Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  I turned up the police radio while I waited for the worst of the weather to pass, fearing I might soon receive a summons to pull charred bodies out of the water.

  After a while, my mind drifted back to the morning’s horrors. Where had she come from, that broken little girl? The Saco Road was heavily traveled, but the Knife Creek Trail was little used. You didn’t have to live across the street from the parking lot to know the hillside above was a tangle of hiding places.

  I regretted now that I hadn’t taken the time to explore Burnt Meadows when I’d first been assigned to cover the district. Maybe if I knew the trail better—and more important, who used it—I would have had some insights into the thoughts of whoever had chosen the spot to conceal a corpse.

  With the rain pouring down, I reached for the battered Maine Atlas and Gazetteer I kept under my driver’s seat and turned to the quadrangle for the southernmost corner of Oxford County. The page showed the trailhead with a dotted line leading up the eastern ridge of the hill toward the low, tree-covered summit. Unfortunately, the scale of the map was too small to reveal any topographical details that might’ve helped me visualize the landscape.

  To an outside observer, my truck might have appeared to be an unredeemed mess, cluttered as it was with raincoats, tools, firearm cases, and discarded coffee cups. But I knew each and every item that I carried with me on patrol and where it resided within the vehicle. I knew, for instance, that the aluminum fly-rod tube behind the seat didn’t hold an actual L.L. Bean fishing rod, but instead contained a roll of antique topographical maps prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey. I unscrewed the metal cap, and the compressed sheets of yellowed paper curled open across my passenger seat.

  The map I had for this region was dated 1941. The names of the roads were mostly unfamiliar, having been replaced with route numbers in the subsequent decades.

  But it wasn’t the highways that interested me. The detailed 1941 map showed the trail Stacey and I had hiked that morning. The path had been in continual use for decades. But the map also showed other, fainter trails, including what looked like an old logging road that ascended into the highlands from the north and intersected the Knife Creek Trail less than a quarter mile from the pig wallow.

  Pomerleau was assuming—as I had—that whoever had buried the baby had parked at the Knife Creek trailhead and hiked up from the Saco Road, but what if the person had come from another direction?

  The lightning passed. The downpour ended as abruptly as it had begun. The moon appeared.

  There was no harm in having a look, I decided.

  * * *

  The road around the back side of the mountain was named the Rankin Road on the map, and it had never been paved. The town had laid down a bed of gravel sometime in the distant past, but the pebbles had been washed away and plowed aside, leaving a sand surface that was soaked with water from the just-passed storm. I could hear the grit splashing against my truck’s undercarriage as I swerved to avoid water-filled potholes of uncertain depths.

  The first inhabited house I passed had white shingles and the ridged metal roof common to these Maine foothills. The usual pickups and SUVs were out front, along with a flame-colored Pontiac Firebird with a FOR SALE sign behind its rain-smeared windshield.

  The next cluster of buildings advertised itself as an alpaca farm, although I saw none of those graceful animals in the moonlit fields.

  I had no idea if the state police had canvassed these residences, or if Pomerleau had erroneously deemed them to be too far from the trailhead, since no one else, as far as I knew, had any knowledge of the old logging road. The ancient path might no longer even exist.

  When I reached the place where I suspected the old trail might have intersected the Rankin Road, I slowed to a crawl and opened the driver’s window so I would have an unobstructed view into the dark, dripping undergrowth.

  I never expected to see another pig wallow at the side of the road.

  The mud bath wasn’t as big as the one near Knife Creek. Probably the hogs had gotten scared into the woods by passing vehicles before they could fully excavate it. But the trampled weeds and deep puddles left no doubt my sounder had come through here regularly.

  I stopped the truck but left the headlights on and the engine idling as I got out to inspect the pit. I focused the beam of my SureFire on the far side. Hard to tell if the tote road began there or not. I ducked my head under a fan of wet sumac leaves and followed a path of broken weeds up the hill, through a stand of red cedars. Past the wall of foliage that had grown up along the drainage ditch, I could finally discern the remnants of the abandoned tote road.

  The wet branches of the sumacs slapped my face and rained water down my shoulders as I made my way back to my truck. Which way to go? There were no tracks to guide me. No houses were visible in either direction.

  But as I was getting back into my truck, a glow appeared in the trees, coming from the main road. High beams that shifted down to regular headlights when they touched the reflectors on the tail of my truck. I waited until a pickup came bumping along into view. It was one of those old Chevy C/Ks, a relic of the past century, about ten thousand miles away from ending up as scrap metal in a junkyard, judging by the sputtering of its engine.

  I crossed the road so I could talk with the driver. He dutifully stopped and rolled down his window, a man in his fifties with a gray mop of hair. His pale face was long, his nose was narrow except for flaring nostrils, and his lips were so thin they might as well not have been there.

  “Evening, Warden,” he said in a breath that smelled slightly of beer and more strongly of cigarettes. “What’s doing?”

  “Oh, you know. Just poking around. How about you?”

  “Going home. Just got out of work.”

  “You live along this road?”

  “Naw. I live down in Brownfield. I like to drive home different ways to look for deer and such.” He ran his hand through his wild gray hair. “So what’s the story with that dead baby you guys found over at Knife Creek? It was all the buzz over at the store today.”

  “The store?”

  “You know Fales Variety, out on the Saco Road? I’m Eddie Fales. I own the place. Everyone at the store was saying it was the hard-ass new warden in town who found the baby. I’m guessing it must have been you.”

  I extended my hand. “I’m Mike Bowditch.”

  “I’ve heard of you.” His lopsided smile suggested he possessed some secret knowledge of my dossier. “You should stop in some morning. Coffee’s always free at my place for first responders. How come you’ve never come by before?”

  “I’m just covering this district until the department rehires the position. If you own the corner store, you must know everyone who lives along this road.”

  “Everyone who smokes cigarettes, buys scratch tickets, and drinks beer.” He had a scratchy laugh. “In other words, yeah. I know everyone who lives along this road.”

  “I passed a few houses coming in from the main drag. Anyone live farther along?”

  “You mean between here and the fork? There’s Lockman’s hunting cabin, but that bastard is only here in the fall. And there’s one of the Nasons’ shitty rentals, but no one’s living there, last I heard. Naw. There’s nothing but woods.”

  “One more question.”

  He inhaled deeply and then rubbed his stubbly chin. “The answer is yeah, I cracked a beer before I left. I always have one when I am closing out the register. But just one.”

  I wasn’t sure if I believed Fales about the single beer, but he wasn’t visibly intoxicated, and I had other interests tonight. “How about pigs?”

  “You mean like those wild boars in the news? Naw, I’ve never seen one. But that’s why I’ve been driving home this way—hoping I do. It’s legal to shoot a feral pig if I see it, right?”

  “Afraid not.” I handed him one of my business cards with my cell phone number on the back. “Give me a call if you spot one, and maybe I’ll give you some of the meat.
”

  He let out another of his parched laughs. “Yeah! I’m sure you will. Have a good night, Warden, and remember what I said about the free coffee.”

  I watched his hunk of junk putter down the road until the brake lights were swallowed up by the darkness.

  From what he’d said, there was no point in my driving farther into the woods. I was prepared to turn around and go home when it occurred to me that Fales hadn’t followed up his question about the dead baby. He’d said it was the topic of conversation all day at his store—and then he’d changed the subject at the soonest opportunity. Clearly, the man was intelligent and curious. It was odd he hadn’t tried to pry any inside information out of me.

  I decided to keep driving and have a look for myself.

  I crawled along at ten miles an hour searching with my high beams for anything that would give me a reason to stop.

  I found it in a piece of litter. It was just a speck of red on the shoulder.

  I climbed out of the truck and bent over for a look. It was an empty pack of Big Red chewing gum. The same brand I’d found at the first wallow. Earlier, I’d presumed the wrapper had been dropped by one of the careless cops at the scene. But what if it had been there before, but outside the cordon? What if it had been blown in as the storm had swept through the forest?

  On an impulse, I returned to my patrol truck and turned off the engine. I was blind as a mole when the headlights went out. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Slowly my night vision returned.

  The road curved around a stand of red pines that grew straight as ship masts from the sandy soil. The tall trees were devoid of lower branches, so I could see between the scaly trunks, around the bend, and deep into the woods beyond.

  I might have missed the house otherwise.

  It was set back at the end of a long, unpaved drive that looked more like a disused Jeep trail, with no mailbox or house number to mark its entrance. The unlit building was a blocky shadow that was only visible because of its unnaturally square outline against the grainy light between the pines.

  This must have been the rental house Fales had mentioned, I realized. He’d said that the building was unoccupied. But it sure didn’t look that way to me.

  Tire marks went into and out of the drive. Someone had tried to brush them away with a pine branch, but they had been in a rush and done a poor job with their improvised broom. The gesture at concealment had taken effort, though. And unusual determination. Someone was hiding from the world behind those dark windows, and I was intrigued to know why.

  8

  I didn’t bother with a flashlight. The moon was nearly full, and I could see well enough now that my pupils had expanded.

  My plan was to approach the house cautiously and to make a quick inspection under the cover of shadows. If it seemed unoccupied, I would move on down the road. But if someone seemed to be in residence, I would bring my truck in with the high beams on to give the occupant warning of my arrival. In woods as deep as these, knocking at the door of a strange house after dark is an effective way to get yourself shot in the chest.

  As I drew closer to the building, it began to take shape. I had assumed it was a crumbling old manse, but I couldn’t have been further from the truth. In fact, the structure looked middle-aged. The three-story, cedar-shingled building was taller than it was wide, with a cinder-block foundation and a drive-in garage. It had a pitched roof to let the snow—so heavy here in the winter—slide off easily. Curiously, the only windows facing the road were on the third floor. The second floor turned a blank face to the drive.

  I made a circle around the perimeter, pushing my way through the abundant ferns. I saw three propane tanks against one wall. They were the kind that people use to heat a small trailer or cabin, not a house of this size. With minimal help a single man could muscle these tall white cylinders in and out of position.

  The back of the structure was newly shingled, the cedar shakes noticeably paler than the older wood around them.

  A set of steps led up along the edge of the house to a door that looked to open on a kitchen or mudroom. A small window in the door was covered by a blind—with a tracing of light along its edges.

  My gut had been right. Someone looked to be home.

  I retreated back to my patrol truck and got on the phone with Ellen Pomerleau.

  “It’s Bowditch. So I’m back over in Birnam—”

  “What?”

  “I had unfinished business. Remember?”

  “That’s right. The piglets. Should I ask how it went?”

  My nonanswer was my answer.

  “Anyway, I have a question for you. Did you or your troopers canvass the Rankin Road this afternoon?”

  “I figured it was too far from the trail to be worth the effort. But it was on our list if we ran into a brick wall with our initial interviews.”

  “Did you run into a brick wall?”

  “What are you getting at? Should I have a bad feeling about this phone call?”

  “Rankin Road isn’t far at all from the Knife Creek trailhead as the crow flies. Not even half a mile. There’s an old cutoff path. It’s not on the modern topo maps, but I found it on a 1941 US Geological Survey.”

  She paused to absorb this information. “You consulted a map from the 1940s?”

  “It’s a good map. Anyway, I am parked outside a house on Rankin. I don’t know the address because there’s no mailbox or house number. I can give you the GPS coordinates, though. The town will have records whose it is.”

  She paused again, like a mother waiting to hear her teenage son get up the courage to admit he’s crashed the family car. “And what makes this particular residence so noteworthy?”

  “The pig tracks led over this way. Also, I found a crushed pack of gum—Big Red—that matched a wrapper I found earlier this evening at the Knife Creek wallow.”

  “Pig tracks and gum wrappers?”

  “I’m a game warden. Sometimes those are the only kinds of clues we find.”

  Pomerleau paused. “I understand you want to help, Bowditch. Your reputation isn’t exactly a well-kept secret among our Major Crimes units. But you need to listen to me and back off here. You do your work, and we’ll do ours.”

  “This is my work. I need to know if they’ve seen other pigs in the area.”

  “Oh, please. You’re coming up with a bullshit excuse to meddle in our investigation. It’s not your job to interrogate the locals about that dead baby you found. And for the life of me I can’t understand why you’re calling now. Is it to ask my permission? You have to know what I am going to say.”

  The truth was that I had an unsettled feeling about the house, and I wanted the state police to know where I was in the event that something bad happened. But Pomerleau was mostly right about my real motivations.

  She exhaled heavily into her cell’s microphone. “How about this? Tomorrow, I’ll send over a trooper to do a knock-and-talk at your mystery house. Once she’s spoken to the residents, I’ll give you the all’s clear, and you can go back to quiz them about your feral swine.”

  I noticed she used a female pronoun when she mentioned the trooper. Pomerleau must have been referring to Tate.

  “Bowditch?” Pomerleau summoned me back to the conversation.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “I’ll wait for your call.” I said, then hung up.

  How long would it take Pomerleau to realize that I hadn’t promised not to knock on the door of the hidden house? Not long. And she would be steamed about it. But at least by then I would have advanced the ball a few yards.

  I flashed my pursuit lights silently for a full minute, filling the trees with pulses of blue. For all I knew, the person or persons inside were asleep—it was late enough—but I wanted to do my best to announce my presence as a law enforcement officer before I knocked. I didn’t want to give some elderly shut-in a heart attack.

  Ready or not, I turned into the driveway and follow
ed the thin, bumping lane until my headlights were shining brightly against the garage door. I climbed out of the vehicle and backed away a few paces until I could see the whole of the building. Sure enough, a light had come on in the third-floor window.

  I made my way up the side steps to a little concrete landing. There was no doorbell or welcome mat. A brighter light snapped on behind the blind in the window.

  I knocked politely on the storm door.

  The blind went up, and I found myself looking at the face of a gaunt, hard-faced woman—probably in her thirties—with hair so red it was almost crimson.

  At first glance, she didn’t look like a new mother.

  At first glance, she looked as if she was more likely to eat a child than give birth to one.

  I pulled open the storm door, expecting her to open the heavier one, but she continued to glare at me through the panel of glass. Her eyes were a dark brown and prematurely wrinkled at the corners. Her lips were chapped and ragged, as if she chewed them. She had one of the pointier chins I had seen in my life, almost perfectly triangular.

  “What do you want?” she shouted.

  “Maine game warden. Can you open the door please?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Wild pigs that came through your property.”

  “Show me your badge!”

  I removed the billfold from my pocket and snapped it open. I held the badge up to the window for her to inspect. While she studied my shield, I took the opportunity to peer past her into the kitchen. The drab room was utterly devoid of decoration. The appliances and cabinets all had a second-rate vibe, were of the kind a builder buys on a single shopping trip to a home-and-garden superstore.

  This sure looks like a rental house, said a voice in my head. Strange that Fales—who seemed to fancy himself the town crier—didn’t know this woman was living here.

  After a moment, I put the billfold away. The woman gnawed at her lower lip but made no move to unlock the door. Her complexion was mostly pale, but she had the sun-spotted look of someone who had once spent entire summers working on her tan.