Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  The old pilot had a grin that always reminded me of a jack-o’-lantern. He was one of those men who are so homely they are almost handsome. “But it’s been years since I took a paddle down that river.”

  “It’s the Fourth of July. We’re having a barbecue here. Mike has to help me get the place ready for our guests.”

  “The warden and I can be on the river at dawn and back while the birds are still singing. Isn’t that right, Mike?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Stacey stiffened beside me. “But why? I don’t get it. What point is there in paddling through that backwater? Casey disappeared on the Saco four years ago. Wherever she is now, she’s definitely not there.”

  “That’s true enough,” said Charley. “But somehow that poor girl ended up in that house that blew up. If we can figure out how and where Casey got off the river, we might learn something about who it was who took her.”

  “Us? Who’s us?” said Stacey. “The state police are investigating what happened to Casey Donaldson, Dad. They don’t need your assistance.”

  His expression was all innocence. “What harm will it do? It’s not like we’re going to go knocking down those Nason folks’ door.”

  She gave me a pleading look. “Mike? Can you support me here, please?”

  “We can be back by late morning, Stace.”

  Stacey knocked a knee, hard, against the bottom of the picnic table as she rose to her feet. It was the leg with the stitches. She winced but continued to slide away from us. “Do whatever you want.”

  Stacey limped back into the house without another word, leaving us sitting around the table. The last candle hissed. Everything went dark.

  * * *

  Stacey stood at the kitchen sink, wrapping leftovers in aluminum foil. I came up behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist and pressed my face into her long dark hair. When she didn’t pause in what she was doing, I took a step back.

  “So you really are going paddling with my dad tomorrow?” She didn’t look at me.

  “We’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “No, you won’t. You’re going to find something odd that you need to ‘investigate,’ or you’re going to have a confrontation with some random assholes you meet out there because that’s what always happens when the two of you go looking for trouble.”

  She wasn’t wrong in that regard, but her tone seemed unusually brittle.

  “What happened with Barstow, Stace?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  “Come on. What did he say to you?”

  “That I’ve been pushing my luck, and I need to shape up, or there will be consequences.”

  “Maybe you should get ahead of this and call your union rep.”

  She turned on the tap to wash her hands. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  The sliding door opened. Charley pushed the wheels of his wife’s chair over the doorframe. Neither of them looked happy. Ora cleared her throat and reached back with her hand, the veins blue beneath the pellucid skin, to tap her husband’s.

  “I owe you an apology,” Charley said gruffly.

  “Are you still planning on going canoeing with Mike?” Stacey asked.

  Her father pushed his hands into his pants pockets. “I am.”

  “Then I don’t want to hear it.” She flipped the dishrag onto the wet counter. “I’m going to bed. I had a long day at work and need to get some sleep before the party. You should be all set in your room, but Mike can get you anything you need.” She bent over to kiss her mother’s cheek. “Good night, Mom. You know I’m not mad at you.”

  “Do you want to talk, honey?” Ora asked. “Just the two of us?”

  “In the morning. I really am beat. Good night.”

  We listened to her quick feet on the stairs, then heard the bedroom door slam shut.

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Charley rubbed a hand through his thick white hair until it stood up. “It looks like I got you into some hot water.”

  “Mike is his own man,” said Ora. “He’s responsible for himself, just as you are responsible for yourself.”

  Her disapproval was like a knife in my heart. But the pain of disappointing that lovely woman wasn’t enough to make us change our plans. Once made, bad decisions are so much harder to abandon than good ones.

  26

  I awoke in the dark to hear a cupboard snapping shut downstairs. Then the rattle of dishes. The clock beside the bed told me it was four-thirty. Stacey continued to breathe softly but steadily a few inches away. She had slept with her back to me all night.

  I dressed in the dark, in the same dirty clothes I had worn the night before. I walked on the balls of my feet out of the bedroom and eased the door until I could hear the latch click.

  In the kitchen Charley was fully dressed and making coffee. The former warden pilot always seemed to wear the same green shirt and the same green pants, as if retirement hadn’t removed from him the desire to put on a uniform each morning.

  “How’s my daughter?”

  “Asleep thankfully. She was still awake when I went up, but she wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “It seems like a small thing to get her so riled up.” The mug he offered me was a stocking stuffer Stacey had given me for Christmas. It was blaze orange with the drawing of a stag and the motto GETCHADEERYET?

  “She’s been having a hard time at work.”

  “My contacts in the department tell me Commissioner Matthews is continuing her one-woman reign of terror.”

  I sipped my coffee. “Barstow is being a dick, too.”

  Charley leaned against the counter and held his steaming cup between his big paws as if to warm them. “Ora thinks it’s something else that’s bothering her, though.”

  “The helicopter crash really shook her up, losing three of her friends suddenly. And then finding that dead baby the other day.”

  “No. Ora thinks it’s something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “She thinks Stacey and you might be having problems.”

  I felt myself blush as if I’d been caught in a lie. “Really?”

  “That girl loves you to pieces, Ora says, even if she doesn’t always show it. But she’s still struggling with herself. When she came back East after graduate school, we hoped she had put her problems behind her. In some ways she is as lost as ever. People assume Stacey’s always finding fault with them, but it’s herself she can’t accept. That’s Ora’s theory, anyway.”

  “What do you think, Charley?”

  “I think my wife is a hell of a lot smarter than me.” He finished his coffee in one long gulp. “Let’s get on the road. We need to be back in time to make amends to our better halves.”

  “Stacey and I aren’t married yet.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder so hard I nearly spilled my coffee. “That’s another thing I wanted to talk with you about.”

  * * *

  We took two vehicles. Charley left my Scout at the lot below Birnam Bridge, then we rode together in my patrol truck up to Fryeburg. By road it was only nine miles, but the Saco was such a winding river we would be covering twice that distance by canoe.

  The sky was the color of smudged charcoal when we passed the Fryeburg fairgrounds. The enormous complex of white buildings had a grandstand at the center, a harness-racing track, and agricultural barns, each labeled with the livestock that would be displayed and judged there in the fall. We turned down the side road that ran along the chain fence until we came to the campground at the end.

  As early as it was, a few people were already wandering about beneath the pines. One shirtless, tattooed gent was walking a rottweiler with jaws big enough to take off your head. Someone else was frying bacon on a portable grill, making me wish we’d stopped for a real breakfast instead of raiding a box of granola bars I kept in the backseat.

  I maneuvered the truck down the hill until I came to the parking lot below Swan’s F
alls.

  Before we launched, I wanted to have a look at the river. The beach was quiet except for a big-bellied man sitting at a picnic table, looking out at the river slowly coming into view with the dawn. The first thing I noticed was his thick black pompadour. He wore a blue polo, poorly fitting dark pants, and black tactical boots. If not for the holstered pistol on his belt and the word POLICE printed on the back of his shirt, I would never have taken him for a law-enforcement officer.

  “You can’t park there,” he shouted, loud enough to wake the campground.

  Charley smiled at him. “We’ll just be a minute unloading, young feller.”

  “The new launch area is back that way, Gramps.”

  Just then the cop caught sight of my own holstered sidearm. His arm jerked at his side, and I realized he hadn’t recognized my black Sierra as a warden truck. Nor had he yet spotted the badge on my belt beside the weapon. I was out of uniform, and he took me for one of those open-carry enthusiasts who make police officers’ lives so pleasant.

  I made a gesture somewhere between a wave and a stop signal. “Game warden.”

  The fat man laughed to cover his mistake. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Finest kind,” said Charley. The old Maine expression translated, in this case, to “Very well, thank you.”

  “Couldn’t see you guys clearly in the dark. Guess I should be eating more carrots. Didn’t know you wardens were going out on the river today. You undercover?”

  “Just going for a paddle,” I said.

  “For fun? No shit?”

  In the few months since I’d been given this extra district to patrol I hadn’t had many encounters with the local constabulary. The Fryeburg cops had a reputation for policing their sixteen miles of riverfront without compromise or mercy. For that reason I had been told that I could devote my energies elsewhere. I’d only met the regular patrolmen, but I knew the town employed close to a dozen reserve officers in the summer to handle the mobs who converged on the river. Fat Elvis here struck me as a seasonal hire.

  My companion introduced himself first. “Charley Stevens, Maine Warden Service, retired.”

  “Mike Bowditch. I’m covering this district until you get a new warden.”

  “Jeff Nisbet. Fryeburg PD.” Most police officers have firm handshakes, but this guy’s was like rubber.

  “They’ve got you out here early enough,” said Charley.

  “I been here since midnight. I like working nights. Besides, it’s the Fourth of July weekend, you know.”

  “Any trouble?” I asked.

  “The usual. Caught some teens drinking. Heard fireworks maybe a hundred yards down the river. They’re illegal on the Saco. But the perpetrators were gone before I could run down there.”

  The man didn’t strike me as someone who engaged in many foot chases.

  “In a couple of hours it’s going to be rush-hour traffic out on the river. You picked a crazy day for a paddle unless you’re doing it for the scenery.” He cupped his hands into imaginary breasts.

  I’d met Fryeburg’s badass new police chief and had a sneaking suspicion that Reserve Officer Nisbet might not be brought back the following summer if this conversation was representative of his attitude.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Keep an eye on my truck while we’re gone. We should just be a few hours.”

  “You got it.”

  Charley and I lifted the upside-down canoe out of the back of my pickup and then walked it down to the beach. The river below the old dam had some chop, but it was hardly the millrace I’d seen here earlier in the spring when the snowmelt from the White Mountains came spilling down through this narrow passage.

  We slid the canoe on the sand down to the water’s edge and were getting ready to push off when Nisbet exclaimed from the high bank, “I realized who you are!”

  Charley and I stared up at the heavyset man, uncertain which of us he meant and which of the many reasons for our notoriety he could have had in mind.

  “You’re the warden from that house that blew up.”

  “That was me.”

  “Thought I recognized you. I was at the scene that day with the rest of the department. Not that there was anything for us to do. That house belonged to my cousin’s landlords.”

  “Pequawket Properties?”

  “Yeah, the Nasons. Couldn’t have happened to better people. My theory is that they blew the place up themselves for the insurance. I even bet money on it with one of the other guys at the station. Fifty bucks! Have a good paddle. Keep your eyes open for hooters.” He cupped his imaginary breasts again.

  27

  The canoe was an Old Town Penobscot 164, forest green except where it had been beaten to hell on my voyages up and down the streams of Maine. The webbed seats were torn, the hull was scratched from long portages through alder thickets, and one of the thwarts had broken when a drunken duck hunter had attempted to sit on the brace. You might say that the canoe’s many scars were the archaeological record of my career as a game warden.

  Charley sat in the bow while I handled the boat from the stern. From his occasional over-the-shoulder glances, I could tell he found the arrangement not to his liking. The old woodsman was accustomed to steering.

  The current was gentle, and it carried us straight downriver. It needed only an occasional J-stroke from me to correct our course. When I trailed a hand in the stream, I found it as warm as bathwater. The air was chilly in the shadows along the eastern bank, though, and the contrast between the cool air and the mild river raised a mist that dissolved when the sun touched it.

  Neither of us spoke. Something about being out on the water in the early morning, the air fragrant with pines and woodsmoke, called for reverence. A few hundred yards below the falls, Charley pointed at a pine on the far shore. The top of it was lit up yellow by the rising sun. The glare made it hard for me to see the white head of the bald eagle until the massive bird lifted off a branch and, with slow and heavy wingbeats, set off before us down the Saco.

  “When I was a boy, there weren’t more than twenty pairs of those birds in the whole state,” said Charley softly. “DDT just about wiped them out. What would it have said about us as Americans if we’d killed off our national symbol?”

  Just then music began to blare from the shoreline. The song was “Here for the Party” by the country singer Gretchen Wilson.

  “What in the—?” said Charley.

  Downstream, the eagle shot forward as if someone had lit its tail on fire.

  From the opposite bank another blast of music answered: “Gin and Juice” by Snoop Dogg. Someone must have been having screwdrivers for breakfast.

  A naked young man came racing from a campsite and belly flopped into the water. When his head popped above the surface, he let out a pig holler. As if summoned, several of his friends (both male and female) came running down the beach, throwing off their clothes and screaming as if they were being chased by zombies.

  “Welcome to the Saco,” I said.

  Within minutes we found ourselves passing through an obstacle course of skinny-dippers and float-tubers. Canoes slid down from the shore laden with coolers and barbecues, tents and folding chairs, cases of beer and cases of water, trash bags full of God knew what. Their occupants began tying the boats together to create rafts, which allowed them to stand up, boogie down, or leap from vessel to vessel to fetch refreshments.

  Not a single person in sight was wearing a personal flotation device. At best, they’d stuffed their life jackets in their canoes’ bows or sterns. But I wasn’t on duty, and there were far too many boats for me to check.

  “Hi, Grandpa!” a girl shouted at Charley, and raised her bikini top to flash him with her tattooed breasts.

  “Haven’t seen a pair like that in a while,” the old man said under his breath. “Haven’t wanted to.”

  A kid with a Super Soaker squirt gun floated by in an inflatable. He fired a stream of water at our canoe, catching me in the face.
r />   “Hey!” I lifted my shirt to show the badge on my belt.

  He giggled. “Sorry, Officer.”

  I sat back down and dug my paddle into the water to get clear of this particular scrum.

  A few minutes later, someone in the rafted canoes had found a new song to play on their portable MP4 blaster: “Fuck tha Police” by NWA. Almost every cop in America knows the words of that rage-filled anthem by heart.

  * * *

  The floating orgy followed us for the next four miles. The party only grew bigger and louder as the temperature rose and we approached the campgrounds on either side of Canal Bridge, where tent cities extended from the dirty beaches, across the trampled fields, to the distant tree lines.

  Some of the vessels were miracles of quasi-nautical construction. One enterprising group had built a platform, complete with a Persian carpet, atop a row of four canoes, using them as pontoons. They had a dance floor and a stack of firewood. In the stern was a tall thronelike chair on which sat a kid in a Speedo wearing a pirate hat and an eyepatch. The American flag drooped from a canted pole over his shoulder. What these rafters didn’t have was a reliable means of steering their vessel. When it drifted into a sandbar, two dancers fell overboard from the impact. Captain Speedo cannonballed heroically to the rescue.

  When we reached Hodge’s Campground, I turned the canoe toward shore, and Charley hopped out and pulled us up onto the white sand beach.

  “Well, this place has changed a mite since my last visit,” said my friend.

  In the shallows, people lounged in half-submerged lawn chairs while naked babies splashed unattended. Thick patches of poison ivy grew up the steep banks with footpaths leading through them. The local drugstores must have done a thriving business in calamine lotion. It being the anniversary of the nation’s founding, we saw a great many flags: flying from poles; decorating muscle shirts, bandannas, and bikini tops; even taking the form of beach towels on which people lay sunning themselves.

  I spotted a man in a Hodge’s shirt carrying a paddleboard down to the river for a little boy.

  “Excuse me!” I lifted my shirt so the man could see the handgun and badge on my belt. “Can you tell me where I can find Dakota Rowe?”