“Don’t try to scare me, little man,” he nearly snarled. “That badge won’t protect you. Lots of bad accidents happen in the woods, especially to a man alone.”

  “Go home, Bowditch. Michelle and Michael are waiting for you.”

  Since their last meeting, Charley had remembered the names of the other man’s wife and son.

  As intended, Jack bristled at the mention of his family. “I’ll be seeing you around, Stevens. And make no mistake, it’ll be before you see me.”

  8.

  Charley wondered whether Elmut would welcome him inside the trailer—the Penobscot really could be a self-righteous prick—but he must have received enough of a scare from Bowditch that he put aside his principles and permitted the agent of the white man’s state to enter his sanctuary.

  The injured man met him at the door, holding a bag of Green Giant frozen corn to his mouth.

  “Is he gone?”

  “I watched him drive off, but that’s no guarantee he’s not lurking nearby or won’t come back. That seems to be his modus operandi.”

  Elmut’s face was shaped like a stretched oval, but the overall largeness was offset by the enormity of his pitch-dark eyes. He was still wearing the woven blanket like a cloak around his shoulders, but he’d put on a pair of ankle-high moccasins made of silky gray fur to warm his feet.

  “Fuck, man!” he said. “I still don’t know what I did to provoke the guy. And now my neighbors have gotten out the torches and pitchforks. Those racist fucks have been looking for a way to push me out of this place. If I don’t move, they’re going to burn me or string me up—or both.”

  Charley scanned the room with a deadpan expression.

  The mobile home was a single-wide with boxboard walls and so little insulation around the doors and windows that the crosswind drafts caused Elmut’s eagle feather to flutter. The place was a mess: not dirty so much as cluttered. There wasn’t three inches of cleared space on any of the surfaces.

  A bookcase was overflowing with books, all of which bore stickers on the spines identifying them as the property of public libraries. Charley couldn’t imagine Tomer Elmut going to the trouble of obtaining a library card for the purpose of borrowing Martin Yan’s A Wok for All Seasons. His stealing these titles was another peaceful protest against the white man’s system.

  Stray antlers and moose sheds lay scattered about. Some impressive taxidermy mounts, including two monster brook trout, an Atlantic salmon, a pair of wood ducks in flight, and the head of a piebald doe, hung from the walls. Charley remembered a pale deer being reported in Highland Plantation that summer; the doe had come every day at dusk to a field planted for hunting with alfalfa and clover. The last time anyone had seen the delicate creature was a week before deer season had begun.

  Circumstantial, Charley thought. But not necessarily irrelevant.

  “You do all these mounts yourself, Mr. Elmut?”

  “You can’t prove any of them are in violation of your so-called laws.”

  “Jack Bowditch claims you shot a bald eagle. Did you?”

  “Eagles are sacred to my people. That’s why I wear this.” He fingered the feather.

  It was not, Charley thought, a denial.

  “How about lynx?”

  “What are you talking about, man?”

  Charley identified what he guessed must be the visitor’s chair as it didn’t face the big-screen TV. He removed a stack of pilfered library books and set them on the floor.

  “Would you mind if I had a seat?”

  Elmut moved the bag of frozen food away from his jaw. The plastic was smeared with blood.

  “Depends if you came here to accuse me of a criminal offense. Because I don’t answer to you or your laws, white man.”

  “What about Levasseur? Do you answer to him?”

  Elmut rolled his eyes. “He signs my paycheck. That’s all.”

  “That’s a handsome pair of seal-skin moccasins you’re wearing, Mr. Elmut. They look new. Import of seal pelts into the US has been prohibited under the Marine Mammal Protection Act since 1972. But I suspect that you don’t believe that federal law binds the Wôbanaki.”

  Elmut cracked a painful-looking smile. “Listen to you, trying to speak Injun. Where’d you learn that one, Kemosabe?”

  “Friend of mine is a Passamaquoddy warden.”

  “Some of my best friends are redskins, right? You gonna confiscate my moccasins?”

  “No, but I’m going to ask you again. Did you shoot a bald eagle on Tuesday at Grand Falls on the Dead River?”

  His hesitation was so brief another person might not have noticed. “Tuesday I was working at the Den.”

  “From what time to what time?”

  “I don’t have to answer your questions.”

  “Levasseur can tell me,” Charley said. “But I’m assuming it was your usual shift. So you went in early afternoon?”

  Elmut loomed over his chair. He had recently showered and smelled of Old Spice deodorant. “You can leave now.”

  Charley crossed one knee over the other and clasped his right kneecap casually. “How late were you there?”

  “Midnight, same as always. I like to get going before closing time and the drunks hit the road. What’s that got to do with this eagle?”

  “I never said it had anything to do with the eagle. I was wondering if you happened to notice Tim Grindle hanging around the Den on Tuesday night. You know Tim, I take it?”

  Elmut drew the blanket closer around his shoulders. “Yeah, he wanted me to teach him taxidermy because I was Native. What is it with you people that you keep asking me to teach you taxidermy? Stuffing dead animals is a white thing.”

  “Why do you do it then?”

  “Because you people pay good money for it.”

  “Taxidermy is messy business. Where do you do your work? Not in this cramped trailer.”

  Again: a hesitation. “Friend has a barn in Kingfield he lets me use.”

  Charley couldn’t deny the quality of the mounts on display. But he also knew that, for all his big talk, Tomer Elmut wasn’t as remotely woods-wise as his ancestors, which was probably why he’d resorted to poaching that piebald doe.

  “You didn’t buy a spruce grouse from Tim Grindle?”

  “If I wanted a fool hen, I could get one on my own. I don’t need some wannabe Davy Crockett to do my hunting.”

  “Tuesday night, did you see Tim Grindle?”

  Elmut covered his bruised and swelling mouth with the frozen bag. His eyes gave nothing away. But Charley’s intuition told him that thoughts were scratching and scurrying around the man’s mind.

  “I was cooking,” he said from behind the ice pack. “When I’m in the kitchen, I don’t know who comes in. Let alone who’s hanging around outside.”

  Charley grinned. “I never said the boy was outside.”

  “Kids aren’t allowed inside the bar unaccompanied. Don’t try to trip me up with your double-talk. I didn’t see him. Is that all you’ve got for me? Are we done?”

  The desperation in his voice was as good as an admission for Charley: Tomer Elmut had seen Tim Grindle on Tuesday night.

  “How long have you been cooking at the Bear’s Den, Mr. Elmut?”

  “Fourteen months. Why?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “No, but I need specie to function in your capitalist system.”

  “I’m unfamiliar with that term. Does it mean money? Legal tender?”

  “Nothing tender about capitalism,” Elmut said, smirking at his own joke.

  “I have been pondering all the problems you’ve had in your kitchen.”

  Elmut let the bag of corn sag from his face. “It ain’t my kitchen. It’s Levasseur’s kitchen. I guess you could say he’s had a run of bad luck.”

  “I noticed the kitchen was closed when I was there earlier. Given the Bear Den’s recent history, I deduced there’d been another health and safety violation. Because Friday wouldn’t be a normal night off for a bar cook.”

  “Inspector found a slab of expired bacon in the back of the fridge. Levasseur swears he just looked at the date on the package, and it was good for a month. Almost like someone substituted the fresh bacon for an old rank slab.”

  “Mocelomogewinuwiw,” said Charley.

  “Is that something else your Passamaquoddy buddy taught you? Is it supposed to impress me? I am Penobscot. You people think all of us speak the same language.”

  “No, sir. I don’t think that at all.”

  Elmut clearly didn’t want to ask the question but was unable to stop himself. “What does it mean?”

  “It means your boss is an unlucky person.”

  It must have hurt Tomer Elmut to grin because his split lip began to bleed again.

  9.

  Ora awakened when Charley returned home. She sat up in bed. Her hair was mussed in the way he found attractive. She listened to him narrate the events of the past hours as he undressed.

  “Where are you with this?” she asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  He appreciated his wife’s willingness to serve as both a sounding board and a spur to action.

  “Tim hasn’t been seen since Tuesday night when he made that call to Ricki Tripp outside the den of iniquity. My gut tells me Tomer Elmut saw him there. The odds are good that Elmut is the man who was buying Tim’s illegal game.”

  “Do you think he might have hurt the boy?”

  “Elmut talks like a revolutionary, but I don’t know if he’s ever spent a night in jail for his hijinks. I doubt he would’ve hurt Tim if it meant risking Ed Grindle’s wrath. But if he knows what became of the young man, he isn’t telling.”

  “So where might Tim have gone?”

  Charley drew his service revolver from its holster and slid the gun into the nightstand drawer. Then he unbuckled his heavy Sam Browne belt and hung it in the closet beside his uniform.

  “Well, he would have known that his brother was in lockup and the house was empty. So he might have walked home through the woods for his things and whatever money he had in his squirrel cache. He’d mentioned stealing his brother’s snowmobile to Ricki. I should have asked Ed if his sled was missing.”

  “So call him again.”

  “Ed won’t talk to me, assuming he’s even conscious. I’ll have to go over myself in the morning to see firsthand. If the sled’s gone, I’m not sure what it means. If the sled’s there, then I’d better start searching the woods between Bigelow and Pickle Hill for Tim’s frozen corpse.”

  “You reported his disappearance to the state. Why isn’t Human Services making him a priority?”

  He unbuttoned and unzipped his wool pants and stepped out of them. “You’ve had students like Tim, Boss.”

  “Don’t call me that, Charley,” she said, trying to hide a smile because she secretly enjoyed the nickname. “Tell me more about this Tomer Elmut.”

  He turned from the closet in his boxer shorts, his welterweight’s physique crisscrossed with scars he’d received in the war. “Tomer thinks of himself as a political activist, but he’s more like one of those yippies who went around throwing pies in people’s faces in the sixties. I’d bet a penny he’s behind all those health and safety violations at the Den. He’s trying to sabotage his loathsome employer’s business. How Levasseur hasn’t cottoned to the truth is a mystery.”

  “Tomer Elmut would do those things even if it means losing his job?”

  “He doesn’t care two cents about that. The man is what a buddy of mine from Wyoming used to call a professional saddle spur.”

  “And you’re certain that he and Tim were acquainted?”

  “He admitted that the boy had asked him for taxidermy lessons.”

  “In exchange for supplying illegal pelts to mount as some sort of protest against federal protections?”

  Charley shrugged. “The Penobscots would disown the man if they knew what an embarrassment he is in the woods. Hitting a roosting eagle would be pushing the limits of his skill as a marksman. I could see him enlisting Tim’s help in obtaining pelts and skins for mounting.”

  He had almost convinced himself of his own hypothesis. But as he sat down in his boxers on the side of the bed, Ora said, “Does Tomer Elmut strike you as someone who could afford to pay Tim Grindle two hundred dollars for a spruce grouse?”

  They’d never slept together on anything but a full-size mattress. The springs creaked as he leaned over her. “Damn it, Boss, just when I think I have a watertight theory, you pull out a pin to prick it.”

  She put a hand against his face. “I wouldn’t be any good to you if I didn’t push you to be your best.”

  He crawled under the covers, reached across her bed-warmed body to turn off the lamp, and growled in her ear until she couldn’t stop herself from laughing.

  10.

  Sunrise the next morning found Charley heading north on his Ski-Doo across frozen Flagstaff Pond. The wind had turned southerly in the night, bringing forty-degree temperatures to the North Maine Woods. The top layer of ice was already melting, there were puddles between the pressure ridges, and the sled’s tracks sent spray into the balmy air. The unseasonable warmth was transmuting the ice and snow into vapor. Pickle Hill was hidden behind a wet white sheet of fog.

  Charley had always been a daredevil at heart. Instead of checking his speed, he used the limited visibility to test his reflexes, jumping ridges, swerving around ponds. If he kept up this recklessness, Ora warned him, he was destined for a nasty crash.

  The trees along the north side of the pond came up on him fast. Charley made a sharp turn as he braked. He followed the icy shoreline until he found the marked trail leading into the woods.

  In the forest, where the cold lingered in the shadows, the mist was thinner. Coming around a bend, he was surprised by the vivid greenness of a patch of Christmas ferns that seemed not to know it was midwinter.

  The warden was so enjoying the ride that he took a wrong turn where the trail forked. He recognized his mistake immediately, but instead of backing up or turning around, he continued forward. This trail also would get him where he wanted to go; it intersected the Flagstaff Road up ahead. From there, he could follow it east to Pickle Hill.

  In his mind he began to recite Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (he had grown up during a time that valued memorization). Ora had told him the poem didn’t mean what most people assumed. Charley didn’t care; he enjoyed the plainspoken beauty of the language.

  By the time he’d reached the last line, he found himself nearing the end of the path, as well. He decelerated as he crested a plowed snowbank; the weight of the engine dropped his skis onto the sand-strewn logging road.

  It was a rough ride after that. The skis and track of his snowmobile made a hell of a racket, louder than a wheeled motor vehicle. And he felt every jolt in his joints and ligaments.

  As slow as he was going, he was surprised to catch up to a pair of hazy taillights. A pickup was idling in the fog. Grouse hunters often crept along in this manner, edging quietly in their vehicles to blast the chicken-sized birds out their open windows. But Charley’s instinct told him this was no “heater hunter.”

  The driver of the truck seemed to be searching for something in the snowbanks.

  He saw now that it was a blue Silverado with a dimly lit vanity plate:

  GRNDL

  What the hell was Ed Grindle doing? Charley remembered the man saying that his last dog, an Akita, had gotten loose and been run over by a snowplow. Had the same fate befallen the Doberman?

  He considered hanging back to watch.

  But patience had never been one of Charley Stevens’s virtues.

  He opened the throttle and shot forward, coming up beside the idling Chevy before Ed knew what was happening. Damned if Grindle wasn’t sobbing inside the cab.

  As the truck rolled to a stop, Charley left the engine of his Ski-Doo running. The warden removed his helmet, set it on the seat, and ran a hand through his buzzed hair. Then he approached the driver’s door.

  Tears streamed down Grindle’s hairy face. His nose was red enough to light a sleigh.

  It’s not a dog he’s looking for. It’s his brother.

  Words rarely failed Charley, but he was having trouble forming the question he needed to ask. He was still struggling when Ed produced a handgun from the passenger seat, pressed the muzzle to his own temple, and fired.

  11.

  “What happened?” murmured Ed Grindle.

  “You flinched,” Charley said. “Lots of people do. The next time you shoot yourself, put the barrel in your mouth with the front sight against the palate. You’re more likely to have success.”

  Grindle was stretched across the bench of his pickup with his shins and boots hanging out the driver’s door. Charley stood outside the passenger’s door so he could wrap his patient’s enormous head with gauze secured by an ACE bandage. Fortunately, the bleeding was slight.

  “As it is, you barely grazed yourself,” the warden said, not unkindly.

  Ed groaned and tried to sit up, but he lacked the energy.

  The floor mats were littered with crushed beer cans. The grainy, alcoholic funk coming off the man turned Charley’s stomach. But Grindle’s appearance—the crumbs in his stubble, the lemony tinge to the sclera of his eyes—and his raw emotional state awakened a feeling of pathos in him.

  He tucked a rolled blanket under the man’s melon-sized head. It would slow the bleeding and keep him from passing out. “While you’re regaining your strength, why don’t you tell me what you were doing?”

  The question prompted Ed to begin leaking tears again.

  “I killed him.”

  “You killed your brother?”

  “You saw me do it. He was the only family I’ve got left!”

  “But how can you be certain, I mean.”

  “When I came home from lockup, Tim had left a message saying he was feeling worse. He said he was going to make me pay. But he sounded like he was dying. And he never called back.”

 

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