by Paul Doiron
“Why? You looking for a job as sternman?”
“I might need one after this case.”
A lame joke was exactly the wrong way to get Hiram to relax his guard. “Ha. Ha. So what did Natty tell you?”
“That he was hunting alone with no alibi yesterday morning.”
“Shit,” Hiram breathed. “I knew he was going to talk himself into a jail cell. But he didn’t have anything to do with it. I know Natty better than anyone.”
“Better than his wife?”
“Oh, yeah, Natty and I are secret lovers. Haven’t you heard? We’ve been jerking each other off since we were in school.”
“I could do without the attitude.”
“Natty doesn’t even possess a motive. He loved that crazy bitch. He would have left Jenny and Ava for her.”
My gut told me he’d said more than he’d intended.
He raised his voice suddenly. “You cops are all the same. You don’t care what really happened. You’re just looking for someone to hang.”
“Maine abolished the death penalty in 1887.”
“Fuck you, Mr. Trivial Pursuit. You can let me out here, and I’ll walk the rest of the way. Sorry I got your seat all wet.”
I had one last card to play before the end of our game. “I was in the churchyard this morning. It was the only good place I could get a cell signal. I saw your brother Heath’s gravestone. The inscription said he was ‘lost at sea.’”
I didn’t expect Hiram Reed to laugh at that. “That’s one way of putting it.”
He made no effort to elaborate so I kept pushing. “How much older was he than you?”
“Six years.”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“My sister, Holly, moved onshore after Heath died and has never been back. The next time I see her will be at my father’s funeral. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”
We’d arrived at the town wharf. I put the transmission into park. He needed his shoulder to shove the dented door open. He didn’t thank me for the lift.
“One last question,” I called after him. “What have you got in your pocket?
He straightened up with surprise. He must have thought he’d gotten through our entire conversation without me noticing he was hiding his hand.
Then a wicked grin spread across his face. “My precious,” he hissed.
The last I saw of Hiram Reed, he was headed into Graffam’s with the single-mindedness of a drunk in search of his next drink.
26
If Radcliffe wouldn’t provide me with a list of Maquoit’s deer slayers, perhaps Harmon Reed would.
The patriarch’s house was impossible to miss. It was the largest of the year-round residences I’d seen on the island: a grand “cottage” with two chimneys on either end, a widow’s walk in the middle, and an expansive wraparound porch overlooking the harbor. The building was clad in newly painted shingles—the color a dark, venous red—and it sat atop a massive sea wall, fifteen feet above the high-tide line. Its views, currently obscured by the white fog, were to the northwest and the outer harbor.
Harmon’s yard sprawled from one stone wall to another and was large enough to have contained an Olympic volleyball court. He had a garden surrounded by an eight-foot electrical fence with only a few orange pumpkins inside left to be harvested. His apple trees, like all the others I had seen on the island, had been nibbled at by deer. Every edible branch, blossom, and leaf beneath the height of a big buck standing on his hind legs had been chewed off.
As I mounted the broad stairs, the front door swung open and an old woman appeared. She was one of those people whose skin turns faintly gray as they age, and her hair, nearly the same color, was long and hung loose around her shoulders. Even the whites of her eyes were gray. She wore dungarees, a flannel shirt, a wool vest. And she stood half a foot taller than her husband.
“You must be Martha,” I said.
“And you must be the warden feller everyone’s talking about. Harm and I was just sitting down to dinner.”
By which she meant lunch. The evening meal in Maine is supper. “I can come back later.”
“Nonsense.” She waved me in.
The front hall was toasty and a relief from the fog that had soaked my clothes, pruned my skin, and chilled my blood. The air smelled of Harmon’s fragrant pipe smoke, balsam pillows, and a meaty odor that might have been roasting beef. Two Scottish terriers came bounding out of a side room to yap at me.
“Who are these two?” I asked, overloud, to be heard above the dogs.
“Goofus and Gallant. You remember that old comic? Don’t try to pet them, or they’ll stick their teeth in you pretty good. Why don’t you hand me that coat of yours, and I’ll hang it over the fire.”
The dogs followed at her heels as she left me alone in the unlit hallway. The walls, I observed, were decorated with surprisingly good oil paintings of the island. It was too dim for me to read the signatures, but the artist or artists had talent.
Like all fishermen, Harmon had the weather radio playing nonstop. A computerized “male” voice provided a running stream of meteorologic updates, wind-speed and barometric-pressure readings, and marine forecasts “from Eastport to the Merrimack River.” It reminded me of how, in my own home, the police scanner was always on.
“How goes the investigation?” Harmon Reed had taken advantage of my distraction to sneak up on me.
“It’s keeping me busy.”
“Come on into the kitchen and we’ll have a mug up.”
These days, I rarely heard old-time Maine lingo except from stand-up comedians mocking Down East folkways, but there was nothing ironic about the Reeds’ vernacular. They continued to speak the bygone language they’d learned at their parents’ and grandparents’ knees.
The kitchen was clean and warmer than the front room. One wall consisted of storm windows with a view across the roofed porch to the mouth of the harbor. Or that would have been the view on a clear day.
“Nice spot you’ve got here,” I said.
“It’ll do.”
Two bowls of pea soup were on the table, with a loaf of home-baked bread and a dish of butter pats. Harmon grabbed a mug from a hook above the sideboard and filled it from a Mr. Coffee machine. He plopped the cup on the table so hard it sloshed onto the gingham tablecloth.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal,” I said.
“You’re awful apologetic for a lawman. Grab yourself a chair and Martha will dish you up some soup. It’s got ham in it, in case you’re of the Hebrew persuasion.”
“I’m not Jewish.”
“Muslims don’t eat pigs either, I hear.”
“I’m not Muslim.”
His wife returned, followed by the dogs, which immediately started up again at my ankles.
“Shut it!” Harmon commanded, and the terriers dropped to their bellies, whimpering as if they expected to be kicked. He turned to his wife. “How you persuaded me to adopt these two curs, I’ll never understand.”
Without my coat to cover my belt, my holstered sidearm was visible, and Martha seemed unable to keep from looking at it. I took a seat at the table to hide it from her view. She gave me an anxious smile and began dipping the ladle up and down in the bubbling soup pot to stir its contents.
I had my back to the harbor, which was just as well, since I was most interested in examining the Reeds’ kitchen. There were more paintings, although these were still lifes of apples on platters and deer antlers arranged artfully on tabletops. It was all the work of the same artist. In the diffuse natural light I could finally read the signature: Joy Juno.
Framed photos were propped on corner shelves and arranged along the top of the sideboard. I saw Harmon and Martha on their wedding day. And on vacation somewhere tropical. I saw childhood pictures of a boy who must have been Hiram and of an unsmiling girl who must have been Holly. I saw class pictures of little girls taped to the refrigerator. Holly’s kids?
What I didn’t see was photographic ev
idence of their dead son, Heath. No baby pictures, no school pictures, no family pictures in which he was included. It was as if, after death, he’d been erased from history like one of those Soviet dissidents whose names were blotted out of textbooks.
The Reeds were waiting for me to taste the soup, I realized.
Even with the ham, it was terrifically bland. “It’s good,” I muttered, and reached for the salt and pepper.
Martha pushed the bread my way. “Not everyone likes pea soup.”
Her husband grunted. “Sam Graffam was yammering on about pea soup fog this morning. What a know-it-all that man is.”
“People expect lobstering families to eat lobster all the time,” Martha said with an air of apology.
“Why eat a bug when you can make more selling it?” Bugs were what lobstermen affectionately called lobsters.
She put her liver-spotted hand on my hand. “Because our season is in the winter, the restaurants here have to bring their lobsters over from the mainland in the summer. Of course, Harm keeps a couple of traps set for houseguests who expect it. But even then, Harm and I don’t usually—”
Harmon didn’t use a spoon but raised the whole bowl to his mouth to slurp. “That’s enough small talk, Martha. What I want to hear from the warden is why the dead woman was out here, pretending to be her sister all that time. And don’t give us some bullshit excuse about it being classified and part of an ongoing investigation. A hunting accident has nothing to do with identity theft.”
“I’m still not convinced Miranda Evans’s death was a negligent homicide.”
He wiped his green lips with the back of his hand. “You think someone murdered her?”
“Let’s say I am trying to keep an open mind. Andrew Radcliffe was supposed to give me a list of the people out here who regularly hunt for deer, but he is dragging his feet for reasons I can’t explain.”
“Hell, man, I can tell you that.” Harmon used his thick fingers to count off the names. “There’s Eli and Rud Washburn, them damn poachers. Their nephews Zachary, Elias, and Judah. Nat Pillsbury always takes a deer. My fool of a nephew, of course. Blackington, when his knees are working. Pete Shattuck. Chum McNulty’s boy, Tom. Joy Juno is the only female. We call her the Huntress. Sam Graffam sometimes, but not this year. George Gordon. That bastard Corso. Ellie’s two boys, Kevin and Keith, but they’re off at high school in Bar Harbor. Kit Billington. Andy Radcliffe—”
I glanced up from my notebook. “Radcliffe said he stopped hunting years ago.”
“That’s nonsense. I saw him just the other day, headed out to Beacon Head with a rifle.”
In the silence that followed I could hear gulls calling in the harbor, waves lapping against the seawall beneath the house. Andrew had told me he’d given up hunting. What did it mean that he had lied?
Then Harmon said, “So what happens next? You go searching for everyone on that list and find out where they were yesterday morning? That sounds like a shitload of work, especially when they’ll all lie to you anyway.”
“What makes you think they’ll all lie.”
“Because people act out of boneheadedness and fear. It seems stupid not to confess. Wasn’t there a feller who killed a man dressed head to toe in blaze orange and he got off with barely any jail time a few years back?”
“Yes, I worked that case as a district warden.”
“How’d he pull it off?”
I stirred my soup while I considered how best to reply. The blunt answer was that Maine law as it pertained to hunting homicides was a travesty. The man Harmon Reed mentioned should have gone to prison for life. Instead he did thirty days in county jail because he somehow convinced a jury he thought he’d been aiming at a deer.
“He didn’t escape a civil suit from the victim’s widow,” I said.
“Yeah, but if the guy was already broke—”
“The state can garnish his wages.”
“Wages?” When Harmon Reed laughed, I saw his uvula quiver in the back of his throat. “Lobstermen don’t get paid wages. We’re—what do you call them?—independent contractors.”
“Why are you asking me these questions, Mr. Reed? You know I can’t provide you with tips on how Miranda’s killer can escape prosecution.”
“Because I don’t want you to waste your time chasing rabbits. That girl wasn’t murdered. It was an accident, like we said from the get-go. Your problem is you got everybody spooked. Maybe if the numbskull who shot that girl realized he wasn’t going to be thrown into a hole for the rest of his life, he’d step forward and admit what he did. And you could go home where you belong.”
I removed my napkin from my lap and laid it over the bowl. “Mrs. Reed, that was delicious. Would you mind giving your husband and me a few minutes? I have some questions for him that are somewhat delicate.”
“Of course! You men talk as long as you need.” She hurried from the kitchen with the two terriers in hot pursuit.
I waited until I heard her footsteps on the stairs to the second floor before I spoke again.
Harmon had risen and begun to clean his pipe over the kitchen wastebasket. “Delicate, huh?”
“Mr. Reed, I’m going to be candid with you. I’m not sure if you know who killed Miranda Evans. I’m not sure if you are withholding that information from me. Maybe you’ve been trying to talk the guilty person into confessing in return for a slap on the wrist. On the other hand, you may not know who did it. In which case, I suspect you’re running your own shadow inquiry, hoping to identify the shooter before I do.”
“And why would I do either of those things?”
“That’s an excellent question.”
He gave his pipe a final knock to free the ashes embedded in the screen, then dropped the dirty pipe cleaner into the trash. “You have this idea of me as the lord protector of Maquoit Island, but I’m just another lobsterman. Maybe I care more for my neighbors than most. Don’t twist my civic pride into an indictment against me.”
“I’ve learned a few things since last we spoke. Nothing that incriminates you.”
“How could there be? But you came here for information. Ask away.”
“When was the last time you saw Miranda Evans?”
He returned to his seat at the table. “Night before she died. She came in the Trap House looking for Nat, but he wasn’t there, so she left.”
“Did she speak with anyone?”
“How the hell would I know?” Harmon Reed was as quick to anger as Hiram. Like son, like father, I thought.
“Who else was in the bar?”
“It ain’t a bar, it’s a social club. It was all the usual suspects. And, no, I don’t mean suspects as in criminals. Look, I didn’t pay attention to who came and went.”
“Except for Miranda.”
“And the only reason I noticed her was because Hiram said…”
“Said what?”
Harmon slammed his forearms on the table. “Hiram said he’d just spoken to Nat. He’d told him he was being a fool, stepping out on his fine wife like that. Told him to call things off with that coquette before he destroyed everything.”
“And how did Nat Pillsbury respond to your son’s words of warning?”
“You’re a stubborn son of a bitch, ain’t you?”
“I’ve been accused of it.”
“Once you get hold of something you won’t let it go. You’re worse than a dog that way. I’m telling you I don’t know who shot that Evans woman. But I’m sure she wasn’t killed deliberately. It was a goddamned accident. The best thing you can do is let folks know that the guilty party won’t be drawn and quartered if he steps forward and admits his wrong.”
It hadn’t passed my notice that he’d veered far away from my line of questions. “And how do you suggest I do that?”
“Come out to the Trap House tonight. Stand on a tabletop and explain how the law goes easy on hunters who make an honest mistake. I guarantee you, the guilty party will step forward.”
I finished th
e bitter dregs in my coffee cup. “I’ll consider your suggestion. But before I do any of that, I have a question. If you did know who shot Miranda Evans, would you actually tell me? Would anyone on this island?”
His chair creaked as he folded his Popeye arms across his enormous chest. “We Maquoiters don’t rat each other out. Not to the clam wardens, not to the coasties, not to the staties, and not to game wardens.”
“What about the Washburns? They’re your worst enemies. If one of them was involved, you still wouldn’t tell me?”
“If Eli and Rudyard was involved in that girl’s death, I would deal with it myself.”
“How has that worked for you, taking justice into your own hands?”
He smiled and brought out the bag of tobacco to refill his pipe. “I’m not in jail, am I?”
27
Mrs. Reed returned to ask if I wanted a piece of carrot cake.
I politely passed on dessert.
Harmon puffed on his pipe as I thanked them for “dinner.” Martha and the dogs saw me out. No sooner had I stepped outside, onto the porch, than the Scotties slipped through the door and started up again with their vicious yapping and snapping. They worried my heels until I was safely inside the battered Datsun.
I still hadn’t nailed down the last person to see Miranda alive. But at least I had a list of hunters now.
I stopped at Graffam’s for yet another cup of coffee, and the room fell silent the instant my shadow darkened the door. I recognized a few of the weather-beaten faces, but when I asked their names, none of them were on the roster Harmon had provided me. Reed had suggested that I go around telling people that the person who’d shot Miranda faced no real legal jeopardy. But I wasn’t going to tell an egregious lie to lure out the killer. A capable defense attorney would crucify me on the witness stand if I made such a promise.
I realized that Graffam could direct me to the homes of the men on my list, but as I approached the counter, I found myself remembering another elusive islander. “Hey, Sam. Can you tell me where Beryl McCloud lives?”
He scratched his impressively dense beard. “I can tell you, but you won’t find her there. Joy told me she gave Beryl a lift to the Spruce Point trailhead. Sounds like she was going for a hike.”
