Dark Tiger (22 page)

Calhoun had just finished his sandwich when he heard the drone of an airplane engine coming their way from the east. He recognized the voice of the engine. He stood up and shaded his eyes, and a minute later he spotted the plane as it cleared the treetops. It was the sheriff's Twin Otter. It circled the lake and then began its descent.

Calhoun held his breath. A log or something floating on or just under the water had caused Curtis Swenson's Cessna to explode.

The sheriff's plane landed without incident. As it began to taxi in, the guides and some of the guests, along with Marty and Robert Dunlap, emerged from the lodge and gathered on the dock.

The Twin Otter turboprop with the Aroostook County Sheriff's Department logo on the side pulled up to the dock and shut off its engines. Ben and Peter, the young guides, held it steady while the sheriff's deputy—Henry was his name, Calhoun recalled—hopped out of the plane and tied it down.

Then the sheriff emerged. Right behind him was Franklin Redbird. Calhoun went over and held up a hand to Franklin, who took it and allowed Calhoun to help him climb down onto the dock.

“I'm glad you're back,” said Calhoun.

Franklin nodded. “Me, too.”

“Did they treat you okay?”

“Fine,” he said. “No complaints.”

“Your lawyer did a good job, then.”

“Guess so. I'm here.” Ralph was sniffing Franklin's cuffs.
The guide reached down and scratched the dogs's ears. “Nobody talks to me,” he said, “but I gather there was an accident here this morning.”

Calhoun nodded. “Curtis Swenson's Cessna exploded out there in the middle of the lake. He was taxiing for takeoff, on his way to get you and bring you back. Hit something, looked like.”

“The sheriff brought a team of scuba divers,” said Franklin. “To recover his body, I guess. Damn shame. Not that Curtis Swenson was any great friend of mine, but still . . .”

“It was hard to watch,” Calhoun said.

The sheriff and Marty Dunlap were conferring. Three other men had emerged from the plane. They unloaded some diving gear—wet suits, air tanks, swim fins, face masks—and organized it on the dock.

After a few minutes, Marty yelled, “Listen up, please.”

The crowd on the dock quieted down.

“I need some guides to take these divers out. Ben, Peter, Mush. Step up here, please.”

The three guides went up to Marty and the sheriff, who proceeded to give them their instructions.

Pretty soon the divers had donned their gear. Each of them then climbed down into the front of one of the lodge's Grand Lake canoes. The three guides lowered themselves onto the stern seats and started up the outboard motors, and then the three canoes were heading for the middle of the lake.

Everybody on the dock stood there watching the canoes until they were dark blurs against the midday glitter off the water. Calhoun noticed that the canoes turned toward the foot of the lake rather than stopping at the area where the plane had exploded, where he and Kim had searched in vain for Curtis Swenson.

It took him a minute to understand why the divers were ignoring the site of the explosion. Loon and Big and Little Hairy, and the entire string of connected lakes, all were links in a great riverway that moved toward the sea. Subtle currents ran through them all. In the several hours since the Cessna blew apart in that sudden orange bloom, Curtis's body could have drifted quite a distance down the lake. Even if the lake currents only moved half a mile per hour, it had been over four hours since the explosion. Curtis might be down in the narrows—or already into the next lake in the long chain of lakes.

After the canoes disappeared around a point of land, Marty yelled, “Everybody listen up. The sheriff wants to say something.”

The crowd quieted down and turned to the sheriff.

“Me and Henry, here, my deputy,” he said, “we're gonna need to talk to each and every one of you. I guess it's probably too late to ask you not to talk with each other about what happened this morning, but I am asking you not to share with each other what me and Henry ask you or what your answers to our questions are. We'll be up at the lodge. I'm asking you all to make yourselves available to us for the next few hours.”

There were a few grumbles from the crowd, but they all began shambling off the dock onto the path that led back to the lodge.

Calhoun waited until everybody else had left. Then he and Ralph fell in behind them.

The sheriff came up beside him. “Mr. Calhoun,” he said.

Calhoun stopped. “Hello, Sheriff.”

“I understand you were an actual witness.”

“That's right. I was standing on the dock when the plane blew up. Saw it happen. Kim was there, too. She's also a guide.”

“Just the two of you?”

Calhoun nodded.

“Before I start with all the guests and other guides,” said the sheriff, “I'd like to get your story.”

“You got questions,” Calhoun said, “fire away.”

“I need a place to sit down, take notes. Someplace where we can be private.”

“My cabin, if you want.”

“That'll do,” said the sheriff.

Calhoun and the sheriff, with Ralph trotting ahead, followed the path to his cabin. Since no hare jumped out of the bushes, they made it without incident.

“We can talk out here on the porch,” Calhoun said. “Want a Coke?”

“Wouldn't mind,” said the sheriff. He sat in one of the chairs at the table. He took off his hat, put it on the table beside his elbow, and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist.

Calhoun was back a minute later with two cans of Coke.

The sheriff took a long swig. Then he plunked the can down on the table, took a pen and a notebook from his pocket, and said, “All right, Mr. Calhoun. Why don't you just tell me what you saw this morning.”

Calhoun told his story, beginning when he asked Curtis Swenson if he could accompany him to fetch Franklin Redbird, and ending with his futile efforts to find Swenson's body.

The sheriff listened without interruption, jotting an occasional note, nodding now and then, and arching his eyebrows a few times.

When he was finished, Calhoun said, “That's about it. That's how I remember it.”

The sheriff frowned at his notebook for a moment, then
looked up at Calhoun. “Let's go back to when the plane exploded,” he said. “Tell me again exactly what you saw, step by step. Go slow. Don't leave anything out.”

“Actually,” said Calhoun, “it all happened so fast, it seemed like everything happened all at the same time.”

“Things hardly ever really happen all at the same time,” said the sheriff. “Mostly they happen one after the other. Cause and effect. Try to remember, will you?”

Calhoun leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He summoned up the moving pictures of the minute or so before Curtis Swenson's Cessna blew up. This was a peculiar gift of his, the ability to remember something as if it were a movie he could slow down and replay in his head. He'd done it before, and he suspected he'd been trained to do it back before lightning obliterated his memory, back when he worked full-time for Mr. Brescia.

So he flicked on the projector in his head, and the images began to play behind his eyes in slow motion—the plane taxiing up the lake, bouncing on the riffled surface, slowly elevating until the pontoons seemed barely to be skimming the tops of the wavelets, and then the sudden mushroom burst of dark orange flame under the nose of the plane. The muffled
whoompf
of the explosion came to his ears a measurable instant later. Then the plane's tail lifted, and the nose dipped, and the Cessna did a flip, ending up on its side with one wing pointing up at the sky. Then came the second burst of orange flame, and again the delayed sound of the explosion traveling across the water to his ears.

Calhoun opened his eyes and looked at the sheriff. “The explosion came before the plane flipped,” he said.

“Before,” said the sheriff.

“Yes.”

“You sure of that?”

“That's how I saw it.”

The sheriff nodded.

“That what you suspected?” said Calhoun.

“I wondered,” said the sheriff.

“It means the explosion caused the accident,” Calhoun said, “not the other way around.”

The sheriff shrugged.

“Meaning,” said Calhoun, “it wasn't an accident at all. Somebody booby-trapped the plane.”

“Well,” said the sheriff, “not necessarily. Lots of things can cause an engine to explode.”

“Somebody rigged the plane to blow up,” Calhoun said. “Somebody set out to murder Curtis Swenson.”

“Murder Swenson?” The sheriff shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What do you mean,
maybe
? What else could explain it?”

“Didn't you say you had planned to be on the plane with Swenson?”

Calhoun frowned. “Sure, but . . .”

“Everybody knew that, right? You spoke to him about it at dinner last night.”

Calhoun nodded. “I see what you're getting at—but why?”

“You tell me,” said the sheriff. “Don't forget, whoever killed Elaine Hoffman—assuming it wasn't you—used your gun and planted it in Redbird's cabin.”

Calhoun considered telling the sheriff about his quest to find out what McNulty had been investigating at Loon Lake, and his assumption that Elaine's murder, and now, apparently, Curtis Swenson's, were all connected.

So maybe the sheriff was right. Maybe the plane's explosion was aimed at Calhoun, not Swenson. Or maybe it was a convenient way to get rid of both of them.

He decided to keep these thoughts to himself for now. He wasn't sure how much he could trust this sheriff. He trusted himself more.

So he shook his head. “I don't know why anybody would want to kill me,” he said. “I haven't been here long enough to make enemies. I'm just a fishing guide. I don't know anything or anybody.”

The sheriff gazed up at the ceiling. “Well,” he said, “it's mighty odd, if you ask me. You been here at Loon Lake—what, all of four days?—and in that short amount of time we got two deaths. One definitely a murder, the other might be. Don't that strike you odd, Mr. Calhoun?”

“How do you expect me to answer that question, Sheriff?”

“Oh, it wasn't a question, I suppose.” He turned and looked hard at Calhoun. “An observation, I guess you'd call it.”

“Well,” said Calhoun, “I agree with you. It is mighty odd.”

“You can understand how it would make me think twice about you.”

Calhoun shrugged.

“I took the liberty of giving my colleague Sheriff Dickman down there in Cumberland County a call,” said the sheriff. “He speaks well of you, said as far as he knew you were up here guiding. Doing no business for him, he said.”

Calhoun spread his hands. “Well, there you are, then.”

“Makes me wonder,” said the sheriff. “That's all.”

“The deputy thing is just now and then,” Calhoun said. “When the sheriff thinks he needs some help. He doesn't pay me or anything.”

“Sheriff Dickman tells me you're damn good at it.”

“He doesn't need me,” said Calhoun. “He just likes my company sometimes.”

The sheriff closed his little notebook and stuck it in his
shirt pocket. “One of these days,” he said, “I'm gonna figure out what you're up to, Mr. Calhoun.”

“I'm just a fishing guide.”

“If you're just a guide,” said the sheriff, “then I'm just a short-order cook because I make breakfast for me and my wife every morning.” He stood up and put his hat on. “We'll no doubt be talking again, Mr. Calhoun. Thanks for sharing your recollections. You've been a big help. Now I guess I better get up to the lodge, see what the other folks have to say.”

He stepped over the sleeping Ralph, pushed open the screen door, left the cabin, and started up the path to the lodge.

 

 

 

 

After the sheriff left, Calhoun lay down on his bed, laced his fingers behind his neck, and stared up at the ceiling. He was thinking about the possibility that what happened to Curtis Swenson was not an accident, that somebody had booby-trapped the Cessna so it would explode on the water. The way the movie of it played out in his head, that's what it looked like.

He also considered the idea that he, Calhoun, and not Swenson—or maybe he along with Swenson—had been the booby-trapper's target.

He shut his eyes. He was suddenly very tired. Watching airplanes explode and diving into the water for survivors and evading the difficult questions of a suspicious sheriff was exhausting work.

Calhoun had plenty of questions of his own, such as: If not Swenson, then who shot McNulty and Millie Gautier, and who killed Elaine Hoffman, assuming it was the same person who blew up the Cessna with Curtis Swenson in it?

And especially, to all of those questions—why?

And whoever it was, did he now have Stoney Calhoun in his crosshairs?

He had no answers to these questions, and right now he didn't have enough energy to think about them.

 

He slept for a couple of hours and woke up feeling disoriented and fuzzy-brained and vaguely depressed, the hangover from another dream, this one instantly forgotten. A quick, steamy shower helped. He put on some clean clothes and grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator, and he and Ralph left the cabin and headed in the direction of the lodge.

As he approached the dock, he saw that Robert Dunlap was coming down the path from the lodge. The sheriff's Twin Otter was still tied up there. Calhoun went out onto the dock, and Robert came along beside him.

“The sheriff coming up with any answers?” Calhoun said.

“If he is,” said Robert, “he's not confiding in me. I don't think anybody knows anything. We just had a horrible accident this morning. That's the only answer.”