Massacre Pond

29

There were two ways back to my cabin. The longer one looped through Grand Lake Stream, acquiring a coating of asphalt along the way, turned east for eight miles to Indian Township, and then veered south again along Route 1 through Princeton and Woodland before it joined up with the highway that would carry me back into the familiar confines of District 58 and, eventually, the long dirt lane that led to my cabin.

Then there was the direct route. Unpaved and frequently blocked by toppled trees, it tunneled through the forest without passing a single secluded residence. A driver could break down on that remote logging road and wait twelve hours, or longer, for another vehicle to pass by. If he was lucky, the vehicle wouldn’t be a truck full of pill smugglers.

I chose the road less taken because I needed to get my head together.

Charley and his daughter had seen through my fraudulent excuse for leaving. After I got over the initial embarrassment, I thought about her silent, sullen reaction. My presence hadn’t even seemed to register with her over dinner, so why had my abrupt departure caused her to act that way?

The question didn’t merit an answer. I’d just promised myself to stop obsessing over Matt Skillen’s future wife. Instead, I needed to focus on the things that truly mattered now: my mother’s cancer and the investigation that might yet determine whether I would decide to leave my job with the Maine Warden Service.

By choosing the forest route, I had put myself out of the reach of cell phones for a solid hour. I wouldn’t get a signal again until I intersected with Route 9 outside Wesley. In retrospect, this had been a dumb move, since I’d wanted to call Neil to check on my mom’s condition. In researching chemotherapy online, I’d read that many people didn’t experience any of the most-feared side effects-nausea, vomiting, fever-until twenty-four hours or more after their first injection. I found myself praying that my mother was sleeping soundly at the moment.

My lower legs were cold; I hadn’t realized it until now. The heat wave didn’t seem to be breaking so much as shattering like a sheet of dropped glass. I hadn’t turned the heater on for months, and the vents gave off the musty odor of an abandoned nest.

A pair of yellow eyes flashed in my high beams, and I stepped hard on my brakes. A coyote-gray and reddish brown-bounded across the dirt road at the edge of the light. In Maine, they grew as big as wolves, and this one was as large as any I’d ever seen. I let my heart return to its normal rhythm before continuing on again.

My BlackBerry chimed as I was cresting the ridge above the Chain Lakes. I stopped the pickup in the center of the dark road and checked the phone’s lighted display. I was still miles from civilization and couldn’t imagine the possible vectors of radio waves that would have allowed a transmission to reach this spruce-blanketed hilltop.

I saw that I had received three missed calls from the same number, my stepfather’s, but Neil had not seen fit to leave a voice mail. He had, however, sent an e-mail message an hour ago:

Mike-

Tried your number a few times. I understand your work takes you out of cell coverage sometimes but had expected to hear from you before now. Your mother got through the procedure fine. The oncologist said it couldn’t have gone any better, although he said she had more questions about losing her hair than about anything else. You know how she is about her hair. She woke up nauseous a little while ago. So far no vomiting. This regimen is very aggressive, the doctor said. He expects significant side effects from the chemo, and there is always the risk of infection in these cases from bacteria in the GI tract. I’d appreciate a call when you get this. Day or night. Please.

— Neil

I pushed redial on the last-received call. The phone started to ring and then the signal dropped. I tried a second time and got the same result. The single bar had disappeared, and the display now showed no coverage, even when I plugged the phone into the booster. Such were the vagaries of mobile communications in the Maine North Woods. I decided I would try him again once I hit the highway.

Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again. I snatched it up without looking at the display and said, “Neil?”

“Mike?” The voice belonged to a woman.

“Briar?”

“I’m having trouble hearing you.”

I raised my voice, as if that would somehow make a difference. “Briar, I’m here. Are you OK?”

“I can barely hear you. You sound like you’re about to break up.” The weakness of the transmission was distorting her voice, but I sensed a distinct note of panic in it. “Someone’s chasing me again. I don’t know where I am, Mike!”

I stopped the truck. “Are you in the woods?”

“I went for a drive again. The guard said to stay away from town, so I went-”

I turned off the engine to quiet the squealing belt. “Say again.”

“Maybe the Stud Mill Road. I don’t know!”

“Your car has a GPS, right?”

“It doesn’t show logging roads!”

“That doesn’t matter. What you want is the compass function. Head east.”

“East?”

“You’re either going to hit a bigger road or you’ll come to one of the rivers or lakes. Most of them have roads that follow the shore. Turn north if you do. That will take you back in the direction of Grand Lake Stream.”

“East and then north. What if I see that truck again, though?”

I didn’t have an answer to that particular question, other than to hope that she didn’t. “I’m going to head back toward Grand Lake Stream. In a minute, we’re probably going to lose our signal, but I will keep trying your number.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“Just keep hitting redial!”

“Mike? Mike?”

Then she was gone. All I heard on the other end was a drone. I restarted my engine and did a sharp three-point turn in the road, starting back north again toward Little Wabassus. I hadn’t asked Briar if it was the same truck following her as before. Maybe when I came to that hilltop, I would get a signal again. I hoped to God I would. Finding her in these woods wouldn’t be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. It would be more like finding a single pine needle in a forest of pines.