I looked up to see a camera winking at me from the corner. There must have been another aimed at the lot where I’d parked.
“It’s a 1980.”
“Wicked cool. Where are you headed today?”
I had decided not to mention Kellam, lest he have standing orders refusing all uninvited visitors.
“I thought I’d do a little small-stream fishing.”
“Where?”
“Anyplace that looks promising.”
I might have imagined the note of suspicion that crept into the voice of my watcher. “We don’t get many anglers coming in to fish the brooks here with the Fish River and the Allagash so close. What time are you coming out?”
“I figured I’d fish until dusk, then drive out after twilight.”
“You need to fill out the sheet in front of you. Put it in an envelope with seven dollars and slide it through the slot in the box to your right.”
Clipped to a clipboard was a form no less comprehensive than an application for United States citizenship. I didn’t lie but fudged the details—used my middle name, John, instead of my first. Anyone looking to identify me could do so, but I didn’t want to make it child’s play.
As I was about to leave, the phone rang again.This time it was a different woman’s voice. “Any problems with the form?”
“No.”
“Make sure you’re out by dark. We’d rather not have to send someone looking for you.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Do you know how many times we’ve heard that before?”
23
The forest along the Rocky Brook Road had been logged so hard there was hardly a tree left standing taller than a telephone pole. The state had outlawed wholesale clear-cutting years ago, but you never would’ve known it from the wanton devastation stretching as far as the eye could see.
Vast fields, consisting of stumps and deadfalls, tangled puckerbrush, and a few worthless cedars, extended for miles along both sides of the thoroughfare. Poplars and willows were so splattered with mud from the logging trucks that they seemed nearly sculptural. If you had told me brutal battles had been fought here with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, I would have believed you.
Following the highlighted route I’d drawn on the map, I eventually left the gravel road for a series of poorly maintained jeep trails that delved into the as yet uncut forest. The farther I went, the narrower and rockier these roads became. Raspberry bushes scraped paint from the sides of my vehicle with their scratching fingers.
Someone had come through ahead of me, and recently, too. Tire marks showed in the muddy dips between the ups and downs. The prints belonged to a Jeep. It had to be Speed Racer, I thought. There was only a single set, meaning that my lead-footed friend hadn’t yet departed, at least by this route. It seemed an odd coincidence, to say the least, that the two of us would have followed the same twists and turns in the maze.
The Jeep had finally turned down a trail so narrow a moose would have caught his antlers in the branches on both sides. So he hadn’t come here to visit Kellam, it seemed. I wondered what lay down the secret path he had taken.
It began to rain again, just enough to require that I turn on my wipers.
The lieutenant’s land was protected by a steel gate, which I was startled to find standing open—as if I were expected. I looked in the treetops for a security camera but saw nothing but the roughly rectangular holes made by pileated woodpeckers. Kellam guarded his privacy; I took it as a testament to his bushcraft that he could hide a spy cam from me.
Descending the hill, I caught the first dull flashes of the lake, metallic gray beneath the heavy overcast. I swung around a curve, pulled as much by gravity as by the engine.
And nearly ran over a man in the road.
He was black-skinned. He had a shaved head. His limbs were long and thin, and the ranginess gave him a misleading appearance of being tall when he was only lanky. He wore a red kerchief knotted around his neck, a rain-dappled shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, and baggy jeans rolled above bare ankles. His shoes were dirty brogues.
In his hand, he held a long tree-pruning tool with a curved, serrated blade at the end. At first glance I mistook it for a medieval polearm.
I unrolled my window. “I’m sorry! I almost hit you.”
“Bon apre-midi. I took you by surprise, yes?”
“I was going too fast.”
“You did not expect me, too.”
The accent spoke of some island blown by the trade winds. Based on the French greeting, my first guess was Haiti. But for all I knew, he could have been a resident of New Orleans’s Fifth Ward or even a visitor from Montreal.
And I had thought Presque Isle felt foreign.
“Is this Stan Kellam’s place?”
“You are his friend, no?”
“We know each other, but I wouldn’t call myself his friend.”
“No? He told me to open the gate because he was expecting a visitor.”
“That wouldn’t be me.”
“You are just here by hazard, then?” As he approached, I saw that his skin was welted with insect bites. A cloud of mosquitoes, blackflies, and deerflies hung over his shining head, but he seemed unbothered by this personal plague.
“Coincidence would be a better word,” I said. “Did he tell you the name of the person he’s expecting?”
“Michael, he said.”
“That’s my name. But I prefer Mike.”
“I am called Edouard. But he knew you were coming, no?”
I couldn’t fathom how, but I put on a smile for the benefit of the man at my window. “Where are you from, Edouard?”
“Port-au-Prince. You know Haiti?”
“I know the name.”
“You have no need to know more! It is a long way from here. A long way from Maine.”
I couldn’t argue the point, least of all at that moment. “Do you work for Stan, Edouard?”
“For two years, I am his—how you say?—his handyman.” Then he broke into a broader grin. “He is a generous personality. My sister never
