Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (26 page)

“Now you’ve got my interest.” I glanced around into the dense underbrush. “Where’s Nimrod?”

“Probably on a bird somewhere. He ran off this morning in the pouring rain. When I finally found him, he was shivering, soaking wet, and pointing at the sorriest-looking woodcock I’d ever set eyes on. That fool dog had probably been there for four hours, waiting for me to show up with a shotgun.”

He motioned for me to follow him down the logging road. I paused a second to listen. Sure enough, he moved among the leaves and fallen branches without making the slightest sound.

“So I’ve been getting daily updates on your moose case,” he said in that offhand way he had of broaching important subjects.

“You probably know more about it than I do.”

“Sounds like Rivard has his head firmly wedged up his rectum.”

“No comment.”

“McQuarrie tells me that Bilodeau is chasing his own tail again, too. How that man became an investigator, I will never decipher. He doesn’t have the brains to pound sand into a rat hole.” He hitched up his pants, which were getting loose from the weight of the hatchet. “Why pick on that Chubby LeClair feller? He’s more of your opportunistic-type poachers, one of those hotheads with no impulse control. He sees a deer and shoots it.”

“The other guy they’re looking at is Karl Khristian.”

“You mean Wilbur? Oh, he’s a dangerous character and a crack shot to boot. That melee at Morse’s lodge sounds like his handiwork. A moose massacre, though? I’m having a hard time connecting the dots there, so to speak.”

“Do you know two men named Pelkey and Beam?”

“They sound like two folksingers. No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Billy Cronk says they’re expert deer killers. I’m not supposed to be investigating anything, but I went to see them out in Talmadge, and I got a definite vibe.”

“In what way?”

“They didn’t seem surprised to see me.”

He veered off the path into a stand of red maples that clung to a steep cut bank to our left. “Your friend Cronk is an interesting case.”

I had to scramble, grabbing branches and pulling myself against gravity, to follow him up the hillside. “How so?”

“Billy’s a good woodsman,” he said. “Handy with a rifle. Knows those woods like nobody’s business. Has a key to the gate. Left his fingerprints in some inconvenient places. And McQuarrie says he’s been acting squirrelly since the morning you found the first moose.”

“That’s because he was afraid Morse would fire him,” I said. “With good reason, it turns out. Whatever’s up with Billy, it has nothing to do with him shooting those moose. I mean, I suppose he could have done it and then called me over, pretending to have been the first person on the scene. But that’s not the man I know.”

“In that case, I trust your judgment.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Since when?”

Charley had a laugh that seemed to start down in his belly. “I guess I should say I
mostly
trust your judgment. You made a few boneheaded calls when you were a green warden, but you’re older and wiser now. Older anyway.”

“I don’t know, Charley,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m even cut out for this job anymore.”

“Who says that? Rivard?” He scowled. “The colonel made a mistake promoting that man, and I told him so at the time. He’ll get his just desserts. You wait and see. Men like that always do.”

“I always feel like I’m swimming upstream with him.”

“That just makes you a trout.”

“I’m serious, Charley.”

“Your problem is you’re a free thinker,” he said. “Now, most law-enforcement officers lack imagination. That’s not a bad thing when you’re patrolling a beat. You don’t want cops who get bored too easily. But investigators need to be a little crazy, on account of the general weirdness of humanity. A normal person tries to apply logic to every unexplained event. A good investigator, though, he knows that sometimes the best way to solve a mystery is to let go of everything he
thinks
he knows.” He stopped and pointed at a rotting stump. “Take this mushroom, for example.”

At the base of a moldering hunk of wood, the remnants of a formerly impressive tree, was a bulbous brown fungus the size and shape of a brain. “What is it?”

“Hen of the woods,” he said. “Some folks call it a ram’s head or sheep’s head. That fungus there—if I drove it down to one of those fancy restaurants in Portland, I could probably sell it for three hundred bucks.”

“Jesus.”

“And it ain’t even the biggest hen I’ve found.”

“I think you might consider a new line of work in your retirement,” I said.

“Who says I’m retired? The thing about these hens is that you almost always find them around red oaks. Sometimes you might see one under a black locust. But what do you see around you here?” He gestured at the nearly leafless trees around me.

“These are maples,” I said.

“Red maples,” he said. “This mushroom has no business being up here. It’s supposed to be in a stand of oaks, down on wet ground. Instead, it’s up on this sandy hillside, where no forager would ever think to look for it.”

“So this is supposed to be a metaphor about solving mysteries? Isn’t the point that you got lucky when you stumbled on it?”

“Not exactly,” he said with a wink. “See the thing of it is, that stump used to belong to an oak. She was a big beauty that blew down years ago when I was a young warden in this district. Crashed right down onto the tote road, blocking traffic. The Skillens crew had a devil of a time hauling it out of these woods. I happened to remember that giant tree when I was out poking around, so I scrambled up here, and what do you know? There’s a baby hen.”

“It still seems to me like you lucked out,” I said.

“Call it luck, then. I guess my point is that if I were following a guidebook, instead of thinking about my early days as a young warden, I would’ve strolled past this beauty. Instead, I let my imagination wander and it brought me somewhere I never would’ve explored otherwise. I only found it because I stopped looking where I was supposed to.”

I scratched a new mosquito bite on my neck. “I’m not sure I’m persuaded.”

“That won’t stop you from eating it, though, I bet.” He grinned. “Stand back a way while I give her a whack with this tomahawk.”

I stood aside while Charley chopped the mushroom free from its stalk. It had lobes that reminded me a little of feathers on a grouse, which was probably how the fungus got its name. He let me heft it in my hand, and it weighed a lot more than I’d expected. Then he eased it into his mesh sack, rearranging the smaller mushrooms to keep from damaging them. “The Boss is making a pasta dish with wild mushrooms,” he said, using his pet name for Ora. “But there’s more than enough to feed a Marine platoon, so I guess I’ll be drying some of these for the winter.”

As we clambered back down onto the tote road, I noticed how dark everything had gotten. The lichen on the boulders seemed luminescent in the half-light, and the hairy cap moss seemed to give off a spectral glow. If you looked up, you could see the gap between the trees on both sides of the road, but the bushes around us seemed to be closing in, and I found myself experiencing an unexpected sensation of claustrophobia. I loved being in the woods at night and never felt the slightest anxiety. It took me a minute to allow my mother’s gaunt face back into my thoughts.

I felt something brush past my head, flying in the same direction as we were going, back along the tote road beside the lake.

“Here they come,” whispered Charley.

“Bats?”

“Stand still a minute.”

The bats came in waves, just a few at first, zipping around my head and shoulders, using their amazing powers of echolocation to avoid colliding with one another and us. But I could feel the delicate tips of their wings inches from my skin, and I could hear their thinly pitched sonar squeaks. I don’t know how long it lasted or how many flew by us—hundreds, thousands—but it was like being surrounded and engulfed by a living, sentient cloud. The fear left me, replaced by an upwelling sense of wonder in my chest. I had an impulse to spread out my arms, wishing the bats might somehow lift me up and carry me off to some secret place only they knew about. Then, just like that, they were gone, and Charley and I were standing silently side by side on the benighted road.

“Happens every evening around this time,” he said in a hushed tone like one you’d use in church. “They fly up the lake, following this path in the woods, and then out over the water. Don’t have a clue where they go, but it’s a rare thrill to be standing here when they come past you in the dark.”

“That was amazing,” I said.

“It breaks my heart every fall when they migrate. I stand here waiting for them to come, but they’ve moved on. Ora says the first night without the bats is the official start of autumn around here.”

It was in that moment that I decided to tell Charley Stevens about my mother.

28

He didn’t press me for details. Charley’s preferred method of counseling was to let me say what I had to say, and if he thought I was being shortsighted or unreasonable, he might give me a gentle, usually humorous prod to remind me how irrational I was being. But what do you say to a man whose mother is dying, especially when it is clear that there are no longer any questions left to be asked, when the finality of the situation is all that remains? My friend, who had witnessed so many deaths, knew that all you could offer was condolences and the comfort of a listening ear.

After a few minutes, his German short-haired pointer, Nimrod, emerged from the undergrowth, his coat stuck all over with burrs and bits of leaves. Lacking a real tail, the dog wagged the whole back half of his body.

“I wonder if he found a bird.” I pulled a burdock from between his floppy ears.

“I’d thought of bringing my shotgun with me,” Charley said. “But I’ve killed more than a few partridge this fall, and mushrooming is a quieter pursuit.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

“Of course, son.”

“Don’t tell Ora about my mom until after I’ve gone home tonight. I’m not sure I can tell it one more time.”

“She’ll sense there’s something worrying you,” he said. “The woman’s got a special insight into the human heart.”

“I just don’t want to talk about it right now, especially around…”

I didn’t have to say his daughter’s name.

I saw the shadow of his head nod and then felt the reassuring weight of his hand on my shoulder as we walked back to the house in the dark.

*   *   *

As we approached the Stevenses’ glowing home, I saw a porch light on outside the little guest cabin beside the water. Two vehicles were pulled up in front: a newly detailed Subaru Outback with a kayak roof rack and a black GMC Denali that I recognized as Matt Skillen’s. I hadn’t expected to feel any lower after my confession to Charley, but I found myself dropping through an emotional trapdoor.

At the top of the wheelchair ramp, Charley stomped his feet a few times to kick loose whatever mud had stuck to his boots, and I did the same. He opened the door, and we entered what was essentially a single enormous room that combined the kitchen, dining area, and seating area with a set of chairs arranged around the fireplace. Everything was a little lower to the ground than in a typical home, the countertops, the doorknobs: a concession to Ora’s wheelchair.

She was in the kitchen, peering into an oven, from which I caught the cinnamon and nutmeg smell of an apple pie.

“You’re back early,” she said, giving us a radiant smile.

“You know I can’t stand to be away from you, Boss,” Charley said, bending down to kiss her cheek.

“What did you find today?”

He patted my shoulder. “Aside from this lost soul? I found quite the treasure trove of fungi.” He emptied the dirty mushrooms into the sink. Ora had to raise her body in the chair to get a good look at everything. “Chanterelles, hedgehogs, matsutakes, and this whopper of a hen.”

“Oh, Charley,” she said. “Those are beautiful.”

He glanced farther into the room with a furrowed brow. There was a fire crackling in the fireplace. It threw flickering yellow light on the metal surfaces of the lamps and chairs. “So it looks like we have an extra guest for dinner,” he said.

“Stacey invited Matt.”

Charley pulled off his hat and hung it from a deer-hoof coatrack I recognized from their former cabin. His short white hair stuck up in all directions. “Where are those two?”

“Down by the lake, watching the sunset.” She wheeled herself to the refrigerator and pulled it open with her strong forearms. “Would you like something to drink, Mike? I made some sun tea, but we also have milk and orange juice and beer.”

I accepted a glass of tea—I was still on duty—but my throat ached for a beer.

“So where’s this new porch?” I asked. “Ora told me you were building her something special, Charley.”

“Come have a look-see.” He stepped behind his wife’s wheelchair without her having said a word and pushed her across the carefully swept floor. Ora seemed not to mind having Charley do things for her—push her chair, fetch fallen objects from the floor—that other paraplegics might have felt undercut their independence. Their relationship seemed not to involve any second-guessing.

The new porch was actually two connected porches—one half was screened and roofed, the other was open to the elements. “The bugs here are worse than back home,” said Ora, which was how she still referred to their lost property on Flagstaff Pond. “And I wanted to put plastic up and create a sort of greenhouse here in the wintertime.”

I inspected the joinery, as if I knew a thing or two about carpentry beyond how to hammer a nail. I was about to say something meaningless about the impressiveness of Charley’s work, when we heard a woman’s laugh down the hill and then the creak of footsteps on the zigzagging ramp that climbed from the lakefront up to the new porch. A moment later, Stacey slid open the screen door and stepped into the sheltered half of the porch, followed by her fiancé.

She was wearing jeans and a bone-colored thermal pullover that showed what a string bean she was. She usually dressed in mannish clothing: a quirk that had given rise to some rumors about her sexuality when she’d first joined the department. I’d never once seen her in a skirt, I realized. But she had inherited her mom’s natural prettiness, which needed no help from mascara or lipstick to make her face look feminine.