She chuckled. “The Amish might not be big on televisions and computers, but they do love their .22 rifles.”
“How about crossbows?”
“If their faith permits them to use firearms, I doubt they’re forbidden from using bows of any kind.”
Finally, I had a lead.
19
When I opened the door of my Jeep, Ronette asked to see the crossbow bolt. She peered at the carbon-fiber shaft with a scientist’s concentration.
“If this thing was inside a wolf for days, you’re not going to get any prints off it. You understand that, right?”
“You never know.”
“In this case I do know.” She handed me back the plastic bag. “It would probably be better for the two of us to ride together into Intervale in my patrol truck. It’s clearly a police vehicle. And when they see there are two of us inside, it’ll get the message across not to fuck with us.”
“Are you talking about the Amish?”
She had a big smile that seemed to engage every muscle in her face. “I’m thinking about several individuals, but notably Gorman Peaslee. I’m not looking forward to knocking on his door. We won’t have any trouble with the Amish. Have you ever had any interactions with them before?”
“Not unless you count a five-minute conversation I had with a chair maker at the Common Ground Fair.”
“And?”
“I was surprised by how normal he seemed. I wondered if he might be an impostor wearing a fake beard so he could charge a markup on his furniture.”
“You’re so suspicious of everyone.”
We left my Jeep outside the Intervale Town Hall, where it was less likely to be broken into than if I’d parked it along the Rangeley Road.
“Someone would break into it in the middle of the day?”
“It doesn’t take more than a second to shatter a window.”
I climbed into her truck, which, predictably, was immaculate and somehow had a new-car smell.
I was traveling light: just a gun, a badge, my cuffs, and a knife. It occurred to me that if I couldn’t crack this mystery by day’s end, I would have to go home for supplies and several changes of clothing. I hadn’t seen any motels, which raised the question of where I would stay upon my return.
From the flyspeck municipal center we traveled north. Ronette drove with a practiced casualness. She braked hard and accelerated fast. She paid less attention to the road than to identifying the drivers of passing vehicles and checking posted land for signs of trespassing. I’d begun to wish we’d taken my Jeep instead.
“So what’s going on with you and Dani Tate?” she asked as if the question had recently occurred to her and she hadn’t been waiting until the exact moment when I would be unable to escape.
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s a term my daughter uses about boys on Facebook.”
“You’re better off asking Dani rather than me.”
“If you haven’t forgotten, I was the one who played matchmaker.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“So should I be having second thoughts about you two? Relationships between LEOs can work—because you understand the stresses of each other’s job—or they can be total nightmares.” The acronym LEO stood for “law-enforcement officer.” “On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for being married to a civilian. There are so many days I thank God I married a builder who doesn’t have a clue about the scary shit I see and do every time I go on patrol. Peter’s been so patient with me and such a good dad. He’s even a great cook!”
“You’re lucky.”
“I prefer the term blessed.”
Then, without any warning, Ronette swung a right onto a gravel road that lacked a street sign. As we careened around the corner, I glimpsed several cardboard squares floating in a black ditch between the trees and the graded surface. It took me a moment to recognize the sodden objects as real estate signs that had been uprooted, knocked over, and tossed into the half-frozen water.
I craned my neck, looking back. “Someone who lives here doesn’t want anyone buying land, I take it.”
“Peaslee.”
The first mile or so of the road was the usual second-growth forest, which had sprung up after the woods had been logged to the ground. Most of it was soft wetlands, not fit for anything but alders and willows, but I suspected some good cedars had once flourished in this marsh.
Then the forest parted, and we were looking across a vast field of snow-broken cornstalks. Something like a hundred crows hopped about between the rows, oblivious to a scarecrow, whose shredded shirt flapped in the breeze, and whose sack head had mostly been decapitated by a shotgun blast.
“Peaslee,” Ronette said.
Up ahead we saw the first road sign since we’d left the main thoroughfare. Fluorescent yellow, shaped like a diamond, it depicted the silhouette of a horse pulling a four-wheeled buggy. Someone had blasted holes through the sheet aluminum with double-aught buckshot.
“Peaslee?” I asked.
“Whatever in the world makes you say that?”
Ronette slowed as we entered a birch thicket. The land rose sharply to our left. A narrow drive led up the wooded hill. My inner compass told me this was the base of Number Six Mountain.
“Zane Wilson and his girlfriend, Indigo, live up there in their yurt,” she said.
We continued on until the road was again passing through open cropland. I recognized these as the plowed fields and fenced pastures I had seen from above. In the first plot, three killdeers, having returned from their winter migration, ran hither and yon, unable to locate insects in the clumped soil. In the next, a small herd of mixed sheep nibbled whatever plant matter they had missed on their prior forages. As we passed the fence, a donkey approached to bray at us.
“Better than sheepdogs, my farmer friends tell me,” Ronette said. “Donkeys are naturally aggressive toward canines. They bite, stomp, and kick. If I were a coyote, I’d give these lambkins a wide berth.”
Now the first farmhouse came into view. Immediately apparent, even from a distance, was its newness. The white clapboards reflected the sun like
