Massacre Pond

9

My first call was to McQuarrie, alerting him to the.22 cartridge Stacey had found. He told me to hang tight while he sent another warden to “assist.”

My second call was to Billy Cronk’s cell phone. There was no answer.

I tried his home number and got Aimee on the fifth ring. “Oh, hello, Mike,” she said. “Is everything OK?”

“Sure, Aimee. Everything’s fine. Why do you ask?”

In the background a child bawled in that unconvincing way a hurt-acting child tends to do. “Billy said he was meeting you this morning, and he sounded real upset over the phone-I can always tell-and I haven’t heard from him. Now here you are calling the house. It has to do with Ms. Morse, don’t it?”

To the unsophisticated eye of the city slicker, Aimee Cronk might have looked like a backwoods stereotype. She tended to giggle easily and blink rarely. Giving birth to four kids had given her the shape of a Mesopotamian fertility goddess. Her outfits were assembled from the aisles of Wal-Mart: white Keds sneakers, ill-fitting mom jeans, flannel shirts, and a scrunchie to hold back her hair when she cooked the kids’ Hamburger Helper. But she was a tack-sharp young lady who had the highest emotional IQ of anyone I’d ever met.

“Yeah,” she had once told me, “my dad was a drunk. And so my brothers and me, we got real good at reading his moods wicked quick, ’cause otherwise we might get a slap across the face before we even opened our mouths.”

It was no wonder she and Billy had ended up together. The world looked at him and saw only his wild hair and ice-blue eyes and the raw strength of that long body. But Aimee noticed the gentleness in the way her husband stroked a cat, and she saw the faint mist in his eyes when he looked at the sunset lighting up the mountain above their house. If she had graduated from high school, she might’ve made one hell of a psychologist-or a detective.

“You’re right, Aimee,” I said. “I am kind of worried about him. Someone shot a bunch of moose last night on the Morse property and Billy feels responsible somehow. He’s worried Ms. Morse might blame him.” There seemed no reason to withhold this information, since her husband shared everything with her, as best I could tell. “He was supposed to be waiting for some wardens at the Sixth Machias Gate, but when I went by just now, I didn’t see his truck. I thought maybe Ms. Morse had sent him on an errand.”

“Nah, that ain’t it.” The child’s crying petered out, diminished to a few poorly delivered sobs. And then Aimee Cronk said, “It’s more likely he’s gone for a drive. That’s what he does when he’s wrestling with something and ain’t sure what to do.”

“If you hear from him soon, can you have him call me on my cell?”

“I definitely will do that.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve gotten you worrying about him, too, Aimee.”

“Worrying never helped me none, so I just avoid it,” she said. “Besides, I got three loads of laundry to do, and there’s an apple pie in the oven.”

* * *

McQuarrie sent Jeremy Bard to photograph and collect the spent shell casing. He was Rivard’s favorite among my sergeant’s men: a rookie even younger than me, but with that hard-core attitude you often see in new cops. He wore his hair in a “high and tight” buzz cut and lifted weights twice a day. His neck was thicker than his head.

“You didn’t touch it?” His suspicious tone implied I had.

“The shell is lying where Stacey first spotted it.”

“It is,” she confirmed.

He scanned the leaf litter and clumped sand along the roadside, squinted into the alders beyond. The bushes were all tangled in shadows. “Hmm.”

“There’s probably another shell along here somewhere,” I said.

He had close-set gray eyes. “Why do you say that?”

“Moose A was shot twice,” I said. “In the jaw and the lungs. Two shots, two shells.”

“The shooter could have picked up his brass.”

“That doesn’t seem to be his modus operandi.”

Bard stared at me.

“Method of operation,” I said. “Do you want me to help you search these alders or not?”

“You’re supposed to be checking out gravel pits,” he said.

“The pits will still be there an hour from now.”

“No, I’ll find it.” Locating the brass on his own had become a point of pride now, and there was no reasoning with him.

“Good luck, then.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Stacey asked me, pointing behind us. “There’s a Bud pounder can ten feet down the road there.”

In truth, I had forgotten about the beer can-probably because I didn’t want to contemplate its association in my mind with Billy Cronk.

Bard frowned at me. “Anything else you forgot to mention?”

“You know what I know, Bard.”

“Have fun in the pits,” he said, grinning at his own joke.

I gave Stacey a vague smile and tried to keep all emotion out of my voice. “Do you need a lift back to McQuarrie? Because I can give you one-if you want.”

She worked a kink out of her neck forcefully with one hand. “Shit, I didn’t think about that part. Mak’s going to be busy for a while now, which means I’m stranded here. I don’t suppose you’re headed toward Wesley. I need to pick up my truck.”

“I could be,” I said. “Come on.”

She followed me back to my dusty, battered GMC but hesitated at the door. “I’m not quite dry,” she said, touching the back of her pants. “I’m going to get mud all over the passenger seat. The inside of your truck is going to smell like the bog I just waded through.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“What’s that noise?” she asked.

“I think it’s my serpentine belt.”

“Can’t you tighten it?”

“It comes and goes.”

“Matt’s been having the same problem. Must be a GMC thing.”

The police radio burped and mumbled. I hit the wipers, hoping to clear away some of the dust. When that didn’t work, I tried spraying some wiper fluid but succeeded only in smearing mud across the windshield, which made it impossible to see through it for several frightening seconds. I kept up a steady stream of blue fluid until the glass became somewhat transparent again. Stacey didn’t seem to notice my alarm.

“What did you think of the Butcher Brothers?” I asked, hoping to start a conversation that wouldn’t end in an argument.

It was as if she’d been half-asleep. “Huh?”

“Clay and Scott Butcher.”

“Those guys are real pieces of work. They had tags for every moose and deer hanging up in their coolers, but I know they must get in some poached animals, too. They were a little too relaxed about our visit, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Like they knew we weren’t going to find anything on the premises. They let us take some samples, like it was no big deal. The other butchers Mack and I visited-they were scared and suspicious as hell.”

“Around here, game wardens come in right below politicians and used-car salesmen on the trust scale.”

“Wildlife biologists don’t score much higher. If you’re driving a state or federal vehicle, you’re considered an automatic asshole.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “Someone let a skunk loose in my trailer last winter.”

“Yeah, I remember that. You really stank that morning in my dad’s plane. Did you ever catch the jerks who did it?”

“It was Joe Brogan, the guy who used to own Call of the Wild Game Ranch.”

“My dad told me the ranch was for sale.” She kept massaging her sore neck. “I wonder what Brogan’s up to these days. Rivard’s probably going to want to check him out. A disgruntled ex-hunting guide-sounds like a suspect to me.”

“In Rivard’s book, everyone is a potential suspect.”

“What’s his problem with you anyway? I can guess, but I want to hear your version.”

The little jab she’d given me stung, but I didn’t let it show. “I was involved with the sister of that drug dealer who fell through the ice on the Machias River. She had a pretty serious substance-abuse problem of her own, it turned out. But the real reason is that I solved a homicide everyone thought had already been solved, and Rivard didn’t like me getting the credit. I’m just focused on doing my job these days. I’m not going to let myself get dragged into Warden Service politics.”

She gave a sharp laugh, which caused me to glance her way. “So you’ve turned over a new leaf? No more troublemaking? Or pissing off everybody you work with?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

I turned my head back to look at the road. “Where do you want me to drop you?”

“Skillens’ Lumber,” she said.

For some reason, I’d had a suspicion we were headed to her fiance’s place of business.

The Skillen family had been original settlers in northern Washington County, during a time when virgin forests blanketed the land as far as the eye could see and Passamaquoddy Indians, dwelling in seasonal camps along the St. Croix River, speared salmon as they leaped free of the tumbling falls. Amos and Harlan Skillen opened their first small stave mill in 1879 on the East Machias. The brothers cut the pines with axes and crosscut saws, and they filed their blades by lantern light.

Flash forward a century and the Skillen Lumber Company was the seat of a small woodland empire. The family owned forty thousand acres of its own forests in Washington and Hancock counties and bought logs from another hundred contractors to mill at their plant in Wesley. Five generations of Skillens had outfitted their factory with state-of-the-art machinery: debarkers and chippers, circular sawmills equipped with band resaws, planer mills, kilns, and bark processors. Each year, the company planted twenty thousand balsams to harvest as Christmas trees when the saplings reached five feet in height. In the fall, before the first snows, it sent forth dozens of “tippers”-men and women who ranged through the woodlots to snap the tips off fir boughs to weave into holiday wreaths and ship to market in Boston and New York. In a part of the world where the only other industry was commercial fishing-which itself seemed to be suffering the first stages of a fatal decline-the Skillens employed hundreds of people and were seen by all accounts deservedly as benign feudal lords.

Then came the collapse. In his rush to grow the company, Merritt Skillen, the current CEO, had overcut his own lands, just as his outside suppliers discovered it was more profitable to send their logs across the border to Canadian mills. Repeated spruce budworm infestations laid waste to the Skillens’ young Christmas trees. The mechanization that had seemed so wondrous a decade earlier soon led to layoffs. Men who had gone straight from high school in Calais to jobs with six-figure salaries found themselves being handed pink slips on Friday mornings. They woke up in late middle age to discover that their services were no longer needed and, furthermore, that the decades they had spent working the debarker had prepared them for absolutely nothing else in life.

Merritt Skillen began cutting select parcels to the bone and then selling them off for quick cash to keep his line running and his trucks rolling, hoping to save what jobs he could. It was this same stubbled land-acres that had once been the heart of a logging empire-that Elizabeth Morse had snatched up for a song. The shell-shocked Skillens had no idea what hit them the morning Betty Morse called a press conference to announce that she had acquired not just most of their land but also that of their neighbors and planned to donate it all to the U.S. Department of the Interior to create what she hoped would be called Moosehorn National Park.

I had never met Merritt Skillen, but I’d seen him interviewed on television and had once caught sight of him across the room at the Crawford Lake Club. In the dim light of the restaurant, with his face illuminated from below by a flickering candle, he looked careworn and haunted. He was still handsome, with a straight nose, a forceful jaw, and a crown of silver hair. Somehow, though, the regalness of his bearing seemed to make him an even more tragic character, and I thought of a fallen king out of Shakespeare, wandering, adrift in his former kingdom.

His son, Matt Skillen, I knew better. He was, after all, Stacey’s fiance. Recently, he had become the public face of the company, appearing in television ads to promote Skillen Lumber’s commitment to clean energy and its new line of pinewood homes-the initiative the family hoped would save its business. He was as good-looking as his old man, but with none of the desperate sadness. On TV he came across as magnetic, well-spoken, and genuine: the kind of bright young businessman the entire state of Maine was rooting for these days.

The mill complex was hidden from the road by a castle wall of evergreens. All that was visible was the sign-SKILLEN LUMBER COMPANY: SINCE 1879-and the plume of white smoke feathering up from somewhere in the trees beyond. We drove down the long, wooded lane, wide enough so that two logging trucks could pass each other, one carrying logs in, the other carrying boards out. Even with my squealing engine, I could hear the loud industrial rumbling of machines ahead.

Eventually, we came to a gatehouse, where an old man in bifocals sat on a stool with a book of crossword puzzles. “Afternoon, Warden. What seems to be the trouble?”

In Washington County, no visit from the local game warden was ever assumed to be less than worrisome. “No trouble,” I said.

Stacey leaned across my body to wave. “Hey, Earl,” she said.

The old guard sat up straighter. “Hello, young lady. I didn’t see you in there.”

“We’re just picking up my car.”

“Go ahead, go ahead. I don’t know if the boys are done detailing it, though. I’ll tell Matt you’re here.”

The guard pushed a button, which caused the gate to roll back ahead of us, retreating on squeaky wheels back inside the high wire fence that surrounded the mill. We pulled into the enormous parking lot, which was notable for two things: the relative scarcity of vehicles and the weeds pushing through the cracked asphalt. Mountains of unprocessed logs were piled ahead of us, like wooden bulwarks meant to thwart an attacking army. Behind them rose the buildings of the mill-tall and largely windowless gray structures that seemed large enough to contain a fleet of 747s. The air smelled acridly of burning wood. A red light blinked atop the fuming smokestack that towered over everything in that vaguely menacing way industrial structures do.

I turned the wheel to avoid a forklift carrying an impossibly high stack of pine boards toward the section of the complex where the processed lumber was waiting to be carried away. The mill might have been a shadow of its former self, but there was considerable activity: forklifts darting back and forth, men entering and exiting the buildings in hard hats, a crane lifting logs from the back of an eighteen-wheeler to drop onto the pile. The place was as busy as an anthill.

“Is that my car?” Stacey said. “I wouldn’t even recognize it.”

I followed her line of vision to a Subaru Outback that looked newly washed and waxed. The metal surfaces had been polished to a mirrorlike brightness. It was parked at the edge of the lot, away from the hustle and bustle.

I parked beside the wagon and she climbed out. She gazed toward the open bay of one of the buildings expectantly. There was an enormous smile on her face.

“I guess I’ll get going, then,” I said. I was eager to depart before Matt Skillen appeared on the scene.

“Thanks for the ride.” She bent over again to push her head through the window. “You really do need to call my dad. It would make his day to hear from you.” She straightened up again. “Here comes Matt.”

Now I had no choice but to stay. I watched a slender young man advance across the parking lot. He had an easy gait, the way natural athletes do, and to look at him, you could imagine that he’d excelled in college track and field. His hair was black and wavy, and he was wearing a white T-shirt with some sort of red-and-blue logo on it, faded jeans, and fawn-colored work boots.

A small boy, maybe eight years old, dark-skinned, and wearing the same T-shirt, trailed along behind him.

“Hey, Beautiful,” Matt said to Stacey Stevens.

“My car looks incredible!”

“Do you like it? The guys just finished detailing it.” He turned to the little boy, who had the flat features of the Central American migrants who came to work in the Maine blueberry barrens, and said, “Diga hola a Stacey, Tomas.”

“Hola,” said the boy. The logo on the T-shirt they were both wearing read BIG BROTHERS, BIG SISTERS OF WASHINGTON COUNTY.

Stacey crouched down so she was at the child’s eye level and held his small brown hands in hers. “Hello, Tomas. Did you have a fun camping trip?”

“Si.” His voice was so soft, I could barely hear it.

“We roasted marshmallows and told ghost stories,” said Matt with a smile. “Tomas even got to swim because the water was still so warm. It was pretty crazy, though, with only four adults and thirty kids. I was up all night taking them back and forth to the outhouse.”

“I’m sorry I had to work, or I would’ve gone with you,” said Stacey.

“Maybe next time.” Skillen suddenly seemed to notice my presence inside the truck. He peered through the open window at me. He had long eyelashes that would have made his face seem feminine if not for the strength of his stubbled jaw. “Who’s that in there?”

“It’s Mike Bowditch,” she said.

“How are you doing, Matt?” I said.

“I’m good, Mike.” He straightened up and leaned his body close to his fiancee’s. “I thought you were going out with McQuarrie today,” he said, a hint of confusion in his voice.

“I got waylaid.”

His nose twitched. “What’s that smell?”

“I’ll explain later.” She flicked her eyes in Tomas’s direction to indicate the story wasn’t appropriate for all age levels.

“I’m going to hit the road,” I said.

Stacey leaned back in through the open window. “Thanks again for the ride. And I’m serious that you’d better call my dad. If you don’t, you and I are going to have a problem, Warden.”

“Understood,” I said, shifting the truck back into drive.

I watched the two of them in the rearview mirror as they walked around the glimmering Outback, admiring its renewed beauty. The little boy held Stacey’s hand. Then I looked down at the passenger seat. Just as Stacey had warned me, she’d left a wet, muddy imprint there in the shape of her ass.