25
The longer I spent in the plane with Stacey, the more curious I became to see what she looked like beneath the headset and sunglasses, but I was seated behind her, and she kept her face turned to the window.
I’d wanted to meet Stacey Stevens forever. Charley and Ora were the parents I would have chosen had such a thing been possible, and yet Stacey seemed to have no end of grievances with them. Based on the stories her father told, the younger of their two girls had inherited these qualities from him: an eagerness to take risks that bordered on suicidal recklessness, a capacity for stirring up mischief, and a love of the great outdoors that surpassed his own.
“Fortunately,” Charley always added, “she got her looks from her mother.”
Ora was quite beautiful.
How ironic it was that I was finally meeting her on the day I’d just started a new relationship with a woman. Nevertheless, I found myself gawking. Her skin was uniformly smooth and pale. There was a small mole beneath her jawline. She wore her brown hair tied in a ponytail, exposing a long neck. Once or twice she may have caught me staring, because she turned her head sharply, and I saw my goofy face reflected in her mirrored glasses.
“How are these game ranches legal?” she asked. “Why come to Maine to kill an elk? Why not just go to Wyoming?”
“Novelty, I guess.”
“People will pay to kill anything,” said Charley. “The money is part of the turn-on.”
We followed the road at an altitude of three hundred feet to avoid the blinking cell-phone towers that jutted periodically from the low hilltops. Traffic crawled along the highway beneath us, headed west to Bangor or east to St. Stephen. I couldn’t see the speedometer, but I could mark our velocity by how quickly we outpaced the logging trucks below.
After fifteen minutes, I caught sight of the Call of the Wild sign, and I knew that all of the property to the north of the highway was fenced with barbed wire. I indicated for Stacey to take us down so that I could get a better look. Away from the truck route, the timberland was webbed with access roads to bring hunters into the backcountry. Brogan had logged portions of the ranch heavily. Most big herbivores dislike mature forests; they prefer clearings that have been heavily cut, where alders and striped maple are growing back in low bushes. I guess this forage appealed as much to Sitka elk as it did to Maine moose.
“There goes a pig,” said Charley.
Down one white road, a wild boar was jogging. It looked brown and shaggy and fairly well fed. As a creature of northern European forests, it didn’t seem to find the temperature oppressively cold, nor did it spook when Stacey descended for a closer look. It glanced at us over one hairy shoulder and then set its head down and charged off into a line of spruces without breaking stride.
Stacey turned the plane back toward Brogan’s office and brought it about in a tight circle until we were spiraling over the building at an alarmingly low altitude. After a few minutes, a door swung open and a man stepped out, looking skyward. I saw a blond beard and ponytail.
“That’s Billy Cronk,” I said. “He’s the one I was telling you about.”
“The one with the skunk?” asked Charley.
“What skunk?” asked Stacey.
“That feller down there let a skunk loose in Mike’s abode.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He’s mad because I pinched him for discharging a firearm too close to a house, so he’s been pulling pranks on me,” I said. “He calls himself George Magoon, after a famous poacher who liked to torment game wardens.”
“What kind of pranks?”
“First, he nailed a coyote pelt to my door, and then he broke into my trailer and released a skunk, which sprayed all over the place. I’ve been sleeping in a motel the past two nights.”
Other men emerged from the cabins to join Cronk. They watched us with generally perplexed expressions, their heads back.
“Are you sure it was the same person both times?” Charley asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You don’t want to leap to the wrong conclusion.”
It never occurred to me that the incidents might have been unrelated. Now that I thought about it, I realized the skunk had not been accompanied by a note from Magoon. Charley had always warned me against making assumptions in my investigations.
“Can you pass me a bottle of water from the cooler?” asked Stacey.
The tight spirals were making me nauseous. A drink sounded like a good idea, but there was only a single Poland Spring in the little Igloo Cooler. I wiped the moisture off with my sleeve and handed it to Stacey. She untwisted the cap, took a swig, and set it between her thighs. Then, very quickly, she lifted the window. A blast of arctic air tore through the cockpit.
“Stacey,” warned her father.
Before I could ask what was going on, she hurled the nearly full bottle straight into the cluster of men beneath us. Cronk leapt nimbly backward, but one of the others, a tubby brown-bearded character, fell flat on his ass in the snow. The plastic bottle struck a patch of rock and exploded like a liquid bomb among them.
“Assholes!” Stacey called out the window before she latched it shut again.
“You could have beaned one of those guides.” Charley did his best to suppress a chuckle.
“That was the idea.”
“I appreciate the gesture,” I said.
“I didn’t do it for you. I have no problem with hunting if the animal is taken fairly and doesn’t suffer, but turning the Maine woods into a private shooting gallery for lazy jerks who just want to fire their guns and pose with a trophy steams me.”
Her feelings were almost exactly my own, although my job prohibited me from saying so too loudly, let alone dropping water bombs on the heads of hunting guides.
“You’re going to get Mike in trouble with his superiors,” Charley said.
“He’s a big boy,” she said. “And it’s not like it will be the first time, according to Mom.”
I wondered what stories Ora had told her daughter about me. I knew that Charley’s wife cared deeply for me, but I also suspected she worried that I brought out her husband’s daredevil side. Ora didn’t blame me for the violence I had brought into their life, but the same couldn’t necessarily be said for Stacey.
My cell phone rang on my belt. I barely heard the ringtone over the engine. The number on the display belonged to Sergeant Rivard. I removed the headset.
“Yeah?” I said, holding the phone to one ear and covering the other with my hand. The noise inside the plane was deafening.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“In a plane.”
“What?”
“In a plane with Charley Stevens and his daughter. We’re flying over Narraguagus.”
“Can you head over to Machias? Prester Sewall just escaped from the hospital.”
“What?”
“A school bus hit a snowplow. He escaped during the Code 66.”
Code 66 is hospital jargon for an all-hands-on-deck emergency, such as a natural disaster or a school-yard shooting. In other words, it means any event requiring every staff member to drop what they are doing, even if they are off duty, and assist with triage. A bus loaded with kids striking a plow definitely qualified. I thought of Jamie’s son, Lucas, and felt a surge of worry.
“Can Stevens help with the search?” Rivard shouted.
I held the phone against my leg and rearranged the headset to explain to Charley and Stacey what had
