by Barbara Ross
While he was gone, I watched the people in the camp. There was plenty of evidence, in bent bodies and lined faces, of hard labor and hard lives. Yet the atmosphere was lively, camp-like. It was suppertime and meals cooked on grills and propane rings. I smelled fresh vegetables, meat, and fish.
Phil returned, his black hair still damp from the shower. “Time for you to tell me what this is about.”
“Did you know there was a murder that morning when you were in Busman’s Harbor?”
He shook his head. “When we checked out of the hotel, all that was known was there was a body in the clambake cooker. I hadn’t heard definitely it was a murder.” He spread his hands, calloused and covered with small cuts, on the rough wood of the table. “We don’t get much news up here.”
“That clambake cooker belongs to me. I’m an owner and the manager of the Snowden Family Clambake Company.”
“I’m sorry for your trouble, but how can I help?”
“Have the police contacted you?”
His expression went from mildly interested to alarmed. “No. Why would they?”
“How early in the morning did you start taking photos?”
He relaxed visibly. “I’m a photojournalist based in Montreal. I have a contract to do photos for a coffee table book on seacoast celebrations from Cape Cod to Prince Edward Island. At Founder’s Weekend, I’d hoped to capture the setup and celebration on the pier—shots from early in the morning when the vendors arrived until midday when there were hundreds of people eating lobster, listening to music, and having a grand time. But the minute the ruckus about the body started, I quit taking shots. For another photographer, a discovery like that might have been a big win. But it wasn’t the kind of scene I’d been hired to shoot. I’d wasted my entire trip to Busman’s Harbor. Once the body was found, nothing I’d shot was useable.”
“How early did you start shooting?”
“Around six-thirty. What time do they think the guy was killed?”
“They don’t know. The body was in bad condition due to the fire. In any case, the victim wasn’t killed on the pier. So you might have captured someone putting him in the woodpile early in the morning, but you probably don’t have photos of the murder.”
“Thank goodness. I’m Canadian.”
I wanted to laugh at that—like Canadians were too polite to get mixed up in stateside murders—but I knew what he meant. He didn’t want to be traveling back and forth to Maine for court appearances.
“I’m sorry about your business, but you haven’t actually told me why you’re here, or what you’re looking for,” he said.
“A young friend found the body that morning. He ran away. The police are searching for him as an important witness, but I’m sure they believe he’s more involved. I think they mean to arrest him as soon as they find him.”
“And you don’t think this friend is guilty?”
“I’m sure he isn’t. I can’t give you a rational reason. I just don’t believe he could kill someone.”
“Tough break,” Phil said. “I’ll help you if I can.” He stood, scraping the wooden chair across the grass. “I’ll get those photos for you.”
I was thrilled a stranger was being so kind. To me. To Cabe.
He went to his car, a silver BMW that had been drawing admiring glances from everyone who walked by it, and retrieved his laptop from the trunk. He came back and fired it up.
“Cabe is a white kid, nineteen or so, average height, slight build, dark blond hair. Have you seen him?”
Phil looked away and my heart leaped. For a moment, I thought he would say he’d seen Cabe, but then he turned back to me. “Nope. Sorry.”
A teenage boy spotted the laptop and called from the street. “Hey brother, can I check my Facebook?”
“You think we have Internet out here, bro? Go spend time with your family. Unplug yourself. Best thing for you.” Phil dismissed the boy with a wave. “Here are the photos from that morning.”
We scrolled through the images. They did, indeed, start early in the morning, but not early enough. In the first shot, Cabe was on the pier fussing with the Claminator, but Weezer was also there with his barbecue and Dan Small had his portable ice cream stand. Stevie’s body must have already been hidden in the firewood by that point.
Even uncropped and unedited, Phil’s photos captured the vibrancy of that glorious morning. The public works guys came to set up the stage and chairs. The sound people came with mikes and speakers. Sonny, Livvie, and Page pulled up in our Boston Whaler and Cabe helped them unload the lobsters and steamers, fresh from the lobster pound, along with more firewood, which they piled to the side. The bakers set out their wares. The members of the high school band trickled in.
“Wait! Stop.” I put my hand on Phil’s arm. “Can I see that one again?”
He scrolled back to the previous image. I studied it carefully. The pier was quite full at the time it was taken—the vendors, the band, and the tourists. At the edges of the photo, I saw two things that surprised me. The first was the young man with scraggily brown hair and a full brown beard I’d almost run into at the RV park. He looked like a hermit or a recluse. It was hard to imagine Founder’s Weekend was his type of deal.
The other thing I spotted was stranger still. In the lower right corner of the photo was the head and neck of a black lab wearing a bright red kerchief. Morgan? It had to be. But Morgan went wherever Bud Barbour went. And Bud was supposed to be at his camp avoiding the Founder’s Weekend crowds.
“Can you e-mail this photo to me?”
“It’ll be awhile before I’m anywhere where I can e-mail. I’ll put it on a memory stick for you.” Phil pulled a thumb drive out of his camera bag and moved a copy of the image to it. “Did you see something helpful?”
“Nothing big,” I admitted. “Your photos are beautiful, though. Thanks so much for showing me.”
We continued looking at the images. There was one of Sonny, face a mask of horror, pointing at the clambake fire, followed by one of the firefighters rushing toward Richelle’s prone body. Then the photos stopped. Not the type of heart-warming pictures of life on the North Atlantic seacoast Phil had been hired to capture.
“Anything else you want?” he asked.
I sighed and let my shoulders slump. It was too difficult to disguise my disappointment. “These photos start too late in the morning. I hoped to see what happened before the crowds arrived.”
Phil shut down the laptop. “It’s a long trip back to Busman’s Harbor. Let me get you something to eat.”
I protested, but feebly. The cooking smells in the camp were too enticing.
Phil disappeared and came back carrying two steaming plates of food and two wedges of coarse bread. “I hope you’re hungry. Dig in.”
The food smelled intoxicating, huge plates of the kind of rib-sticking goodness intended for people who’d done hard, physical labor. I dug into the beans.
“My God, these are delicious. They taste something like New England baked beans.”
“And who do you think invented those?” Phil smiled at me. “All the tribes in Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick cooked beans mixed with maple syrup and bear fat in clay pots buried with hot coals.”
“The beans in this are bigger than I’m used to.”
“Soldier beans. Now grown all over, but they’re native to this region.”
The bigger beans gave the dish a fuller texture. I took a forkful of the second item on the plate, ground meat mixed with celery, onions, mushrooms, and small pieces of bacon. I recognized tarragon and cinnamon in the seasoning, a distinctive combination common in French-Canadian cooking. The cultures constantly enriched one another, beans from the Native Americans, spices from the Quebecois.
I mopped up the food with a wedge of the bread Phil called lu’sknikn. Cooked at the camp in a large iron frying pan, it was crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. The closest thing I could relate it to was Irish soda bread. “Who made this?”
“My mom.” Phil gestured over his shoulder toward a short, sinewy woman with long gray hair, still cooking over a propane gas ring. She spotted me looking and waved.
“She is dying to know who you are.” Phil laughed.
I laughed, too. We ate in silence for a few moments. Then Phil looked up and caught me staring at him.
“You’re wondering why I’m here, raking blueberries.”
Had I been that transparent? Here was a successful photojournalist, the kind who got contracts for high-end coffee table books, bending, lifting, and sweating as he raked blueberries. Surely he didn’t need the work.
“I come because my parents came, and their parents and their parents. No one knows how long the Mi’kmaqs have come to pick blueberries in Maine. Probably since before there was a Maine.” He ran a hand through his black hair. “I come to reconnect with cousins and friends, people I don’t see enough of as I travel for work throughout the year. I spend two weeks unplugged from the Internet and away from my job and the stress of living in a world where I look different. Here I look the same as everyone.” He caught my skeptical look. “Well, maybe a little better off.”
And taller and handsomer. But I left those thoughts unsaid. “I get why you come, but why do you rake berries?”
“Partly out of pride, to prove that at forty, I can still rake like a young man. But mostly because I want to be part of all this, a participant. I don’t want to stand on the outside and observe. That’s what I do for my job. Here I belong.”
“You weren’t away from the job. You were taking photos when I spotted you.”
“That’s another thing. Being in camp takes me back to when my photography was a hobby, not a job. No one’s paying me to take pictures of the people in the camps. I’ve been doing it since I was a boy.”
When we finished, Phil excused himself to return the plates to his mom. I stood to go.
Phil walked me to my car. “You really think this kid is innocent?”
“I really do.”
Phil hesitated, clearly considering. Finally he said, “The images on my laptop aren’t all there are. I’d hoped to do a video of time-lapse photographs to promote the book on the publishers’ website. Sort of a ‘day in the life.’ I had a stationery camera set up on the balcony taking photos all night. You know, moonrise, sunrise, the town wakes up and gets ready for its big party.”
“That’s fantastic!” I couldn’t believe the luck. “Can I see those photos?”
“I sent them home with my editor.”
His editor? The woman whose room he’d stayed in at the Lighthouse Inn? “Can you get them?”
He considered. “Maybe. If I can get word to her. She’s coming to visit. But there are over ten thousand images. If you don’t know what time the crime occurred, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“That’s okay. I’ll figure it out.” I didn’t know how, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
“All right. I’ll find a way to contact you if I’m able to get my hands on those pictures.”
I gave him my cell number and thanked him. By the time I got in Mom’s car, big drops of rain splattered the windshield. The weather Sonny had warned me about had arrived.
Chapter 25
It was a three and a half hour drive from the Mi’kmaq camp back to Busman’s Harbor. Most people, used to the tiny, crowded states of the Northeastern U.S., didn’t realize how big Maine was. It took the same amount of time to travel from Portland, Maine to New York City as it did to travel from Portland to the Canadian border. I was spending the better part of my evening driving across a relatively small part of Maine.
The rain, which escalated occasionally to a downpour, and the fog, which crept in on the stretches where the road hugged the sea, had me sitting straight up in my seat, concentrating on my driving. Radio reception was so spotty, I stopped trying, and my mother’s old car offered no way to amplify the tunes stored on my phone. I rode along in the silent car, alone with my thoughts.
I sorted through the jumble in my head. What had I accomplished by playing hooky? More important, was I any closer to my goal of helping Cabe? Both the teacher Adam Burford, and the group home manager Emily Draper had confirmed my strong impression of Cabe. He was an honest, generally positive kid. He might seem a little closed off, but there were reasons for it. Now that I knew his background—the repeated losses, the false accusation, and the time spent in an institution—I was even more impressed by the strength of his character. Adam and Emily could tell a jury what a great kid Cabe was, but I didn’t want it to come to that. Given what Cabe had been through, it was important he never spend a single night in jail.
My mind drifted to Binder and Flynn. I was keeping four things from them—Cabe’s employment application, his phone call, the existence of the image on the thumb drive Phil Johnson had given me, and the possibility of more useful photos Phil had sent with his editor to Montreal. Maybe I should give the information to Binder. I wrestled with the dilemma as I drove along. It was my natural instinct to turn it over. But, I was mad. Binder had led me to believe I was part of the team and used me to get information, while keeping me in the dark about what he knew. Maybe Flynn’s disgruntled attitude was part of the act, too. No, that was real. The man just didn’t like me.
I’d gone to the Mi’kmaq camp to find Cabe, and instead had found the photographer, Phil Johnson. Coincidence? Phil claimed he’d never seen anyone meeting Cabe’s description. But he’d looked away from me when he said it. Could I trust him? Perhaps Cabe was at another camp. The woman at Wild Blueberry Land had said there were five.
What had I learned from the photo Phil had put on the thumb drive? Two things, admittedly neither of them big. The hairy kid had been on the pier in the morning before the body was found. That could be completely meaningless—there’d been at least a hundred people on the pier by the time the shot was taken. And Bud Barbour had been there, too, or at least, Morgan was. Bud was supposed to have been at his camp up north, avoiding the Founder’s Weekend crowds. He’d sworn to us all he wouldn’t be on the pier for the opening ceremonies.
As I drove on through the rain, I thought about Bud.
May
The day before the third Founder’s Weekend committee meeting, I went to Gus’s in the late afternoon. There weren’t many customers at that time of day and Gus was known to be more expansive. I scraped the mud off my boots before I walked down the stairs to the restaurant. In New York it was springtime, with lunches outside and beautiful, flowering shrubs in Central Park. In Maine it was cold and wet. The day and a half we’d later remember as “spring,” was a month away.
I sat down at the counter. Bud Barbour dawdled at the other end. Morgan lay quietly at his feet, red bandanna around her neck as always. Gus had all kinds of rules, including, “No Animals,” though he, like everyone else, made an exception for Bud’s black lab.
I tried to out wait Bud and Morgan, but finally gave up. “I hear you’re the expert in the history of our peninsula,” I said to Gus.
“Ayup.” Gus didn’t go in for false modesty. He was more about accuracy.
“Can you tell me,” I asked, desperately hoping for a shortcut, “who the founder of Busman’s Harbor was?”
Gus waggled his a bushy white eyebrows at me. “Which time?”
“Which time what?”
“The first founder of Busman’s Harbor was a Wabanaki Chief. The Wabanaki tribes called this land Ketakamigwa, ‘the big land on the seacoast.’ They came here seasonally and farmed, fished, lobstered, and traded with other tribes, and eventually with the French.”
“And their village was right where the town is?”
“Probably not,” Gus conceded. “The steep, protectable harbor wasn’t needed by people who didn’t have enemies. They would’ve wanted a sheltered beach for drying fish and clamming. Archeologists think their longest seasonal settlement was where Camp Glooscap is.”
I wondered if Stevie knew that.
“And this founding chief’s name wasn’t, by any chance, Mr. Busman?”
“Alas, his name’s been lost to the misty dawns of time.”
Gus poured me a cup of coffee I was sure had been sitting on the burner for hours. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t protest. Another of his rules was you couldn’t come to Gus’s just to sit and yak. You had to buy.
“The first European settlers,” Gus continued, warming to his subject, “were fishermen. In those days, for cod to be sent home to England, it had to be dried on wooden racks. There was fierce competition among the fishing crews for the best areas for drying operations, and it didn’t take long for captains to figure out that if they left a small group of men over the winter, they’d have a huge advantage come the spring.”
“When was this?”
“1615.”
“Before the Pilgrims?”
“Definitely. Those Massachusetts-come-latelies are always claiming the credit.”
“Massholes,” Bud interjected. It was the first time he’d looked up from his coffee cup.
“These fishermen, was one of them was named Busman?” I asked, not particularly hopeful.
Gus laughed. “Not too many auto-buses in the early seventeenth century.”
“Maybe he was French? Bisou man? Perhaps a bit of a kisser? I’m sure it got lonely staying all winter.”
“Ha-ha,” Gus said. “By the way your French is terrible.”
“Well, do you know his name?”
“Nope,” Gus answered. “But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be recognized as our founder. Imagine how lonely and cold it was in that fishing station. How long the days were, and how heavily time weighed. The nameless people do all the hard work.”
“Ayup. You tell it, brother,” Bud called from the end of the counter. He got up and moved to the stool next to mine to join the conversation.
“The first permanent settler arrived in 1642. Like most Maine settlers, our founder wanted nothing more than to be left alone with his family and servants to farm and fish. Of course, that made the Puritans to the south deeply suspicious and set up years of conflict between them, especially after Maine became a colony of Massachusetts.”
