The Poacher's Son

by Paul Doiron

  Charley took a sip of coffee and glanced out the window. “Something’s been bothering me, Russell, and I hope you can help me sort it out. You think Jack killed Jonathan Shipman and Bill Brodeur, right?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Charley scratched his chin. “That’s the thing of it. If he did, I can’t figure out why.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re the one with the grudge against Wendigo, not Jack Bowditch.”

  Pelletier leaned forward. “Are you trying to imply something, Charley?”

  “I’m just saying that Jack’s motive doesn’t seem all that strong to me.”

  “You’ve been hanging around this kid too long. I think Jack had plenty of motive.”

  “How so?”

  “Wendigo is shutting me down. That means they’re kicking him out, too. I think he got drunk and pissed off, and he decided he was going to do something about it. I think it was a stupid spur-of-the-moment thing to do-which is the story of Jack’s life, if you ask me.”

  I said, “So how did my father know Brodeur was taking Shipman out the back way?”

  Pelletier glared at me. “What’s that?”

  “Whoever killed those men knew Brodeur was driving Shipman out that logging road. How did my dad know that? Who could’ve told him?”

  “How should I know?” Pelletier asked. “Charley, what the hell are you doing here? I understand why the kid cares about this, but why are you defending a son of a bitch poacher like Jack Bowditch?”

  “I’m just trying to figure a few things out.”

  “I already talked to that Indian detective about this.” He coughed into his hand. “Frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time than sit here playing a game of Clue. Jack Bowditch killed those two men. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m losing my business and my home and what happened last week won’t change that.” He rose to his feet and loomed over us. “If you want to talk to B.J., you know where she is. Now I’ve got a roof to fix.”

  Listening to that imperious tone, I couldn’t help remembering how he’d bossed me around eight summers ago-how he’d called me his “serf” and made my life hell. I despised him all over again. He was halfway to the door when I called out, “You tried to rape her.”

  Pelletier spun around. “What?”

  “Brenda says you tried to rape her three years ago.”

  “That’s a fucking lie!”

  “She said that after you and your wife split, you started coming on to her, and that my dad stopped you. She said he beat the shit out of you, and that you’ve been holding a grudge against him ever since.”

  Pelletier advanced on me, hands balled into fists. “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to me like that?”

  I stood up. Charley jumped between us. “Mike’s just repeating what the girl said.”

  “I never touched her!” said Pelletier.

  I didn’t care what he said. “That’s not all. She claims you and Truman Dellis conspired to murder Jonathan Shipman and blame it on my father.”

  “She what?”

  “She says she saw Truman out here the day of the shootings, talking with you behind the boathouse.”

  “That’s bullshit! I haven’t seen that drunk since I fired his sorry ass.” Pelletier turned his attention from me back to Charley. “You don’t actually believe this crap?”

  It took the old pilot a few moments to answer. When he did, his voice was soft. “No, but I do believe there’s a reason the girl hates you. Something happened between you two to make her this mad.”

  Pelletier became quiet.

  Charley’s tone was measured. “What happened, Russ? You can’t deny it was something.”

  Russell Pelletier ran his yellow-stained fingers through his greasy hair, looked away, and took a deep breath. “It was after I fired Truman-for being drunk all the time. Doreen and I were having problems. One night Brenda and I were here alone. I thought she was sending these signals. You don’t know this girl, Charley.”

  Charley folded his arms. “Go on.”

  “We started kissing. It just happened. The next thing I knew, she started freaking out. She said I was disgusting. She called me all kinds of names, and she ran off, leaving me lying there on the couch. All I did was kiss her.”

  “She was just a girl, Russell,” said Charley.

  He scowled. “Tell that to Jack Bowditch.”

  “What happened next?” I asked. All the contempt I felt for him came through in those three words.

  He ignored me and focused on Charley. “When I woke up, Jack was standing over me. She must have told him what she told you. We had a fight.” He fumbled in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, found one, and lit it. “He beat the crap out of me, basically. I told Doreen I fell down the stairs, but she didn’t believe me.”

  We watched him tuck the plastic lighter carefully back in his pants pocket. Again I noticed the knife sheathed on his belt.

  Pelletier continued: “She started going over to Jack’s cabin after that. She’d go over there after dinner. She just seemed obsessed with him, and I wasn’t going to get in the middle of it. I had my own troubles with Doreen, by that time.”

  Charley nodded slowly. “What do you think she’s got against Truman?”

  “He didn’t mess with her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or I never saw any sign of it, anyway. After Truman’s wife died, all he cared about was getting drunk. Most of the time I think he forgot she even existed.”

  Charley absorbed this information. Then he asked: “You heard about Truman’s accident?”

  “With the chainsaw? Yeah, I wondered if Jack might have done it to him-whipped him across the face with the blade. Or the chain might have broken in the woods like he said.” He inhaled so deeply on his cigarette that an inch of it burned to ash before our eyes. “I’m not proud of what happened that night with B.J. But I didn’t rape that girl, and I didn’t kill anyone, no matter what she says. She’s a goddamned liar, Charley.”

  My head was throbbing. I was worried that Charley might be swallowing Pelletier’s story. “She told the truth about my dad beating you up,” I said. “She told the truth about your having a grudge against him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Pelletier exhaustedly. “She uses people. She used your old man, and now she’s using you, kid.”

  I heard an appliance humming softly in the kitchen, the only sound.

  “I guess it’s time I had a talk with the young woman,” Charley said at last.

  27

  We left Pelletier standing outside the main lodge, lighting yet another Marlboro.

  A dirt road, scarcely more than a wheel-rutted path, led over to my father’s cabin, but the most direct route was by water. Charley and I borrowed one of the camp’s aluminum canoes and paddled across the cove to the gravel beach where, eight years ago, we’d first met. In the shallows minnows scattered under our paddles and the canoe made a metallic knocking noise as it struck bottom. Charley hopped out with a splash and hauled the bow up, scraping, onto the stony shore.

  We stood together looking up the steep plank stairs that scaled the hillside to my father’s cabin, both of us, I think, remembering that night when Truman Dellis had aimed a deer rifle at him from the darkness above.

  Charley cupped his hands around his mouth, just like he did to call the coyotes. “Brenda Dean! It’s Charley Stevens and Mike Bowditch!”

  There was no answer.

  “We made enough racket with that damned aluminum canoe,” he said to me. “You’d think she would have heard us.”

  Along the stairs I noticed hanging shreds of yellow police tape that someone had ripped down. “So much for this being a crime scene,” I said.

  I hadn’t seen the camp in eight years, but it looked no different. There were the same three separate log cabins angled onto the porch. All had rusty screen windows and screen doors that made the rooms hard to see into.

  We check
ed the three cabins, but Brenda wasn’t in any of them. I was struck by how clean everything looked. There were the same propane stove and fridge from when I was a kid, and even the same weathered topographic maps pinned to the log walls, but none of the mess I remembered. The floors had been swept. The beds had been made with clean sheets and blankets. Knowing the miracle Sarah had performed on my own home, I could only attribute the transformation to Brenda’s woman’s touch.

  “Maybe she’s up at the outhouse?” I suggested.

  Charley nodded. “Hate to disturb her there, but we should see.”

  Behind the middle cabin, facing the hillside, was a stack of weathered firewood with a blue tarp thrown over it and a couple of storage sheds. The dirt road wound away through the trees in the direction of the sporting camp. Down it a little ways was my father’s stinking two-seater outhouse.

  She wasn’t there, either.

  Charley pushed up the brim of his cap and gave his forehead a scratch. “Where the hell is that girl?”

  “Right here.”

  To our left Brenda stepped out from behind a shaggy hemlock along the road. She was wearing the same oil-spotted blue jeans she’d worn yesterday and a man’s faded blue chambray shirt, and she was carrying over her shoulder an old single-barreled shotgun. Charley and I were both unarmed.

  “What are you doing hiding in the woods?” Charley asked.

  “Getting the drop on you, old man.” There was a shine in her eyes that didn’t seem natural. Her smile showed her crooked teeth. “I thought you guys were supposed to be game wardens.”

  I could see the corded muscles in the pilot’s neck standing out like braids in a brown rope. His eyes flicked from the shotgun back to her dilated pupils. “You called Detective Soctomah,” he said. “You said your father threatened you.”

  Her face tightened. “He said he’d kill me if I didn’t shut up. He told me you came to see him.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” I asked.

  “Arrest him.”

  “What else did Truman say to you on the phone?”

  “He said he killed those men.”

  “He did, did he?” Charley brushed a bug off his ear.

  The ripe smell of the outhouse was all around us. The thought that Truman had spontaneously confessed to the murders was just too good to be true. Even if he did have a part in the killings, why admit it over the phone? Truman was dumb, but not that dumb. Which raised again the question: How far should we trust Brenda? I remembered the humiliation on Russell Pelletier’s face as he told us about the night my dad beat him up. Brenda had accused him of trying to rape her. My father had believed her story, but I couldn’t shake my doubts.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” she said.

  Charley gave a slight smile.

  She turned to me. “I swear to God, it’s the truth.”

  “How about handing over that shotgun?” said Charley.

  She gripped it tighter. “What for?”

  I put my hand out. “Come on, B.J., give me the damned gun.”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  This was the second time in two days I’d confronted an angry person with a firearm-like father, like daughter-and I was getting sick of that nervous flutter in my stomach. “It’s hard to have a friendly conversation with you holding a loaded shotgun,” I said.

  “Fine.” She held out the gun for me. “Here.”

  It was an old New England Firearms one-shot: the kind you can buy for seventy-five bucks at a pawn shop. The safety had been switched off. I switched it back on. “Why were you hiding from us?”

  “I wasn’t hiding from you. I was hiding from Truman. What’s wrong with you people? Why won’t you just arrest him?”

  “Someone from the state police is talking with your father right now,” said Charley.

  “Are they searching his place, checking his truck?”

  “And why should they do that?” asked Charley.

  “To find proof that he did it, that he killed those men.”

  “What do you think they’ll find?”

  “I don’t know, evidence.”

  “The police already have evidence that Jack Bowditch killed those men.”

  “It was a setup. I told you that. Truman said he did it.” Her hands were shaking, she was so upset. “No one ever believes me!”

  We watched her storm back to the middle cabin, yank open the screen door, and disappear inside. The door clattered shut behind her.

  “What do you think?” he asked softly.

  “She’s lying about Pelletier,” I said, “but I’m not sure why. And another thing, why does she want the police to search Truman’s truck?”

  “Good question. Let’s see if we can get an answer.”

  We found Brenda in the kitchen cabin, standing with the propane refrigerator open. She’d grabbed a can of Budweiser and was gulping it down right there, with the fridge ajar. It wasn’t even ten o’clock.

  “Isn’t it a little early for that?” said Charley.

  “I had a rough night.” She was breathing hard from drinking so fast.

  “Why don’t we sit down and have a talk.”

  He gestured to the knife-scarred picnic table in the center of the cabin. It was the same table on which my father had butchered that deer he poached, the night I first met Charley Stevens. Brenda sat down across from us. I set the shotgun carefully beside me on the floor.

  “When did Truman call you?” asked Charley.

  “Last night, late.”

  “He called on the radio phone?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We can’t use a cell phone here on account of the mountains or something. You have to go five miles up the road to get a signal.”

  “And he was calling for you and not Pelletier?”

  “Maybe he was calling for Russell. I don’t know. He got me instead.”

  “Did Russ Pelletier hear your conversation?”

  “No, he was asleep.”

  “Pelletier said you’d moved over to this cabin after Jack Bowditch disappeared. What were you doing back over at the lodge?”

  “Getting my stuff.”

  “What stuff?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, boxes from when I was a kid, that sort of stuff. Jesus.” She took another sip of beer. “I waited until he was asleep to go over there because I didn’t want to see him-and that’s when I heard the phone.”

  “If you think Russell Pelletier conspired with Truman to murder those men, weren’t you afraid to go over there?”

  “I had my shotgun.”

  Charley pulled on his chin in a reflective way. “If Truman called you last night, why did you wait until this morning to contact Detective Soctomah?”

  “Because they already arrested me once. Those cops think I’m a liar. I didn’t think they’d do anything if I told them.”

  “So why call them at all?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess I wanted someone to know in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “In case something bad happened.” She gazed directly into my eyes. “You should have heard him on the phone.”

  Looking into her eyes, I was disturbed again by the animal reaction I had to her. It troubled me to be attracted to this woman. “What exactly did Truman say?”

  “He said, ‘You goddamned bitch. What lies are you telling about me?’ And I said, ‘It’s the truth. You killed those men, you and Russell.’ And he said, ‘I’ll kill you, too, if you don’t shut your fucking mouth.’ Then I hung up.”

  “So that was it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Charley leaned forward. “How long did you know Bill Brodeur?”

  She looked startled. “Who?”

  “Bill Brodeur, the sheriff’s deputy who was murdered with Jonathan Shipman.”

  “I didn’t know him.”

  “You never met him at the Dead River Inn?”

  Suddenly, far off in the forest, we heard a horn honking, followed by the noise of an
approaching truck engine. Brenda leaped to her feet and ran to the screen window looking out to the road. Charley kept his eyes on her as he rose.

  “It’s Pelletier,” she said.

  Charley turned to Brenda. “Why don’t you stay here while we go see what he wants?”

  “I don’t want to talk to that asshole, anyway.”

  I reached down and grabbed the shotgun. Then I followed Charley out the door and through the middle cabin.

  Pelletier’s new truck was coming down the road fast, bouncing over the sun-hardened ruts. It braked at the edge of the dooryard, and Pelletier poked his head out the window and shouted over the diesel engine, “You got a call back at the camp.”

  “Who from?”

  “Soctomah. He needs your plane.”

  I felt my stomach sink. “What’s going on?”

  “Truman’s disappeared. They need you to help search for his truck.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. Soctomah wants you to call him. Hop in and I’ll drive you back to camp.”

  Charley stepped close to me. “This is strange,” he said in a whisper.

  “What do you think is happening?”

  “Maybe the state police found something at Truman’s place.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Go talk to Soctomah, I guess.” He turned back to the window from which Brenda was watching us. “You mind coming out here, Miss Dean?”

  “What for?” came her voice.

  “We’re going to take a ride over to the camp.”

  “No way!”

  I looked at Charley. “You want me to drag her out?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll go with Russell and talk with Soctomah. You stay here with the girl.”

  “Do you trust Pelletier?”

  “Trust him? No, but I don’t think he’s a murderer. I may have to leave right away. If I do, I’ll leave a message with him. You can call me over the radio-or call Soctomah and he’ll tell you what’s going on.” He took a step toward the idling truck.