The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

had lost something irreplaceable.
    When I awoke the next morning, I found myself inside, lying facedown on the couch. The phone was ringing, and it took everything in me to stumble across the room to answer it. Sunlight, flooding through the windows, burned my eyes.
    “Hello?”
    “I need to see you,” said my mother.

 
     
    17
     
    T he town of Scarborough is where I’d spent the second half of my childhood after my parents divorced and where my mom and stepfather still lived. It is only a two-hour drive south along the coast, but it always feels longer because the land changes so much with every passing mile. These days, southern Maine is just an extension of the Boston suburbs.
    When we first moved to Scarborough, right after the divorce, there were still cornfields and thick oak forests that stretched for miles. Then the houses really began to sprout, first along the country roads heading down to the beaches, and then in vast subdivisions wherever there was enough land for building. Soon the weedy fields where I’d caught garter snakes became a grid of neo co lo nial homes and impossibly green lawns. Woods where Wabanaki Indians had once hunted deer were cleared to make way for “Indian Woods Estates.”
    As a teenager, I fought the future as best I could. Rather than taking up soccer or skateboarding, I cast for striped bass in the Spurwink River. Instead of playing video games I read
The Last of the Mohicans
. I watched the pavement spread under my feet and dreamed of moving to the North Woods and becoming a game warden. As if you can ever really escape what’s coming.
    *   *   *
     
    My mother had received a call from my father, and she was in a panic. She didn’t want to go into the details over the phone. “I need you here,” she said.
    It was a brilliant morning. The blue of the sky and the green of the leaves looked like colors from a child’s picture book. After two hours on the road, I pulled into the driveway of my mother’s beautiful new house. Next door, a rainbow haze drifted across the lawn from the neighbor’s sprinkler system.
    I rang the bell and waited. After a while, I had the sense of someone on the other side of the door, studying me through the peephole, and then it opened and there was my stepfather. Neil Turner was a tall, flat-stomached man with a full head of dark hair going silver at the temples. He wore a lime-colored polo shirt and khakis and was clutching his cell phone. He smiled awkwardly and extended a hand for me to shake. “You really didn’t have to drive all the way down here.”
    “It’s OK,” I said.
    “Is that Michael?” my mother called from the second floor.
    “It’s me,” I said.
    She appeared at the top of the steps. She was barefoot, and she was wearing white shorts and a striped blue cotton shirt. A small gold crucifix hung at the base of her throat. She hurried downstairs to embrace me. “It’s so good to see you.”
    I smelled shampoo in her hair as she hugged me. “It’s good to see you, too, Mom.”
    She held me at arm’s length. There were dark circles under her eyes. As she studied me, her forehead became wrinkled, the only lines in an otherwise perfect oval face. She touched my cheek. “Michael, what happened to your chin?”
    “I scratched myself going through some bushes. I want to hear about the call you got from Dad.”
    She glanced at Neil, who was now standing against the relocked door.
    “Why don’t we go out into the living room,” he said.
    They sat together on a couch holding hands, and I sat across from them. It was a cream-colored room with Scandinavian furniture, and sheer curtains that let in some gauzy sunlight. On the coffee table was a book of Matisse paintings and a framed picture of Neil with his daughter from his previous marriage. They’d redecorated since Sarah and I were last here at Christmastime.
    “I shouldn’t have called you,” said my mother. “Neil told me not to, but I was in a panic.” The slight French-Canadian accent in her speech seemed more pronounced than usual: a sign of stress I’d learned to recognize.
    “Tell me about the phone call,” I said.
    She glanced at Neil, and he squeezed her hand. “He called early. It must have been eight o’clock. It sounded like he was on a cell phone. There was a lot of static.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said he didn’t kill those men. He said he’d asked for your help, but that you wouldn’t help him.”
    I felt a tightening in