“So you’re the one who wants them crooked trees.” BB flashed Oliver a nearly toothless grin. “We’ve got some good ‘uns for you down the slope.” Unlike the coastal drawl, he spoke with the short, clipped accent of inland Maine.
They haggled in a lackadaisical way over the price, amid glum comments about the plight of small-time wood cutters.
“That’s a lot of work for a half-load of cedar. We’ve got to go all over, jerk them out one at a time. It’s not like we can make up a good twitch, haul a bunch at a whack,” Jack said.
“What do you want them crooked trees for?” BB asked.
“It’s just the oak he wants crooked,” Jack said. “He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have a use for them.”
“They’re for deck beams. Decks are curved,” Oliver said, sketching an arc with his hands.
“Well, if you need crooked trees, we got ‘em,” BB said.
Jack seated himself on a dead log. “I went to Camden a while back to see the ocean.” He nodded at the Chevy. “She don’t look like much, but that old bird’s a runner.”
“Just like mother,” BB added. “Hell to get goin’ in the morning, but once she’s rollin’, watch out.”
Ralph propped open the Nova’s trunk with a stick and rooted out a jug of bar oil.
“Lot of fancy boats down there,” Jack continued.
“I imagine they all had crooked beams,” BB said happily.
“Drove right up to the yacht club,” Jack went on. “They must have been having a party, men all dressed up in fancy straw hats, blue jackets, and everything.”
“Was they glad to see you?” BB asked.
“I don’t imagine.”
“Them city people don’t know nothin’ about the woods,” Ralph said, sloshing oil into his saw. “They sit around Augusta and make up rules, but they ain’t cut down a tree in their lives.”
“Most of them’s from away,” BB said, as though that explained it. “I visited my sister down in Massachusetts a while back. Lord, what a godawfull place to live.”
“That’s why they move up here,” Jack said.
BB frowned. “Trouble is, they come up here and make all those rules and regulations, and shit—pardon my French—so it’s just like where they left. If they come up here because it’s so good, why don’t they leave it the way it is?”
Jack nodded, glancing sideways at Oliver. “Why don’t they stay where they are and fix up their own country, and let us take care of ours?”
Ralph dropped the oil jug back into the Chevy. “I helped my old man cut over this territory when I was ‘bout twelve. Had an old Ford jitterbug. Took all summer.”
“When was that?” BB grinned at the old man.
“During the war, around ‘44. Jimmy Bright and I cut her off again in ‘75, and here I am doin’ her one last time.” Ralph let the trunk lid drop with a crash. “The woods’ll be here long after them city people are gone.”
Chapter 21
“You paid too much for that oak, considering it wasn’t worth diddly until you came along,” Pearly said as they tramped back to his truck.
“Maybe, but Fournier is right, Pearly,” Oliver said. “The guys in the boaters and blazers can afford it. Look around, we’re an hour’s drive from all those million-dollar houses on the coast.”
“You sound like a Massachusetts liberal,” Pearly retorted. “You’ve got stock options and god knows what else from when you worked at that engineering company in Massachusetts. If I don’t make enough money to eat, I starve. I can’t afford to be so generous to people like Fournier that they get spoiled.”
“I don’t think we have any choice, in the long run.”
Pearly shook his head. “I think you should take care of your own first, and worry about the next county later. Besides, these people don’t like it when someone tries to help them, anyway. They’re as ornery as a wet boot.”
“These people? What about Myra Huggard?”
Pearly glanced at his companion, sensing a trap. “What do you mean by that?”
“Myra wasn’t living very high on the hog, but at least she wasn’t dependent on all the out-of-state money the way we are. Look at Fournier. He can tell us to screw off because we need him more than he needs us.”
“You’re too soft. And gullible too.”
They walked on in silence, and soon a chain saw started up behind them. “Do you suppose Fournier really crashed the Camden yacht club?” Oliver said.
A faint smile wrinkled the corners of Pearly’s mouth. “Who knows, but I sure would have liked to be there if he did.”
* * *
Oliver pulled into his driveway that afternoon with Wes sprawled on the seat beside him. The dog’s neck was wrapped in a bandage, and he was still groggy from the anesthesia. The vet had given Oliver a paper bag full of bandages and antibiotics, and assured him that the wound wasn’t as bad as it looked, but the dog would need rest.
A turkey meandered reluctantly out of the driveway and into the field as they approached. Wes looked, gave a half-hearted sniff, and lowered his head. Oliver fumed.
Owl sat in front of the barn, and Oliver felt an unexpected twinge of jealousy. Sarah had mentioned going out in Brian’s boat this afternoon if the weather was good.
He helped Wes out of the car. “Come on, you mangey old reprobate, let’s get something to eat.”
There was half a pizza in the fridge, left over from some dimly remembered meal. He zapped it in the microwave.
For some reason, Sarah reminded him of Arlene. He wasn’t quite sure why, since they were very different people. Even so, having the woman drop on him like this had rattled his cage.
The memory was seared into his brain: the day he had answered the page to Phil’s office, the expression on the older man’s face when Oliver entered. Phil Hendrix rated a corner office, and the afternoon sun that danced along the trees lining the parking lot shone through the windows to deepen the shadows lining Phil’s face. Oliver saw Betty Malloy from Human Resources standing in a corner, and felt his heart stop.
A drunk in an SUV had run a stoplight. Oliver’s wife and daughter had died in the intersection, their car flattened. At least his son was spared.
Oliver had adjusted, in a way, to being a single parent with a teenage son, but he never recovered from his loss and never expected to. His training as an engineer taught him to value logic only up to a point, beyond which lay chaos and uncertainty. Logic told him that life went on and change was inevitable, but in the end, trying to maintain the old life proved too hard to bear, and he had moved to Maine. Some of his friends accused him of running away from his emotions, walling them off, burying them along with half of his family. After ten years, he still wondered if they were right.
Oliver forced his mind onto his father’s drawings, still lying on the work bench. Sarah would like his father’s boats; his designs were a lot like Herreshoff’s work. How had Sarah put it? Graceful, almost delicate, lines? Her words were filled with the same appreciation, even passion, that he also felt when looking at boats of grace and beauty. Yes, he and Sarah had much in common, Oliver thought before shaking himself free of such musings.
He would start lofting the lines this afternoon, an enjoyably soothing process that involved recreating the boat’s curves full-size on the white-painted plywood sheets spread out in the barn loft. Using the full-size lines, he would then cut out the pieces to build a framework over which the hull could be formed.
* * *
Brian Curtis appreciated the Good Life and his taste in boats reflected that appreciation. Good Times was built on a lobsterboat style hull, but with a plush cockpit and a cabin that included cruising accommodations for two.
“I did some lobstering when I was a kid, like most everyone else around here,” Brian said. “Had my own lobsterboat, so I decided to get the kind of boat I knew when I bought one to play with.”
They rumbled out the mouth of Burnt Cove harbor and into the sound, Good Times’ exhaust
burbling throatily from the stern. The early afternoon sun dappled the water and highlighted the many-colored lobster pot buoys.
“It looks like more lobster pots than I remember,” Sarah said.
Brian smiled at her. “They put video cameras in some traps once and found out that most of the lobsters crawl in there, eat the bait, and crawl right back out, no problem. Seems to be just the real dumb ones, or the unlucky ones, that get caught. Turns out, we’re running a bunch of fast food joints for lobsters down there.”
He nodded at a boat pulling pots across the sound. A flock of gulls circled over it hopefully. “I’m glad not to be doing that any more. It’s wicked hard work. Not bad on a day like this, but wicked miserable in rough weather.”
They watched as the boat moved on to the next buoy, a cloud of smoke belching from it’s exhaust stack. A few seconds later the engine’s roar reached their ears.
They ran along the rocky shore of Squirrel Point. “Your old stomping grounds,” he said, pointing to the granite ledges that fronted the camp and Myra Huggard’s property.
Sarah turned away. “I’m in Myra’s will,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Owl, her lawnmower, gardening tools, and the Studebaker.”
“Well good for you,” Brian said with a smile.
“She also left me a deed.”
He glanced at her sharply. “A deed?”
“To her land.”
Brian laughed. “Oh, that deed.”
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, but if it’s the deed I’m thinking about, she drove the Borofskys crazy with it, claiming she owned a hunk of their land.”
“And you think this is the deed?”
“I’d have to look at it to be sure, but—”
Sarah pulled her purse out of the canvas tote bag she had brought along and extracted the deed.
Brian looked bemused, but took the paperwork from her fingers somewhat faster than Sarah expected. He cut the engine to an idle and studied the document.
“This is the one, transferring the land from William Burndt to Cyrus Huggard, back in 1883.” He pointed to the handwritten text. “See where it says ‘from the young oak tree by the shore marking the property line of Conrad Burndt?’ The tree had been blazed, but the mark was pretty much grown over, and Myra claimed they had the wrong oak and she owned another forty feet of Borofsky’s land.”
Brian scanned the deed some more and said, “Myra called the cops when Roy started excavating the foundation, said he was on her land, and got the digging stopped until the dispute was settled. Borofsky came roaring up from New York that afternoon, mad as hell.”
“Couldn’t they prove she was wrong?”
“Sure, they could. The tree thing was a crock. That line was surveyed when Evan sold the land to the Merlews, and it was surveyed again when Sam subdivided the camp into house lots.”
Brian refolded the deed. “Borofsky and I went and talked to Myra about the line. She started off by saying the surveyors were incompetent, and threatened court orders, law suits, and all that. Then, she offered to ‘sell’ him the forty feet of land. I thought Borofsky was going to have a heart attack, but he finally paid her something just to get her out of his hair, so he could get his house built.”
“What if Myra had been right about the tree?”
Brian shrugged. “Without that forty feet, Borofsky wouldn’t have had anywhere near enough frontage for the legal minimum to build. It probably would have ended up being a lawyer’s free-for-all: the Borofskys suing the Merlews, everybody suing the surveyors, maybe even the town.”
“So, why didn’t the oak tree cause a problem when the Merlews bought the land?” Sarah asked.
Brian laughed. “Good question. Thing is, Evan was the one who sold the land. If it had been up to Myra, she’d still own every inch. Evan had inherited the land, and he probably didn’t agree with Myra about which tree marked the line, but then he and Myra didn’t agree about a lot of things.
“Why didn’t Evan sell the woodlot?”
“It wasn’t worth much back then. Besides, they needed it for the firewood. Eldon was still cutting wood off it for Myra up until she died,” Brian replied.
“They had a fair chunk of land to start with,” he want on, “mostly old hayfields. The Merlews bought two pieces from Evan when they started the camp, and they added the lot the Borofskys have now in the early sixties.”
Brian returned the deed. “It’s funny she would give you that deed. I wonder what she was thinking.”
Sarah had wondered too. Was the troublesome old woman expecting her to carry on the Borofsky feud? What was the point, now that she had been paid off, and the house was almost finished?
“I have no idea,” she said.
“She never mentioned it?”
“No.”
“Funny, I figured you two must have kept in touch,” he said.
“I haven’t talked to her since I left camp. I tried calling her several times last fall when I learned she was leaving Owl to me, but she never answered the phone. The Merlews suggested I just write her a note, so I did that.”
“She didn’t like talking on telephones.” Brian shrugged. “Weird she should give you a worthless deed like that without saying anything, but she was getting pretty batty.”
“That’s what the lawyer said.”
Brian opened up Good Times’ throttle, saying, “A lot of farmers used to sell pieces of land back and forth all the time in the old days. The trouble is, most of them weren’t very careful with the boundaries, so they’d write a deed with a lot description like, ‘Go easterly from the dead spruce tree to the corner of my cow pasture.’ That kind of stuff can drive a surveyor crazy a hundred years later.”
They reached the tip of Squirrel Point, where the rambling shingled hotel looked out to sea.
“Water looks pretty calm,” Brian commented, “Let’s go out to Brill Ledge and see if we can spot a whale.”
* * *
It was late afternoon as Good Times made its way back up the estuary to Burnt Cove. The wind had died, the fog had stayed off shore, and Sarah hadn’t even needed her windbreaker. Best of all, they had seen a whale, a little Minke that let them watch for nearly a minute before it dived. A most satisfactory afternoon.
Sunlight, low in the sky, lit the town with a reddish glow.
“The cove looks like it’s on fire, like the name,” Sarah said.
Brian cut the engine and Good Times rolled gently in the swell. They watched the deepening glow for a while, and Sarah found Brian’s arm around her shoulder. She moved away.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Hey, I’m the one who should apologize. I know how you feel, being divorced myself.”
Sarah doubted that he really knew how she felt. “I’ve had a great afternoon, though.”
“Me too. Maybe we can take a picnic out to one of the islands sometime.”
His enthusiasm gave her a pang of guilt. She had accepted Brian’s invitation partly to see what he could tell her about Myra. She had learned some interesting things, though she didn’t know what they meant. Still, Sarah felt guilty at using him in this way, even though he was fun and she enjoyed his company.
Chapter 22
Sarah pulled into Oliver’s driveway the next morning, and Wes ran out to greet her as usual, front end barking and rear end wagging. From a distance it looked as though he was wearing a bandanna around his neck. Then she realized it was a bandage. She got out and scratched his ears, careful of the bandage, and he panted happily at her.
“What happened to Wes?” she said when Oliver appeared at the door.
Sarah listened with growing indignation as Oliver told her.
“Poor thing.” She scratched his ears again. “You’re one lucky dog.”
“The sonofabitch who did it won’t be so lucky, if I find out who it was,” Oliver growled.
“Whoever was trying to steal Cathy’s boat must have known the headst
one was in it,” she said.
“Caldwell is my first guess. We stirred him up with a stick Wednesday evening in Rockland, and that night somebody tried to take Cathy’s boat. It’s a mighty big a coincidence.”
Stirring up Caldwell had been Sarah’s idea, and she felt guilty. “But how would he know the headstone was in there, and what’s so important about it anyway? It’s not a very obvious hiding place, and I can’t see why Cathy would tell him, of all people.”
“Maybe Caldwell was lying when he said she knew he was behind Oak Hill, and she asked him for advice about the stone.”
“I wondered about that too. Of course, she might have talked to someone working at Oak Hill, like Roy Tupper, and he told Caldwell,” Sarah said. “Would that ground penetrating radar really work, or were you just trying to scare Caldwell?”
“It might work. The trouble is, there’s a lot of marine clay along the coast here, and the radar can’t see very deep through that stuff.”
Oliver shrugged. “Besides, it might not be the headstone at all. Caldwell was wrong, or lying, about one thing, though. Cathy was the one who wanted to help Myra stay in her house, not Eldon.”
Sarah nodded. “Eldon went along with Cathy because he was smitten.”
“We still can’t rule out Myra’s neighbors. We know she got money from the Borofskys, and she didn’t make life easy for the Vincents either.”
“And there’s Grinshnell’s land on the other side of Myra,” Sarah said. “Maybe she was giving him a hard time too.”
Having only questions and no answers, they turned to Owl, which sat on her trailer in the midday sun, ready at last. Oliver double-checked to make sure everything was firmly lashed down, then turned to Sarah. “Have you got life jackets, flares, pump, and all the stuff I put on the list?”
Suddenly fussy and officious, Oliver cross-examined Sarah about her preparations for Owl’s launching. The inquisition seemed unnecessary, if only because Pearly wasn’t launching the boat until tomorrow morning. “Everything is in the car,” she said brusquely.
Gravely Dead: A Midcoast Maine Mystery Page 15
