Foursome (31 page)

“Doing some hiking.”

“Making the job work for you?”

“Not exactly.”

Judson poured herself a glass, then sat on the other chair. “Ask your questions.”

I’d given some thought to the order in which I’d bring up the topics. “You’re here most of the time, Ma?”

“Most of it.”

“In the weeks before the killings at the Shea place, did you see anybody unusual around?”

“Unusual.”

“Yes. Anybody you didn’t know.”

She took a gulp of lemonade, running the back of her hand across her lips, then smacking them. “Can’t say I did.”

“Seaplane?”

“Seaplane? Not this year.”

“No cars, no hikers?”

“Cars by his place, I wouldn’t have seen them. Same for hikers. About the only thing I’d see, maybe, is somebody by boat, and the only feller I can think of was after the killings, not before them.”

“After.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Can you describe him?”

“I can. He was about your age, probably not as tall. Wore a baseball hat, a jacket like for golfing, not fishing, and he didn’t have any tackle in his boat anyway, I could see. Pants looked kind of dressy, too.”

So far it could have been Dwight Schoonmaker on his “recon.” “Ma, can you describe his features?”

“Didn’t get that close to him.”

“Then how do you know how old he was?”

“The way the man moved. Different people, different ages, move differently.”

“How about the boat?”

“What about the boat?”

“Did you recognize it?”

“It was a rowboat with a gas outboard on it.”

“Like the one Ralph and Ramona Paine have for rent?”

“Like it. Couldn’t swear it was theirs.”

Again, the careful observer. “All right. What’d this man do?”

“He come down into our cove here, driving the boat at trolling speed, only he didn’t show any tackle, like I said. He made two, maybe three passes back and forth in front of your client’s hacienda there, then pulled his boat in.”

“Pulled in?”

“Docked it like, by their boathouse. Then walked onto the land.”

Dwight, Dwight. “What’d you do?”

“Same as I did with you, young man. Got the Weatherby and went to ask him his business. Only as I’m on the path, I could hear him starting up and moving off. By the time I was onto your client’s lawn there, the feller was showing me his back from a quarter mile up the pond.”

“So you didn’t see if he took anything?”

“No. Can tell you one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“’Less he knew I was watching him arrive, he didn’t bring anything with him that couldn’t fit in a pocket.”

I looked at her. “Why would he bring anything with him?”

“To plant in the house.”

“You mean …”

“Incriminating evidence. Christ come to earth, used to happen every other week on
Perry Mason
, back when I was watching the boob tube.”

Then Judson blushed, as she had when she mentioned the dogs sleeping with her. All I could think of as a reason was the word
boob
.

I said, “But nobody before the night of the killings?”

“They pay you more, asking the same question so many times?”

I had to smile over my lemonade. “I went up to your brother’s house this morning.”

A stiffening. “That’s private property.”

“I didn’t disturb anything. I just walked the land up there and looked down. Pretty good view of Shea’s house from the edge of the drop-off.”

“Godly view of everything. That’s what killed him.”

“The view?”

“The attitude he had. That he was God just because he ran the sawmill and could build that house when he had a perfectly good place down to Augusta and the prettiest little camp here you’d ever want to see. He sold them both, then sat up on his mountain like he was Zeus himself, collecting those implements of torture and drinking himself into a stupor. Toasting himself, most likely.”

“Have you been up to the house lately?”

“Go up once a week. My duty, as I see it. Check on the place.”

“It’s in pretty bad shape.”

“It’s in the shape it deserves to be in, young man. My brother built that house, then was arrogant enough to think the traps couldn’t kill him, kill him for what he encouraged people to do to animals by collecting the infernal things in the first place. He sinned this way and that, and the Almighty just caught up to him, is all.”

“So you’re letting the place go to ruin.”

“And why not? I own it, it’s my right to do with it as I see fit.”

“When you go up there, have you seen any evidence of other people having been there?”

“Better not.”

“Why is that?”

Ma Judson looked at me. “Because it’s private property. You haven’t learned at least that from all the questions you’ve been asking me, this interview is over, too.”

I walked to Dag Gates’s place, making enough noise to alert his dog, Runty, well in advance of my getting there. Making noise was easy, the road really deteriorating almost as soon as I left Ma Judson’s place at the south end of the cove and began moving along the east shore. It was hard to see how a vehicle could make it over this section in good weather, much less under winter conditions.

I didn’t hear any barking, but the chickens started up as I came into view of the back of his house. They flustered around their wire enclosure, probably wanting me to feed them. No dog, though, and no Dag.

I walked through the dust between the coop and his house. Not seeing or hearing anything, I moved toward the lake. The green and white lawn chair was folded and leaning against a tree, but there was no canoe on the ramp. At the tree, I opened the chair and sat down. A loon slid by, beak preening the feathers under its wings. After the loon was a distance away, some fish began rising, making little rings at the surface as they fed on what I assumed was a hatch of insects. A hummingbird zoomed and hovered a foot from my face, whirring like a special effect in search of a Spielberg movie, then zoomed off before I could even register its colors.

About fifteen minutes later, I heard some barking from up the lake. Turning my head, I saw Gates returning in the canoe, hugging the shoreline, Runty up on his forepaws at the bow. One more bark, Dag saying something I couldn’t make out, and the dog slid down into the hull.

Gates reached his little dock and turned off the electric motor. Runty jumped onto the weathered planks, staying near Dag rather than coming up to inspect me.

Gates said, “Just in time for lunch.”

“Don’t go to any trouble.”

He raised a metal chain stringer out of the water, Runty yipping at the sizable bass on it. “Brought take-out from my favorite restaurant. Plenty for two, and no trouble past what I’d be doing for myself.”

“Then thanks. What can I do?”

“Nothing for now except sit there and tell me what’s on your mind.”

I watched as Gates repeated his routine of securing the canoe and hopping with the fish to the table with the clamp on it.

He looked back at me over his shoulder. “Go ahead. I can listen, maybe even talk, while I clean this beauty.”

I said, “The weeks before the killings, did you see anybody unusual around the Shea place?”

“Unusual?”

“A seaplane, for instance.”

“Seaplane. Well, that would be unusual.”

“Why?”

“Most folks using seaplanes are fishermen, trying to get into ponds up north you can’t access by roads.”

“Anything else then?”

“You mean, like somebody who wasn’t supposed to be there?”

“Yes.”

A shake of the head as the hand did something with the fillet knife. “No. But then, I’m out on the pond a lot, John. You have any particular somebody in mind?”

“If Shea didn’t do it, the killer set it up awfully professionally, which would have required some sort of surveillance and planning to get the timing right.”

“Time it so the killer got in and out while Steve was down to Ralph and Ramona’s.”

“That’s right.”

Gates put a fillet onto the side of the table and played with the clamp again. “Probably two ways of doing that. One’s from the water. Just put in a boat over at the public launch in the village, then come down here, making like you’re trolling or just sightseeing.”

“What’s the other?”

Using his knife, he pointed across the pond and up. “Old Tom Judson’s place is just about over where Shea’s house is, that driveway you see to the right with a chain and orange flags on her as you come onto the camp road off the paved one. You might be able to look down and watch the house from his property.”

“I’ve been up there. You can.”

A nod.

I said, “You didn’t see anybody suspicious, then?”

“No, but like you said, John, if this person was a real professional, I guess that means I wouldn’t have, right?”

Made sense. “How about after the killings?”

Gates crooked his head around to me. “After?”

“Yes. You see anybody then?”

“Anybody suspicious, you mean.”

“Right.”

“No, aside from all kinds of boats just cruising by the place, like people slowing down in their cars to gawk at a traffic accident. The news up here was full of what happened, and the house is sure easy to spot, you know what you’re looking for.”

He turned completely around, holding the second fillet in his hand. “The entree is ready for frying, but it would be a help if you’d slice up a couple of tomatoes for us.”

Ten minutes later, we were sitting in the Adirondack chairs around the camp table on his log-framed porch, a can of Miller’s Genuine Draft flanking each plate. The plates contained the fish in breadcrumbs, the tomatoes and dressing, and a couple of hunks of bread. Simple, but another fine country meal. I took a deep breath, felt the diaphragm do a rise and fall, and lifted the beer to my lips.

Around a mouthful of fish, Gates said, “She’s getting to you a bit, isn’t she?”

“Who?”

He gestured with his fork. “The pond.”

I set down the can. “Maybe Maine in general, Dag, or at least this part of it.”

“You have that same … I don’t know, sense about you I remember having back when. I tell you, the people like Shea who come up just for the summers, they don’t know what it can be like.”

“Being nourishment for the black flies?”

Gates laughed. “Sure, they’re a part of it, because everything is. But I mean the folks who see only the daisies in June or the raspberries in July or the blueberries in August, they just miss so much. The leaves start turning the second week in September, yellows and oranges and reds, more than three colors, a dozen varieties of each. Especially the red of the sugar maples, John, like a tall old lady with just one saucy hat. Then the loons band together in October for the flight south, getting themselves into this sickle pattern on the water, fifteen or twenty of them, the way battleships formed up in a newsreel of the South Pacific during WW Two.

“After that, the female black bears begin hibernating, birthing their cubs about a month later. The mother bear, she doesn’t leave her den, suckling the cubs without herself urinating or defecating. Some life, huh? She spends half her year half asleep.

“But come November, John? The moon when it rises is … different. Here the moon comes up on its side, quartered horizontally, not vertically. The first frost takes care of most of the bugs that bother you, so you can sit out on that dock and watch the sun set and the moon rise. So clear and bright, John, you’d think God’s poured fluorescent milk into a glass bowl and suspended it there, just for you, the clouds moving past it so fast in those first winds down from Canada, it’s like one of those time-lapse nature films of a night into day.”

I’d stopped eating, and Gates suddenly noticed it.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes get kind of carried away.”

He fumbled his fork, and it flipped over and away from the table. I got up before he could and retrieved it.

“Just give it back here, John.”

As Gates cleaned it on the paper towel he used as a napkin, I said, “None of my business, but have you ever tried a prosthesis?”

He smiled. “Tried one. This hook thing. Didn’t care for it. And the leg, well, that has what they call phantom sensation.”

“That you still feel the leg?”

“More that it still hurts, even though the docs say the injury’s all healed. Can’t really stand to have the leg thing on. You ever hear about that champion skier, Diana Golden from down by you?”

“No.”

“Well, she lost a leg to cancer a while back, so she skis on just one. Clocked her up to sixty-five miles per hour downhill, I heard. She doesn’t like to use an artificial leg, even for walking. I’m the same way.”

“How about the arm, though? Don’t they have these kind of bionic things now?”

A nod. “Call them myo arms—myoelectric, I think is the real word. But I like things simple, John, simple and natural. Besides, getting one of those things repaired, especially if it got wet, wouldn’t be so easy up here. You don’t rely on it, you don’t miss not having it.”

I motioned back toward the road. “But how do you get around in winter?”

“I have a phone inside, so I can call Ma. Her old Bronco tracks pretty well so long as you start your driving before the snow has a chance to get too deep. Plus Ralph has a snowmobile, so he can come over the pond to me once a week for what I need and take my eggs back with him.”

“What does a snowmobile weigh?”

“Eight, nine hundred pounds, I guess.”

“The ice is strong enough for that?”

A laugh. “John, the ice gets thirty, thirty-six inches thick by February. The boys drive
trucks
on her.”

“Come on.”

“God’s truth.”

“And they don’t go through the ice?”

His face toned down. “Once in a while. Maybe eight, ten a year statewide die doing it.”

“That many?”

“Out in Minnesota I hear it’s more like thirty a winter. See, what happens is, the ice gets thin over a spring. They call it a rift, because there’s like this floe in the center of what looks like solid ice.”

“And somebody drives onto it.”

“And the floe flips over like my fork did, with the car going down. Not straight down, because the engine is heavier, so it kind of dives at a forty-five-degree angle, away from the rift above.”