Massacre Pond

36

Whoever had built my cabin had used logs from the same spruce and fir trees that stood as sentinels around it. Sometimes I fancied that I lived in a house of bones. Tonight was one of those occasions.

Cluster flies buzzed along the dusty sills. I would open the window to let one swarm out and then discover that another swarm had appeared on the inside of the glass the next morning. I had no clue where the big gray insects came from or how they got in, but their incessant buzzing was like static inside my brain.

I dumped the empty beer cans into a milk crate I used for recycling and sat down at the table with a glass of milk. Of all the mysteries in my life at the moment, Billy Cronk had to be the most frustrating. I’d convinced myself that the hardened face he showed the world was just a mask he’d forged during tours of duty in distant war zones. I would watch him play with his ragamuffin kids or stare adoringly at his sweet wife, and I would decide that he really was a kind and gentle man, someone with whom I could be friends. Then he would look at me with those frost-colored eyes, and I would have a vision of him manning an observation post in Afghanistan, firing M240 machine-gun rounds into the bodies of advancing Taliban fighters, and I would begin to distrust my instincts.

Time after time in my life, I’d come to the conclusion that human beings are essentially unknowable. I’d been betrayed enough that I should have stopped trying to figure other people out and accept them for the enigmas they were. And yet, some stubborn, foolish part of me refused to go through life that way. I wanted to believe in Billy. More than that, I needed to.

After I’d eaten my usual unhealthy dinner-burritos that went mushy in the microwave and were made palatable only with a slathering of Tabasco-I checked in on my mother’s progress.

“Hello, Michael,” my stepfather said when I reached him on his cell.

“Hey, Neil,” I said. “I just wanted to check in and see how she was doing.”

“Fine, fine.” He sounded distracted. “She’s sleeping again.”

Despite the autumnal darkness, it was still pretty early. My mom seemed to be sleeping a great deal, but for all I knew, fatigue was a side effect of the chemotherapy. I figured having your bloodstream filled with tumor-killing chemicals must be exhausting.

“Is everything all right down there?” I asked.

“Well, this is new territory for the both of us. We haven’t been sure what to expect and-I’m actually waiting to speak with the oncologist now.”

He said this in an offhand way, but the muscles in my stomach tightened. “What’s wrong?”

“Just trying to sort out the side effects.”

“What side effects?”

“She has a bit of a temperature, but nothing alarming. The doctor told us that mild fever was to be expected.” He paused, as if something had caught his attention. “I have another call, and it may be the oncologist. Can I call you right back?”

“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”

I sat at the table for half an hour, waiting for my cell to ring again, but it never did. After a while, I got up and cleaned my greasy dish in the sink and lay down on the bed in my full uniform. I fell asleep in minutes.

When I awoke, the room seemed overly bright. Sunlight was poking in through the south-facing window of the cabin, but not hard enough to account for the intense illumination before me. It took a moment to realize I’d left the overhead lights blazing. And a new swarm of cluster flies was bouncing off the windowpanes.

I shaved in the shower and found the last clean undershirt in my bureau. One of these days, I’d need to drive into Machias with my Bronco loaded with bags of laundry. I could only get by for so long hand-washing underwear and T-shirts in the sink and hanging them on the line I’d strung between the pines. The owner of the Wash-O-Mat didn’t like cops. He didn’t have the guts to bar me from his establishment, but he treated my every visit as if it were an incitement, which to some degree it was. Living in a small community, you didn’t have the luxury of avoiding your enemies.

Or your friends.

Unless McQuarrie had need of me this morning-and there were no messages from him saying that he did-I decided to make my first stop of the day Billy Cronk’s house. I wanted to see whether he’d ever returned from his “walkabout.” Our conversation had left me unsettled, and while I could have checked in with him over the phone, I preferred to see his expression when I asked him again what information he was hiding from me.

“He’s come and gone,” said Aimee Cronk. She stood in the doorway of her home with the youngest of their straw-haired children tucked under her arm. The baby was red-faced from bawling, but his mother paid the noise no attention.

A chill wind was blowing at my back. There had been a coating of hoarfrost on my truck thick enough that I’d needed to scrape the windshield before setting out. “Gone where?”

With her free hand, she readjusted the scrunchie holding her ginger-red hair in place. “He told me this is the day he finds a job again.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Skillen’s.”

“The mill just laid off a bunch of guys. Why would Billy think they were hiring?”

“Why does he think any of the things he thinks?” She phrased the sentence less like a question with an answer and more like a declaration of her husband’s essential naivete.

Once again, I found myself envying Billy. No matter how often he fell ass-first into trouble, he still had a loyal wife at home who could see into his heart as if it were sculpted out of glass. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be known like that by another person.

“I heard about that Morse girl,” Aimee said. “Billy said you liked her. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re going to go looking for him today, ain’t you?”

This unschooled woman’s ability to make deductions was far better than that of half the law officers I knew.

“I thought I might.”

“Tell him supper is at five o’clock sharp,” she said before she closed the door.

I knew she was really telling me to make sure he got home. We were both worried about him, I realized.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky this morning, but a wind was gusting out of the northwest, and the sun seemed unable to generate any real heat, as if it were spent after burning too bright for too long. I remembered the old couple my mom and I had met in the parking lot near Massacre Pond on our way to Scarborough Beach. The man had used a particular phrase to describe weather like this. “A bluebird day,” he’d called it.

The only birds I saw were my two ravens. They might not have been the same ones, probably weren’t, in fact. But watching them coast over the leafless treetops, riding the wind the way surfers negotiate a crashing wave, I experienced a sense of deja vu that sent my thoughts spinning back to the Morse estate on the morning we’d found the dead moose.

What is Billy up to? I wondered.

He might have been desperate enough to apply for a job at Skillen’s, knowing the odds were against him. Or he might have been lying to Aimee about his intended destination for the day. In spite of everything, I preferred to give him the benefit of the doubt. When I reached the main road, I turned the wheel in the direction of Skillen’s lumber mill.

The phone rang. “You’re never going to believe this,” McQuarrie said in a voice that told me he was smiling.

Considering his sour mood the last time I’d seen him, I didn’t know what to make of this metamorphosis. “Try me.”

“The MDEA asked Devoe to bring Tomahawk to LeClair’s place this morning,” he said. “They wanted the dog to nose around the property. They figured Chubby might have kept his stash somewhere within reach. Probably not on his own land-Chub was stupid, but not that stupid-but close enough that he could fill an order if some junkie showed up at his door in the middle of the night wanting a kick in the noggin.”

Like most of the veteran wardens in the service, Mack liked nothing better than to spin a yarn. I’d learned to shut up and let the old guys tell their stories. It was faster than interrupting them with questions.

“So Devoe and the K-9 are roaming around the joint,” he continued in his hoarse, happy voice. “Tommie’s not a drug dog, but if you give her a whiff of Mary Jane, she knows what you’re after. Anyway, they’re poking around every tree stump on that hillside, when the dog goes crazy. She practically pulls Devoe out of his boots. She races to this big pile of leaves and starts digging. Guess what was buried underneath it.”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“A trash bag with two rifles in it,” he said.

“Twenty-twos?”

“Yeah. A Marlin 780 and a Browning SA-22.”

He waited for me to leap to the natural conclusion: “So Chubby and an accomplice-maybe the Indian boy-drove out to Morse’s land, somehow found their way through one of the locked gates, expertly executed a bunch of moose, and then drove back to his Airstream, where they then carelessly hid the rifles in a plastic bag in the backyard.”

“The point is, we found the fucking twenty-twos.” Mack no longer sounded like he was wearing a ten-karat grin.

“So you think Bard was right about Chubby?”

“It sure as hell looks that way.”

“But it doesn’t change the fact that he shot that boy.”

“Jeremy’s still in deep shit,” my sergeant said. “He’s going to have a hard time selling self-defense to the AG, but now at least there’s something to back him up about LeClair. Those rifles give him extenuating circumstances.”

“Come on, Mack,” I said. “He recklessly discharged his weapon, and a fourteen-year-old kid died.”

“He fucked up. But maybe his career isn’t totally in the shitter.”

I had a hard time summoning any good feelings toward Bard, who deserved to lose his badge, in my opinion, although I was hardly one to pass judgment on a fellow warden accused of carelessness. “Have you talked to him?”

“I tried his place. His girlfriend said he went out. Didn’t take his phone.”

I nearly swerved off the road. “What? He just got shot in the head!”

“It was just a scratch. You know how heavy a cut on the head bleeds. The ER docs sent him home last night in record time.”

So now Bard had gone off on a walkabout as well. When he returned home, he was going to find he’d won the lottery. And he wasn’t the only big winner this morning.

“Rivard must be relieved,” I said.

“Yeah, well, he’s still got half of Augusta calling for his ass on a platter. But you’ve got to figure this news has definitely brightened his day.”

“Has it occurred to anyone that the guns might have been dumped there last night?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“If the ballistic techs can match those guns to the bullets we dug out of the moose, then it’s case closed. Pretty convenient. Wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m still not following you, kid.”

“Everyone in the county must have heard about Chubby and that Indian kid. If you had shot those moose and were hanging on to those rifles, could you have come up with a better place to get rid of them than in the woods behind that camper?”

Mack disappeared into silence for a half a minute. When he returned, it was with a caustic laugh. “You really do have an overactive imagination. People have been telling me you’re all into riddles and conspiracies. I hate to tell you, Mikey, but sometimes life ain’t that complicated. Your number-one suspect is usually the one who did it.”

Dead leaves tumbled across the asphalt in front of my truck. “So I guess this means I’m free, then.”

“Free?”

“You don’t need my help with the investigation anymore.”

“Not unless Zanadakis needs you for something,” Mack said. “Why? Have you got other plans?”

A row of pines appeared alongside the road. All of the trees were the same height and sharply pointed, and together they reminded me of a turreted green wall. A wide lane led through a gap in the trees to a distant, unseen smokestack from which a column of white vapor was billowing into the cloudless sky. A sign loomed ahead: SKILLEN LUMBER COMPANY: SINCE 1879.

“I might,” I said.