One Last Lie Read online

  As a reconnaissance pilot in Vietnam, he wouldn’t have engaged in direct combat, but he had called in the locations of enemy forces who would then have been subjected to air strikes and other bombardments. Depending upon how susceptible he was to guilt, a Bird Dog pilot could feel as if he had the blood of thousands on his hands.

  There might also have been another wartime incident of which I was unaware, something that had happened after Charley had been shot down.

  He seldom spoke of the experience, but he had spent nearly a year in Hỏa Lò Prison, better known as the Hanoi Hilton, where one of his fellow inmates was a future United States senator and presidential candidate. Torture had left him with burns and rope scars. He had suffered a broken leg in the crash that had healed badly and yet rarely revealed itself. The only time he showed any sign of a limp was in bitterly cold weather after having already hiked miles across difficult terrain.

  I was falling down a rabbit hole, I realized. My recent investigation of Captain Wheelwright had me focused on the sins of military men, but this mystery had all started with a game warden’s badge. I needed to concentrate on Charley’s life in Maine.

  During the course of his long career as a law enforcement officer, he had never killed another human being. Of that I was close to certain.

  Forget what you’ve read in novels and watched on television—in real life, cops don’t respect other cops who are quick to pull a trigger. In just seven years, I had already acquired a reputation for being a gunfighter. Charley had made it abundantly clear that having a high death count was not something of which I should be proud. Just the opposite, in fact.

  I returned to the letter.

  It means there’s a man out there who’s kept quiet all these years, waiting for me to wise up to my foolishness, a man of patience and guile. He’s been expecting me, I fear, and taken precautions. I can’t put Ora or the girls in danger of his retribution.

  These sentences suggested that finding this badge had led Charley to conclude he might’ve been duped. The notion seemed outlandish to me. But even though I had yet to meet a criminal mastermind, it didn’t mean they didn’t exist. Obviously, Charley had his suspicions. He would be extra careful in confronting anyone he suspected might have gotten away with murder.

  I know you well enough to reckon that you won’t heed my words of caution.

  Damned right, there was nothing he could do to stop me.

  Which is why I am leaving you in the dark, too. I will cover my trail to keep you from following, but I fear I may have taught you too well.

  Charley needed my help, but he didn’t want to be responsible for placing me in danger. Why else leave a letter worded this way if he didn’t hope I would disobey his instructions? Why not give me the name of the man or men he suspected? Wouldn’t it be more dangerous for me to wander blindly into the crosshairs of a masterful killer?

  Who are you, Charley?

  What have you done?

  What do you require me to do?

  Lying atop the bedspread in the humid dark, smelling the lake alive with new life, I considered these questions. My younger self had believed fiercely in the idea that we can never truly know another human being, that we are solipsistic creatures doomed to brief, lonely existences. Experience had taught me that we can only escape our private prisons by trusting and giving ourselves to others. Now, for the first time in years, I found myself seeing the face of someone I loved in my mind’s eye and wondering about the stranger behind the mask.

  13

  I awakened after dawn to the singing of a mourning warbler outside my window. Millions of Americans have heard this species of woodland bird but will never see one. The warbler’s recorded song is used by television sound engineers when they need background effects suggestive of peaceful mornings and idyllic golf courses. Hear a bird singing in a commercial? Odds are it’s a mourning warbler.

  The lonesome bird was still singing his heart out, weeks after he should have been settling down to nest. The poor little guy hadn’t found a mate.

  I put on a Henley T-shirt and jeans, laced up my Bean boots, stripped the bed, and threw my duffel over my shoulder.

  I stepped outside into another drowsy morning. The tree trunks were wet as if with perspiration. The earthy smell of leaf mold and crumbling stumps rose from the forest floor. Orange fungi erupted from the wounds in the bark of the rotten logs.

  As I made my way up the ramp toward the house, I caught the scent of frying doughnuts coming from the kitchen. I began to salivate like my wolf back home.

  I poured myself a mug of coffee and sat down at the table while Ora dusted the doughnuts with cinnamon and powdered sugar.

  “Stacey called late last night,” she remarked with a casualness that sounded forced. “She said you skipped out on her without saying goodbye.”

  “I was at her house—getting cleaned up—when you called me about Charley.”

  “She thought you must have had a crisis of conscience about Dani.”

  True enough. “Did you tell her I was here?”

  “It would have meant telling her about her father, and she already sensed something was wrong. She said she was worried about him and didn’t know why. I lied and told her he was off on a camping trip, but I know she didn’t believe me.”

  Despite having been raised in a Catholic household, I had always been a skeptic when it came to paranormal matters. Then I’d met Ora and Stacey Stevens. Their “feelings” about distant events had often turned out to be true, far more frequently than could have been predicted by random chance.

  “Stacey shares her mother’s ESP.”

  “You make it sound supernatural that we’re emotionally connected.”

  “I’m not sure it isn’t.”

  While she prepared the rest of our breakfast—strawberries and home-baked granola—I thought of the other envelope Charley had left me, the letter to his wife. I would keep it secret for the time being. He intended it to be shared only in the event of his death. I hated myself for not telling her about it.

  “What is your plan?” she asked.

  “I think I’ll pay a visit to John Smith and find out how he really got his injuries.”

  “Are you sure that’s a wise idea?”

  “Of course it isn’t.”

  “Stop in to see Nick Francis on your way north. You’ll be passing through the reservation anyway. Maybe he knows more than he’s saying.”

  “You told me you’d already spoken with Nick.”

  “But I’m not Mike Bowditch.”

  It was the first time since I’d arrived that I’d seen playfulness in those beautiful eyes. The good humor lasted only an instant.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, I was driving northeast along the Stud Mill Road, a gravel-strewn highway for logging trucks that cuts through the heart of the woods from the border crossing at Calais to the outskirts of Bangor. Eighteen-wheelers, loaded with unskinned tree trunks, barreled along at terrific speeds, heedless of deer, moose, or other motorists. I emerged into the little hamlet of Grand Lake Stream with my Scout plastered with mud kicked up by their massive wheels.

  I had made my home in this village once, during a hiatus in my service as a game warden. I had worked briefly as a commercial fishing guide, taking “sports” out onto Big Lake and the St. Croix River to catch salmon, trout, and smallmouth bass. I had not been unhappy. It was in Grand Lake Stream that I had asked Stacey out on our first date. And she had said yes.

  But the general store had changed owners twice since I had been away, old-time residents had died, houses had been sold to people whose names I didn’t recognize.

  I kept driving until I had entered Indian Township. According to the most recent census, just six hundred or so people lived there now. They and three thousand of their relatives, scattered about the state, were all that was left of the great Passamaquoddy Nation.

  The Passamaquoddy were one of five Native American tribes in Maine, the others being the
Penobscots, the Maliseets, the Abenaki, and the Micmacs. Like American Indians elsewhere, they had not prospered during the centuries since Europeans built their first blockhouses on the continent. I couldn’t help but think of my visit to the Miccosukee restaurant. In a single day, I had left one pocket of Indian country for another.

  Peter Dana Point, named for one of their most venerated leaders, jutted into the narrows between Long and Big Lakes. The road passed through unbroken forest for a half mile before it transformed into a strip of identical houses. These were all brick, all one-story, and most had cluttered yards. Near the tip of the point was a ball field and a school and some buildings designed by architects who specialize in post offices and other nondescript governmental structures.

  Every person I passed—every child playing in a yard, every middle-aged man riding a bicycle, every group of women smoking on a porch—watched me drive past with interest. The reservation drew few non-Indian sightseers. What was there to see?

  Nick Francis lived on Pit Row, a road named for its defining feature: a gravel excavation at the terminus. I pulled into his dooryard and turned off the engine. The home boasted a fantastic flower garden, bright with still-blooming purple lupines, orange poppies, pink azaleas, and white peonies. Someone in the Francis household had a wicked green thumb.

  Nick’s property also had its share of “yard art”: the term Mainers use for the random items that can accumulate outside houses. In addition to the usual ATVs, snowmobiles, and old appliances, there were half a dozen canoes, including several made by the owner of the house. Nick’s birchbark designs were not works of art or faithful renditions of his people’s historic watercraft, but they were impressive canoes, nonetheless.

  I didn’t know Francis well. Our only interactions had been through Charley, but I knew that Nick had been a tribal game warden during the same period when my friend had patrolled the forests around the rez. Later, he had become police chief and, later still, tribal governor before some sort of scandal—there had been the suggestion of self-dealing—had led to crushing electoral defeat.

  “If Nick Francis was padding his pocket, then I am the Queen of Sheba,” Charley had remarked when the news broke.

  The two men were what Wheelwright and Fixico should have been, it occurred to me. Men from different cultures who had walked through fire for each other and would do so again. There was something infinitely hopeful in their unbreakable friendship.

  That said, I was unsure how I would be received by the retired tribal governor. White people rarely drove out to the point, and not all who did came with friendly intentions. Like the rest of Down East Maine, the reservation was in the grip of the opioid epidemic. Most of the worst dealers were whites, or at least they had been when I was stationed in the area.

  The front door opened as I mounted the stairs.

  A girl stood before me. Nick’s granddaughter? He was a longtime widower who had lost his wife when she was young and had never remarried. Charley told me he had raised his son and daughters himself.

  I guessed the girl to be around thirteen, although I am a poor judge of children’s ages. She was pencil thin with a round face, wide-set eyes, and hair shaved on one side of her head and long on the other. She was wearing a hoodie, denim cutoffs, and flip-flops.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Yeah?” she said, forming the word around a mouthful of chewing gum.

  “I’m hoping to speak with Governor Francis. Is he at home?”

  “Governor! He ain’t been that in a while. What you want him for?”

  “I’m a friend of a friend—Charley Stevens. My name’s Mike Bowditch.”

  “I’m Molly.” Her mobile eyes narrowed in recognition. “Wait a second! I know you. You used to be the warden out on the lake. You checked our boat for life vests once—wrote my pa a ticket. He tore it up and spat in your face.”

  The man in question was Nick’s son and namesake, a troubled soul whose temper only worsened with every alcoholic beverage he consumed, and it wasn’t unusual for him to drink a dozen Twisted Teas a day. He had claimed not to recognize my authority to write him a citation, even though I had stopped his pontoon party boat in Musquash Bay, outside Passamaquoddy waters.

  “I remember that day well.”

  She cracked her gum. “My pa’s an asshole. I’m surprised you didn’t shoot him when he ripped up that ticket and threw it into the lake.”

  “We try to avoid using lethal force in littering cases.”

  She smiled wide enough for me to identify the color of her gum as purple. “It would have saved us some trouble. He ran off on us a few years back. Met a Maliseet girl at the powwow on Indian Island. That’s where my gramp is—up north, trying to get money out of my dad.”

  “North where?”

  “Houlton. The Maliseet ain’t got a rez of their own. They got screwed out of one by you people.”

  I absorbed the blow, because what was there to say? “White people haven’t treated the Passamaquoddies very well either.”

  She scratched the stubble side of her hairdo. She moved her gum around the inside of her mouth. I had scored zero points with that one.

  I offered my best smile. “You wouldn’t have a number for your grandfather?”

  Molly Francis sighed and fished a bedazzled phone out of the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie. She asked for my number and sent me her grandfather’s contact information.

  “He might not be in a good mood,” she said. “Gramp’s a good man, but my pa brings out the beast in him. By the way, it ain’t Passamaquoddies. It’s Passamaquoddy. Plural. The s is something you whites added for us.”

  14

  From Indian Township, I followed US Route 1 north. The road paralleled the international boundary with Canada, and at certain crossroads, there were signs pointing east toward official crossings. I passed more than one white-and-green Border Patrol vehicle.

  I wondered if any of the agents had come from the neon streets of Miami. Did they consider their Maine assignments exiles or escapes from the front lines of the immigration wars?

  After a while, the pine woods gave way to hardscrabble farms that had never been prosperous. The thin glacial soil was too poor for crops to thrive. Most of the pastures hadn’t been grazed in ages. In the abandoned apple orchards, the blossoms had fallen, and the trees looked like they had piles of snow beneath them.

  In the flyspeck town of Orient, I passed a trailer with a NO TRESPASSING sign and a Confederate flag flying from a jutting broomstick repurposed as a flagpole. The property itself seemed to consist of nothing but the ancient mobile home and a yard land-mined with dog piles. Why were the owners of shitholes the most belligerent about keeping strangers off their precious land?

  Sadly, the sight of the Stars and Bars flying proudly in Maine, the heart of the Union, had ceased to shock me.

  * * *

  John Smith had an unlisted address, of course. Luckily, a dispatcher at the Regional Communications Center in Houlton owed me a favor. I had cut her teenage son some slack on a poaching charge; he was a good kid who had fallen in with backwoods delinquents.

  I typed the address the dispatcher gave me into my GPS and was surprised to discover that John Smith owned waterfront property. Given the description I’d gotten of the two-bit fence, I had assumed he dwelled on some dirty, dead-end road. Not that Hook Lake was considered a posh body of water. But lakeside houses in Maine don’t come cheap, and even the ones that have been passed down over generations are freighted with crushing tax burdens, requiring income streams rarely achievable by men who dealt antiques at flea markets.

  From Houlton, I sped west through a picturesque countryside utterly unlike the croft land I had just left. Here were great, prosperous farms, grand old homesteads with majestic oaks and elms shading the front yards. Many of them had signs advertising their produce and meat as organically raised and free of genetically modified organisms.

  How quickly one Maine could become another.

&
nbsp; After a few minutes, I found the lake road. The clouds remained unbroken, with no chinks of sunlight between them, and I had the feeling the drizzle might begin any second. I caught sight of water shimmering like hammered tin through the leaves of the maples. I eased my foot off the gas.

  The house was the second of three cottages built on lots that were longer than they were wide. The developer had marked out the property lines to maximize access to the water. In the paved drive of Smith’s residence was parked a dented van that matched Carol Boyce’s description. I pulled in behind it so our bumpers kissed.

  In the neighboring cottage, a white-haired man peeked out of his garage. He had the physique of someone who swam two miles every morning. He was wearing white short shorts and a lemon tank top. His deeply tanned skin shone with old-fashioned suntan oil, not the UV-blocking kind.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  He chuckled mysteriously and made his way down the hill to his dock.

  I strode up the front steps and pushed the glowing doorbell. I heard a muted chime inside the house but no footfalls. I pushed the button again and waited, this time for a full thirty seconds.

  Smith could be passed out in there, drugged or drunk.

  A warm breeze stirred the leaves of the aspens planted around the property. Another low-pressure front moving in from the south, the threat of afternoon thunderstorms.

  I backed away from the doorstep to see if I was being watched from one of the windows, but there were no signs of life.

  The old neighbor had returned to the garage for a life vest. He still wore the same expression of ironical amusement.

  “Did you come here to kick the crap out of him, too?” he asked in an accent I associated with Martin Scorsese movies.

  “No.”

  “Shame.”

  Just then, I thought I heard a screen door closing in the back of the house. It wasn’t a sharp bang. More like a metallic tap. Then thudding noises that sounded like a man with a wooden leg running down a wooden dock.