Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

“Busy so far?”

  He shrugged. “Gave away a lot of wisdom. Didn’t sell a helluva lot.” “I’m real sorry, Stoney.”

  He looked up.

  “About how I behaved yesterday.”

  He nodded. “Lyle said they were gobbling sand eels on those mudflats along the inside of Swan Island about an hour into the incoming last week. Just at dusk. You know those mudflats I mean?”

  “I get scared sometimes,” she said.

  Calhoun stroked the tail of the fly in his vise. “What do you think?” he said. “Maybe needs a bit more flash?”

  “Some guys came in yesterday morning,” she continued. “They wanted to go trout fishing on the Kennebec up around Bingham, below the Wyman Dam. They’d heard it’s really hot. Hell, it is hot. Everybody knows that. It would’ve been a good trip for us. Three lawyers. Well-connected local lawyers. First thing I thought was, well, I’ll give these boys to Lyle.” She shook her head. “It would’ve been a great trip for Lyle. I can’t believe it, Stoney.”

  Calhoun didn’t look up. He didn’t want to see Kate’s face right then. “I would’ve taken them,” he said.

  “See, that’s it. You weren’t here. And—and neither was Lyle. Just me. I was the only one here. So what did I do? I called around, found a guide over to Santo’s for those lawyers.” She sighed. “I hate giving business away. We’re not doing so hot, you know.”

  “I’ve been telling you,” he said. “I’ve got money. Make me a partner.”

  “You’re not going to bail me out, Stoney. I’ve got to make this work.”

  He took the finished sand eel from the vise. “It wouldn’t be bailing you out, honey. It’d be an investment for me. A good investment.” He clamped another hook in the vise. “They keep putting money into my account. You know that. It’s just sitting there.”

  “Invest it in something good, then,” she said. “Not some stupid business that’s gonna go belly-up.”

  “We aren’t going belly-up,” said Calhoun.

  “Walter fell out of his wheelchair yesterday,” she said. “Speaking of going belly-up. When I got home, he’d been lying there all afternoon. Couldn’t get up, couldn’t even get to the phone. He looks up at me and says, ‘Kate, I wet my goddam pants. Will you please for Christ’s sake put me away.’ ”

  Calhoun looked up at her. “Are you thinking of putting Walter in a nursing home or something?”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what he meant.”

  “Let me buy in, Kate,” he said. “Then we can hire somebody to mind the shop once in a while. Do some advertising. Get a new sign for out front. Free you and me up so we can do more guiding. Maybe even take a day off occasionally. Actually go fishing. Hell, when was the last time you and I went fishing?” He shrugged. “Give you some time with Walter. If we pump some capital into the shop, you can pay more attention to Walter.”

  She shook her head, turned, and started for her office in the back. Then she stopped. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  He smiled. “I never pretended to get it, honey.”

  She stood there for a minute with her hands on her hips, frowning at him as if he was somebody she thought she’d seen somewhere but couldn’t remember where. Then she went into her office.

  A little after noon, Calhoun asked Kate if she wanted him to go get them some lunch. She was at the counter talking with a couple of young guys who Calhoun figured would just as soon stand there all afternoon flirting with her, making her smile, and she glanced up at him and said, “No,” as if he’d asked if she wanted him to chop off her thumb.

  Whenever he looked her way, she managed to have her head turned in another direction.

  Actually, he did get it. It wasn’t complicated. If Calhoun became her partner, she’d be tied to him, and Kate needed things to be on her own terms.

  Well, Calhoun didn’t mind that. He understood it. It wasn’t the way he preferred it, but it was okay.

  In the middle of the afternoon he glanced up and saw Sheriff Dickman standing in the doorway. The sheriff jerked his head toward the parking lot out front, then walked out.

  A few minutes later Calhoun went outside. Dickman was leaning against the side of his Explorer tapping his Stetson against his leg.

  “What’s up?” said Calhoun.

  Dickman nodded. “Thought you’d want to know. We found that rented Taurus. One of the deputies spotted it in the lot beside the general store in Standish.”

  “Standish,” said Calhoun. “Was Fred Green in it?”

  “Nope.” Dickman shrugged. “The gal in the store said Lyle was in on Tuesday, asked if she’d mind if he left it there. She said she thought it was only for the day, but when he didn’t come by she guessed she got it wrong and didn’t think anything of it. I showed her your sketch of Fred Green. She never saw the man.”

  “Did she mention anything about Lyle making a phone call?”

  Dickman nodded. “They’ve got an inside pay phone on the wall by the door. Lyle bought some cold drinks and used the change to make a call.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Calhoun. “I’m trying to figure this out.”

  “Welcome to the club, Stoney. We traced the car. It was rented from an Avis place at the airport in Augusta by a man calling himself Fred Green. He paid with a credit card.”

  “So Green is his real name.”

  Dickman shook his head. “Turns out the Fred Green who belongs to that Visa card recently moved into a nursing home in St. Augustine, Florida. He’s eighty-two, and he’s going blind from diabetes.”

  “The card was stolen?”

  Dickman nodded.

  Calhoun frowned. “I figured Green—whatever his name is—shot Lyle, drove his old Power Wagon to the school in South Riley, picked up that Taurus, and . . .”

  “He didn’t pick up that Taurus,” said Dickman. “It was sitting there in front of the general store in Standish the whole time.”

  “So,” said Calhoun, “unless Mr. Green is living in South Riley, there was a third vehicle. Which means—”

  “Which means,” said Dickman, “he had an accomplice.”

  “And that means that the whole thing must’ve been premeditated.”

  “Frankly,” said Dickman, “I don’t know what any of it means. I’ve been trying to create scenarios, and I’m not getting very far. We know Green showed up here at the shop on Tuesday. We know he and Lyle drove off, each of them in their own car. Lyle had a date with that Moulton girl that evening, so they stopped in Standish and left the Taurus there. Lyle called his gal from there. Then Green climbed in with Lyle. We know they went to that millpond in Keatsboro, and we know Lyle got shot and was left there in the water. We know that Lyle’s truck ended up behind the elementary school in South Riley. We know that the Taurus hasn’t moved.” He shrugged. “The state boys’ve towed both of those vehicles away. They’ll do their forensics, maybe come up with something.”

  “What we don’t know,” said Calhoun, “is why this Mr. Green would want to kill Lyle in the first place.”

  Dickman shrugged. “Everybody’s got enemies, Stoney. When we catch up to Green I guess we’ll know the answer to that.”

  “When?”

  “Okay. If. The man does seem to have disappeared himself pretty thoroughly. But we’ve got your sketch and we’ve faxed it to the state police and every sheriff’s department in Maine, along with the message that the man is wanted for murder. We’ve got people talking to the folks in the airports and bus terminals, and we’ve notified the authorities in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and by Jesus, Stoney, we’ll get the sonofabitch.”

  “If he’s got an accomplice . . .”

  Dickman shook his head, then put his Stetson back on. “I gotta go. I just wanted to keep you up to speed.” He narrowed his eyes. “You got a mind for this stuff, Stoney. Think on it for me. You’re the only one who saw Green, who talked to him. Anything you can remember, you let me know.”

  “You can count on it,” said Calhoun. />
  Dickman slid into his Explorer and drove away. Calhoun stood there in front of the shop, staring off in the direction that the sheriff had taken, trying to add it all up. After a couple of minutes, he turned and went back inside.

  They closed up at five as they always did on Saturdays. Calhoun decided he wouldn’t ask Kate if she wanted to hang around, relax after a busy day, put her feet up, have a Coke. He knew she’d say no.

  After he finished cleaning up, he went to her office in the back. She was doing some paperwork.

  “I hope Walter’s okay,” he said.

  She looked up and smiled. “Thank you.”

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  She nodded. “Thanks, Stoney. I don’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you take the day off tomorrow. I can handle the place.”

  “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “You didn’t. I offered.”

  She looked at him through narrowed eyes for a minute, then nodded. “That’d be wonderful. You’re sure?”

  “I’ll be here,” he said.

  He whistled to Ralph, went out to his truck, and they headed for home. Along the way he managed to avoid thinking about Kate and wondering if she was trying to tell him that she wouldn’t be coming by anymore. Instead he tried to focus on what the sheriff had told him.

  He drove past the turnoff for Dublin and kept going, heading for Keatsboro. He wanted to look around again. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he felt drawn to the millpond where Lyle had died.

  He pulled to a stop by the break in the stone wall just down the road from Anna and David Ross’s farmhouse. He got out and Ralph scooted out, too.

  They started down the woods road. Ralph went hunting, quartering back and forth, his head held high, questing for bird scent. Lyle had said that Ralph had bird hunting in his blood. He’d offered to train him, but Calhoun wasn’t particularly interested in bird hunting.

  So far, Ralph had shown a good deal of interest in trout. When he was a puppy, he pointed moths and grasshoppers, and once Calhoun had to take him to the vet after a close encounter with a porcupine. Calhoun figured he should let Ralph hunt. It’s what he lived to do, and pointing brook trout probably wasn’t entirely fulfilling for a bird dog.

  The sun had settled behind a cloudbank low in the western sky by the time Calhoun descended the long slope to the millpond. Already it was starting to get dark. He whistled in Ralph, sat beside the old dam, and closed his eyes. He tried to visualize it, what had happened here, tried to conjure up a mind-picture of Fred Green lying in the grass, squinting through the sights of his .22, holding steady on Lyle’s chest, the muffled pop of the small-caliber rifle, Lyle slumping over, Green jacking another cartridge into the chamber, aiming again, and shooting a hole in the float tube.

  And then Lyle adrift out there, the tube hissing out air, growing soft and flabby, Lyle sinking deeper in the water, his bowed head going under, his weight sinking the deflated float tube and his waders filling with water . . .

  Ralph was lying beside him with his chin on his paws, staring at him as if he was trying to figure it out, too. Calhoun reached over and scratched his forehead.

  Then Fred Green had walked out, climbed into Lyle’s Power Wagon, driven to South Riley, and left the truck behind the elementary school.

  Then what?

  Then Fred Green—which wasn’t his name—had disappeared. He had not used his rented Taurus.

  Where the hell was the man?

  Calhoun thought about Lyle, his interest in folk history, his fascination with the 1947 fire, his collection of reminiscences, those taped conversations with the local old-timers. “They won’t be with us forever,” Lyle used to say. “We’ve got to save their stories.”

  Up on the hill on the other side of the stream a farmer named Potter had died in that fire. Calhoun could make out the overgrown cart path on the other side of the stream, winding into the dark woods and up the hill. Lyle would surely have wanted to follow it up to the burned-out cellar hole where Potter had died trying to save his home from the inferno.

  Calhoun pushed himself to his feet. “Come on,” he said to Ralph. “Let’s go take a look.”

  The rutted old road curved up the hill and among scrubby second-growth hardwoods, and Calhoun wondered again about the unusually impractical Yankee farmer who would build his place so far from the road—especially when, according to the topographic map, another road passed just a couple hundred yards behind it.

  A tall, scraggly lilac grew at the corner of the granite foundation. Dried brown blossoms still clung to it. Briars and weeds and sumac grew out of the cellar hole, tangled among some charred timbers and a rusted woodstove. The old chimney had toppled and a pile of field-stones lay scattered on the ground.

  Potter had expected the fire to miss his place, but instead it had come racing up the hill at him. Calhoun closed his eyes, and he could see it and smell it and hear it . . . a wall of flame higher than the tops of the trees, crackling and roaring, suddenly upon him, the very heat of it singeing his hair and burning his eyes, pine trees exploding, blazing branches crashing to the ground. It surrounded him, sucked the oxygen from the air and from his lungs, devoured the house, not even slowing down, leaving a corpse and an empty, smoking cellar hole behind.

  It had been tinder-dry in the woods that summer of ’47, Lyle had told Calhoun. Dozens of small fires had exploded all over southern Maine in August and September. Firefighters had squelched them, but many of them continued to burn underground, feeding on roots and powdery soil, and later popping up somewhere else. The Great Fire of ’47 was actually many fires, stoked by the dry west wind on the twentieth of October, then exploding, too many fires moving too fast for the disorganized—mostly volunteer—local firefighters to control, all those fires racing eastward, joining and then splitting off, leveling whole towns, missing others entirely, choosing this house, skirting around another one.

  The Ross family across the road, where David was a young teenager living with his mother in 1947, had been lucky.

  Mr. Potter up here on the hill had been unlucky.

  It didn’t make any sense. But Calhoun knew how hard it was to make sense of things. Lyle’s getting shot didn’t make sense. Getting hit by lightning, that didn’t make any sense, either.

  He looked around. Where the hell was Ralph?

  He whistled, then listened.

  The sun had set and it had grown dark in the woods. A pair of nighthawks were swooping around overhead chasing mosquitoes and moths, their long pointed wings flashing white underneath. A soft breeze was ruffling the leaves in the oaks.

  “Ralph,” he called. “Goddammit, get your ass in here.”

  From somewhere in the woods came a yip, then a whine.

  “Ralph,” yelled Calhoun. “Come here, you.”

  Ralph continued to whine, and Calhoun thought that he might’ve hurt himself, maybe got his foot caught in a trap. He headed in his direction, following the sound of Ralph’s whining. Calhoun’s directional system didn’t work so well. You needed two ears to hone in on the direction of a sound. But when he headed down the back side of the hill, Ralph’s yipping got louder. He hurried through a shadowy grove of pine trees and found himself in some bottomland where the ground was soft and blanketed with last fall’s leaves.

  Ralph was sitting there, whining.

  Calhoun went over to him. “Ralph, for Christ’s sake, what the hell—?”

  In the fading evening light, Calhoun saw something pale in the bottom of the depression that Ralph had been excavating.

  He sat back on his heels beside Ralph, looking at the object that the dog had found.

  It was a human foot, sticking up out of the ground.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  CALHOUN CLOSED HIS EYES. When he opened them, the foot was still there.

  He started to reach out to touch it, to verify it, but then stopped himself and pulled back his hand.

&n
bsp; He and Ralph sat there on their haunches, looking at the foot sticking up out of the dirt. It was a medium-sized right foot, and it was wearing a dirty white cotton sock. It could’ve belonged to a man or a woman. Calhoun figured if he pulled off the muddy sock he might be able to tell. But he was damned if he was going to corrupt another crime scene. The foot was cocked slightly to the side so that the big toe pointed up at the sky.

  Calhoun pushed himself to his feet. “C’mon,” he said to Ralph. “You better heel.”

  Ralph heeled, and they trudged back up the hillside to the cellar hole, down the other side, across the dam at the millpond, and up the long sloping hill through the dark woods to where he’d left his truck.

  By the time they got there, the moon had risen. He needed a phone and looked across the road in the direction of the Ross’s farmhouse.

  He saw no lights up there, but Calhoun and Ralph got into the truck, and he drove up to the Rosses’ anyway. Anna’s cloth-topped Wrangler was parked in front of the barn. The truck with the plow hitch on the front was gone. No lights glowed from the windows of the farmhouse, and the barn itself was dark.

  Calhoun went to the back door of the house and rang the bell. He heard it chime inside, but there was no sign of life.

  So he went back to the truck and headed out to the main road. He remembered seeing a gas station and a general store along the way. He doubted if either of them would be open at this time on a Saturday night. But maybe there’d be a pay phone out front.

  He ended up driving all the way to Gallatin, the next town east of Keatsboro, where he found Juniper’s, a little restaurant with its lights blazing and the side parking lot jammed.

  He parked on the street, told Ralph to sit tight and growl fiercely at strangers, and went inside. The front door opened into a tiny lobby. To the right was a dining room. A couple of family groups were seated in there, talking back and forth between tables, but it looked as if the dinner hour had come and gone.

  The big room to his left was a bar, and it was jammed with folks seated at tables and at the bar itself and standing against the walls, a mixture of young men and women and older couples. Jukebox rock music played at high volume, competing with a TV over the bar showing a baseball game.