Gray Ghost (9 page)

Calhoun’s thoughts kept flipping back to Ralph. He was so full of regrets that he felt like screaming, or crying, or smashing a hammer down on his fingers. Why in hell hadn’t he brought Ralph to the shop with him? If he had, it wouldn’t change what happened to Paul Vecchio, but Ralph would be here with him, at least.

Eventually his mind went all fluffy, and thoughts mingled with dreams, and after a while there were only dreams.

When he woke up, the sky was still dark and the owls were calling to each other. His leg was cramped, and when he tried to move it, he felt a weight on it. He reached down and touched the fur on Ralph’s back. He rubbed it, and Ralph squirmed against him. Calhoun mumbled, “Hey, bud,” and he felt the dog’s wet tongue give his hand a couple of licks, and pretty soon he went back to sleep.

Calhoun woke up from a dream about having a big tree fall on the back of his legs, pinning him to the ground. He was trapped, immobilized, and some big wolflike animal was breathing into his face and showing his snarly wet teeth. Calhoun tried to yell at the creature, but his words got stuck in his throat.

He forced himself to wake up. He was lying on his stomach inside his sleeping bag hugging his pillow. The chilly September air around him was filled with morning birdsong, hundreds of birds, dozens of different species, all calling to each other. There was no rhythm or tune to it. It was a chaos of noise.

Ralph was curled up on top of the sleeping bag in the V of Calhoun’s legs. When he tried to roll over, Ralph groaned and refused to move.

Finally Calhoun slid his legs out from around Ralph and crawled out of the sleeping bag. The sky was turning from purple to pewter. Most of the stars had winked out. Five thirty, according to Calhoun’s mental clock. It was a good thing he didn’t require much sleep.

He slid out of the truck, went up to the house, got the coffeepot going, and pulled on a sweatshirt. When he came back out onto the deck and saw that Ralph’s food dish was empty, he took it inside, rinsed it out, put more dog food in it, and put it back on the deck.

He poured some coffee and took it down the hill to Bitch Creek. He sat on a boulder beside the pool downstream from the old burned-out bridge and watched a trout feeding on mayfly spinners and listened to the water music and sipped his coffee and thought about Lyle. Calhoun was the one who’d found Lyle’s dead body. Now he’d found Paul Vecchio’s. It felt like some kind of curse. Whether it was rational or not, he felt responsible in both cases.

After a while, Ralph wandered down and sat beside him.

Calhoun held down his coffee mug, and Ralph took a lick.

“Where the hell did you go?” he said.

Ralph lifted his head and looked up at him.

“Well,” said Calhoun, “don’t ever do that again.”

He wondered if any apparitions would drift down the stream or come ghosting out of the woods this morning. Sometimes that happened, and when it did, Calhoun took them seriously and tried to understand their messages.

There were no apparitions this morning, so when the coffee mug was empty, he and Ralph went back up to the house. Ralph went onto the deck to eat his breakfast, and Calhoun backed his truck down to his boat trailer and hitched it up.

When he went back to the house, he noticed that his Colt Woodsman .22 pistol was missing from the kitchen drawer, but the Remington twelve-gauge still hung on its pegs by the back door.

He showered, got dressed, refilled his coffee mug, and snapped his fingers at Ralph. They piled into the truck, Calhoun behind the wheel and Ralph riding shotgun, and headed for the shop, dragging the boat behind them. It was a Friday in the middle of September. The summer tourists who swarmed into the shop between Memorial Day and Labor Day to pore over the clothing and books and souvenirs were pretty much gone. Most of the autumn customers were hard-core fishermen hoping to catch the tail end of the striper migration, and they were more interested in information and opinion than in buying equipment. Mostly they gave themselves their best chance of receiving sound advice by buying a handful of flies. Not many of them wanted or needed a guide. It was coming up on the end of the season, and Kate had already switched over to winter hours—closed on Monday, open nine to four Tuesday through Saturday, noon to four on Sunday.

Once Calhoun had tried to talk to her about doing some winter guiding on the bay for sea ducks. He could make some sets of decoys, paint his boat camouflage, and rig up some netting. He could build blinds on a few of the uninhabited islands where he knew the eiders and scoters and old squaw flew. He thought it would be fun, and they could expand their business.

Kate had shrugged. He realized that she was distracted because of Walter, so he dropped the subject for the time being.

They got to the shop around nine thirty, and he parked his truck and boat in the side lot. Kate would be coming in later on. Until then, Calhoun and Ralph were in charge. He opened up, got the coffee started, checked the phone for messages and the computer for e-mails, tuned the radio to the NPR classical music station, and went around straightening out the displays and checking the fly bins. His regular morning routine.

He didn’t expect to see many customers, so he decided to spend the morning at the fly-tying bench. They had a standing order from some Massachusetts guys for a batch of landlocked salmon flies. Every spring at ice-out these men spent three or four weeks trolling for salmon on Sebago and Moosehead, and at the end of every spring season they ordered twenty-five dozen streamers. They were retired doctors and lawyers and bankers who had formed their own private fishing club. Their rules required them to fish for salmon the old-fashioned way. They rowed wooden boats. No outboard motors. They trolled with bamboo fly rods and floating lines, and they fished with nothing but old-time Maine feather-wing and bucktail streamers, flies such as the Chief Needahbah, the Edson Dark Tiger, the Golden Witch, the Hurricane, the Magog Smelt, the Nine-Three, the Supervisor, the Warden’s Worry.

Calhoun’s job was to keep them supplied. They left it up to him to decide which patterns to make. Considering the time it took and the cost of materials, they didn’t make much money by selling three hundred flies—even though they charged double what flies imported from Taiwan or Sri Lanka were selling for at retail—but Kate figured it was a start. Authentic Maine streamers tied by an authentic Maine guide might give them a nice niche in the complicated fly market. The Massachusetts fellows loved Calhoun’s flies. They said they were spreading the word.

Calhoun decided to tie a batch of Gray Ghosts. The Gray Ghost was perhaps the most famous of all the Maine salmon streamers. It was invented in 1924 by Carrie Stevens, the legendary Maine fly tier, to imitate a smelt, the most important baitfish in her Rangeley lakes system. A lot of new fly-tying materials had come along since 1924, and a lot of new flies had been invented, but Gray Ghosts still took fish, and Calhoun enjoyed the feeling of tradition that went along with tying them according to Mrs. Stevens’s original pattern.

Kate showed up a little after noon. She came over to Calhoun’s bench, put her hand on his shoulder, and bent over him. He could smell the familiar soapy scent of her. She peered at the Gray Ghosts he’d completed and said, “Real nice flies, Stoney.”

He looked up at her. He hoped she was smiling at him, but she wasn’t. “Thanks,” he said.

Her hand moved off his shoulder and she straightened up. “Well,” she said, “I’ve got to finish doing the inventory and get at the winter orders. I’ll be out back if you need me.” She headed for her office in the back of the shop.

Her scent lingered in the air after she left, and his shoulder felt warm where she’d touched him. It reminded him of the lingering feeling on the same shoulder when Dr. Surry had given it a squeeze.

Kate was acting awkward around him, a combination of shy and intimate and embarrassed and pissed-off. He guessed she was feeling uncomfortable about what was happening with Walter and how she’d decided to pull back from Calhoun.

He intended to let her call the shots. If she wanted to talk, he’d be happy to talk. If she wanted to have supper together sometime, he’d do that. If she changed her mind and wanted to make love with him, he wouldn’t make a fuss about it. He didn’t like what had happened. It left a hole in his heart. But Kate was the one with the problem, not him, and he couldn’t justify feeling unhappy or angry about it. He’d just have to wait her out.

He spent the afternoon tying flies and listening to music and talking with the few customers who came into the shop, and around four thirty, Kate came out from her office and said, “I see you’ve got your boat with you.”

Calhoun shrugged. “Thought I might go out for a few hours, catch the evening tide, see if I can clear my head.”

She smiled. “You need to clear your head?”

He realized he hadn’t told her about finding Paul Vecchio shot dead at his house. “Had a little excitement last night,” he said.

She was frowning at him. “I can see trouble in your face, Stoney. What happened ?”

So he told her. He kept it simple, just finding Mr. Vecchio’s body with bullet holes in it and the police and various other official people coming to his house. He didn’t mention how Ralph had run off or how worried he’d been or that he’d slept in his truck.

When he finished his story, Kate looked at him for a minute. Then she said, “What are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “I guess I’ll go fishing.”

“Well,” she said, “tight lines.”

By the time Calhoun launched his boat at the East End ramp, the tide was close to full flood and the sun hung low and red in the western sky. The afternoon breeze had settled down, and Casco Bay lay flat and impenetrable.

He weaved slowly among the buoys and moored watercraft, and when he cleared the harbor, he gunned the motor. He wanted to put some distance between himself and the mainland. He had no particular destination, and even though he had his rods and other gear with him, it didn’t matter much whether he found fish to cast to or not. He just needed to get away from everything, and the best way he knew to do that was to go out on the ocean alone in a boat.

Well, Ralph was with him, but dogs, even a dog like Ralph, didn’t count. Dogs didn’t make demands or pursue agendas or get hurt feelings or use their love like a weapon. It was people and their complicated, self-centered affairs he wanted to get away from.

He took the same route he’d taken with Paul Vecchio, cutting between Peaks and Great Diamond islands and then out past Long Island and Great Chebeague to where the bay opened into the ocean. He saw only a couple of distant sailboats out there, which was about as solitary as anybody could reasonably expect.

When he felt like he could take a deep breath, he throttled back the motor and putted along, barely moving, more or less headed out toward the area near Quarantine Island where he and Mr. Vecchio had found the fish blitzing a few days earlier.

Now the sun had sunk behind the mainland and the western horizon was fading from orange to yellow. The eastern horizon was purply-black. A soft mist was rising from the dark glassy water. Overhead, a few bright stars had winked on.

Ralph was sitting up on the front seat, alert for flocking birds and blitzing fish, but there were none to be seen from horizon to horizon. The ocean had fallen dead.

Calhoun slipped on a fleece jacket against the September evening damp and chill.

When he figured he wasn’t going to spot any birds or fish, Ralph slipped off the seat and lay down in the bottom of the boat.

They putted along while the sky turned from purple to black and the mist turned into fog and obscured the stars, and pretty soon the jumbled rocks of Quarantine Island lay silhouetted ahead of them.

Calhoun shut off the motor. The sudden silence rang in his ears for a minute. Then he heard the doleful clang of a distant bell buoy echoing in the fog. Sound travels forever over foggy water.

A dog barked from one of the islands. Ralph raised his head, perked up his ears, and lifted his nose for a minute. Then he kind of shrugged and went back to sleep.

All Calhoun wanted was a little peace. He tried to keep his mind clear, but regretful thoughts about Kate and Paul Vecchio and the sheriff kept intruding, and he couldn’t shake that awful feeling he’d had in his stomach when he thought Ralph was never coming back. He remembered falling asleep in the bed of his truck, his disturbing thoughts becoming jumbled with disturbing dreams, and he remembered how amidst that mental chaos there had been another kind of thought, something analytical and objective, that he hadn’t quite been able to get a handle on.

Now that same thought began buzzing around on the outskirts of his brain again. He tried to bring it into focus, to pin it down and see it clearly, but it was elusive, like a speck of dirt on the corner of your eyeball, so that no matter how you moved your eyes around, it was always on the periphery of your vision and you could never look at it straight on.

After a few minutes, Calhoun let the thought slink away into his unconscious. He figured it would be back, and maybe next time he’d nail it down.

As they sat there on the water, surrounded by the misty fog, Calhoun became aware of a new sound. It began as a soft mournful moan, rose into a keening wail, faded, died. Then the same sound rose again, answering, it seemed, from a different direction. It was a human sound, not words, just pure, raw emotion, an infinitely tragic sound that made Calhoun’s throat tight.

He closed his eyes and let the rise and fall of the wailing cries wash over him, and in his mind’s eye an image began to materialize the way a photograph takes form in a darkroom tray. He saw a figure, a woman, standing atop a boulder with her arms raised and her gray robe flowing around her. It was, he realized, a nun in her gray habit. A hood covered her head, and her face was lifted to the sky, and she was moaning and wailing, a gray ghost calling to Stoney Calhoun.

In his mind he saw the hospital on Quarantine Island ablaze, sooty orange flames burning holes in the black wintry night, and he saw the faces of a hundred souls crowded together inside, men, women, children, trapped, their eyes wide, their hands lifted in helpless horrified disbelief, and he saw the nuns in their gray habits, kneeling in prayer, their heads bowed, their palms pressed together under their chins, and he watched as the flames engulfed them all…

When he opened his eyes, the mournful cries had faded away, and then he wondered if he’d really heard them or if they had just been another sputtering short-circuit in an undependable brain that had been zapped with lightning seven years ago.

Ralph was curled up in the bottom of the boat. “Did you hear that, bud?” said Calhoun.

Ralph opened his eyes, looked at Calhoun, let out a deep sigh, and went back to sleep.

He continued to drift out there in the dark, silent fog, but the gray ghosts did not call to him again.

After a while he started the motor, turned the boat around, and headed back to the harbor. He wasn’t sure if he’d interpreted the gray nuns’ message accurately, but now, at least, he thought he knew what he was supposed to do.

It was close to eleven by the time Calhoun backed his trailer into its slot beside the house, got it unhitched, hosed out the boat, and gave Ralph his dinner. He figured he should wait until morning to call the sheriff at his office.

Then he remembered that they were friends again, so he guessed it would be all right to wake him up.

Jane answered after four or five rings. “Mm,” she mumbled. “Who in the world could be calling at this hour?”

“It’s Stoney Calhoun, ma’am,” he said, “and I’m awfully sorry to wake you up.”

“Stoney Calhoun,” she said. “I should have known.”

“Yes, ma’am. I got to speak to your old man for a minute if you don’t mind.”

“You got another dead body for him, Stoney?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Please don’t call me ma’am.”

“Sorry. Can I talk to him?”

“It’s okay by me. Hang on.”

Calhoun waited.

“Jesus, Stoney,” said the sheriff when he came onto the line. “I was asleep. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Me neither. I slept in my truck.”

“Ralph?”

“He came back.”

“I’m glad.”

“Thank you. Me, too. Look, Sheriff. I’m ready to take that deputy’s badge if you still want to give it to me.”

“You are, huh?”

“Yup.”

“What changed your mind?”

Calhoun hesitated. He didn’t think the sheriff would understand about hearing the gray nuns calling to him out on Quarantine Island. “I’ve just been doing some thinking about it, that’s all.”

“Well,” said the sheriff, “good. That’s good. I can use you, for sure. I’ll drop by in the morning. You gonna be around?”

“I don’t have to be at the shop till the afternoon. I’ll be right here.”

“Get some sleep, Stoney.”

“I’ll try. You, too.”

“I was doing pretty good,” said the sheriff, “before you called.”

Calhoun was around back splitting firewood when he heard the Explorer pull into the yard. Ralph, who’d been sprawled beside him watching him sweat, pushed himself to his feet and went out to greet the sheriff.

A minute later Ralph returned, and then the sheriff appeared. He was out of uniform. He was wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt and a Red Sox cap to cover his bald head. He stood there with his arms folded across his chest and a bemused smile on his face while Calhoun balanced a hunk of cordwood on the big oak stump he used for a chopping block and whacked it with his maul, sending two equal halves flying in opposite directions.

Calhoun’s T-shirt was hanging from his hip pocket. He used it to wipe the sweat off his face and chest.

“Splitting firewood,” said the sheriff. “Good exercise. What is it they say? Warms you many times over. Cutting it, then splitting it, then stacking it, then lugging it. All that before you even burn it.”

Calhoun nodded. “It’s true.”

“That kind of work helps a man think.”

“Helps me not think,” said Calhoun. “Let’s get some coffee.”

They climbed up onto the deck. The sheriff sat at the table. Calhoun went into the kitchen and came out a minute later with two

mugs of coffee. He put one beside the sheriff’s elbow, then sat down across from him.

The sheriff picked up the mug, took a swig, then said, “Let’s do this.” He fished the leather case that held the deputy badge from his pants pocket and put it on the table beside Calhoun’s elbow. “I’ve got to swear you in.”

“Go for it,” said Calhoun.

The sheriff smiled. “I forgot to bring the paper. It’s been so long since I did it, I can’t remember what I’m supposed to say.”

“I, Stonewall Jackson Calhoun, do solemnly swear I’ll uphold all the laws of the state of Maine that make reasonable sense,” Calhoun said. “I swear I’ll do whatever you want me to do provided it ain’t too dumb. I swear any time you want me to quit I’ll go ahead and quit without a fuss. I swear I’ll tell you the truth about most things. I swear to disagree with you when I think you’re being stupid. I swear if you ask for my opinion about something, I’ll give it to you even when I think it’ll hurt your feelings.” He shrugged. “That about cover it?”

“I should’ve copied that down,” said the sheriff. “It’s a way better oath than the regular one. You are hereby and therefore and whereas my deputy, God help us both. Okay?”

“Sure,” said Calhoun. “Okay.”

“Let’s get to work, then.” The sheriff took a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket and peered at it. “Here’s what I know about Mr. Paul Vecchio so far,” he said. “He’d been an adjunct professor of history at Penobscot College up in Augusta for the past twelve years. Taught American studies and a course on the New Deal. Wrote a couple of books that kept him in royalty checks. He grew up in Rhode Island, went to U. Maine in Orono, got his doctorate at Michigan. Lived in the town of Sheepscot.”

“That’s just west of Augusta, ain’t it?” said Calhoun.

The sheriff nodded. “Two towns over, to the southwest. Vec-chio’s divorced, one kid, a teenage daughter who lives with her mother, his ex-wife, in California. A few speeding tickets on the Maine Pike. That’s it.” He handed the piece of paper to Calhoun. “You take it, Stoney. It’s got his address on it.”

Calhoun took the paper and glanced at it, which imprinted a photograph of it in his brain that he could look at any time he wanted to consult it. He didn’t need the paper, but he folded it and stuffed it into his shirt pocket anyway. He didn’t want to seem like was showing off. “We don’t really know anything about Mr. Vec-chio, then,” he said.

The sheriff shook his head. “Nowhere near enough.”

“What about that state cop, Gilsum?” said Calhoun. “He’s on the case, ain’t he?”

“Well,” said the sheriff, “Gilsum sees himself as more of an administrator than a policeman. He thinks he’s too important to actually go around interrogating suspects and looking for evidence. He’s pretty big on delegating and appointing and coordinating and in general letting other people do the real work. Gilsum’s a politician. He’s angling to be a police commissioner somewhere.”

“This is your case, then?”

“It’s our case, Stoney. This one and the Quarantine Island case. I’ve got to report to Gilsum, and that DA, Enfield, he’s keeping his nose up my butt. But we got both cases. You and me.”

“Just us?”

The sheriff rolled his eyes. “Not hardly. These are big cases, Stoney. There are lots of people on these cases, and I suspect that once we make some headway, maybe come up with a good suspect, Gilsum will take over. In the meantime, he wants us working on them, and that, by Jesus, is what we’re going to do.”

Calhoun grinned. “Well, let’s hope all those others don’t get in our way. So where do you want to start? Tell me what you want me to do.”

“According to that oath you just administered to yourself,” said the sheriff, “I’m not inclined to give you orders. But I’m thinking that we need to know more about Mr. Vecchio, and if you agree

Calhoun nodded. “I agree. Why don’t I head on up to Sheep-scot, poke around, see what there is to be seen.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” The sheriff found another folded-up piece of paper in his pocket and gave it to Calhoun. “Directions to Vecchio’s house. From my computer.”

Calhoun stuffed the paper into his pocket without looking at it. “So what’re you gonna be doing, while I’m up there investigating?”

“Me?” said the sheriff. “Hell, Stoney. What do you think I need a deputy for? It’s Saturday. This is my day off.”

“You’re joking, right?”

The sheriff shrugged. “Unfortunately, I am. I’ve got to hold down the office today. If things are quiet, I’ll play around on the computer, see what I can dig up. You can learn a helluva lot about a case these days just sitting at your desk.” He tipped up his coffee mug, drained it, put it down on the table, and stood up. “Soon as you finish up in Sheepscot, let me know what you find out.”

“You want a report in writing?”

“That’s how it’s usually done, Stoney.”

“We haven’t talked about salary,” said Calhoun. “How much you paying me ?”

“You’re a volunteer deputy. Didn’t I mention that?”

“I didn’t volunteer to do paperwork.”

The sheriff smiled. “You can submit your reports orally, if you prefer.” He reached into his pocket and placed a little cellular telephone on the table in front of Calhoun. “Just call me.”

Calhoun pushed the phone away. “I hate these things.”

The sheriff nodded. “I understand. But you’ve got to take it. I set it so it’d vibrate rather than ring. Keep it in your pocket. If you feel it buzz against your leg, it means I need to talk to you. Nobody else has the number, so it’ll always be me. Look.” The sheriff picked up the phone and pointed at a little green button. “If it buzzes, just press this button and say hello, and I’ll talk to you. Understand?”