by Paul Doiron
“What about the evidence we collected at the kill sites?”
“No DNA matches on the cigarettes. No prints on the candy wrappers. None of those twenty-two shells you collected were worth a damn, either, by the way.”
I tried not to think of the hours I’d spent on my hands and knees collecting them. “Bilodeau seemed to be excited about the shell casings and bullets he collected at Morse’s house.”
“Bill’s got some trick up his sleeve, same as always. But who knows? Maybe this time he’s cracked it.”
“You don’t sound very confident, Mack.”
Using both hands, he wadded up the newspaper into a softball-size projectile and hurled it at the top of the nearest garbage can. He missed by a mile. “There goes my second career with the Celtics,” he said. “I’m probably gonna need a new job after next week.”
“So what do you want me to do today?” I asked. “I can run down some of those OGT calls.”
“Maybe,” he said. “The L.T.’s talking about having another strategy session tomorrow. He wants to bring in the state police, which shows you how desperate he is. He’s got Tibbetts at a checkpoint way the fuck out on the Stud Mill Road, like that’s going to do anything. Devoe’s been hanging around gun shops, trying to see who bought twenty-twos recently. Bayley and Sullivan are visiting the local sporting camps for the second time. As if the guides are suddenly going to remember they had a couple of sports last week boasting about slaughtering moose.”
McQuarrie had a reputation as a company man; he might crack wise occasionally about the lieutenant or some of the other officers up the chain of command, but he never displayed any lack of confidence in the decision-making ability of his superiors. What I was witnessing from him-this outburst of exasperation-was surprising, if not completely shocking.
I hesitated before asking my next question. “What about Bard?”
“He’s doing a surveillance detail on Chubby LeClair.”
“Yeah, I know. Chubby’s been calling me, bitching about him. I’m not sure how he got the idea we were friends. Have you talked with Jeremy recently?”
He spit tobacco juice into his half-filled coffee cup. “Just before you got here. Why?”
So Bard hadn’t told Mack about my trip to Talmadge or our confrontation in the gravel pit. That seemed strange. It went completely against my sense of the man as a whining kiss-ass. “I was just wondering.”
“Speaking of friends,” said McQuarrie, “the lab guys found your buddy Cronk’s prints on a can of Budweiser in the road where Moose A was shot. Bilodeau’s been out to see him a few times. You talk to Billy recently?”
“Couple of days ago,” I said. “He asked me if he was eligible to receive Morse’s twenty grand if he helps catch the guys who shot the moose.”
“That’s all we need-a mountain-man vigilante.” The sergeant’s knees made a creaking sound as he rose to his feet. “If you want to make yourself useful, keep an eye on him. Billy Cronk on the rampage is a scary thought.”
27
Mack told me to “go do warden stuff” for the rest of the day. If Morse changed her mind and decided she needed me, I should drive over to Moosehorn Lodge and seek to calm the troubled waters. Otherwise, I should patrol my district and catch up on the calls that had come in while I’d been preoccupied with the moose massacre.
A woman with a heavy New York accent had reported an injured bald eagle in the backyard of her waterfront estate in East Machias. I drove over to have a look. It turned out to be a seagull, which took off on two strong wings when I approached. Two guys were fishing illegally on Mopang Stream, which had closed for the season on the first of the month. I wrote them summonses and confiscated the two brook trout they had caught on jigs. The fish were beautiful: fat and orange-bellied, with hooked jaws and brilliant yellow dots along the sides. Another woman-a wizened lady in Dennysville, whose house smelled of cigarettes and gin-had a problem with a saw-whet owl that had flown down her open chimney and taken roost atop a bookcase. After chasing the bird around the house for half an hour, breaking a Hummel figurine in the process, I managed to capture it in my stinky salmon net. The little owl, which was no bigger than a pigeon, seemed no worse for wear, but I put it in a box and drove it to the house of the local wildlife rehabilitator. He inspected the bird’s primary and secondary flight feathers, found no signs of damage, and tossed the bird into the sky above my head. It winged away, making a direct line for Dennysville, as if intent upon returning to its roost atop the bookcase.
Out of curiosity, I made a detour past Karl Khristian’s walled compound. He’d hoisted a new Confederate flag on a pole-an ironic choice for a man whose ancestors had almost certainly fought for the Union-but otherwise I saw nothing noteworthy at the castle. The bald little man seemed to have gone into his bunker.
Late in the day, I called Mack one more time, telling him I was headed over to Charley and Ora’s house for dinner. “So we’re on tomorrow for another strategy meeting at the IF amp;W field office at eight,” he said. “The L.T. wants to go back down the suspect list one more time. By the way, he’s ripshit about an interview Maine Public Radio did with Queen Elizabeth’s new chief of security. He doesn’t say nice things about our investigative efforts. Don’t be surprised if Rivard unloads his anger on all of us.”
Nothing the lieutenant did or said surprised me anymore. I wasn’t sure if I’d grown a thicker skin or was past the point of caring. This time, I didn’t intend to bring doughnuts.
* * *
When I’d first met them, Charley and Ora Stevens lived in the western Maine mountains in a lakeside house that reminded me of a woodcutter’s cabin in a medieval German folktale. They’d owned their cottage for thirty-odd years, but in an arrangement unique to the Maine North Woods, the land beneath their home had been leased from the Atlantic Pulp amp; Paper company. When a new corporation-Wendigo Timber-purchased the property, along with thousands of surrounding acres of forestland, it evicted the Stevenses and their neighbors in order to build expensive waterfront developments they could market as vacation homes to wealthy out-of-staters.
Charley and Ora had fled east, to a pond near Grand Lake Stream, where they’d found a ramshackle home they could repair and a big-enough boathouse to store both Charley’s motorized Grand Laker canoe and, more importantly, his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. They’d spent a year fixing up the rambling red building before Elizabeth Morse breezed into Washington County, announced she was canceling leases on the lake properties she’d just bought, and began talking up her grandiose plan for a new national park. Charley and Ora must have felt a disorienting sense of deja vu. Fortunately for them, they’d made certain to buy the land this time, along with the house. Not all their neighbors on Little Wabassus Lake had been so wise.
After searching all day for a way through the ashen clouds, the sun had finally made its escape, just in time for dusk. It hung above the tops of the old-growth pines that surrounded the Stevenses’ house, as round and orange as a Halloween pumpkin. I’d turned on my headlights to see beneath the trees in the failing light. When I snapped them off, the woods became suddenly dark and gloomy. A slight chill was rising from the still-damp pine needles that carpeted the forest floor.
As I climbed out of the truck, I glanced at the guest cabin Charley had weatherized for Stacey. The windows were dark, and her Subaru was gone, leaving a rectangular dry patch where it had been parked on the leaves. I doubted that a woman as independent as Stacey relished living with her parents. But decent rentals were hard to come by in this part of the world, as evidenced by my own rodent-infested cabin.
There was a handicapped-accessible van parked beside Charley’s Ford Ranger and a ramp leading up to the front of the building. I rapped at the door, feeling that familiar sense of homecoming I always experienced when I visited the Stevenses. The old couple had taken me under their wings during the lowest point in my life. They’d fed me and counseled me and given me hope. Standing on their welcome mat, I couldn’t
remember why I’d stopped visiting them.
After a minute or so, the door opened and I found myself looking down at the radiant face of Ora Stevens. She was seated, as always, in her wheelchair: a beautiful woman with Scandinavian cheekbones, snow-white hair brushed back from her face, and eyes as green as her daughter’s. She reached out with both hands for mine.
“Oh, Mike,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you.”
I bent down to kiss her warm cheek. “Thanks for inviting me, Ora. I’m sorry I kept canceling our dinners.”
She was wearing a patterned Icelandic-style sweater that I was sure she’d knit herself and white denim pants and tennis shoes. “You don’t need to apologize. Charley is out with Nimrod collecting mushrooms for dinner, and he told me to send you after him. Otherwise, he’ll be out there till the owls go to sleep.”
I glanced off into the gathering gloom. “How will I find him?”
“Just walk south along the tote road. He’ll hear you coming.”
“I guess I will see you soon, then.”
As I turned away from the glowing doorway, she called after me. “Mike?”
“Yes.”
“Stacey will be joining us. I hope that’s OK.”
The knot that formed in my throat made it hard to get the words out. “That’s great.”
The emerald light that came suddenly into Ora’s eyes told me that she understood exactly what I felt for her daughter.
The last minutes of daylight are my second-favorite time to be in the woods-right after the first minutes of daylight. In the morning, there is an atmosphere of expectancy. Finches and sparrows begin to sing in the darkness, as if summoning the sun to appear. Then the first beams of light begin to filter through the evergreens, strands of gold amid the green, and the sudden warmth causes a mist to rise in the places where the sun touches the ground. Every leaf and blade of grass is wet with dew, and you emerge from the woods into a shocking brightness, with your pants soaked to the knees and a chorus of birdsong in your ears.
But at dusk, the shadows move. The sun sinks down into the treetops and then slides along the trunks until you are only catching furtive glimpses of it through the understory. The wind, if it was blowing throughout the day, might suddenly die completely, and a stillness surrounds you that makes every stray sound-every acorn dropping, every chipmunk peep-seem overly loud. The birds go quiet. Sometimes you’ll hear a distant crashing that makes your heart stop; a buck has caught your scent and gone leaping off into the brush before you can spot the white flag of his tail.
I followed the tote road south along the shore of Little Wabassus Lake. Alders and poplars and birches were growing up from the old ruts, and the weeds were as high as my knees. Wilting ferns curled like witches’ toes. Loggers hadn’t used the trail in many years. The tips of the low bushes showed signs of having been chewed recently by deer. In a few weeks, Charley would be hunting here with that lever-action Marlin he’d owned forever.
As Ora predicted, her husband surprised the hell out of me by suddenly stepping out from between two spruces, right into my path. “You surely make a racket,” he said.
“That’s because I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you.”
He was dressed entirely in green, except for his Bean boots and moose-leather belt, and on his long head was perched a green cap with the red logo of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. In one big hand he was carrying a mesh bag already stuffed with mushrooms. A hatchet hung from a looped rope he’d tied to his belt. The look on his craggy face was one of unalloyed happiness.
“It’s always good to practice creeping along,” he said. “You need to put your heel down first and then your toe. Try to push the leaves down softly instead of crushing them flat.”
“You sound like the last of the Mohicans.”
“I’m the last of something all right.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder, his traditional greeting. “It’s good to see you, young feller.”
I pointed at the mesh bag. “I seem to have missed the mushroom hunt. What have you got there?”
He loosened the drawstring and opened the top of the sack. The gloom made it hard to see anything inside beyond a few bright orange bulbs. “The rain brought out a bunch of these buggers,” he said. “I found some chanterelles and a few matsutakes down in that stand of old hemlocks along Curtis Cove. There were some nice hedgehogs in those birches up along the hillside above the house. But I’ve been saving a real beauty for you. I wanted you to see it in its natural habitat before I went at it with the hatchet.”
“Now you’ve got my interest.” I glanced around into the dense underbrush. “Where’s Nimrod?”
“Probably on a bird somewhere. He ran off this morning in the pouring rain. When I finally found him, he was shivering, soaking wet, and pointing at the sorriest-looking woodcock I’d ever set eyes on. That fool dog had probably been there for four hours, waiting for me to show up with a shotgun.”
He motioned for me to follow him down the logging road. I paused a second to listen. Sure enough, he moved among the leaves and fallen branches without making the slightest sound.
“So I’ve been getting daily updates on your moose case,” he said in that offhand way he had of broaching important subjects.
“You probably know more about it than I do.”
“Sounds like Rivard has his head firmly wedged up his rectum.”
“No comment.”
“McQuarrie tells me that Bilodeau is chasing his own tail again, too. How that man became an investigator, I will never decipher. He doesn’t have the brains to pound sand into a rat hole.” He hitched up his pants, which were getting loose from the weight of the hatchet. “Why pick on that Chubby LeClair feller? He’s more of your opportunistic-type poachers, one of those hotheads with no impulse control. He sees a deer and shoots it.”
“The other guy they’re looking at is Karl Khristian.”
“You mean Wilbur? Oh, he’s a dangerous character and a crack shot to boot. That melee at Morse’s lodge sounds like his handiwork. A moose massacre, though? I’m having a hard time connecting the dots there, so to speak.”
“Do you know two men named Pelkey and Beam?”
“They sound like two folksingers. No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Billy Cronk says they’re expert deer killers. I’m not supposed to be investigating anything, but I went to see them out in Talmadge, and I got a definite vibe.”
“In what way?”
“They didn’t seem surprised to see me.”
He veered off the path into a stand of red maples that clung to a steep cut bank to our left. “Your friend Cronk is an interesting case.”
I had to scramble, grabbing branches and pulling myself against gravity, to follow him up the hillside. “How so?”
“Billy’s a good woodsman,” he said. “Handy with a rifle. Knows those woods like nobody’s business. Has a key to the gate. Left his fingerprints in some inconvenient places. And McQuarrie says he’s been acting squirrelly since the morning you found the first moose.”
“That’s because he was afraid Morse would fire him,” I said. “With good reason, it turns out. Whatever’s up with Billy, it has nothing to do with him shooting those moose. I mean, I suppose he could have done it and then called me over, pretending to have been the first person on the scene. But that’s not the man I know.”
“In that case, I trust your judgment.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Since when?”
Charley had a laugh that seemed to start down in his belly. “I guess I should say I mostly trust your judgment. You made a few boneheaded calls when you were a green warden, but you’re older and wiser now. Older anyway.”
“I don’t know, Charley,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m even cut out for this job anymore.”
“Who says that? Rivard?” He scowled. “The colonel made a mistake promoting that man, and I told him so at the time. He’ll get his just desserts. You wait and see. Men like th
at always do.”
“I always feel like I’m swimming upstream with him.”
“That just makes you a trout.”
“I’m serious, Charley.”
“Your problem is you’re a free thinker,” he said. “Now, most law-enforcement officers lack imagination. That’s not a bad thing when you’re patrolling a beat. You don’t want cops who get bored too easily. But investigators need to be a little crazy, on account of the general weirdness of humanity. A normal person tries to apply logic to every unexplained event. A good investigator, though, he knows that sometimes the best way to solve a mystery is to let go of everything he thinks he knows.” He stopped and pointed at a rotting stump. “Take this mushroom, for example.”
At the base of a moldering hunk of wood, the remnants of a formerly impressive tree, was a bulbous brown fungus the size and shape of a brain. “What is it?”
“Hen of the woods,” he said. “Some folks call it a ram’s head or sheep’s head. That fungus there-if I drove it down to one of those fancy restaurants in Portland, I could probably sell it for three hundred bucks.”
“Jesus.”
“And it ain’t even the biggest hen I’ve found.”
“I think you might consider a new line of work in your retirement,” I said.
“Who says I’m retired? The thing about these hens is that you almost always find them around red oaks. Sometimes you might see one under a black locust. But what do you see around you here?” He gestured at the nearly leafless trees around me.
“These are maples,” I said.
“Red maples,” he said. “This mushroom has no business being up here. It’s supposed to be in a stand of oaks, down on wet ground. Instead, it’s up on this sandy hillside, where no forager would ever think to look for it.”
“So this is supposed to be a metaphor about solving mysteries? Isn’t the point that you got lucky when you stumbled on it?”
“Not exactly,” he said with a wink. “See the thing of it is, that stump used to belong to an oak. She was a big beauty that blew down years ago when I was a young warden in this district. Crashed right down onto the tote road, blocking traffic. The Skillens crew had a devil of a time hauling it out of these woods. I happened to remember that giant tree when I was out poking around, so I scrambled up here, and what do you know? There’s a baby hen.”