“Your sister?”
“Vaneese. You will meet her next.” He beckoned me forward. “Drive that way, and you will see the big house. If you see Ferox, stay in the truck unless you want to get bitten. He killed a bear, that dog! Bon chance.”
Edouard continued up the hill with that cruel-edged tool over his shoulder.
Whatever I had expected from Kellam, it hadn’t been this. Where had he acquired a Haitian factotum? Edouard had mentioned a sister. Was she the cook?
Before me, Moccasin Pond spread out into the hazy distance. Its surface was stippled by light rain. To my left stood several outbuildings. There was a barn for construction equipment and a garage for snowmobiles, a humming structure that seemed to contain the generator that powered the compound, and assorted toolsheds. Down at the water’s edge, a long dock extended from a boathouse into the lake.
To my right was the “big house.” The design, more hotel than home, showed the property’s history as a sporting camp. It had the long porch of an inn, complete with rocking chairs, larger plate glass windows on the first floor, and a row of smaller windows on the second story that suggested multiple bedrooms.
But the cream siding looked new, and the green trim had just been painted, as had the doors, and the roof was fashioned of bright steel for the snow to slide off.
I stepped out of the Scout and heard the breeze sighing in the tall pines and water spilling from the gutters. I breathed deeply to fill my lungs with the wet, balsam-scented air. Then I turned toward the house and saw something that made my heart seize up like a stuck motor.
Bounding toward me came a charcoal-black dog with a square head, a muscular chest, ears clipped to points, and bared fangs. It hadn’t uttered a sound until it saw me turn toward it. Then it let loose with a series of barking growls that made me dive toward my vehicle. My hand reflexively found the grip of my handgun under the hem of my shirt.
Fortunately, a woman’s voice intervened. “Ferox! Pfui! Was machst du!”
The effect on the coal-colored dog—some sort of mastiff seemingly—was immediate. The huge animal slid to a stop as if it had reached the end of a chain. We were less than fifteen feet apart; a single leap would have bowled me over. Spittle flew from its black lips.
I was terrified to look away or remove my hand from my gun, but out of the corner of one eye, I saw the shape of a woman rushing toward us.
“Schlecht hund!”
If the language wasn’t German, I didn’t know what it was.
“I am so, so sorry!” she said in an accent that wasn’t remotely Teutonic. “He got past me when he heard your vehicle. He wasn’t supposed to be loose. He could have killed you!”
Still focused on the dog’s eyes, I watched a slender brown hand take hold of his collar. Then the woman was kneeling beside the animal, fastening a muzzle over his still snarling jowls.
Only then did I really see her. She was, by any standard, one of the most striking people I had ever come across—in part because of the contrast between her mocha-toned skin and her caramel-colored eyes.
I would have put her age in her late twenties, maybe her early thirties. She was dressed as if on a modeling shoot for the L.L.Bean catalog: gingham shirt, canvas pants, and boat shoes that exposed her slender ankles.
“Don’t apologize. Your brother warned me about the dog.”
“You met Edouard?”
Her own speech bore a much fainter Creole accent than her brother’s. It made me think she’d spent significantly more time in the United States than he had, even though she appeared to be at least a decade younger.
“We spoke on the way in,” I said. “What kind of dog is this?”
“A Cane Corso. Have you heard of them?”
“They were the war dogs the Roman legions brought with them on campaigns.”
Her imperfectly aligned teeth somehow only made her prettier. “I only know they come from Italy.”
I estimated that the mastiff weighed somewhere around 120 pounds—20 odd pounds less than Shadow—but he was far more muscular than the wolf hybrid. In a fight to the death, I wasn’t sure which would prevail. The most likely outcome would be that the two canines would tear each other to bloody shreds.
“Why were you speaking to him in German?”
“Stan says it’s to avoid the dog hearing a word in English that he associates with commands.”
“You must be Vaneese.”
“Vaneese Delhomme.”
A voice boomed from the direction of the house. “There he is! Maine’s second-most famous game warden.”
Stan Kellam descended the porch stairs with arms extended.
He was in his sixties, but he had a vitality about him you don’t often see in men his age. He had acquired a considerable belly, but his chest and shoulders were as burly as I remembered, and he had the narrow hips of a former athlete. He wore his sandy hair barbered in the same flattop he’d sported as a young warden. His jaw was square, resolute. His mouth was small and thin lipped.
“How are you, Mike? I hope my monster here didn’t give you too bad a scare.”
Kellam was dressed in a maroon Florida State T-shirt, cargo shorts, and leather sandals. I’m six two, and we were eye to eye when we shook hands. As a younger man, he must have stood even taller.
“I’m fine, Lieutenant.”
“Please don’t call me that. I’ve spent the past six years trying to forget my checkered career. I see you’ve met Vaneese. And Ferox, the bloodthirsty bastard.” He said these last words with affection while kneeling beside the dog and, to my dismay, removing the muzzle. The animal continued to glare at me with demonic auburn eyes.
“You seem to have been expecting me,” I said.
He responded with a merry twinkle. “Yes and no.”
Again, I paused.
“I’ll explain over lunch,” he said. “Vee and I were just
