The decision before me—choosing to believe in Charley’s essential goodness—seemed to have momentous importance, as if in making it, I wasn’t just defending my friend but also somehow defining myself.
Because I had been betrayed before by trusting in the character of a person I’d thought I’d understood, I had vowed never to be fooled again, no matter the circumstances. But I couldn’t live my life distrusting the people closest to me.
I made my decision. I trusted Charley.
Kathy had been true to her word. When I opened my email, there was a message with the subject line: DUKE DUPREE!
He killed himself after his draft board refused his application to join the army after Pearl Harbor. His wife found him in the outhouse with a shotgun at his feet and half his head blown off. That’s the legend in Millinocket anyhow.
Of course, you won’t see this message since you’re deep in the woods at Debouille Pond with no signal. I hope the char are biting!
PS: Call Dani.
Dupree having committed suicide explained why his badge had held no particular value to his next of kin. The shield symbolized his dishonor. Dupree might even have pawned the badge before his death. Who could say how many hands it had passed through over the decades?
As intriguing as this information was, it brought me no closer to understanding why Charley had reacted the way he had when he saw the badge on Smith’s table. What connection did he have to a failed game warden who’d died before he was born? If anything, I felt myself to be at a greater loss than I’d been before I read Kathy’s message.
Meanwhile, Ora was waiting. I could picture her in the camp, in her wheelchair with the green blanket over her knees, Vivaldi playing on the old cassette stereo. I owed her the truth, I realized. I couldn’t have it both ways. In order to trust, I needed also to be trustworthy.
“Where are you?” was her first question.
“I’m at a motel in Houlton.”
“Did you find Mr. Smith?”
As if the jackass deserved to be called mister, I thought.
But that was Ora Stevens. She would grant the devil the dignity of being addressed with an honorific.
She listened to my account of the day without interruption until I came to the part of the story where I’d met Nick Francis and he’d brought up the bungled undercover investigation fifteen years earlier.
“This has to do with that man Michaud,” she said, her voice rising as the truth became clear to her. “He is the one in the picture in Charley’s cigar box!”
“Yes.”
“I should have recognized him, but when it happened, I couldn’t bring myself to read the papers. The grief was too much for me. And I could tell how greatly Charley was suffering. Of course this is all about Scott. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“What connection did Scott Pellerin have with Charley?”
“Oh, Mike,” she said. “Scott Pellerin was once you.”
20
While we talked, I opened the browser on my phone and brought up the Warden Service website. I found the page dedicated to fallen officers.
In his commemorative photo, Scott Pellerin was wearing the same dress uniform—red coat and short-brimmed green Stetson—that I had worn the day I was sworn into service.
His eyes were an unremarkable brown. His hair was an unremarkable brown. Perhaps it was the anonymity of his features that had made his superiors think him suitable for undercover work. Scott Pellerin had a face you could easily forget.
“They were like father and son,” Ora said. “Scott’s own father was a merchant mariner and alcoholic. His mother was one of those enablers. Scott never had a male role model until he met Charley.”
The resemblance to my own life story wasn’t exact—but close enough to be unsettling.
“Of course, you and Scott had different personalities,” Ora continued, “and there wasn’t anything between him and Stacey. She was just a teenager when he died, busy with her friends.”
Still, I was surprised Stacey had never mentioned this Pellerin to me. Maybe she hadn’t realized the extent of her father’s connection to the young man. She had been a rebellious teen, uninterested in her parents’ lives. A typical adolescent in other words.
“When you say we had different personalities, what do you mean?”
“Scott wasn’t as well educated as you, but he was extremely intelligent. He was quiet, but not shy. Strangers seemed to warm to him easily. Maybe because he seemed so interested in people.”
Unlike me.
“What else?”
“You were both brave to the point of being foolhardy. Scott loved taking risks. He probably would have grown out of it, as you have. Charley had been teaching him to fly, and he was close to getting his pilot’s license when—you know what happened.”
“Not really,” I said. “All I know is that he was working undercover in St. Ignace, infiltrating a group of poachers, and that someone must have gotten suspicious because he didn’t make his scheduled rendezvous with his handler.”
“Stanley Kellam. The lieutenant was Scott’s handler.”
I had met Stan “the Man” Kellam a dozen times before his retirement. He used to run Division E, which included the entirety of Aroostook County: roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
“Did they have a starting point for the search?”
“Scott mentioned that the poachers kept an illegal camp near Tornado Path on the Allagash River, so that was where they focused initially. They dredged Round Pond, which is just above the path.”
“I’ve been there,” I said. “Remember when Stacey and I paddled the Allagash?”
“Oh, yes. I had forgotten.” I heard the tinkling sound of ice in a glass: her nightcap. “The search expanded to include the entire waterway, south to Chamberlain Lake and east to Ashland and then west to the Québec border and north to Estcourt Station.”
She was describing a search area of a thousand square miles.
“Tell me about this Pierre Michaud.”
“I only know what Charley told me. That he was a horrible man. He shot people’s
