I remembered that Lieutenant Malcomb had said the same thing about his old friend. “You don’t have to do this, Charley.”
“I got nothing else scheduled. That’s the nice thing about being an old geezer.”
Part of me wanted to be alone, but another part thought he might be helpful when I confronted Truman. There was no question in my mind that this offer was just his way of keeping an eye on me. I wondered whether I was in danger of selling Charley Stevens short. How much of his jolliness was genuine and how much was a put-on? “I’m really not hungry, though.”
He clapped me hard on the back. “Then you can watch me eat!”
Ten minutes later, Charley emerged from the darkened bay of H. B. Flint’s Garage, jangling a set of car keys. I followed him around the building to a weedy field where smashed autos were arranged like some sort of modern art sculpture garden. I couldn’t imagine any of these wrecks being capable of locomotion, least of all the old Plymouth Charley indicated. It looked like it had once been red or maroon in color, but it was so rusted and patched with Bondo, there was no way to be certain.
“Hal says a chipmunk has made the tailpipe his abode,” said Charley. “Watch to see if he comes shooting out the backside when I start her up.”
“I hope for his sake he’s out gathering nuts.” I tried to fasten my seat belt, but the strap had been sawn off below the buckle. I had to knot the loose ends instead.
The Plymouth coughed, shook, and died when Charley tried the ignition. He tried again, this time giving it a little gas, but with the same result. On the third attempt the car shivered itself awake and we were able to move forward. We turned left on Main Street in the direction of Dead River Plantation.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Across the river, Bigelow Mountain rose four thousand feet into the sky, a dark and jagged shape. In the seventies a developer proposed building an enormous ski resort on the mountain’s opposite slope, facing the existing resort at Sugarloaf. He said he wanted to turn the area into “the Aspen of the East,” but activists organized a referendum to foil his plans. In the end, the State of Maine bought the mountain and established a preserve from the Carrabassett River in the south to the Dead River in the north. Environmentalists considered it a huge victory, but it was hard to feel much joy about the situation now, given Wendigo’s development plans for the surrounding region.
Charley turned south on Route 144, following the Dead River away from town. Farther along that dark forest road were a few houses and farms, a schoolhouse, the fish hatchery that had so recently been the command post for my father’s manhunt, and of course the Natanis Trading Post, where Truman Dellis lived over the barn.
That was when I realized where we were headed.
I hadn’t seen the Dead River Inn since the night I got my skull busted by those three bikers. Now the sight of the heavy wood sign, hanging beside the road, sent a chill through me. The inn was a rambling old hotel with dormer windows and gables and two massive granite chimneys. It had a veranda along the first floor with rocking chairs set up so visitors could gaze down the half-mile dirt drive that led back to the road.
We parked the Plymouth under some tall hemlocks and went around front to the porch. The screen door made a wheezy sound as Charley pulled it open, and then it snapped shut on my heels. I followed him into the dining room across the lobby from the tavern.
The inn’s restaurant was an expansive, low-ceilinged space with pillars scattered among the heavy oak tables and captain’s chairs. The wide pine floorboards needed a new coat of varnish. Framed black-and-white photos of the inn’s employees from its postwar days to the present hung on the walls along with amateurish oil paintings of loons and moose. Along one wall, light was leaking inside through linen curtains the color of mummies’ bandages.
Given the hour, we had the dining room more or less to ourselves. A family with three small children were the only other diners, and they were preparing to leave.
A thin, buck-toothed waitress, dressed in gingham, came over. “Sorry, guys, we’re closed,” she said. “Oh, it’s you, Charley!”
“Hello, Donna. Is Sally around this afternoon?”
“She went down to Skowhegan. But she should be back in a couple of hours.”
“So what’s the soup du jour?”
“We just finished serving lunch. The cook’s gone up to his room.”
“Oh, no,” Charley said with a disappointment that seemed out of proportion to the situation.
“But I could, maybe, rustle up some sandwiches.”
“Could you? We’d appreciate it. And could you bring us some coffee, too?”
“Of course!”
The waitress scurried off to make our lunches, trying without much success to get her thin hips to wiggle as she walked away.
“I think that waitress has a thing for you,” I said.
“She’s just being polite to an old man.”
“No, I think she likes you. And I believe you were flirting with her just now.”
He removed his baseball hat and set it on the table. His grizzled hair stood up as if electrified.
“Who’s this Sally?” I asked.
“Sally Reynolds. She owns the place. I haven’t seen her since the night of the shootings, and I wanted to ask her how things have been going. It can’t have helped her business.”
“So this is where Wendigo held the meeting-in this room?”
“People were packed in tighter than sardines. Hotter than hell, too.”
“You were here?”
“I was.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the old pilot might actually have been present at the meeting. “Tell me about it.”
He pointed to the front of the room. “Well, there was a table set up over there with that Jonathan Shipman from Wendigo sitting at it. He was dressed head-to-toe in brand-new clothes from L.L. Bean. Looked like a fashion model for their summer catalog. Anyway, he was seated beside Ted Rogers and Fud Davis, who both used to work for APP and took jobs with Wendigo. And that fool Newhall who represents this district in the state legislature. And a lady from the Forest Council-I forget her name, nice looking, though.”
“What happened?”
“First, Newhall spoke about how Shipman was a guest here and deserving of our courtesy and all that. Then the Forest Council lady got up and said a few words about how the new timber companies are committed to doing things the same as Atlantic Pulp & Paper to preserve public access. Then Rogers and Davis both said some more reassuring horseshit. Then Shipman got up.”
The waitress arrived with a coffeepot. Charley waited politely for her to fill our cups before he spoke again.
“Now this Shipman character,” he said. “He was a piece of work. You could tell he was a lawyer, that denim shirt couldn’t hide his true nature. It was the words he used-‘comprehensive reevaluation of holdings’ and ‘strategic non-timber operations.’ I guess he figured he could pull the wool over our eyes if he used enough legalese.”
“Did he say anything about evicting people?”
“Oh, he didn’t come out and say Wendigo was going to cancel the leases, but his meaning was clear enough.”
“What happened next?”
“People started shouting. They didn’t even wait for him to finish. I was standing in the back of the peanut gallery-over there, next to Sally-and I could just about feel the thermostat go up ten degrees once people started yelling. I thought that numbskull Tripp’s head might explode.”
“Did you see my father?”
“I didn’t. Nor did I see Truman Dellis. Brenda Dean was drinking in the bar earlier-that’s what Sally told me, anyway-but I didn’t see her at the meeting. Russ Pelletier was here. I think it just about killed him to sit still for two hours without a cigarette. But he did it.”
“When did the meeting end?”
