Given the condition of my Scout and my unkempt appearance, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d come out shooting.
“Jon ain’t here!” she called from the stoop, as if this were her usual response to late-night visitors.
I swung open the door and stood behind it. “My name is Mike Bowditch. I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. You’re Dorothy, right?”
“Yeah, Jon told me about you. Said you interrogated him. He ain’t around.”
“Where is he?”
“Why? So you can go arrest him again? The cops have already crawled all over our house.”
“Your husband was never arrested.”
“We have nothing to hide.”
“Can I come up?”
“I can hear you fine from there, Mister.”
“I think Jon is in danger,” I said. “Because of what happened to Angie Bouchard. You need to tell me where he is.”
Cops routinely feed people bullshit to get them to cooperate. Dorothy Egan struck me as someone who knew this. I raised my hands where she could see them to make myself less threatening.
The baby opened his or her throat and let loose with a piercing cry that started the spaniel barking again. “Jon can take care of himself. He wasn’t scared when he left either. He just needed to help some fool out. Be back real quick, he said.”
“What fool?”
“Jon rents boats. Canoes, kayaks, tubes. He works for someone who does, I mean. One of the clients is up a creek without a paddle.”
“Um…?”
“The funny thing is the guy’s an Indian. You’d think he’d know how to paddle a damned canoe. But he flipped over going down Golden Rapids and lost his paddle and is stranded on Musket Island in the middle of the river.”
There was no cell service in Dickey. “How did he manage to contact your husband, this stranded man?”
“He’s got one of those CB radios.”
“He lost his paddle but managed to hang on to a radio without it getting wet?”
“Look, I wasn’t present for the event. I can’t offer you the whys and wherefores. Now, you need to excuse me. This baby requires his dinner, and I ain’t going to just pull out my titty and give you a free show.”
“Thanks for your time, Mrs. Egan. Just one last question. Does your husband have a scar on his arm, here?”
I indicated my left shoulder.
“He’s got a tattoo there. A flaming heart!”
“Really?”
“I mean, he got the tattoo to cover a scar, yeah. It was a burn he suffered from falling against a radiator back when he still drank. Jon’s a God-fearing man now. He found Jesus in prison. We go to services over in Allagash village every Sunday. The pastor washed him clean of his sins in the river, right below the church. My husband’s been born again into the family of God. Can you say the same for yourself, Mr. Warden? I didn’t think so.”
41
It was no accident that Nick Francis had contacted Egan via a two-way radio. To implement Charley’s plan—the exact shape of which still eluded me—they needed the conversation to be overheard by someone with a combination police scanner and CB unit. In backwoods Maine, that category of persons included everybody.
But the old pilot needed a specific person to be listening.
Who?
Not just Egan, obviously.
Like most petty criminals, Roland Michaud almost certainly owned a radio to keep track of the movements of local law enforcement.
Kellam had a police scanner in his truck. I’d heard it squelch when he was righting my Scout.
First responders and law enforcement officers in the area all had them. Chief Plourde. Zanadakis. Lamontaine.
I had one, too. The problem was it had stopped working during the crash.
My waterlogged map showed Musket Island as a glorified sandbar downstream of St. Ignace. It probably spent half its year underwater. The river was running high at the moment from all the rain. I wondered how much of the little island was above the surface.
Charley and Nick had a purpose in choosing to summon Egan to this particular spot.
The atlas showed that a bridge had once crossed the river at Musket Island. Probably the structure had been washed out decades earlier during an especially damaging ice jam. But there were approaches on both sides and an icon indicating a boat launch on the north shore. No doubt some of the old pilings remained. From experience, I knew that bridge supports can be dangerous places to paddle, both as obstacles in your way but also because currents flow faster where they are squeezed together.
The logging road from Dickey to the boat launch above Musket Brook was surprisingly well maintained. Fresh gravel had been spread and graded, and there were periodic bumps where new culverts had been installed to channel spring freshets under the hard-packed surface. Fully loaded logging trucks can weigh up to eighty thousand pounds. As a consequence, timber companies were also forced into the road maintenance business.
I passed a few buildings, their lights shining hazily up through the trees from the riverside. The timber company had leased waterfront plots to people to build vacation cabins. This arrangement was commonplace in Maine although less common than it had once been.
I drove into the first unattended camp. As I’d expected, the owner had a canoe. He had secured it with a chain to the biggest hemlock on the property. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for me, I kept a pair of bolt cutters in my vehicle. This wasn’t the first occasion I’d had to “borrow” a boat.
I wasted no time tying the stolen Old Town to my roof rack. From there, it took me fifteen minutes to cover five miles. In the backcountry of Maine, that is called making good time.
As I descended the hill to the St. John River, I saw the old bridge looming in my high beams. The timber company had bulldozed boulders at its base. The rocks were intended to stop some drunken fool from driving headlong into the channel. As I braked and turned, my headlights caught the reflectors on the back of Egan’s Tacoma, parked in a patch of sweetfern. He
