The Poacher's Son

22

I followed Menario back up the creaking stairs to the clerk’s office. In the corner of the room, Charley Stevens was perched on a desk, sipping from a styrofoam cup of hot coffee, of all things. Soctomah, brow furrowed with annoyance, was holding a wireless phone to his ear. “He’s here,” he said to the person on the other end. He handed me the phone. It was slick from his sweaty hand.

“Kathy?” I said.

“You stupid piece of shit.”

“I guess I deserve that.”

“You are officially suspended. Appeal it with your union rep, if you want, but as of this moment you are prohibited from acting in any capacity as a warden until further notice.” The static on the line told me she was using her cell.

“How did you track me down?”

“I went over to your house and when you weren’t there, I called Sarah. She didn’t know where you were, so I figured maybe you’d mixed yourself up with the homicide investigation again.” She was quiet for a moment. “Jesus Christ, Mike. What the hell’s happened to you?”

“It’s my dad, Kathy. I have to do this.”

“So you’re just flushing your career down the shitter?”

“That’s for the lieutenant to decide.”

“Don’t put this on Malcomb. He was just going to send you to a counselor, give you time to get your head together. I can’t believe you would just blow him off like that.”

I didn’t have an answer that would satisfy her, so I didn’t bother responding. “So what happens now?”

“I’m driving up there.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I’m your friend as well as your supervisor, and I’m not going to let you do this to yourself. You’re a good warden, or at least you used to be. Besides, I’ve invested too much time training you. You’ll plead temporary insanity to Malcomb. Maybe we can still get you off with a suspension.”

I listened to my sergeant with mixed emotions. On the one hand I felt like I didn’t deserve the support she was giving me. On the other, I resented her meddling in my personal life. “You spoke with Sarah?”

“Yeah, and she’s even more pissed with you than I am, if that’s possible.”

“You shouldn’t have called her.”

“Cry me a river. I’m on the road now. I should be there in a few hours. If you’re not there, I’m going to hunt you down and cut your balls off.” And with that, she hung up.

As I handed Soctomah his phone back, he said, “You should have told us you had a meeting with Lieutenant Malcomb.”

“If I had, you never would have brought me up here. And frankly, what’s going on with my job isn’t any of your business. Now do you want to hear what Brenda had to tell me or not?”

My boldness seemed to take him back a little. “Go ahead.”

I told them everything Brenda had said-almost everything. I left out the part about my dad’s secret midnight phone call and my being an accessory to his escape after the fact. Other than that, I related the entire conversation. “A lot of what she said makes sense,” I concluded.

Menario snorted. Soctomah was gazing abstractedly at the window fan, the blades spinning round.

“All your evidence is circumstantial,” I said, glancing across the room at Charley Stevens. “A tire track and a boot print? You can’t get a conviction on that, and you know it.”

If Soctomah was pissed off at the old warden for spilling the beans on an active investigation, he certainly didn’t show it. He was as composed as ever.

Not Menario, though. “Goddamn it, Charley.”

“I thought the young man deserved to know.”

His face was purple, his neck swollen. He looked like a man who was in the process of being strangled by his own shirt. “It’s an active investigation.”

“From what Charley says, you don’t even have enough to go to trial,” I said.

“The guy’s a fugitive. If he’s so innocent, why’d he flee to Canada?”

“My dad knew you wouldn’t believe him, given his record. Brenda says he was scared that Truman and Pelletier might try something against him.”

“He wasn’t afraid,” Charley Stevens said softly.

“What’s that, Charley?”

“Jack Bowditch wasn’t afraid of those two. No way.”

Soctomah scratched his chin contemplatively. Then he leveled his eyes at me. “Well, this was a waste of time.”

I was dumbfounded. I’m sure my jaw dropped. “Aren’t you going to check out her story? Talk to Dellis and Pelletier?”

“We’ve already conducted interviews with both of those individuals,” he said in the same flat, impersonal voice I’d heard him use on television when briefing the press.

“But what about my father?”

“At the moment, he’s still the chief suspect.”

“Thanks for coming in,” Menario said in his most sarcastic tone.

“If anything breaks, we’ll let you know,” said Soctomah. “Your sergeant has asked us to keep you here until she arrives, but we need to get going. I promised to bring Brenda Dean back to Rum Pond, and I’m not going to break my word.”

I was speechless.

Soctomah looked at Charley Stevens. “Can you stay with Mike until Sergeant Frost arrives?”

“Oh, sure,” said the old pilot. “I’ll take care of him.”

They took Brenda Dean out the front, and as she passed, we made eye contact. She looked terrified. Through the window I watched the unmarked cruiser and Twombley’s patrol car pull away from the curb. “This is bullshit!” I said to Charley. “They’re just going to blow this off. It doesn’t matter what she says.”

He shrugged. “The girl’s not exactly trustworthy.”

“Then they should prove she’s lying.”

“Soctomah knows what he’s doing. You should have faith in him.”

“I’m not just going to go back home with Kathy Frost and forget about this. No fucking way.”

“So just what exactly are you going to do?” Charley looked at me with an expression that seemed to combine fascination and annoyance.

“I’m going to talk to Truman Dellis.”

“I’ve been asked to babysit you until Sergeant Frost arrives.”

“You can’t keep me here, Charley, and you know it. I’m not under arrest for anything. And you have no authority with the Warden Service anymore.”

“So you’re just going to walk over to the Natanis Trading Post.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s ten miles down the road.”

“I’ll hitch a ride.” I was beginning to get a sense of how foolish I sounded, like a rebellious teenager. “Look, I appreciate your bringing me up here, I really do. But I can take care of myself.”

He was silent for a long moment, then his weathered face split into a wide smile. “Fair enough. But before we part ways, I could do with a bit of lunch. How about you?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Sure you are! Tell you what, Flint’s Garage is right up the road. You’re going to need a car to get down to Dead River. If you’ll have lunch with me, I’ll drive you wherever you want to go today. We can borrow one of Flint’s old beaters.”

“Soctomah isn’t going to appreciate me fucking around with his investigation, and Kathy’s going to be ripshit when she finds I’m not here. I don’t want to get you in trouble, too.”

“I’ve been in trouble since before you were born.”

I remembered that Lieutenant Malcomb had said the same thing about his old friend. “You don’t have to do this, Charley.”

“I got nothing else scheduled. That’s the nice thing about being an old geezer.”

Part of me wanted to be alone, but another part thought he might be helpful when I confronted Truman. There was no question in my mind that this offer was just his way of keeping an eye on me. I wondered whether I was in danger of selling Charley Stevens short. How much of his jolliness was genuine and how much was a put-on? “I’m really not hungry, though.”

He clapped me hard on the back. “Then you can watch me eat!”

Ten minutes later, Charley emerged from the darkened bay of H. B. Flint’s Garage, jangling a set of car keys. I followed him around the building to a weedy field where smashed autos were arranged like some sort of modern art sculpture garden. I couldn’t imagine any of these wrecks being capable of locomotion, least of all the old Plymouth Charley indicated. It looked like it had once been red or maroon in color, but it was so rusted and patched with Bondo, there was no way to be certain.

“Hal says a chipmunk has made the tailpipe his abode,” said Charley. “Watch to see if he comes shooting out the backside when I start her up.”

“I hope for his sake he’s out gathering nuts.” I tried to fasten my seat belt, but the strap had been sawn off below the buckle. I had to knot the loose ends instead.

The Plymouth coughed, shook, and died when Charley tried the ignition. He tried again, this time giving it a little gas, but with the same result. On the third attempt the car shivered itself awake and we were able to move forward. We turned left on Main Street in the direction of Dead River Plantation.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

Across the river, Bigelow Mountain rose four thousand feet into the sky, a dark and jagged shape. In the seventies a developer proposed building an enormous ski resort on the mountain’s opposite slope, facing the existing resort at Sugarloaf. He said he wanted to turn the area into “the Aspen of the East,” but activists organized a referendum to foil his plans. In the end, the State of Maine bought the mountain and established a preserve from the Carrabassett River in the south to the Dead River in the north. Environmentalists considered it a huge victory, but it was hard to feel much joy about the situation now, given Wendigo’s development plans for the surrounding region.

Charley turned south on Route 144, following the Dead River away from town. Farther along that dark forest road were a few houses and farms, a schoolhouse, the fish hatchery that had so recently been the command post for my father’s manhunt, and of course the Natanis Trading Post, where Truman Dellis lived over the barn.

That was when I realized where we were headed.

I hadn’t seen the Dead River Inn since the night I got my skull busted by those three bikers. Now the sight of the heavy wood sign, hanging beside the road, sent a chill through me. The inn was a rambling old hotel with dormer windows and gables and two massive granite chimneys. It had a veranda along the first floor with rocking chairs set up so visitors could gaze down the half-mile dirt drive that led back to the road.

We parked the Plymouth under some tall hemlocks and went around front to the porch. The screen door made a wheezy sound as Charley pulled it open, and then it snapped shut on my heels. I followed him into the dining room across the lobby from the tavern.

The inn’s restaurant was an expansive, low-ceilinged space with pillars scattered among the heavy oak tables and captain’s chairs. The wide pine floorboards needed a new coat of varnish. Framed black-and-white photos of the inn’s employees from its postwar days to the present hung on the walls along with amateurish oil paintings of loons and moose. Along one wall, light was leaking inside through linen curtains the color of mummies’ bandages.

Given the hour, we had the dining room more or less to ourselves. A family with three small children were the only other diners, and they were preparing to leave.

A thin, buck-toothed waitress, dressed in gingham, came over. “Sorry, guys, we’re closed,” she said. “Oh, it’s you, Charley!”

“Hello, Donna. Is Sally around this afternoon?”

“She went down to Skowhegan. But she should be back in a couple of hours.”

“So what’s the soup du jour?”

“We just finished serving lunch. The cook’s gone up to his room.”

“Oh, no,” Charley said with a disappointment that seemed out of proportion to the situation.

“But I could, maybe, rustle up some sandwiches.”

“Could you? We’d appreciate it. And could you bring us some coffee, too?”

“Of course!”

The waitress scurried off to make our lunches, trying without much success to get her thin hips to wiggle as she walked away.

“I think that waitress has a thing for you,” I said.

“She’s just being polite to an old man.”

“No, I think she likes you. And I believe you were flirting with her just now.”

He removed his baseball hat and set it on the table. His grizzled hair stood up as if electrified.

“Who’s this Sally?” I asked.

“Sally Reynolds. She owns the place. I haven’t seen her since the night of the shootings, and I wanted to ask her how things have been going. It can’t have helped her business.”

“So this is where Wendigo held the meeting-in this room?”

“People were packed in tighter than sardines. Hotter than hell, too.”

“You were here?”

“I was.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that the old pilot might actually have been present at the meeting. “Tell me about it.”

He pointed to the front of the room. “Well, there was a table set up over there with that Jonathan Shipman from Wendigo sitting at it. He was dressed head-to-toe in brand-new clothes from L.L. Bean. Looked like a fashion model for their summer catalog. Anyway, he was seated beside Ted Rogers and Fud Davis, who both used to work for APP and took jobs with Wendigo. And that fool Newhall who represents this district in the state legislature. And a lady from the Forest Council-I forget her name, nice looking, though.”

“What happened?”

“First, Newhall spoke about how Shipman was a guest here and deserving of our courtesy and all that. Then the Forest Council lady got up and said a few words about how the new timber companies are committed to doing things the same as Atlantic Pulp & Paper to preserve public access. Then Rogers and Davis both said some more reassuring horseshit. Then Shipman got up.”

The waitress arrived with a coffeepot. Charley waited politely for her to fill our cups before he spoke again.

“Now this Shipman character,” he said. “He was a piece of work. You could tell he was a lawyer, that denim shirt couldn’t hide his true nature. It was the words he used-‘comprehensive reevaluation of holdings’ and ‘strategic non-timber operations.’ I guess he figured he could pull the wool over our eyes if he used enough legalese.”

“Did he say anything about evicting people?”

“Oh, he didn’t come out and say Wendigo was going to cancel the leases, but his meaning was clear enough.”

“What happened next?”

“People started shouting. They didn’t even wait for him to finish. I was standing in the back of the peanut gallery-over there, next to Sally-and I could just about feel the thermostat go up ten degrees once people started yelling. I thought that numbskull Tripp’s head might explode.”

“Did you see my father?”

“I didn’t. Nor did I see Truman Dellis. Brenda Dean was drinking in the bar earlier-that’s what Sally told me, anyway-but I didn’t see her at the meeting. Russ Pelletier was here. I think it just about killed him to sit still for two hours without a cigarette. But he did it.”

“When did the meeting end?”

“Nine o’clock or thereabouts.”

“Did Shipman and Brodeur just get up and leave, or was there an altercation?”

“Tripp tried to get in his face, but Deputy Brodeur gave him the heave-ho. Or so I heard, anyhow. I’d gone home by that time. The original plan was for Shipman to stay overnight here at the inn, but I guess he had second thoughts. Not that I blame him. Brodeur was driving him over to Sugarloaf to escape whatever lynch mob might form.”

“You mean this was a last-minute change of plans?”

“More or less.”

“So whoever ambushed them must have known about the change. Did any of this go out over the police radio?”

“No.”

“So who knew about it?”

“Brodeur and Shipman, of course. Sally Reynolds. The sheriff and his deputies. And I guess I should add myself to the list.”

I pictured Twombley’s cherub face. “No one else?”

“Not that we know of,” said Charley. “You’re on the right track, though. Whoever shot Shipman and Brodeur did have the inside scoop. The killer knew they were driving over to Sugarloaf, and he knew exactly where to set up an ambush.”

“Then it couldn’t be my dad,” I said. “How would he have known any of this? Who would have told him?”

“Here comes our lunch” was Charley’s only answer.

Donna had prepared tuna sandwiches with ripe tomatoes on thick slices of homemade bread. While we ate, Charley told me that his camp, where he and his wife lived from ice-out in April through deer season in November, was just across Flagstaff Pond from the public boat launch. I asked if his wife Ora flew, and he said he had tried to teach her once, but she didn’t even enjoy going up as a passenger anymore. The subject seemed to make him melancholy, so I let it drop.

After we’d finished our sandwiches, Charley excused himself-to call his wife, I figured-and left me alone at the table. I sat in the empty room and listened to the afternoon sounds of the inn: the hum of a vacuum cleaner upstairs, the clatter of dishes being washed and stacked in the kitchen, the sharp clack of a screen door as someone carried out the trash. But in my mind I also heard a murmur of ghost voices that grew louder when I closed my eyes. With a little imagination I could place myself in this same room six nights earlier. I could sense the heat of close-packed bodies. The sour smell of sweat. The night air as electric as the seconds before a lightning strike.

I opened my eyes to see Charley Stevens coming through the door. A toothpick was tucked in the corner of his mouth. “I thought we might make a small detour.”

I rose to my feet. “What kind of detour?”

He grinned like a mischievous boy. “Since you came all the way up here, and we’re just around the corner, so to speak, I figured you might like to see the scene of the crime.”

We went out to the car and somehow got it started again. But instead of heading back down the drive, which is what I expected, Charley drove us across a ragweed field that stretched from the south side of the property to a wall of distant evergreens. He followed two parallel grooves that had been worn into the sun-hardened dirt, like an ancient wagon trail on a prairie. Up ahead I saw a cut in the trees.

“This used to be a two-sled road,” said Charley.

“A two-sled road?”

“They’d haul logs out of here with a two-sled rig-like two bobsleds joined together. Runs all the way out to the main road, three miles. Except there’s a gate on the other end now. Sally gets some mountain bikers using it these days. But mostly it’s the partridge hunters who use it come fall.”

“Why did Brodeur go this way? Why not just drive back the way he came?”

“Tripp and some of the others were waiting out front of the inn with their trucks. Guess young Bill figured he’d slip out this way before they were wise to him.”

“What about the gate?”

“Most of the locals know the combination.”

The old logging road was dappled with what little late afternoon sunlight managed to make it through the pine boughs overhead. In the shadows beneath the trees I saw bracken ferns and wintergreen and the bone-white trunks of birches. I was reminded of the swamp road where I’d set my bear trap. The signs of recent traffic showed themselves more clearly here than in the sunbaked field near the inn. Tire marks from all the police vehicles rutted the soft dirt.

We came to a clearing in the woods where the bigger trees had recently been harvested and now thin popples and birches were coming up like green shoots after a wildfire. Yellow police tape hung in strips from some of the nearest trees. Pollen floated everywhere, catching the sunlight like thrown glitter.

Charley halted the car. The sudden quiet was like my heart stopping.

“This is it?” I asked.

But he didn’t feel the need to answer such an obvious question. He just moved the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. We got out and stood in the hot open air. Charley pointed ahead to where the road reentered the forest.

“They drove into the clearing,” he said, “and he was waiting for them on the other side in the dark. His truck was blocking the road, facing back this way across the clearing, and I figured he hit them with a spotlight to blind them. His first shot went through the windshield on the driver’s side and straight on through Deputy Brodeur’s throat.” He tapped the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. “The second one took the top of his head off as he was slumping forward over the wheel.”

“What about Shipman?”

“The third shot got him in the shoulder as he was trying to get out. He managed to get his door open and stagger back this way.” He led me to the edge of the clearing. “But he didn’t get but a few steps. Probably the killer shouted at him to stand still and he did, poor son of a bitch. The bullet that finished him was fired point-blank through the back of his head.”

He knelt down and touched three fingers to the ground. Nearly a week had passed, and I knew crime scene technicians had been over every inch of this clearing, taking samples, but I still thought the dirt looked darker there, as if Jonathan Shipman’s blood had left a permanent stain on the earth.

“The one thing I can tell you for sure,” said Charley, straightening up, “is that the man who did this is a poacher. He jacklighted those men just like deer.”

When he looked at me, there was a steeliness in his eyes I hadn’t seen before.

No, that wasn’t true. I had seen it before-eight years earlier, the night he stood on the dark stairs leading up to my father’s camp. Behind the affable exterior was a knife-sharp intelligence. I wondered how many poachers had underestimated Charley Stevens and found themselves worse off for it.

“Why did you bring me to this place?”

His gaze was direct and piercing. “Because you wanted me to.”

Suddenly the sun lost all its warmth, as if an invisible cloud had passed across its face. “All right,” I said. “I’ve seen it. Now can we go talk to Truman?”

He spat the toothpick on the ground. “Whatever you say. I’m just the chauffeur here.”