It was only when it leaped clear of the surface and I caught a flash of orange along the belly that I realized it was my favorite of all species: a native brook trout. This one just happened to be the size and shape of a football. It fell back into the pond with a tremendous splash but still attached to my hook and line.
“That’s got to be a four pounder!” Kellam exclaimed.
“Closer to five.”
My blood was up, my forearms were burning, and my vision had darkened along the peripheries.
I had no idea what made me look up.
For some reason, I raised my head and glimpsed the unmistakable outline of a man on the shore of the lake. He was half-hidden in the alders. The low mist made him impossible to identify, but the silhouette removed any doubt that I might be mistaking a stump for a human being. He seemed to be wearing a brimmed hat.
In the same instant, the trout made one final effort to escape. He used all his remaining energy to give one last leap. If luck had been on my side, he might have plopped into Kellam’s outstretched landing net. Instead he fell sideways into the water and spit out the fly.
“Damn it!” said Kellam.
I reeled in the line while I sought out the spot where the man had been standing. There was no sign of him.
“You owe me twenty dollars, Bowditch.”
“What?”
“We bet you wouldn’t get that trout onto the boat. I said you wouldn’t. You said you would. Time to pay up.”
26
We stayed on the lake for two more hours until the drizzle turned to rain and the rain turned into a torrent. My allegedly waterproof gear was no match for the cloudburst. Although he talked constantly, not once did Kellam mention St. Ignace. We caught a few fish, brookies mostly, but nothing close to that first lunker, also a three-pound lake trout, which Kellam killed by whacking its head with the spine of his knife. The togue gave a visible shiver and went still.
“Those lake trout are loaded with toxins,” I said.
“Edouard doesn’t care. To him, they’re the best-eating fish in Maine.”
“Have you explained about acid rain? How mercury builds up in their livers? How the oldest fish are the most poisonous?”
“The man grew up in Haiti, Mike. In Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince. That’s the poorest neighborhood in the poorest city in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. He assesses risk differently from people like us.”
People like us.
I had almost forgotten that Stan was using Edouard Del-homme’s shaky immigration status to rationalize near total control of the man’s life. Just when I came close to liking the retired lieutenant, he would say something to repulse me.
Kellam was a complicated man, to say the least. A woodsman who also happened to be an intellectual. A career cop who thought nothing of breaking laws for no other reason than they personally inconvenienced him. Somehow this old crank had managed to romance a beautiful, intelligent woman half his age and persuade her to relocate to the geographic middle of nowhere.
I didn’t trust him, and so I deliberately failed to mention the shadowy man I had seen along the shore.
Had it been Edouard? If so, he had acquired a hat since we’d left the dock. And why would he have been spying on us from the woods?
Unless he’d been armed with a sniper’s rifle and told by his employer to take me out on cue.
But that was paranoid thinking.
There was a good chance the man I saw had been the driver of the silver Jeep. People did fish and hike in the Maine woods. Most did so without malevolent intentions. But Moccasin Pond was not known as a destination fishery. Maybe if word got out that it held five-pound trout, it would become one.
Could that mystery man have been Charley? My first thought was no. My friend was too bushcrafty to give his presence away in such a clumsy fashion. There is a line from a book I like that could just as well apply to my friend: “You will not see a tiger that does not choose to be seen.”
Charley Stevens was a tiger.
A hatless, water-logged Edouard waited for us to motor up to the dock. “Anything?” he called.
“Togue!”
The Haitian rubbed his palms together in excited anticipation.
As I clambered with my fishing gear onto the slick dock, Kellam said, “You’re staying here tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Do you have a room booked at the Madawaska Four Seasons?”
“I have people I need to speak with. I’ve been off the map all day.”
“Use my signal.”
“You have service here?”
He pointed to a forested ridge overlooking the pond. “See that odd spruce up there that’s taller than the others? That’s actually a cell tower. We’ve got line-of-sight access to it from the house.”
Kellam had been nothing but welcoming, but I had an itching sensation that it would be wise to leave before the sun went down on Moccasin Pond.
“I told the gatekeeper I was coming out at dusk.”
He sniffed. “If you don’t want my hospitality, I won’t force it on you, but I thought you might like to review my files on the St. Ignace operation.”
“You have the documents here?”
“My own personal copies of the files. At one juncture, I’d considered using the botched operation as the jumping-off point for my dissertation. Maybe even write a book. You always learn more from failures than successes. That’s a life principle that law enforcement rejects more than any other profession—the media excepted.”
Kellam knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to review the original reports. Despite what he’d told me at lunch, I had only the vaguest concept of the undercover operation he and Pellerin had conducted, its scope and duration, as well as the circumstances around the blown warden’s disappearance. About the aftermath—the burning of St. Ignace, Pierre Michaud’s escape into the woods, Charley’s shooting of the fugitive cop killer—my information was sketchy at best.
As Kellam and
