Dead by Dawn

by Paul Doiron

  I do not consider myself a superstitious person. I reject the primitive thinking that tempts us to see ill omens in the behavior of birds and other animals. I never use the term “murder of crows,” even in jest. But the pall cast by the flock touched some ancient part of my soul. And a shiver passed through me that had nothing to do with the fast-plunging temperature. I was overcome by the spectacle of these carrion birds so numerous as to be beyond counting.

  I doubted I could capture their flight in a photo, but I dug out my phone, even so. I had turned it off while I’d been interviewing Felice. Now I found the usual texts and emails, but only one voice message.

  It was from Stacey Stevens of all people. Seeing her name made me catch my breath.

  I pressed Start and held the cold glass to my ear.

  “Hey, you. I heard my folks invited you and Dani to the house for Christmas supper. And I wanted to let know you I’m bowing out. I don’t want to create a problem or make her uncomfortable. I’ll be there Christmas Eve, anyway, and I have another invitation for Christmas supper, so it’s no big deal.”

  She’d always been a lousy liar. There was no other invitation for Christmas supper. Stacey had friends in Maine, but not many. She had always been hard to know and blunt with her opinions. Before she’d left the state for Florida, she had been written off by most of the people we worked with as difficult and arrogant. And because she was a woman who did not defer automatically to men or use charm to win them over, she was described in the ugliest of terms. I’d never heard a woman called a bitch as often as Stacey Stevens.

  Remembering this, I missed the second half of her message and had to play it again.

  “Dani must think I came back to Maine to cause trouble,” Stacey said. “But I didn’t, and I’m sorry if my being here has been a problem. It’s just that I realized Maine is where I belong, where my heart is.” She paused. “That came out wrong. Maine is where I belong, is what I meant to say. The one favor I have to ask you, Mike, is not to avoid my parents. Please don’t punish them on my account. They love you like a son, and it breaks their hearts not to see you.”

  For the past six months, ever since Stacey had returned, I’d known I needed to make a decision. Not choosing becomes a choice. Not acting becomes an action.

  The last crows passed over.

  Again I had to remind myself that nature was not sending me a message.

  I watched the stragglers dwindle over the half-frozen river, and then I returned to my Jeep and the caged animal inside.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure if wolves held grudges, but I had a feeling mine did. No expensive cut of meat would make up for being trapped in a box with a piss-stained blanket. The series of growls he let loose as I raised the lift gate made his resentments clear.

  “I know, I know.”

  Through the metal bars in the kennel door he glared at me with eyes the color of embers.

  But when he saw me bring out the Nalgene bottle, he submitted to the drill. Even before I started squirting water, he opened his mouth wide. His muzzle always seemed longer with his jaws apart. His enormous fangs seemed more prominent, too, now that they had been brushed. He caught the liquid on his tongue and used the tip to curl it into his gullet.

  “Your breath isn’t exactly minty fresh,” I said, opening the Ziploc bag of moose jerky.

  Charley had made this dried, smoked meat. The retired warden was locally famous for his secret blend of herbs and spices. Hunters would trade him meat in exchange for his dried delicacies. At Christmas he always presented me with pounds of moose jerky, turkey jerky, salmon jerky, even bear jerky. Stacey liked to joke that there wasn’t a game animal in Maine’s North Woods her dad hadn’t jerked.

  I thought again of Stacey as I slid sticks of dried meat into the cage for Shadow to swallow.

  “What do you think I should do?” I said to him. “You’ve had better luck in love than me.”

  In the years he’d run wild in the Boundary Mountains, Shadow had somehow managed to pair up against all odds with a she-wolf, despite wolves having been declared extirpated in Maine for more than a century. Now, only a few lonely wanderers were ever sighted. And Shadow had managed to find a female who wasn’t put off by him having been neutered as a pup. Evidently the need of the two canines to form a pack, even a pack of two, outweighed his problematic lack of hormones.

  As a wildlife biologist, it pained Stacey that she had never met Shadow. Nor had she seen my house in Ducktrap, I realized. She had respected my relationship with Dani and stayed away.

  To what end though? Dani was in line for a job that would keep us apart more than ever.

  “So you don’t have any advice for the lovelorn?” I asked the wolf.

  His reply was a belch.

  * * *

  Painful as it was to give her credit, Mariëtte Chamberlain had been right about me. I was like a dog—or a wolf—when I got hold of a bone. The strongest man on earth couldn’t tear it loose from my jaws.

  Had Eben Chamberlain’s death been a tragic accident or something else?

  The question resonated inside me with the clarity of a struck chord. Everything else that had happened that day was mere noise.

  I had started out thinking Mariëtte was one of those desperate people who require closure at all costs and must find meaning in tragic circumstances. Then I had met Jewett who was, if anything, more scurrilous than she had described. Lynda Lynch had seemed positively eager to cast suspicion on Vic Bazinet. And Felice, maybe out of some perverse humor, had sought to incriminate her “friend,” Bibi Chamberlain.

  Magicians rely on misdirection to perform their tricks. Con artists use obfuscation to conceal their crimes. In the course of the afternoon I had been subjected to both devious devices, and the same question kept bouncing around my skull.

  Why?

  To divert me from the truth under my nose?

  To use my growing obsession with the Chamberlain case to keep me knocking on doors?

  To stop me from leaving?

  “I wouldn’t get caught up there after nightfall if I were you,” Bibi had told me.

  It was too late for that. It wasn’t even four o’clock and darkness had already fallen.

  37

  They throw me into the rear of the SUV, atop a bed of crushed beer cans. I have a container of gasoline for a pillow. The sloshing sound it makes is oddly soothing.

  They’ve refastened my wrists behind my back, this time with plastic cables. These aren’t the zip-ties you can buy at any home improvement store; they’re specially designed for cops to use in place of steel handcuffs. I don’t know the proper name for these restraints; I’ve only heard them referred to as “cobra cuffs.” None of the methods one can find online about how to escape conventional flex cuffs work with these heavier pieces of plastic.

  I honestly expected Tori to shoot me. God knows she wanted to pull the trigger. Fear of her grandmother must have stopped her. Or maybe she knows that the punishment Grambo has planned for me will be torturous. Where I am being transported is a mystery beyond the powers of my exhausted brain to solve.

  To keep me quiet for the trip they did some tenderizing first. The bearded man had held me up, arms pinned behind my back, while Tori jabbed the butt of her shotgun in my shoulder, my solar plexus, my bleeding thigh. It didn’t escape my notice that she was wearing an Israeli bandage taped to her leg where I’d slashed it.

  I’d wanted to roll my eyes when she and Tiff had said they were home health aides (although what better job to rob old and ill people of their pain meds). But Tori knows about human anatomy. There are nerve bundles that, when pressed, can reduce tough guys to whimpering babies. She is a natural born torturer, this one.

  Fortunately for me, they hadn’t had more time. They had two bodies to collect—Tiff and the young logger who’d tried to shoot me behind Reynolds’s van—and reason to believe that cops were on the way. I’d watched them carefully place their beloved dead in the cab-covered back
of a Ford truck that rolled late onto the scene.

  I didn’t see what they did with poor Reynolds.

  Now I am lying on my side with my knees raised. The bed liner under my cheek smells of stale beer and another foul smell I recognize. Someone shot a deer recently and threw it here, probably under a tarp so that the local warden wouldn’t see. From the amount of half-dried blood and the overpowering musk, it might have been multiple animals. I’m riding in a deer hearse.

  The surface is tacky from the blood and beer. My face sticks to it, and there is a peeling sound when I lift my head. Bristles of hair adhere to my skin.

  The bearded man is at the wheel, and Tina rides in the passenger seat. The vehicle is large enough that there is a second unoccupied row behind them. At least they’ve got the heat jacked. It’s the first time I’ve been truly warm since I went into the river.

  Someone up front has a two-way radio. I hear the hissing of an open channel.

  Then Tina says: “See you at the gravel pit.”

  The response is fuzzed, but I am guessing it’s an affirmative.

  The countdown to my execution has begun. The one consolation is knowing that Shadow escaped. The last sight I had of him, rushing into the forest, brings tears to my eyes. Maybe he’ll find his way north to the mountains.

  Why can’t my last thought be a sentimental fantasy about the wolf reuniting with his lady love?

  Inevitably I find myself picturing the faces of everyone who cares about me: Charley and Ora, Kathy Frost, Billy and Aimee and the Cronklets, Dani, and Stacey. The thought that they’ll never know what became of me hurts almost as much as the physical punishment my body has endured. Because I have a strong certainty that mine won’t be the first corpse the Dillon clan has successfully disposed of.

  I try pulling my hands through the cobra cuffs, but they’re too tight, and even if my left wrist weren’t sprained, and both of them bleeding from the tow rope, it would all be for naught.

  The road is rough, definitely unpaved, and was probably last plowed two and half storms ago. Sand and gravel rattle around the wheel wells. The muffler has a hole in it that causes it to emit a continuous farting noise.

  My captors are making no effort to keep their voices down: another bad sign.

  “Tiff was always careless,” Tina says in her smoke-strained voice. “Just like her old man. I was thinking they practically died the same way.”

  “What are you talking about? It was totally different. Tiff wasn’t riding an ATV. She didn’t hit a moose.”

  “Both of them ran into things because they were going too fast, Tanner. They both deserve Darwin Awards.”

  “Show some fucking respect, Tina.”

  “My dad deserves one, too,” she argues, before succumbing to a coughing fit. “I went to see him in prison the week before he died. And do you know what he said? That I should be putting more money into his canteen account. Nothing about missing me or his granddaughter.”

  Suddenly, I realize there’s another noxious odor circulating in the vehicle, beyond the spilled beer and the deer stench. It is coming from the bench seat in front of me. Like someone emptied a chamber pot.

  “Christ!” Tina says. “Do you smell that?”

  “I think he shit himself,” says Tanner.

  “Bowditch?”

  “No, the other one. People do that when they die. The muscles in your ass loosen and out comes the crap.”

  “Gross!”

  Reynolds is in here with me. They’ve thrown his body into the SUV, too.

  This really is a hearse.

  That’s going to complicate matters for the crime scene investigators back in the field. From the blood, they’ll know someone died, and not from the crash. There will be footprints and drag marks showing a body was removed. And the license plate of the wrecked van will lead them to Reynolds. But they won’t be 100 percent sure his is the missing corpse, not without first processing the physical evidence they collect.

  Tina has rolled down a window and lit a menthol cigarette to obscure some of the stench inside the cab, but the smoke, from my perspective, only makes the miasma even more stomach-turning.

  “We’re going to have to burn this vehicle anyway,” says Tanner. “We can’t just drop it in a quarry like we did that other one. Those CSI guys can pick a fiber off a body and match it to a blanket that’s only for sale at Marden’s.”

  “Half that stuff is made up for TV,” she says.

  “Gram won’t take that chance. I’m glad we didn’t take my Toyota. I love that 4Runner. I couldn’t have torched it.”

  “You would have done it if Gram told you to.”

  He actually laughed, the son of a bitch. “Hell yeah, I would. I saw what she did to Lynda for being cute with the warden.”

  But I’m thinking about what Tina and Tanner said before how the twins’ father died. He crashed into a moose.

  It’s not an exotic way to die in Maine. I’ve stood over a dozen of those fatals.

  But Tina mentioned that her own father had perished in prison.

  All day I have walked around with a vague discomfort, haunted by shadowy thoughts that refused to take shape into suspicions. I knew I was being played but I was too blind to understand why. The “Dillons” were batting me around like a cat with a stunned mouse.

  In my mind now their names began to stream downward like credits at the end of a movie.

  Tori.

  Tiff.

  Tina.

  Tanner.

  The kid I’d met in Jewett’s woodlot, the one I’d shot when he rushed Reynolds’s van, his name began with a T, too.

  Todd.

  Now the realization passes through me like a hot flash.

  These people aren’t who they are pretending be. In an effort to escape their criminal history and start anew, they have changed their last name since our paths last crossed.

  These people aren’t Dillons.

  They are Dows.

  And suddenly I understood the reason behind the family’s hatred for me.

  When I’d first met the Dows, they were a clan of drug dealers, blackmailers, camp burglars, extortionists, and insurance cheats who lived in a heavily guarded compound outside the North Woods town of Monson. I was in the area searching for two hikers who’d disappeared from the Appalachian Trail. In the process I’d stumbled on a criminal dynasty.

  To the world at large, two brothers had seemed to head up the outlaw gang. Troy and Trevor Dow had bullied and menaced the communities around Lake Hebron for decades until the Maine Warden Service ended their reign of terror.

  Both were dead now. Because of me.

  Troy Dow, fleeing the raid in which I’d taken part, had crashed his ATV into a moose. He had been Tori and Tiff’s father.

  Trevor Dow, I’d arrested. Less than three years later, he lay dead on the floor of the Maine State Prison laundry room. Tina, his daughter, had said she’d visited him the week before he was stabbed through the neck.

  We’d thought the Dows were finished. But we had forgotten the rumors that surrounded the family before their fall.

  Troy and Trevor were never the ones calling the shots. It had always been their mother, a little old lady who looked like anyone’s grandma. Her name wasn’t Lynda Lynch. It was Tempest Dow.

  I should have recognized the danger she posed, but after Troy died and most of the male Dows went to jail, I hadn’t considered the females a threat. I hadn’t even encountered most of them the day I’d been in their compound. Meanwhile the matriarch had begun plotting her revenge.

  When chance brought me to Pill Hill, she had seized her opportunity. She had sent out her granddaughters—none of whom were known to me—to string me along. And then used her friend Lynda as a mouthpiece, all the while staying out of my sight.

  That morning Rivard had asked me, “How much time do you spend looking over your shoulder?… You’ve made a lot of enemies over your career.… And even the dead ones have brothers and sons eager for payba
ck.… I always said your cockiness was going to get you killed.”

  And how had I responded? “It hasn’t yet.”

  “Just wait,” he’d said, as if he knew what was coming.

  I wandered into their hyenas’ den without a clue. Fortune had delivered one of their most-hated enemies onto their doorsteps. I’m surprised Tori didn’t shoot me the moment she read my name on the ID card.

  I know now why Lynda Lynch had been so attentive to her phone during our conversation. She’d been receiving texts the whole time. Tempest must’ve had fun sending out her dim-witted friend in her place. She was probably in the next room, barely suppressing a cackle while she listened through the wall to her ventriloquist’s dummy.

  When I left Pill Hill, I had been so cocky about having figured out the mystery of Eben Chamberlain’s death. Even if I couldn’t be sure of the motive, I was confident I knew who had done it. I even had an idea how Tori and Tiff were tangled up in the conspiracy.

  But it was the crucial thing I had missed—the true identities of the Dillons—that was going to get me killed.

  I roll onto my back and my head knocks the gas can. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough that Tina hears.

  “Don’t make us stop the car, Mike!”

  I remain quiet. I know that Tanner won’t be stopping the Suburban until they’re well clear of the cops.

  As if she’s reading my mind, Tina tunes the radio to the police band.

  A dispatcher says: “419 Augusta. Last words came in broken.”

  Call numbers beginning with four are state troopers.

  This one responds: “419 Augusta. There’s a van in the field, but everyone who was here has cleared out. Tire prints and snowmobile tracks all over the area. I don’t want to disturb them. I’m going to try to get my spotlight on the van from here.”

  The radio snapped silent.

  “Why’d you turn it off?”

  “I don’t want him hearing that,” Tina says, between hacks. “I don’t want him knowing what’s happening.”