Massacre Pond

19

With the rest of my afternoon free, I decided to pay a visit to the home of Billy Cronk. I figured I would give myself a couple of hours before I alerted anyone that I had been temporarily dismissed as Elizabeth Morse’s personal liaison. And I wanted to have a frank talk with my friend about his strange behavior over the past forty-eight hours.

On the way, I stopped to use the outhouse at the rest area where Route 9 crossed over the babbling East Machias River. Given what a beautiful day it was, I would have expected to see picnickers at the raised grills and red cedar tables, but there was only a single vehicle in the paved lot: a black Sierra Denali. The truck was brand-new, recently washed and waxed. I didn’t recognize the plate number, but I had a vague sense of having seen the expensive pickup around town. The driver was probably fishing on the river. I decided to have a look at him.

Wardens spend a lot of our time spying on people. If your intention is to catch someone taking too many trout, there is no better substitute than watching him from behind a bush. The anglers we arrest-or “pinch”-for these misdemeanor offenses complain that our methods are sneaky and unfair, but most law-enforcement officers aren’t prone to worrying whether the ends justify the means.

I made a semicircle away from the river and then back again, heading for an upstream pool where fishermen liked to dunk worms. Whirlygig samaras spun down from the sugar maples on their rotary blades: the seeds of future giants.

Eventually, I heard voices and spotted a flash of movement through the alders that hugged the riverbank. I crept close to the water, getting lower and lower as I went, until I was crawling on my hands and knees through the puckerbrush.

Out in the river, a man was trying to teach a very small boy how to cast a fly line. My first thought was that it was a father and son. Both were dark-haired and on the skinny side. The man wore a fishing vest and khaki waders; the boy was dressed in a white T-shirt and bathing trunks, and he was having a hard time managing the long fly rod. His fluorescent yellow line just flopped on his head when he tried to throw it forward into the current.

“No trate de forzarlo, Tomas,” the man said.

It was Matt Skillen and his “little brother,” I realized.

“No puedo hacerlo,” said the boy.

My college Spanish had gotten rusty, but I didn’t need a translator to understand that the kid was feeling frustrated.

“Watch me,” said Skillen in English. He took the rod from the boy’s hand and executed a beautiful roll cast that fully extended the leader and dropped a bushy dry fly in the eddy behind a boulder. Just as the fly hit the water, a fish rose to bite it. I knew at once that it was a brook trout because of the glimpse of orange I saw on its underbelly, and I knew that it was big.

Skillen set the hook and then handed the rod back to the boy, who seemed reluctant to take it. “Reel it in, Tomas! Keep the line tight!”

Tomas had a hard time keeping the tip of the rod up and working the reel. I was certain that the trout would escape, but Skillen leaned over and guided the boy’s hands, almost the way a father would teach a young child to pedal a bicycle. The man was doing all the work, but the boy was the one laughing.

After a few minutes of playing the fish, Skillen maneuvered the trout into the net. It was a beautiful male brookie, more than a foot long, with an impressively hooked jaw. Skillen unhooked the fly from the fish’s lip and lifted the dripping net for the boy to see.

“Wow, Tomas! Look how beautiful he is. Your first fish on a fly rod. We need to take it home to show your mama.”

“Pero lo agarro.”

“No, no,” Skillen said, putting the fish into an old-fashioned wicker creel. “You caught this one. I just helped. Come on, let’s see if we can catch an even bigger one.”

On the boy’s face was the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

I could have made my presence known to them; I could have congratulated Tomas on his magnificent trout. But the scene seemed so private, I felt almost embarrassed to be watching, especially from behind a bush. Tomas would never forget this moment. My own father had never taught me how to fish like this. Never once had he shown me such patience and kindness. And so, as much as I wanted to resent Matt Skillen for being the man Stacey had chosen over me, I found myself unable to dislike him.

As quietly as I could, I crept away through the alders and left the two of them alone on the sun-spangled river.

When I arrived at Billy’s house, I found Aimee stringing wet sheets along a clothesline between two trees. The Cronklets were nowhere in sight, but Billy and Aimee seemed to worry less about their children’s safety than did parents in more urbanized areas. At first, I had viewed the Cronks’ approach to parenting as something like negligence, but over time, I had watched the eldest boy carrying the youngest girl up and down stairs, seen a younger child chastising his twin for climbing atop the picnic table when he’d clearly been told not to, and I’d realized that child care was more of an art than a science, and that I should be careful about making judgments on a subject I knew nothing about.

“Hey, Mike,” Aimee said, pushing a red strand of hair out of her eyes and gripping the clothesline with her other hand, as if for support. “Billy’s taken his bow and gone turkey hunting.”

“That answers one of my questions,” I said. “How long was he in jail?”

“The sheriff let him out yesterday morning. I think she was only holding him overnight to make a point. But she’s the law, so whatever. Billy’s still facing a trespassing charge.”

“The DA isn’t charging him with assault on Khristian?”

“Threatened to,” she said, “but everyone seems to agree it was more like self-defense than Billy kicking the shit out of that old dwarf.”

I glanced around at the second-growth forest that clustered at the edges of the Cronks’ dooryard. The oaks had held on to their tattered brown leaves, but the limbs of the maples, birches, and beeches had mostly been stripped bare by the autumn winds. An old skidder trail led up through the woods to an overgrown field where I knew Billy liked to hunt.

“Is he up that way?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said. “But you won’t find him unless he wants to be found.”

I started off around the house, feeling the Indian summer heat on my neck, wondering when it would finally break. By the time Moosehorn National Park ever received its official designation, Elizabeth Morse’s dreams of creating a sanctuary for boreal flora and fauna would be foiled by global warming. Instead of observing woodland caribou and timber wolves in their natural habitat, visitors would see feral pigs and opossums; rather than wandering beneath the boughs of hemlocks and jack pine, they would pass through sapling thickets of dogwoods and blue ash. The scorching weather might or might not be a harbinger of climate change, but it was definitely turning my thoughts in morbid directions.

As I came around the corner, I heard the shouted voices of children, overloud, as kids always are. Then, all at once, they fell silent. I raised my shaded eyes at an ancient red oak in which Billy had constructed a ramshackle tree house, with irregularly carved windows and a dangerous-looking ladder that would undoubtedly snap beneath the weight of an adult. Several blond heads poked out through the haphazard windows and doors. The kids were all gathered inside like a nest of raccoons, and like baby animals, they knew to be quiet when an unknown presence approached.

“Hey, guys,” I said.

The Cronklets watched me silently. As soon as I had passed by up the hill, the urchins resumed their raucous play.

Billy had cut wood from his hillside lot the previous winter and brought it down the skidder trail. The machinery had flattened the alders and poplars that had been threatening to overtake the path, but the resilient little trees had spent the summer rebounding, and so I had to push through some scratchy vegetation in places. The fallen leaves on the ground-a pattern of red and silver-reminded me of a Persian carpet. Every now and then, I came across one of Billy’s big boot prints, but I knew that his wife was right that he could vanish into the foliage whenever he chose. My friend wasn’t as expert a woodsman as my father-no one was-but I always learned a trick or two whenever I followed him into the forest.

Aimee said he was bow hunting for wild turkeys, which meant he was probably decked out in full camo. Most turkey hunters liked to set up decoys and then settle down to call the birds into shooting range. Billy preferred to stalk them, which was a pretty good way to get yourself shot by another hunter, in my opinion. My friend scoffed at the dangers.

“If I don’t spot another hunter before he can take a crack at me, then I deserve to die,” he’d said.

After wandering aimlessly along the trail for a while, I decided to make things easy on myself and stood in place and started hollering his name at the top of my lungs.

Billy appeared after a few minutes, carrying his bow over one arm, and with a dead jake turkey slung over the other.

“That’s another stupid thing to do,” I said.

He removed the camouflage hat and face mask he had been wearing. “What is?”

“Toting a dead turkey on your back. There are crazy hunters who will see a flash of what looks like a moving bird and open fire.”

“I’ll take my chances.” His pale irises were even more humorless than that night at Khristian’s. “What do you want?”

“You’re not going to thank me for helping Aimee pick up your truck?”

“Thank you.”

“The last time I saw you, you were telling me what a good friend I was. What the hell happened?”

“I spent a night in jail.”

He lowered the turkey to the ground. It was a simultaneously handsome and disgusting creature; its iridescent brown feathers shined in the sunlight as if oiled, but its bald, misshapen head had blotches of venous blue and arterial red that made me think of a diseased old man.

“Well, I just spent the day with your former employer,” I said. “Rivard made me Betty Morse’s personal liaison with the moose investigation.”

“Did you talk to her about me getting my job back?”

“Frankly, I think you’re better off that she fired you.”

“Tell that to the power company when they come to cut off our electricity.” He ran his hand across his tanned, sweaty face. His beard needed trimming. “I’m sorry I’m in such a piss-poor mood. I just can’t see the bright side of anything today.”

“Well, you bagged a turkey,” I said.

He grunted and came very near to smiling. “Yeah, I guess.”

“So what’s going on with you, Billy? You’ve been acting really strange ever since the morning we found those moose. McQuarrie asked you to stay at the gate, but instead you took off for God knows where without telling anyone. The next thing I know, you’re outside Karl Khristian’s bunker, daring him to shoot you. What gives?”

“I didn’t want to lose my job,” he said. “I figured if I helped crack the case quick, I would be a hero.”

I wanted to believe him, but the explanation seemed forced. “There’s something else. Stacey Stevens backtracked the first moose to the spot where it was shot. It turns out it was killed outside the gate, and right nearby was an empty Bud pounder.”

“So?”

“Bud pounders are what you drink. The forensic guys are going to dust that can for fingerprints. They’re not going to find your prints, I hope.”

He clapped his hand to his shining forehead again. “They might. I litter sometimes. Cans fall out of the back of my truck. It sure as shit doesn’t mean I shot any of them moose.”

“Billy, they already have your prints on one of the shell casings,” I said.

“I picked that up by accident!”

“Rivard is hell-bent on hanging someone for these killings, and because you have a poaching conviction, your name is near the top of his list.”

“God fucking damn it!”

For the first time since the night we’d met, I felt nervous around Billy Cronk. I had to prevent my hand from drifting down to my service weapon. “You need to tell me you didn’t have anything to do with what happened on Morse’s property that night,” I said.

“You don’t trust me?”

“That’s not an answer.”

He spun around in a complete circle, nearly stomping on the head of the bird. “I can’t believe you’d accuse me of that, Mike.”

It wasn’t lost on me that he was evading the simple question I had asked. But instead of helping him to open up to me, my approach seemed to be having the opposite effect and antagonizing him. I decided to change tactics.

“Betty Morse is offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons who killed the moose,” I said.

He became suddenly still. “No shit?”

“No shit,” I said.

“Do you think she’d give me the money if I was the one who provided the information?” he asked.

“I don’t see why not-as long as you weren’t involved with the crime.”

He glared at me with a hardness that did nothing to dispel my worries. “You should talk to gun dealers.”

“We have been. Cody Devoe has been making the rounds of the local stores, asking if they sold any twenty-twos lately.”

Billy shook his head. “I mean the private dealers, the ones who sell under the table. When I worked for Call of the Wild, we bought some used guns from these two guys named Pelkey and Beam. They work with my brother-in-law over to Skillen’s, but they’ve got a sideline dealing guns for cash.”

“Lots of people do around here,” I said. “Besides, two nights ago, you were convinced Karl Khristian was the shooter.”

“I’ve been thinking what you said about it being two guys. That fucker KKK doesn’t have a friend in the world.”

“Where do these Pelkey and Beam guys live?” I asked.

“Talmadge,” he said. “They live together.”

“Together?” I held up two fingers, one twisted around the other. “As in together?”

“Some chick lives with them, too. But who knows what they all do behind closed doors.”

“So what made you think of them in particular?” I asked.

“I went with Joe Brogan to their trailer a couple of times to try out some deer rifles. We wanted to get some cheap thirty-thirties and thirty-aught-sixes-you know, big-caliber rifles for guests who weren’t the best shots and could use the extra stopping power. The weird thing was, this Pelkey guy kept trying to talk us into buying twenty-two Mags instead. He said it was more of a challenge using the smaller caliber. Brogan told him our clients were challenged enough without using squirrel guns.”

“What’re their full names?”

“Todd Pelkey and Lewis Beam. Will I get the reward if it turns out to be them?”

I thought about how to answer his question honestly, knowing the consequences of being truthful here. In the end, I decided that, however cagey he was being with me, Billy Cronk was my friend, and I wasn’t going to lie to him. “If it’s just your bringing forward their names, I’m guessing it would be no.”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Billy,” I said.

He reached down and grabbed the turkey by its long scaly legs. As he passed, I caught a whiff of the dead jake. I had forgotten how much turkeys stink.

“Where are you going?” I called after him.

“I’ve got to tag this bird down to Day’s store before Aimee can cook it,” he said. “Don’t want any game wardens to accuse me of poaching it!”

The odor of the dead bird left a bad taste in my mouth.