by Paul Doiron
“Murder seems a bit extreme,” said Skillen.
“You didn’t see those animals,” I said.
He nodded as if to cede the point. “From a legal perspective, I mean.”
Ora passed plates of pie around the table while Charley distributed mugs of coffee. We ate in silence for a minute or two. It was early yet, but I was feeling an increasingly strong desire to wolf down my dessert and leave.
“It’s because she’s a woman,” said Stacey out of nowhere. She leaned both of her elbows on the table. “If Elizabeth Morse was a man, people might disagree with her, but they wouldn’t be attacking her this … violently.”
I leaned back in my creaking chair. “I thought you didn’t like her.”
“I don’t! I think she’s nuts, but she’s a strong woman, and strong women make insecure men feel weak. That’s the story of my fucking life.”
“Language,” said her mother.
Skillen patted Stacey’s hand, the one with the engagement ring. “I guess that means I’m not insecure.”
She placed her free hand on his. “You have the opposite problem.”
Ora looked at my half-finished plate. “Mike, would you like some more pie?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “Can you excuse me for a second?”
I pushed my chair back from the table and went into the bathroom. The face in the mirror was fierce and uncompromising. I could stay here mooning over a woman I would never possess, or I could go back to work and find the men who murdered those moose. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a game warden, and sooner or later I would need to make that decision. But this wasn’t the time to play Hamlet. I had a job to do, and Charley was right that this case would haunt me for the rest of my life unless I did my part to solve the crime.
Somewhere in Boston, my mother was lying in a hospital bed, her body racked by disease and flooded with strange and potent chemicals. In my gut, I knew she’d been thinking of me as the doctors inserted the needle, thinking about my future. It seemed important tonight for me to act like the man she’d always wanted me to be. I owed her that much.
I flushed the unused toilet, ran water in the sink, and returned to the dining room table.
“I’m afraid I need to get going,” I said.
“So soon?” said Ora.
“I got a text from Sergeant McQuarrie. He wants me to meet him.”
Charley rose onto his overlarge feet. “Duty calls, then.”
“Yes,” I said.
Matt Skillen also stood up, but Stacey remained seated in her chair, studying me with an odd, confused expression. Her fiancé stuck out his arm, and we shook hands.
“It was a pleasure.” For the first time, I heard the booze in his voice.
I smiled tightly but didn’t speak. I kissed Ora on the cheek and thanked her for her hospitality, and she reached out to touch the side of my face. “You are always welcome in this home,” she said.
“Good night,” I said to the room.
Stacey didn’t reply. She sat at the table, looking at her empty wineglass, while Charley walked me out the door and down the ramp. The wind was changing direction, swinging around from the north. The air seemed colder than it had since springtime.
“Keep me posted about the investigation,” he said. “I depend on you to satisfy my boundless curiosity in these matters.”
I told him I would and opened my truck door. Then I looked back, unable to stop myself from asking the question. “Do you know what was the matter with Stacey just now? Did I say something to offend her?”
“We don’t have cell coverage at the house,” he said, stroking his long chin. “Something about the hills around the lake. I’m sure she was puzzled how you could have gotten a text message in the bathroom. Stacey can be willful as all get-out, and she doesn’t always see the light right away. But in the end, not much gets past that girl.”
29
There were two ways back to my cabin. The longer one looped through Grand Lake Stream, acquiring a coating of asphalt along the way, turned east for eight miles to Indian Township, and then veered south again along Route 1 through Princeton and Woodland before it joined up with the highway that would carry me back into the familiar confines of District 58 and, eventually, the long dirt lane that led to my cabin.
Then there was the direct route. Unpaved and frequently blocked by toppled trees, it tunneled through the forest without passing a single secluded residence. A driver could break down on that remote logging road and wait twelve hours, or longer, for another vehicle to pass by. If he was lucky, the vehicle wouldn’t be a truck full of pill smugglers.
I chose the road less taken because I needed to get my head together.
Charley and his daughter had seen through my fraudulent excuse for leaving. After I got over the initial embarrassment, I thought about her silent, sullen reaction. My presence hadn’t even seemed to register with her over dinner, so why had my abrupt departure caused her to act that way?
The question didn’t merit an answer. I’d just promised myself to stop obsessing over Matt Skillen’s future wife. Instead, I needed to focus on the things that truly mattered now: my mother’s cancer and the investigation that might yet determine whether I would decide to leave my job with the Maine Warden Service.
By choosing the forest route, I had put myself out of the reach of cell phones for a solid hour. I wouldn’t get a signal again until I intersected with Route 9 outside Wesley. In retrospect, this had been a dumb move, since I’d wanted to call Neil to check on my mom’s condition. In researching chemotherapy online, I’d read that many people didn’t experience any of the most-feared side effects—nausea, vomiting, fever—until twenty-four hours or more after their first injection. I found myself praying that my mother was sleeping soundly at the moment.
My lower legs were cold; I hadn’t realized it until now. The heat wave didn’t seem to be breaking so much as shattering like a sheet of dropped glass. I hadn’t turned the heater on for months, and the vents gave off the musty odor of an abandoned nest.
A pair of yellow eyes flashed in my high beams, and I stepped hard on my brakes. A coyote—gray and reddish brown—bounded across the dirt road at the edge of the light. In Maine, they grew as big as wolves, and this one was as large as any I’d ever seen. I let my heart return to its normal rhythm before continuing on again.
* * *
My BlackBerry chimed as I was cresting the ridge above the Chain Lakes. I stopped the pickup in the center of the dark road and checked the phone’s lighted display. I was still miles from civilization and couldn’t imagine the possible vectors of radio waves that would have allowed a transmission to reach this spruce-blanketed hilltop.
I saw that I had received three missed calls from the same number, my stepfather’s, but Neil had not seen fit to leave a voice mail. He had, however, sent an e-mail message an hour ago:
Mike—
Tried your number a few times. I understand your work takes you out of cell coverage sometimes but had expected to hear from you before now. Your mother got through the procedure fine. The oncologist said it couldn’t have gone any better, although he said she had more questions about losing her hair than about anything else. You know how she is about her hair. She woke up nauseous a little while ago. So far no vomiting. This regimen is very aggressive, the doctor said. He expects significant side effects from the chemo, and there is always the risk of infection in these cases from bacteria in the GI tract. I’d appreciate a call when you get this. Day or night. Please.
—Neil
I pushed redial on the last-received call. The phone started to ring and then the signal dropped. I tried a second time and got the same result. The single bar had disappeared, and the display now showed no coverage, even when I plugged the phone into the booster. Such were the vagaries of mobile communications in the Maine North Woods. I decided I would try him again once I hit the highway.
Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again. I snatched it up wit
hout looking at the display and said, “Neil?”
“Mike?” The voice belonged to a woman.
“Briar?”
“I’m having trouble hearing you.”
I raised my voice, as if that would somehow make a difference. “Briar, I’m here. Are you OK?”
“I can barely hear you. You sound like you’re about to break up.” The weakness of the transmission was distorting her voice, but I sensed a distinct note of panic in it. “Someone’s chasing me again. I don’t know where I am, Mike!”
I stopped the truck. “Are you in the woods?”
“I went for a drive again. The guard said to stay away from town, so I went—”
I turned off the engine to quiet the squealing belt. “Say again.”
“Maybe the Stud Mill Road. I don’t know!”
“Your car has a GPS, right?”
“It doesn’t show logging roads!”
“That doesn’t matter. What you want is the compass function. Head east.”
“East?”
“You’re either going to hit a bigger road or you’ll come to one of the rivers or lakes. Most of them have roads that follow the shore. Turn north if you do. That will take you back in the direction of Grand Lake Stream.”
“East and then north. What if I see that truck again, though?”
I didn’t have an answer to that particular question, other than to hope that she didn’t. “I’m going to head back toward Grand Lake Stream. In a minute, we’re probably going to lose our signal, but I will keep trying your number.”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“Just keep hitting redial!”
“Mike? Mike?”
Then she was gone. All I heard on the other end was a drone. I restarted my engine and did a sharp three-point turn in the road, starting back north again toward Little Wabassus. I hadn’t asked Briar if it was the same truck following her as before. Maybe when I came to that hilltop, I would get a signal again. I hoped to God I would. Finding her in these woods wouldn’t be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. It would be more like finding a single pine needle in a forest of pines.
30
Racing back along the logging road, worried about the very real possibilities of getting a flat tire or crashing into a moose, I tried to conjure the crazy map of logging roads between Grand Lake Stream and the Airline. My district crept into this wild country as far as the southernmost section of Morse’s estate, and so I had learned the ins and outs of these particular woods over the course of the past year. I’d also familiarized myself with Cody Devoe’s district to my west, which included a lengthy stretch of the Stud Mill Road. But the winding dirt lanes to the north belonged to Jeremy Bard, and he hadn’t exactly hung out a welcome sign for me.
I paused for a few minutes at the top of the hill where I’d gotten Neil’s e-mail earlier, hoping to see a bar or two on the BlackBerry display, but whatever genie had allowed a signal to reach me before had vanished in a puff of smoke. The best I could hope for was that Briar Morse would find her way safely out of the woods on her own. Why had she foolishly gone for a drive again after her last experience on these same logging roads? I was surprised that Jack Spense’s guard had even let her through the gate, and I had no doubt that Betty would unleash holy hell on her new “threat-assessment specialist.”
The wind blew fallen leaves into my windshield like kamikaze birds. I pushed my foot hard on the gas.
* * *
After what seemed like an eternity, I passed the road that led down to Little Wabassus and the Stevenses’ house along the shore. I knew that if I could just get past the low hills to the west of the lake, I might find myself in range of the new cell tower outside Grand Lake Stream.
My phone chimed in the cradle of the signal booster. I grabbed at it and pressed it to my ear.
“Briar?”
“Mike,” she said. “I’ve been trying you forever!”
“Where are you?”
“Outside Grand Lake Stream.”
I let out a deep breath. “Great,” I said. “So you can find your way back to your mother’s north gate.”
“No! You don’t understand. I tried that, but there was a pickup truck waiting on the road to the gate.”
My hand clenched the wheel. “Are you sure it was the same one? What did it look like?”
“I don’t know! It snapped on its high beams as I came around the corner, like it was waiting for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I got the fuck out of there.” The signal was clear now, and I could hear how terrified she was. “You’ve got to rescue me!”
“Is the truck still following you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you drive into town?”
“Yes, but I don’t know where to go.”
I tried to think of a safe haven, somewhere public where she could seek protection. But Grand Lake Stream was too small a village to maintain its own police force. A couple of times a day, a deputy sheriff or state trooper might swing through town, but most of the time, if the residents needed the assistance of a law-enforcement officer, they would call the local game warden. Why did I have misgivings about sending her to Jeremy Bard’s house?
I glanced at the clock on the dash. The Pine Tree Store would be closed now. There would be men fishing the stream this time of night, but the unlighted parking lot at the Dam Pool would hardly seem to Briar like a refuge. “Go to Weatherby’s.”
“The sporting camp?”
“You’ll be safe with them, Briar. I promise. Honk on your horn if you need to wake people up. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can. I’m going to call Jack Spense. He and his men might be able to get there before me. OK?”
“OK.” She didn’t sound assured.
“Everything will be fine,” I said. “Just watch your driving, and everything will be fine.”
After I hung up with Briar, I tried to key in the number for Moosehorn Lodge without crashing into a pine tree. There are good reasons so many states outlaw using a cell phone behind the wheel.
“Warden Bowditch?” said a man’s voice.
“Mr. Spense?” I should have figured that he had installed some sort of caller-recognition device with my number in it. I’d certainly phoned the house enough at this point.
“What can we do for you?”
“Briar is in trouble,” I said. “She went for a drive.”
“What?”
“Someone must have let her through the gate. A pickup truck is chasing her again. She didn’t get a good look at it, but I bet it’s the same one. She tried going back home, but it was waiting to intercept her, so she turned around.”
“Why didn’t she call here?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve told her to go to Weatherby’s. That’s a sporting camp in town, on the left past the store. I told her to seek shelter there—the owners are good people—and wait for me to arrive.”
The phone went dead, and not because the call had been dropped. The bastard had hung up on me. He must have realized the urgency of the situation and decided not to waste time with pleasantries. Either that or he realized the hit his reputation would take if his company failed to protect the daughter of one of the wealthiest women in America.
As I turned onto the Little River Road, I wondered if I should call Briar back to keep her talking. Would it be safer to have me on the line while she drove into town, or would it be better for her to focus on the road? The girl was such a speed demon. I worried that she would disregard my warnings about trying to outrace her pursuer on the winding woods road.
I was right to have worried.
I saw the red brake lights as I came around a sharp corner a few miles from the village. They stared at me out of the darkness like the eyes of a demonic creature. My high beams revealed the new skid marks in the gravel, and then they touched the bumper of the cherry-red BMW, angled off the road in a ditch. The front end of the vehicle was crushed against the trunk of an eno
rmous white pine that the area loggers had let stand for unknown reasons, since they had already chopped down so many towering trees here. It was as if they had sensed that the pine had some other destiny than to be turned into a ship’s mast, that it was fated to loom over this stretch of road for untold years until the moment when a young woman would drive her car into its trunk, snapping it finally in two.
The beams from my truck cast a white light around me as I approached the car. They projected my frantic shadow against the horrible backdrop. I tried both doors and found them crushed permanently shut. Briar’s headlights had gone out in the split second it had taken for the front end to hit the tree, pushing the engine back into the driver’s compartment.
I might have called her name. I honestly don’t remember. What lingers in my memory now is the brightness of the blood splattered across the air bag—as red as the car itself.
* * *
Maine game wardens are issued two flashlights. One is a small SureFire about the size of a quarter in diameter and not much longer than a pencil. It has a clip that fastens to your shirt pocket. The other is a black Maglite the length of a man’s forearm. It is heavy enough to be used as a club and can be carried through a rubber loop on the back of your duty belt.
I used the Maglite to attack the already-spiderwebbed glass separating me from Briar. I had no illusions about what I would discover once I pulled back the useless air bag. I had seen my share of fatal crashes. But I had never looked into the open, lifeless eyes of a woman who had kissed me.
After I saw Briar’s shattered face, I didn’t want to see the rest of her. I could imagine what the damage might have done to her rib cage and pelvis, the possibility that her legs had been severed below the waist. I backed away from the vehicle, lost my footing in the ditch, and fell backward onto my rear end. The Maglite slipped from my hand and rolled into the standing water; its light continued to shine even though submerged.
I closed my eyes and sat there until the thundering of my pulse was no longer the only thing I could hear. Then I grabbed my wet flashlight from the ditch and returned to my truck to call 911 and await the arrival of Morse’s ineffectual guards.