by Paul Doiron
There was nothing here about the men having been mutilated by tomahawks or the corpses tossed into the muddy waters to bloat and rot. There was no mention of ghosts. If Massacre Pond was haunted, it was only in my imagination.
I hadn’t attached any special meaning to this passage before. But places like Massacre Pond proved that my new hometown wasn’t as boring as it seemed; it had a mysterious history worth getting to know. As a child recently uprooted from his past, I had been desperate to find a place where I could belong again, and this blood-soaked landscape captured my morbid imagination. Elizabeth Morse had been right about me, I realized. I had lived just as many years on the fogbound marshes as I had in the wooded foothills. I was my mother’s son, perhaps even more than my father’s. Why had I spent so long trying to deny it?
After a while, I wandered back out into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. Fastened by magnets to the sleek Sub-Zero refrigerator was a picture and a clipping. The photograph was three years old and showed me with my arm around Sarah Harris. She looked blond and beautiful in the snapshot, and I remembered the winter’s day it had been taken, the last visit we had paid as a couple to this house. I used to feel a pang whenever I stumbled across a picture of Sarah, but now I was surprised to realize that the first image to jump into my head was of Stacey riding beside me in my patrol truck.
The clipping came from the Portland Press Herald. It was just a scrap of yellowing newsprint.
MAINE WARDEN SERVICE ACADEMY GRADUATES FIVE
VASSALBORO, Maine—Five new Maine game wardens graduated on May 22 from the Maine Warden Service Advanced Academy in Vassalboro. The training first includes attending the Maine Criminal Justice Academy for the Basic Law Enforcement Training Program to become certified as police officers. Then, game wardens attend the Advanced Warden Academy to continue with specialized training and learn skills pertaining to enforcement of recreational vehicles, crash investigations, search and rescue, public relations, and many other essential skills related to game warden work.
Graduating were Jenn Scott, assigned to Bucksport; Jeremy Bard, assigned to Princeton; Patrick Flynn, assigned to Sanford; Jason LaMontagne, assigned to Caribou; and Mike Bowditch, assigned to Sennebec.
I’d had no clue my mom had even marked this momentous occasion in my life. She and Neil had been traveling in California and were unable to attend the graduation ceremony, but she had belatedly sent me a card with a check for a hundred dollars inside. And yet she had kept this clipping pinned to her expensive fridge for the past three years. My mother had always shown an amazing capacity to surprise the hell out of me.
The only thing I knew about ovarian cancer was that it was one of the scariest ones. If surgeons couldn’t remove the tumors, then how did they hope to treat her? The thought of chemotherapy being able to shrink two growths the size of golf balls seemed like an empty hope. Was my mom really going to die?
Out on the porch again with my glass of milk, I checked the messages and e-mail on my cell phone. The only item of importance was a text from my former supervisor, Sgt. Kathy Frost, asking if I’d caught Elizabeth Morse’s appearance on the Today show that morning:
That woman is a force of nature! By the end of the interview, she’d even sold me on her cockamamie park. Heard through the grapevine that Rivard has made you her sheepdog. Good luck with that. How are things going in the wilds of Down East Maine, Grasshopper? I worry when you go into your silent running mode.
Kathy knew me pretty well, I had to admit.
My cell phone rang as I was tucking it back into my pants pocket. “Hello?”
“Bowditch?” It was a woman’s stern voice. “Where are you?”
“Sheriff Rhine?”
“Rivard told me that he’d embedded you with the Morse family.”
“It was at her request. She seems to enjoy debating with me. What’s going on?”
“Someone shot up her house last night while no one was home. Broke most of the windows facing the lake. I figure he was in a boat out on the water. I’m not sure if he knew that the house was unoccupied. It was like a scene out of one of the Godfather movies.”
“Who called it in?”
“The housekeeper. She arrived this afternoon to get the place ready. I can’t believe they didn’t have a security system installed, but then nothing that woman does surprises me anymore. Morse and her entourage are due back from NYC this evening. I thought you might want to come over and take a look at the carnage.”
“Who’s handling the investigation into this shooting?”
“The staties. Given the death threats she’s received, we all agreed it would be best if they took point here.”
“Michael?” My mother stood at the sliding door, rubbing her sunken eyes.
“I’m still here.” I smiled to reassure her. “But I’m on the phone with the Washington County sheriff.”
“Bowditch?” said the sheriff.
“Sorry,” I told Roberta Rhine. “I’m taking a personal day. I’m at my mom’s place in Scarborough, but I can be back in Wa-Co in four hours or so.”
“That might be wise. Something tells me the queen is going to be ready to chop some heads. Call me when you get here, and we’ll send someone down to get you.”
Always abrupt, the sheriff signed off without so much as a good-bye. I stood up from the glass-topped table and jammed the BlackBerry into the front pocket of my jeans. “Sorry about that.”
“Is anything wrong?” my mother asked.
“Some idiot shot up Elizabeth Morse’s windows last night.”
“Was she home?”
“She was in Manhattan, filming the Today show.”
“So you know her, then? I’ve always wondered … is she as attractive in person as she looks in photographs?”
My mom had a tendency to judge people entirely on their surface appearance. She had disapproved of my Rubenesque high school girlfriend for that reason alone. I’d grown used to this flaw in her character, even if it still drove me bananas. “She’s a handsome woman.” I decided not to mention that her daughter was also attractive, lest it give my mother ideas. “You couldn’t sleep more? It seems you should be resting.”
“I was having bad dreams about haunted ponds.” She stepped aside so I could place my empty glass in the dishwasher. “So you need to leave, then?”
“I’m afraid so. When do you expect Neil to get home? I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“He’s waiting for me to call him. I’ll be all right, Michael.”
“I feel like the three of us should talk,” I said. “We need to make a plan.”
She laughed and some of the old light came back into her eyes. “Father Campbell says, ‘If you want to see God laugh, tell him your plans.’”
“I think that’s a quote from John Lennon,” I said. “Why don’t you plan on my calling tonight. I’d like to talk with you again before you go to Boston.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she said with a dry chuckle.
She walked me outside to the Bronco. We embraced for a long time in the driveway, neither of us saying anything. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right here by yourself?” I asked.
“I’ve been alone more than you think,” she said, kissing me on the cheek with her cracked lips.
I didn’t think she was making an existential statement. But she had spent days alone during her first marriage, tending to me as a baby, while my dad went off on a bender or one of his weeklong deer hunts. And then there were the years when she was a single mother in Portland, working two jobs to pay the rent on our third-floor walk-up. I’d also detected a lack of intimacy in her marriage to Neil; the two of them rarely touched each other in my presence. At no time had I ever thought about her loneliness or how I might help assuage it. I felt like the shittiest son on the planet.
Driving back through the spreading subdivisions of Scarborough, I saw kids skateboarding along a paved sidewalk where once there had been an overgrown field at the edge of a second
-growth forest. I had shot my second deer there, amid the alders and sumac, using a twelve-gauge that left a bruise on my shoulder when I fired it. Even then, I had been aware of the new houses crowding in on my hunting grounds and felt a sense of anger at what I stood to lose when the bulldozers and builders began their inevitable work.
Was this the same anger that had driven someone to fire his rifle through Morse’s plate-glass windows? Instead of developing her woodland holdings, she had banished all hunters from the hardwood ridges and cedar swamps where they and their ancestors had hunted for more than a century, and the result was the same. I rolled down the window, because the Bronco lacked air conditioning, and let the warm wind swirl about the cab, tickling my ears and sending gasoline receipts fluttering like moths.
First there had been the anonymous death threats against Elizabeth Morse. Then came the attack on her cedar gate. Afterward, two men had sneaked onto the property to slaughter ten defenseless animals in an act of bloody vandalism that horrified even Maine’s most hardened game wardens. Were they the same men who had chased Briar Morse along the dark roads outside Grand Lake Stream? Now someone had fired a barrage into the house itself. Had the waterborne sniper known the mansion was vacant for the night, or had he hoped to hurt the residents, whom he believed to be inside? Laying out the chronology like this, it was hard to escape the fact that the violence was escalating. I had a bad feeling that I knew what the next step would be.
23
I didn’t bother stopping at my cabin to change into my uniform or swap the Bronco for my patrol truck. Instead, I drove in street clothes directly to the Sixth Machias gate and arrived as the afternoon was fading to evening. As I rolled to a stop on the soft pine needles, I saw a black SUV in the deepening shadows on the other side. A broad-chested man in dark glasses climbed out of the vehicle and moved with surprising speed toward my Bronco. The first thing I noticed about him was his shaved head, which was glistening with perspiration. He wore a loose black shirt with epaulets and black cargo pants over combat-style boots. The military bearing and the untucked shirt made me think he almost certainly had a handgun hidden inside the waistband of his pants.
I didn’t notice the radio receiver in his ear until he was standing beside my window. His breath smelled of wintergreen chewing gum.
“Can I help you, sir?” he asked.
“I’m Mike Bowditch, with the Maine Warden Service, here to see Sheriff Rhine.”
“Identification?”
I produced my warden ID from my wallet and handed it to Elizabeth’s new security guard. He took an exaggerated amount of time to compare my photograph to my face. Without another word, he passed the card back to me and unlocked the gate. He motioned me through impatiently, as if I were holding up a long line of vehicles.
As I continued on to the log mansion, I wondered where Morse had picked up the thug; he definitely wasn’t a local. It made me curious what other developments I’d missed over the past twenty-four hours. A bank of clouds hung above the western horizon like a distant gray wall. Two birds were soaring up high: my pair of ravens.
Moosehorn Lodge had been overrun with vehicles. Parked in the circular drive outside the double doors were three Washington County sheriff’s cruisers, an unmarked blue Ford Interceptor that almost certainly belonged to a state police detective, a silver GMC Sierra that was the property of the Maine Warden Service, an obsidian SUV that looked like it had been driven straight from a dealer’s showroom, and a mechanic’s van with the words STONECOAST SECURITY stenciled on the side. I noticed a man on a ladder installing a camera on a tree trunk, the lens focused on the entrance to the building. I nodded to him as I got out of the Bronco, but he ignored me and continued with his work.
Briar answered the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said with a broad smile that showed off her perfect teeth.
She was wearing a purple Bennington T-shirt that was as tight as another layer of skin, denim cutoffs, and no shoes. Her dark hair was wet, as if she’d just come from the shower or swimming in the lake, and she was trying to knot it up so the long strands stayed out of her face.
“I heard someone shot up the place,” I said.
“The windows overlooking the lake are all shattered. There are bullet holes everywhere.”
I could hear a jumble of voices down the hall; it sounded like the Morses were having a dinner party.
“It’s a good thing you weren’t home at the time,” I said.
“I’m not sure why we even came back from New York. It’s pretty obvious we’re not wanted around here. But you know how stubborn my mom is. Nothing’s going to scare her off or change her mind. Hey, you’re out of uniform.”
“I had the day off.”
She pinched the fabric of my flannel shirt and gave me a playful look. “I think I prefer the uniform.”
She gave a girly laugh that reminded me how young she was, and then she turned and headed toward the sunlit rooms within. I followed her.
In the kitchen, we found Elizabeth Morse, Leaf Woodwind, and Dexter Albee. Another man, a stranger whose head was also shaved, stood in the doorway leading to the formal dining room. He had thin lips, a boxer’s flat nose, and cold gray eyes that had probably looked out across more than one Middle Eastern battlefield. A coil ran from his ear down his neck. He wore a tight black T-shirt over his muscular torso and snug blue jeans that made me wonder where he was hiding his pistol.
“Hello,” I said to the group.
“Briar, put on some shoes,” said Elizabeth Morse. “There’s broken glass everywhere.”
Her daughter let out an exasperated breath, as if it were a ridiculous request. The windows in this room were all intact. The light streaming through the curtains had softened with the gathering clouds, giving everyone’s face a sickly cast.
“You’re turning this place into a prison,” said Briar.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” replied her mother. “Nice of you to join us, Warden. You seem to be in mufti today.”
“I was in southern Maine, visiting my mother.”
“She must appreciate having such a devoted son.” The jab seemed intended for Briar. “You missed all the excitement, in any case. Some nutcase decided to open fire on the lodge last night, as I’m sure you’ve heard. It seems we are now under siege. I decided to call for reinforcements. Warden Bowditch, this is Jack Spense. He’s my new security consultant.”
The name seemed vaguely familiar. Maybe I had seen it on a book jacket. He nearly crushed my metacarpals when we shook hands.
“Nice to meet you,” he said in a tough-guy tone that didn’t seem at all sincere.
“I met your new guard at the gate,” I said. “And I noticed you were installing cameras around the property.”
“How long have I been telling you to do that, Betty?” asked jug-eared Dexter Albee. “There are some real idiots in this part of the state.”
And talk like that is unlikely to persuade them to support your national park, I thought.
Leaf was moping by himself at the kitchen table; he scratched his beard and stared out at the lake. Having his house invaded by the police had thrown the old hippie into a funk. He seemed to be counting the minutes until he could get high again.
“Better late than never,” said Morse. “Mr. Spense is an expert in—what’s the term you used? Threat assessments? He specializes in providing security to multinational corporations and high-profile individuals.”
“Which celebrities have you worked for?” asked Briar.
His smile was so thin as to be almost imperceptible. “I can’t reveal the names of my other clients, Miss Morse.”
“But you’ve been a bodyguard to lots of famous singers and actors, right?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Briar, leave the poor man alone. It’s bad enough that we dragged him to the wilds of Maine.” She stepped around the granite island and took hold of my biceps in a familiar way, which surprised me. “We should let Warden Bowditch consult with his colleagues
. He has better things to do than listen to my daughter prattle on about her celebrity crushes.”
She just about pushed me through the door.
* * *
The first thing I noticed was the smell of the lake, that pleasant fishy smell. It floated down the hall on a gust of tepid air.
The great room, where Albee had given me his national park spiel, looked like a hurricane had hit it. Except for a few knifelike shards projecting from the sills, the windows were almost completely gone. Broken glass lay everywhere underfoot, in jagged plates and sparkling fragments. The housekeeper would be finding bits of crushed glass embedded in the furniture and carpets for the next decade.
My entrance interrupted a conversation between Sheriff Rhine and a dark-eyed, dark-skinned man in a sharkskin suit. I’d first met Detective Lieutenant Zanadakis, of the Maine State Police, the previous winter, when he interviewed me about a drug dealer I’d found frozen to death in a peat bog. The detective had interrogated me for a couple of hours on the presumption that I’d omitted some crucial details in my written report. I’d just caught him in midsentence.
“I don’t think the shooter ever left his boat,” he told the sheriff.
“Why do you say that?” asked Rhine.
“The evidence techs haven’t found any brass on the shore.”
“Looks like they’ll need to do some diving, then.” Rhine flicked her coal-black eyes in my direction. She looked more professional than at our last encounter, outside KKK’s compound, having swapped her bathing suit for a neat khaki uniform. Her sheriff’s badge was clipped to her shining black belt. “Hello, Bowditch.”
“Sheriff,” I said. “Lieutenant.”
“The question is whether he knew the house was empty,” continued Zanadakis. I might have been a dog that had wandered into the room, as far as the detective was concerned. “It’s the difference between aggravated criminal mischief and attempted murder.”