs to the guy who owns the Power Wagon. I’m borrowing it.” He stopped. “Do me a favor, Miss Russo?”

  “Maybe.”

  He fumbled in his shirt pocket and found one of Kate’s business cards. He handed it to her. “If you feel you’ve got to have this car moved, or if anybody comes for it, give me a call?”

  She squinted at the card, then looked up at him. “I guess I can do that.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  WHEN CALHOUN GOT HOME, he put on more coffee, took his phone out onto the deck, and called the shop.

  “Kate’s Bait, Tackle, and Woolly Buggers,” she answered.

  “It’s me,” he said. “What’ve you got going on today?”

  “Nothing particular. What’s up? What’d you find out?”

  “I was thinking I might take the day off, do some snooping.” He told her about his trip to South Riley, finding Lyle’s Power Wagon, and his conversation with Miss Russo, the janitor. “Figured it was about time I tracked down Mr. Fred Green,” he finished.

  “We should’ve done that yesterday,” she said.

  “Probably should have. But we didn’t. So we’ll do it today.”

  “I know you’ll let me know what you find out.”

  “Sure will.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Stoney?” she said softly.

  “I’m here, honey.”

  “That was nice last night.”

  “It’s always nice,” he said. “And that’s the truth.”

  After he disconnected from Kate, Calhoun went inside, poured himself a mug of coffee, found the Greater Portland phone directory, and went back out on the deck.

  He looked up the number for the new Marriott down on the waterfront. It had the most rooms in town, so the way Stoney figured it, the probability was greater that Green had stayed there than anyplace else.

  When the young man answered, Calhoun asked to be connected to Mr. Fred Green.

  “What room, sir?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please hold.” Calhoun endured about three minutes of what sounded like the Elevator Orchestra playing a slowed-down version of “Day Tripper” before the desk clerk came back. “I’m sorry, sir. No Mr. Green staying with us.”

  “Hmm,” said Calhoun. “Wonder if he checked out yesterday or this morning. Could you look that up for me?”

  “I’m really not supposed to—”

  “This is Deputy Sheriff Calhoun, over in York County,” said Calhoun quickly. “I’d appreciate your cooperation. Makes things easier for all of us, okay?”

  The clerk hesitated a moment, then said, “Certainly, sir.” This time the violins played “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” Surely an impressive repertoire. “No, sir,” said the clerk a minute later. “I’m sorry. We’ve had no Mr. Green with us this week.”

  “There was a convention in town,” said Calhoun. “Could you tell me where it was held?”

  “All the conventions are held at the Civic Center, sir, but there have been no conventions this week. No conferences, for that matter. The New England Periodontal Association will be here on Thursday. That’s our next one.”

  “No conventions or conferences,” said Calhoun. “You sure of that?”

  “It’s my business to know about conventions and conferences in Portland, sir. Is there something else I can help you with?”

  “No, thanks,” said Calhoun. “You’ve been a big help. And I love your music.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “Well, sir, you have a nice day.”

  “It’s off to one helluva doubtful start,” said Stoney.

  Calhoun sipped his coffee, scratched Ralph’s head, and gazed down to the creek. The mayfly spinners were no longer swirling over the water. The trout would be resting their bellies on the bottom of their pool where they could find some tasty stonefly nymphs to chew on until the sun got low and the next batch of mayflies began hatching and the evening caddisflies flew out of the bushes and started fluttering over the water.

  He looked at the listing of hotels and motels in the phone book. There were dozens of them. Well, the hell with it. Green was staying somewhere, and maybe he’d misunderstood about the convention.

  Now he wished he’d been friendlier to Fred Green, encouraged the man to keep talking, asked him some conversational questions. He might’ve learned something.

  He started with the Abbott Motel and worked all the way down the list to the Zanzibar Inn, and after that he looked up the bed-and-breakfasts and called every one of them, too.

  By two o’clock in the afternoon, Calhoun’s only functional ear, the right one, was ringing, and his neck had a painful crick in it from cradling the telephone against it. He was convinced that Fred Green had not rented any kind of roo
m in Portland or any of the surrounding towns.

  And he had not been attending a convention or a conference, either, because several of the innkeepers he’d talked to had repeated what the young man at the Marriott had told him. There had been none in Portland that week.

  Well, dammit, the man had rented a car. So Calhoun proceeded to call every car rental agency in the Greater Portland phone book. None of them had done business with anyone named Fred Green that week.

  That’s when Calhoun decided that Fred Green was not the man’s name, and he further deduced that if Green—or whatever his name was—would lie about his name, he must’ve had an important reason to do so.

  Then Calhoun decided it was time to be seriously worried.

  He stood up, arched his back, and went down to his truck. He retrieved Lyle’s gazetteer from where’d he’d left it on the dashboard, and as he was walking back to the house, Kate’s image popped into his head.

  She had a telephone to her ear and a frown on her face.

  He went in and called the shop.

  Kate picked up on the first ring. “Stoney?”

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Your phone’s been busy for hours. I was concerned.”

  He told her about calling all the hotels and motels and bed-and-breakfasts and car rental agencies.

  “But why would the man give a phony name?” she said.

  “I’d say that’s the big question, all right,” he said. “I reckon he had somethin’ to hide.”

  “And you think . . .”

  “I’m thinking what you’re thinking, honey. You’re thinking that I sent Lyle off with a man who should’ve been my client, a man who had cause to lie about who he was. You’re thinking that if I’d’ve taken Mr. Fred Green fishing myself, like I was supposed to, we wouldn’t be sitting here worried about Lyle right now.”

  “Now, Stoney,” said Kate, “I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

  “Well, I am.” Calhoun let out a long breath. “This is my doing, Kate. I was selfish and small-minded. Decided I didn’t like the man. You’ve said it a million times. We don’t have the luxury of selling stuff only to nice folks or guiding only people we like. We do business. Well, I didn’t do business. I sluffed Mr. Green off to Lyle, and now we don’t know where Lyle is.”

  “What’re we gonna do?”

  “Well, I don’t plan to sit here on my ass for the rest of the day, I can tell you that. Guess I’ll head back up to South Riley, poke around, see what I can shake out of the trees.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “You stay put,” he said. “Nothing you can do I can’t do myself. Anyway, we’ve got several people who’ll call the shop if they hear something. Wouldn’t want to miss a call.”

  She sighed. “I guess you’re right. You let me know what falls out of those trees.”

  “Of course I will.”

  After he disconnected from Kate, Calhoun opened Lyle’s gazetteer on the kitchen table and flipped to Map 4, the one that included South Riley.

  Unlike road maps, topographic maps, as their name implies, show topography—man-made as well as natural features. Each map is a rectangle—a quadrangle—which they call a quad. It represents twenty-five minutes of latitude and longitude, encompassing an area twenty-nine miles north-south by twenty-one miles east-west, on a scale of one-half inch per mile.

  Calhoun, like many outdoorspeople, and especially hunting and fishing guides, consulted topo maps religiously. He knew that a single dotted line represented a trail that might or might not be passable in his four-wheel-drive truck, that little tufts of grass meant a marsh or swamp, that a black square represented a dwelling or a cellar hole where a dwelling had once stood. Thin blue lines were brooks or streams. A swath of pale green meant a woodland. You could estimate the steepness of a hill by how close together the contour lines were drawn.

  Calhoun loved to study topographic maps, to translate their legends into mental pictures and to read the stories they told, and like Lyle, he’d discovered a few secret ponds and trout streams in the middle of the winter by reading a topo map at his kitchen table.

  Of course, he knew that there really wasn’t a single truly secret pond or stream left in the entire state of Maine. After nearly four centuries of lumbering and farming and deer hunting and trout fishing, not a square foot of topography had been left unexplored, even in this state where thousands of acres that were owned by lumber companies still did not have names.

  But there were some streams and ponds that were too small and inaccessible and unpromising for most people to bother with, even in the more populated southern part of the state. Calhoun assumed that Fred Green’s secret pond was one of these.

  The western shore of Sebago Lake jutted into the upper-right edge of Map 4, which covered the western half of the skinny southern part of Maine over to the New Hampshire border. South Riley sat west of Sebago, only about six crow-flying miles from New Hampshire, in Oxford County just north of the York County line. Most of this country west of Sebago featured large unbroken patches of green and a lot of irregular blue lines and shapes, representing streams and lakes and ponds. It was crisscrossed with roadways, most of which were double dotted lines—dirt roads that were, in theory, passable by any sort of vehicle.

  It was rural country, and Calhoun knew that all the towns—like Dublin, where he lived—were small, and that most of it was rolling old farmland, much of it now in the advanced stages of reverting to mature forest.

  The Great Fire in October of 1947 had roared through here on its way to the sea, destroying houses and barns and woods and bridges and forests and a few entire villages, leaving several people and hundreds of head of livestock and uncounted numbers of wildlife dead in its wake.

  Lyle collected stories about that fire and loved to share them with Calhoun.

  Most of the old-timers who’d been burnt out in ’47, the stoic old Yankee farmers, had shrugged, cleaned away the ashes of their homes, and set to work rebuilding. But many hadn’t. The woods west and south of Sebago Lake were dotted with old cellar holes filled with charred timbers and rusted bedsprings and old crockery. The dirt roads that led into them—single-dotted lines on the topographic maps—were now growing thick with alder and poplar.

  Lyle’s legends were scattered across Map 4, hillsides and ridges and swamps and ponds that he’d circled in black felt-tip pen, many of them labeled in Lyle’s neat printing—“Big Buck,” “Hot Corner,” “Bear Shit” —names that not only stood for places, but were for Lyle McMahan also the titles of memorable stories.

  Calhoun closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, and brought up his memory-picture of Lyle and Fred Green bent over the open gazetteer on the hood of the Power Wagon. Green was pointing with his forefinger. Lyle had been holding a pencil in his hand.

  When he’d come back inside, Lyle had told Calhoun that they were heading for Green’s secret pond.

  He opened his eyes, fished his fly-tying glasses from his shirt pocket, and bent to the map. He focused on South Riley and worked his way systematically outward in ever-widening circles, until, about two and a half inches—five miles—south and west of the elementary school where Lyle’s Power Wagon sat, in the town of Keatsboro in York County snug against the New Hampshire border, Calhoun spotted a faint X made with a pencil.

  He translated from the map—a single dotted line ran off a double dotted line and curved over widely spaced contour lines to a marshy area with a thin blue line running through it. The dotted line passed over the blue line and twisted over several more contour lines to a little black square on the top of the hill—a dwelling of some sort, or perhaps a former dwelling, a burned-out or abandoned farmhouse, now a cellar hole.

  Lyle had drawn his X where the dotted line intersected with the blue line. The blue line thickened a bit there, indicating that the stream widened into a large pool, or perhaps even a skinny pond. This was Fred Green’s secret trout place.

  Calhoun guessed that
somebody—probably the farmer who had lived on the hilltop, if he was a farmer—had built himself a milldam on the stream that ran through the marshy area, creating a little pond—perhaps for power, perhaps to collect water for his livestock, or maybe both. He’d built a bridge over the dam, so that he could drive his tractors and trucks all the way in from the dirt road to his place on the hilltop.

  Most farmers built close to the road for the obvious practicality of it. But this one had chosen to locate himself as deep into the woods as he could get. Taking into account all of its twists and turns, the trail from the dirt road to the top of the hill would be about a mile long, Calhoun estimated—half a mile to the stream, and another half mile to the dwelling. It was a lot of road to keep open in the wintertime and in mud season, a lot of work for a notoriously pragmatic Yankee farmer. In fact, another town road ran along behind the hillside where the house had been built. A driveway out to this road would’ve been just a couple hundred yards long. But there was no indication of any old driveway on the map.

  Calhoun took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was not particularly interested in the man who lived—or used to live—on the hilltop a mile from the road. He was interested in the whereabouts of Lyle McMahan.

  He shut the gazetteer. Ralph, who had been lying by the door, lifted his head and looked at him.

  “Sorry, pal,” said Calhoun. “I’m leaving, and don’t know where I’ll end up or how long I’ll be gone. You stay here and answer the phone.”

  Ralph dropped his chin back onto his paws, sighed, and closed his eyes.

  Calhoun snagged a Coke and a couple of apples from the refrigerator. He considered bringing a fly rod. If nothing else, he could give Fred Green’s secret trout pond a try.

  But he had no heart for fishing. Not this time. This was a hunting trip.

  If he were headed for the big woods up north, he’d bring his compass and waterproof matches and maps and a sidearm. But there were no big woods around Keatsboro. It was all old farmland, intersected with roads, some paved and some dirt, studded with apple orchards and cornfields and farmhouses and pretty New England village greens, more or less like Dublin. Even a flatlander from New Jersey or Connecticut would have trouble getting seriously lost in the woods of southwestern Maine.