The Poacher's Son

“Nine o’clock or thereabouts.”

“Did Shipman and Brodeur just get up and leave, or was there an altercation?”

“Tripp tried to get in his face, but Deputy Brodeur gave him the heave-ho. Or so I heard, anyhow. I’d gone home by that time. The original plan was for Shipman to stay overnight here at the inn, but I guess he had second thoughts. Not that I blame him. Brodeur was driving him over to Sugarloaf to escape whatever lynch mob might form.”

“You mean this was a last-minute change of plans?”

“More or less.”

“So whoever ambushed them must have known about the change. Did any of this go out over the police radio?”

“No.”

“So who knew about it?”

“Brodeur and Shipman, of course. Sally Reynolds. The sheriff and his deputies. And I guess I should add myself to the list.”

I pictured Twombley’s cherub face. “No one else?”

“Not that we know of,” said Charley. “You’re on the right track, though. Whoever shot Shipman and Brodeur did have the inside scoop. The killer knew they were driving over to Sugarloaf, and he knew exactly where to set up an ambush.”

“Then it couldn’t be my dad,” I said. “How would he have known any of this? Who would have told him?”

“Here comes our lunch” was Charley’s only answer.

Donna had prepared tuna sandwiches with ripe tomatoes on thick slices of homemade bread. While we ate, Charley told me that his camp, where he and his wife lived from ice-out in April through deer season in November, was just across Flagstaff Pond from the public boat launch. I asked if his wife Ora flew, and he said he had tried to teach her once, but she didn’t even enjoy going up as a passenger anymore. The subject seemed to make him melancholy, so I let it drop.

After we’d finished our sandwiches, Charley excused himself-to call his wife, I figured-and left me alone at the table. I sat in the empty room and listened to the afternoon sounds of the inn: the hum of a vacuum cleaner upstairs, the clatter of dishes being washed and stacked in the kitchen, the sharp clack of a screen door as someone carried out the trash. But in my mind I also heard a murmur of ghost voices that grew louder when I closed my eyes. With a little imagination I could place myself in this same room six nights earlier. I could sense the heat of close-packed bodies. The sour smell of sweat. The night air as electric as the seconds before a lightning strike.

I opened my eyes to see Charley Stevens coming through the door. A toothpick was tucked in the corner of his mouth. “I thought we might make a small detour.”

I rose to my feet. “What kind of detour?”

He grinned like a mischievous boy. “Since you came all the way up here, and we’re just around the corner, so to speak, I figured you might like to see the scene of the crime.”

We went out to the car and somehow got it started again. But instead of heading back down the drive, which is what I expected, Charley drove us across a ragweed field that stretched from the south side of the property to a wall of distant evergreens. He followed two parallel grooves that had been worn into the sun-hardened dirt, like an ancient wagon trail on a prairie. Up ahead I saw a cut in the trees.

“This used to be a two-sled road,” said Charley.

“A two-sled road?”

“They’d haul logs out of here with a two-sled rig-like two bobsleds joined together. Runs all the way out to the main road, three miles. Except there’s a gate on the other end now. Sally gets some mountain bikers using it these days. But mostly it’s the partridge hunters who use it come fall.”

“Why did Brodeur go this way? Why not just drive back the way he came?”

“Tripp and some of the others were waiting out front of the inn with their trucks. Guess young Bill figured he’d slip out this way before they were wise to him.”

“What about the gate?”

“Most of the locals know the combination.”

The old logging road was dappled with what little late afternoon sunlight managed to make it through the pine boughs overhead. In the shadows beneath the trees I saw bracken ferns and wintergreen and the bone-white trunks of birches. I was reminded of the swamp road where I’d set my bear trap. The signs of recent traffic showed themselves more clearly here than in the sunbaked field near the inn. Tire marks from all the police vehicles rutted the soft dirt.

We came to a clearing in the woods where the bigger trees had recently been harvested and now thin popples and birches were coming up like green shoots after a wildfire. Yellow police tape hung in strips from some of the nearest trees. Pollen floated everywhere, catching the sunlight like thrown glitter.

Charley halted the car. The sudden quiet was like my heart stopping.

“This is it?” I asked.

But he didn’t feel the need to answer such an obvious question. He just moved the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. We got out and stood in the hot open air. Charley pointed ahead to where the road reentered the forest.

“They drove into the clearing,” he said, “and he was waiting for them on the other side in the dark. His truck was blocking the road, facing back this way across the clearing, and I figured he hit them with a spotlight to blind them. His first shot went through the windshield on the driver’s side and straight on through Deputy Brodeur’s throat.” He tapped the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. “The second one took the top of his head off as he was slumping forward over the wheel.”

“What about Shipman?”

“The third shot got him in the shoulder as he was trying to get out. He managed to get his door open and stagger back this way.” He led me to the edge of the clearing. “But he didn’t get but a few steps. Probably the killer shouted at him to stand still and he did, poor son of a bitch. The bullet that finished him was fired point-blank through the back of his head.”

He knelt down and touched three fingers to the ground. Nearly a week had passed, and I knew crime scene technicians had been over every inch of this clearing, taking samples, but I still thought the dirt looked darker there, as if Jonathan Shipman’s blood had left a permanent stain on the earth.

“The one thing I can tell you for sure,” said Charley, straightening up, “is that the man who did this is a poacher. He jacklighted those men just like deer.”

When he looked at me, there was a steeliness in his eyes I hadn’t seen before.

No, that wasn’t true. I had seen it before-eight years earlier, the night he stood on the dark stairs leading up to my father’s camp. Behind the affable exterior was a knife-sharp intelligence. I wondered how many poachers had underestimated Charley Stevens and found themselves worse off for it.

“Why did you bring me to this place?”

His gaze was direct and piercing. “Because you wanted me to.”

Suddenly the sun lost all its warmth, as if an invisible cloud had passed across its face. “All right,” I said. “I’ve seen it. Now can we go talk to Truman?”

He spat the toothpick on the ground. “Whatever you say. I’m just the chauffeur here.”

23

We didn’t talk for a while, just sat side by side, driving. The hot pine-needle smell of the forest floated in through the open windows. After a mile or so we emerged from the tree-clotted darkness into sunlight again. Between the logging road and Route 144 stood a rusted metal gate. Charley turned the numbers on a combination lock until he got it open.

“How about closing that gate for me?” he asked after we’d idled through.

I walked back behind the Plymouth and pushed the heavy gate shut and snapped the combination lock closed,