When I got home, I changed out of my uniform in favor of jeans and a T-shirt, clipped my badge and sidearm to my belt, and threw my duffel into the back of my patrol truck. By six P.M., I was on the Maine Turnpike, heading north. The sky had taken on a peach-colored hue after the sun had set, and the drivers hurrying home in the opposite direction were switching on their headlights.
Stacey still hadn’t responded. I wanted to believe that she was busy with her work, or maybe she was just working through her anger. The worry manifested itself as a ticklish sensation inside my chest.
My phone rang as I passed the exit to Lewiston. I hit my blinkers and pulled into the breakdown lane. When I saw the number on the screen, the itchy feeling spread to my spine.
“I just got a call from Stacey’s boss, Tom Waterman,” Charley said. “He and I worked together at IF&W on that lynx project up north. He wanted me to hear the news from him.”
“What news?”
“Stacey blew up at him on the phone this afternoon. Told him she was done tagging coyotes, and if the governor wanted to hand out bounties, he could come up to Monson and collect the damned carcasses himself.”
I could almost hear the conversation in my head: Stacey launching into a blistering tirade, followed by her supervisor’s exasperated response. No doubt she had dared him to fire her, knowing the union would protect her job. From personal experience, I knew how hard it was for the state to terminate a problem employee.
“Have you spoken with her?” I asked.
“Ora and I have been trying to reach her, but she won’t pick up the phone.”
Before I spoke again, I waited a moment and gazed up at the darkening sky. I saw a V-shaped formation of geese outlined against the diaphanous clouds. The term for that flight pattern was a skein.
“Maybe she’s driven off into the woods to cool down and she can’t get a signal. You know how hotheaded she can be.”
It would explain why she hadn’t gotten back to me.
“The problem is, Ora has one of her feelings.”
Woman’s intuition had once struck me as an outdated myth. Then I met Stacey’s mother. Ora Stevens had empathic powers that were downright spooky.
“I’m actually on my way to Monson.”
“Say again?”
“Stacey sounded miserable the last time I spoke to her. I decided to take a couple of comp days and drive up there. I thought I’d help her out at the tagging station.”
He murmured something to another person in the room with him. Ora, I assumed.
“Can you give us a call when you find her?” he said.
“How about I have her call you instead?” I didn’t want them to worry.
“Good luck with that!” he said. “Stacey can make a mule seem accommodating when she doesn’t want to do something.”
He didn’t need to tell me about his daughter.
* * *
The stars were out by the time I left the highway. In Maine the constellations become sharper the farther from civilization you travel, especially on a moonless night like this one. I saw Sagittarius drawing his horn bow, and winged Pegasus taking flight. The Big Dipper hung, as if from its handle, above the northern horizon. That was the direction I was headed. Into the wild.
I filled my gas tank at the truck stop in Newport, feeling the eyes of the people inside—the truckers, clerks, and drunk drivers—watching me. The station burned with a bright, cold light. I put on the expensive Fjällräven climbing jacket my mother had given me the Christmas before she died. I found myself missing her intensely. She had never met Stacey, and so I would always wonder if she would have approved of her. At the very least, my mom would have appreciated knowing I was in love again. It hurt my heart to think that she had passed on when I was still alone, probably wondering to the end whether I would ever find the right woman.
The road to Moosehead Lake passed through a series of derelict mill towns. The windswept parking lots outside the factories had weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt. Apple trees outside one stately house dropped their unwanted fruit onto the sidewalks for the raccoons to eat. Halloween was a month away on the calendar, but the ghosts were already in residence in Piscataquis County.
I arrived in Monson an hour after leaving the truck stop, my back stiff, my nerves raw from too much caffeine. The town was as dark as the others, but the neon beer lights in the windows of the general store beckoned.
Toby Dow’s overturned five-gallon bucket sat beside the Dumpster, waiting for the mayor of Monson to return in the morning. Stacey’s IF&W truck wasn’t in the lot, but I hadn’t expected it would be. The shuttle van hadn’t moved since my last visit; I wondered if it was a permanent fixture. I pulled up beside an empty, idling Dodge Neon. My headlights bounced against the cinder blocks.
The man behind the counter looked up from the register. I recognized him from my prior visit: six-five, gray hair cut straight across his forehead, rhinestone stud, deeply set dark eyes. In his build and affect, he reminded me of Boris Karloff lurching around the set of The Bride of Frankenstein.
He had been making change for an underaged girl buying cigarettes. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, but I was not in town to enforce the state’s laws against minors purchasing tobacco. She swiped two packs of American Spirits off the counter when she saw my badge and gun.
“See you later, Benton,” she said in a squeaky voice, hurrying out the door.
“Take care, Tasha,” the clerk said.
When the door closed, I realized that we were alone. The last time I’d been inside the store, country music had been playing over the speakers, but now that he had the place to himself, Benton had opted for the shrill flute of Jethro Tull. I inspected the bulletin board. The missing-persons poster had been torn down, but there was a new notice, emblazoned with the shield of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, advertising the hundred-dollar bounty for coyotes.
The clerk examined me with the impassivity of a steer.
“I don’t suppose that girl’s last name is Dow, is it?” I asked.
“Tasha? How did you know?”
“Just a wild guess.” I tapped the badge on my belt. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course I do.”
“I don’t suppose you know where I can find the wildlife biologist who was here tagging coyotes.”
“She left in a huff this afternoon.” Benton began chewing his fingernails, or what was left of them.
“She didn’t say anything about where she was going?” I asked.
“No, sir.”
I couldn’t tell if he was slow-witted, lacked all powers of observation, or was lying to me for fun.
“Thanks.” I turned toward the door.
“How will you folks know when you find the coyotes that killed those girls?”
“Excuse me?”
He spit a piece of keratin out of the corner of his mouth. “Do they do blood tests or something? Or cut open their stomachs to see what’s inside?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not a forensics expert.”
“A lot of the hikers that’ve come in are scared to go back onto the trail. They keep asking me if it’s safe.”
“What have you been telling them?”
He finally showed me a smile. It completely changed the character of his face, almost made him handsome. “I tell them no.”
“That’s the right answer.”
“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s a quote from George Carlin. Have a good evening, Warden.”
What a flake, I thought on my way out the door.
I decided to make Ross’s Rooming House my next stop. Stacey had told me she was staying there on the state’s tab. With luck, I would find her holed up in her room, cooling her anger with a six-pack of beer.
As I cruised through the village, I passed the boarded storefronts and the illuminated sign of the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle with its dire biblical warning. Then I turned left toward the lake. The old Victorians along the side street seemed to be sinking slowly into their own front lawns. Stacey’s truck wasn’t parked outside the hiking hostel, either.
I sat behind the wheel and considered my next move. The engine made a ticking sound, like a stopwatch counting down the seconds until something exploded. After a minute, I went inside.