The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (3 page)

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

“The game wardens are here.”

“Game wardens? Where the hell are the Camden cops?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The wardens were the first to arrive. There are two of them—two women.”

“Who are they? Do you know them?”

“No.”

“Fucking hell.” James tended to curse more after his visits to D.C., and Lyla assumed it was something he picked up there: a way people had of establishing their hierarchies in the halls of power. “Is Jimmy still in the barn?”

“I think so.”

“What does that mean?”

“The wardens wanted me to wait in the house while they tried to talk with Jimmy.”

“I need you to do something for me, Lyla,” James said. She always took comfort in her husband’s absolute confidence, the quick way he arrived at decisions. “I need you to go out there and call them back from the barn. I don’t want them talking to Jimmy until I get home. Tell them I’m only five minutes away.”

“But what if they—”

“Tell them he’ll listen to me. They just need to wait. Everyone just needs to wait.”

“But James—”

“Just do what I say. I can take care of this.”

Lyla opened the mudroom door, and the springer tried to push past her leg, until she shoved his head down. The sound of the rain was a constant roar. The water gushing from the house’s roof drains was louder than if she’d been standing beside a rushing stream.

She took several steps toward the barn, crossed half the distance from the house to the double doors, when a scream brought her up short. It was one of the Morgans. Lyla had grown up with horses and recognized when an animal was terrified.

The next thing she remembered were the shots: two of them, back-to-back. And then all the horses were screaming, panicked by the echoes, and she was running to the side door, which was standing open now, the rain slanting in.

An arm caught her as she stepped inside, holding her fast. It was the young warden, Danielle Tate. Their eyes met for a moment, and Lyla saw the other woman’s surprise and fear. The barn smelled of gunpowder in addition to the usual hay and manure. Tate was gripping a pistol.

Sergeant Frost loomed over Jimmy’s fallen body. She was holding a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The tiny blue beam was the only illumination in that huge space, and it shone straight down on the disfigured face of her son: a face that had once seemed beautiful to Lyla because of its resemblance to his father’s, but which was now the texture and color of melted tallow, as fake-looking as the red wig the young man had worn in public after he returned from the war.

Blood pumped from the hole in his neck and flowed across the rubber mat between the stalls. Even from the doorway, Lyla saw that his eyes were open, but they were fluttering, losing focus. In horror, she watched Kathy Frost kick the shotgun away from Jimmy’s clawlike hand, as if her dying son could possibly pose a danger to anyone now.

It was only when the sergeant raised her eyes to Lyla that the mother found her voice. “What have you done?” she cried, louder than the horses. “What have you done to my boy?”

3

On the morning after the shooting, while the medical examiner was zipping up the body bag and the detectives were beginning their interviews with everyone involved—including James Gammon Sr., who had arrived home five minutes after his son was shot through the carotid artery—I was sitting in the stern of a Grand Laker canoe, many miles to the north and east.

Two people were seated in front of me in the boat. One was a smooth-faced, bespectacled young man with a slight paunch and the weary air of middle age coming on way too fast; the other was his attractive girlfriend, who seemed to be compensating for her own long hours at a desk with militant dieting and exercise. Both were investment bankers from New York City who had paused in Freeport on their drive to Down East Maine to equip themselves from head to toe in outdoor clothing and fly-fishing gear from L.L.Bean.

Before setting out from the lodge, I’d given them both casting lessons on the dew-beaded lawn. The man, Mason, claimed to have been a lifelong angler, but he threw awful loops that kept twisting his tippet into wind knots. The young woman, a button-nosed blonde named Maddie, had never held a fly rod before. Within fifteen minutes of instruction, she was shooting line forty-five feet with pinpoint accuracy. Her success just made her boyfriend red-faced, and the harder he tried, the worse he cast.

I’d found it generally true that women were the best fly-casting students, since the secret to success is acquiring the smoothest form, which generates greater line speed. Men believe that the only way to prevail is to muscle their way through things, which is exactly the wrong lesson to draw from fly-fishing (and life). Too often I’d tried to use brute strength to solve my own problems, and I’d failed miserably. So I could sympathize with Mason.

A week of steady rain had raised the surface waters of West Grand Lake to the point where it was nearly swamping the boathouses, and the dam keeper who watched over the gate at the south end had been forced to increase the flow to levels few of the locals remembered. Most of the fishermen who came to the North Woods village of Grand Lake Stream—a nine-hour drive from Manhattan—came for the landlocked salmon that gathered in the river below the dam. They came to wade in the gin-clear water and cast to fish whose movements showed as darting shadows on the gravel and sandbanks along the bottom. But only a suicidal fool would have attempted to wade the stream at a flow of three thousand cubic feet of water per second.

In an effort to salvage some business, the local guides had switched to bass fishing on the surrounding lakes and ponds. The conditions weren’t much better, given the high, cold water. The bass hadn’t yet moved to their spawning beds and were hanging deep around the submerged boulders that dot the landscape of Washington County. If you wanted to catch anything, you’d be best off dunking a golden shiner down into the depths, something alive and wriggling, and even then you’d need some luck to catch a trophy.

But Mason and Maddie wanted to fly-cast for smallmouth using streamers and poppers. I warned them to lower their expectations. I was a guide, not a magician who could produce fish from murky lake bottoms.

“We don’t care if we catch anything,” Mason said. “We just want to be outside.”

Those are the magic words every fishing guide hopes to hear.

We dubbed around for a few hours, trying various rock clusters I knew to be fishy, as well as some hidden ledges and bars that the lodge owner, Jeff Jordan, had recommended. Maddie even managed to catch a decent-size pickerel. Mostly, though, I did my best to inform and entertain the couple. The mist made it difficult to take in the views, but occasionally a breeze would open a curtain in the fog and the pea-green hills would sharpen into focus, and you’d feel as if you were standing in a museum in front of the greatest landscape painting you’d ever seen.

I pointed out the distinctive songs of the migrating warblers we heard along the shore, nineteen species in all that morning, including Blackburnian, Cape May, mourning, bay-breasted, and northern waterthrush—birds that serious bird-watchers paid money to add to their life lists.

Coming around a bend, slowly because I was afraid of wrecking us on rocks that even in good conditions were hard to spot, we surprised a moose feeding in the shallows. It was a bull who had lost his antlers over the winter, and his shedding coat was mottled gray in patches across his shoulders. To me, he looked shopworn, but he was the first moose Maddie had ever seen and therefore something special.

“Oh, wow, he’s beautiful,” she said, trying to take a picture with her cell phone while I paddled in close. The animal lifted his dripping camel nose and squinted at the unfamiliar shape approaching across the gray water. As excited as I was for Maddie, a sadness enveloped me as we drew near the shore. I had seen many dead moose as a game warden and had killed more than a few myself, but the ones that haunted me were the five I’d found along a logging road the previous autumn: slaughtered out of pure evil by men who’d left the corpses to rot. It was one of the experiences that had shaken my commitment to my chosen profession. I had discovered there were limits to the cruelty I could bear witnessing.

I tried to shrug off the ghost images and nudged the canoe closer. But the bull decided he’d had enough of the paparazzi and shook his enormous head before splashing away into the forest.

Maddie turned to me in her high-backed chair. Her face was flushed. “That was awesome!”

“Thank you,” Mason said.

“My pleasure.” I scratched my chin. It was a new experience, touching my face and finding whiskers there.

Maddie had been looking at me strangely all morning. There was something about her face that seemed familiar, too. We must have been thinking the same thing.

“Mike, what did you say your last name was again?” she asked.

“Bowditch.”

“Did you go to Colby?”

“Yes.”

“I knew I’d met you before! I’m Maddie Lawson! Sarah’s friend from Choate.”

I barely remembered my ex-girlfriend’s roommate from prep school. Maddie had come to visit Sarah a couple of times in Waterville. The picture I had in my memory was of a homely brown-haired girl who had struggled unsuccessfully to keep off weight.

“You’re … blond,” I said.

“Yeah, and I have a new nose, too. I can’t believe we’ve spent the whole morning together and I didn’t even recognize you. Sarah told me you were some sort of forest ranger.”

“A game warden,” I said. “I used to be.”

“I was so sure you two were going to get married someday.”

I had thought so myself. “Sarah and I realized we were going in different directions.”

“Did you know she was back in Maine?”

The news took a while to settle in my gut. “The last I heard, she was in D.C., working for Head Start.”

“She’s living in Portland now,” Maddie said, “doing development work for a new charter school. We talked about meeting for a drink on the drive home. She’s going to be so freaked-out to hear that you were our fishing guide!”

We were drifting closer to shore than I had intended, and suddenly I heard a scraping sound under the boat and quickly pushed the paddle over the side to keep from running aground.

“You should have dinner with us at the lodge and catch up,” Mason said.

“You should!” said Maddie. “It would be our treat. Are you allowed to do that?”

“Yes, I am.” I kept my head down and back-paddled the canoe away from a looming rock. The mention of food made me check my wristwatch. “I should make you two a shore lunch before it gets any later or it starts to pour again. There’s an island up ahead with a picnic table. The guides have set up a tarp, so we can get out of the rain for a while.”

“It’s not raining now,” said Mason.

“We’ve been so lucky today,” said Maddie.

“We haven’t caught as many fish as I would have liked,” I said.

“Oh, we don’t care about that,” she said. “We’re just grateful for the experience.”

Magic words, as I said.

Mason gazed out at the blurred shoreline and breathed in the pine-sweet air. “I can’t believe you get to come out here every day and see all this beauty,” he said. “You probably hear this all the time, Mike, but I think you must have the best job in the world.”

Coming from a guy who pulled down a seven-figure salary, it seemed like a funny comment. But Mason was right that guides heard similar remarks from men who lived their lives utterly detached from the natural world. There was almost a physical shock that came from breathing air heavily scented with balsam and hearing the cries of a loon across a mirror-smooth lake. To the extent I believed in epiphanies, it was from watching people venture out to the edge of the wilderness and realize how hollow their souls were. Whether being a low-paid fishing guide was the “best job in the world” was another matter.

Now that we were no longer strangers, some of the pleasure had seeped out of the morning for me. Maddie and Mason seemed perfectly nice, among the friendliest and least demanding “sports” I had met. But I had been enjoying the anonymity that came from being just another fishing guide in a town with dozens of them.

I wasn’t sure about dinner, but it seemed rude to refuse their invitation. After I’d left the Warden Service, I’d made a resolution that I was going to put aside my regrets and direct my attention to the days ahead of me. Rehashing the past with Sarah’s friend might not be my idea of a good time, but it wasn’t like I had other plans.

*   *   *

Once we were clear of the shoreline boulders, I cranked the engine on the Evinrude outboard and pointed the bow in the direction of Bump Island. The canoe took off, and it felt like we were traveling along a corrugated surface. Every few seconds, the bow of the boat would hit a wave, and we would be momentarily jolted into the air before gravity pulled us back into our ladder-backed seats. I tried not to go so fast as to soak my clients or collide with one of the half-submerged trees that the winter storms had knocked into the lake.

As we approached Bump Island—an almost perfectly dome-shaped rock just large enough for a cluster of spruce trees to have taken root—I spotted a boat floating offshore. Another fisherman was using our communal picnic site.

The boat was a wedge-shaped Champion—the kind you see on Saturday-morning fishing shows. It had a flat deck for standing, a ruby red paint job that seemed to include a liberal amount of girlish glitter, and a huge black Mercury outboard. Eastern Maine has some of the best smallmouth fishing in the country, but it was unusual to see these tournament-style bass boats on our icy lakes.

“Looks like it’s occupied,” said Mason.

“I’m going to say hello, if you don’t mind,” I said.

I didn’t recognize the boat and wanted to have a look at its owner. The impulse to investigate any unusual occurrence in the woods was one aspect of the warden’s mind-set I was having trouble letting go.

As we drew nearer to the island, I saw blue smoke drifting sideways from under the spruce boughs, pressed down by the low-pressure system that had descended on the Northeast for the past week. Beside the picnic table, with its overhanging canvas tarp, stood an enormous electric-blue tent. Its owners had pitched it no more than ten yards from the
NO CAMPING
sign.