The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

inch of it burned to ash before our eyes. “I’m not proud of what happened that night with B.J. But I didn’t rape that girl, and I didn’t kill anyone, no matter what she says. She’s a goddamned liar, Charley.”
    My head was throbbing. I was worried that Charley might be swallowing Pelletier’s story. “She told the truth about my dad beating you up,” I said. “She told the truth about your having a grudge against him.”
    “Jesus Christ,” said Pelletier exhaustedly. “She uses people. She used your old man, and now she’s using you, kid.”
    I heard an appliance humming softly in the kitchen, the only sound.
    “I guess it’s time I had a talk with the young woman,” Charley said at last.

 
     
    27
     
    W e left Pelletier standing outside the main lodge, lighting yet another Marlboro.
    A dirt road, scarcely more than a wheel-rutted path, led over to my father’s cabin, but the most direct route was by water. Charley and I borrowed one of the camp’s aluminum canoes and paddled across the cove to the gravel beach where, eight years ago, we’d first met. In the shallows minnows scattered under our paddles and the canoe made a metallic knocking noise as it struck bottom. Charley hopped out with a splash and hauled the bow up, scraping, onto the stony shore.
    We stood together looking up the steep plank stairs that scaled the hillside to my father’s cabin, both of us, I think, remembering that night when Truman Dellis had aimed a deer rifle at him from the darkness above.
    Charley cupped his hands around his mouth, just like he did to call the coyotes. “Brenda Dean! It’s Charley Stevens and Mike Bowditch!”
    There was no answer.
    “We made enough racket with that damned aluminum canoe,” he said to me. “You’d think she would have heard us.”
    Along the stairs I noticed hanging shreds of yellow police tape that someone had ripped down. “So much for this being a crime scene,” I said.
    I hadn’t seen the camp in eight years, but it looked no different. There were the same three separate log cabins angled onto the porch. All had rusty screen windows and screen doors that made the rooms hard to see into.
    We checked the three cabins, but Brenda wasn’t in any of them. I was struck by how clean everything looked. There were the same propane stove and fridge from when I was a kid, and even the same weathered topographic maps pinned to the log walls, but none of the mess I remembered. The floors had been swept. The beds had been made with clean sheets and blankets. Knowing the miracle Sarah had performed on my own home, I could only attribute the transformation to Brenda’s woman’s touch.
    “Maybe she’s up at the out house?” I suggested.
    Charley nodded. “Hate to disturb her there, but we should see.”
    Behind the middle cabin, facing the hillside, was a stack of weathered firewood with a blue tarp thrown over it and a couple of storage sheds. The dirt road wound away through the trees in the direction of the sporting camp. Down it a little ways was my father’s stinking two-seater out house.
    She wasn’t there, either.
    Charley pushed up the brim of his cap and gave his forehead a scratch. “Where the hell is that girl?”
    “Right here.”
    To our left Brenda stepped out from behind a shaggy hemlock along the road. She was wearing the same oil-spotted blue jeans she’d worn yesterday and a man’s faded blue chambray shirt, and she was carry ing over her shoulder an old single-barreled shotgun. Charley and I were both unarmed.
    “What are you doing hiding in the woods?” Charley asked.
    “Getting the drop on you, old man.” There was a shine in her eyes that didn’t seem natural. Her smile showed her crooked teeth. “I thought you guys were supposed to be game wardens.”
    I could see the corded muscles in the pi lot’s neck standing out like braids in a brown rope. His eyes flicked from the shotgun back to her dilated pupils. “You called Detective Soctomah,” he said. “You said your father threatened you.”
    Her face tightened. “He said he’d kill me if I didn’t shut up. He told me you came to see him.”
    “What was I supposed to do?” I asked.
    “Arrest him.”
    “What else did Truman say to you on the phone?”
    “He said he killed those men.”
    “He did, did he?” Charley brushed a bug off his ear.
    The ripe smell of the out house was all around us. The thought that Truman had spontaneously confessed to the murders was just too good