Scott Pellerin.
His sister confirmed to Ora that Dupree was the maiden name of their mother. She verified that his grandfather’s badge had been her little brother’s most prized possession.
When Ora had told me that Pellerin was “me,” I hadn’t appreciated the full extent of our similarities. I understood that Charley had looked upon him as a troubled young man in need of a surrogate father. What I hadn’t realized was that my precursor had been compelled to join the Warden Service for reasons not unlike those that had driven me to the same decision.
I had become a game warden to win my estranged father’s respect. I had imagined he would be impressed when I announced my career choice. Instead he had mocked me for a fool.
Scott Pellerin had signed up for similarly misguided reasons. He had wanted to redeem the stained legacy of his maternal grandfather. And so he had carried Duke Dupree’s battered badge with him, stashed away in secret, as a personal talisman.
It wouldn’t be the first relic that got a man killed.
Fort Kent is the literal end of the road. It is mile zero of Route 1. There is even a marker to commemorate the designation. You have to search hard for the plaque, tucked away in a motel parking lot. I have read there is a similar monument, 2,369 miles south, in Key West, Florida, making the same claim to be the start of Route 1.
Two mile zeros. Like most things in life, where you are standing is all a matter of perspective.
As I descended the hill above town, I saw the St. John River, broad and blue, and the verdant hills of Canada beyond. In every significant way, the north shore of the river was indistinguishable from the south, and yet in 1842, an American and a British statesman had decided to draw an invisible line down the middle of the channel, severing a close-knit French-speaking community that had occupied the Valley for half a century beforehand.
Even now, as I turned onto Main Street, I couldn’t help but watch the ring-billed gulls flying carelessly back and forth across the St. John, and I thought about how every border on earth is a man-made fiction. The birds are never fooled.
I made a call to the state police barracks in Houlton and spoke with a trooper working a desk.
“Who caught the Angie Bouchard case?”
“Lieutenant Zanadakis.”
“Great.”
The dapper detective was also looking into my run-in with John Smith. I had prayed that the investigator in charge would be someone I knew. Not someone who knew me too well.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” asked the trooper in Houlton.
“I have some information about the dead woman Lieutenant Zanadakis needs to hear. Where can I find him?”
“In St. Ignace, at the Valley View Motel. That’s the crime scene. He’ll be there until the medical examiner arrives and the evidence techs finish up.”
I cruised down a tidy main street that ran parallel to the river: a downtown of brick shop fronts and well-kept clapboard buildings. Instead of following the traffic headed to the customs station at the foot of the bridge to Canada, I left Route 1 and turned onto a road that clung to the south bank of the river.
Most people conceive of northernmost Maine as a howling wilderness, but even I, who had visited the Valley before, found myself taken aback by the handsome prosperity of Fort Kent.
The views were spectacular. The St. John had its headwaters across the border at Lac Frontière in Québec and drained thousands of square miles on its journey to the tidal tumult of the Bay of Fundy. Here, on the border between Maine and New Brunswick, it was a broad, sandy stream with brushy islands in the middle that inevitably would be submerged the following spring when ice floes jammed the river and the streets of lower Fort Kent began to flood.
I passed through two villages named for Catholic saints—John and Francis—before I reached a crossroads. It was T-shaped intersection where a logging road angled away from Route 161 and plunged south into the vast commercial timberland that extended to Moccasin Pond and another five hundred miles beyond that. My atlas gave the name of this hamlet as St. Ignatius, but to the French speakers of the Valley, it had always been St. Ignace.
Now it was mostly just ruins. Along the riverside, a row of charred foundations were all that remained of the houses and business that had burned the night the Maine State Police and the Maine Warden Service had come looking for Scott Pellerin. Sumacs, poplars, and assorted small bushes had grown up from the rubble, but all that fresh green life couldn’t hide the violence that had happened fifteen years before. The fact that the fire that had claimed half the village had been the fault of Pierre Michaud, covering his tracks, wasn’t visible in the devastation.
I came to a stop. The first drops of yet another rain shower fell upon my windshield. The hot engine hissed.
Across the road from the ruins stood a general store, closed and for sale; a Grange hall that didn’t appear to have hosted a meeting in decades; and a clapboard house with a sunken roof that looked to be one good blizzard away from collapsing. Two trucks, three ATVs, and a dooryard walled with stacked firewood told me the dwelling was occupied.
I dug out the snapshot of Pierre Michaud and held it at arm’s length with the overgrown ruins of his former home in the background.
Who was this man? What had he been thinking when he rigged his house with gasoline-drenched blankets, propane tanks, and canisters of acetylene? How did he imagine he could escape with a hundred police officers on both sides of the border searching for him by land, water, and air?
He must have known that Beau Lac, twenty miles north, along a tributary river, was a soft spot in the invisible fence. The wardens found
