by Paul Doiron
“Does Kenneth usually hunt down that way?”
“I don’t know where he hunts. I hung up my rifle years ago. Not that I ever bothered getting a license. We don’t get many visits from game wardens out here on the edge of the known world.”
“Did Mr. Crowley tell you who he thought might have fired that shot?”
“I asked him that same question. Hadn’t seen a soul all morning, he said.”
“What did you do next?”
“Rung up the constable and told him the sad news.”
“When Andrew Radcliffe called our office, he led me to believe that your nephew had confessed to shooting Ariel Evans by mistake. Do you know how the constable could have come to that conclusion?”
“You should ask him. I was clear as crystal about what the boy had told me.”
“What did you do after you got off the phone?”
“Sat and finished my coffee.”
“You didn’t drive out to Gull Cottage to see the scene firsthand?”
“Why would I? I’m a lot of things, young man, but I’m not a ghoul. I waited for Andy to come by the house. Then he and I drove up to the airfield to meet your plane. After that, my whereabouts are fairly well established, I would expect.”
“Describe Ariel Evans to me.”
Harmon sucked on his pipe. “You’re new at this, I take it.”
“New?”
“New at interrogating people. Your questions are zooming every which way. But I’ll oblige you. Miss Evans was pretty, and she enjoyed the effect her looks had on members of our sex. The Latin word for a woman like her, I believe, is cocktease.”
“You disapproved?”
The old man laughed so hard he began coughing out smoke. “Young man, I don’t know who told you I was a prude, but, no, if a sexy little thing wants to saunter around in my presence, I have no objections. And if she took someone home to her bed, well, it was none of my business.”
“There must have been rumors about who she was sleeping with.”
“Nat Pillsbury.”
“That was the rumor?”
“That was the fact. But as I said, what those two were up to was none of my business. It was definitely Jenny’s business. She’s Nat’s wife. But it sure as shit wasn’t mine.”
The disclosure threw me off-balance. The rental agent who had booked Ariel Evans into Gull Cottage was the wronged wife. No wonder Jenny Pillsbury had been so dry eyed when we’d met.
“Don’t think this makes me your informant out here,” Harmon Reed said. “You were going to find out eventually, and frankly, I’d prefer you wrap up your inquiry sooner rather than later. Nat’s the one who brought her to the Trap House. Rules are it’s off-limits except to islanders, but he’s the last of the Pillsbury clan, which he claims entitles him to certain rights.”
Reed spoke with matter-of-factness. But only a dunce could miss how much the old man disdained the younger one.
“Was Ariel having sex with anyone else as far as you knew?”
“I will plead ignorance on that one. I can tell you that she liked her wine. Brought three whole cases of French stuff on the boat, I heard. Must have been afraid we only drank Boone’s Farm out here.”
“What about drugs?”
When his eyes narrowed, his bushy white brows lowered over them. “What about them?”
“Do you know whether she used drugs?”
“No.”
“She didn’t use drugs, or you don’t know if she used drugs?”
He removed his pipe from his mouth and licked his lips. “If she used them, I would have heard about it.”
“You know everything that goes on here?”
“I’ve already admitted I don’t. But on the subject of drugs people know not to hide secrets from me. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get ready for the ferry. It only comes once a week this time of year, you know.”
“Jenny Pillsbury claimed she was working at the store at the time Ariel Evans was killed.”
He returned his pipe to his mouth. “She was.”
“And your son was here, too?”
“Hiram?” Harmon blew out a smoke ring. “The lazy sod didn’t budge from his chair if I recall. But it seems like you’re getting ahead of yourself, Inspector Clouseau.”
I didn’t appreciate the jab, but Harmon was right that I was having trouble staying focused.
“Two more questions.”
“Oh, for—”
“Did you kill Ariel Evans?”
“I already told you I didn’t. But I’ll repeat myself for the record.” He leaned his broad face into the camera of my iPhone. “I, Harmon J. Reed, did not kill or cause to be killed one Ariel Evans.”
“Do you know who did kill her?”
“No, but I have suspicions—as does every person on this fogbound rock of ours. Will I share them with you? No, I will not. Living on an island, you learn the trouble that comes from wild speculation and unproven accusation. Besides, isn’t it your job to find out the drunken fool who mistook her for a deer?”
Why drunken?
When the broad-backed man stood up, the room seemed to contract around him. Seated, he had seemed stout and eccentric in a grandfatherly way. On his feet, the enormous power in those huge arms became real again. I found myself stepping aside to let the squat strongman pass.
He paused in the doorway but didn’t glance back. “If Nat Pillsbury asks who told you about his tomcatting, you can say it was me. If he has a problem with it, he knows where I live.”
17
I ate my hash and drank my coffee. I expected that Radcliffe would show up eventually with the list of deer hunters I had demanded from him, but the constable never appeared. Except for a couple of old women, no one came in the store. Word must have gotten around that I was lying in wait because Sam Graffam complained he’d never seen the place so quiet on a ferry day. Eventually, to the grocer’s great relief, I abandoned my stakeout and wandered down to the waterfront.
Bishop’s Wharf was already loud and bustling. Every truck on the island seemed to be squeezed onto the dock. Each of them had backed in to make loading and unloading easier. Their headlights shone up the road. I could see individual water particles illuminated in the cold salt air.
The seas had calmed overnight, and now the waves were lapping gently against the blackened pilings that held up the wharf. The poles had been capped with copper and painted with creosote to prevent shipworms from turning the wood into Swiss cheese. I hung my head over the dockside to peer into the water. It was the color of pewter and so opaque I couldn’t see more than a foot beneath the surface. Seaweed floated like hunks of mermaid’s hair. A discarded styrofoam cup bobbed along with unsinkable buoyancy.
Out in the hidden harbor I could hear birds: the chuck-chucking of common eiders, the cartoonish quacking of a mallard, the distant chatter of gulls jockeying for position on some ledge newly exposed by the falling tide.
The M/V Edmund S. Muskie was Maquoit’s lifeline to the world. It was how its people got their food, their propane tanks and wood pellets, their building materials, their Amazon packages, and, not least of all, their cases of liquor. Those who didn’t own lobsterboats relied on the ferry as their sole means of transportation on and off the island.
I saw Joy Juno chewing on an apple.
Jenny Pillsbury held an infant wrapped in a cocoon of cotton and wool. I noticed she had a suitcase with her. She was leaving the island for some reason she hadn’t mentioned. The timing couldn’t have been worse from my perspective. I needed to talk with her again but not before I interviewed her philandering husband.
Nat Pillsbury stood beside his wife. Ariel’s alleged lover cut a striking figure. He had wavy black hair and one of those rugged faces that doesn’t make a mustache look affected or ridiculous. He was taller than average, lean and long, and wore an orange raincoat that was smeared with tar and duct-taped to cover rips he’d gotten hauling and stacking traps. Nat Pillsbury, in other words, didn’t
look like a model dressed up as a commercial fisherman for a catalog shoot; he looked like a man who worked day in and day out in the deadliest of all professions.
A voice behind me, unmistakably Harmon’s, said, “Well, go wake him up! That fool knows what time the ferry comes.”
At the harbormaster’s command, Kenneth Crowley hurried away, but before he was lost in the fog, he cast a backward glance at me.
The squawking of a gull made me turn my head. A wild-haired, dirty-faced child had thrown a handful of gravel at the bird. It whined and flapped to the next piling down the dock.
“There you are,” said Andrew Radcliffe, as rosy cheeked as ever. He was dressed in a bright yellow slicker, yellow rain pants, and a yellow sou-wester. He might have stepped off a box of fish sticks. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
I hated being lied to. “You found me.”
“How’d you sleep? I’ve never stayed at the Wight House myself, but I’ve heard it’s a quaint old manse.”
“Quaint is one word for it. You were supposed to give me a list of the people you know who hunt deer.”
“Darn it, I forgot. I apologize for that, but I promise to get right on it.” His eyes darted toward the big mechanical gangway at the end of the dock where the ferry would tie up. The steel ramp could be raised and lowered depending on the height of the tide to make it easier to embark and disembark. “Do you happen to know if other officers will be arriving on the Muskie?”
“As far as I know, I am on my own.”
His cell phone began to ring in his pocket. Radcliffe had chosen as his ringtone the klaxon of an old rotary model. He clapped a hand to one ear and shouted into the speaker, “Hello? Bethany?… Yes, it’s Andrew. What’s going on? Is the boat delayed?”
Half-listening, I scanned the crowd. I caught Jenny Pillsbury pointing me out to her husband. I could almost feel the intensity of the man’s appraisal: like a hot lamp being shone on my face.
Andrew was saying, “Well, that is certainly odd. You’re sure that’s the name she used?” He paused to listen to the woman on the other end. “Is it possible it was some sort of perverse joke?”
He listened a while, then ended the call. “That was the woman at the ticket counter in Bass Harbor. The oddest thing happened there this morning. There was this passenger—”
At that moment a terrific roar brought our conversation to a skidding stop. It was the sound of racing engines and rattling chassis. Seconds later, two burgundy pickups came charging out of the mist. Neither of them had their headlights on. They were going so fast and with such momentum, it seemed as if they might careen off the end of the pier.
Just as people began diving for cover, the trucks hit their brakes hard. Both of them slid to a stop mere feet from the other vehicles. Side by side now, they blocked the road. None of the other trucks could drive off the dock unless the two daredevils moved aside.
“Who is that?” I asked Radcliffe.
He let out a sigh like a slashed tire. “The Washburns.”
Lobsters are cannibals. Leave them together in a tank without rubber bands around their claws, and they will dismember and devour each other in short order.
Drop a bunch of lobstermen together on an island—Maquoit, for instance, twenty miles off the Maine coast—and they begin to resemble the cold-blooded creatures they catch.
The men who emerged from the trucks seemed to be twins. They seemed to be in their late fifties, maybe early sixties, and had balding, egg-shaped heads. They were dressed in matching black anoraks and blue jeans that revealed long, powerful legs. Their rubber boots weren’t the usual brown XtraTufs but the black bargain-store variety. One of them had a brush mustache. Otherwise, they were as identical as two men could possibly be.
So these were the descendants of Maquoit’s other founding family, the Reed clan’s blood enemies, the violent outlaws everyone had warned me against, Eli and Rudyard Washburn.
“Which is which?” I whispered to Radcliffe.
“The one with the mustache is Rudyard. People call him Rud. The other one is Eli. He’s the one whom Harmon shot.”
Eli Washburn contorted his face into an expression of puzzlement.
Radcliffe said, “The boat’s running a little late, Eli. That’s all.”
The lanky fisherman glared at him silently.
Was the man a mute?
Harmon Reed came over, and I noticed that he had several men behind him, his entourage from breakfast. The harbormaster removed his pipe from his mouth and dumped the still-smoldering embers to the dirt, where they continued to glow orange. “What’s this I heard about you boys setting traps already? Someone says he spotted zebra-striped buoys two miles east of Foggy Head.”
The mustached one, Rudyard, looked at his brother, and they both erupted in laughter.
Harmon, a foot shorter than either of the Washburns, but a foot wider, said, “Not sure why you find that funny. We all made a compact not to start hauling until after Trap Day. You both signed that agreement. The rest of us are abiding by it.”
Eli spoke with a stammer, it turned out. “Who says … he saw … our buoys?”
“My boy Hiram.”
“Must’ve been hallucinating. Same as … his brother.”
“Don’t you mention Heath in my presence,” said Harmon.
“He was a junkie. Facts are … facts.”
From the back of the crowd came a shout, “Shut your fucking mouth, Washburn!”
It was Hiram Reed, pushing people aside in his anger. Despite his rage, he was ghastly pale beneath his dark muttonchops. Crowley trailed after him, shoulders hunched.
“Why, it’s … the walking dead,” said Rudyard, who shared his brother’s stammer along with everything else.
“Go to hell,” snarled the younger Reed.
“Hasn’t been … taking his … medicine,” said Eli Washburn.
“Or maybe,” said Rudyard. “He has.”
Radcliffe, to his credit, piped up. “There’s no cause for this, gentlemen.”
Harmon only turned to his retainers. “What do you think, boys? It sounds like Eli and Rudyard are in need of another lesson.”
“Come on … old man.” Eli reached a hand around his back. He might have had a handgun stuck in his pants or a knife sheathed horizontally under his jacket. The Washburns’ difficulty speaking had lulled me into thinking they were somehow not dangerous. But I recognized the murderous glee in the tall man’s eye.
I edged toward the confrontation.
“You think I won’t shoot you again?” Harmon Reed said. “I got away with it once.”
“Try it! Dare you!”
“Hey, fuckheads!” It was Nat Pillsbury. I hadn’t noticed that he’d also been moving toward the action. “You Washburns might not know it—and maybe you forgot, Harmon—but there’s a game warden standing right there. Maybe this isn’t the best time for you guys to play Clash of the Clans.”
Suddenly, everyone was looking at me as if I’d materialized out of a puff of sulfurous smoke. I made a point of opening my coat so that my badge and gun were visible on my belt. The Washburn brothers tried to stare me down.
Behind me now, in the quiet that had fallen over the dock, I could hear the rumbling of an engine. This sound was coming from the harbor. It had to be the M/V Muskie breaking through the haze.
The harbormaster addressed the men behind him. “Come on, boys. Let’s get to work now. We’ve wasted enough time on this nonsense.”
But as the others began pushing toward the end of the pier, Harmon grabbed his son by the shoulder, so hard it made him wince. Whatever the father whispered to his son, it definitely wasn’t words of devotion. Nor did he release his grip until the young man seemed on the edge of tears.
Harmon’s last words were the only ones I heard. “After the boat is gone. You understand me? We’ll talk about it then.”
Hiram rubbed his aching shoulder.
I heard the gangway lurching on its steel cables. Na
t Pillsbury stood between me and the ferry.
“I know you need to talk to me,” he said in a voice raspy from cigarettes. “All I ask is that you wait until my wife and baby daughter are on board, and the Muskie has left. Can you do that for me?”
“I can do that. Where are they going so sudden?”
“Ava’s got an appointment to see the pediatrician in Ellsworth. She’s been having ear infections. Don’t make this out to be more than it is, like it’s something suspicious. We’ve had that appointment scheduled for days.”
Without another word, the brawny fisherman made his way to his wife and sick child. Jenny was trying hard not to glance at me, but it was clear that she, at least, was worried what conclusion I might be drawing from her departure.
If her husband was nervous, he hadn’t showed it. What impressed me about Nat Pillsbury was that among all of the hardened men on the wharf, he alone had projected an effortless self-confidence. The Washburns were schoolyard bullies who backed down when confronted. But even the imperious Harmon Reed had shrunk under Pillsbury’s reprimand.
The state ferry was large, twice the size of the Star of the Sea, maybe 150 feet long, and close to half a million tons. Three stories high, from the lower passenger deck to the captain’s bridge. Painted bright, almost phosphorescent, white.
I slid between two pickups that were waiting to be loaded with cargo. One of them was Joy Juno’s Ram. She stood in the truck bed, probably because she’d wanted a better view of the fight that hadn’t materialized.
“At least you got to see one of our pissing contests,” she said.
“I was worried I was going to have to step in and end it.”
She smirked at me. “You wouldn’t have been able to.”
“Pillsbury did.”
“But Nat is Nat.”
She’d been gazing over my head toward the ferry when she’d uttered those words. Suddenly, the good humor left her face. Her eyes grew wide. Her smile became a grimace.
The first person to come down the ramp was a woman. She was petite with blond hair, attractive even from a distance, dressed in expensive mountaineering gear, and carrying a laptop bag.
I felt the muscles in my jaw go slack. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.
