by Paul Doiron
When I returned to my clients, I saw that Maddie was looking at me with a quizzical smile.
5
At dinner I took a chair that gave me a view of the table where Stacey was eating with her friends. She had positioned herself so that her back was to me. The seating arrangements seemed deliberate.
The women all looked to be in their late twenties and projected that aura of vitality that people who pursue lots of outdoor activities always seem to radiate. I had the sense that they might have been college classmates, maybe members of the same ski team. I’d seen a couple of Subaru wagons with Vermont plates and kayaks strapped to the roof racks out in front of one of the cabins. The lodge was often the launching spot for kayakers beginning a camping trip through the chain of lakes north and west of Grand Lake Stream—although most people wisely waited until the end of the blackfly season.
Their table was too far away for me to eavesdrop, but they seemed to be having a rowdy good time. Three of them were sharing bottles of wine. The fourth, who had ink-black hair and a nose ring, stuck to beer.
“What are these green things?” Mason asked as our plates arrived.
“Fiddleheads, silly,” said Maddie. “Haven’t you eaten them before?”
I speared one with a fork. “They’re ostrich ferns. We consider them a Maine delicacy.”
He bit his in half. “Tastes like spinach.”
As promised, Mason interrogated me on my former career as a law-enforcement officer with a terrierlike persistence. I kept trying to divert the conversation to anything else—fishing, politics, their banking jobs in New York. But Mason’s curiosity would not be denied. He waited until his girlfriend got up to use the bathroom and then launched a fusillade across the table.
“So here’s what I’m wondering.” His speech had grown a little sloppy from the wine. “How did you go to work each day knowing that someone might try to kill you?”
“Most days, no one tried to kill me.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that. There was no way of anticipating what you might encounter in the woods. Like those guys on the island. How would you have dealt with them? If you’d been all alone, I mean.”
“I would’ve told them to get the hell off the island before I busted them for trespassing.”
“But they were carrying guns,” Mason said.
“That’s not unusual,” I said. “Just about everyone a warden meets in the woods is armed.” I poured whiskey from the pint bottle onto the melting cubes in my water glass. “These days, you also have to assume that anyone might be carrying a concealed weapon.”
Mason leaned his elbows on the table, his fingers clasped, almost as if in prayer. “What if they’d threatened you?”
“I would have done everything in my power to keep the situation from escalating before I started acting tough,” I said. “But sometimes they don’t give you a choice. People react to your overall presence, so it’s important to show them you’re the alpha dog. You do that through your posture and the tone of your voice. You try to come across as someone not to be fucked with.”
“So what would you have done if that guy with the mustache had pulled his pistol? Would you have tried to shoot it out of his hand?”
“That’s just something from the movies,” I said. “Cops don’t shoot to wound. You shoot to kill.”
“How do they train you for that?”
“Repetition. Role playing. But no matter how much you train, it doesn’t prepare you for having somebody point a gun at you in real life. You’re a human being, and you’re afraid.”
“So you would have killed him?” Mason asked.
“I would have done what I needed to do to protect myself.”
Mason leaned back in his chair, nodding, as if a problem that had been puzzling him all evening finally made sense. “That must have been what happened with those two cops,” he said.
“Which two cops?”
“The two cops who shot that crazy vet last night. There was a thing on the radio about it before dinner.”
The muscles in my neck and back tightened. “Where did this happen?”
“Somewhere south of here.”
“Did you get the names of the officers?”
“The police spokesman said they weren’t giving out that information yet. It sounded like a real shit show, though. To use a term from the hood.”
At that moment, Maddie returned. She sat down and fluffed out her napkin and laid it across her knees. “What did I miss?”
* * *
As the cute Latvian waitress cleared our dinner plates, Maddie began musing aloud about the possibility of buying a vacation home in Maine. I found myself unable to focus on the conversation.
There was a decent chance that I knew one or both of the cops involved in the shooting, either from the Criminal Justice Academy or from having worked a search or a drug bust with them. And Mason’s mention of a “crazy vet” had left the back of my neck tingling, for some reason. I was eager to ask Jeff Jordan if I could borrow his computer to find out what had happened, but politeness kept me in my chair.
Dessert was blueberry pie made with blueberries that Jeff’s kids had picked the previous summer.
One of Washington County’s few claims to fame—aside from being the easternmost county in the United States—was that it was the wild blueberry capital of the world. Grand Lake Stream sat on the edge of the big woods, but south and west of us there were miles of open fields where migrant workers from Latin American countries came each year to rake berries. They’d set up their gypsy camps for a few months and then move south again in the fall. The sight of the barrens in autumn, blazing like a red carpet thrown over the hills, always made me think of my first district. There were blueberry fields along the Midcoast, too.
I’d been living Down East for more than a year, but I still felt homesick for the fishing villages and hardscrabble farms where I’d learned to be a game warden. I’d done a lot of growing up since I first joined the service, but sometimes I experienced painful feelings of nostalgia when I remembered my youthful enthusiasm and naive desire to do good in the world. I missed that kid. Where the hell had he gone?
Without meaning to, I found myself staring at the back of Stacey’s head. I wasn’t sure why. My gaze just locked onto her as if pulled there by a magnetic force.
Her friend, the one with the nose ring, was watching me with a sour expression. She leaned across the table, nearly upsetting one of several beer bottles in front of her, and muttered something. Stacey half-turned her head in my direction, then thought better of it.
Stacey worked as a field biologist for my former employer, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. She was the only woman I’d ever met who loved the woods with the same intensity I did. Her parents, Charley and Ora Stevens, were among my best friends in the world. The rift between us was stupid and unnecessary, I decided, even if she was never going to reciprocate my feelings.
I excused myself from the table.
The friend with the nose ring gave me the evil eye when she saw me crossing the dining room. I stopped beside Stacey’s chair and said, “Good evening.”
I had the sense from their forced smiles that they all knew who I was.
“Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” I said. “Stacey, could I have a word with you?”
She narrowed her eyes. “What is it, Mike?”
“Maybe we could talk out on the porch.”
I wasn’t sure she would agree, but she did. The chair made a screeching noise as it slid back across the pine floorboards. Out on the porch, an older couple was playing gin rummy. I glanced around for a private alcove, but the library was also occupied by guests. Stacey just pushed past me, going through the front door and out into the lightly falling rain. I followed her outside. Neither of us was wearing a jacket.
Rain spun in the light above the lodge entrance. Stacey was dressed in a green zip-neck shirt that clung to her small breasts. She had on blue jeans tucked
into rubber-soled Bogs boots.
She crossed her arms and cocked her head. “What is it?”
“Did your parents get off on their trip all right?”
Charley was taking Ora on a flying vacation to Newfoundland to see the vast colonies of seabirds—gannets, puffins, and kittiwakes—that nested along the cliffs there. He was a retired warden pilot and a legend in the service. He had also been the closest thing I’d had in my life to a father figure.
“That’s what you wanted to talk with me about? My parents’ vacation? How much have you had to drink?”
Not enough, I thought. “I want to apologize.”
“Apologize? For what?”
“I know you blame me for what happened between you and Matt.”
The suggestion seemed to annoy her. “I don’t blame you. Why would I blame you? I was the one who got engaged to a scumbag.”
If she didn’t hold me responsible for ending her engagement, why did she always make herself scarce when I visited the home she shared with her parents on Little Wabassus Lake?
“Jeff told me Matt is running for the state legislature,” I said.
“He’ll probably win, too. Don’t criminals always win elections? Why are we having this urgent conversation again?”
“I want our relationship to be better.”
“We don’t have a relationship.”
“That’s what I mean. I’m friends with your parents. I’d like it if you and I could be friends, too.”
“What are you, sixteen?” She wiped her wet face with both hands. “Can I go back to my dinner now?”
I rubbed the water from my own face. “The women you’re with don’t seem to like me, for some reason.”
“Maybe they didn’t like having their dinner interrupted.”
“The one with the short hair and the ring in her nose—”
“Kendra.”
“She’s been glaring at me for the past hour.”
“Kendra never likes it when men look at me. It’s always pissed her off.”
“Why would it piss her off?”
“She and I used to date when I was in college. I’m surprised my dad never shared that juicy tidbit with you.”
She’d intended the words to land like a punch, and they did. “I guess he didn’t think it was any of my business.”
“It’s not any of your business. Are we finished, Matt? Because I’d like to go back inside.” She closed her eyes, shook her head, and took another stab at it. “I meant ‘Mike.’”
After she had returned to the dining room, I stood in the rain, feeling more like a fool than I had before. I wouldn’t have imagined that was possible.
6
The rain began to fall more heavily as I drove west out of the village on my way home. I flipped the wipers into high-speed mode. The rhythmic clacking made my head hurt. Drinking half a pint of whiskey might have had something to do with it.
Just as likely, I was suffering the side effects of my conversation with Stacey. When she’d first come to work for the department, I’d heard whispers about her sexual orientation, but I’d dismissed them as the self-serving stories men tell themselves to explain why attractive women show no interest in their crude advances. The gossip had ended after she’d gotten engaged to Matt Skillen. I expected the rumor mill would start churning again. Not that it was any of my business. Stacey had been right about that part.
I rounded a corner, where someone had set up a memorial to a girl killed in a car crash the previous year. It was a simple wreath of white flowers nailed against the shattered stump of an oak tree. Local jerks kept taking down the display, but the unidentified mourner kept arranging for replacements. Just as soon as one memorial was stolen, another took its place. The back-and-forth contest struck me as symbolic: the eternal struggle we undergo, trying to hold on to a memory when others have a stake in forgetfulness.
After a while, I turned down a darkened dirt road. The steady rain was carving new channels into the packed earth. I felt the emergent potholes through the worn shock absorbers of my Bronco.
A steel gate loomed in my headlights. It was a simple metal bar that pivoted on a pillar. With the engine idling, I pulled the hood of my jacket over my ears and climbed out into the mud and mist. Wood frogs were quacking in the darkness. I bent over to turn the combination lock, shining a flashlight on the dial, then pushed open the heavy, groaning gate. There were hidden night-vision cameras on me the whole time. Only I and a handful of other people—the owner and her new security team—knew about the surveillance equipment.
I drove down the shore of Sixth Machias Lake to the compound at the far end, passing through a stand of ancient hemlocks that the landscape architects had left standing when they built Moosehorn Lodge. The main building was an enormous log mansion constructed atop a fieldstone foundation. Motion-sensing lights snapped on as my vehicle approached, and I knew that more video cameras were recording my arrival, sending the images to a digital feed, which the security company could review at its leisure.
Although the buildings were all new, a forsaken air hung over the place. Everything was well maintained—there was no flaking paint or loose roof shingles—and yet even a casual observer could tell that no one had lived here for a while and maybe never would again. This place would always be haunted by bad memories.
It felt like returning to my own personal fortress of solitude. I pulled up in front of one of the guest cabins but kept the headlights focused on the door. Steam rose from the hood. I reached into the pocket of my jacket and took another pull from the whiskey bottle, warming myself before I started my nightly rounds. I turned off the ignition and listened to the engine ticking.
My arrangement with Elizabeth “Betty” Morse was this: In exchange for free rent and a thousand dollars a month, deposited electronically into my bank account in Machias, I was to lend a human presence to her property. I wasn’t officially the caretaker, because that title would have suggested Ms. Morse cared for this collection of buildings in any meaningful sense of the word. Her plans to create an ecological preserve on the estate hadn’t worked out as she’d hoped, and sometimes I wondered if she wouldn’t have been happier walking away from her Maine holdings with a multimillion-dollar insurance check.
The last I’d heard, she had turned her attention to a valley in northern Montana and was making a project of buying up her own private glacier. After the initial phone conversation we’d had—word had gotten to her that I had left the Warden Service, and she thought I might be right for the job—she had stopped answering my e-mails. Betty Morse was famous for her wandering attention. When you are worth nearly half a billion dollars, you can afford to follow your whims.
My responsibilities started at occupying one of the guest cabins and stopped at letting people in the area know that a former law-enforcement officer was in residence at Moosehorn Lodge. I didn’t feel right about taking her money for living rent-free in the most luxurious cabin in the world, so I made a point of poking around the grounds with a flashlight. I was sure that Mrs. Morse would have found my unwarranted devotion to duty endearing.
I spent fifteen minutes taking a tour of the property, which included a visit to the end of the dock, where I watched raindrops stipple the surface of the lake. There wasn’t another building on Sixth Machias. It always astonished me to gaze across such an enormous expanse of water without seeing so much as a single lighted window.
The irony of my living situation was not lost on me. Morse’s last caretaker had been my friend Billy Cronk, the one currently doing seven years in the Maine State Prison for manslaughter. Prior to working at Moosehorn, Billy had been a hunting and fishing guide—my other newly chosen profession.
When I’d told him over the phone that I’d accepted the job with his former employer, he’d said, “What are you, nuts?”
“I know she can be difficult.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’m just wondering why you think it’s a smart move, following in my fo
otsteps. You planning on getting sent to prison, too? What the hell’s wrong with your head, Mike?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my head.”
“So why’d you quit being a cop? You were one of the best I ever met.”
“You have low standards,” I’d said, trying to make a joke out of it.
“I guess I do.”
I’d put off visiting Billy in prison for too long. Part of me was reluctant to revisit the Midcoast, where I’d once been a warden. The other part was afraid of seeing my friend in an orange jumpsuit, knowing I’d helped put him in it.
By the time I stepped inside my cabin, the front of my jeans was soaked through, and I needed another sip of Jim Beam to shake off the chill. I hoped that Mr. Mustache and his friend were getting thoroughly drenched out on Bump Island. I took another swig of whiskey, then another. When the bottle was empty, I went back outside to the Bronco and retrieved my Walther PPK/S from the locked glove compartment.
I found my gun-cleaning kit in one of the cardboard boxes I had piled in the corner. I took a yellowed newspaper from the wood box and spread the pages out across the granite bar that separated the kitchenette from the living area. The PPK series is an old-fashioned design, originally favored by the Nazis—a holdover from the days when firearms were made of steel and not high-tech polymers. It weighs more than it should. If you grip it the wrong way, the slide bites viciously into the webbing of your hand between your thumb and index finger every time you fire a shot. I disassembled the gun, poured bore solvent on a rag, then pushed an oiled patch inside the barrel to remove the carbon buildup.
It bugged me that Jeremy Bard hadn’t returned my calls. We had worked together as wardens in adjoining districts for more than a year. I had come to his assistance when he’d needed me in emergencies. What the hell was his problem?
I decided to phone his house from the landline in the cabin, knowing he wouldn’t recognize the number if he was screening his calls.
Sure enough, he picked up. “Game warden,” he said, not even bothering to give his name.
“Bard. It’s Bowditch.”