by Paul Doiron
Welcome to the jungle.
The road west along the St. John River had grown narrower with the ground fog. My nervous foot kept hitting the brake pedal. My imagination saw a looming moose around every bend.
Twenty miles out of Fort Kent, I again came to the crossroads. I passed the overgrown ruins of the Michauds’ burned houses. Then the haunted Valley View Motel with its sad bilingual sign, now and forever vacant. Police tape hung across the entrance to the parking lot: a reflective ribbon. And then St. Ignace was behind me. The hamlet was no longer a real place, just words on a map that would, in time, disappear, too.
Finally, a handsome wooden sign, adorned with painted oak leaves, appeared in my lone headlight.
ENTERING
A Scots/Irish Community
Settled in 1838
I lost my cell signal long before I reached town.
* * *
The village center sat at the looping confluence of the Allagash and the St. John Rivers. I paused in front of the lone eatery, closed for the night, and shined my flashlight onto the water-stained pages of my atlas, spread across the passenger seat. I had no idea where Jon Egan lived.
I only knew that I would recognize his Toyota Tacoma, with its distinctive plow mount and safety lights, when I saw it again. Most people in the area, I guessed, lived close to the roads. The lumber company that owned 99 percent of the land outside town had kept residential development confined to maximize the extent of its tree-felling operations.
Twin lights in the mist behind me announced the arrival of another vehicle—a large pickup, from the height of the beams—but before I could reach for my handgun, the truck stopped in the road. It was too far for me to identify the color, especially with its high beams on. The driver hesitated, but not more than fifteen seconds, then turned left onto a woods road.
Maybe someone tailing me, maybe not, but I had better things to do than go chasing it.
I made a slow circuit of the village, sparking the interest of more than a handful of watchdogs. Porch lights snapped on as I idled outside trailers. If I had been an Allagasher, I would have grabbed my gun if a junked Scout stopped outside my door.
Having found no sign of Egan, I crossed the Dickey Bridge. The span, above the St. John, was where the pavement ended. One could go no farther north in Maine except on private property. A handful of houses stretched out along the north bank.
I didn’t spot any Tacomas parked outside these residences, so I followed the road north, losing hope with every tick of my odometer. Soon I would come upon yet another gatehouse and be forced to turn back. I couldn’t even call anyone for assistance, my phone being useless.
I had just about given up when I saw the snowplow.
It was beached in the dooryard of a modular home. Two ATVs were parked out front, his and hers, along with a Toyota 4Runner SUV that had seen better days.
The reason the plow caught my attention was its color. It wasn’t the golden yellow of the snowplows made by the Maine-based company, Fisher. It was black and yellow: a Meyer HomePlow. The same maker of the mount on Egan’s pickup.
When I pulled into the drive, a dog began to bark inside the house. It didn’t sound as fierce as Ferox, but even smaller breeds can take a hunk of meat from your calf. A motion-sensitive light came on, flooding the entire yard, catching a thousand moths and mayflies in midflight. A woman, holding a baby in her arms, appeared in the door. She had close-cropped blond hair and was dressed in mismatched sweats. She was at least twenty years younger than Egan. Taller, too, by almost a foot. A curly-haired spaniel peeked between her long legs.
Given the condition of my Scout and my unkempt appearance, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d come out shooting.
“Jon ain’t here!” she called from the stoop, as if this were her usual response to late-night visitors.
I swung open the door and stood behind it. “My name is Mike Bowditch. I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. You’re Dorothy, right?”
“Yeah, Jon told me about you. Said you interrogated him. He ain’t around.”
“Where is he?”
“Why? So you can go arrest him again? The cops have already crawled all over our house.”
“Your husband was never arrested.”
“We have nothing to hide.”
“Can I come up?”
“I can hear you fine from there, Mister.”
“I think Jon is in danger,” I said. “Because of what happened to Angie Bouchard. You need to tell me where he is.”
Cops routinely feed people bullshit to get them to cooperate. Dorothy Egan struck me as someone who knew this. I raised my hands where she could see them to make myself less threatening.
The baby opened his or her throat and let loose with a piercing cry that started the spaniel barking again. “Jon can take care of himself. He wasn’t scared when he left either. He just needed to help some fool out. Be back real quick, he said.”
“What fool?”
“Jon rents boats. Canoes, kayaks, tubes. He works for someone who does, I mean. One of the clients is up a creek without a paddle.”
“Um…?”
“The funny thing is the guy’s an Indian. You’d think he’d know how to paddle a damned canoe. But he flipped over going down Golden Rapids and lost his paddle and is stranded on Musket Island in the middle of the river.”
There was no cell service in Dickey. “How did he manage to contact your husband, this stranded man?”
“He’s got one of those CB radios.”
“He lost his paddle but managed to hang on to a radio without it getting wet?”
“Look, I wasn’t present for the event. I can’t offer you the whys and wherefores. Now, you need to excuse me. This baby requires his dinner, and I ain’t going to just pull out my titty and give you a free show.”
“Thanks for your time, Mrs. Egan. Just one last question. Does your husband have a scar on his arm, here?”
I indicated my left shoulder.
“He’s got a tattoo there. A flaming heart!”
“Really?”
“I mean, he got the tattoo to cover a scar, yeah. It was a burn he suffered from falling against a radiator back when he still drank. Jon’s a God-fearing man now. He found Jesus in prison. We go to services over in Allagash village every Sunday. The pastor washed him clean of his sins in the river, right below the church. My husband’s been born again into the family of God. Can you say the same for yourself, Mr. Warden? I didn’t think so.”
41
It was no accident that Nick Francis had contacted Egan via a two-way radio. To implement Charley’s plan—the exact shape of which still eluded me—they needed the conversation to be overheard by someone with a combination police scanner and CB unit. In backwoods Maine, that category of persons included everybody.
But the old pilot needed a specific person to be listening.
Who?
Not just Egan, obviously.
Like most petty criminals, Roland Michaud almost certainly owned a radio to keep track of the movements of local law enforcement.
Kellam had a police scanner in his truck. I’d heard it squelch when he was righting my Scout.
First responders and law enforcement officers in the area all had them. Chief Plourde. Zanadakis. Lamontaine.
I had one, too. The problem was it had stopped working during the crash.
My waterlogged map showed Musket Island as a glorified sandbar downstream of St. Ignace. It probably spent half its year underwater. The river was running high at the moment from all the rain. I wondered how much of the little island was above the surface.
Charley and Nick had a purpose in choosing to summon Egan to this particular spot.
The atlas showed that a bridge had once crossed the river at Musket Island. Probably the structure had been washed out decades earlier during an especially damaging ice jam. But there were approaches on both sides and an icon indicating a boat launch on the north shore. No d
oubt some of the old pilings remained. From experience, I knew that bridge supports can be dangerous places to paddle, both as obstacles in your way but also because currents flow faster where they are squeezed together.
The logging road from Dickey to the boat launch above Musket Brook was surprisingly well maintained. Fresh gravel had been spread and graded, and there were periodic bumps where new culverts had been installed to channel spring freshets under the hard-packed surface. Fully loaded logging trucks can weigh up to eighty thousand pounds. As a consequence, timber companies were also forced into the road maintenance business.
I passed a few buildings, their lights shining hazily up through the trees from the riverside. The timber company had leased waterfront plots to people to build vacation cabins. This arrangement was commonplace in Maine although less common than it had once been.
I drove into the first unattended camp. As I’d expected, the owner had a canoe. He had secured it with a chain to the biggest hemlock on the property. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for me, I kept a pair of bolt cutters in my vehicle. This wasn’t the first occasion I’d had to “borrow” a boat.
I wasted no time tying the stolen Old Town to my roof rack. From there, it took me fifteen minutes to cover five miles. In the backcountry of Maine, that is called making good time.
As I descended the hill to the St. John River, I saw the old bridge looming in my high beams. The timber company had bulldozed boulders at its base. The rocks were intended to stop some drunken fool from driving headlong into the channel. As I braked and turned, my headlights caught the reflectors on the back of Egan’s Tacoma, parked in a patch of sweetfern. He had towed a boat with him and backed the trailer into the water to launch the craft.
When I opened the door of my Scout, I could hear the rapids downstream. My muscles had grown even stiffer from the rollover. Like an arthritic old man, I limped through the woods along the river. I crushed wintergreen beneath my boots, loosing a minty, medicinal scent from the leaves. There was no moon, no light from the sky beyond a pale cast, but I could feel the towering pilings of the old bridge looming above me like the coldness of a shadow.
I squinted at where the island should be and saw a light flickering. Definitely a campfire.
There it was: the bait in Charley’s trap.
But had Egan taken it?
I cut the ropes I had used to tie the canoe to the top of the Scout and positioned myself to take the weight of the broad-beamed boat onto my sore shoulders. I walked the overturned canoe up the shoreline, my tendons burning, my boots slipping on the loose gravel.
The current was too strong for me to cut straight across. If I attempted the shortest route, I would find myself carried past the island before I could make three paddle strokes. I would need to launch from upstream, I realized. Fortunately, the hull was made of polyethylene, which is lighter than aluminum or white cedar.
The hill above me was steep, and I reached a drop-off that impeded my portage upriver. I had no choice but to flip over the canoe into the water and secure the painter to the branch of an overhanging birch while I went to fetch the paddle.
I strapped on a 500 Lumens headlamp, the most powerful light I had with me.
I took hold of the beavertail paddle and used it to steady myself as I sat down in the center of the canoe. When paddling solo, the middle is where you usually want to be. Then I leaned forward and gave a yank to the quick-release end of the rope. The knot, a highwayman’s hitch, slipped free of the branch, and I was torn adrift in the stream.
I turned the canoe with a series of sweep strokes so that my bow was facing downriver.
I thought I’d carried the canoe a fair ways up from the bridge, but it was only seconds before the foundations reared up dead ahead. I sideswiped the white-water eddy in front of the nearest pier and let the current pull me to the inner channel.
Musket Island was shaped like a football, narrow at the top and bottom, fat in the middle. I aimed for the pointed end. I needed to paddle hard to keep from being swept back into the deep water. My shoulder ached.
I have decent balance for a normal human, but not for a North Woods waterman like Charley. I didn’t dare stand up in the canoe. Instead I slid over the gunwale into the river, going in all the way to my waist. The early summer water was warm, but not so warm that I didn’t feel a stabbing pain in my groin. Once I had found my footing, I turned off the headlamp.
In the dark, I walked the canoe up the shallows, feeling that strange sensation you get in moving water of unseen hands tugging at your ankles, until I heard the bottom scrape gravel. Then I lifted the bow and did my best to muscle the thing onto dry land, all while remaining hunched over. I had seen the campfire at the bottom end of the football and wanted to approach with as much stealth as possible, given that the only cover on the low-slung island was a ridge of alders and willows running down the spine.
I kept low, then went lower, and finally began to crawl on hands and knees. Leopard frogs sprang up ahead of me from the wet weeds. Some of the grass blades had serrated edges and cut my hands.
“Come on up, young feller. You’ve been spotted.”
The son of a bitch.
I rose to my feet, swiped my palms on my pants legs to remove the muck, and waded through the sedges to the two men I now saw seated across a small woodfire from each other.
Jon Egan, wild-eyed in the firelight, sat upon a skinned log that could only have rolled into the river from the back of someone’s truck. His arms were bound behind him, and a kerchief was knotted in his open mouth.
Charley sat opposite him on a small boulder, resting his old service revolver, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, on one bouncing knee. His head was just as disconcertingly bald as I’d remembered, and he was dressed in the same faded coveralls. They appeared vintage, as if he’d scavenged them from Goodwill, but I could have sworn that the American flag sewn on the chest was new.
“What the fuck, Charley?”
“I’m sorry, Mike.”
“What are you doing? Why’s he tied up like this?”
“I felt bad about what you said—about me using you as bait. So I decided to switch to Mr. Egan here.”
“Bait for who?”
“Roland Michaud, of course. He killed Scott, and he killed that poor girl Angie when he found out she’d sold off that badge. She didn’t know that it linked her boyfriend back to what happened here fifteen years ago.”
Egan screamed into his cloth gag, shook his head violently, and rocked back and forth on his log. The redheaded man nearly toppled over backward.
Charley’s theory baffled me, it was so full of holes.
“Roland was in New Brunswick the night Angie was strangled, Charley. I was in the room for his interrogation. He has people who can vouch for him, including customs officials.”
“I’ve spoken to one of his so-called witnesses. I haven’t been as idle as you think. One of those impartial customs officials Roland mentioned just happens to be his Canadian cousin.”
“Charley, it wasn’t Roland.”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
“If you’re convinced that you’re right, why are you holding a gun on Egan?”
“Because I intend to kill him.”
The word came out in one breath. “What?”
“If Mr. Egan here doesn’t tell me where they disposed of Scott’s body, I’m going to brain him with this pistol and toss his body into the St. John. The police will think he overturned in the rapids.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“I know you believe that, son, but the last few days have tested me, and, well, I’ve learned I’m not the man I thought I was. I failed Scott. But I am going to avenge him tonight, so help me God.”
I felt the first stirring of a breeze on my cheek, saw the woodsmoke shift direction, even begin to rise. How many days had this stagnant heat sat motionless over us?
“So what do you expect is going to happen—that Roland is going to come
motoring out here?”
“That’s the general plan. Yes.”
“That’s ludicrous.”
In the flickering firelight Egan’s face had turned nearly the same shade of red as his hair. I worried he was going to hyperventilate before Roland even arrived.
“You’re not a murderer, Charley.”
“I killed Pierre.”
“You shot Pierre. He drowned, trying to get away.”
“I tried to kill him, though. And how can you be sure Nick and I didn’t just let him drown?”
I didn’t believe this last statement, not remotely. “Where is Nick?”
“Not here. I didn’t want to include him in this if things go wrong.”
“But you included me.”
“More than once, Mike, I told you to stay out of this.”
“For Christ’s sake, Charley!” I took a step toward him, but a pitiless look came into his eyes that stopped me cold. “This isn’t you. At least take Egan’s gag off so he can breathe.”
“If I do, he’ll call out and give us away.”
The man on the log shook his head vigorously to indicate he wouldn’t ruin our plans.
“How can you be certain Egan knows where they hid Pellerin’s body? The Warden Service searched half the County for it.”
“And the Mounties searched their side of the border, too. But I think you might’ve guessed why I suspect Mr. Egan here was a party to a conspiracy. It has to do with a certain identifying mark.”
I pointed at the bound man. “Can I see for myself?”
“Just so long as you cut the cloth and not the ropes.”
I removed my knife from my pocket and pressed the button that opened the automatic blade. With the razor-sharp tip, I cut a hole in the shoulder of Egan’s shirt. The dancing light didn’t reveal much of the tattoo beyond the greenish-black ink. But I didn’t need to see the design. I only needed to run my fingers over the raised skin to feel the old scar.
