The Poacher's Son

29

Brenda refused to paddle. She sat in the front of the canoe with her arms crossed and her back rigid as a wall. When we reached the opposite shore of the cove, she surprised me by jumping into the shallows and hauling us up onto the beach beside Pelletier’s other boats.

“I thought you were going to stay in the canoe,” I said.

For an answer she gave me a stone-faced look. I swapped the paddle for the shotgun and followed her up the dirt path. The plate-glass windows of the main lodge were mirrors reflecting a backward image of the lake and the mountains. The sky had been neon blue all morning, but now I saw tall, cumulus clouds piling up to the west of Holeb Mountain. I didn’t like the look of them. I didn’t like how deserted the sporting camp felt, either.

We paused outside the screen door. “Russell?”

There was no answer.

Again, Brenda startled me by forging ahead. Inside, a bitter smell hung in the air. In the dining room the blackened coffeepot was beginning to smoke. I switched the machine off and followed her through the kitchen and pantry. Pelletier was nowhere to be found.

We backtracked out to the great room and tried a different hall. The door to the camp office was ajar and I peered in. The radio phone sat on a shelf beneath the only window.

“I wonder where he is,” I said.

“Probably jerking off in his cabin.”

Not an image I cared to have in my head. “Maybe he went into town.”

“He’s probably in his cabin.” Brenda took a step in the direction of the kitchen door. When I didn’t move, she said, “Come on.”

“I’m going to call Charley.” I entered the office and sat down behind the desk.

She hung in the doorway as if a spell prevented her from entering the room. “Pelletier doesn’t like people in his office.”

I ignored the warning and dialed Charley’s cell-phone number. He answered almost immediately: “Charley Stevens!”

“It’s Mike.”

He spoke loudly above the noise of his plane: “I tried calling Rum Pond a while ago but didn’t get any answer.”

“I don’t know where Pelletier is. I’m here with Brenda and we can’t find him.”

“That’s queer,” he said.

“He was hammering before, but I haven’t heard him for a while.” I glanced out the window, but the office faced the lake, not the cabins. “He’ll probably turn up. What’s going on?”

“The detective got an anonymous tip this morning to check Truman’s apartment. When they showed up they found he’d vamoosed. The door was open, though, so they had a peek inside. I can’t tell you what they found, but it’s changed their minds about a few things.”

So Truman had vanished, too. What the hell had Soctomah found in his apartment? “If they’re looking for Truman now, what does that mean for my dad?”

“He’s still a fugitive…” His voice trailed off. “Listen, I want you to ask the girl something for me.”

My eyes flicked from the window back to the doorway. Brenda was no longer there. “She’s gone.”

“What?”

“She was just standing here. I looked away for a second and she disappeared.”

“You need to find her.”

A door slammed inside the lodge. I closed my hand around the shotgun resting on the desk before me. Suddenly Brenda appeared in the door again. Her chest was rising and falling. “Come quick!”

“What is it?”

“Pelletier!” She dashed back down the hall without waiting for me.

“What’s going on?” Charley asked.

“I don’t know, but it’s something to do with Pelletier. She wants me to follow her.”

“Do you still have that shotgun?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on to it. I’m going to head over your way. Should I get a patrol car out there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll call you right back.”

“All right, but don’t let her out of your sight.”

“She already is.”

“Be careful, son.”

I reloaded the shell and switched off the safety. Then I moved cautiously down the hall and out the back door. I wasn’t sure which way she’d gone, but Pelletier’s truck was parked behind his private cabin, so that was where I started.

When I came around the corner of the building I saw the door standing open. I saw something else, too: a trail of blood that led from the porch into the undergrowth at the edge of the forest.

“Brenda?”

I found her standing just inside the door, holding both hands over her mouth.

On the floor lay Russell Pelletier.

He was lying on his back with his arms out. His head rested on a big bearskin rug in front of the fireplace. A pool of blood spread out beneath him like red wings. Near one hand lay a hunting knife with a bloody blade. Both of his eyes stared up at the rafters.

I knelt down and checked his pulse with two fingers, but I felt nothing. The body was still warm, but the skin had begun to take on a waxy look and a faint grayish color around the lips.

Don’t touch anything is the first lesson you learn about crime scenes. Brenda’s bare feet had left bloody smears along the floorboards. Her toes were painted red with it. But there were other tracks as well-the prints of a man’s heavy boots. Not Pelletier’s.

I scanned the floor. The shell casing from the murder weapon had rolled partway under the paw of the bearskin rug. The brass came from a rifle, but not being free to pick it up, I couldn’t say what caliber.

“There’s no sign of a knife wound,” I said aloud. “Which means the blood on the knife isn’t his. Before he died, he must have stabbed the person who shot him.”

“Truman,” she said, speaking slowly and softly. “Truman did this.”

I rose to my feet and closed my hand around her bare arm, trying to move her toward the door. But her whole body was dead weight. “We have to call the police.”

“But he’s still out there.”

“I think he’s wounded. He won’t get far.”

“You have to find him-before he kills us.”

“We’ll sit tight and wait for help. We’ll be fine.”

“What was that?” She turned her head sharply in the direction of the open door. “I heard a noise!” She pulled loose of me and darted outside.

“Brenda!”

I saw her sprint around the corner of the cabin, headed for the main lodge. Then, taking a step into the open, I heard a sharp metal-on-metal sound come from somewhere in the trees. The noise put me in mind of a car door slamming. The killer was still here. And I was letting him escape.

The blood trail showed brightly in the sunlight, a wet red path leading into the bushes. When Pelletier stabbed his murderer, he must have severed an artery, there was such a spray of it. A man couldn’t bleed like that and live, not without medical attention. My heart was seized with a perverse hope: It was Truman trying to get away, Truman dying from loss of blood. But what if it wasn’t him? What if it was my father? I couldn’t leave him to die in the forest. I had to know for certain.

I took the first few steps without realizing what I was doing. Then a cloud drifted across the sun and the fear hit me. I entered the woods, following the blood trail.

I put my feet down softly, as I had learned stalking deer, heel first and then toe, avoiding dry leaves and fallen branches where I could, pausing every few steps to listen. Young birches and poplars had sprouted up along the forest edge, and the green of their leaves showed the red of the fallen blood.

The trail could have been made by a drunken man. It staggered left and right, leading first deeper into the woods and then veering back toward the camp road. Here and there, shafts of sunlight pierced through the canopy to the pine-needle floor of the forest. In those sunlit patches the blood drops were bright as rubies.

Sweat rolled down into my eyes and stung like acid. I thought of the stories my father had told me of trailing gut-shot deer for miles, how often the deer ended up circling back because, even mortally wounded, they feared to leave the safety of their home territories, as if anything worse could happen to them. And I wondered whether the man I was tracking had circled back behind me and was even now aiming a rifle at me from some secret place in the trees.

The trail angled sharply to the right. Up ahead a green wall of raspberry bushes grew along the shoulder of the camp road, blocking it from view. The bushes were very thick, and I knew I would have to bust my way through them to get to the road. When I stepped out into the sun, I would be an easy target for a man with a rifle.

I paused beside a big pine and scanned left and right, looking for a way through the tangle of bushes.

That was when I caught sight of the truck. It was parked up the road from the camp, thirty or so yards from me. All I could make out was a metallic flash of blue amid the forest-green. But I knew.

It was a blue Chevy with an ATV in the bed.

Truman’s truck.

I felt a giddy, lifting sensation in my heart, as if I’d just taken a strong drink. It was Truman after all. He had killed Pelletier, he had killed Shipman and Brodeur. Charley had been wrong about my father. Everyone had been wrong.

But where was Truman? Maybe he had made it to the truck and passed out. Maybe he was sprawled in the road, dead. Or maybe he had heard me coming and was waiting in ambush to shoot me even as his blood drained away.

If he was waiting for me, it made sense that he was watching the road in the direction of the camp. He would expect me to come that way. In which case, the best bet would be to come around him from behind. I would need to circle a dense stand of firs to do that. The balsams were no taller than big Christmas trees, but they grew together so closely I couldn’t easily slip through them. I followed the outer edge of the stand deeper into the forest, stepping carefully over fallen trees whose branches rose into the air like spikes. The ground was very dry, and no matter how slowly I stepped, twigs snapped. I felt as stealthy as a freight train.

A bend in the road hid the truck from view. My scratched and sweaty arms were powdered with dust, and my T-shirt was smeared red with raspberries. I wiped the perspiration from my hands on my pants and did my best to dry the shotgun grip with my shirttail. Then I filled my lungs full of air.

I moved along the side of the road, staying in shadows as much as possible. Soon I could see the rear end of the truck. The bed was open. Truman was nowhere in sight. I crossed to the other side of the road to have a look at the driver’s side.

Truman was slumped against the door, his legs out in front of him, holding both hands over his stomach as if he’d eaten too much. He wasn’t moving. Even from a distance of twenty yards I could see the puddle of blood under his legs. The rifle lay in the dirt a few feet away.

I trained the shotgun on him and edged forward. “Truman Dellis!”

He didn’t move.

I drew closer, keeping the shotgun aimed at his chest. I’d seen so much death in my job, I thought I could always recognize it. But now I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

Truman’s eyes were closed and his head lolled to one side, motionless. I saw the slash where Pelletier had stabbed him in the gut. His shirt bore the red handprints he’d made trying to keep the life from draining out of himself. The blood lay in a viscous puddle at my feet. I kicked the rifle away from his hand. He didn’t even twitch.

I wedged the butt of the shotgun in the crook of my right arm to hold it one-handed, and then I knelt down to feel for a pulse in his throat. And as I did, Truman grabbed me.