Dark Tiger Page 10

  Calhoun sat beside Franklin Redbird, who was holding a coffee mug in both hands and sipping from it. “You eat already?” said Calhoun.

  “Flapjacks, Maine maple syrup, sausages,” said Franklin. “What I always have. Flapjacks and sausages stick to a man’s ribs all day long.”

  Calhoun poured himself a mug of coffee. Curtis Swenson, the bush pilot, wearing his usual gaudy Hawaiian shirt, this one featuring multicolored toucans, was sitting down at the other end of the table sipping coffee and reading a newspaper and ignoring everybody. The two young guides, Peter and Ben, were shoveling in the food, and the heavyset guide they called Mush was sipping his coffee. The others apparently had either already eaten or hadn’t showed up yet.

  Robin, the waitress, came in and asked Calhoun if he wanted some eggs or pancakes or French toast or some combination thereof. Or maybe some oatmeal?

  He asked for three eggs over easy.

  “You ready to go fishin’ today?” said Franklin.

  “Rarin’ to go,” said Calhoun.

  “I got rods and flies and lunch and everything,” Franklin said. “It’ll be a treat, having a real fisherman and a good bird dog in my canoe. You and Ralph just meet me on the dock after you’re done with breakfast.” He wiped his mouth on a napkin and stood up. “See you there.” He patted Calhoun’s shoulder and left the dining room.

  “The Indian’s taking you out today, huh?” said Mush around a mouthful of Wheaties.

  “Franklin’s going to show me around, yes,” said Calhoun. He didn’t like the way the burly guy used the word “Indian,” with just the hint of a sneer.

  “That old Penobscot grew up around here,” said Mush, “knows the water better’n anybody, and knowin’ him, he’ll probably show you all his best spots.” He grinned. “Me, I’d rather hang on to my secrets. So it’s a good thing you got him, not me.”

  Calhoun smiled. “I agree with you on that.”

  Mush frowned, then shrugged, and returned his attention to his cereal.

  A couple of minutes later, Robin returned with a plate of eggs for Calhoun and a bowl of dog food for Ralph.

  “Thank you,” said Calhoun.

  “You want anything else,” said Robin, “just holler.”

  After they finished eating, Calhoun and Ralph went back to the cabin. Even though Franklin said he had all the gear they’d need, Calhoun put a couple of his own fly boxes into his shirt pockets. He preferred to fish with flies he’d tied himself, and he had some patterns he’d invented that he thought Franklin might like to try.

  He strapped his sheathed hunting knife onto his belt, put on his sunglasses and a long-billed cap, and grabbed his rain jacket, and he and Ralph went down to the dock.

  Franklin Redbird was sitting in the stern of a classic Grand Lake canoe tinkering with the outboard motor. Calhoun was happy to see that the lodge used Grand Lakers. They were sleek twenty-foot-long square-ended canoes, wood skeletons covered with green fiberglass, with elegant upswept bows. Franklin’s had what looked like an eight-or nine-horsepower outboard motor clamped on the transom. The broad-beamed Grand Lake canoes were stable and dry in a heavy chop, they could navigate shallow water, and they carried three adults and piles of gear with room to spare.

  Calhoun saw that Franklin had two fly rods already strung up and stowed on pegs under the gunwales. “Shall I cast us off?” he said.

  Franklin nodded. “Let’s go fishin’.”

  Calhoun pointed to the middle of the canoe and said to Ralph, “Get in and lie down.”

  Ralph jumped softly into the canoe and curled up near the middle thwart.

  Calhoun untied the lines, then climbed in and took the bow seat. He pushed the canoe away from the dock. Franklin took a few strokes with a paddle, then started up the motor, and they were cruising across the lake.

  It was a cloudy, warm, soft day. The air smelled moist. Sometime in the night the wind had turned from the north to the southwest—an excellent quarter for salmon fishing—and there was just enough chop on the water. Calhoun put on his rain jacket against the spray that the bow occasionally threw up.

  When they got to the other side of the lake, Franklin said, “Let’s put out some lines, see what happens.” He handed one of the fly rods up to Calhoun.

  Calhoun took it and decided not to replace the flies Franklin had chosen. There was a Ballou Special tied to the point and a Black Ghost on the dropper. Classic old Maine salmon streamers. He approved of Franklin’s choices, and besides, he was afraid he’d insult the man if he replaced them with his own flies.

  He turned around and sat facing the back so he could watch his line as it trailed out behind them. Franklin cut the motor down to a slow trolling speed. “This here is a good shoreline this time of year,” he said, raising his voice a little to be heard over the low grumble of the motor. “This wind coming out of the southwest blows onto it, and that seems to push the baitfish into the rocks. Plus there are several brooks that come into the lake along here where the smelt like to spawn.”

  A few minutes later Calhoun’s rod bounced, and then it bent steeply, and line began peeling off his reel. “Hey,” he said. He lifted his rod and felt the weight of a good fish. “I got one.”

  Franklin cut the motor and reeled in his own line. Far behind the boat a large landlocked salmon jumped. Then it ran toward the deep water. Calhoun lowered his rod so that it was parallel to the water and held it to the side and tried to turn the fish. He liked to bully them, to land them fast so they wouldn’t be dangerously exhausted when he netted them. If you babied it, a fish like a salmon could kill itself pulling against the resistance of the rod by overdosing its muscles with lactic acid. Once in a while he broke off a fish this way, but Calhoun figured that was a reasonable price to pay for returning a healthy fish to the water.

  With unrelenting down-and-dirty pressure from the long, limber fly rod, he got the fish close to the boat quickly, and Franklin netted it with the long-handled boat net. He held the net down to Calhoun so he could reach in and twist the fly from the salmon’s mouth. He didn’t even touch the fish. “A lovely salmon,” he said.

  “A beauty,” said Franklin. “Close to four pounds, I’d say. Nice job of fighting him, too.” Then he put the net back into the water and flipped it over, and after a moment, the salmon realized it was free and swam slowly away.

  They caught three more salmon and one nice brook trout in the morning, trolling along the shoreline of Loon Lake. A little after noontime, Franklin Redbird beached the canoe on a sandy point of land. Ralph hopped out and went to explore the bushes. Franklin and Calhoun hefted the big cooler out of the canoe, then gathered dead wood and got a fire going.

  “Now you relax,” said Franklin. “Take a nap or something while these coals burn down and I get lunch going.”

  “I’d rather help,” said Calhoun.

  “One-man job,” said Franklin. “I’m all over it. Take a nap.”

  “A nap,” said Calhoun.

  “Why not?”

  It went against Calhoun’s grain to let somebody else do all the work, but that was how Franklin wanted it. So he found a mossy place in the sun and lay down and closed his eyes, and Ralph came over, turned around three times, and lay down tight against Calhoun’s hip, and to his surprise, the next thing he knew Franklin was poking his arm and telling him lunch was all ready.

  It was a typical Maine guide’s shore lunch—a bubbling pot of chili, grilled rib-eye steaks, slices of tomatoes, a loaf of sourdough bread, a bag of Toll House cookies, and a pot of coffee.

  “This is great,” said Calhoun. He tossed a hunk of steak to Ralph, who swallowed it whole. “You do this every day?”

  Franklin nodded. “Some of the guides have the cook make sandwiches, but I like to give my sports the traditional Maine shore lunch experience. The cook’ll pack whatever you want. Steaks, sliced potatoes and onions, beans, soup, chili, pies and cookies, soft drinks, coffee and tea. All you gotta do is build a fire.”

  “No
beer?”

  Franklin shook his head. “Not in my canoe. You can bring some if you want. In my experience, it tends to make your sports crabby and argumentative. Or else they just end up falling asleep in the boat.”

  “I don’t bring beer when I go guiding, either,” said Calhoun. “There are plenty of times and places for drinking beer besides on a fishing boat.”

  While they were eating, Franklin said, “I asked around about McNulty last night.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Calhoun said. “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

  “No trouble,” he said. “Didn’t learn anything, though. Sorry. I tried.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Either nobody knows anything,” said Franklin, “or they just ain’t talking about it.”

  “It’s not important,” Calhoun said.

  A few minutes later there came the sound of an airplane passing over the lake. Both Calhoun and Franklin Redbird used their hands as visors and peered up at the cloudy sky, but the plane did not come into their view.

  “That’d be Curtis,” said Franklin. “Picking up some clients in Canada probably.”

  “Canada,” said Calhoun.

  “A lot of the international sports come in through Canada. We’re real close to the border here. It’s a much shorter flight than the one from Greenville you took yesterday. Just a quick hop from their wilderness lake to ours.”

  “And no passport needed,” said Calhoun.

  Franklin shrugged. “You’re right about that.”

  Calhoun listened to the diminishing roar of the plane’s engine. He didn’t recognize it. He remembered the distinctive sound of engines, and this was not the Twin Otter that had brought him to Loon Lake, the float plane that Curtis Swenson piloted. He didn’t bother correcting Franklin, though. He didn’t feel like trying to explain his gift for identifying engine sounds.

  After they finished eating, they cleaned up their campsite, loaded the canoe, and went exploring. At the head of the lake, Franklin showed Calhoun how to paddle upstream through the narrows to get to Big Hairy Lake. Then he beached the canoe at a place where a small brook entered Loon Lake, and the three of them, with Ralph leading the way, walked about a mile on a path the followed the meandering brook until they came to another, smaller lake. This was Little Hairy, where a rowboat with a pair of oars lay overturned on a sand beach. Franklin pointed out good fishing spots along the shoreline of Little Hairy.

  Then they walked back to the canoe and motored down to the foot of Loon Lake, where Franklin showed Calhoun how to get to the other lakes—Muddy, Crescent, Drake, and June’s. This time of year, he said, they all fished well. Look for rocky shorelines and drop-offs and the places where brooks came into the lake.

  By now it was getting on toward late afternoon, and they decided to troll their way back to the lodge.

  They caught a couple more salmon on the way. When they rounded a rocky point and came into the cove where the lodge was located, Calhoun saw that there were three seaplanes tied off at the E-shaped dock—the lodge’s Twin Otter, the smaller Cessna, and another Twin Otter that hadn’t been there in the morning, which he assumed was the one they’d heard when then were eating lunch.

  “That’s the sheriff’s plane,” Franklin shouted over the roar of the outboard. “From Houlton. Something’s going on.”

  As they approached the dock, Calhoun saw that there were four men standing there. Two of them were Marty and Robert Dunlap in their green shirts. The other two wore khaki-colored shirts with matching pants and Smokey the Bear hats. They’d be the Aroostook County sheriff and a deputy, one of whom doubled as a float-plane pilot, he guessed.

  Franklin shut off the outboard motor as they approached the dock, and they glided up to it. Robert Dunlap knelt down and eased the bow against a piling. Calhoun climbed out and tied them off. Then he whistled at Ralph, who jumped up onto the dock and trotted to the bushes that grew along the shore.

  Calhoun reached down and gave Franklin Redbird a hand up.

  Franklin mumbled, “Thanks, Stoney.” He was looking hard at the two men in khaki.

  They both approached Franklin. One of them looked to be about fifty. He had a florid face and straw-colored hair and a big, hard-looking belly. The other was younger and thinner, with black hair and pale skin and a slim mustache that curved down at the ends.

  “Franklin Redbird?” the older one said.

  “That’s me, Sheriff,” said Franklin. “You know me. We’ve met a number of times.”

  The sheriff nodded. “I’m arresting you for the murder of Elaine Hoffman. You have the right to an attorney. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand what I just told you?”

  “You saying Elaine got murdered?”

  “That’s right,” said the sheriff.

  “What the hell?” said Franklin. “I didn’t murder anybody. Least of all Elaine.”

  “Please,” said the sheriff. “Do you understand your rights?”

  “Of course I do,” said Franklin. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “We’ll be the ones asking the questions,” the sheriff said. He turned to his deputy. “Henry, cuff this man, put him in the plane, and stay there with him, will you?”

  Henry came over, pulled Franklin’s arms behind him, and handcuffed him. Then, holding his arm, he steered him over to their float plane, which had AROOSTOOK COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT, HOULTON, MAINE printed on its fuselage. Both of them climbed in.

  The sheriff turned to Calhoun. “You’re Calhoun, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Stonewall Jackson Calhoun?”

  Calhoun nodded.

  “Well, Mr. Calhoun,” said the sheriff, “me and Henry have had a chance to talk to everybody else here except you. I hope you don’t mind if I ask you some questions.”

  Calhoun shrugged. “I don’t mind. I can tell you, you got the wrong man.”

  The sheriff jerked his head at the lodge. “Why don’t we go inside, get comfortable, have some coffee. That all right, Marty?”

  Marty Dunlap, who’d been standing there with Robert watching, said, “That’s fine. Nobody’ll be in the guides’ dining room this time of the day. You can use that. We’ll make sure there’s some fresh coffee.” He turned to Robert. “Why don’t you go on up there, fill a carafe with coffee, put out some cream and sugar and mugs for them.”

  Robert hesitated, then shrugged and headed up to the lodge. Calhoun guessed that Robert didn’t appreciate being asked to do menial chores that the help should be doing, even—or maybe especially—if it was his own father who did the asking.

  Calhoun and the sheriff strolled up to the lodge, went into the guides’ dining room, and sat across the table from each other. Robert came in with the coffee. The sheriff poured his mug full, then handed the carafe to Calhoun, who filled a mug for himself.

  The sheriff waited for Robert to leave the room. Then he leaned forward on his forearms and said, “You’re a deputy sheriff. What’re you doing up here?”

  “I’m guiding,” Calhoun said. “That’s what I mainly do. A fishing guide down in Portland. I help out Sheriff Dickman now and then when he needs a hand with something. I’m just a part-time unpaid deputy. It ain’t my job or anything.”

  “That’s not how I heard it,” said the sheriff.

  “Well,” said Calhoun, “I can’t help what you might’ve heard. Give Sheriff Dickman a call, ask him. He’ll tell you what I just told you.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything. Just curious.”

  “I’m here because one of their regular guides got called home. I’m filling in for a month because this is their busy season. That’s all.”

  The sheriff held up both hands. “Okay, okay. I believe you. That’s what Marty told me. Except he didn’t say anything about you being a deputy sheriff.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a
small leather-covered notebook. He opened it and squinted at it, then looked up at Calhoun. “Some people have told me that you were with Elaine Hoffman last night.”

  “She and I sat on the dock for maybe half an hour after dinner, just talking, getting to know each other a little,” Calhoun said. He remembered the sound of Elaine’s soft voice, her gentle smile. He was having a hard time with the idea that she was dead. “Why don’t you tell me what happened to her and why you’re arresting Franklin Redbird.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “I don’t remember. Not much. Fishing. Elaine told me how much she liked it here. Said it was the best job she ever had.”

  “Did she mention having any problems with anybody?”

  “Like Franklin Redbird, you mean?”

  “Anybody,” said the sheriff.

  “Actually, she said she’d had an argument of some kind with Franklin.”

  “What’d she say they argued about?”

  About McNulty, Calhoun thought. Franklin asked her about McNulty, and she said she didn’t know anything about the man, and Franklin didn’t believe her.

  Calhoun wasn’t ready to mention McNulty to this sheriff. “She didn’t tell me what the issue was,” he said, “and I didn’t ask. None of my business. I had the feeling it wasn’t very important and that neither of them was overly upset about it.”

  “Well,” said the sheriff, “Mr. Redbird was upset enough that he went to Ms. Hoffman’s cabin sometime in the night while she was sleeping in her bed and plugged her three times in the chest with his .22.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  The sheriff nodded. “We found his pistol in a drawer in his cabin. It had been recently fired, and three cartridges were missing from the clip.”