Past Haystack Mountain, the landscape changed from farm fields to hills bristling with timber. A visitor might mistake these forests for wilderness, but they were just another cropland. The trees comprised plantations of softwoods—spruces and firs, mostly—that grew fast and could be harvested at the earliest opportunity to turn into paper for magazines and toilet tissue.
During the era of the river drives, when cut logs were transported on highways of water during the spring floods, the Maine North Woods had been largely unbroken by roads. The practices of the old-time loggers had caused many environmental problems, but they had left the boreal forest more or less intact. Bigfoot could have been hiding here, and no one would’ve been the wiser.
Now you could drive the length and breadth of Aroostook County on dirt and gravel roads. From the air, the North Woods was crisscrossed with innumerable scars.
“This used to be good country once,” Charley would sometimes grumble when we were airborne, “but now it’s nothing but a bunch of damned tree farms, owned by New York bankers who wouldn’t know a maple from a magnolia.”
“And you accused me of being a young old fart! What does that make you?”
“Somebody who’s lived past his expiration date.”
“I won’t tell Ora you said that.”
“Thank you.”
I had noticed that my friend had gotten crankier and more backward-looking since Stacey had left for Florida. His favorite daughter had shared some of her youthful energy with the old man and kept him focused on the future. Without her, Charley had begun to drift, like so many people his age, into reveries of lost days.
No wonder Duke Dupree’s badge had affected him so profoundly.
Knowing that Angie Bouchard had been responsible for the shield resurfacing was interesting but unhelpful without context. What was her connection to Scott Pellerin? She would have been a child when he disappeared.
I was banking on Stan Kellam filling in some of the missing puzzle pieces. He had been Pellerin’s commanding officer and handler, and Ora made it sound as if he’d taken the young investigator’s death as hard as Charley had. But when I thought of Kellam—commanding, conniving, brilliant—I was reminded of the specific language in that letter to me:
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 didn’t associate patience with Stan Kellam. The man had had a reputation for routinely exploding at his subordinates in red-faced rage. But guile? Absolutely. The way he’d tried to maneuver Kathy Frost into leaving the service after her husband’s death.
Ora had told me that the former lieutenant had purchased an old sporting camp on Moccasin Pond in a vast swatch of Maine referred to as the Unorganized Territories. A few minutes with The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer located the pond by latitude and longitude, but the map was less helpful in plotting a course. The dotted lines indicating roads might be passable or not, and forget about GPS in that untraveled tract of woods. Kellam had chosen to retreat from the world in a place where no one actually lived. Population: zero.
These unincorporated townships were so remote, they didn’t even have true names but were marked on the atlas by letters and numbers: T13 R17, T12 R9, and so on. Not all the dotted lines leading to Moccasin Pond on the map even had names. I would be lucky to find Kellam’s compound and luckier to find my way out of the woods if darkness fell before it was time to leave.
The Rocky Brook Road headed west from Portage through the heart of the state’s commercial timberland to the Québec border outside Saint-Pamphile. Instead of asphalt, or even sand, it had been surfaced with shards of granite. The sharp stones were famously fond of slicing tires to shreds. I never traveled the North Woods logging roads without at least two spares.
I drove at a good clip, knowing that poking along wouldn’t spare me from getting a flat. Nevertheless, a speedster in a silver Jeep Wrangler came racing up behind me, then swerved past before I could give him room. The license plate was so mud-plastered the digits were unreadable.
In the old days, when I had worked as a patrol warden, I would have chased down the Jeep to write the driver a citation. There was no law against being an asshole, but he had cut in front of me so aggressively he’d nearly forced me off the road. But I was trying to control my temper.
I half hoped I would catch Speed Racer at the Fish River Checkpoint, where recreational visitors to the North Woods were required to stop, register, and pay an entrance fee. By the time I came upon the little gatehouse, however, my friend in the Jeep had already blown past the stop sign and continued through.
The checkpoint belonged to a nonprofit organization that acted as the de facto watchmen for the private owners of large tracts of land in northern Maine. The little building was more vertical than horizontal, painted a soft mint green, and steepled with two antennas.
The ironic thing was that, as a state game warden, I had carte blanche to pass through the gate without explanation, but my visit would have been captured on hidden cameras, and might have set into motion a chain of events whose outcome I couldn’t predict. If at all possible, I didn’t want the higher-ups in the Warden Service asking questions about what I was up to.
A buzzer sounded as I entered the cabin. I crossed to a counter and waited, then called into the room beyond. Instead a telephone rang. It was an old-fashioned Bakelite model with a dial and curly cord. I picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Good afternoon,” said a female voice. “That’s a honey of
