Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (16 page)

Morse leaned back in her chair and showed her pearly teeth. “There you go, Lieutenant. When I told you I wanted your people to be more candid, that’s exactly what I had in mind. You’re not afraid of me, are you, Warden Bowditch? You don’t worry about sugarcoating your opinions for my delicate ears.”

My eyes darted to Rivard’s scowling expression and back. “No, ma’am,” I said.

“I fired Billy Cronk because he can’t do his job if he’s in jail. And frankly, if there’s a chance he
did
have something to do with the murder of those moose, then having a violent man around my family is a risk I see no point in taking.” She lifted a forkful of tofu to her mouth and swallowed. “Besides, he lied to me about his criminal record.”

I felt an urge to stand up for my friend, but the firmness in Morse’s voice told me that she didn’t back down from many decisions. “I’m not sure what being your liaison entails,” I said.

“You’ll be in communication with the investigative team throughout the day,” Rivard told me. “You’ll also be the point of contact between Ms. Morse and the state police, since they’re cross-checking the death threats she received against our MOSES database of convicted poachers, and following a parallel investigation on that front. They’re hoping to bring stalking or terrorizing charges, as well.”

“Should I just stay here all day?”

“Is there somewhere else you need to be?”

“No, sir.”

The lieutenant picked up his hat. “In that case, I am going to head back to the field office.”

“Thank you for coming over, Lieutenant,” said Morse. “Do you need someone to show you out?”

“I think I can find my way.” He nodded at the people seated at the table but pointedly avoided looking in my direction, and then he disappeared down the hall.

I caught up with him as he was opening the front door. “Lieutenant! Can I have a word?”

“What is it, Bowditch?”

“How much do you want me to tell her?”

“As little as possible—although I doubt she’ll accept that. She didn’t accept it from me.” He stepped out into the sun.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I said.

“I know,” said Rivard, reaching in his pocket for a tin of chewing tobacco. “That’s what pisses me off.”

17

After the lieutenant left, I wandered back into the kitchen. Leaf had already wolfed down his tofu and started on the doughnuts that had been sitting on the counter. It was dangerous to stand between a plate of junk food and a man with the munchies.

He held up a curved piece of doughnut. “Want one? They’re gluten-free.”

“My cook uses almond flour on account of Briar’s allergies,” said Morse.

“No, thank you.”

Morse gave me that sly catlike smile of hers. “You have excellent manners, but they don’t seem to get in the way of you voicing an opinion. And I don’t get the sense that you, unlike some of your colleagues, have an issue with strong women.”

I thought of the confident women I’d known in my life—my former supervisor, Sgt. Kathy Frost; Sheriff Rhine; my strange and inscrutable mother. “No, ma’am.”

Dexter Albee was watching me carefully, as if he had seen Morse engage in this cat-and-mouse game with other people before and already knew what would happen to the mouse. I remembered having seen him quoted in a number of newspaper articles about the proposed Moosehorn National Park. He had an office near the Maine state capital, where he was a registered lobbyist and conservative punching bag. Given the general disdain in which Elizabeth Morse and the Thoreau Initiative were held, I admired Albee’s courage in being the spokesman for such an unpopular cause.

“I want you to tell me what’s going on with your investigation,” she said.

“I haven’t been privy to all aspects of the case,” I said. “I’ve kind of been on the periphery.”

“That’s undoubtedly why the lieutenant agreed to station you here. You don’t know enough to spill any of the important beans. So in that case, what can you tell me?”

I braced myself against the granite counter. “We’re operating under the theory that there were at least two shooters, based upon the different-caliber bullet cartridges we recovered. We also found some cigarette butts and candy wrappers at the kill sites. The state police forensic lab in Augusta is testing everything for fingerprints and DNA. The fingerprint matches should come back soon—if there are any matches—but the DNA tests can take weeks.”

“Was the lieutenant being straight with me when he said you had a list of suspects?”

“There is a list,” I said.

She leaned an elbow on the table and brought her hand to her face in contemplation. “And what have you been doing since I last saw you?”

“I have been searching the local gravel pits, looking for spent cartridges that might match the ones we found on your property. If we knew where the killers practiced, we’d have another potential clue in identifying them. I also spent some time checking the rifles of local hunters, trying to find a match with the bullets used to slaughter the moose.”

“And did you?”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “That remains to be seen.”

“What’s your confidence level in the investigation?”

“My confidence level?”

“How much faith do you have in the men overseeing the case? Rivard and that weaselly one?”

“The Warden Service has an exemplary track record in solving shootings like these.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know, ma’am.”

Her mouth dropped open. She looked at Albee with her jaw hanging loose, and then she let out a belly laugh. “Very diplomatic! Dexter, you should recruit this young man to come work for you. We could use someone with his silver tongue in Augusta.”

“My guess is that the warden isn’t a Moosehorn supporter, Betty,” said Dexter Albee.

“That’s because he hasn’t heard your sales pitch.” She stood up from the table. “Why don’t you take him into the great room while Leaf and I do the dishes. I’ll be in to join you in a few minutes.”

Elizabeth Morse had a way of framing all her suggestions as commands. Is her forcefulness a result of being rich, I wondered, or is it an innate quality that enabled her to rise from a hardscrabble farm to the corporate boardrooms she now frequents?

Whatever the answer was, I found myself blindly following Albee through a formal dining room that could have comfortably seated the New England Patriots fifty-three-man roster and into an immense open area where the ceiling shot up past second- and third-floor walkways to distant dark rafters. The great room held not one fireplace, but two, and was walled entirely with glass overlooking Sixth Machias Lake. Looking out the windows, I saw far green mountains and bottle-blue waves rippling across miles of open water. The light inside the room had a shifting, aqueous quality from the reflection of the lake below.

In front of one of the fieldstone hearths, an easel was set up with a chart showing eastern Maine; a red line delineated Morse’s extensive property holdings. She really did own the northern halves of Hancock and Washington counties, I realized. There were folding chairs arranged in front of the easel, as if Morse had recently compelled a dozen of her unwitting houseguests to listen to Dexter Albee’s promotional pitch.

He tugged on one of his puppet ears and said, “You don’t really want to hear this.”

“Actually, I’m kind of curious.”

From reading the Bangor paper, I was familiar with the broad-brush description of the proposal, but I hadn’t spent hours immersing myself in the details. Maybe boning up on the specifics would give me some insight into the twisted mind-set of the men who had slaughtered the moose. I was also trapped in the house for the rest of the day, so what else did I have to do?

He motioned for me to take a seat, but I shook my head no and remained standing.

Albee spread out his arms, as if pantomiming a welcome to a sizable crowd. His voice projected across the room. “‘Primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature.’ Those were the words Henry David Thoreau used to describe the Maine woods after his 1846 expedition to the summit of Katahdin. At the time of Thoreau’s three visits to Maine, most of the North Woods was public, a resource owned entirely by the people of the state. But by the time of his death, in 1862, this ‘collective commons’ had been destroyed. Shortsighted Maine politicians had sold off all the land or granted deeds to private interests. And so began the taming of nature, and the loss of one of America’s crown jewels.

“Thoreau believed that wild places such as the ones he found in northern Maine should be set aside as national preserves, and over the decades efforts were made to secure large-scale protection for the North Woods. In 1933, Maine’s then governor, Louis Brann, put forward the idea of establishing a million-acre ‘Roosevelt National Park’ in northern Maine. Four years later, Congressman Ralph Brewster proposed the creation of a four-hundred-thousand-acre ‘Katahdin National Park,’ with the backing of both the Appalachian Trail Conference and the Millinocket Chamber of Commerce. Alas, both these efforts failed, and it was only through the personal vision, determination, and philanthropy of a former governor, Percival Baxter, that Katahdin itself was spared. Today the ‘forever wild’ preserve Baxter created out of his own funds and which he donated in its entirety to the citizens of Maine—two-hundred-thousand-acre Baxter State Park—stands as a testament to what one brave individual can accomplish in the face of well-financed corporate opposition.

“Now, after decades during which the surrounding woods have been clear-cut and despoiled, developed without regard to the natural movement of wildlife across the landscape, or without any effort to maintain the scenic beauty of one of the nation’s last unpeopled places, there finally comes a successor. Maine entrepreneur, philanthropist, and mother Elizabeth Morse has accepted the challenge thrown down by Percival Baxter to take personal action to protect the North Woods. She stands ready to donate one hundred thousand acres of her own land to the citizens of the United States to create its newest national park, Moosehorn, here on the eastern edge of our great nation.”

I found my eyes drifting toward the sparkling lake and imagined the spell his words must cast on the powerful people Morse invited to sit by her fires.

Albee continued his well-practiced speech. “Moosehorn National Park will be a place of verdant pine and spruce forests, multicolor hardwoods that blaze with foliage in the autumn, boreal bogs brightened by lady slippers and swamp loosestrife, crystalline lakes, and rolling mountains unbroken by cell towers or other man-made structures. It will be a safe haven for fish and animals, not just the salmon and moose and eagles that already live here but also the cougars, timber wolves, and woodland caribou that were cruelly extirpated from these remote forests. People weary of twenty-first-century noise and overpopulation—the artificial condition we call ‘civilization’—will find solitude here and experience the spiritual rebirth that comes from meeting nature in its primeval state. Moosehorn will be a time capsule containing the hopes and dreams of—”

Above my head, someone began to clap. “Preach it, Pastor Albee!”

Dexter frowned at the second-floor walkway. “Hello, Briar.”

I craned my neck and found myself looking straight up the oversize T-shirt she wore as a nightie. Out of reflex, I turned my eyes to the floor.

“I never get tired of hearing your sermons,” she said. “Who are you trying to convert to the cause this morning?”

I heard a creaking noise that sounded as if she was leaning over the polished log bannister for a look at the top of my head. I raised my face so she could see it.

“Hi, Briar.”

She had her mother’s superwhite smile. Her loose hair was hanging down. “Mike! I didn’t realize it was you. What are you doing here?”

“Your mother has asked Warden Bowditch to be her contact with the investigation,” said Albee.

“Really? That’s so awesome.”

I heard the slapping of bare feet on the floor above and then quick steps as she came prancing down the stairs. She entered the room with her luxuriant brown hair all a mess and her eyes still a little unfocused, as if she’d just awakened from an enchanted slumber that had lasted for years. Her T-shirt was pink and had a slogan on it:
SAVE DARFUR: DON’T JUST LOOK AWAY. STOP GENOCIDE NOW
. It barely covered the tops of her suntanned thighs. Briar Morse was clearly not self-conscious about showing off her body.

“So, has Dexter persuaded you to join the cult?”

Albee gave a polite smile. “Briar has been forced to hear my presentation on more than a few occasions.”

“Have you gotten to the part about how it’s never going to happen in a million years?”

“I was curious about the process,” I said. “Everything I’ve heard suggests you need to get votes from politicians who are opposed to removing so much timberland from the tax rolls.”

“I usually save that part for the end,” he said. “The first thing you need to keep in mind is that this is almost always a long road. It took twenty-six
years
to create the Grand Canyon National Park. Today, we can’t imagine anyone not wanting to protect the Grand Canyon, but a hundred years ago there was still a contentious debate around setting that land aside. It’s the same dynamic here at Moosehorn. Our task is to persuade people that these lands are investments and that the returns will be accumulated not just by future generations but by those in the existing communities surrounding this area. Tourists spend eleven
billion
dollars a year in park gateway towns like Bar Harbor and West Yellowstone. Critics of our plan cite the loss of hundreds of woods-products jobs, but they don’t mention the three thousand jobs Acadia National Park has created seventy miles from here on the coast.”

“You still haven’t explained the process,” I said.

He grinned as if I had caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. “There are two ways that a parcel of land can become a national park. The first is when Congress asks the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, to conduct a special resource study to evaluate the site’s boundaries and budget. The NPS then sends a report back to Congress, which can choose to accept or ignore its recommendations.”