Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Publishing Group ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you for your personal use only. You may not make this ebook publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  1

  The woman on the phone refused to give her name, but she swore she’d just seen a rattlesnake on her hike up Black Cat Mountain.

  “I almost stepped on the frigging thing!”

  The man on the other end of the call was a Maine game warden named Mike Bowditch. “Did you get a picture of it?”

  “No, I didn’t get a picture of it. I was running for my life in terror. For real.”

  Bowditch had taken the call in his patrol truck, the air conditioner of which was busted again. Sweat slithered down his temples. He had rolled up the windows thinking it might be cooler without the radiant heat from the asphalt wafting in. He couldn’t decide if it was better or worse.

  “Can you describe the snake for me?”

  “You don’t believe me about it being a rattlesnake. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “That’s not it,” he lied awkwardly. “But you have to understand that timber rattlers aren’t native to Maine, so it would be highly unlikely—”

  “Why is there a Rattlesnake Mountain in Casco? And a Rattlesnake Island in Kezar Lake?” Her throaty voice cracked. She sounded gleeful and triumphant, like a litigator who had caught a hostile witness in a lie. “Don’t tell me I didn’t see what I saw.”

  “There used to be rattlers here, don’t get me wrong,” he said as traffic whipped past his stopped GMC. “But people wiped them out in the nineteenth century. The snakes would gather underground in the winter in what are called hibernacula, where they could be doused with kerosene—”

  The woman hadn’t come to him for a lecture in herpetology, but Bowditch was prone to over explanation, a character defect in himself he seemed incapable of correcting, which suggested he didn’t view it as a defect requiring correction.

  “I called you as a public service! I don’t want some dog getting snakebitten up there. Or a little kid, even.”

  Bowditch couldn’t help but note that, for his unknown caller, child safety took second place to canine safety. On this scant evidence, he deduced she was a childless dog owner. Making quick and dirty deductions about people was another of his self-admitted flaws.

  “I appreciate that,” he told the woman. “But sometimes we get calls from hikers who think they’ve seen rattlesnakes when they’ve stumbled across native milk snakes. They have this defense mechanism—milk snakes—they vibrate the tips of their tails against the ground to simulate a rattle and scare off predators.”

  “Dude, it wasn’t a frigging milk snake,” she said, her deep voice breaking high again. “You’d better haul ass over to that trailhead and catch that rattlesnake before someone gets bitten and dies. For real! And FYI: Mansplaining is bad enough without throwing in gaslighting.”

  She hung up. Bowditch decided the air trapped inside the truck was hotter than the steaming day outside. He rolled the window down.

  2

  The warden had no intention of rushing up Black Cat Mountain in search of a spurious rattlesnake, but later that afternoon, after he’d spent hours in the sun at the Range Ponds public landing, checking the hulls of sport-fishing boats for an invasive weed called milfoil, he found himself passing the trailhead on his drive home and felt obliged to stop.

  His thoughts were still mired in milfoil as he climbed the short path up the hill. His department’s program to arrest the spread of the lake-choking weed was worse than futile—it was an utter waste of his time. Mere shreds of the plant, caught in an outboard’s propeller or stuck to a hull, were enough to spread the pestilence from one pond to the next, rendering the water unboatable, unswimmable, and ultimately uninhabitable to certain aquatic life. The warming climate was bringing many new species into the state of Maine: red-bellied woodpeckers, emerald ash-borer beetles, maybe even timber rattlesnakes if his caller was to be believed. The milfoil scourge seemed less like an invasion “from away” than from an alien galaxy.

  The Black Cat Mountain trail was overspread by native white pines and white oaks, the sheltering leaves of which did little to break the late-June heat. When he reached the top, he emerged onto an east-facing ledge with a vista of Lower Range Pond. He’d hoped for a cooling breeze at the summit, but the air was as breathless as at the base. He had hoped, also, to meet hikers whom he could ask about the reported snake, but the only people he encountered were a surprised, half-dressed teenage couple who had the smell of cannabis and coitus on them and ran behind bushes at his approach.

  “No, man, we haven’t seen any snakes,” the boy said, enunciating slowly, taking pains not to sound stoned. He had rock star hair and a trace of scruff that made his face look more dirty than rugged.

  “No snakes,” the girl giggled, clutching her bra to her sizable chest because it was unfastened beneath her blouse.

  Bowditch was twenty-seven.

  He guessed the lovers were a decade younger than he was, but as he was dressed in his field uniform, with its heavy bulletproof vest and heavier gun belt, he couldn’t help but feel grizzled and world-weary in their adolescent presence. His colleagues in the Warden Service had rightly warned him that the cares of the job would age him. But he was only now beginning to mourn what he had traded away to wear the badge.

  He would have thought the prospect of rolling around on the same hilltop where a rattler had been reported might prompt the lovers to leave. But they remained crouched behind the bushes, waiting for him to depart.

  “There ain’t any dangerous snakes in Maine,” the sweaty boy offered.

  “I know that.”

  “So why’re you saying there are?”

  “I’m just telling you what someone reported.” He handed the kids business cards with his name and number and told them to call if they spotted a snake of any kind. “If you guys see anything…”

  Then he left Adam and Eve to begin again their innocent gropings amid the serpentless trees.

  3

  That night, he was awakened by another phone call, this one from the warden who patrolled the adjacent district, a twice-divorced cynic named Tommy Volk, who embodied everything Bowditch feared becoming.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Volk said. “I just got a call from a buddy of mine who drives an ambulance for Sebago EMS. He and his partner are transporting a kid to Maine Med who was bitten by a rattlesnake.”

  Bowditch kicked off his top sheet. “Don’t tell me it happened on Black Cat Mountain.”

  “No, it was at a keg party in a gravel pit in Casco. The kid had been passed out in some weeds when his friends heard a scream. Some girl found the poor guy with a timber rattler attached to his leg.”

  The hair follicles on Bowditch’s arms tightened into welts. “How do they know it was a rattlesnake?”

  “Because the kid who rushed to the rescue beat it to death with a two-by-four. He sent me a picture he took of the carcass. I’m headed out to the pit now to fetch the thing. I thought you might want to tag along. You studied natural history at Colby, right?”

  In fact, Bowditch had majored in human history, but he saw no reason to correct Volk, who was not alone in the Warden Service in considering him to be overeducated and therefore suspect.

  “What’s the kid’s name? The one who was bitten?”

  Volk needed to look at his notes. “Jax Stevenson.”

  The name meant nothing to Bowditch. “Do the EMTs think he’ll survive?”

  “Given that Maine ambulances don’t carry antivenin for supposedly nonexistent venomous snakes, it ain’t fucking likely.” Volk cleared something thick from his throat. “Why’d you ask if it happened on Black Cat Mountain?”

  “I don’t know,” Bowditch lied. He was lying more and more with every year on the job, he realized. He was getting good at it. “Where do you think the snake came from?”

  “Where else? It escaped from some idiot’s menagerie.”

  “You don’t think it could be wild? There are rattlers in New Hampshire.”

  Volk hacked again as he laughed. “When I was a kid, my grandfather told me they were still in Oxford County, too. He swore to Christ he saw a rattlesnake back in the ’50s. Gave a very detailed description of it crawling across a ledge.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Nowhere! He made it all up. The old man didn’t own a pair of pants that weren’t scorched in the ass from lying.”

  4

  Somehow Bowditch beat Volk to the scene.

  He had expected to find the gravel pit deserted. Backwoods parties tended to attract people who had cause to be furtive: illegal drug users, underage drinkers, and the older men who lurked at the edges of bonfires eyeing the teenage girls until they were too im paired to give consent. Instead, he was surprised to find a half dozen cars and trucks parked in a semicircle with their headlights making a luminous space for a scrawny teenager to show off the snake.

  The speaker had an oversize head, heavy black bangs, and quick eyes that acknowledged the warden before returning to the rapt and wasted members of his audience. He wore a Mossy Oak tee, nylon gym shorts that exposed his twig legs, white socks, and flip-flops. Bowditch had never seen a person possessed of such natural self-confidence as the adolescent oddity named Ricky Elwell.

  Ricky seemed to be giving an oration to his young audience by the light of the remaining vehicles. He held the rattler aloft with the its body hanging limp and sinuous while, at the same time, he used a lighted cigarette in his free hand to direct their attention to aspects of the creature’s anatomy.

  “Now, timber rattlesnakes have what you might call a sixth sense,” he was saying, his voice echoing off the walls of the pit. “See these holes between the eyes and nostrils? Down inside them are these nerve bundles that ‘see’ infrared radiation that is invisible to the genus Homo. That’s why they’re called pit vipers. It’s just a coincidence this bastard was lurking in an actual gravel pit.”

  Bowditch should have known it was Ricky Elwell who’d leaped into the breach and beaten the hapless reptile to death. The kid had taken over his late dad’s deer-cutting and taxidermy business before he’d finished his freshman year in high school. The young butcher had carved up every huntable species in the Maine woods, and a few that were forbidden, and he knew these critters inside and out.

  “We’re going to have to leave things there on account of the law having arrived. I need to consult with Warden Bowditch about the disposition of this serpent, but I’ll post on my social if he allows me to perform a dissection.”

  Bowditch paused for the kids to disperse, leaving a single vehicle to light the rocky amphitheater, an ancient pickup that was presumably Ricky’s. Bullet holes pockmarked the sides of the rusted bed.

  “Isn’t he a beauty?” Ricky presented the snake for Bowditch’s inspection. “I measured him as four feet two from nose to rattle tip.”

  The rattler was lighter than Bowditch had expected and stiffening as rigor mortis took hold of its muscles. The scales were dry and roughly abrasive when he ran his hand against the grain.

  “Any idea how it got here?”

  “Don’t you want to hear the blow-by-blow first?”

  “By all means.”

  Ricky explained that he’d been a late arrival to the party, as he’d been working on a turkey mount for a taxidermy client. No sooner had he arrived than he heard a girl scream. She’d been sneaking into the bushes to pee and had tripped over a heavily intoxicated but not insensate young man thrashing on the ground with a snake attached to his calf.

  “I figured it was a water snake—some of them get pretty big,” he said, gesticulating with his cigarette. Ricky chain-smoked Old Golds, and the tips of his eight fingers (he’d cut off two in butchering mishaps) were stained ocher. “I reached for the first weapon I saw, which happened to be a piece of lumber. But that bastard had his fangs deep, and it took me two swings, the second being the death stroke.”

  When he’d realized that the serpent was, in fact, a timber rattlesnake, he said that partygoers had encouraged him to suck out the poison like they did in Westerns, but Ricky Elwell, with his encyclopedic knowledge of wildlife biology, knew that particular treatment was an old wives’ tale.

  “I don’t know the dude well—Stevenson—but I could tell he was royally fucked, so I held his hand until the ambulance showed. His leg was swelling up from his ankle to his wiener. I knew he was in trouble when his breath got all ragged and he started twitching spastically. But the EMTs didn’t want to hear my professional opinion on the dude’s prognosis.”

  These details weighed on Bowditch who had been feeling intimations of guilt as soon as he’d gotten the call from Volk. Maybe if he hadn’t dismissed that young woman’s story about seeing a snake—?

  But no, this can’t be the same rattler. Black Cat Mountain is miles from here.

  “So you mentioned having some ideas about how a rattlesnake got here,” the warden said.

  “It might have slithered over from New Hamster—the state line’s only twenty miles west of Casco, give or take—but it’s my professional opinion this viper was deliberately released into the wild.”

  “And why do you think that?”

  “Because the Goreckis live over that hill.”

  “Who are the Goreckis?”

  “I forget you’re new around here. Ted and Fay Gorecki, the weirdos who want to bring timber rattlers back to the state of Maine. They used to run a snake lab in Windham, milking venom to make antivenin.”

  He took a deliberately long draw on his smoke.

  “The lab burned down when I was just a kid,” added the seventeen-year-old. “Arson, you’ll hear some folks say.”

  Bowditch had been patrolling the district for nearly a year; he’d poked around every woodlot and marsh, sucked up local gossip like a sponge, and yet somehow, he had never heard of these husband-and-wife snake handlers before. This affected him as a personal failure to do his research.

  He heard an engine growl and tires crunch behind him and then saw the sweep of headlights across the curvature of the pit. Volk, as was his obnoxious habit, let out a blurt from his truck’s siren, announcing his arrival.

  “This piece of shit,” groaned Ricky.

  “Why didn’t you call me instead of Volk if you don’t like him?”

  “Because I’ve known Tommyknocker my whole life, and that counts for a lot around here. No offense, Warden, but I’ve been burned by new wardens who were all smiles and bullshit until they wrote me up for some made-up violation.”

  Volk’s shadow preceded him as he approached, diminishing in size until it was smaller than Bowditch’s own.

  “Hey, Ricky!” the older warden said. “Lost any new fingers?”

  The teenage butcher flashed a maimed hand. “Just the one I was diddling your mother with last week.”

  Tommy Volk just about shoved Bowditch aside to grab Ricky’s shirt. “What did you say, mouth?”

  The veteran warden had a hard jaw and big fists he enjoyed using. For a moment, Bowditch felt he might need to restrain his fellow officer for the boy’s safety.

  “Relax, man,” said Ricky, utterly unafraid. “I was just telling Warden B. here that this snake probably belonged to the Goreckis. Can you believe he’d never heard of them before?”

  Volk released the shirt and smoothed it against the boy’s negligible chest. Then he turned to Bowditch with a raised eyebrow.

  “Seriously? I guess Ted and Fay have been out of the news for a while. But you must know their run-down farm on the Rolfe Brook Road. It’s the one with the razor wire fence and the Keep Out signs and general air of decrepitude. So you think the Goreckis have decided to reintroduce rattlesnakes to Maine on their own, Ricky?”

  “I’m just extrapolating based on the geography and Ted’s reputation as a herpetologist, not that I’ve ever met the man.”

  “He’s disabled, a recluse,” explained Volk as he seized the snake from Bowditch.

  The sudden motion caused the rattle to signal its now purposeless warning.

  Ricky spoke with the cigarette held loosely in the corner of his mouth. “Supposedly old Ted knows more about venomous vertebrates than anyone in New England. The man is, like, off-his-rocker crazy on the subject of Crotalus horridus. That’s Latin for—”

  “Timber rattlesnakes, I get it,” said Volk. “Ricky here talks like he has a Ph.D. in biology, Bowditch, but everything he knows he’s learned watching Animal Planet on his mom’s big-screen TV.”

  Ricky grinned at them from under his bangs. “Now about this specimen…”

  “Forget it!” said Volk.

  Bowditch forcibly retrieved the snake from his colleague’s grasp. “I need to have it tested first, Rick. The department’s chief reptile biologist will want to inspect this snake for anything that might indicate whether it was born in the wild or in captivity.”

  “Tell your guy to call me if there’s anything he can’t understand,” Ricky said. “I’m always glad to offer the department my professional expertise.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8