Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (15 page)

“He’s so self-righteous and boring.”

“Briar dropped out of Bennington last spring,” Leaf explained, “so we’re all doing what we can to continue her education.”

“Bill and Melinda Gates have done more good in the world than Noam Chomsky ever will,” said Briar. “Just look at Africa. That’s where Mom should be spending her money.”

At this hour, I didn’t want to get drawn into a debate over the role of philanthropy in a political world. I found a business card in the console between the front seats and handed it to Briar. “If someone threatens you again, you should try nine-one-one first, but don’t hesitate to call me, too.”

She gave me a smile and held the card between two fingers over her breasts. For a moment, I thought she was going to tuck it into her bra, but the gesture was only meant to make me look. “Do I have to wait that long to call you?”

I laughed. “You two have a good evening.” I had little doubt that Leaf, at least, intended to do so.

“You, too, Warden,” said the hippie. “You, too.”

As they walked side by side back to their waiting cars, I noticed that they were exactly the same height.

16

Shortly before dawn, I awoke to a bloodcurdling scream. I swung my legs off the bed and sat upright. For a few disoriented seconds, I sat there, heart racing, trying to recall the nightmare that had shattered my sleep. Then I heard the scream again in the woods outside my cabin. It sounded like a woman. I grabbed the flashlight that I kept in the dust beneath my futon and ran out of the bedroom in my undershorts.

I had locked my firearms in the safe for the night, so I grabbed the only weapon in view, which just happened to be the hatchet beside the woodpile, and I went leaping through the front door and down the steps into the darkness. In less than a minute, I’d gone from a deep, dreamless sleep to a state of high alert. My hand was shaking from the adrenaline, causing the flashlight beam to jump along the pine-needle floor of the forest.

“Hello?”

The night was still. The air had the tangy, almost pungent aroma that is the smell of autumn in the North Woods. I heard in the distance the ecstatic warble of a purple finch that had risen to greet the sun, which would soon be pushing pink light above the horizon. I sprinted around the back of the cabin to the steep, wooded hillside where chanterelle mushrooms appeared in orange clusters after rainstorms. I shined the light back and forth, high and low. To another human being, I would have looked like a crazy man, running around in his underwear, brandishing an ax and shouting at the dark.

But there were no other human beings present, only a fisher and the snowshoe hare it had just killed.

It was the hare I’d heard screaming. When they are injured, rabbits make a noise like a child being murdered. I’d heard the sound often enough over the years, and if I’d been fully awake, I would have known instantly what it was. This one’s brown fur had already started to turn white in spots. Despite the balmy temperatures, it was growing out a pale winter coat that would have allowed it to hide amid the inevitable snowbanks. Instead, the white splotches had given the hare away as it tried to vanish into the lingering greenery. The poor thing had never stood a chance.

I watched the fisher grab the lifeless hare by the neck and trot away into the darkness. Trappers sometimes call them fisher cats, but they are actually weasels on steroids. Weighing in at a deceptively light ten pounds, they are ferocious and fearless critters—brown of coat, with devil-pointed ears and shaggy tails—that feast on porcupines, which they flip onto their backs to attack the soft underbellies. Fishers are usually the culprits behind the disappearance of neighborhood house cats. I had even found a lynx skull once with two fang marks that must have pierced the brain; a biologist friend told me those mortal injuries had been inflicted by a fisher.

Later, I would remember the scream of that luckless rabbit and wonder if it was a portent of the bad things that were to come. I had to remind myself that nature doesn’t send us omens to warn us of all the calamities we bring upon ourselves.

*   *   *

I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I lay flat on the bed, with the screen window open above my head and the curtain fluttering in the warm breeze. I watched the green fabric billow out like a sail and then be sucked back against the mesh when the gust had passed. The air had the evergreen smell of a Christmas wreath.

After a while, I got up and made myself a cup of instant coffee. I took it outside and sat on the porch in my underwear and listened to the forest waking up around me, the finch still singing his hopeful tune, joined by a chattering red squirrel, a flock of cooing mourning doves, and all of it backed by the sighing sound the wind made in the tops of the hemlocks and tamaracks. I was never happier, never more my best self, than when I was in the woods.

I had been that way as a boy, as well, which had made my mother’s decision to divorce my dad and leave the woods so much harder to accept when I was nine. Nothing about the suburbs had appealed to me: not the chemically green lawns or the backyard cookouts with neighbors you invited out of politeness rather than real friendship, and certainly not the three-floor McMansions with so many rooms the owners didn’t even know what to put in them. I’d spent my teenage years running to the last wild places in town the developers hadn’t yet destroyed. But my mother seemed to be happy living in Scarborough, a stone’s throw from the beach. Today I would call her and ask what was going on between her and Neil. What was up with all the inspirational messages? And why had Neil phoned my house for perhaps the first time ever?

At precisely eight
A.M.
, my cell phone rang. The display read
UNKNOWN.
I answered the call anyway.

“Warden Bowditch, this is Elizabeth Morse.”

The sound of her voice made me self-conscious that I was standing there half-naked. “Hello, Ms. Morse. Good morning.”

“I understand that you rescued my daughter from some trouble last night.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“She seems to think it was significant.” She paused. “I’d like you to come to my house this morning.”

I set the empty coffee cup down on the bureau. “Um. Why?”

“I have some questions for you about the progress—or lack thereof—in this investigation. It was what I wanted to speak with you about the other night.”

“Ma’am,” I said. “You really should be talking to Lieutenant Rivard.”

“I’ve been talking to him. Now I would like to talk to you.”

“I’ll need to clear this with him.”

“All right,” she said, and I sensed that she was handing off the phone to someone else.

“Just get over here, Bowditch,” said Marc Rivard, sounding as pissed off as a person can be without totally blowing his lid.

*   *   *

An hour later, I pulled up to the gate that allowed entry onto Morse’s woodland estate from the south. Again, the gatekeeper was Leaf Woodwind. He was wearing the same outfit he’d had on the previous evening—anarchy T-shirt, cutoffs, and flip-flops—although he had added a floppy wide-brimmed hat to the ensemble. He must have left the Toyota Prius parked back at the log mansion.

“I like to go for a walk in the morning,” he said as he climbed into my passenger seat. Behind his glasses, his eyes were threaded with pink lines. “There’s something so beautiful about first light—it’s like the color of magic.”

I glanced at him through my Oakleys, wondering how high he was flying. “That’s an interesting way of describing it.”

“Back in Vietnam, in the mornings, this mist would rise off the rice paddies. The sun would catch it just this certain way, and it would shimmer, you know, like ghosts dancing.”

“You were in the war?” For some reason, this news surprised me. He seemed like such a peacenik. Then again, I supposed that a lot of the back-to-the-landers had been men whose faith in the modern world had been shattered by mechanized warfare.

“Ninth Infantry,” he said. “The ‘brown water navy.’”

“My dad was in the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” asked Leaf.

“Why do you say that?”

“I can hear it in your voice, man.”

We drove past the place where Moose A had dropped dead in the withering weeds. The carcass seemed to be gone, whether removed by wardens or picked apart by ravens and coyotes, I had no idea. I studied the roadside, but I was thinking that Leaf Woodwind was a more perceptive and complicated man than the smiling stoner he appeared to be at first glance.

Rivard’s spiffy black GMC was parked outside Morse’s front door in the open area she reserved for guests. This time, rather than parking around the corner with the hired help, I pulled in beside Briar’s expensive convertible. Mine wasn’t the only vehicle out of place: A dented and scraped blue Subaru Outback was also parked here.

As we approached the entrance, I again gazed up at the
MOOSEHORN LODGE
sign over the door, this time wondering how Morse could reconcile her desire to create this ostentatious log castle in the woods with a campaign to remove other human habitations from the area. Her yearning to experience wilderness seemed to end at her own doorstep.

Leaf punched a coded number into a console beside the double doors, and I heard the very clear sound of a lock clicking open. Then he twisted one of the knobs and led me inside. We entered a vast, airy foyer that reminded me, in its openness and the random placement of chairs and couches, of the lobby at the El Tovar Hotel on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The log walls gleamed with new varnish, and the flagstone floor showed no sign yet of the inevitable scuffing you get from boots tracking abrasive winter sand inside. A spectacular chandelier hung overhead, like a leafless tree turned upside down, with bulbs at the tips of the branches, although there was no need this morning for artificial illumination, not with the shafts of golden sunlight falling from the high windows.

“They’re in the kitchen,” said Leaf.

I followed him past a broad set of stairs leading up to the second story, down a hall hung with paintings by Maine artists whose names I recognized—Hartley and Fitzgerald and Welliver—and finally into a bright kitchen bigger than my entire cabin, where Elizabeth Morse stood at a stove, frying tofu, while Lieutenant Rivard drank tea from a stoneware mug and conversed with a jug-eared man whose face seemed vaguely familiar.

“I’m just making breakfast,” Betty Morse said. She wore an apron over a chambray shirt and jeans that had been patched with squares of patterned red fabric. I noticed she was barefoot. “I’m making my signature tofu scramble with curried spinach.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve already eaten. But I’d love some coffee.”

“Leaf, pour the warden a cup of tea.”

The hippie happily obliged.

Rivard glared at me over the rim of his mug. “Bowditch,” he said by way of a growled greeting.

“You haven’t met my partner in crime,” said Morse, turning from the stove. “Dexter, introduce yourself.”

The jug-eared man grinned and held out an overly large hand for me to shake. Everything about him seemed out of proportion. His chin was too small and his cheekbones were too wide; his shoulders were too broad and his legs were too short. His dark blond hair seemed beset by cowlicks. There was something almost endearingly grotesque about his appearance, as if he had been drawn by a small child. He was wearing a red-and-black flannel shirt over faded Levi jeans, the legs of which were tucked into well-worn Bean boots. “Dexter Albee,” he said.

“Dexter is with the Thoreau Initiative. He’s the one who sold me on the idea of creating a park.”

“Betty, that’s a fib,” he said.

“How so? You’ve been running around the state for a decade with this idea, getting nowhere. I’m just your sugar momma.”

Albee flashed a smile that made his exaggerated features seem even more so. “You were at the very first meeting of the initiative in Concord. And I still have the check you wrote, so don’t deny you were a pioneer.”

Morse scooped the mushy tofu onto three stoneware plates and carried them to the butcher-block table beside the windows. “All right,” she said, untying her apron and draping it over the back of a hand-crafted chair. “I am a pioneer, as well as a crackpot, nutcase, tree hugger, bitch, flatlander, queen, and what else, Leaf?”

“One of the letters accused you of being a hermaphrodite,” said the hippie.

She sat down heavily at the table without waiting for her guests. “I think he said I had a cock where my cunt should be.” She picked up a fork and pointed the tines at Rivard. “Why mince words? Right, Lieutenant? When someone wants to kill you, it doesn’t pay to soft-pedal the truth.”

Rivard and I remained standing while the others began to eat.

“What about Briar?” Leaf asked.

“She finished a bottle of wine after we went to bed. We won’t see her till noon.” Morse raised her eyes from her plate and locked them on mine. I had forgotten what an interesting shade they were, green, with flecks like polished pieces of amber. “I’m guessing by now you’re wondering why you’re here, Warden Bowditch.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell him, Lieutenant.”

“Charley Stevens has located three more kill sites, bringing the total of dead moose we’ve found now to ten.”

“Jesus,” I said.

Elizabeth frowned. “You’re leaving something out, Lieutenant.”

“Ms. Morse has asked that you be assigned as her personal liaison for the duration of the investigation into the moose killings.” Rivard said this with all the joy of a man telling his wife he’d just lost their nest egg at a Las Vegas casino.

“Why me?”

“The lieutenant has more important things to do than ‘handle’ me,” said Morse. “Two days have gone by, and my understanding is that you don’t have a single plausible suspect—”

“That’s not entirely accurate,” said Rivard, smoothing his mustache.

“A single plausible suspect,” repeated Morse, “with the possible exception of my own former caretaker, whose motive still seems a bit unclear to me.”

“If you don’t believe Billy shot those moose, then why did you fire him?” I asked.