“Kathy, I need you to do something for me. It’s important.”
Route 11 between Portage and Fort Kent is one of Maine’s officially designated scenic byways, but I couldn’t have described the views that day to save my life. There were lakes with cottages. Green hills maybe. Rolling fields.
My head felt as if it had been shaken like a snow globe.
Kathy volunteered to drive out to Dani’s house to check on her. After some debate, we agreed against summoning an ambulance, knowing what a proud person my girlfriend was. They lived two hours apart, so I wouldn’t hear from Kathy soon.
“Maybe you want to cut your fishing trip short,” she offered.
“I’m not fishing.”
“I know that, Mike. Whatever you’re up to, I hope you can justify it.”
“Dani understands.”
“She also sounds out of her head.”
Next, I called Ora.
“I had to tell her the truth,” she said, meaning Stacey. “She knew something was wrong. She senses things like I do.”
“What did she sense?”
“That her father was in danger.”
“We don’t know that, Ora.”
She treated my response as not requiring a rebuttal. “This woman they found dead this morning in St. Ignace—she was involved in this matter Charley’s investigating?”
For a moment, I’d thought Ora’s vague premonitions had graduated to witch-level clairvoyance.
“How did you know about it?”
The truth was less sensational. “The story’s been all over public radio this morning.”
Of course it would be.
“The truth is, I don’t know if Angie Bouchard’s death is connected to this thing with the badge or not. I suspect it is.”
I told her about my brief encounter with the murdered woman and her boyfriend. Then I provided an account of my hours in the company of the inscrutable Stan Kellam.
“I never liked him,” Ora said with uncharacteristic tartness. “Charley used to say that Stanley’s virtues outweighed his vices, but only by a pennyweight. That arrogant man knows something about Scott’s death that he’s not admitting. And no, it’s not one of my ‘intuitions’ that makes me say that. It comes from having known Stanley Kellam for three decades.”
“About Stacey,” I said.
“She’s arriving in Bangor tonight. She’s going to rent a car and drive here. Tomorrow, she’s planning on taking Charley’s plane and flying up to the Valley.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Stacey’s not the way she used to be, Mike.”
“Her rash decision to come up here suggests otherwise.”
“Her father is in trouble. I don’t have to ask what you would do in that situation, because you already know.”
She was referring to my rash, juvenile behavior when my father had been accused of murder and fled into the forest. It seemed an age ago now. And of course, I had no answer for her. How do you rebut the cold, hard truth?
Nor could I forget how Stacey had handled the situation in the Big Cypress National Preserve when Buster Lee was bitten by that snake. It wasn’t the competence she’d shown, treating the man’s gory wound. Stacey had always been proficient at more skills than I could count. It was the steady calmness with which she’d handled her terrified patient.
If I was no longer the human powder keg I had been at age twenty-four, then how could I say that Stacey Stevens was incapable of personal growth?
“I remembered something else,” Ora said. “Scott Pellerin was from Millinocket.”
“What?”
“He grew up in Port Clyde, before his mother passed, but he was born at the old Millinocket Community Hospital. His mom had family up in the Katahdin region. I don’t know if it means anything to you or not.”
“More than you can possibly know. Do you happen to have a number for Scott Pellerin’s sister in Providence?”
“Yes, I believe so. I’m not sure if it’s still current.”
“Can you call her and ask what their mother’s maiden name was? The question will be easier coming from you than a stranger.”
Ora, as sharp as her husband, deduced what I was after. “It’s the badge!”
“I think so, yes.”
For the first time, I thought I understood what the name Duke Dupree meant to Charley and why finding his badge on Smith’s table had set him off on his heretofore inexplicable quest.
32
Every morning, as I prepared myself for the day ahead, I would take from my bedside a set of dog tags.
At home I kept them within easy reach, strung from a deer antler I’d found in the leaf litter near a cabin on Rum Pond. When I’d first started wearing the tags, I had felt intense emotions every time I put them on—often anger, sometimes sadness, occasionally an affectionate nostalgia for an alternate life I’d never lived. The dog tags only weighed four grams, but on bad days, they felt as heavy as an anchor chain. Now I wore them out of habit more than anything else. Just a week earlier, leaving for Florida, I had set off the metal detector at the Portland airport because I’d forgotten I was wearing them, let alone why.
Now I pulled the tags from beneath my T-shirt and, keeping one hand on the wheel, raised the two medallions to a place before my eyes where I could read the name stamped in the stainless steel.
BOWDITCH, JOHN M.
My father had been a man whose conscience had atrophied over the course of his life to the point where you doubted he’d ever possessed one. He had been a hard-drinker and a womanizer, a poacher and a scofflaw, and in the end, he’d become a cold-blooded killer.
Jack Bowditch had also been my father. Blood of my blood. We looked so much alike you might even say I had been made in his image. The analogy might have been blasphemous, but I wore the dog tags he had brought back from two tours in Vietnam the way that certain religious people wear medallions devoted to their name saints: less in the hope of receiving divine intercessions than out of a sense of spiritual identity. I would never, could never, escape my patrimony.
Similarly, the tarnished badge of Duke Dupree had been
