Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  Steven Nason was the key. If he hadn’t known exactly who was living here, and under what conditions, he must have had suspicions. Hopefully, Pomerleau would be able to pry some useful information out of him this morning, but I feared that Christopher Nason would use all the lawyerly arrows in his quiver to hold the detective at bay.

  What was I to do in the meantime?

  I couldn’t very well start tailing around Dakota Rowe in the vague hope that he would lead me to the next hidey-hole where the “Cobbs” were keeping Casey out of sight.

  I hated waiting.

  Waiting for the baby’s DNA results to confirm what my heart already told me was true.

  Waiting for the Cobbs to make a mistake and pop their heads up somewhere.

  Waiting to hear whether I had gotten the warden investigator job.

  Waiting for Stacey to get her life together—if she ever would.

  When all you can do is wait, I had learned long ago, the best thing to do is work.

  * * *

  I spent the rest of that afternoon dealing with the mundane tasks, minor emergencies, and odd encounters that constitute my life as a Maine game warden. In short, it was a day of unique occurrences: it was a day like any other.

  Stacey wasn’t home when I pulled into the drive an hour before sundown. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt I’d gotten competing in the Tough Mudder Mud Run and Obstacle Race in the spring. My team of wardens, led by Captain Jock DeFord, had destroyed our archrivals from the state police. The troopers might actually become a threat to beat us if Dani ran the course next year: that little woman was an absolute beast.

  What had I been thinking inviting her to our party?

  Of course Stacey chose that moment to call me. “How was your breakfast with Menario?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll fill you in tonight.”

  “Can you stop at the grocery store on your way home? We need some stuff for the cookout.”

  “I’m already home.”

  “I guess I can pick it up.”

  “No, I’ll do it.” I grabbed a pen and jotted down the items she listed.

  “I’ve been thinking. You know who we should give that pork to if it tests OK? The Cronks. Aimee can always use a helping hand. What’s your name for those rambunctious kids of theirs?”

  “The Cronklets,” I said.

  “They must be growing up fast.”

  While their father—my friend—sits behind bars for manslaughter, I thought. Billy Cronk wasn’t due to be released from the Maine State Prison for three more years.

  “Maybe we should invite them,” I said. “Aimee and the kids.”

  “It’s late notice and a long drive from Washington County, but sure. Why not? There’s all that jungle-gym crap in our backyard no one uses.”

  I hadn’t yet figured out how to broach the subject of my conversation with Dani Tate. “Anyone else we’re forgetting to invite?”

  “You think about it. I’ve got a meeting with Barstow in five minutes. He probably wants to talk with me about what’s going to happen with the moose survey now that there’s no staff or funds.”

  End of the day before a holiday weekend. I didn’t like the timing of this impromptu conversation at all.

  “I almost forgot,” she said. “You need to pick up my parents. They’re flying over from Grand Lake Stream. You know my dad, he can’t ever just drive when he can take the Cessna. They’ll be tying up over at Dingley’s Marina and need a ride from the lake to the house.”

  “Anything for your folks.”

  “And they’d do anything for you. You’re like the son they never had.”

  24

  The items Stacey had requested for the party weren’t available at our local market so I had to drive down to the supersize chain store in Gorham to do my grocery shopping.

  I have never been comfortable in crowds. My senses seem tuned to a higher frequency than those of most other people, and I am easily overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and smells of so many human beings massed together in a confined space. Overstimulation is the curse that comes with the gift of heightened sensitivity. Anyone who has ever owned a cat will understand what I mean.

  I clutched my shopping list and kept my head bowed as I pushed my cart down the fluorescent-lit aisles. Otherwise I knew I would start losing myself in distractions that might require nonstop interventions. That man who lurched past me with a case of beer, on his way to his car—didn’t his breath smell of liquor? The bruise on that child’s face—didn’t it have the shape of an adult’s hand?

  I almost made it successfully to the checkout.

  At the very last aisle, along the row of dairy coolers, as I was stocking up on cheese for our mooseburgers, I noticed a pale woman wearing a wig. It wasn’t crimson. The color was somewhere between red and orange. But it was cut straight in the bangs and across the shoulders. She was skinny, dressed in oversize clothes, and wearing dark sunglasses that obscured much of her face; and she had her head down, as if trying desperately to go about her business without being spotted. Her shopping cart was heaped full of the sort of staples you’d buy to outfit a bomb shelter.

  No way, I thought. Impossible.

  She seemed to sense my staring because she turned her cart 180 degrees and began hurrying toward the checkout as if she expected to be chased.

  I abandoned my purchases in the middle of the aisle. “Excuse me!”

  She quickened her pace.

  “Hey! You in the wig!”

  She must have heard me because every other person around us did, but still she didn’t pause. She turned a corner fast to escape me.

  I began to jog. As I always did these days when I was off duty, I was carrying my backup piece, a Walther PPK/S, which I wore in a concealed holster inside the waistband of my pants. I was close to reaching for it.

  I caught up with the woman as she was passing the pharmacy. I stepped around her and grabbed her shopping cart. The sudden stop nearly caused it to tip over sideways. The surprise made her whip her head around and her sunglasses fell off.

  But she refused to look up. “What do you want? Why are you doing this?”

  Instantly I realized my horrible, inexcusable mistake. “Oh, God! I am sorry.”

  I squatted down to retrieve her glasses from the floor.

  She seemed reluctant to take them from my outstretched hand. But as she did, she lifted her head, and I saw her face. I recognized the gray complexion and dark-ringed eyes of a chemotherapy patient. My mother had died of cancer.

  “I am so, so sorry.”

  Tears of fright and embarrassment were streaming down her hollow cheeks. She hid herself again behind her sunglasses.

  The pharmacist, having witnessed my unprovoked assault, had come out from behind his counter and was standing over us. “Is there a problem here, sir?”

  “It’s my mistake. I apologize, ma’am. I saw you and thought you were someone else.”

  I offered to pay for her groceries, but she refused. All that poor, sick woman wanted was for everyone to stop looking at her. She wanted to become anonymous again.

  * * *

  I cursed myself all the way home.

  If I could have mistaken a cancer patient for Becky Cobb, was it any wonder that Barrett and the others doubted my identification of Casey Donaldson? It almost made me question my own certainty.

  But no.

  My idiocy in the supermarket was a by-product of the helplessness I was feeling. As I had just demonstrated, my fear for Casey’s safety was eroding my judgment. I needed to collect my emotions and focus my thoughts.

  After I’d put away the groceries, I poured myself some iced tea and sat outside with the map of the Saco River that Menario had given me spread across the picnic table.

  Now that I had been assigned to patrol the Saco, I owed it to anyone I might have to rescue to familiarize myself with the endlessly zigzagging watercourse. Stacey and I had once made the paddle from the boat launch at the covered bridg
es in Conway, New Hampshire, around Swan’s Falls by portage, past the mobbed campgrounds at Walker’s Bridge, through the insect-thick backwaters at Lovewell Pond and Brownfield Bog (where ducks exploded into the air around every bend), and come ashore above Hiram Falls: a multiday journey of thirtysomething miles. I put my finger on the X that marked the spot where Casey had last been seen. I couldn’t even remember that particular crook in the river.

  My phone buzzed on the tabletop. “Hello?”

  “Is this Bowditch’s Taxi Service?”

  “Charley?”

  “Why, hello, young feller! The Boss and I just arrived on Sebago. And my daughter said you might be available to chauffeur us to your domicile.”

  Stacey’s father had grown up in logging camps in northwest Maine during the era of the river drives, and even though he had served as a pilot in Vietnam and had inhabited the civilized world from the Age of Aquarius to the Digital Age, he still spoke like the last of the old-time lumberjacks. Some of it was pure affect. Charley Stevens was one of the smartest men I’d ever met, especially when it came to sizing up other people, but as a warden, he had found it useful to have criminals underestimate his intelligence. I’d also come to see Charley’s insistence on using the backcountry vernacular as a stubborn act of rebellion against an American culture that had no use for the wisdom of its elders. Stacey wasn’t the only maverick in her family.

  “Where are you? Have you landed already?”

  “I’m not sure landed is the right term for a floatplane, but, yes, we’ve arrived at the lake. We’re over at Dingley’s chewing the fat with the man himself. Look for two old geezers and a beautiful young woman in a wheelchair.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  As quickly as I could, I grabbed the keys to my personal vehicle, an International Harvester Scout, and set off for the marina on the northwest shore of Sebago Lake.

  The “beautiful young woman in a wheelchair” Charley had mentioned was Stacey’s mom, Ora, who could not be described as young but was certainly beautiful in a way that went deeper than her kind and radiant face. The Stevenses’ relationship was my Platonic ideal of what marriage could be. Charley and Ora made it look so easy and natural. Why were Stacey and I having so much trouble?

  I pulled into the marina as the first stars were appearing in the darkening sky above the lake. Down at the end of the longest dock, I could see a floatplane tied up and three silhouettes, a person in a wheelchair and two others. Ora waved at me from her chair as I strode down the floating walkway, my footsteps hollow and metallic in the breathless evening air.

  “There’s the man who wants to run off with my girl, Dingley,” Charley said as I approached them.

  “Looks like trouble to me,” said the marina owner.

  “Oh, Mike, it’s so good to see you,” said Ora.

  She had snow-white hair cut at shoulder length and was wearing a pale green sweater, almost the exact color of her eyes, although it was too dark to see anything apart from her big smile. I bent over to kiss her cheek, but she wrapped her arms so tightly around me, I almost lifted her free of the chair.

  As usual, Charley just about crushed my hand when he shook it. For a smallish man, he had the strongest grip. “Do you know Dingley, Mike?”

  I shook hands with the marina owner. “Sure, Dingley calls me every time a drunk boater pulls up to one of his docks.”

  “Don’t say that!” said Dingley. “I’ll lose all my customers if that rumor starts going around.”

  Charley clapped him hard on the back. “Your secret is safe with us.”

  “There is no secret,” pleaded Dingley.

  “We were just talking about bats,” said Charley.

  “Did you see one?” I glanced at the lake, hoping to spot a flitting shadow. Out on the water the few remaining boats showed as bobbing green and white lights. But I saw no bats.

  “No,” said Charley. “That’s what we were talking about—how you almost never see a bat since that white-nose syndrome wiped out most of their colonies. They used to be thick as mosquitoes up at Grand Lake Stream.”

  “I remember.”

  “I miss the bats,” said Ora. “I miss watching them fly up the lake every night at dusk.”

  I felt a mosquito alight on my neck and slapped at it. “I miss the way they used to eat all the bugs.”

  “I suppose we should get going before we all come down with—what did the Penguin call it?—the Ziki fly?” said Charley.

  “You know it’s the Zika virus,” said Ora.

  The Penguin was Charley’s nickname for our governor. “Someone should educate the chief executive,” he said. “He clearly flunked biology.”

  We said our good-byes to Dingley, who promised to keep a close watch on the Cessna for the duration of their visit. Charley wheeled Ora up the ramp while I carried their luggage. I knew better than to offer to help them with the wheelchair. I stood back as the wiry old man lifted his wife effortlessly and set her down in the passenger seat of my vehicle.

  As I settled myself behind the wheel, Ora took hold of my hand with hers and squeezed it. She seemed to have less strength than I remembered. I was afraid to apply pressure for fear of hurting her.

  “Oh, Mike, it’s so good to see you again.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Ora.”

  But as I raised her hand to my lips to kiss, I felt a pang—worry? regret?—that I couldn’t explain.

  25

  Stacey’s Subaru was in the garage and the door was open when we arrived home. She came out to greet us but did her best to hide the slight limp from her injured leg. She was barefoot, but still wearing her uniform. I was curious to hear about her meeting with Barstow, but I knew she wouldn’t want to talk in front of her parents about being called onto the carpet.

  “You’re late,” she said. “Did you take a wrong turn over Katahdin again, old man?”

  Charley poked his big head out the backseat window. “If I did, it was because I didn’t have my favorite copilot with me.”

  Charley and Stacey had been estranged for many years; she had blamed him for the accident that had paralyzed her mother. Every time they met each other now, it seemed to stand for a more profound reconciliation.

  Dinner was venison loins that I had dusted with salt and pepper and wrapped with bacon before throwing on the grill. To ward off mosquitoes, we lit citronella candles that flickered as we ate. Besides the steaks, we had new potatoes and peas from the farm stand down the road. Stacey and I drank beer while Ora had a whiskey on the rocks. Charley, as was his custom, consumed only milk, until we brought out the strawberry shortcake. Then he switched to black coffee. The man consumed so much caffeine I wondered how he ever fell asleep.

  As we were about to collect the plates, Charley said, “What’s that over there, flapping?”

  I squinted into the gloom until I saw what he was pointing at. I had forgotten the map on the table, and it had blown to the edge of the yard where it had lodged against the fence. The old pilot had the eyes of an owl.

  “It’s a map of the Saco River.” I used my palm to press out the wrinkles from the paper.

  Charley brought his craggy face close to it. “I suppose this map has to do with that supposedly dead girl you saw.”

  Stacey tossed her head back in mock frustration. “I knew this was coming.”

  “What dead girl?” asked Ora.

  Somehow Charley had restrained himself through dinner from bringing up Baby Jane Doe, the house that had exploded, and everything else he’d pried out of his many contacts in law enforcement. But the discovery of the map had given him permission to inquire. Not that he usually waited for permission.

  “Mike’s gotten into mischief again,” said the old pilot. “Only this time he’s involved our daughter.”

  Ora touched Stacey’s arm. “What is he talking about, dear?”

  “It’s nothing, Mom. Come on, let’s go inside. I want to give you that Louise Erdrich book I tol
d you about. We can turn on the classical-music station.”

  “No, I want to hear.”

  Stacey shook her head sadly. “Go ahead, Mike. It’s your story.”

  I pushed the smeared red plate of strawberries away from me, leaned my elbows on the table, and took a deep breath. “It all started with some pigs.”

  * * *

  By the time I had finished, one of the candles had gone out and the last was guttering in a pool of citrus-smelling wax. The dancing light seemed appropriate for a ghost story. The expression on Ora’s face was certainly one of horror.

  “Why isn’t every cop in Maine out there now looking for those Cobbs?” she asked.

  “Where would they start, Mom?” Stacey said. “There are tens of thousands of buildings in southern Maine, assuming they didn’t flee into New Hampshire.”

  Charley tugged on his big chin as he often did when he was trying to solve a puzzle. “Sometimes the best way forward is to go backward.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Assuming everything you said is true—about her being abducted off the river—then it might be useful to figure out how she came to meet the Cobbs in the first place.”

  “There was an extensive search, Dad,” said Stacey.

  “But we know something now they didn’t know back then. We know Casey’s alive. And I’m inclined to agree with Mike that she’s been held prisoner all this time. So where did she meet her kidnapper? He had a reason for being where he was that day.”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” I said.

  “I sure don’t,” said Stacey.

  Charley peered again at the map, held in place at the corners by our glasses and mugs. “So this is where she was last seen?”

  “According to Dakota Rowe,” I said. “But I wouldn’t exactly trust his testimony on the matter.”

  “I’d like to meet that young man myself and take his measure.” Charley picked at his teeth with a fingernail. “You’re not working tomorrow, are you, young feller?”

  Stacey placed her hands flat on the table. “No, Dad. Don’t even think about it.”