Paul Doiron - The Poacher's Son

He winced. “Don’t speak too soon.”

“I’m going to get you out of here, Charley.”

He smiled, but his eyes were full of doubt. “I think I’m going into shock.”

“You’re a tough old geezer. You’ll make it.”

I made a pressure bandage out of my T-shirt and wrapped it tight around his leg. Then I went to fetch the canoe. I’d kicked it away leaping into the water and had to swim out to retrieve it. Getting Charley into the canoe without overturning it wasn’t easy. He passed out from the pain of being lifted up, and I had to shake him to bring him around again. He looked me full in the eyes.

Flecks of spittle clung to his lips. “What happened?”

“You passed out.”

“Shit.”

I pushed off with the paddle and turned the canoe in the direction of the sporting camp, a mile up the lake.

He tried to clear his throat, but his voice was still faint and strained. “Where’s your dad?”

“He killed himself.”

“I thought I heard a shot before. What about the girl?”

“Drowned.”

He nodded as if this explained everything. “If I pass out again and don’t come around, tell Ora I’m sorry.”

“You can tell her yourself.” The rain had stopped, but I hadn’t noticed until I’d begun paddling again. The wind had died down and a mist was rising off the slick surface of the lake. “You’re the one who told me you were indestructible.”

“Told you a bunch of lies.” He smiled and closed his eyes and folded his hands on his chest. But he was restless and couldn’t keep his fingers and feet from twitching.

“Stay with me,” I said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I tried to keep my strokes calm and controlled. My arms and shoulders ached as if I had done a hundred pull-ups, but I never stopped, not even for a second.

The lakeshore slid along the side of the boat, an endless wall of dripping pines and birches. We passed beneath the tumbling, talus cliffs of Holeb Mountain, its bald summit dissolving into clouds. Up ahead I saw the sporting camp take shape out of the mist. First the dock, then the lodge.

Blue lights were flashing behind the buildings. It took me forever to realize what those lights were.

Before Charley had broken off his search for Truman Dellis, he put in a call to the state police. The first trooper had arrived at Rum Pond only minutes after my father and Brenda made me step into the canoe. Now there were troopers, deputy sheriffs, and game wardens all over the scene. Wearily I watched them carry Charley away, making a stretcher of their interlocking arms. I tried to follow, but hands restrained me. I turned my head. It was Soctomah. He was wearing a navy Windbreaker over a bulletproof vest. He wanted to know what had happened. Where, he wanted to know, was Brenda Dean?

I pointed down the lake.

For an instant the detective followed the invisible line that extended from my fingertip as if the mists would part and bring her into view. Then, just as quickly, he turned back to me, his face dark with confusion and impatience. “What happened?” he asked again.

“It was my father,” I said. “He killed them all.”

Someone found a shirt for me. Someone else brought me a paper cup with black coffee in it.

After Soctomah and Menario were reassured that there was no longer any present danger-that my father had no armed accomplice lurking in the woods-they sent a boat down to the other end of the lake to find the bodies. Then they sat me down at a wet picnic table and made me describe what had happened from the moment Charley and I arrived this morning at Rum Pond. They wanted to know about my discovery of Russ Pelletier’s body and how much I had disturbed the crime scene, and they wanted to know the exact sequence of events that resulted in my shooting Truman Dellis. The entire camp was being cordoned off, they said, and the state police evidence recovery team needed to know every step I had taken and what I had touched and what I’d left alone.

“You were describing how you stood up in the canoe,” said Detective Menario, pushing a little tape recorder across the table at me. “Why’d you do that?”

“I don’t know. I guess it was the look on her face.”

“What look?”

“She couldn’t stop grinning. It made me mad.”

“So the canoe overturned?”

“That’s right.”

“And she never came up?”

“She hit her head on something underwater. It might have been a rock or maybe she came up under the canoe. I remember kicking something pretty hard when I went under. It might have been her head.”

Menario gave me an incredulous smile. “And your father was so grief-stricken he shot himself.”

“She was the reason he came back.”

“I thought you said he came back to frame Pelletier and Dellis.”

“The real reason was Brenda. After she drowned, he had nothing else to live for.”

“A real romantic.”

My coffee had grown cold. I poured it onto the ground. Dusk had begun to fall. Out on the lake I saw trout rising as insects hatched out onto the surface. Soon the bats would come out to feed in the dark. “I’d like to go to Skowhegan. I’d like to wait with Ora at the hospital.”

The tape recorder clicked off on its own. Menario reached into his Windbreaker for a new microcassette. “Let’s go over this again,” he said.

“It can wait,” Soctomah said to his partner. “Why don’t you go find a ride for Mike.”

Menario looked at him sourly. Then he stuffed the recorder in his pocket and walked off.

“He’s a good detective,” said Soctomah, watching him go.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“The A.G. is going to have to take a look at what happened with Truman Dellis. Your shooting him, I mean.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

A boat motored up to the dock. We watched the state police unload two body bags, carrying them up the hill to a waiting ambulance.

I stood up. My joints felt a hundred years old. “I’d really like to get going, if it’s OK with you.”

“I understand,” he said.

My last view of Rum Pond Sporting Camps was in the mirror of Deputy Twombley’s patrol car. Once again he had been designated my private chauffeur. Lit up by the blue strobes of police cruisers and the lights brought in by crime scene investigators, the camp receded into the darkening forest. I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

Probably not. Pelletier didn’t have any children, that I knew of, no heirs except maybe his ex-wife, but it wouldn’t matter if he’d left behind a family of ten since there was no way in hell Jonathan Ship-man’s murder would stop Wendigo Timber from developing this land. There was never any chance of that happening, no matter what Vernon Tripp and the others might have hoped. The leaseholders would be evicted from their camps throughout the region and this hundred-year-old sporting camp would be sold to some hedge fund millionaire to turn into a private lakeside retreat to be used two weeks every summer.

Which meant Charley and Ora would also lose their home of thirty years on Flagstaff Pond. What would they do then? What would Ora do if he never returned from the hospital?

Twombley didn’t say a word during the drive. His puffy face was lit up by the dashboard, but I couldn’t read his expression. I rolled down the automatic window, letting the air rush in around my head, and closed my eyes.

He woke me sometime later. We had arrived at Redington-Fairview General Hospital in Skowhegan and were idling beside the ambulance bay. I started to get out, but he called after me. “Bowditch.”

“Yeah?”

He stared at me for a long time, then shook his head and said: “Never mind.”

I went inside to start my vigil.