The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

of mummies’ ban dages.
    Given the hour, we had the dining room more or less to ourselves. A family with three small children were the only other diners, and they were preparing to leave.
    A thin, buck-toothed waitress, dressed in gingham, came over. “Sorry, guys, we’re closed,” she said. “Oh, it’s you, Charley!”
    “Hello, Donna. Is Sally around this afternoon?”
    “She went down to Skowhegan. But she should be back in a couple of hours.”
    “So what’s the soup du jour?”
    “We just finished serving lunch. The cook’s gone up to his room.”
    “Oh, no,” Charley said with a disappointment that seemed out of proportion to the situation.
    “But I could, maybe, rustle up some sandwiches.”
    “Could you? We’d appreciate it. And could you bring us some coffee, too?”
    “Of course!”
    The waitress scurried off to make our lunches, trying without much success to get her thin hips to wiggle as she walked away.
    “I think that waitress has a thing for you,” I said.
    “She’s just being polite to an old man.”
    “No, I think she likes you. And I believe you were flirting with her just now.”
    He removed his baseball hat and set it on the table. His grizzled hair stood up as if electrified.
    “Who’s this Sally?” I asked.
    “Sally Reynolds. She owns the place. I haven’t seen her since the night of the shootings, and I wanted to ask her how things have been going. It can’t have helped her business.”
    “So this is where Wendigo held the meeting—in this room?”
    “People were packed in tighter than sardines. Hotter than hell, too.”
    “You were here?”
    “I was.”
    It hadn’t occurred to me that the old pilot might actually have been present at the meeting. “Tell me about it.”
    He pointed to the front of the room. “Well, there was a table set up over there with that Jonathan Shipman from Wendigo sitting at it. He was dressed head-to-toe in brand-new clothes from L.L. Bean. Looked like a fashion model for their summer cata log. Anyway, he was seated beside Ted Rogers and Fud Davis, who both used to work for APP and took jobs with Wendigo. And that fool Newhall who represents this district in the state legislature. And a lady from the Forest Council—I forget her name, nice looking, though.”
    “What happened?”
    “First, Newhall spoke about how Shipman was a guest here and deserving of our courtesy and all that. Then the Forest Council lady got up and said a few words about how the new timber companies are committed to doing things the same as Atlantic Pulp & Paper to preserve public access. Then Rogers and Davis both said some more reassuring horse shit. Then Shipman got up.”
    The waitress arrived with a coffeepot. Charley waited politely for her to fill our cups before he spoke again.
    “Now this Shipman character,” he said. “He was a piece of work. You could tell he was a lawyer, that denim shirt couldn’t hide his true nature. It was the words he used—‘comprehensive reevaluation of holdings’ and ‘strategic non-timber operations.’ I guess he figured he could pull the wool over our eyes if he used enough legalese.”
    “Did he say anything about evicting people?”
    “Oh, he didn’t come out and say Wendigo was going to cancel the leases, but his meaning was clear enough.”
    “What happened next?”
    “People started shouting. They didn’t even wait for him to finish. I was standing in the back of the peanut gallery—over there, next to Sally—and I could just about feel the thermostat go up ten degrees once people started yelling. I thought that numbskull Tripp’s head might explode.”
    “Did you see my father?”
    “I didn’t. Nor did I see Truman Dellis. Brenda Dean was drinking in the bar earlier—that’s what Sally told me, anyway—but I didn’t see her at the meeting. Russ Pelletier was here. I think it just about killed him to sit still for two hours without a cigarette. But he did it.”
    “When did the meeting end?”
    “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 what ever lynch mob might form.”
    “You mean this was a last-minute