Gray Ghost

by William G. Tapply

  “I meant, he’s missing.”

  Calhoun nodded.

  “Well,” said Gilsum, “I hope nothing happened to him.”

  “That’s what’s got me worried,” said Calhoun.

  The two started to walk away. Then they stopped and Gilsum came back to where Calhoun was sitting. “We’re trying to keep a lid on this,” he said.

  “This?” Calhoun waved his hand around indicating his property.

  “What happened tonight.”

  “Good,” said Calhoun.

  “So don’t talk to any reporters,” said Gilsum.

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Calhoun.

  After a while, an emergency wagon pulled into the yard, and a couple of men went up onto the deck. A few minutes later, they came bumping back down the steps with a big plastic bag strapped on a gurney. Calhoun was pretty certain the bag contained Paul Vecchio’s body. The men rolled the gurney over to the wagon, collapsed it, slid it into the back, slammed the doors shut, and drove off.

  Calhoun sat there on his boulder while the forensic techs hustled into and out of his house. The uniformed state trooper leaned against the side of his cruiser more or less watching him, but he didn’t insist that Calhoun get back into the backseat. Dr. Surry had left after she finished talking with Calhoun. Gilsum and Enfield and Sheriff Dickman hung around the yard talking with each other. Once in a while one of them would talk on his cell phone. A couple of times a tech came out of the house and spoke to them.

  They all ignored Calhoun, which was fine by him.

  Calhoun guessed it was a few minutes before midnight when they all started climbing back into their various vehicles and driving away.

  Gilsum came over to where Calhoun was sitting and said, “You can go inside now.”

  “I expected you’d have that yellow crime-scene tape draped around my house for a week.”

  “You’ve been watching too much TV.”

  “I don’t watch TV at all, actually,” said Calhoun. “If you looked around in there, you’d see I don’t own one.”

  “Well, whatever,” said Gilsum. “We’re all done, anyway.”

  Then he got into the cruiser, and the trooper slid behind the wheel, and they drove off.

  The sheriff was the last one to leave. He seemed pretty anxious to get going. He didn’t have much to say, and Calhoun wondered whether he’d changed his mind and decided that Calhoun might’ve shot Paul Vecchio after all.

  He just said he hoped Ralph showed up, and they’d be in touch.

  Then he left, and Calhoun was alone.

  He went up to the deck. The floodlights lit the area like daylight, and Calhoun noticed that some black blood had seeped into the wooden seat of the Adirondack chair where Paul Vecchio had been sitting. He wondered how long it would take for the weather to wash away the stain.

  His .30-30 was lying there on the table where he’d left it.

  He stood at the railing and yelled for Ralph.

  After a while he picked up the Winchester and went inside. The forensics people had moved around some chairs and left several drawers and cabinet doors open. Otherwise there was no evidence that people had been prowling around in there.

  He closed the drawers and doors and pushed the chairs back to where they belonged. Then he found an apple in the refrigerator and a box of raisins in one of the cabinets. He poured himself a glass of water, went out on the deck, and had supper at the table.

  Still no Ralph.

  He went back inside and got the automatic coffeemaker ready for the morning. Then he made Ralph’s supper and filled his water dish and put them out on the deck under the table where Ralph liked to eat.

  According to Calhoun’s internal clock, it was about quarter past one in the morning. He was supposed to be at the shop before nine to open up. He didn’t figure he’d sleep much, but he knew he should give it a try. So he went to the closet in his bedroom, got down his sleeping bag, grabbed a pillow off his bed, picked up his .30-30, and took them out to his pickup. He slid the rifle behind the front seat, then opened the sleeping bag on the truck bed and crawled in, leaving the tailgate down.

  He stared up at the September night sky. He knew he should feel bad about Paul Vecchio. He had seemed like a nice guy, smart and mild-mannered and friendly, hardly the sort of man you’d expect to be murdered. Hell, he was a college professor and he liked fishing.

  Well, that was all Calhoun knew about the man. Maybe he’d been a drug dealer or a pedophile. You never knew about people.

  He would’ve felt worse about Vecchio, he understood, if it hadn’t been for Ralph. Ralph was a hard knot of worry in his stomach. The only thing he could figure was that whoever had shot Vecchio had snatched Ralph, although he couldn’t really figure out why they’d want to do that, or how they could manage it. The previous summer an enemy of Calhoun had kicked Ralph and hit him with the butt of a rifle, and ever since then, Ralph had been skittish around strangers.

  Maybe they shot him like they shot Mr. Vecchio. But if they did, why didn’t they just leave his body there where he fell, the way they’d left Paul Vecchio where he’d been sitting?

  Most likely Ralph had slinked away into the woods when Mr. Vecchio and whoever killed him showed up. Calhoun hoped that was it.

  He tried to sort through things, to analyze what he knew about Paul Vecchio and his murder, to deduce the connection between him and the burned body on Quarantine Island, but the evening’s adrenaline and caffeine had drained out of him, and his brain was too fuzzy to think straight. Scenarios drifted around, and there seemed to be one thought in particular that he wanted to pin down, but he couldn’t conjure up the energy to focus on it any more than he could focus his eyes on a single star up there in the sky.

  So he let his mind go wherever it wanted to go. There were images of making love with Kate, how she tasted and smelled and felt. It had only been the previous night, but when he remembered that it wasn’t going to happen again, at least not for a while, not for as long as Walter was in the nursing home, or maybe forever, it seemed like something that had happened a long time ago.

  Calhoun’s thoughts kept flipping back to Ralph. He was so full of regrets that he felt like screaming, or crying, or smashing a hammer down on his fingers. Why in hell hadn’t he brought Ralph to the shop with him? If he had, it wouldn’t change what happened to Paul Vecchio, but Ralph would be here with him, at least.

  Eventually his mind went all fluffy, and thoughts mingled with dreams, and after a while there were only dreams.

  When he woke up, the sky was still dark and the owls were calling to each other. His leg was cramped, and when he tried to move it, he felt a weight on it. He reached down and touched the fur on Ralph’s back. He rubbed it, and Ralph squirmed against him. Calhoun mumbled, “Hey, bud,” and he felt the dog’s wet tongue give his hand a couple of licks, and pretty soon he went back to sleep.

  Calhoun woke up from a dream about having a big tree fall on the back of his legs, pinning him to the ground. He was trapped, immobilized, and some big wolflike animal was breathing into his face and showing his snarly wet teeth. Calhoun tried to yell at the creature, but his words got stuck in his throat.

  He forced himself to wake up. He was lying on his stomach inside his sleeping bag hugging his pillow. The chilly September air around him was filled with morning birdsong, hundreds of birds, dozens of different species, all calling to each other. There was no rhythm or tune to it. It was a chaos of noise.

  Ralph was curled up on top of the sleeping bag in the V of Calhoun’s legs. When he tried to roll over, Ralph groaned and refused to move.

  Finally Calhoun slid his legs out from around Ralph and crawled out of the sleeping bag. The sky was turning from purple to pewter. Most of the stars had winked out. Five thirty, according to Calhoun’s mental clock. It was a good thing he didn’t require much sleep.

  He slid out of the truck, went up to the house, got the coffeepot going, and pulled on a sweatshirt. When he came ba
ck out onto the deck and saw that Ralph’s food dish was empty, he took it inside, rinsed it out, put more dog food in it, and put it back on the deck.

  He poured some coffee and took it down the hill to Bitch Creek. He sat on a boulder beside the pool downstream from the old burned-out bridge and watched a trout feeding on mayfly spinners and listened to the water music and sipped his coffee and thought about Lyle. Calhoun was the one who’d found Lyle’s dead body. Now he’d found Paul Vecchio’s. It felt like some kind of curse. Whether it was rational or not, he felt responsible in both cases.

  After a while, Ralph wandered down and sat beside him.

  Calhoun held down his coffee mug, and Ralph took a lick.

  “Where the hell did you go?” he said.

  Ralph lifted his head and looked up at him.

  “Well,” said Calhoun, “don’t ever do that again.”

  He wondered if any apparitions would drift down the stream or come ghosting out of the woods this morning. Sometimes that happened, and when it did, Calhoun took them seriously and tried to understand their messages.

  There were no apparitions this morning, so when the coffee mug was empty, he and Ralph went back up to the house. Ralph went onto the deck to eat his breakfast, and Calhoun backed his truck down to his boat trailer and hitched it up.

  When he went back to the house, he noticed that his Colt Woodsman .22 pistol was missing from the kitchen drawer, but the Remington twelve-gauge still hung on its pegs by the back door.

  He showered, got dressed, refilled his coffee mug, and snapped his fingers at Ralph. They piled into the truck, Calhoun behind the wheel and Ralph riding shotgun, and headed for the shop, dragging the boat behind them. It was a Friday in the middle of September. The summer tourists who swarmed into the shop between Memorial Day and Labor Day to pore over the clothing and books and souvenirs were pretty much gone. Most of the autumn customers were hard-core fishermen hoping to catch the tail end of the striper migration, and they were more interested in information and opinion than in buying equipment. Mostly they gave themselves their best chance of receiving sound advice by buying a handful of flies. Not many of them wanted or needed a guide. It was coming up on the end of the season, and Kate had already switched over to winter hours—closed on Monday, open nine to four Tuesday through Saturday, noon to four on Sunday.

  Once Calhoun had tried to talk to her about doing some winter guiding on the bay for sea ducks. He could make some sets of decoys, paint his boat camouflage, and rig up some netting. He could build blinds on a few of the uninhabited islands where he knew the eiders and scoters and old squaw flew. He thought it would be fun, and they could expand their business.

  Kate had shrugged. He realized that she was distracted because of Walter, so he dropped the subject for the time being.

  They got to the shop around nine thirty, and he parked his truck and boat in the side lot. Kate would be coming in later on. Until then, Calhoun and Ralph were in charge. He opened up, got the coffee started, checked the phone for messages and the computer for e-mails, tuned the radio to the NPR classical music station, and went around straightening out the displays and checking the fly bins. His regular morning routine.

  He didn’t expect to see many customers, so he decided to spend the morning at the fly-tying bench. They had a standing order from some Massachusetts guys for a batch of landlocked salmon flies. Every spring at ice-out these men spent three or four weeks trolling for salmon on Sebago and Moosehead, and at the end of every spring season they ordered twenty-five dozen streamers. They were retired doctors and lawyers and bankers who had formed their own private fishing club. Their rules required them to fish for salmon the old-fashioned way. They rowed wooden boats. No outboard motors. They trolled with bamboo fly rods and floating lines, and they fished with nothing but old-time Maine feather-wing and bucktail streamers, flies such as the Chief Needahbah, the Edson Dark Tiger, the Golden Witch, the Hurricane, the Magog Smelt, the Nine-Three, the Supervisor, the Warden’s Worry.

  Calhoun’s job was to keep them supplied. They left it up to him to decide which patterns to make. Considering the time it took and the cost of materials, they didn’t make much money by selling three hundred flies—even though they charged double what flies imported from Taiwan or Sri Lanka were selling for at retail—but Kate figured it was a start. Authentic Maine streamers tied by an authentic Maine guide might give them a nice niche in the complicated fly market. The Massachusetts fellows loved Calhoun’s flies. They said they were spreading the word.

  Calhoun decided to tie a batch of Gray Ghosts. The Gray Ghost was perhaps the most famous of all the Maine salmon streamers. It was invented in 1924 by Carrie Stevens, the legendary Maine fly tier, to imitate a smelt, the most important baitfish in her Rangeley lakes system. A lot of new fly-tying materials had come along since 1924, and a lot of new flies had been invented, but Gray Ghosts still took fish, and Calhoun enjoyed the feeling of tradition that went along with tying them according to Mrs. Stevens’s original pattern.

  Kate showed up a little after noon. She came over to Calhoun’s bench, put her hand on his shoulder, and bent over him. He could smell the familiar soapy scent of her. She peered at the Gray Ghosts he’d completed and said, “Real nice flies, Stoney.”

  He looked up at her. He hoped she was smiling at him, but she wasn’t. “Thanks,” he said.

  Her hand moved off his shoulder and she straightened up. “Well,” she said, “I’ve got to finish doing the inventory and get at the winter orders. I’ll be out back if you need me.” She headed for her office in the back of the shop.

  Her scent lingered in the air after she left, and his shoulder felt warm where she’d touched him. It reminded him of the lingering feeling on the same shoulder when Dr. Surry had given it a squeeze.

  Kate was acting awkward around him, a combination of shy and intimate and embarrassed and pissed-off. He guessed she was feeling uncomfortable about what was happening with Walter and how she’d decided to pull back from Calhoun.

  He intended to let her call the shots. If she wanted to talk, he’d be happy to talk. If she wanted to have supper together sometime, he’d do that. If she changed her mind and wanted to make love with him, he wouldn’t make a fuss about it. He didn’t like what had happened. It left a hole in his heart. But Kate was the one with the problem, not him, and he couldn’t justify feeling unhappy or angry about it. He’d just have to wait her out.

  He spent the afternoon tying flies and listening to music and talking with the few customers who came into the shop, and around four thirty, Kate came out from her office and said, “I see you’ve got your boat with you.”

  Calhoun shrugged. “Thought I might go out for a few hours, catch the evening tide, see if I can clear my head.”

  She smiled. “You need to clear your head?”

  He realized he hadn’t told her about finding Paul Vecchio shot dead at his house. “Had a little excitement last night,” he said.

  She was frowning at him. “I can see trouble in your face, Stoney. What happened ?”

  So he told her. He kept it simple, just finding Mr. Vecchio’s body with bullet holes in it and the police and various other official people coming to his house. He didn’t mention how Ralph had run off or how worried he’d been or that he’d slept in his truck.

  When he finished his story, Kate looked at him for a minute. Then she said, “What are you going to do?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I’ll go fishing.”

  “Well,” she said, “tight lines.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By the time Calhoun launched his boat at the East End ramp, the tide was close to full flood and the sun hung low and red in the western sky. The afternoon breeze had settled down, and Casco Bay lay flat and impenetrable.

  He weaved slowly among the buoys and moored watercraft, and when he cleared the harbor, he gunned the motor. He wanted to put some distance between himself and the mainland. He had no particular destination, and even thoug
h he had his rods and other gear with him, it didn’t matter much whether he found fish to cast to or not. He just needed to get away from everything, and the best way he knew to do that was to go out on the ocean alone in a boat.

  Well, Ralph was with him, but dogs, even a dog like Ralph, didn’t count. Dogs didn’t make demands or pursue agendas or get hurt feelings or use their love like a weapon. It was people and their complicated, self-centered affairs he wanted to get away from.

  He took the same route he’d taken with Paul Vecchio, cutting between Peaks and Great Diamond islands and then out past Long Island and Great Chebeague to where the bay opened into the ocean. He saw only a couple of distant sailboats out there, which was about as solitary as anybody could reasonably expect.

  When he felt like he could take a deep breath, he throttled back the motor and putted along, barely moving, more or less headed out toward the area near Quarantine Island where he and Mr. Vecchio had found the fish blitzing a few days earlier.

  Now the sun had sunk behind the mainland and the western horizon was fading from orange to yellow. The eastern horizon was purply-black. A soft mist was rising from the dark glassy water. Overhead, a few bright stars had winked on.

  Ralph was sitting up on the front seat, alert for flocking birds and blitzing fish, but there were none to be seen from horizon to horizon. The ocean had fallen dead.

  Calhoun slipped on a fleece jacket against the September evening damp and chill.

  When he figured he wasn’t going to spot any birds or fish, Ralph slipped off the seat and lay down in the bottom of the boat.

  They putted along while the sky turned from purple to black and the mist turned into fog and obscured the stars, and pretty soon the jumbled rocks of Quarantine Island lay silhouetted ahead of them.

  Calhoun shut off the motor. The sudden silence rang in his ears for a minute. Then he heard the doleful clang of a distant bell buoy echoing in the fog. Sound travels forever over foggy water.

  A dog barked from one of the islands. Ralph raised his head, perked up his ears, and lifted his nose for a minute. Then he kind of shrugged and went back to sleep.