Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  Jackson came to a halt and Charley stood beside him, looking down.

  The cellar hole was a rectangle of burned timbers and charred shingles. There were shards of broken bottles, some crumbled masonry, along with more recent trash that displaced campers had thrown into the shallow pit. This seemed to be the local toxic-waste dump. If the landowner had no problem with people throwing dirty diapers and bags of garbage here, he was a better man than I was.

  “John Blood!” Jackson exclaimed. “That’s what he said his name was. Sounded like a comic book character to me.”

  And to me, as well. But the surname was not uncommon in Maine.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I was sure it was Stacey calling to ream us out for running late. But the name on the screen was Ellen Pomerleau.

  “Guess what,” she said.

  I turned away from Charley and Jackson, who were musing over the question of when the cabin might have burned down. “What?”

  “The DNA sample from your Baby Jane Doe came back from the crime lab.”

  “And—?”

  “There’s no question about it. The match was ninety-nine percent with the sample on file in CODIS. That little girl and Casey Donaldson share fourteen of twenty-two markers. You were right, Bowditch. I don’t know how, but you were right. Casey Donaldson is still alive.”

  29

  A heat shimmer was rising over the vast bog. The waves of distortion in the air made the hills along the far shore seem to ripple. I paused to get my bearings, looking for the trail of broken vegetation Charley had made to lead us back to the canoe. When I couldn’t find it at first glance, he set a fatherly hand on my shoulder and led the way.

  “There’s no chance of it being a mix-up?” he said as we trudged through the huckleberry and sheep laurel. “DNA analysis came around late in my career. To me it’s always sounded like something out of Buck Rogers.”

  “Sure, there’s a possibility of a mix-up.” I pulled my boot out of yet another sinkhole. “But it’s like billions to one. The term the crime-lab analysts use is loci, but the easiest way to think of them is as points of comparison. The FBI database uses twenty loci. The more repeats that show up, the higher the probability there is of a match. The odds against the baby being the daughter of anyone but Casey are astronomical.”

  “I guess this news is going to ruin Detective Menario’s holiday.”

  “Pomerleau is trying to keep a lid on it until she can bring in the FBI. But Menario will probably hear from one of his buddies in the department.”

  “What about the girl’s family? Who’s going to tell them?”

  “Pomerleau thinks the Bureau will want to send an agent to her stepdad’s house to talk with him. It’s not the sort of news you break over the phone.”

  “Not unless you want to give the poor man a heart attack. So what happens next?”

  “I assume Pomerleau will call a meeting of whoever worked the initial search for Casey four years ago along with anybody involved in the recent investigations.”

  “Sounds like you’ll be leaving your own party early.”

  The party.

  In the excitement I had forgotten about the backyard barbecue—just as Stacey had warned me I would. Our guests would be arriving in less than four hours. The only reason I could imagine that Stacey hadn’t called to chew me out for being late was that she was plotting a more inventive punishment.

  The thought of throwing a party, now that we had absolute confirmation that Casey was still alive, made my stomach burn. How could I enjoy myself when I knew that she was suffering nearby? But, as Dani had reminded me, I was a warden and not a state police detective, and this was not my case to work.

  The breeze had picked up, and a northern water snake had somehow found its way into the boat and was curled up on my seat cushion. It was about four feet long and mocha brown with darker cross bands. As a boy I had acquired a respect for their surly temper and the sharpness of their fangs. But Charley reached in and grabbed the serpent by the tail. He hurled it into the channel before it could whip around to bite him. I watched the reptile swim away in S-shaped strokes, the motion reminiscent of the tail swishes of an angry cat.

  Charley used the diversion to snag a seat in the stern. I had been right about the old woodsman; he couldn’t bear to be in a canoe he wasn’t steering.

  We ended up following the serpent downstream. At first we couldn’t dig the paddles into the water too deeply without raising clouds of mud from the bottom, but as the channel widened and deepened, we began to pick up speed. Soon we started hearing war whoops from rafters on the main channel of the river. Then the rat-tat-tat of thrown firecrackers in violation of the laws prohibiting them.

  The island where Casey and her friends had camped, and where she thought she had lost her mother’s diamond ring, came into view. We slid by it in silence, each of us absorbing the full weight of what had now been proven. Somehow, in seeking to find her way out of the maze of the bog, Casey Donaldson had found herself in another kind of labyrinth, one in which real monsters lurked.

  “We can stop calling her Baby Jane Doe,” I said as the sandbar disappeared behind a tussock. “She’s the Donaldson girl now.”

  “That’s not a proper name for her, either.”

  “It’s a start.”

  The sensation I had experienced before—of an enemy watching me from some secret place—returned. Only this time I knew it was just the wind.

  * * *

  We wasted no time in getting off the Saco. For me, that meant ignoring a half dozen boating violations (principally absent flotation devices), along with other misdemeanors such as lewd conduct, littering, and almost certainly underage drinking, judging by the looks of some of the kids we saw floating along in tubes with cans of beer. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t on duty today. Still, I hoped to God that no one drowned later on account of my inaction. When you are a law-enforcement officer, it is sometimes hard to accept that you can’t save everyone from his or her bad decisions.

  We arrived, along with a mass of other canoeists and tubers, at the sandbank above Birnam Bridge. By the time I had backed my Scout down the beach, Charley had somehow flipped the heavy boat over and was walking it up the ramp, the yoke braced against his shoulders, his oversize hands gripping the gunnels tightly. The sixteen-foot-long Old Town weighed seventy-five pounds. I gathered up the paddles and flotation cushions while he lashed the canoe to the top of my vehicle with trucker’s hitches.

  As we set off to Fryeburg to retrieve my patrol truck, Charley said, “I expect they’ll bring the landlords in for another talk.”

  “The Nasons? The older son, Steven, seems to be the only person besides me and Connie Fales to have seen this ‘Becky Cobb’ in the flesh. He definitely knows more than he’s admitting.”

  “You said he struck you as being empty between the ears?”

  “His mother did all the talking.”

  “And she didn’t seem too sharp, either.”

  “She was sharp enough to ingratiate herself with a rich, dying man and persuade him to leave her his fortune.”

  Charley rolled down his window to let out a deerfly that had pursued us into the vehicle. “I’m pretty sure Kathy Frost worked this search four years ago with her coonhound.”

  “She’s coming to the barbecue tonight. Hopefully she can fill us in on what went wrong.”

  Now that it was midday, the Swan’s Falls Campground was even more mobbed than it had been at first light. We had to wait in a line of slow-moving traffic to enter the grounds, only to find our new acquaintance from the Fryeburg police turning around cars since the lot was full.

  Reserve Officer Nisbet even tried to turn us around before he recognized our faces. He stuck his face through my open window. His breath was horrible. “You’re back!”

  “So it seems,” said Charley.

  He pushed at his pompadour, which was losing its shape. “How far did you get?”

  “Oxbow Island.”
<
br />   “That far?”

  “We need to get into the lot to get my patrol truck,” I said.

  “Might be easier if one of you just walked in. There are cars jammed up every which way near the water. The chief is down there himself trying to sort out the parking situation so we can clear out some vehicles. What a shitshow!”

  “Do you mind meeting me back at the house?” I asked Charley.

  “Not at all. Any specific apologies you want me to make on your behalf?”

  “Better I do it myself.”

  The campground was a human zoo with every subspecies of Homo sapiens running loose, out of their cages. One group of college-age rafters had painted their bodies bright blue, like ancient Picts going into battle against the Roman legions. I saw many females wearing ill-chosen bikinis. Some fool scoutmaster had taken his Cub Scouts out on the river in the midst of the holiday chaos. Never had I seen so many young eyes opened wide in shock and fright.

  It took me a solid fifteen minutes to nudge my Sierra out of its space and crawl back up the hill through the herd of vacationers. Finally I found myself back out at the campground gate, where Reserve Officer Nisbet was in a shouting match with a carful of frat boys.

  I rolled down my window. “Hey, Nisbet!”

  “Sometimes you want to strangle these punks,” Fat Elvis confessed.

  Death by throttling struck me as a harsh punishment for rudeness, but the reserve officer had a more draconian code of ethics than I did.

  “Speaking of which,” he continued, “Dakota Rowe came by looking for you. He’d heard you were asking about him at Hodge’s. He must have guessed you put in here.”

  For years Rowe had only had to fend off Menario. Maybe my appearance on the scene had begun to trouble him.

  “You know Dakota?”

  “Every cop around here knows that piece of shit.”

  As I was about to leave, one last question occurred to me for Nisbet. “You mentioned that your cousin rents a house from the Nasons. Do you remember anything he said about them?”

  “It’s a she actually. Aside from never fixing anything? Not really. Look, Warden, no offense, but I’ve got work to do. I’m already up shit’s creek with the chief.”

  “OK. Thanks.”

  Nisbet started to turn away, then stopped. “There is one thing. My cousin said she caught the dumb one peeping through her bathroom window once. I told her if it happened again to call me, and I’d personally drive out and shoot the son of a bitch.”

  So in addition to being a liar, Steven Nason was also seemingly a Peeping Tom. I wondered if Pomerleau was aware of that rumor. I looked forward to sharing it with her. It made me feel as self-satisfied as a cat dropping on its owner’s doormat a dead mouse.

  30

  Even before I pulled into the driveway, I could see that one of our guests had arrived a full hour early. Kathy Frost had backed her bronze Nissan Xterra across the shaggy lawn and parked it in the shade of the pines, no doubt so that she could keep the tailgate open for her puppy in her crate. Every game warden and former game warden I knew made a habit of backing his or her vehicle into parking spaces—the better to pull out in a hurry if an emergency call came over the police radio.

  Charley had beat me home, too, and had already untied the canoe from the top of my Scout and stowed it away in the backyard. Stacey’s Subaru was in its usual spot, but I could deduce from its altered position that she had been out and back during the morning.

  I heard voices in the backyard, so instead of going through the house, I circled around the side of the building.

  Charley and Kathy were both sprawled on the grass, in the shadows thrown by the late-afternoon sun, playing with a honey-brown puppy: Kathy’s new Malinois. When my former sergeant caught sight of me, she rose to her knees, a tall, fiftyish woman with a chestnut-colored bob, hazel eyes, and a freckled face that was appealing more because of the personality that radiated from it than the symmetry of her features.

  “Grasshopper!” She had given me the pet name when I was a rookie.

  “Hey, Kath.”

  Several years ago, Kathy Frost had been shot in the line of duty and had lost her spleen and parts of other organs; she still carried steel-shot pellets inside her from the attack. The assault—followed by her forced early retirement from the Warden Service—had aged her, and for a long time I had worried about her health. But her cheeks were full of color this afternoon, and when she hugged me, I was afraid she might crack one of my ribs.

  The puppy sniffed excitedly at my muddy pant leg.

  “This is Maple,” Kathy said.

  “Nice to meet you, Maple.” When I reached down to scratch the puppy’s head, she bit my hand—not hard, but firmly enough to leave marks.

  “Give a yelp,” advised Kathy.

  “A yelp?”

  “So she knows she bit too hard.”

  I did my best to imitate a puppy in pain. Surprised, Maple released my hand.

  “That was the sorriest effort at canine communication I ever heard,” said Charley. He flicked a rope toy at Maple, and soon she was in a new tug-of-war. I noticed his hair was wet, and he’d changed into a fresh green T-shirt and Dickies. How had that old geezer managed to shower, too? I hadn’t been that far behind him.

  Kathy bent carefully over to lift her beer can from the grass. As healthy as she looked, she was still dealing with the long-term damage of the shotgun blast.

  “So how goes the training?” I asked her.

  “Great! Right now Maple and I are focusing on the basics. We won’t start search-and-rescue exercises until she stops eating my shoes. She seems to have real aptitude, though. Her nose is excellent. Almost as good as—” She caught herself before saying the name of her dear, departed coonhound. Instead she addressed Charley: “How’s Nimrod doing?”

  “I swear that pointer is going to outlive us all. Fifteen years old and still full of vinegar!”

  It didn’t seem like the right moment to raise the subject of Casey Donaldson, but I was eager to ask Kathy about her memories of the aborted search. Pluto had still been alive then and was considered one of the best rescue-and-recovery dogs in the country—Kathy had taken him to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to assist in finding the bodies. How, then, had he failed to find any trace of Casey?

  I glanced at the screen door that led into the kitchen. “Where are Stacey and Ora?”

  “Making potato salad,” Charley said. “Ora got the recipe from her mother, who was Waldoboro Dutch. It’s good German-style salad. None of that mayonnaise-y stuff.”

  “I guess I’d better go face the music.”

  “Just a suggestion,” Kathy said, “but you might want to change those yucky pants first. You smell like the Swamp Thing.”

  “Stacey’s used to it.”

  I did, however, take off my boots and socks and hosed off the muck between my toes and under my toenails. In doing so, I found I had carried home an engorged leech. I flicked the little bloodsucker into the daylilies.

  Stacey and her mother were preparing the salad at the table, which was the only surface low enough for Ora to reach from her wheelchair. The room smelled of fried bacon and caramelizing onions.

  My bare feet left wet prints on the floor. “I’m home.”

  Stacey kept her back to me as she pushed the sizzling bacon around a cast-iron pan. “So we see.”

  “Charley said you had news.” Ora said, unable to hide her anticipation. “He didn’t want to spoil it.”

  Stacey turned around finally, but her expression wasn’t annoyed, as I had expected, but tense; it was as if she were doing her best to keep a flood of emotions from bursting through some internal dam.

  I plucked a piece of bacon from the paper towel on which it was oozing grease. “Detective Pomerleau called while we were exploring the edge of the bog where Casey was last seen. The DNA results came back from the crime lab. The baby we found was Casey’s.”

  Ora made a swallowing sound and seemed to sh
rink in her wheelchair. But Stacey remained motionless. Her mouth tightened. Neither of them seemed capable of speech.

  “Pomerleau’s keeping it under wraps for now,” I said.

  “Have you told Kathy?” asked Ora. “Didn’t she and Pluto work that case?”

  “I didn’t want to hit her with it first thing. Maybe after she puts Maple back in her crate. There’s going to be a meeting tonight at the crime lab in Augusta to plan a course of action.”

  Ora fiddled with the hem of her sweater. “Are you going?”

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking that there will be people there who will want to hear what I have to say. But Pomerleau hasn’t formally invited me yet.”

  “Of course you’re going,” said Stacey with no hint of anger. “It’s not even up for discussion. That poor girl needs you.”

  I was having trouble reading her. “Is it too late to postpone the party?”

  Stacey’s smile was more of a wince. “I think my folks and I can manage to entertain people in your absence. It’s not like you’re a social butterfly.”

  I tried to keep things light. “More like an antisocial moth.”

  “Go take a shower, Mike.”

  * * *

  In the bathroom, trying to shave in a foggy mirror, I realized how little I knew about Casey Donaldson as a person—what made her laugh, whether she was a good student, what her dreams had been before she was taken away like Persephone to Hades.

  Too often that’s the way it is with the victims of homicides or, in this case, a presumed homicide. Except for the investigators, who need to know everything about the habits of the deceased, most of us prefer to treat the victims of violence as icons. That’s why we use their first names (Nicole, JonBenét)—as if they were members of our own family. We don’t want them to be complex human beings. We want them to be flat screens on which we can project our outrage.

  Stacey cracked open the door. “Our guests are wondering where you are.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  “I forgot to tell you. Allan called yesterday from the USDA-APHIS office. He got the results back from the lab and says our pork is disease-free and fine to eat.”