immediately. I left the phone on the seat and got out of the truck.
“Same guy?” Vinnie said.
“Apparently.”
“Shouldn’t we call him back? He might know something.”
“It sounds more like he wants us to tell him what’s going on. But yeah, I suppose we should. As soon as we head south a little bit, we’ll pick up a signal again.”
Guy parked his motorcycle behind his house and came back around to lead us through the front door. His mother nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw us.
“It’s okay,” Guy said. “I stopped them on the road. I decided I needed to talk to them.”
She nodded her head, but kept staring at us with wide eyes. Guy sat down next to her on the couch and slid over to give Vinnie room. I sat on the chair next to the television. The air in the room was hot and stale.
“So why are you talking to us now?” I said. “Earlier today, you were hiding from us.”
“A lot’s happened since then,” he said. “They found that Suburban in the woods, for one thing. Then the police came by looking for me. Just to ask me some questions, they said.” His mother closed her eyes as he said that. “They must have got my name from the lodge. And with me living here on the reserve, I mean, you can imagine what they were thinking. I know they’ll ask me if I had ever met Tom before, or if I had talked to him at the lodge.”
“Did you?” Vinnie said. “You said they were already gone when you got there on Saturday.”
“It was the Saturday before, when they first got there. I had just come back with a group that day, and I was still hanging around when they pulled up. Mr. Gannon had told me they didn’t want a guide. So when I saw Tom, I said to myself, no wonder, these jokers brought their own guide. I was a little upset. Then I heard these guys carrying on, and I wasn’t upset anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were just a bad bunch, you know? The white guys, I mean.” He slipped me a quick look. “Not Tom. He was cool about it. These guys were all hitting on Mrs. St. Jean and making all these jokes about shooting anything that moved. I mean, you hear that kind of stuff a lot, but these guys-There was something about them, like they weren’t just kidding around. I was pretty sure Tom was at least part Indian, so I went up to him and asked him what the deal was on these guys. He said they were all a little drunk already. I guess it was quite a trip getting up there. I asked him if he was up for spending a whole week with these guys, and he said he’d deal with it.”
“Had Tom been drinking?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“Okay. So what happened then? They loaded up the plane and flew out?”
“I don’t know. I left. I had just been out in the woods for a week. So I wanted to get home and take a shower.”
“So you never actually saw them fly out in the plane.”
“No,” he said. “I just assumed they did. The next time I was at the lodge was this past Saturday, the day they were supposed to come back. By the time I got there, they were already gone. The plane was back on the dock, and their Suburban wasn’t there anymore.”
“So what makes you think they never flew out there?”
“It’s just a bunch of things, you know? I never really put it together in my head until today, when they were asking me all those questions. When I got to the lodge on Saturday, it was like nobody had been there at all. The butcher shed was clean, the dock was clean. It was just… weird.”
“Gannon said they didn’t get a moose,” Vinnie said. “So of course the shed’s gonna be clean.”
“Yeah, well, I asked him about that. And that’s what he told me. He flew them back that morning. No moose. No nothing. They got in their van and left. But it was just-I don’t know, the way he said it. It just gave me a funny feeling. And then when the other group got there, I was busy helping them get their stuff together, while Mr. Gannon fired up the Otter. That’s his plane-it’s an old DHC-3 Otter. Sometimes it takes a while to get warmed up, you know. Anyway, I’m helping out these guys and I can’t help noticing, he’s cranking and cranking that thing until it finally starts. If he had just been out that morning, the engine would have still been warm.”
“Are you gonna tell the police this?” I said.
He raised his hands. “I’m gonna tell them I’ve got this funny feeling Mr. Gannon never actually flew out on Saturday to pick them up? And that everybody at the lodge is lying to them? How do you think that’s gonna go over? They’re already asking questions about me, like they’re thinking maybe me and Tom had something to do with this.”
His mother closed her eyes again. She put her hand to her face and took a deep breath. “Guy, mon coeur,” she said.
“Don’t worry, Mom. It’s gonna be okay.”
“It’s not good,” she said. “For any of us. It’s the last thing this place needs right now.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just from my old days as a cop, I gotta tell ya. The odds of getting four people to all tell you the same lie
…”
“Did you talk to all four of them?”
“Well, actually no. Just Helen and Gannon.”
“And let me ask you this,” he said. “How was Mr. Gannon acting?”
I thought about it. “Like he was unhappy we were there,” I said. “Like he couldn’t wait to get rid of us.”
“Okay, then.”
“What do you think, Vinnie?” I said.
“We can’t just go back to the lodge and ask them. Is there some other way we can tell if they went out there?”
“Yes,” Guy said. “As a matter of fact, there is.”
“How?”
“I was out at that cabin three weeks ago. I remember how we left it. If we go there now, I’m sure I’ll be able to tell if someone else has been there.”
“Gannon took those two constables out there yesterday,” I said. “They looked all around the place. It sounded like it was a real mess.”
“Maybe it was,” Guy said. “But who knows if those men really made that mess?”
“What, you mean somebody else did?”
“If they can lie about them going out to that cabin, they can certainly take a few minutes to make it look like they were there.”
“So how will you be able to tell?”
“I’ll know,” he said. “If somebody’s really spent some time up there in the last three weeks, I’ll know.”
“Okay, so how do we get out there? Gannon certainly isn’t gonna fly us.”
“He doesn’t have to.”
“Who else has a plane?”
Guy smiled. “I’ll show you.”
Guy led us back outside and down the street to the house next door. If Guy’s house needed a little work, this house needed to be run over by a bulldozer. If you believed what was left of the paint, it looked like one side had been green and the other side red. A thin stream of smoke rose from a metal chimney pipe, set at a crazy angle in the middle of the roof. Someone had put down the black tar paper on that roof, but had never bothered with the shingles.
Guy pushed open the front door. “Grandpere?”
We followed him into the room. The television was on, and a fire glowed red through the glass door of the wood stove.
“Grandpere!” Guy said, a little louder.
A man came in through the back door. He was carrying enough firewood in his arms to keep the house warm all night. He dropped it all in a heap next to the stove and clapped the wood chips off his bare hands.
