The drizzle had picked up while we were eating, and we both put on waterproof jackets and pants for our excursion. Kellam’s rainwear didn’t have any patches from Abu Garcia or Rapala, but the fabric was redder than a fire engine. Soon his face was red, too, from the rain.
Edouard helped us load and launch the boat. He didn’t have on a hat or a jacket. The water just streamed off his bald head and made dark stains on his shoulders and along the tops of his thighs.
How does Vaneese feel about him acting as Stan’s houseboy?
The retired warden took a seat at the wheel. He turned the key, and the outboard growled like a big cat that had been asleep and didn’t appreciate having been awakened. The next thing I knew, we had exploded forward from the dock. The g-force pushed the hood off my head, causing it to flap along my neck.
“I’m sure you’re wondering where I got my money!” Kellam shouted above the engine.
I wished I’d paused long enough to grab my earplugs. Most of the old wardens and guides I knew suffered from hearing loss to the point of near deafness. It was the inevitable outcome of a life running outboards, riding snowmobiles, and firing long guns inches from your unprotected ears.
“My second wife believed I was going to get killed on the job, and she saw it as her road to riches. The year before we split, she took out life insurance on me. Ten million bucks! And I said, ‘What about you? What do I get if you croak, babe?’ She thought that was hilarious, but we changed the policy. Six months later, she was run off the road by a logging truck. The insurance company wouldn’t pay at first. An adjuster actually investigated me! He thought I’d set it up somehow. But the truck driver was a Québécois from Daaquam, a good Catholic kid. He thought he was going to hell for accidentally killing my wife, so he took the blame. I wanted to kiss that fucking frog.”
By the time he’d shouted out his story, we’d sped across the pond to a cove that looked promising for trout. Kellam cut the engine, but the Bass Hawk continued its forward momentum until he pushed the button that released the anchor. The weight caught in the muddy bottom, and the boat stopped with a jerk.
My ears were still ringing from the engine noise. My head was wreathed with gasoline fumes. I felt a persistent vibration in the walls of my heart.
“I want you to use one my flies,” Kellam said, still speaking loudly. “I want the credit when you catch a monster.”
I stood in the bow, and he stood in the stern. I could tell it needled him that I could cast all ninety feet of my fly line and into the backing. He kept trying to muscle his line out farther and farther, which is the surest way to sabotage your casts.
He’d brought a six-pack of beer, as well as a ziplock bag of moose jerky Edouard had made. I passed on both the Coronas and the dried meat.
“Edouard uses Haitian spices. I guarantee you haven’t had anything like it before.”
“I’m still full from lunch.”
He drained half his bottle in one gulp, then let loose with a belch. “I know you’ve been waiting for me to get around to telling you what happened with Scott Pellerin. Truth is, I don’t like to go back to St. Ignace. Neither mentally nor physically. I haven’t set foot in that town since Charley and I agreed we were never going to find Scott. What did he tell you about the disaster?”
“I’d prefer to hear your version.”
“Spoken like a true investigator. I blame myself, obviously. Chasse had told me how hot the situation was, and still I sent in Pellerin, undercover.”
“Chasse Lamontaine?” I remembered Kathy having mentioned the warden’s name.
“He was just a deputy warden at the time, not even an anointed law enforcement officer. The warden who’d brought him on as a helper was retiring, which meant that Chasse was losing his job, too, unless he could distinguish himself somehow. It’s kind of a miracle he managed it. Most deputy wardens never go on to have careers with the service. You must know him.”
Chasse Lamontaine was the closest thing the Maine Warden Service had to a heartthrob. He had a cleft chin and piercing eyes. He was pushing fifty now, but in his younger years, he could have played Captain America with that cartoonishly masculine face.
“I’m surprised Chasse even wanted a job with the Warden Service,” I said. “It sounds like the whole Valley was up in arms after what happened in St. Ignace.”
“Given how hot emotions were running, I highly recommended to Chasse that he take his talents elsewhere, but he said people knew him and trusted him because he’d grown up there. That was how he won over the hiring panel—through his bold naiveté.”
In my own limited interactions with the man, I had found him to be earnest to the point of humorlessness, prone to self-righteous speeches, a teetotaler who made everyone in his orbit uncomfortable holding a beer. His nickname among his fellow wardens was Dudley Do-Right.
I jigged my line, raising the weighted chenille nymph up in the water column and then letting it settle again into the silt.
“It was because of Chasse that I sent in an investigator to begin with,” said Kellam. “I think it was a clumsy ploy to get a full-time job, his complaining about how the Valley wardens were overwhelmed. But it was true that the locals were poaching everything that moved and smuggling drugs back and forth into New Brunswick. From St. Ignace you can throw a baseball across the river into
