The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

change of plans?”
    “More or less.”
    “So whoever ambushed them must have known about the change. Did any of this go out over the police radio?”
    “No.”
    “So who knew about it?”
    “Brodeur and Shipman, of course. Sally Reynolds. The sheriff and his deputies. And I guess I should add myself to the list.”
    I pictured Twombley’s cherub face. “No one else?”
    “Not that we know of,” said Charley. “You’re on the right track, though. Whoever shot Shipman and Brodeur did have the inside scoop. The killer knew they were driving over to Sugarloaf, and he knew exactly where to set up an ambush.”
    “Then it couldn’t be my dad,” I said. “How would he have known any of this? Who would have told him?”
    “Here comes our lunch” was Charley’s only answer.
     
    Donna had prepared tuna sandwiches with ripe tomatoes on thick slices of homemade bread. While we ate, Charley told me that his camp, where he and his wife lived from ice-out in April through deer season in November, was just across Flagstaff Pond from the public boat launch. I asked if his wife Ora flew, and he said he had tried to teach her once, but she didn’t even enjoy going up as a passenger anymore. The subject seemed to make him melancholy, so I let it drop.
    After we’d finished our sandwiches, Charley excused himself—to call his wife, I figured—and left me alone at the table. I sat in the empty room and listened to the afternoon sounds of the inn: the hum of a vacuum cleaner upstairs, the clatter of dishes being washed and stacked in the kitchen, the sharp
clack
of a screen door as someone carried out the trash. But in my mind I also heard a murmur of ghost voices that grew louder when I closed my eyes. With a little imagination I could place myself in this same room six nights earlier. I could sense the heat of close-packed bodies. The sour smell of sweat. The night air as electric as the seconds before a lightning strike.
    I opened my eyes to see Charley Stevens coming through the door. A toothpick was tucked in the corner of his mouth. “I thought we might make a small detour.”
    I rose to my feet. “What kind of detour?”
    He grinned like a mischievous boy. “Since you came all the way up here, and we’re just around the corner, so to speak, I figured you might like to see the scene of the crime.”
     
    We went out to the car and somehow got it started again. But instead of heading back down the drive, which is what I expected, Charley drove us across a ragweed field that stretched from the south side of the property to a wall of distant evergreens. He followed two parallel grooves that had been worn into the sun-hardened dirt, like an ancient wagon trail on a prairie. Up ahead I saw a cut in the trees.
    “This used to be a two-sled road,” said Charley.
    “A two-sled road?”
    “They’d haul logs out of here with a two-sled rig—like two bobsleds joined together. Runs all the way out to the main road, three miles. Except there’s a gate on the other end now. Sally gets some mountain bikers using it these days. But mostly it’s the partridge hunters who use it come fall.”
    “Why did Brodeur go this way? Why not just drive back the way he came?”
    “Tripp and some of the others were waiting out front of the inn with their trucks. Guess young Bill figured he’d slip out this way before they were wise to him.”
    “What about the gate?”
    “Most of the locals know the combination.”
    The old logging road was dappled with what little late afternoon sunlight managed to make it through the pine boughs overhead. In the shadows beneath the trees I saw bracken ferns and wintergreen and the bone-white trunks of birches. I was reminded of the swamp road where I’d set my bear trap. The signs of recent traffic showed themselves more clearly here than in the sunbaked field near the inn. Tire marks from all the police vehicles rutted the soft dirt.
    We came to a clearing in the woods where the bigger trees had recently been harvested and now thin popples and birches were coming up like green shoots after a wildfire. Yellow police tape hung in strips from some of the nearest trees. Pollen floated everywhere, catching the sunlight like thrown glitter.
    Charley halted the car. The sudden quiet was like my heart stopping.
    “This is it?” I asked.
    But he didn’t feel the need to answer such an obvious question. He just moved the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. We got out and stood