by Paul Doiron
“How are things going?” Mack asked.
“The shooters haven’t come by yet, but I’m sure they will any second.”
My sergeant took a moment to respond. “It might not feel this way, kid, but you’re earning points here. Every hour you spend eating shit counts in your favor with the brass. The L.T. needs to know he can trust you to do your job.”
“I’ve done my job for two years,” I said. “You know my conviction rate, Mack. None of those guys Rivard has working the case has a better one.”
“Yeah, but you also have this … reputation. Look, I can see that you’re trying here. You might be a smarty-pants college boy, but I know you’ve got some grit in you. Let me keep working on the L.T. He’ll come around eventually. Why don’t you head down to the HQ and turn in the bullets you collected?”
The dashboard clock came on as I started the engine. I had lost nearly ten hours of my life manning that checkpoint. The realization made me gun my engine as I headed toward the village of Grand Lake Stream. I didn’t care about the rocks banging against my truck’s undercarriage or the damage inflicted to my already-worn shock absorbers. All I wanted was to beat the long shadows that signaled the end of another day in the woods.
Grand Lake Stream was a village of sporting camps and tidy little houses built along a swift-flowing river of the same name. The stream was famous for its landlocked salmon, which dropped down out of West Grand Lake in the autumn when it came time to spawn. Ted Williams had fished the Hatchery Pool, and so had Dwight Eisenhower. Their photographs hung in places of honor on the wooden walls of Weatherby’s beside taxidermied fish—salmon, trout, and bass—so fantastically huge, it was hard to believe they were real.
I crossed the bridge over the stream and saw a crowd of fly anglers upstream at the Dam Pool. Combat fishing had never been my thing, so I tended to avoid the river during its more popular months, but I never crossed that bridge without feeling a desperate desire to pull on the waders and cast a Black Ghost out into the current.
The store at the crossroads constituted the beginning and end of the village’s commercial district. It served the multiple roles of pizzeria, fly tackle shop, hardware store, gas pump, tagging station, and gossip hub. If you wanted to know what was going on anywhere in the woods of northern Washington County, it paid to shoot the shit at the Pine Tree Store.
I gassed up my vehicle and then went inside to order a meatball sandwich. The blonde behind the counter tried to pull some information out of me concerning the moose shootings—the massacre was the talk of the town—but I refused to bite. I politely paid for my dinner and headed back outside to the parking lot, feeling proud of my professional restraint (I had a tendency to blab too much to blondes), only to find a very fat man leaning against the door of my truck.
He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. His face was like a ball of bread dough before it has been rolled flat. Tiny gray eyes were pressed into the soft flesh, and a wispy red goatee decorated the topmost of several chins. The beard was the same color as his long hair. The big man had hitched his size fifty-something jeans halfway up his enormous belly with the help of suspenders, and he wore a faded black T-shirt over B-cup breasts. The shirt bore the words PASSAMAQUODDY INDIAN DAYS 2011, framed by two eagle feathers.
“You’ve got to help me, Mike!” said Chubby LeClair in a huffy, heavy-breathing voice I recognized from his frequent phone calls. “They think I killed them moose.”
“Did you?”
“Heck no! My people believe moose are, like, sacred omens. The elders say that if you dream of a moose, you’ll live a long time.”
“The Passamaquoddy tribal manager says you’re not a real Indian.”
“He can’t see into my heart. The blood flowing through my veins is totally wolamewiw. It’s authentic, man, one hundred percent.”
I had heard Chubby’s bullshit before, but I’d never seen him in such a sweaty state of agitation. I worried for the heart beating beneath all that blubber. “So what happened?”
“Bard busted me last night for driving in the woods. I was driving my uncle’s truck, and there was a shotgun I didn’t know about stashed behind the seat. But he said I was hunting without a license, because there were some feathers in the bed. I told him the truck wasn’t mine and the gun wasn’t mine, but he wrote me up anyhow. Then, today, he came to my crib, man, my wikuwam. He asked if he could search it, and I said, ‘Sure, man. Be my guest, right? You know I never got nothing to hide.’ Dude didn’t tell me he was going to trash the place!”
“He trashed it?”
“Yeah! Said he didn’t need a warrant if I gave my permission. He kept asking where I kept my twenty-twos. I told him I don’t own any guns because, you know, I’m a peaceful person.”
“Chubby,” I said. “I busted you with a rifle this summer, remember?”
“That was my cousin’s gun, like I told you. I don’t even know what that gun was doing in my truck.”
“There was also a dead doe sticking out your window,” I reminded him.
“I was transporting it for my cousin. Doing him a favor and all. I’m too softhearted. That’s my problem.”
My own theory was that Chubby LeClair kept his arsenal in a footlocker buried somewhere beneath the matted leaves around his camper. God only knew where he hid his marijuana stash. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency had sent a K-9 team to sniff around the property on two occasions, without finding so much as a single roach.
I motioned him aside so I could get into my truck. “I don’t know what to tell you, Chub. You have a history of poaching, and we’re investigating all possible leads. It makes sense that Warden Bard would want to talk with you.”
“He didn’t have to trash my wikuwam, though! It ain’t right; it just ain’t right.”
“I’ll talk to Bard about it.” I wasn’t sure what I would say to him. For all I knew, Bard had cause to give Chubby a hard time, and it wasn’t cool for one warden to question another’s methods.
“Thanks, man. I owe you.” His small eyes were moist.
As I drove off, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the fat man leaning against the gas pump for support. I worried it might tip over from his considerable weight. Chubby was clearly distressed, and I wondered if Bard might have been onto something after all.
15
I ate my dinner at the boat launch on West Grand Lake. I pulled in, the nose of my vehicle facing the water, and thought about the windmills being built along the ridgeline of Stetson Mountain far to the north. From this distance, I couldn’t see the red lights of the turbines, but I knew if I motored up the lake, they would come into view.
For some reason, the wind farm made me think about Elizabeth Morse and her national park. The land she had purchased included many leased camps, just like the one Charley and Ora had once owned on Flagstaff Pond. My friends had been evicted from their beloved cottage by a Canadian timber company, and now the same thing was happening to people in Washington and Hancock counties. One of Morse’s first actions as the new landlady had been to cancel the existing leases, forcing the people who owned those lakeside cabins to relocate the buildings or simply abandon them to the elements. Morse had been quoted by a conservative blogger as saying she wanted to remove “the human cancer” from the landscape and allow it to revert back to wilderness. You can imagine how well that offhand comment had gone over at the Pine Tree Store.
Maybe Stacey was right about her, I thought. Morse had made her millions peddling worthless herbal remedies to consumers desperate to lose weight. She promised cleaner colons and healthier livers, smoother skin and renewed sexual vigor. Did it make her less of a snake-oil saleswoman if she believed her own fantasies?
I thought about her cryptic message from the previous evening. What could she possibly have wanted to ask me about? It couldn’t have been important, since she hadn’t called again. By now, I figured, Billy Cronk would have made bail. He would also have learned that he was without a job.
Such a bombshell would inevitably awaken my friend’s powerful thirst. I might need to do a sweep of the local roadhouses before bed.
The light above the hills had turned salmon-colored. I crumpled up the wax-paper sandwich wrapper and dusted the bread crumbs from the front of my shirt. I didn’t want to keep Mack waiting at the field office. The four measly bullets I had collected were sure to be the crucial pieces of evidence Warden Investigator Bilodeau needed to crack this case once and for all.
I was driving down the Milford Road, headed back toward Route 1 and what constituted real civilization in this part of the world, when I saw headlights approaching fast in my rearview mirror. A car came tearing up the road behind me and then went shooting past, scattering fallen leaves into the ditches. It was a cherry-red BMW Z4 roadster, and I estimated its speed at seventy miles per hour. The woman behind the wheel was seemingly unaware that my truck’s flashing lights signified I was a law-enforcement officer who wanted her to stop.
I stepped hard on the gas and hoped my engine had enough power to keep this chase from becoming a total embarrassment. For a while, it looked like the Z4 was going to leave me in the dust. Then the driver must have finally noticed the pursuit lights in her mirror. She slammed on the brakes so hard, I was afraid my own forward momentum would flatten the convertible against my grille. Somehow, we both managed to come to a halt without a collision.
I hopped out of the patrol truck and strode up alongside the expensive sports car, the nerves in my neck and arms buzzing as if touched by an electrical charge. The young woman behind the wheel had a leopard-spotted scarf wrapped around her dark hair to keep it from whipping in her face, and despite the lateness of the hour, she was still wearing giant sunglasses, which might have concealed her identity if I hadn’t already known who she was.
“Officer, thank God you’re here,” said Briar Morse, breathing hard. “Someone was just chasing me!”
My first thought was that she had made up the story to get out of a speeding ticket. But then I noticed that her hands were shaking when she removed her sunglasses, and her brown eyes were wide with what sure looked like panic. Briar Morse was either genuinely terrified or she was ready for her acting debut on the Broadway stage.
“Who was chasing you, Miss Morse?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Her voice wasn’t as flat and commanding as her mother’s, but it wasn’t her most feminine attribute, either. “Someone in a pickup truck.”
“What color was it?”
“I’m not sure. Dark?”
That narrowed it down to several thousand vehicles, including most of the patrol trucks owned by the Maine Warden Service. “Why don’t you step out of the vehicle and tell me what happened.”
She unbuckled the chest strap and opened the door. She was wearing a sheer white blouse over a scoop-necked brown top that showed her considerable cleavage, khaki short shorts, and Roman sandals. Her exposed skin—of which there was so much—was deeply tanned. She had an oval face that was pretty more because of her youth and vitality than because of the underlying structure of the bones. The hair gathered beneath the scarf was very dark and very thick.
Briar peered down the road in the direction of the village, as if expecting to see two headlights waiting in the distance. But there was nothing there except the forest, slowly darkening beneath an indigo sky streaked with lavender clouds.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning,” I said.
“I went for a drive.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere in particular,” she said. “I like to drive, and there isn’t much to do up here except swim and lie around in the sun. And seeing all those wardens on our land was getting me down. I just wanted to get away from all that death, you know?”
I nodded, trying to follow her lurching thoughts. “When did you notice this dark truck?”
“As I was driving past the store. Maybe it was parked there? I’m not sure. I drove past, and it crept out behind me. It was moving slowly at first—hanging back, you know? But for some reason, I got this bad feeling about it.”
“Why?”
“It just seemed to be following me. I thought maybe it was one of your Warden trucks headed back from my mom’s place again. I decided to pull over and let it pass, but instead it stopped, too. That was when I started getting scared. I didn’t know what to do, so I made a turn down this road, and it turned right behind me. I made this big loop back to the main road, and it kept following me the whole time! Finally, I decided just to gun it and see if I could get to that Indian police station out on Route One.”
“I don’t suppose you got a license plate number,” I said.
“No. It had its high beams on—that was another weird thing—and it blinded me to look in my rearview mirror. It had kind of a whiny engine.”
“And you couldn’t tell what color it was?”
“Green maybe? Or blue? It was too dark for me to tell.”
I had been watching Briar as she told her story, and I couldn’t tell if her anxious body language—the fidgeting from foot to foot, the lack of eye contact—was the result of genuine fear or merely the stress most people experience when telling an elaborate lie. There was a quiver in her voice that made me feel she was frightened and needed protection. I had always been susceptible to this particular impulse in myself and tried to be on guard against pretty girls who showed too much cleavage and knew how to manipulate gullible men into doing their bidding.
“I’m going to let you go with a warning,” I said. “But if you see a truck following you again, you should call nine-one-one instead of trying to outrun it. There are lots of deer along this road, and you could have hit one or wrapped your vehicle around a tree.”
Suddenly, she reached out and grabbed my forearm with both of her hands. She locked her dark eyes on mine. “You’re not going to leave me here?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Follow me back to my mom’s place. The truck stopped back there, and I’ll have to drive past it again to get to the north gate.”
This might all have been an act she was putting on, just a game she was playing to break up the boredom of being in the middle of nowhere. But I could feel her soft hands shaking, and I decided to err on the safe side. At worst, she would have some fun at my expense, and it would cost me an extra half hour of time on the road tonight.
“All right,” I said.
Her eyes filled with sudden tears, which gleamed in the headlights of my truck and made me feel cynical for having doubted her intentions. “Thank you so, so much,” she said.
* * *
The northern gate to Elizabeth Morse’s property was located off the gravel logging road that ran from Grand Lake Stream through fifty-five miles of unbroken timberland all the way to the Penobscot River above Bangor. The Stud Mill Road closed during the winter and stayed closed through the depths of mud season, but the rest of the year it served as a tire-slashing superhighway to the wildest country in eastern Maine. Wardens often came across stranded motorists who had underestimated the road’s ability to incapacitate the sturdiest vehicles. It was not a thoroughfare to travel alone, especially after dark.
Briar drove slowly along the abrasive surface, her caution making me think the road had inflicted a few flat tires in the past. We had passed without incident through Grand Lake Stream, encountering no creepy trucks; just a wagonful of fly fishermen moving from one pool to another and a white van returning with bird hunters to one of the sporting camps along the lake. When we hit the gravel road, I kept my distance from the roadster’s taillights in order to avoid the bombardment of rocks the spinning wheels launched into the air.
It took longer than I had expected to reach Morse’s northeast gate. This was a different way onto the property than the Sixth Machias entrance, where I had met Billy Cronk two mornings ago. Technically, we were in Bard’s district here. I was out of my territory in many ways, I realized.
There was a car waiting on the othe
r side of the heavy steel gate. I saw its headlights snap on as we approached, and the silhouette of a man advanced to open the lock and admit Morse’s wayward daughter. I stopped my pickup and remained idling in place, waiting for Briar to drive through. As she did, the headlights lit up the man, and I saw that it was Leaf Woodwind. The hippie had his hair in its signature ponytail and was wearing cutoff denim shorts, flip-flops, and a faded blue T-shirt with the symbol for anarchy emblazoned on the front. I would have figured Leaf to be more of a peace symbol type of guy, but that showed just how little I understood these people.
After the roadster had entered the grounds, Leaf pushed the gate shut and bent over to turn the dials on the combination lock. He straightened up and looked in my direction, shielding his bespectacled eyes against the glare of my lights. I saw Briar come up behind him and say something into his ear, and then the two of them came strolling toward me. I turned the volume down on the police radio and unrolled my dusty window.
“Evening, Warden,” Leaf said.
“Hello, Mr. Woodwind.”
“Call me Leaf. Briar called us at the house to tell us what happened. Thank you for coming to her rescue.”
Again I detected the unmistakable odor of marijuana on his person. Under the circumstances, I didn’t feel like giving him a hard time. I could imagine Rivard’s displeasure at learning I had arrested Morse’s personal assistant on a misdemeanor drug-possession charge.
“I didn’t really do anything,” I said.
“Yes, you did,” said Briar with a surprising insistence. “You totally saved me.”
“We’re not the most popular people in this neck of the woods,” said Leaf, scratching his salt-and-pepper beard. “Sometimes Briar forgets that.”