Foursome (8 page)

As Judson went back up the path, Gates looked to me.

I said, “I’m a private investigator from Boston working on the Shea case.”

“The …” His face dropped. “You mean the killings, then.”

“That’s right.”

The index finger and thumb worked on the mustache at the right corner of his mouth. The thumbnail was broken and yellowed. “Guess you’ll be wanting to talk to me about it.”

“If I could.”

A reluctant nodding. “Seems right. Let me just get the dog here, and you can come back to my place, sit for a while.”

“John, look to your left, now. About ten o’clock off the bow. See that loon dive?”

The water was crystal clear and not so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. The big black and white bird went by the canoe, almost under it, using its wings to propel itself through the water. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.

Gates said behind me, “What does that look like to you?”

“Like it’s flying underwater.”

“That’s exactly how I’d describe it. First time I saw that, I rubbed my eyes, thought I must be hallucinating.”

“Mr. Gates—”

“Dag, please.”

“Okay. But what’s ‘Dag’ short for?”

A pause behind me. Runty, who was between us in the canoe, snuffled twice.

“Actually, John, it’s short for ‘diagonal.’ After I lost my arm and leg, a little boy saw me in the hospital lounge and said to his mother, ‘Look, Mom, it’s daggonel man,’ on account of how my right arm and left leg made me seem. Well, one of the nurses heard it, and of course the mother was real embarrassed, so I said, That’s fine, son. Call me Dag from now on. It fits.’ And so it’s been, though ‘Donald’ was my given name.”

Gates steered the canoe in toward the shore. As we had pulled away from Ma Judson’s place, I’d looked behind me, and realized that you could see her cabin only if you were directly in front of it and pretty close to shore, when her boat and dock stopped looking like big rocks and took on artifact form. As we approached the east shoreline, the same was true for Gates’s property. The white birch Sheriff Willis pointed out to me spread above a simple dock. Unlike Judson’s sunken dock, though, there was a ramp for the canoe made of short logs nailed together to form a series of X-shaped ribs, like an inverted picnic bench. After Gates let me and the dog off on his dock, he guided the canoe at a relatively high speed toward the ramp, pulling up a stringer with one good-sized bronzed fish on it from over the gunwale. He slacked off the motor just as the bow hit the first “X,” the canoe riding up onto it and its neighbors. Then he climbed out, the stringer in his hand. A long cane fishing pole with a rubber frog on its line stayed in the boat. Gates hopped agilely to the birch, set down the fish, and then played out line from a small hand winch on the birch. Going back to the canoe, he put a metal “S” through an eyelet on the bow and hopped back to the tree, cranking the winch and bringing the canoe all the way up and out of the water.

I said, “Pretty clever.”

“Used to teach shop, John. Or ‘Industrial Arts,’ you want to be formal. Comes in handy to sort of compensate for things.” He picked up the fish again. “Okay if I clean him while we talk?”

“Sure.”

“Hate not to clean them while they’re still fresh. Take that little folding chair from by the dock. I use it to watch the sunset, but it ought to hold you just fine.”

I opened the chair with its white and green vinyl strapping and settled into it, Gates showing me his back as he moved to a rough table a few yards in from his dock. There was a spring clamp on the end of it and some lime-sized stones lying on top of it. Gates whacked the fish on the head with the handle of his knife. Runty barked once as Gates used his elbow to open the clamp and his hand to position the fish’s tail under the clamp, releasing his elbow to allow the clamp to hold the fish.

Gates smiled at the dog. “Runty, he gets excited when he sees a smallmouth, John. He doesn’t bother my chickens, but these bass, they drive him nuts, don’t they, Runty?”

A quick yip.

Gates started the knife quickly on the fish. “So, what do you need to know?”

I looked over to the west shore. The Shea house and its lawn stuck out of the surrounding forest like the proverbial sore thumb. “It would help if you could tell me what you saw and heard that night.”

“At the house, or before, now?”

“Before.”

“Before. Well, I’d left old Runty here in the camp to go out and try some night fishing.”

“You fish at night a lot?”

A rueful grin. “When your client and his friends were up, I did.”

“Noisy.”

“Some. But, hey, it’s their summer place, so I figure they’re entitled. Besides, night fishing is usually pretty good. Anyway, I’m out in the canoe, toward the north end of the pond and behind one of the islands, when I hear this screaming. Well, when you’re on the water, and behind an island, it’s tough to tell just where noise is coming from sometimes. So I pull out into the open a bit, and I can tell it’s coming from down our end of the pond. I put the electric on ramming speed and get myself down here fast as I can. Now, I was some distance from the house, but I’d guess it was only ten, twelve minutes till I got there. I beached the canoe by the boathouse and headed up the lawn, calling out for people, see if I got an answer. And I didn’t, except for Ma.”

“What’d she say?”

“She yelled for me to get the hell up there, onto the deck, I mean. So I managed to do that, and—Christ. …”

Gates took a deep breath and set down the knife, busying himself with the clamp and turning the fish over to go for the fillet on the other side.

He had the fish repositioned, but didn’t pick up the knife right away. “There’s this woman, the wife in the other couple, flat on the deck with an arrow through her, eyes open. …”

Gates shook his head, finally starting in again with the knife. “Her husband’s across the threshold of the center door, feet on the deck, another arrow in him. Then inside, Ma’s got her shotgun on Shea, and there’s this crossbow, all bloody, at her feet, and Shea’s on the floor, like holding his wife, who’s also got an arrow—Christ, John, it was like what one of those Indian massacres must have been like, you know?”

“The crossbow was at Ma Judson’s feet?”

“Yeah. I heard from Patsy—that’s our sheriff?”

“I’ve met her.”

“I heard from Patsy that Shea’s fingerprints were all over the bow, but you must know that, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, Ma tells me to call the sheriff. So I use the phone in their great room and reach a deputy, and he says he’ll radio the sheriff, get her over right away.”

“What did you do then?”

“Tried not to throw up. That’s what surprised me the most, I suppose. It … the whole scene, it got worse the longer I was there. I thought the initial shock of seeing everything would be the worst, but it wasn’t. It was waiting there for Patsy to arrive that got to me.”

“Did you see anybody else around the house that night?”

Gates stopped with the knife again. “No. It was a nice night, and I watched the sunset from the dock with a beer just before I went out. I don’t recall seeing any other boats or anybody else around your client’s place. I wasn’t out by the island too long when I heard the screaming start.”

Gates seemed to finish with the bass. He used his elbow to release the fish’s tail from the table, leaving two sizable fillets. Then he stabbed the fish carcass six or seven times before shoving one of the stones through the mouth and down into the gullet. Gates carried the carcass by the lower jaw to the edge of his dock, flinging it out toward the center of the lake.

I said, “Isn’t that kind of littering?”

“No.” He hopped back up to me. “Punching holes in its innards and stuffing that stone down its throat means it’ll sink to the bottom, where the crayfish and other things’ll get a good meal. You saw the size of some of the crayfish in this pond, John, you wouldn’t wiggle your toes in her. Come on up to the house.”

As he gathered the fillets from his table, I followed him up the gentle incline. Gates—or somebody for him—had cut a winding path like Ma Judson’s. His house seemed newer by far than hers, however. A small, one-story bungalow, the wood was a soft, natural yellow that blended into the shade from his tall trees. There was one picture window with a small deck only two feet off the ground in front of it, a screened porch next to it. The porch was more rustic than the bungalow, with logs as posts; and beams and lintel above the door, two Adirondack chairs and a small, slatted table between them as furniture.

Gates got up the three deep steps to his deck and held the screen door with a shoulder for me as Runty went off running after something. This close to the house, I could hear the noise of chickens out behind it. Inside the porch was a door leading to a cozy living room. The walls of the living room were lined with books, here and there pewter beer mugs, hunting knives, and driftwood as whatnots on the shelves. A sturdy black wood stove occupied the center of the room, two easy chairs on a sisal rug facing it. Kitchen and bathroom finished the downstairs, a small sleeping loft shoehorned under the peaked roof.

Gates disappeared into the kitchen. I looked at the books. Alpha by author, but a wide range of subjects, from engineering to art history. A more than representative sampling seemed to deal with the environment. A shelf under a side window held a small laptop computer, a straight-back caned chair in front of it. Next to one easy chair was a
New York Times
, three days old.

From the kitchen, Gates said, “You care for a beer, John?”

“I would, thanks.”

“Catch.”

I turned. From the doorway he tossed a can of Miller’s Genuine Draft to me.

Gates hopped out with one for himself. “Hope you don’t mind the can.”

“It’s fine.”

“The pop-top is just a lot easier for me than a bottle cap. Let’s sit on the porch.”

I let him take one Adirondack chair before I took the other. He had an Audubon Society guidebook on birds on the slatted table, some binoculars and a pad next to it. From the lake, you really couldn’t see his house. From his house, though, you could see the lake and the Shea house through the trees, the limbs crossing the view in a natural but not obstructing way.

I said, “How can you have this kind of view without cutting down the trees?”

Gates took a swig of beer, licking the foam off his mustache. “Not so hard, really. You just sit where you want the view from, then tell a couple of the boys to climb the trees and take a limb here, a limb there. Bingo, you’ve got a window through the woods without the people on the water being able to see you.”

I studied the trees. “I don’t see where they cut the limbs.”

“I had the boys put black paint over the wounds. Covers them cosmetically as well as protects the tree from insects and other critters using the wounds to get inside her.”

“Pity Steven Shea didn’t do that.”

Gates rested his can on the arm of his chair. “You’ve met him, too?”

“Not yet.”

“Brace yourself.”

“He comes on strong?”

“Kind of … single-minded. When he got started on his building, I went over to introduce myself, feel him out a bit on what he planned on doing. I made every suggestion I could think of to help him protect his land and the pond with it. He just nodded and smiled and then clear-cut to his heart’s content. All so legal, all so stupid. You’ve seen the erosion over there?”

“The gully with the little bridges over it?”

A snort. “The damned fool! How he expected his ‘lawn’ to make up for trees there going on a century is beyond me.”

“I thought there already was a house there.”

“Was, kind of. Old Tom Judson’s camp. He was worse, in his own way, Old Tom.”

“How do you mean?”

Gates looked at me. “Nobody told you the story?”

“I guess not.”

He sighed and took another swallow of his beer, forgetting to lick the foam this time. “It was seven years ago this month. Old Tom was president of Judson Lumber—his sister, Ma, she never got much involved in the business. Judson Lumber had title to this whole end of the lake, picked it up for a song from a farmer in the 1880s that clear-cut it for meadowland, then went hard broke in some depression. Anyway, the natural timber growth over a hundred years restored itself, as it will, and it was about time for the company to think about logging it again.”

“They’re allowed to log so close to a lake?”

“Used to be. Well, I was at Rutgers down in New Jersey in the late sixties and went to the first Earth Day, spring of 1970. You remember that at all?”

“I remember the twentieth anniversary stuff a few years ago.”

“Well, back in ’seventy, it was a big thing on our campus. What with the war and all. …” Gates paused. “You in it?”

“For a while.”

He paused again, then nodded. “There were a lot of us who weren’t so much against the war as against everything that seemed to be going on. The draft, Nixon, the rape of the environment. So anyway, that first Earth Day, I went to the teach-ins and demonstrations about how to save the planet, and I came away really believing in them. I majored in education, Industrial Arts in particular, and dabbled with ways to make things better, cleaner. I even started vacationing up in Vermont and New Hampshire, but when I saw Maine, John, I knew I was hooked. I tried to figure out how I could get to be here, since there aren’t that many jobs around, period. I finally saved some money and moved up, just about making it in Augusta by bagging groceries at the Shaw’s, that kind of thing.

“Well, turns out old Tom Judson is going to cut all this timber except for his sister’s parcel and his own. So this environmental group I belonged to got wind of it and decided to demonstrate at his lumber mill. We go over there, and Old Tom himself—big, bluff man, looked a little like Ted Kennedy with the boozer’s nose, you know?—ordered us all off. We were being a little stupid, John, carrying buckets of scrap iron to kind of screw up the machinery. Well, I barge past him and a couple of his men and into the mill itself. Old Tom catches me just as I’m about to throw my bucketful into the works. Here, now, it depends on who you believe. Tom said I was swinging the bucket at his head. I say I was just trying to keep it away from him. Anyway, he shoves me, hard, and I …”