Clay and Alyce Markham made their appearance, walking hand in hand from the direction of the horse stable.
I had expected the notorious photographer to be outfitted in some bizarre costume that matched his macabre reputation: done up like a bullfighting aficionado in a Basque beret and white homespun or dressed as laird of the glen in a quilted waistcoat and tweed hunting breeches.
Instead, Markham was attired in a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and much-scuffed cowboy boots: his lone affectation.
He stood about six feet tall and was still broad-shouldered and muscled in a rawboned way despite his advanced years. His mostly gray hair still had some black in it. His nose and ears were large, as sometimes happens with elderly men for whom those appendages never stop growing. These exaggerated features made him ruggedly handsome. He had the face of a Founding Father, minus the powdered wig.
“I’m Markham,” he said in a drawl. “This is my wife, Alyce.”
She was a foot shorter than he was but broadly built. No amount of diet or exercise could compensate for those big bones. She wore red-framed glasses, and her hair had been cut in silver bangs. She was dressed for gardening—rubber shoes, camp pants, and cotton smock—and the outfit was convincingly green at the knees. A pair of pruning shears projected from her back pocket.
“How is the poor man?” She had no trace of her husband’s Southern accent. “Will he be all right?”
I knelt beside Klesko, clenching my friend’s hand, while hives spread up his arms like a fast-moving plague. His pulse was weak and thready. Beneath his fluttering eyelids, his pupils had grown enormous, all but consuming his irises.
“He’s in serious condition,” said Stacey. “We need to have him ready for LifeFlight.”
“I’ve told the boys to bring the UTV,” the photographer said in his slow, syrupy voice. “What do you think, Ridge? We should be able to fit him in the bed, wouldn’t you say?”
The nervous, bearded man chuckled. “His feet will hang off the end, but I don’t see a better option.”
His nervous tic was getting under my skin. I didn’t care if he couldn’t stop it.
“It’s a heck of a thing to be allergic to bees and not know it,” said Markham, shaking his head.
“People are, dear,” said his wife.
“You’d think the police would test their officers for such things.” His skin was the splotchy bronze of a professional safari guide or a lifelong yachtsman. “It’s a heck of a thing.”
I heard an engine. The two “boys”—Heath and the other blond man—had returned with the estate’s utility terrain vehicle. It was a six-wheeled John Deere with a cargo box that resembled a miniature truck bed. They had become common on certain islands as alternatives to gas-guzzling pickups.
Markham, as the head of the household, assumed command. I wagered he always assumed command.
“Finn, take his legs. Heath, you get his arms. Be careful of his head, boys.”
Steve was sweating heavily. I let go of his hand. Stacey hopped in beside him in the cargo box. Finn made way for Markham to take the wheel. The green-and-yellow UTV shot away across the lawn with Finn trotting behind like a golden retriever and Ridge doing the best he could do to keep up.
I found myself alone with Alyce Markham. She removed a red kerchief she’d worn knotted around her throat and shook it out.
I pointed to the bloodstained nitrile gloves on the ground. “You wouldn’t have a trash bag where I can get rid of these?”
“You can leave them there.”
“They’re contaminated.”
“I know all about medical waste,” she said. “I’ll make sure they are disposed of appropriately. Please don’t argue with me, Warden. I know you must be eager to be there when the helicopter arrives.”
I thanked her, grabbed Klesko’s murder bag, and began trotting along in the grooved tracks left by the UTV. It had circled behind the buildings, past an ice pond that was tucked into an alcove of the forest, and across another lawn on the south side of the hilltop. There I was greeted by one of the most spectacular vistas I’d encountered in Maine.
The hill fell off so abruptly it might have been a green cliff. I gazed over the tops of tall spruces growing down the steep hillside. The beacon of Ayers Light rose on its grassy headland. Beyond the red-and-white tower was a stretch of relatively flat water, protected from the larger waves by two tidal ledges. These were named Boar and Sow, if I remembered right. White surf exploded along these emergent rock walls, making a sound like thunder from a storm that will pass you by. In the hazy distance, the ocean stretched unbroken to the luminous horizon.
The UTV had come to a halt at the edge of the lawn. Klesko remained in the vehicle while Stacey held his hand and Markham ordered one of his servants to bring a “cold compress”: a term I hadn’t heard in years and not a treatment for anaphylactic shock, as far as I knew. The photographer carried himself as a man of action. Ridge glanced back and forth at the western sky. The LifeFlight helicopter would be coming from the inland city of Lewiston, along the Androscoggin River.
“How is he?” I asked Stacey, who was cleaning up the tracheotomy with antiseptic, fresh gauze, and tape.
“Not good. I wish we’d been able to administer the epinephrine sooner.”
“Hang in there, buddy.” I touched my friend’s swollen hand.
Klesko tried to speak, but the pen in his throat made it impossible.
“I’ll call Kim for you,” I said, thinking this would have been the natural thing he’d want to ask of us. “I’ll see if I can arrange for a state police plane to fly her to Lewiston.”
He tried to speak again, with even less success.
“Young man,” Markham said, leaning over Klesko and addressing him with patriarchal self-confidence, “I forbid people dying on my property. I simply won’t have it. Understand?”
Over my shoulder, I became aware of the sound of a descending helicopter. Most people think they’re hearing the thwacking rotors when it’s the engine or engines drowning out the fainter noises made by the blades. The LifeFlight fleet included three AW109s. These birds possessed twin turbo engines capable of speeds topping 165 miles per hour.
The rotors whipped up a green whirlwind of newly cut grass.
The copter touched down, but the blades continued to spin.
Knowing that these aircraft had no room for passengers, I said my goodbyes to my friend. In some places, his skin was the color of curdled milk. Where the hives had risen on his arms, it looked like someone had taken off the top layer with a belt sander.
“Hey, man, you’ve got to hang in there!” I shouted to be heard as the airborne paramedics exited the chopper. “You’ve got a beautiful wife and son at home!”
He tried to speak again. I didn’t know why, but I had the sense he wanted to tell me something about the case, of all things. He was confused. Whatever it was must have been meaningless. But that didn’t quiet the voice in my head.
A moment later, I was asked to step aside by a woman in a green jumpsuit, who began readying the patient for transport. Stacey was briefing another crewman while the pilot remained at the controls; their goal was to be airborne again in minutes. I handed the crewman the duffel with Steve’s personal effects.
Having participated in countless rescues, I had learned that if you’re not part of the medevac team, the most helpful thing you can do is stay out of their way. Markham, however, remained in place, craning his head to overhear Stacey’s conversation with the female flight medic.
“We should give them room to work!” I shouted at the photographer, being so bold as to put my hand on his upper arm.
His expression told me he didn’t appreciate being touched, but he nodded his long head and backed off.
We retreated to a safe distance to watch the flight medic and the crewman secure Klesko onto a litter. They wheeled him to the side door and slid the contraption inside—the wheels folded beneath the stretcher—with the efficiency of a team that had practiced this drill blindfolded.
As the rotors began to accelerate, I raised a hand to protect my eyes against wind-whipped projectiles.
“Godspeed,” I heard Markham say. “Godspeed.”
The chopper was airborne again. Tail raised, it moved out over Ayers Island Light before banking sharply to the west. It passed across the blinding nimbus around the sun. As the sound of the engines diminished, I became aware that the loudness of the machine had filled my head with a noise not unlike the buzzing of bees.
Stacey crossed the lawn and wrapped an arm around my waist and leaned into my embrace.
“I take it you’ve had medical training,” Markham said in the most Southern way possible. “What do you suppose his chances are? Be honest.”
“I don’t know. It was such a long time between when he was stung and when I injected the adrenaline.” Her voice broke as she raised her face to mine. “I can’t lose another friend today, Mike. It’ll break me if Steve doesn’t make it.”
“Let’s think positively.”
“Hear, hear,” said Markham, who hadn’t seemed to consider that Stacey and I might want privacy at this moment. “We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Clay Markham. This is my spread.”
I thought he might shake my hand, and he almost did but stopped himself.
“This is my friend Mike Bowditch,” said Stacey.
“I gathered as much. Warden, my wife and I are at your disposal, along with our entire staff.”
“Thank you, Mr. Markham. Can you give Stacey and me a minute?”
“Heck,” he said. “Take as long as you need.”
We watched him stride across the lawn toward Ridge, who was waiting with a cigarette pinched between his fingers. Finn had returned with a white facecloth that must have been the cold compress.
“Nice of him to grant us a moment alone.”
She rubbed her wet eyes with the back of her hand. “Now what?”
“I’ve got to call Kim,” I said, “then Steve’s superiors at the state police, and mine, too. The AG will want to speak with me, I’m sure. Bureaucrats think of freak occurrences as failures. The idea that a high-profile investigation could be derailed by a honeybee exceeds the limits of their imaginations.”
“You’re forgetting I used to be a state employee. I know about bureaucrats and their limited imaginations.”
Her mention of having worked for the State of Maine ushered an unlikely question into my mind. “You didn’t happen to see Spinney down at the dock?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I would’ve expected to get a call from him when the LifeFlight alert went out. He would have gotten a notification. He was also our ride back to shore. I guess he still is, except…”
“What?”
I gazed out at the lighthouse. The eastern side of the tower was in shadow, but the sun reflecting off the Fresnel lens in the turret was as blinding as if the electric lamp were illuminated.
“Now that Steve’s gone, I’m worried what will happen if we leave,” I said. “There’s a strong chance I’ll be sidelined. The justification for my involvement always had to do with being the department’s representative on the scene at Baker Island.”
“Are you looking for an excuse to stay, Mike?”
She knew me too well. “Spinney said something I can’t stop thinking about. The islanders ‘haven’t had time to get the official story straight.’ I feel like he’s right about that. These people can’t all be trusted. For Steve’s sake, and the sake of the victims, I can’t waste valuable time.”
She straightened her spine to affect an attitude of authority. “In my professional opinion as a Registered Maine Sea Kayaking Guide, I think it would be inadvisable for us to paddle back tonight.”
“Really?”
“Night kayaking is always more dangerous, and in this case, we’d have to cross the Fish Island passage. There can be a lot of fast-moving traffic through that channel this time of year. The risk of a collision in the dark is too high.”
I smiled with relief. “That settles it, then. We’re staying.”
“Glad to help.”