“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.
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.
“That’s him, getting away,” said the tanned old man.
Moments later, I heard the unmistakable noise of someone pulling the cord on an outboard motor.
I took off down the hill, rounding the corner of the building just as the engine sparked to life. Smith was seated in the stern of a battered, square-bowed aluminum boat. His hairy face was bruised and bandaged. He was wearing a flapping bathrobe over board trunks. His
