The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

table and took a step forward, coming face to chest with me. “I want to sit on the porch—if it’s all right with you.”
    I stepped aside. She shoved open the screen door and plopped into one of the two Adirondack chairs my dad had built by hand. I leaned against the porch railing, gazing out at the water. The lake shined with a blue light through the trees.
    There was a long silence between us that made me uncomfortable.
    “You really cleaned up this place,” I said at last. “I almost didn’t recognize it.”
    “Jack needs someone to take care of him. All men do.”
    I smiled in spite of myself. “You think we’re all a bunch of slobs.”
    “The one thing I know about—living here all my life—is men.”
    I was still chewing over that remark when I heard the sputter of Charley’s Super Cub coming to life. Then the plane came skimming by on its pontoons and I watched it lifted upward into the sky as if by an invisible hand. The sound it made—an insect-like hum—grew fainter and fainter until finally all I could hear were the real insects in the pines and the lake lapping against the shore.
    “Well,” I said, mostly to myself. “He’s gone.”
    “Good,” she said.

 
     
    28
     
    W hen I worked at Rum Pond, the only time Brenda and I ever spent together was in the kitchen. She’d be peeling potatoes for dinner while I scrubbed out the pots from lunch. I can’t recall a single conversation we ever had. She was twelve, and I was sixteen, and, at the time, that was a pretty big gap.
    My only real memory of actually conversing with her came one afternoon, just before I packed my bags and went home. I was mopping the pine floor in the dining room. After a while, I got the sense of someone watching me—that cold-breath feeling along the back of the neck. I looked up and she was standing in the kitchen door, this stick-figure girl, all braids and cheekbones, watching me with a weird expression. I can only describe it as hatred.
    “I heard you’re leaving,” she said.
    “Tomorrow. I’m going back to Scarborough.”
    “Why?”
    “My dad doesn’t really want me here. No one does.”
    Her hands were balled into fists by her sides. “I hope you get in an accident,” she said, and darted back into the kitchen.
    Those were the last words she spoke to me. At the time I remember finding that interchange funny. I remember shaking my head and laughing. And then I forgot all about them—and her—for eight years.
    “I never thought about what it was like for you growing up here,” I said now. “Being the only female.”
    “Doreen Pelletier was here until a few years ago, but you know how she was—the old witch. And there were always women guests. But puberty was no picnic, if that’s what you mean. After a while, though, you get used to the itty-bitty-titty jokes.” She was slouched in her Adirondack chair, watching me with those animal-black eyes of hers. “So now what?”
    “We stay put.”
    “For how long?”
    “Until Charley comes back.”
    “You mean we just sit here all day?”
    “We don’t have to sit,” I said. “We can go over to Rum Pond and I can use the radio phone and find out what’s going on.”
    She folded her arms across her breasts. “I told you I’m not going over there.”
    “Then it looks like we’re staying put.” I removed the single shotgun shell from the chamber and put it in my pocket.
    “What are you doing that for? If Truman shows up, he’ll kill us both.”
    “If he shows up, I’ll reload it.”
    She shook her head in disbelief. “You won’t have time. You’ll never hear him coming. The next thing you know you’ll be looking down at your chest wondering how that bullet hole got there.”
    “Thanks for the warning.”
    She let out a big laugh. “You’re such an asshole.”
    “I get called that a lot. It goes with my job.” Or at least it used to, I thought.
    “It has nothing to do with your job,” she said with a cockeyed grin. “You’re just an asshole personally.”
    I could see how this day was going to go.
    “You used to be a nice guy,” she said. “That summer you lived here, I really liked you, even though you never paid any attention to me. What happened to you?”
    “Nothing happened to me.”
    “Yeah, it did. How come you left that summer, anyway? It was only July and you were supposed to stay through August.”
    “I was tired of being Russell’s serf.”
    “You never said good-bye to me.” She finished her beer