Massacre Pond

35

The boy’s name was Marky Parker. One of the Passamaquoddy officers who arrived at the scene knew him. He said Marky had gotten into some trouble on the rez for drugs and alcohol, but nothing serious. He was a good kid, the policeman said.

“I didn’t know the boy was in there,” Bard told Sergeant McQuarrie. “Honestly, Mack, I had no idea.”

The paramedics had managed to staunch Bard’s wound with a powdered clotting agent and a linen bandage wrapped tightly around the skull. They’d even managed to clean most of the dried blood off his pug-nosed face with alcohol swabs, although the process had tinted his skin orange in places. The EMTs made him lie flat in the back of the ambulance as a precaution. Bard had already fainted once when he’d attempted to look inside the camper himself.

The injured warden stared up at us with wide, imploring eyes that still had flecks of blood stuck in the lashes. He was such a muscular, energetic man, it was strange to see him in a posture of such helplessness. “There was no way for me to know that Chubby had a kid in there with him,” he said. “You have to believe me.”

McQuarrie wore the expression of a man who has just received a call from his oncologist. His broad shoulders seemed bent, and his chin kept sinking against his barrel chest. He had a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, which made me think of a chipmunk carrying a nut.

Bard gave me a twitchy, uncertain smile. “Bowditch, you can back me up here.”

I stared hard into his gray eyes; they reminded me at that moment of dirty nickels. But I didn’t say a word.

“Let me just tell you what happened from the beginning,” Bard said to McQuarrie.

The sergeant spat brown saliva onto the ground. “Stop talking, Jeremy.”

“But I’ve got nothing to hide.”

A vein began to pulse in my neck. “Listen to the sergeant, Bard.”

In a hoarser-than-usual voice, McQuarrie said, “You’ll have plenty of chances to tell it to the state cops and the AG’s office. They’re going to want a detailed statement on how this happened. I suggest you bring your lawyer to the interviews. In the meantime, my advice is to keep your trap shut.”

From his back on the gurney, Bard gave us a defiant glare. “They’re going to pay me while I’m suspended, though. I’m still going to get paid, right?”

“You’ll get your money,” I said.

Then I walked off to watch the activity around the camper.

Lieutenant Zanadakis had done a U-turn on his way to Machias and arrived shortly after the Passamaquoddy police. The deputy sheriff who had been directing traffic at Briar’s crash scene had sped over, only to be given the same thankless job here. Wardens Bayley and Sullivan stood talking beside their patrol trucks at the periphery of the action. Every few minutes, another cruiser would arrive. The sheriff, I’d heard, was on her way, along with the district attorney and the medical examiner. The attorney general would be sending one of his people, too.

I kept thinking about my last conversation with Chubby, how he’d called me in a panic, hoping I could persuade Bard to stop harassing him. It was hard for me to have much sympathy for a con man and drug dealer who had entertained half-naked kids in the privacy of his camper. LeClair probably deserved his violent end. The boy didn’t, though. The image of his blood-soaked body was seared into my brain in a way that made me think I’d carry it around forever. The fact that Marky was a Passamaquoddy lent this shooting an awkward political dimension, given the tensions that always existed between the tribe and the state of Maine. I had a feeling that powerful forces would demand a sacrificial animal be thrown onto the pyre. Jeremy Bard was about to get his ass roasted.

“And I thought this was going to be a good day,” Mack said in my ear. “First, Bilodeau gets those ballistic results. Then we arrest KKK without anyone firing a single shot. You’d think at my age I’d know better.”

“Maybe this is just one of those cursed investigations,” I said. “No matter what we do, it all turns to shit.”

“Do you believe in curses, kid?”

“I’m starting to.”

Mack let out a sigh that smelled of Skoal wintergreen. “So what do you think really happened here? Give it to me straight.”

“There are black dents in the door of the Airstream,” I said. “You can’t see them because the door is open, but I noticed the scuff marks before when I approached the camper. I bet the dents match the bottom of Bard’s boot. I think he came here trying to provoke Chub into doing something crazy. You heard the way Rivard laid into him this morning. Bard wanted to be the hero. He caught Chubby fondling a half-naked kid and spooked LeClair into opening fire. We’ll probably never know how it unfolded.”

“You don’t expect him to tell the truth?”

“Do you?”

I’d always had a cynical streak in me. It was just one of the emotional scars my father had inflicted on my character during my childhood. But my frequent bouts of pessimism had always been counterbalanced by a naive idealism: a belief that justice could be brought to the affairs of mankind, not in every case, but often enough to be worth the trouble. A sense of righteousness had led me to join the Warden Service. Now it seemed as if every sentence I uttered came barbed with sarcasm. And I didn’t like what I heard.

Once again, the state police would need to get a formal statement from me: the second in less than twenty-four hours. The deaths of Chubby LeClair and Marky Parker had pushed Briar out of my thoughts for a short while, but when I closed my eyes, I found myself returned instantly to the bend in the road where her car had gone airborne. Her broken body was another image I realized I would never exorcise from my haunted head.

The sky was growing dark and the trees had taken on silhouettes that reminded me of deformed men by the time Zanadakis finally gave me permission to leave. I’d already told my story three times: once to the detective, once to an assistant attorney general, and once to Sheriff Rhine. I’d probably need to tell the tale a fourth time when the Warden Service conducted its own internal affairs investigation into Jeremy Bard’s actions on this cold day in October.

On the drive home, I checked my messages and found a text from my former sergeant, Kathy Frost: “I heard the news today. Oh boy.”

I wasn’t sure what news she meant: Briar’s death, Karl Khristian’s arrest, or the shootings in Plantation No. 21. Probably all of the above. I missed Kathy’s wicked sense of humor. Her jokes had brought me back from many dark places in my rookie years, and it was probably no coincidence that my misgivings about the Warden Service had escalated after I’d been transferred from her squad. That was one of the reasons I’d been avoiding her. I didn’t want reminders of a time when I’d worked for supervisors I liked and respected. Better not to think about those days.

There was nothing at all on the phone from my stepfather-no texts, no e-mails, no voice mail. I needed to see my mom. I decided I would try Neil again after I’d microwaved a couple of burritos back at the hacienda.

Whatever plans I was making flew away like so many scared birds when I pulled up to my cabin and my headlights showed Billy Cronk sitting on my porch steps. He was wearing his camouflage hunting jacket, blue jeans, and heavy boots, and his golden hair was loose about his shoulders. He leaned forward, with his shoulders hunched, resting his forearms on his knees in a contemplative pose. On the pine needles at his feet, five pint-size Budweiser cans lay scattered.

I hadn’t left the porch light on, so when I shut off the truck, he disappeared back into the shadows. I reached for the SureFire I wore on my belt and shined it at his tanned face.

“What the hell, Billy?”

He squinted into the light. “I saved one for you.” He raised the last beer in the six-pack as if it were a peace offering.

“Thanks but no thanks. What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize for being a turd the other day.”

I glanced around my dooryard, realizing for the first time that the only other vehicle present besides my patrol truck was the Bronco. “Wait a minute. Where’s your pickup?”

“I walked here.”

“You live seven miles away!”

“Needed to think about a few things.”

I snapped off the light, plunging us both into darkness. “But you decided to stop for beers?”

“Figured you could use a few pops. But I’ve been waiting here awhile. Expected you to be home sooner.” He spoke in his usual decibel range, without slurring his words. I’d seen Billy drink prodigious quantities of alcohol on occasion, but he never displayed a hint of intoxication. When I didn’t accept the can from him, he popped the top and took a sip. “I heard about Briar.”

I reached down to collect the five empty cans. I arranged them in a row along the edge of the porch. “What did you hear?”

“She ran her sports car into a tree. Folks say someone was chasing her.”

I think he expected me to sit down next to him, but I remained on my feet. “Folks are right.”

“That fucking sucks.”

“Yes, it does.” I gave up and sat down beside him on the plank steps. “Is that why you decided to get wasted tonight?”

“It takes more than a few beers for that to happen,” he said. “It’s a shame about Briar. She was a crazy girl. She came on to me the first night we met at the lodge, but I didn’t do nothing, on account of Aimee. After that, she was kind of bitchy, to tell the truth. She bossed me around worse than her mom. I don’t think she was used to men telling her to keep her pants on.” He took a long drink of beer. “Do you know who it was who chased her?”

“Bilodeau thinks it was your buddy Karl Khristian.”

“Yeah, I heard you guys arrested him.”

I was always amazed at how quickly news traveled in the Maine woods. People might live miles apart, but when a barn went up in flames or a car skidded off the road, everyone seemed to know about it within a matter of minutes.

I rubbed my bare hands together against the cold. “It looks like your hunch about KKK was right.”

“Looks like it,” he said. “So I guess that means there’s no more reward.”

The thought of Betty Morse’s twenty thousand dollars hadn’t crossed my mind since my last conversation with Billy, but it was clear that my friend had been thinking of little else.

“There’s ballistic evidence linking Khristian to the shooting at Morse’s house, but I don’t think Bilodeau has anything yet linking him to those moose. Technically, I suppose that means there’s still a reward.”

He finished the beer and crushed the can in his big hand. Then he flung it away into the darkness.

I jumped after it. The half-frozen leaves crackled beneath my feet. “Come on, Billy, this is my yard.”

“Oh fuck,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m not thinking straight these days. My head feels like it’s full of spiders.”

I held on to the crushed can. “When I feel that way, it usually means I have a guilty conscience.”

He rose slowly to his feet and towered over me. In the moonlight, his face had the hardness of welded metal. “What do you mean?”

I wasn’t sure what I meant, other than that my friend was continuing to behave in odd ways, and I wanted to let him know that I’d taken notice. “If you walked here, you probably didn’t hear the news that Chubby LeClair killed himself.”

His response was to grunt. “Fucking child molester.”

I waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, I continued. “There was a Passamaquoddy kid named Marky Parker with him in his camper. The boy is dead, too.”

“Did Chub kill him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There was a shoot-out at the camper, and the boy was injured.”

“What kind of shoot-out?”

“Jeremy Bard says Chubby fired at him from the Airstream. The boy was probably caught in the cross fire.”

“Bard?” Billy gathered his pale hair in one big fist and twisted it into a knot. “Now that’s interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled at me; I could actually see his teeth shining in the moonlight. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a suspicious motherfucker?”

I leaned forward, trying to catch his eyes. “What do you know, Billy?”

He turned his shoulder and took a step away from me. “I know it’s time for me to go home to my wife and family.”

“Let me give you a ride,” I said.

“No thanks. I can find my way.”

“It’s seven miles,” I couldn’t help repeating.

“Yeah, but it’s a beautiful night.”

“I’m going to call Aimee and tell her where you are.” My tone sounded more threatening than I’d intended.

He paused at the edge of the clearing. I could barely make out his looming shape in the blackness beneath the evergreens. “If you do, you’ll only worry her. She’s used to me going off like this when there’s something on my mind. She calls them my ‘walkabouts.’ Says it’s an Australian word for walking and thinking. I’m sorry I drank the last beer, Mike.”

And with that, Billy Cronk melted as quietly as a deer into the forest.