Massacre Pond

18

We stopped briefly in the kitchen to pick up two mugs containing EarthMother herbal tea and then proceeded through a sliding door onto the immense flagstone patio beside the lake. The air was heavy and muggy, and a translucent haze hung along the distant hills. It could have been the dog days of summer. The morning was already too hot for tea.

Elizabeth Morse didn’t speak until she had settled herself into one of the two Adirondack chairs flanking the extinguished fire pit. She waved a hand at me to indicate I should do the same. It felt awkward. I was a law-enforcement officer, in uniform and on duty, and not some vacationer here to enjoy the view.

“When I die, I intend to donate this house to serve as the park’s welcome center,” she said. “I had it designed with that purpose in mind.”

“It’s certainly spectacular.”

“Albee didn’t shoot those animals,” she said.

I didn’t inform Elizabeth Morse that she had an uncanny habit of reading my mind. “That’s good to hear.”

“He was giving a presentation at a house party in Cumberland Foreside, near Portland. You can ask the hosts.”

Greater Portland was approximately five hours away by car. Since I doubted that Albee had spent the night at the home of Morse’s potential backers, he might easily have driven to Washington County after the party had ended. Given that the moose might well have been shot between midnight and dawn, his alibi didn’t amount to much.

“So what was your reaction to the proposal?” Morse asked me after a long pause.

“It’s ambitious,” I said.

“That’s true, but you don’t support the idea. I can always tell a skeptic.”

“I know a lot of good people who work in the forest industry,” I said. “You’re not going to retrain them to run bed-and-breakfasts and souvenir shops. Maybe someday all the good economic benefits you talk about will happen, but a generation is going to struggle in the meantime.”

“What else?”

“I’m a game warden, Ms. Morse. I know it’s not politically correct. But hunting and trapping and fishing mean something to me. They’re part of our heritage here in Maine and important activities in my own life.”

She leaned forward in her chair. “Last week was the moose hunt, wasn’t it?”

“In this zone, it was. The moose hunt happens during different weeks in September and October around the state.”

“How many dead moose did you see?”

I thought back to my patrols during that long, hot week; the many times the agent at the tagging station had called to tell me a big bull had just come in on a trailer; the occasions when I had happened on a party of hunters field-dressing an animal in the woods.

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I know they tagged twenty-three at Day’s General Store.”

“Yes, I saw several being weighed as we drove by. They were lifted on a chain by their hind legs over that pole contraption they have set up there. All of them had been gutted beforehand, and there was a pool of blood on the ground. People were taking pictures. It was a grotesque spectacle.” She set her mug down on the arm of the chair. “The question I have for you is, how was that any different from what happened on my property?”

“The hunters who shot the moose didn’t just leave them to rot,” I said. “They’re going to eat the meat. In many cases, these men and their families are poor, and they are going to save hundreds of dollars in food bills. Nothing is going to waste.”

She waved her hand, and I saw that her fingernails were newly polished. “You pretend it’s all a utilitarian enterprise. What’s that word hunters always use? The deer harvest? That’s a cozy term for mass murder, in my opinion.” Her throaty voice began to rise in pitch. “But you’re deliberately ignoring the key similarity between the ‘legal’ hunters who gleefully pose for photographs with their trophies and the hunters who shot the moose on my land.”

“Which is what, ma’am?” I tried to keep the personal insult I was feeling out of my voice.

“The enthusiasm. The joy of killing another living thing. You hunters can pretend you’re engaged in some noble tradition that softhearted city people will never understand. But the truth is, you get a kick out of inflicting death, and I find that repugnant.”

I had heard this argument before many times when I was in college, and I had usually answered that Homo sapiens evolved as a species of hunters. It wasn’t some cultural artifact we would morally relinquish, the way we had slavery or leaving old people on ice floes. Hunting was woven into the strands of our DNA. It was the reason we had incisor teeth. Man is a meat eater-and always will be.

But I was already tired of debating with Elizabeth Morse, when what I wanted to be doing was searching for the men who had killed those animals. And the fact that I was stuck here, seemingly for the sole purpose of entertaining this wealthy woman’s whims, made me feel even more like a useless plaything.

“Then you and I disagree,” I said.

“Where did you grow up?” she asked me. “You don’t remind me of the other wardens I’ve met.”

“In what way?”

“You talk the same talk-about your proud outdoor heritage, et cetera-but it’s as if you’re pretending somehow. You don’t have much of a Maine accent, and your speech is different, not quite so folksy.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.

“The wardens I’ve met are always using words like critters to describe animals. It’s like you come from a very different background than your sergeant and lieutenant. Where did you go to college?”

I paused before I answered. “Colby.”

“And what did you major in?”

“I was a history major.” I felt peeved that she had identified some special quality that separated me from my colleagues.

“My daughter was studying dance and theater at Bennington. Now she tells me she wants to work for my foundation. She wants to use my money to help ‘people instead of animals,’ she says. Her latest fixation is curing typhoid fever in Zambia and Zimbabwe. I notice you don’t wear a wedding ring.”

This woman took a lot of liberties. “No, ma’am.”

“I think Briar likes you.”

“She’s a lovely young woman,” I said.

She leaned back in her Adirondack chair and brought her hand to her chin. She studied me with those perceptive hazel eyes. “I’ve decided to raise the reward I’m offering to twenty thousand dollars. What do you think about that?”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Not to me, it’s not,” she said. “The question is whether it’s enough money to achieve the outcome I desire.”

“In this part of the world, I would say it is.”

“Good, then perhaps you can help me get the word out through whatever channels you use for these things.”

“We have a program called Operation Game Thief.”

She made an amused noise in the back of her throat. “Another euphemism.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Game. As in something you play.” She stood up from the chair and stood in a place where the sun was shining directly behind her, surrounding her silhouette with a celestial aura. “Dexter mentioned that I’m flying to New York today. I have some meetings, and I’m going to tape segments with the network morning shows tomorrow about the shootings. I’d thought of having you appear with me on TV-you are articulate and photogenic-but I have a feeling the idea would give your Lieutenant Rivard a fit. And I don’t get the sense that you enjoy the limelight.”

Nor would I enjoy being used as a prop to advance your park proposal, I thought.

“I don’t think the Maine Warden Service wants me to be its official spokesman,” I said, rising to my feet. “But I could check with the corporal down in Augusta who handles information requests. Perhaps he would be available to go with you.”

“It was just a fleeting idea I had. Now I should go pack some things. You’re free to stay or go. I’ll give you a call when I need you again.”

And with that, I was dismissed. In Queen Elizabeth’s eyes, I was just another servant. I was beginning to understand Billy’s resentments.

“Have a safe trip,” I said.

“And good luck with your investigation. By the way, do you know what Thoreau’s last word was?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“It was moose. I’m coming to see that as an auspicious omen for me.”

I put a call into the Augusta headquarters and told the corporal who handled the media for the Warden Service about Elizabeth Morse’s twenty-thousand-dollar reward. He whistled when I told him the sum. It would be the largest amount of money ever offered through Operation Game Thief, he said.

The comment made me reflect on Morse’s wordplay: game, as in a wild animal killed by hunters; game, as in a childish form of recreation. I didn’t want to think too hard on the point she had been trying to make.

Leaf Woodwind escorted me to the Sixth Machias gate. He sat in my passenger seat, reeking so much of marijuana, it seemed like almost a deliberate attempt to taunt me. After riding with him for a few minutes, however, I concluded that the old hippie was just heedless of how obviously drugged he was.

“So you guys really don’t have any leads on this thing?” he asked.

“We have a few.”

“Man, I hope you do, because Betty isn’t the most patient person on the planet.”

I looked at him out of the side of my sunglasses, keeping my head facing the road. “I heard you used to be her business partner.”

“Yeah, I was. Back in the eighties.” He stroked his beard softly, as if it were a pet he’d owned a long time. “But I never really saw it that way, you know? To me, it was more like we were together and the business stuff was just something we did to pass the time.”

“I can’t really picture Elizabeth Morse as a back-to-the-lander.”

He had a laugh that was more of a deep-throated giggle. “Betty was always more of a pretend hippie. The first time I saw her, she was standing next to this overheating VW Super Beetle, with her hair all in crazy curls, wearing this peasant dress. I asked her where she was heading, and she said nowhere. She was just this restless young thing exploring the Maine countryside. So I gave her a ride, and we ended up back at the shack where I was living, and Betty thought it was the coolest place in the world. She had read the Nearings, you know? She had all these fantasies of eating only food she grew herself and living the good life. She moved in with me that night. I was a bit older than her so I couldn’t believe my luck. I didn’t realize she was this rich kid from Boston.”

Like most cannabis aficionados I had met, Leaf was a talkative character. I let him ramble.

“I had this herb garden back then,” he continued. “And I used to dry and sell my stuff at various farmers’ markets-parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, as the song goes. But one day, Betty heard two guys at the next stall talking about medicinal plants, and she suddenly got all interested in growing milk thistle and chickweed and nettle leaf. She started making tinctures and extracts and teas. I thought it was kind of fun at first, experimenting, but Betty was all business from the start. She got one of our artist friends to draw up the EarthMother logo to put on the packages. Then she took over a barn down the road and hired these local women to help her brew everything. The next thing I knew, she was driving all over New England to co-ops and head shops to sell her herbal products. I don’t know why it surprised me when she told me she wanted to move out of the shack to a real farm, where she could have a bigger operation. But I wasn’t interested in moving, and so she asked me to sign a paper giving up my rights to the business, and I did because it was always her thing and not mine, and we peacefully parted ways. Eight months later, she sent me a letter telling me she’d had a baby girl she’d named Briar.”

“Briar’s your daughter?”

“Betty’s never told me for sure, and I’ve never asked. We were into free love, man. What can I say?”

I didn’t have a clue how to respond to this. “Isn’t that strange for all of you? Briar doesn’t want to know who her father is?”

He pushed his glasses back higher on the bridge of his nose. “I’d say that anyone who has Betty Morse for a mom doesn’t need another parent. I think that’s how they both feel. But looking at Briar does make me smile, I have to say.”

We passed the dry meadow where we’d found the first moose. A small flock of migrating sparrows that was feeding along the roadside took off, each bird flying away in its own crazy direction. When I’d first driven onto Elizabeth Morse’s woodland estate, I’d had the feeling of entering a different world. Now it seemed like more of an alternate universe.

“After all that,” I said, “how did you ever end up working as her personal assistant?”

“I got busted for growing dope-it was a game warden pilot who spotted my little plantation, actually-and then the IRS took my shack for nonpayment of taxes. Betty somehow heard I was in trouble, and she asked if I wanted a job, and I didn’t have a whole lot of options, you know?”

His muscles had tensed up when he mentioned being arrested for marijuana cultivation, and for the first time during this conversation, I remembered that he’d been a soldier in the Mekong Delta long ago. I wondered what roiling emotions the harmless old stoner might be keeping at bay through regular hits from the bong. Leaf had been Elizabeth’s business partner, but now he was merely her assistant. He was seemingly Briar’s father, but Morse had denied bestowing that status on him, as well. I couldn’t imagine how the man lived with himself.

“If you had kept your share of the business, you could have been rich,” I said.

“That’s true. But I’ve never needed a whole lot to be happy.”

We entered the thick stand of evergreens, then a minute later rolled to a stop in front of the Sixth Machias gate. As he reached for the door handle, I couldn’t help but ask, “The situation doesn’t make you feel bitter at all?”

“Sometimes, yeah, it does.”

“How do you deal with it?”

Leaf Woodwind shook his head and giggled again, as if the answer were staring me in the face. “I get high, man. I get high.”