Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

“I can barely hear you. You sound like you’re about to break up.” The weakness of the transmission was distorting her voice, but I sensed a distinct note of panic in it. “Someone’s chasing me again. I don’t know where I am, Mike!”

I stopped the truck. “Are you in the woods?”

“I went for a drive again. The guard said to stay away from town, so I went-”

I turned off the engine to quiet the squealing belt. “Say again.”

“Maybe the Stud Mill Road. I don’t know!”

“Your car has a GPS, right?”

“It doesn’t show logging roads!”

“That doesn’t matter. What you want is the compass function. Head east.”

“East?”

“You’re either going to hit a bigger road or you’ll come to one of the rivers or lakes. Most of them have roads that follow the shore. Turn north if you do. That will take you back in the direction of Grand Lake Stream.”

“East and then north. What if I see that truck again, though?”

I didn’t have an answer to that particular question, other than to hope that she didn’t. “I’m going to head back toward Grand Lake Stream. In a minute, we’re probably going to lose our signal, but I will keep trying your number.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“Just keep hitting redial!”

“Mike? Mike?”

Then she was gone. All I heard on the other end was a drone. I restarted my engine and did a sharp three-point turn in the road, starting back north again toward Little Wabassus. I hadn’t asked Briar if it was the same truck following her as before. Maybe when I came to that hilltop, I would get a signal again. I hoped to God I would. Finding her in these woods wouldn’t be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. It would be more like finding a single pine needle in a forest of pines.

Racing back along the logging road, worried about the very real possibilities of getting a flat tire or crashing into a moose, I tried to conjure the crazy map of logging roads between Grand Lake Stream and the Airline. My district crept into this wild country as far as the southernmost section of Morse’s estate, and so I had learned the ins and outs of these particular woods over the course of the past year. I’d also familiarized myself with Cody Devoe’s district to my west, which included a lengthy stretch of the Stud Mill Road. But the winding dirt lanes to the north belonged to Jeremy Bard, and he hadn’t exactly hung out a welcome sign for me.

I paused for a few minutes at the top of the hill where I’d gotten Neil’s e-mail earlier, hoping to see a bar or two on the BlackBerry display, but whatever genie had allowed a signal to reach me before had vanished in a puff of smoke. The best I could hope for was that Briar Morse would find her way safely out of the woods on her own. Why had she foolishly gone for a drive again after her last experience on these same logging roads? I was surprised that Jack Spense’s guard had even let her through the gate, and I had no doubt that Betty would unleash holy hell on her new “threat-assessment specialist.”

The wind blew fallen leaves into my windshield like kamikaze birds. I pushed my foot hard on the gas.

After what seemed like an eternity, I passed the road that led down to Little Wabassus and the Stevenses’ house along the shore. I knew that if I could just get past the low hills to the west of the lake, I might find myself in range of the new cell tower outside Grand Lake Stream.

My phone chimed in the cradle of the signal booster. I grabbed at it and pressed it to my ear.

“Briar?”

“Mike,” she said. “I’ve been trying you forever!”

“Where are you?”

“Outside Grand Lake Stream.”

I let out a deep breath. “Great,” I said. “So you can find your way back to your mother’s north gate.”

“No! You don’t understand. I tried that, but there was a pickup truck waiting on the road to the gate.”

My hand clenched the wheel. “Are you sure it was the same one? What did it look like?”

“I don’t know! It snapped on its high beams as I came around the corner, like it was waiting for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I got the fuck out of there.” The signal was clear now, and I could hear how terrified she was. “You’ve got to rescue me!”

“Is the truck still following you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you drive into town?”

“Yes, but I don’t know where to go.”

I tried to think of a safe haven, somewhere public where she could seek protection. But Grand Lake Stream was too small a village to maintain its own police force. A couple of times a day, a deputy sheriff or state trooper might swing through town, but most of the time, if the residents needed the assistance of a law-enforcement officer, they would call the local game warden. Why did I have misgivings about sending her to Jeremy Bard’s house?

I glanced at the clock on the dash. The Pine Tree Store would be closed now. There would be men fishing the stream this time of night, but the unlighted parking lot at the Dam Pool would hardly seem to Briar like a refuge. “Go to Weatherby’s.”

“The sporting camp?”

“You’ll be safe with them, Briar. I promise. Honk on your horn if you need to wake people up. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can. I’m going to call Jack Spense. He and his men might be able to get there before me. OK?”

“OK.” She didn’t sound assured.

“Everything will be fine,” I said. “Just watch your driving, and everything will be fine.”

After I hung up with Briar, I tried to key in the number for Moosehorn Lodge without crashing into a pine tree. There are good reasons so many states outlaw using a cell phone behind the wheel.

“Warden Bowditch?” said a man’s voice.

“Mr. Spense?” I should have figured that he had installed some sort of caller-recognition device with my number in it. I’d certainly phoned the house enough at this point.

“What can we do for you?”

“Briar is in trouble,” I said. “She went for a drive.”

“What?”

“Someone must have let her through the gate. A pickup truck is chasing her again. She didn’t get a good look at it, but I bet it’s the same one. She tried going back home, but it was waiting to intercept her, so she turned around.”

“Why didn’t she call here?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve told her to go to Weatherby’s. That’s a sporting camp in town, on the left past the store. I told her to seek shelter there-the owners are good people-and wait for me to arrive.”

The phone went dead, and not because the call had been dropped. The bastard had hung up on me. He must have realized the urgency of the situation and decided not to waste time with pleasantries. Either that or he realized the hit his reputation would take if his company failed to protect the daughter of one of the wealthiest women in America.

As I turned onto the Little River Road, I wondered if I should call Briar back to keep her talking. Would it be safer to have me on the line while she drove into town, or would it be better for her to focus on the road? The girl was such a speed demon. I worried that she would disregard my warnings about trying to outrace her pursuer on the winding woods road.

I was right to have worried.

I saw the red brake lights as I came around a sharp corner a few miles from the village. They stared at me out of the darkness like the eyes of a demonic creature. My high beams revealed the new skid marks in the gravel, and then they touched the bumper of the cherry-red BMW, angled off the road in a ditch. The front end of the vehicle was crushed against the trunk of an enormous white pine that the area loggers had let stand for unknown reasons, since they had already chopped down so many towering trees here. It was as if they had sensed that the pine had some other destiny than to be turned into a ship’s mast, that it was fated to loom over this stretch of road for untold years until the moment when a young woman would drive her car into its trunk, snapping it finally in two.