Bitch Creek (5 page)

If he didn't call, it meant something
had
happened.

He poked out the number for the York County Sheriff's Office, gave the dispatcher his name, and said he needed to speak to Sheriff Dickman himself.

A minute later Dickman said, “What's up, Stoney?”

“Need some information,” he said.

“When're we going fishing again, son?”

“You name it,” said Calhoun. “But look. I was wondering if there were any accidents last night.”

“There's accidents every night, Stoney. What's going on?”

Calhoun told him about Lyle's failure to show up at the shop and his broken date with Penny Moulton. “Only thing I could figure . . .”

“I've got a printout here somewhere,” mumbled Dickman. “Hang on . . . Okay. Here we go. What'd you say that boy's name was?”

“McMahan. Lyle McMahan.” Calhoun spelled it.

“Nope,” said Dickman after a minute. “What kind of vehicle does he drive?”

“Old Dodge Power Wagon. Sixty-three, I think. It's sort of gray. Gunmetal gray, I guess you'd call it, except for the rust.”

“Whoa,” said the sheriff. “You saying this thing's over forty years old?”

“Yup,” said Calhoun. “Pretty beat up on the outside, but those old Power Wagons are indestructible, and Lyle keeps it humming. It would've been full of fishing gear. Trout Unlimited, Ruffed Grouse Society stickers on the rear window.”

“You don't have a registration on it, do you?”

“No.”

“Well, there can't be a helluva lot of sixty-three Power Wagons left on the road. Hmm . . . Uh-uh. No Power Wagon on my accident report here. Not in York County any time yesterday.”

“What about Cumberland or Oxford? He might've been up there.”

“I don't have them right in front of me,” said the sheriff. “I can check for you, if you want.”

“Please.”

“You want me to get back to you? I can pull 'em up here on my computer, but it'll take a minute.”

“I'll hang on,” said Calhoun. “If you don't mind.”

He sipped his coffee, and several minutes later Dickman said, “Sorry, Stoney. Nothing in Cumberland County, nor Oxford, either.”

“Well, don't be sorry. It's a relief.”

“If I hear something, I'll let you know.”

“I'd appreciate it.”

“It'll cost you a day of fishing,” said the sheriff.

“You got it. Just name the day.”

Calhoun put the phone on the desk, stood up, and went out into the shop. Kate was at the front counter paging through the shop's logbook. She looked up. “Well?”

He recounted his conversations with Penny Moulton and Sheriff Dickman. “I don't know what else to tell you,” he said. “I guess if something happened to him, the sheriff would know it.”

“That's a comfort,” she said. She shook her head. “I've been looking back through the log, trying to figure where Lyle might've gone yesterday.”

“He said he was heading for someplace that Mr. Green knew of. Someplace new for him.”

She sighed. “I know. It was just a thought.”

“All we can do is wait,” said Calhoun.

She looked up at him and smiled. “You know,” she said, “I can sit for hours beside a stream and wait for the mayflies to start hatching and the trout to rise, and I don't have any trouble waiting for the tide to turn and the stripers to move up onto the mussel beds. Some things, I'm pretty damn excellent at waiting for. But I have a good deal of trouble waiting for a boy to show up when I just know goddam well something bad's happened to him.” She shook her head. “What're we gonna do, Stoney?”

“Nothing we can do,” he said.

Calhoun spent most of the morning taking inventory while Kate did some ordering on the phone. Every time somebody pulled into the parking area out front, Kate twisted around and peered out the window. Then she turned, looked at Calhoun, and shook her head.

A few customers came in, poked around, bragged about their angling prowess, tried to weasel secrets out of the shopkeepers, bought some flies.

At noon, Calhoun got into his truck and drove over to the new Thai restaurant at the mall for takeout, that spicy noodley stuff with baby shrimp and hunks of chicken that Kate liked. They ate it with chopsticks and washed it down with Coke, sitting on the front porch outside the shop.

Kate had a half-day guide trip in the afternoon. Her clients—a father and his twelve-year-old son who'd driven over from Rochester, New Hampshire—showed up around one-thirty. Neither of them had ever caught a striped bass before. This was the boy's birthday present. They were bubbling with eagerness, the father as much as the boy, and Kate put on a good show of enthusiasm, though Calhoun could tell that she was still preoccupied with Lyle.

He helped her get her trailer hitched up and her Blazer loaded with gear. The man, who turned out to be a plumbing contractor, climbed into the passenger seat, and the boy crawled in back.

Kate got behind the wheel and rolled down the window. “Don't wait around, Stoney,” she said. “I plan to keep these fellas out through the bottom of the tide, see if we can't hang a keeper for the birthday boy.”

“Tide doesn't turn till, what, after eight?”

She nodded. “It'll be late. Close up at six and get on home and feed Ralph.”

“I'll leave you a note if I hear anything.”

“I know you will,” she said.

He stood there as she pulled away, the Blazer belching smoke and sounding like a motorcycle. Got to fix that damn tailpipe, he thought, before she gets a ticket.

Around five o'clock Calhoun heard a car pull into the lot. He glanced out the window and saw a green Ford Explorer with a light bar on top and the York County Sheriff's Department logo on the door.

A moment later Sheriff Dickman came in. “Happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said. He was a short, barrel-chested guy with twinkling eyes and a sly leprechaun grin. The sheriff was close to sixty, but Calhoun knew he had the vitality of a man half his age. He wore khaki pants and matching shirt, a Stetson on his head, a badge on his chest, and a revolver on his hip.

“Hear something?” said Calhoun.

“Nope. Wondering if you did.”

“Nope,” said Calhoun. “Coke?”

“Sure,” said Dickman. “Let's sit outside so I can keep an ear on the radio.”

They sat on the porch. The radio in the Explorer squawked and buzzed through the open window. Dickman took off his hat and hung it on his knee. He smoothed his hand over his balding head and said he'd alerted everyone in his department, plus his counterparts up in Cumberland and Oxford counties and the state police, to be on the lookout for a gray-and-rust '63 Dodge Power Wagon that might've been in an accident, and he'd had one of his deputies call the hospitals. So far, nothing.

“Maybe you'd want to call his house again,” said Dickman.

“No harm in that, I guess,” said Calhoun.

He went inside, got the portable phone, brought it out on the porch, and dialed the number for Lyle's house. This time a young man named Danny answered. Nobody had seen or heard from Lyle, as far as he knew, and Danny had been there all day.

When Calhoun disconnected, he turned to the sheriff and shook his head. “He hasn't been home, and he hasn't been here,” he said. “Something's definitely happened to him.”

The sheriff shrugged. “I expect you're right. Don't know what else we can do. Something'll turn up.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” said Calhoun.

Darkness had fallen by the time he pulled into his dooryard that night. He fed Ralph and heated a can of beans for himself, tuned his stereo to the classical music station out of Portland, and settled into his soft chair for an evening of reading. Ralph curled up on the floor beside him, strategically positioning himself so that Calhoun could dangle his arm over the side and absentmindedly scratch his ears.

Shortly after he'd come to Maine, Calhoun had bought a thick American Lit college anthology at a yard sale. The book was nearly two thousand pages long. It began with the diaries and poems and sermons of the first settlers—John Smith and John Winthrop and Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. It ended with some stories by Ann Beattie and John Updike and Bernard Malamud.

Calhoun was sure he'd read a lot of this stuff during the time of his life that was still fuzzy, all those years that he'd lived before he woke up in the hospital. He wanted to recapture it, to catch up on his education.

He'd been doing it slowly and chronologically, dipping into the anthology now and then, skipping nothing, not even the sermons of those early fire-and-brimstone preachers, keeping his place marked with a matchbook, no more than one writer in an evening of reading. Most of them, he figured, he'd never read before. But once in a while he had a hit—a flash of recognition, a certain knowledge that he'd read, and probably studied, one of these writers before. Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Whitman. The excerpts in the anthology led him to the novels. He read as many of them as he could find at yard sales. He'd liked these writers before, he knew, and now he liked them all over again. Some of the Walt Whitman poems, he only needed to read the first few lines to be able to close his eyes and recite the rest.

Now, after five years with the anthology, he'd read his way well into the twentieth century.

Tonight it was a Katherine Anne Porter short story called “Maria Concepcion.” It sparked no memory flashes, but Calhoun rather liked it—liked Porter's clear, no-nonsense writing, the complexity of her characters, the irony in the story. When he finished it, he closed the heavy book and put it on the table beside him, dangled his hand, and gave Ralph a scratch.

He hadn't noticed when the radio station switched from classical to jazz, which meant that it was sometime after midnight. Calhoun laid his head back and closed his eyes. He recognized Miles Davis on trumpet, Red Garland on piano, John Coltrane on tenor sax. Bluesy, moody music, more déjà vu that brought Calhoun a flood of memory fragments which he didn't bother trying to sort out.

The first thing he'd bought for his new house—as soon as he started sleeping inside—had been an expensive stereo system with top-of-the-line Bose speakers. Pretty ironic for a man who was completely deaf in one ear and could not really hear in stereo.

He loved music, got a lot of those déjà vu rushes when he heard something from before. He wondered if he'd ever played an instrument. Figured he had. He expected that one day he'd pick up a saxophone or guitar or sit down at a piano and music would come bursting out of his fingers. Things kept happening to him that way.

That's how it had been the first time he'd picked up a fly rod after the hospital, and the first time he'd sat down to tie a fly. The memory was all there, in his brain and in his muscles, waiting to be let out.

He resisted sleep, thinking about Maria Concepcion, trying to analyze the story, wondering who he'd known before that Maria reminded him of. But he must've drifted off, because he jerked up when Ralph scrambled to his feet, scuttled over to the door with his toenails scratching the floor, and barked.

“Shut up, you,” said Calhoun mildly. Ralph barked whenever a coon or a porcupine wandered into the yard. His ears were considerably sharper than Calhoun's.

Then he heard the grumble of the busted tailpipe, growing louder, coming up his driveway, pulling in outside, falling suddenly silent. A car door slammed. Soft footsteps on the deck, the rattle of the doorknob, the click of the latch.

Then Kate came in.

K
ATE USUALLY PUT ON MAKEUP
and wore a dress and stockings and jewelry when she came in the night, but this time she had on the same shorts and T-shirt she'd been wearing that morning.

It didn't matter. Kate always looked great.

Ralph's entire hind end was wagging. Kate knelt down to scratch his ears. She looked up at Calhoun. “Evenin', Stoney.”

“Hi, honey,” said Calhoun. “You're right on time.”

Calhoun had started working for Kate Balaban a week after they met beside the tidal creek. At first he'd just waited on customers and tied flies in the shop, giving her a break and allowing her to guide clients occasionally. By September he was dickering with sales reps and building up the shop's inventory of fly-fishing gear and studying for his Maine Guide license.

Even during slack times or when they shared lunches on the porch, they talked only business. She never asked him where he had come from or why he seemed to be a man without a history, and he did not ask about her marriage.

Within a month, he realized he loved her. He tried not to dwell on it. Kate was married, and that was that.

She'd appeared at Calhoun's house for the first time one evening in early October following that first summer. He had a fire going in the woodstove and a Bach organ fugue was playing loud on his stereo when he heard a car door slam out in the dooryard.