The badge had inspired young Pellerin to become the warden his grandfather never was and restore the family honor. And yet this same piece of metal had been Scott’s undoing, too. It had given away his identity when Emmeline found it hidden in his motel room.
Truth be told, I was glad to give it back.
“I wish you and Scott could have known each other.” Charley Stevens was not a man inclined to tears, but I could hear emotion in the sudden softness in his voice. “He’d be forty-two now, and maybe he could have taught you some things. You could have taught him, too. More is likely.”
I understood that he had a story worth listening to, and so I stayed quiet.
“He showed me this badge, second or third time we met,” Charley said. “Told me about his grandfather’s disgrace. Of course I had heard all about Warden Duke Dupree, and there were some details I could’ve added to the tale, but I could see the young man needed to believe in his granddad’s tragic fall. It wouldn’t have helped to tell him what an ass Duke was. Scott carried the badge everywhere as a good-luck charm. I warned him against bringing it undercover, but he laughed at me and said, ‘Charley, you worry too much.’
“After he went missing, I told the detectives to be on the lookout for it. I said it might be the most important clue they found to his whereabouts. But I figured Pierre wouldn’t have risked its discovery. That’s why I was so gobsmacked to see it on Smith’s table in Machias.
“I felt that providence had placed the badge before me and presented me with a second chance to do right by Scott. We all assumed that the truth of what had happened had died with Pierre, but if someone had the badge all this time, maybe they knew the whereabouts of Scott’s remains, too. They might even have taken this thing off his body as a souvenir. The way I figured it, the only person who could’ve had this badge was one of the coconspirators. They’d stayed quiet before—but not this time, by God. I am an old man, and what did I have to lose from leaning on them beyond the limits of what the law allows?”
“You could have lost your liberty,” I said. “You could have gone to prison.”
“I was so beset with anger, I wasn’t thinking straight. I rushed up to confront Smith without even the ghost of a plan. You saw how that turned out.”
“I saw it up close,” I said.
“Afterward, I knew I needed help—someone calmer than me—so I asked Nick to be my second, so to speak. Not once in all the years we’ve known each other has that man let me down. The name Angie Bouchard connected us back to the Valley View. We hadn’t heard Emmeline had passed. It seems we would’ve been better off following your lead and speaking with her daughter.”
“You didn’t need to,” I said. “You only had to wait for me to show up.”
“We knew that Roland was there—I was watching the house while you met with Nick—and figured your appearance on the scene might flush him into doing something careless. But when you left for Kellam’s place, we had to make a decision. Nick followed Roland to Edmundston in my truck, and I followed you in his Jeep. It ended up costing Angie her life.”
“I feel like I have her blood on my hands, Charley. If I hadn’t knocked on her door—”
He squeezed my arm. “You can’t take responsibility for C. J. Lamontaine’s evil act. Guilt is a temptation. It’s understandable, but in this case, don’t fall prey to self-reproof. It won’t make you a better man, I can tell you from hard experience.”
The breeze blew puffs off the dandelions in the field, each seed a white parachute. I saw the shadow of a bird pass along the ground and, looking up, spotted a raven riding the wind, silent and watchful. Those intelligent black birds didn’t miss a thing.
“You used me, Charley. You used me to flush out Roland, and then you used me to interrogate Kellam.”
He was watching the raven as it made another reconnaissance of us.
“I hope I have a chance to make amends for that. It was just that we knew that Stanley knew something more than he was telling, and there was no way he would share his information with me after our falling-out. When you accuse a fellow warden of negligent homicide, by which I mean Scott’s, he’s unlikely to take you into his confidence again.”
“As it turned out, Kellam wasn’t keeping any dark secrets. My visit with him was a bust, looking back.”
“Not so! You saved him from killing Chasse.”
“Maybe that was another mistake.”
“Take it from a POW, a quick death is a gift compared to life in prison. In C. J. Lamontaine’s case, we’re talking about a long time with nothing to think about except his bad decisions. And his father, too, is facing charges that might end up as a life sentence, hopefully will.”
“When did you begin to suspect Chasse?”
“From the first. See, over the years, I had allowed myself to believe that I understood the whole story. The only mystery was Scott’s final resting place. That’s why seeing the badge shook me. I thought it was buried forever. But somehow it had gotten loose into the world and had ended up with this John Smith jackalope. How was that possible?
“The badge told me that I knew less than I’d thought. So I went back over everything again in my mind. And I remembered Chasse’s ‘suggestion’ we take a ride up to Beau Lac. With the advantage of hindsight, it occurred to me that Warden Lamontaine had been the only one who’d come out of the tragedy better off than before. But there was nothing to connect Chasse to Scott’s murder—and I didn’t
