Dark Tiger

by William G. Tapply

  June patted his shoulder and went back to the kitchen, and the guides began passing around the bowls and platters of food.

  “So’d you do some whoring and gambling and boozing today, Stoney?” said Ben, the lanky young college-aged guide.

  “You bet,” Calhoun said. “Guess I had myself enough debauchery today to last me at least till my next day off.”

  Ben grinned, and Peter, the other young guide, said, “Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve got tomorrow off. Heading right back to St. Cece, are you?”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Calhoun said. “I’m too old for two straight days of St. Cecelia.” He glanced at Curtis Swenson, who, as usual, was reading a magazine and ignoring everybody. “Hey, Curtis,” he said.

  Swenson looked up. “What?” He was wearing his signature Hawaiian shirt. This one featured orange and red parrots in a green and purple jungle.

  “I heard you’re flying to Houlton tomorrow to fetch Franklin Redbird.”

  Swenson nodded. “I heard the same damn thing. That must mean it’s true.”

  “Want some company?”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Suppose I went along with you?”

  “Why’d you want to do something like that?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “Franklin’s my friend. I just thought it would be a nice thing to do, to be there to greet him. Give you some company, too.”

  “I don’t care about company,” Swenson said.

  “I’d like to go,” said Calhoun.

  Swenson shrugged. “If you want to go, I guess I can’t stop you. Meet me at the dock at eight thirty, and don’t be late, because I ain’t going to wait for you. Oh, and leave the dog home. I’ll be taking the Cessna, and there ain’t that much room in it.”

  “There’s got to be room for a dog.”

  “Just leave him this time, okay?”

  “Sure,” said Calhoun. “Ralph doesn’t need to come. I’ll explain it to him.”

  “Good,” said Swenson. “You do that.” He took a bite out of a muffin, then turned a page in his magazine and resumed his reading.

  When Calhoun walked out of the dining room, June Dunlap came up behind him and said, “Stoney? Got a minute?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  They walked outside and stood there on the deck. “It’s about Robin,” June said. “My kitchen girl.”

  “I know Robin,” he said.

  “I know you do. That’s what I wanted to mention to you.” She looked away for a minute, then swung her eyes back to his. “I think she’s got a crush on you.”

  Calhoun smiled. “Really.”

  June nodded. “She’s a vulnerable child. Her daddy was a commercial fisherman, and he went overboard three winters ago. They never found his body.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said. “That’s rough.”

  “Yes, it is,” June said. “I think Robin sees you as a father figure.”

  “You saying there’s some kind of Freudian thing going on with her?”

  “I’m just saying watch out, that’s all,” she said. “It wouldn’t be hard to hurt her, and I don’t think you want to do that.”

  “I generally go for more grown-up women anyway,” Calhoun said, “but thank you for the warning.”

  June brought out the breakfast food on Sunday, too. Calhoun guessed Robin’s day off went from after breakfast on Saturday until Sunday evening dinner.

  It was around seven thirty in the morning, and Curtis Swenson wasn’t at the table. Calhoun supposed he’d already eaten and was down at the dock getting the Cessna ready for their flight to Houlton to pick up Franklin Redbird.

  After he and Ralph finished their breakfasts, they started down the pathway that led back to the cabin. About halfway there, a snowshoe hare popped out of the bushes right in front of them. It stopped for a moment with its long ears perked up and its nose twitching, then scooted down the path.

  Ralph let out a yelp and bolted after the hare. Calhoun yelled, “No!” Yet he knew it was futile. In an instant both hare and dog were out of sight.

  Calhoun yelled at Ralph to come back, but he knew that was futile, too. Ralph was normally obedient, but his training and discipline couldn’t compete with his hunting instincts.

  The dog’s barking sounded like the baying of a hound as it faded into the distance.

  “Well, damn,” Calhoun muttered. He knew there was no sense in continuing to call to the dog. Even if Ralph heard his yells, he’d ignore them. This was not the first time he’d taken off after a rabbit or a squirrel or a fox. When he realized he couldn’t outrun a snowshoe hare, he’d come trotting back with his tongue lolling and a big shit-eating grin on his face. Based on past history, that would probably take ten or fifteen minutes.

  Calhoun continued on to his cabin, then sat on the steps and glanced at his watch. It was a little after eight fifteen. He hoped Ralph would be back in time for Calhoun to meet Curtis Swenson at the dock at eight thirty. In any case, Calhoun would wait for Ralph. He wouldn’t go flying off to Houlton without knowing that the dog was back from his hare-chasing adventure safe and sound.

  He’d been sitting there for a little while when he heard the unmistakable roar of a float plane’s engine starting. Just one engine. The Cessna. He glanced at his watch. It was just about eight thirty. He assumed Swenson was getting the plane warmed up and checking his various gauges and lights and dials and buttons. Then the pitch of the engine changed, and Calhoun realized the plane was taxiing out onto the lake.

  Son of a bitch. Curtis was leaving without him.

  Calhoun got up and ran down to the dock. The Cessna was already a couple of hundred yards away, heading out to the middle of the lake.

  Calhoun stood there with his fists clenched. “God damn it,” he muttered.

  Kim, the big lady guide, was there. She went over to Calhoun, touched his shoulder, and said, “I reminded him you were planning to go along. He said it was time to go and he’d be damned if he was going to wait, mumbled something about the weather.” She glanced up at the sky, where some puffy white clouds hardly looked ominous.

  “Well,” said Calhoun, “maybe I am a couple minutes late. Ralph ran off, and I was waiting for him to come back. That’s no damn excuse. Curtis could’ve waited. I really wanted to be there for when they let Franklin out of jail.” He shook his head and blew out a breath. “It’s no big deal, I suppose. Damn inconsiderate of Curtis, though.”

  Actually, it was kind of a big deal. Not because it might be nice for Franklin Redbird to have Calhoun there to greet him when he walked out of the jail in Houlton, although there was that. His main agenda had been to engage Curtis Swenson in conversation and see if he could get his guard down and elicit a contradiction or an ill-considered response out of him, something that might further convince Calhoun that Swenson was the key to what McNulty had been investigating, that the pilot was the one who’d tried to make McNulty’s and Millie Gautier’s deaths look like a murder-suicide, and that he was the one who’d shot Elaine Hoffman with Calhoun’s Colt Woodsman .22 pistol—and, of course, why he did those things.

  It wasn’t a particularly clever or well-thought-out plan, he realized. It wasn’t even a plan, really, but it was something, and now it wouldn’t happen. At least, not today.

  He stood there with Kim, shading his eyes with his hand against the glare that bounced off the wind-chopped surface of the lake, and watched the Cessna taxi toward the middle of the lake.

  “I tried to talk him into waiting for you,” said Kim.

  “Thanks,” Calhoun said.

  When the plane got to the middle, it turned left and taxied about half a mile down the lake. Then it turned, putting its nose into the wind, which was blowing hard down the lake from the north, and began its takeoff run. The pitch of the Cessna’s engine increased as the plane gained speed, and pretty soon it appeared to be skipping like a flat stone over the tops of the little whitecaps out there in the middle of the lake.

  Suddenly a g
reat blossom of orange burst from the underside of the plane, and all at the same time, the plane’s nose dipped and its tail lifted. The muffled whoompf of the explosion came echoing across the water to Calhoun’s ears an instant later—the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. As if in slow motion, the Cessna flipped and landed on its side, so that one wing was in the water and the other was pointing at the sky.

  Then came a second, bigger orange bloom, and a great cloud of black smoke, and a delayed whoompf, this one louder than the first explosion, and then, suddenly, the plane was gone. Whether it had exploded into a million parts or had sunk, Calhoun couldn’t tell, but it had entirely disappeared from the surface of the lake, and the wind had blown away the black smoke, and it was suddenly eerily silent. It was as if the Cessna had never been there.

  Calhoun hesitated for just an instant. Then he slid down into one of the Grand Lake canoes that was tied up to the dock. “Cast me off,” he said to Kim. “Quick.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but I’m coming with you.”

  She hastily untied the lines that held the bow and stern of the canoe to the steel rings on the dock while Calhoun got the motor started.

  Kim climbed into the bow seat, and he gunned it, heading for the middle of the lake where he’d last seen the plane. The big broad-beamed canoe and the little outboard motor were designed for slow salmon trolling, not lifesaving speed, and it was frustrating how long it took them to get to the area in the middle of the lake. An oil slick marked the place where the plane had exploded. Calhoun cut back on the throttle, and they putted around the area for a few minutes. They did not see Curtis Swenson. Or his body.

  Calhoun shucked off his shoes. “Grab a paddle and hold her steady,” he said to Kim, and then he slithered over the side.

  The frigid lake water momentarily paralyzed him. He gulped a lungful of air, then dove under. In the gin-clear water he saw that the lake was about twenty feet deep here. The bottom was sprinkled with airplane pieces. He spotted some engine parts, a hunk of upholstered seat, a piece of the tail section, half a wing. The gasoline and burnt oil in the water stung his eyes, and the smell of it seeped into his nose and mouth even though he was holding his breath.

  He came up for air and dove again and again. He swam in increasingly large circles around the area where the plane had gone down. He did not find Curtis Swenson.

  After a while he surfaced and waved at Kim, and she paddled the canoe over to where he was treading water, thoroughly exhausted. She grabbed the back of his shirt and helped him haul his belly onto the gunwale and then slide into the boat.

  “Nothing?” she said.

  He shook his head. “There’s pieces of the blown-up airplane,” he said, “but I couldn’t find Curtis.”

  “Well, damn,” said Kim.

  He started the outboard, and they widened their search, looking for anything that might be floating. Aside from a hunk of stuffing from one of the airplane seats and a curved piece of tail section with air trapped under it, they found nothing.

  After a while, Calhoun said, “We might as well go in.”

  “Might as well, I guess,” said Kim.

  He turned the canoe and headed back. As they got nearer, he saw that the dock was crowded with people, and he realized that just about everybody—guests, guides, and all three Dunlaps—was there, watching.

  He turned off the motor and glided up to the dock. Kim steered with the paddle and nosed the canoe alongside the dock, then tossed up a line. One of the guests grabbed it and tied it onto a ring.

  Marty Dunlap held down a hand to Calhoun. He took it and hefted himself onto the dock.

  “You’re okay?” said Marty.

  Calhoun nodded. “Cold is all.” He hugged himself against the shivers that seized his body.

  Ralph came over with his stubby little tail all awag.

  Calhoun knelt down. “You’re back,” he said. “Did you catch that damn hare?”

  Ralph poked his nose at Calhoun’s face and gave it a thorough lapping.

  Calhoun hugged his dog. He was glad to have him back.

  “I heard the explosion,” Marty said. “Came running down. Curtis . . . ?”

  Calhoun stood up. “Couldn’t find him.” He shook his head.

  “So what happened?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “I guess the plane hit a log or something out there when he was taxiing for takeoff. It flipped and blew up and just disappeared.”

  Marty shook his head. “Good Lord.”

  “A terrible thing,” said Calhoun.

  “Thank God you’re all right, anyway.”

  “Huh?”

  Marty said, “You were planning to go with him to pick up Franklin, weren’t you?”

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  “You could’ve been in that plane.”

  “Would’ve been, too,” Calhoun said, “if Ralph hadn’t taken off after a hare. Made me late, and Curtis didn’t wait for me.” He gave Ralph’s head a pat.

  “So Ralph saved your life,” said Marty.

  “I guess he did,” said Calhoun, “though I’ll be damned if I’m going to give him credit for it. All he wanted to do was catch that hare.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The guests and the guides and other staff continued to hang around the dock, talking in subdued voices as if they were comparing perceptions and trying to make sense of what had happened.

  Marty Dunlap had jogged up to the lodge. He was back ten or fifteen minutes later. “Listen up,” he said.

  Everybody fell silent and turned to look at Marty.

  “I just talked to the sheriff,” he said. “He’s on his way with some divers. He wants everybody to stick around and be available. He’ll probably want to talk to all of us. So no fishing today, I guess. Or at least not till they finish their job. You can go to your rooms or hang around in the great room, have a swim, play horseshoes, whatever. Go back to bed if you want. We’ll rustle up something for lunch at noon.”

  Calhoun, who’d been standing around with everybody else, felt a tug on his sleeve. He turned. Robin was standing there looking at him. “Can I talk to you?” she said.

  He nodded. “I’ve got to go back to my cabin. I need to get into some dry clothes.” He snapped his fingers at Ralph, who’d been sitting at his side, and they left the dock and started down the path.

  “I heard you were supposed to be on that plane,” Robin said. “Is that true?”

  He nodded.

  “That is very scary,” she said.

  “It is,” he said. “I agree.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do,” she said. “I mean, first Elaine, then you?”

  “Well, I’m fine,” Calhoun said.

  “Did you see what happened?”

  He nodded. “It happened very fast. The plane just exploded. Looked like it hit something when it was taxiing.”

  “I’m glad you weren’t on it.”

  “Thanks to Ralph,” he said. “He took off after a hare. I waited for him to come back. Made me late. Curtis, being Curtis, I guess, he couldn’t wait for me.”

  They came to the cabin. Robin sat in one of the rockers on the porch.

  “Want a Coke or something?” Calhoun said.

  “Sure,” she said. “A Coke would be fine.”

  Calhoun got a can of Coke for her, then went inside and changed into some dry clothes. He got a Coke for himself and took it out to the porch and, sat in the rocker next to Robin. “So,” he said. “How old are you, anyway?”

  She cocked her head and looked at him. “Wow. Where’d that come from?”

  He shrugged. “I was just wondering.”

  “Worried I’m not of age, are you?”

  “June told me what happened to your father.”

  She blinked. “What’s that got to do with how old I am?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” Calhoun said. “I was just thinking how hard it must be for you, losing your daddy that way.”

/>   “You sound like a shrink,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I’m twenty-two,” she said. “How about you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Tell me the truth,” she said.

  “You first.”

  She peered at him for a moment, then smiled. “Okay. I’m nineteen.”

  “Why’d you lie to me?”

  “Why did you?”

  “Because you did,” he said.

  “I lied a little,” said Robin, “because I wanted you to take me seriously.”

  “Don’t I take you seriously?”

  “You think I’m a kid,” she said.

  He shrugged. “The truth is, if you’re nineteen, I’m exactly twice as old as you. What do you think?”

  “I guess that makes me a kid to you.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

  “Sure.” She nodded. “We’re friends. I hope we are. I just don’t need a shrink, okay?”

  Calhoun and Robin made sandwiches from the fixin’s that June Dunlap laid out in the guides’ dining room—ham and cheese with mustard on rye for him, sliced turkey breast with mayo on wheat for her. They loaded their paper plates with potato chips and pickles, picked up Cokes, and took their lunches down to the dock.

  They took off their shoes and socks and sat out at the end dangling their feet and eating, with Ralph eyeing them closely for handouts and dropped crumbs. Robin shared her chips with him.

  Calhoun had just finished his sandwich when he heard the drone of an airplane engine coming their way from the east. He recognized the voice of the engine. He stood up and shaded his eyes, and a minute later he spotted the plane as it cleared the treetops. It was the sheriff’s Twin Otter. It circled the lake and then began its descent.

  Calhoun held his breath. A log or something floating on or just under the water had caused Curtis Swenson’s Cessna to explode.

  The sheriff’s plane landed without incident. As it began to taxi in, the guides and some of the guests, along with Marty and Robert Dunlap, emerged from the lodge and gathered on the dock.

  The Twin Otter turboprop with the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department logo on the side pulled up to the dock and shut off its engines. Ben and Peter, the young guides, held it steady while the sheriff’s deputy—Henry was his name, Calhoun recalled—hopped out of the plane and tied it down.