Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (33 page)

I glanced around my dooryard, realizing for the first time that the only other vehicle present besides my patrol truck was the Bronco. “Wait a minute. Where’s your pickup?”

“I walked here.”

“You live seven miles away!”

“Needed to think about a few things.”

I snapped off the light, plunging us both into darkness. “But you decided to stop for beers?”

“Figured you could use a few pops. But I’ve been waiting here awhile. Expected you to be home sooner.” He spoke in his usual decibel range, without slurring his words. I’d seen Billy drink prodigious quantities of alcohol on occasion, but he never displayed a hint of intoxication. When I didn’t accept the can from him, he popped the top and took a sip. “I heard about Briar.”

I reached down to collect the five empty cans. I arranged them in a row along the edge of the porch. “What did you hear?”

“She ran her sports car into a tree. Folks say someone was chasing her.”

I think he expected me to sit down next to him, but I remained on my feet. “Folks are right.”

“That fucking sucks.”

“Yes, it does.” I gave up and sat down beside him on the plank steps. “Is that why you decided to get wasted tonight?”

“It takes more than a few beers for that to happen,” he said. “It’s a shame about Briar. She was a crazy girl. She came on to me the first night we met at the lodge, but I didn’t do nothing, on account of Aimee. After that, she was kind of bitchy, to tell the truth. She bossed me around worse than her mom. I don’t think she was used to men telling her to keep her pants on.” He took a long drink of beer. “Do you know who it was who chased her?”

“Bilodeau thinks it was your buddy Karl Khristian.”

“Yeah, I heard you guys arrested him.”

I was always amazed at how quickly news traveled in the Maine woods. People might live miles apart, but when a barn went up in flames or a car skidded off the road, everyone seemed to know about it within a matter of minutes.

I rubbed my bare hands together against the cold. “It looks like your hunch about KKK was right.”

“Looks like it,” he said. “So I guess that means there’s no more reward.”

The thought of Betty Morse’s twenty thousand dollars hadn’t crossed my mind since my last conversation with Billy, but it was clear that my friend had been thinking of little else.

“There’s ballistic evidence linking Khristian to the shooting at Morse’s house, but I don’t think Bilodeau has anything yet linking him to those moose. Technically, I suppose that means there’s still a reward.”

He finished the beer and crushed the can in his big hand. Then he flung it away into the darkness.

I jumped after it. The half-frozen leaves crackled beneath my feet. “Come on, Billy, this is my yard.”

“Oh fuck,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m not thinking straight these days. My head feels like it’s full of spiders.”

I held on to the crushed can. “When I feel that way, it usually means I have a guilty conscience.”

He rose slowly to his feet and towered over me. In the moonlight, his face had the hardness of welded metal. “What do you mean?”

I wasn’t sure what I meant, other than that my friend was continuing to behave in odd ways, and I wanted to let him know that I’d taken notice. “If you walked here, you probably didn’t hear the news that Chubby LeClair killed himself.”

His response was to grunt. “Fucking child molester.”

I waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, I continued. “There was a Passamaquoddy kid named Marky Parker with him in his camper. The boy is dead, too.”

“Did Chub kill him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There was a shoot-out at the camper, and the boy was injured.”

“What kind of shoot-out?”

“Jeremy Bard says Chubby fired at him from the Airstream. The boy was probably caught in the cross fire.”

“Bard?” Billy gathered his pale hair in one big fist and twisted it into a knot. “Now that’s interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled at me; I could actually see his teeth shining in the moonlight. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a suspicious motherfucker?”

I leaned forward, trying to catch his eyes. “What do you know, Billy?”

He turned his shoulder and took a step away from me. “I know it’s time for me to go home to my wife and family.”

“Let me give you a ride,” I said.

“No thanks. I can find my way.”

“It’s seven miles,” I couldn’t help repeating.

“Yeah, but it’s a beautiful night.”

“I’m going to call Aimee and tell her where you are.” My tone sounded more threatening than I’d intended.

He paused at the edge of the clearing. I could barely make out his looming shape in the blackness beneath the evergreens. “If you do, you’ll only worry her. She’s used to me going off like this when there’s something on my mind. She calls them my ‘walkabouts.’ Says it’s an Australian word for walking and thinking. I’m sorry I drank the last beer, Mike.”

And with that, Billy Cronk melted as quietly as a deer into the forest.

36

Whoever had built my cabin had used logs from the same spruce and fir trees that stood as sentinels around it. Sometimes I fancied that I lived in a house of bones. Tonight was one of those occasions.

Cluster flies buzzed along the dusty sills. I would open the window to let one swarm out and then discover that another swarm had appeared on the inside of the glass the next morning. I had no clue where the big gray insects came from or how they got in, but their incessant buzzing was like static inside my brain.

I dumped the empty beer cans into a milk crate I used for recycling and sat down at the table with a glass of milk. Of all the mysteries in my life at the moment, Billy Cronk had to be the most frustrating. I’d convinced myself that the hardened face he showed the world was just a mask he’d forged during tours of duty in distant war zones. I would watch him play with his ragamuffin kids or stare adoringly at his sweet wife, and I would decide that he really was a kind and gentle man, someone with whom I could be friends. Then he would look at me with those frost-colored eyes, and I would have a vision of him manning an observation post in Afghanistan, firing M240 machine-gun rounds into the bodies of advancing Taliban fighters, and I would begin to distrust my instincts.

Time after time in my life, I’d come to the conclusion that human beings are essentially unknowable. I’d been betrayed enough that I should have stopped trying to figure other people out and accept them for the enigmas they were. And yet, some stubborn, foolish part of me refused to go through life that way. I wanted to believe in Billy. More than that, I needed to.

After I’d eaten my usual unhealthy dinner—burritos that went mushy in the microwave and were made palatable only with a slathering of Tabasco—I checked in on my mother’s progress.

“Hello, Michael,” my stepfather said when I reached him on his cell.

“Hey, Neil,” I said. “I just wanted to check in and see how she was doing.”

“Fine, fine.” He sounded distracted. “She’s sleeping again.”

Despite the autumnal darkness, it was still pretty early. My mom seemed to be sleeping a great deal, but for all I knew, fatigue was a side effect of the chemotherapy. I figured having your bloodstream filled with tumor-killing chemicals must be exhausting.

“Is everything all right down there?” I asked.

“Well, this is new territory for the both of us. We haven’t been sure what to expect and—I’m actually waiting to speak with the oncologist now.”

He said this in an offhand way, but the muscles in my stomach tightened. “What’s wrong?”

“Just trying to sort out the side effects.”

“What side effects?”

“She has a bit of a temperature, but nothing alarming. The doctor told us that mild fever was to be expected.” He paused, as if something had caught his attention. “I have another call, and it may be the oncologist. Can I call you right back?”

“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”

I sat at the table for half an hour, waiting for my cell to ring again, but it never did. After a while, I got up and cleaned my greasy dish in the sink and lay down on the bed in my full uniform. I fell asleep in minutes.

*   *   *

When I awoke, the room seemed overly bright. Sunlight was poking in through the south-facing window of the cabin, but not hard enough to account for the intense illumination before me. It took a moment to realize I’d left the overhead lights blazing. And a new swarm of cluster flies was bouncing off the windowpanes.

I shaved in the shower and found the last clean undershirt in my bureau. One of these days, I’d need to drive into Machias with my Bronco loaded with bags of laundry. I could only get by for so long hand-washing underwear and T-shirts in the sink and hanging them on the line I’d strung between the pines. The owner of the Wash-O-Mat didn’t like cops. He didn’t have the guts to bar me from his establishment, but he treated my every visit as if it were an incitement, which to some degree it was. Living in a small community, you didn’t have the luxury of avoiding your enemies.

Or your friends.

Unless McQuarrie had need of me this morning—and there were no messages from him saying that he did—I decided to make my first stop of the day Billy Cronk’s house. I wanted to see whether he’d ever returned from his “walkabout.” Our conversation had left me unsettled, and while I could have checked in with him over the phone, I preferred to see his expression when I asked him again what information he was hiding from me.

“He’s come and gone,” said Aimee Cronk. She stood in the doorway of her home with the youngest of their straw-haired children tucked under her arm. The baby was red-faced from bawling, but his mother paid the noise no attention.

A chill wind was blowing at my back. There had been a coating of hoarfrost on my truck thick enough that I’d needed to scrape the windshield before setting out. “Gone where?”

With her free hand, she readjusted the scrunchie holding her ginger-red hair in place. “He told me this is the day he finds a job again.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Skillen’s.”

“The mill just laid off a bunch of guys. Why would Billy think they were hiring?”

“Why does he think any of the things he thinks?” She phrased the sentence less like a question with an answer and more like a declaration of her husband’s essential naïveté.

Once again, I found myself envying Billy. No matter how often he fell ass-first into trouble, he still had a loyal wife at home who could see into his heart as if it were sculpted out of glass. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be
known
like that by another person.

“I heard about that Morse girl,” Aimee said. “Billy said you liked her. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re going to go looking for him today, ain’t you?”

This unschooled woman’s ability to make deductions was far better than that of half the law officers I knew.

“I thought I might.”

“Tell him supper is at five o’clock sharp,” she said before she closed the door.

I knew she was really telling me to make sure he got home. We were both worried about him, I realized.

*   *   *

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky this morning, but a wind was gusting out of the northwest, and the sun seemed unable to generate any real heat, as if it were spent after burning too bright for too long. I remembered the old couple my mom and I had met in the parking lot near Massacre Pond on our way to Scarborough Beach. The man had used a particular phrase to describe weather like this. “A bluebird day,” he’d called it.

The only birds I saw were my two ravens. They might not have been the same ones, probably weren’t, in fact. But watching them coast over the leafless treetops, riding the wind the way surfers negotiate a crashing wave, I experienced a sense of déjà vu that sent my thoughts spinning back to the Morse estate on the morning we’d found the dead moose.

What is Billy up to? I wondered.

He might have been desperate enough to apply for a job at Skillen’s, knowing the odds were against him. Or he might have been lying to Aimee about his intended destination for the day. In spite of everything, I preferred to give him the benefit of the doubt. When I reached the main road, I turned the wheel in the direction of Skillen’s lumber mill.

The phone rang. “You’re never going to believe this,” McQuarrie said in a voice that told me he was smiling.

Considering his sour mood the last time I’d seen him, I didn’t know what to make of this metamorphosis. “Try me.”

“The MDEA asked Devoe to bring Tomahawk to LeClair’s place this morning,” he said. “They wanted the dog to nose around the property. They figured Chubby might have kept his stash somewhere within reach. Probably not on his own land—Chub was stupid, but not that stupid—but close enough that he could fill an order if some junkie showed up at his door in the middle of the night wanting a kick in the noggin.”

Like most of the veteran wardens in the service, Mack liked nothing better than to spin a yarn. I’d learned to shut up and let the old guys tell their stories. It was faster than interrupting them with questions.

“So Devoe and the K-9 are roaming around the joint,” he continued in his hoarse, happy voice. “Tommie’s not a drug dog, but if you give her a whiff of Mary Jane, she knows what you’re after. Anyway, they’re poking around every tree stump on that hillside, when the dog goes crazy. She practically pulls Devoe out of his boots. She races to this big pile of leaves and starts digging. Guess what was buried underneath it.”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“A trash bag with two rifles in it,” he said.

“Twenty-twos?”

“Yeah. A Marlin 780 and a Browning SA-22.”

He waited for me to leap to the natural conclusion: “So Chubby and an accomplice—maybe the Indian boy—drove out to Morse’s land, somehow found their way through one of the locked gates, expertly executed a bunch of moose, and then drove back to his Airstream, where they then carelessly hid the rifles in a plastic bag in the backyard.”

“The point is, we found the fucking twenty-twos.” Mack no longer sounded like he was wearing a ten-karat grin.