She glanced up at Calhoun. “Hang on a sec,” she said and returned her attention to her computer. She hit a couple of keys, shook her head, typed in something else, then nodded and sat back. She looked up at Calhoun. “Okay. What can I do for you?”
Calhoun took the leather folder that held his deputy badge out of his pocket, opened it, and showed it to her. “I need to speak with Edwin Gautier.”
She glanced at the badge, then frowned at Calhoun. “You’re new around here, ain’t you?”
“I’m not from around here,” he said. “I have an interest in Mr. Gautier’s daughter’s death.”
“Well, you ain’t the only one. Poor ol’ Edwin’s been questioned a bunch of times already.”
“I need to do it one more time,” said Calhoun. “Can you tell me how to find him? I understand he works here.”
“I’ll have to git him for you,” she said. “You can’t go out in the yard. Insurance, you know.”
“That’s fine,” said Calhoun. “Thank you.”
The woman picked up a phone, hit a couple of buttons, gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then said, “Chester? Listen, send Edwin up here to the office, would you? Somebody here needs to talk to him.” She chuckled, glanced at Calhoun, then said, “Yeah, yeah. I know. Okay, thanks.” She hung up the phone. “He’ll be right along,” she said to Calhoun, “soon as he dumps his load. Edwin drives the forklift. You might as well meet him out front, talk to him there.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Calhoun.
He went outside and sat on the steps, and about ten minutes later a man came around the corner of the building. He was wearing a green shirt and matching pants, with work boots and a yellow hard hat. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. When he saw Calhoun sitting on the steps of the office building, he stopped, dropped the butt on the ground, and stomped on it. Then he took off his hard hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. “You lookin’ for me?” he said.
“Are you Edwin Gautier?”
Gautier nodded cautiously. He was a small man, wiry and compact, late thirties, early forties, Calhoun guessed. His pale, stringy hair was thin on top and hung to his collar on the sides.
Calhoun fished out his deputy badge and showed it to the man.
Gautier shrugged. “Why don’t you guys just figure out what happened to Millie and leave me alone? I told you everything I know.”
“I apologize for putting you through this all over again,” Calhoun said, “but it’s a peculiar case, and we’re not making much headway with it. So I got to ask you some questions you might’ve already answered.”
“What if I don’t feel like talking about it anymore?”
Calhoun shrugged. “I guess we can drag you down to the police station and hold on to you till you do feel like talking about it.”
“You threatening me?”
“Nope. Just answering your question. Clarifying your options.”
Gautier sighed. “So what do you want to know?”
Calhoun patted the step beside him. “Why don’t you sit down.”
Gautier shrugged and sat.
“So tell me about Millie,” said Calhoun.
“What about her?”
“Well, for starters, what was she doing hanging out with a man old enough to be her father?”
“How’m I supposed to know?” said Gautier.
“She was your daughter.”
“Look,” he said. “I done my best with Millie, and I know that wasn’t good enough. Her mother run away when Millie was seven. She was a willful child, just like her old lady, and she grew into a willful girl. I tried to discipline her, but it didn’t do no good. She just did what she wanted, and lately that included hanging around grown-up men. Her big dream was to find some guy who’d take her out of St. Cecelia. She knowed it wouldn’t be me.”
“That must have been difficult for you.”
Gautier shrugged. “From the time she was about thirteen, she was a wild one. She had a reputation, Millie did.”
Calhoun said nothing.
“When some of the guys you work with, have a beer with, they’ve, um, been with your daughter?” Gautier shook his head. “Downright embarrassing.”
“I guess I would’ve given her a good whipping if she was mine,” said Calhoun.
“Oh, I done that. Yes I did. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I did. That’s why I whupped her. I never gave up on Millie. I tried to show her the error of her ways. Smacked her bare little butt with my belt more than once. Little devil, she’d just laugh at me. ‘Hit me harder, Eddie,’ she’d say. Bitchly child always refused to call me Daddy.”
Again, for the ten-thousandth time, Calhoun wondered if, in his previous, unremembered life, his life before a lightning bolt obliterated his memory, he’d had children, and if he did, whether he’d beaten them.
He doubted it. It took a certain kind of man to beat a child, and Calhoun didn’t see how he could ever have been such a man.
Edwin Gautier was such a man, and Calhoun had to stifle an urge to punch the ignorant man in the face.
It was no wonder that Millie wanted to get away from St. Cecelia.
“What can you tell me about McNulty?” Calhoun said. “The man Millie was found with.”
“I never met the man, myself,” said Gautier.
Calhoun said nothing.
After a minute, Gautier shrugged. “I heard some things.”
Calhoun nodded encouragingly.
“Millie thought this McNulty was gonna take her away from here. He was her ticket. He was a rich guy, staying at that fancy fishing lodge up to Loon Lake. Millie would’ve done anything for him. The night before she . . . she died—she didn’t come home. She was with him.”
“With McNulty.”
Gautier nodded. “Yes, sir.
“How do you know?”
“She come home in the morning to change her clothes, and we had a conversation. I asked her where she’d been at, and she said it was none of my business, as usual. Then she told me she was leaving for good and I better not try to stop her, she’d found herself a nice rich man who was gonna take care of her.”
“Did she say where they were going?”
“She said this man—it was McNulty, I guess, though she didn’t mention any name that I recall—he had business in Augusta, and then maybe they’d go to Florida. Millie was always talking about Florida. I suppose she might’ve made that part up. About going to Florida. To make me jealous or something, as if everybody dreamed about going to Florida the way she did.”
“Did she say what the man’s business was in Augusta?”
Gautier shook his head. “She was just trying to make him sound important, I suppose.”
“So she said they were leaving that day?”
“Yes. The day she died.”
“You saw her that morning?”
Gautier nodded.
“And she was okay?”
“Okay? What do you mean?”
“Healthy. Not sick.”
“Oh, she was healthy, all right. Rarin’ to go, she was.”
“Did she seem afraid?”
Gautier frowned. “How so?”
“Worried? Nervous that something bad might happen?”
“Not that I noticed. Anyway, Millie wasn’t like that. Nothing fazed her.”
“It was later that day that they found her?”
“That night,” Gautier said. “In the woods south of town. In his vehicle.”
“So,” said Calhoun, “I know I’m not the first person to ask you, but I got to do it again. Did you follow them and find them parked there in the woods, looked like they were sleeping, maybe, and shoot the both of them and leave it to look like a murder and suicide? Was that you who did that?”
“You’re right,” said Gautier. “You ain’t the first person to accuse me of that.”
“I wasn’t accusing. I was just asking.”
“Same difference, ain’t it?”
; “You saying you didn’t do it?” said Calhoun.
“That’s right. I did not do that.”
“I bet you have an idea who did.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t. I figure it was about the man, McNulty, not about Millie. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Why is that?”
He shrugged. “Because Millie didn’t have any enemies. She was just a kid. No reason to kill her. Everybody liked Millie.”
“Except you,” said Calhoun.
Edwin Gautier turned his head to look straight at Calhoun. “You’re wrong about that,” he said. “I liked Millie a lot.” He swallowed and blinked, and Calhoun saw the man’s eyes brimming. “I loved her, sir. She might’ve been a bitch sometimes, and she surely was a wild one, but she was always my little girl.”
After Edwin Gautier twisted his yellow hard hat back onto his head and shambled down the slope to the steel hangar where his forklift was waiting for him, Calhoun went back to the Loon Lake Range Rover and let Ralph out. While the dog snuffled around the sandy area, lifting his leg on certain bushes, selected for reasons known only to him, and ignoring others, Calhoun fished out his cell phone and checked it again for messages.
There were none.
He’d hoped Kate would change her mind and leave him a voice mail. “Hey, how you doing?” would have been fine. “I still love you” would have been excellent.
It was a little after four on this Saturday afternoon. She’d still be at the shop. He thought about calling again, and this time not letting Adrian off the hook. He’d demand to talk to Kate, and when she came on the line, however reluctantly, he’d just tell her he missed her and loved her no matter what she might be thinking and feeling about him.
Still, he didn’t do it. He figured if she hadn’t called and left him a message, it meant she was still mad and would just refuse to talk to him. So he snapped the phone shut and stuck it in his pocket. Once he headed back to Loon Lake, he’d be out of cell phone service, and then there would be no chance of talking with Kate. It was frustrating.
He whistled to Ralph, and the two of them climbed into the Range Rover. He started it up, turned onto the dusty lumber company road, and headed north, back to the lodge.
As he drove slowly over the humpy dirt road, he tried to figure out what, if anything, he’d learned.
He’d learned that Edwin Gautier loved his daughter and was an unlikely suspect for shooting her and McNulty’s already-dead bodies. Anyway, even if he had done that, it had nothing to do with McNulty’s mission at Loon Lake.
McNulty and Millie had died of botulism poisoning, most likely contracted from eating the same food, but it didn’t appear that they’d had that food at Tiny’s Café. They’d eaten entirely different lunches that day, and besides, nobody else who’d eaten there had died from botulism. In fact, no one in St. Cecelia except for McNulty and Millie had died from botulism. That meant it had come from someplace else.
Millie Gautier had told her father that McNulty was headed for Augusta, the state capital. Assuming that was true, and that McNulty did not plan to return to Loon Lake, it meant that he’d found what he was looking for up there and was going to Augusta to submit a report. Whatever McNulty had uncovered at Loon Lake—Mr. Brescia suggested it might have something to do with national security—he did not have the chance to report it. He died of botulism poisoning first. Then somebody, who apparently didn’t realize they were already dead, shot him and Millie. The shooter, Calhoun guessed, aimed to prevent McNulty from submitting his report. The shooter was the man whose name McNulty would have turned in.
It was most likely somebody from the lodge. That narrowed it down considerably.
Calhoun remembered seeing the shadowy figure prowling around the float plane and then leaving with something in his hand. It looked like a small suitcase, and he hadn’t had it with him when he arrived. Calhoun guessed the snooper was Curtis Swenson, the pilot, sneaking around in the darkness so he wouldn’t be seen, collecting something illicit that he’d hidden on his plane.
Somebody—Calhoun guessed that shadowy figure was the same man, probably Swenson—had followed him and Robin when he’d walked her back to her room the night after Elaine Hoffman was killed.
The more he thought about it, the more Calhoun kept circling back to Swenson. The pilot, unlike the guides at the lodge, had the freedom and flexibility to go to St. Cecelia almost anytime. He could fly back and forth across the border to Canada, and he could go anywhere in Maine where there was a lake to deliver whatever he kept hidden on the plane.
Swenson could’ve followed McNulty to St. Cecelia and shot him and Millie in their car. He could’ve killed Elaine Hoffman with Calhoun’s Colt Woodsman .22 pistol, too.
Now if he was following Calhoun and Robin around, it meant they weren’t safe, either.
Calhoun needed to figure out what Swenson was up to. If he could discover what was in the suitcase he kept hidden on his float plane, he guessed he’d know what McNulty had known, and if he could then avoid getting himself killed, he’d be able to submit a report to Mr. Brescia.
Then he could go home.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Calhoun got back to the lodge in time to take a shower and relax for a few minutes before supper. He’d just finished toweling his hair and getting dressed when somebody knocked on the cabin door.
He said, “Come on in,” and the door opened, and Robin stepped into the cabin.
“Hey,” said Calhoun.
She smiled. “Hey, yourself.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be serving dinner tonight?”
“It’s Saturday,” she said. “My night off.”
“And you’re still here?”
“Where would I go?”
“Home?”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so. And there’s no place around here except St. Cece. Nothing for me there.”
He nodded. “I was down to St. Cecelia today. It’s not much of a place. Want a Coke?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” the girl said. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Her feet were bare, and her shaggy blond hair was damp, as if she’d just gotten out of the shower, too. Calhoun thought she looked about twelve years old, except for her strong legs and her grown-up chest.
He fetched two cans of Coke. “Why don’t we sit out on the porch,” he said. “There’s a nice breeze comes off the lake this time of day.”
They went out to the screen porch and sat in the rockers. Ralph followed along and plopped down in front of the door.
“So what’s up?” Calhoun said.
She turned and smiled at him. “Does something need to be up?”
“Huh? Oh. No, I guess not.” He shrugged. “So tell me something.”
“What?”
“Do they pay you really well here?”
Robin smiled. “You mean, what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?”
Calhoun shrugged. “Something like that, I guess.”
She nodded. “Yes, they pay very well. Way better than I could do back in Madrid.” She pronounced it MAD-rid, with the emphasis on the first syllable.
“Madrid,” Calhoun said, repeating her pronunciation, “being your hometown?”
“Ayuh,” she said, “and I can’t wait to get away from there. I want to go to college, Stoney. I want to go far, far away. Arizona or Colorado sounds good to me. Someplace as different from Madrid, Maine, as I can find. My dad is dead, and my mother has no money, but I’m willing to work hard and make sacrifices to earn enough money to get where I want to go. Like serve food and make beds and vacuum floors and anything else June Dunlap tells me to do.”
Calhoun remembered Edwin Gautier telling him about Millie’s dream of going to Florida. He guessed it had to be hard, being a small-town Maine girl with big dreams.
“Half of my high school friends got pregnant before they graduated,” Robin said. “The other half are working at the supermarket and planning on ge
tting married to their boyfriends who work at the mill.” She shook her head. “Not me, mister.”
Calhoun smiled. “Can’t blame you.”
“I’m a good worker,” she said, “and I’m pretty smart. I deserve better.” She frowned. “Oh, the reason I came to see you, actually, was to tell you something. Mr. Redbird has been released. He’s coming back. I know you’re his friend. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Well, yes,” he said. “Thank you. I’m glad about that. Franklin was wrongly accused.”
“I guess they didn’t have enough to hold him on,” Robin said. “So they had to let him go. I heard that Curtis Swenson is flying to Houlton tomorrow to pick him up.”
Calhoun nodded. An idea had occurred to him.
That Saturday evening, Robin’s night off, it was June, Marty Dunlap’s wife, who brought the food from the kitchen into the guides’ dining room: a big bowl of baked kidney beans with salt pork, a platter of hot dogs, another of brown bread, baskets of fresh-baked corn muffins, a plate of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and a bowl of potato salad—beans and franks, the traditional New England Saturday night supper. After she’d put everything on the table, June touched Calhoun’s shoulder.
He turned and looked up at her. She had wide-spaced green eyes with squint lines in the corners and a small, turned-up nose. Her brown hair was liberally sprinkled with gray. Calhoun thought June Dunlap was a very attractive woman.
“You’ve been here three days already, Mr. Calhoun, and we haven’t been introduced,” she said. “I’m June.”
Calhoun smiled. “I’m Stoney.” He held up his hand to her. “Nice to meet you.”
She gave his hand a quick shake. “I hear you drove down to St. Cecelia today.”
“I did,” he said. “It’s quite a town.”
June rolled her eyes. “It’s a depraved and malignant town. Good for nothing except gambling and boozing and whoring.”
He nodded. “That’s what I meant. Nothing of interest to me, but I’m glad I got to see it for myself.”
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