Dark Tiger (23 page)

Calhoun nodded. “I guess you're right.” He shaded his eyes and peered down toward the foot of the lake. “Those divers have been out there a long time.”

“Don't know whether that's good or bad.”

“I suppose if they found Curtis,” Calhoun said, “they'd bring him right in.”

As he was looking, a low, dark shape materialized on the water, coming from around the far point of land down toward the foot of the lake. Then two more shapes appeared, and as the shapes moved closer, they began to look like canoes. A minute later the drone of the three outboard motors crossed the water to Calhoun's ears.

“There they are,” he said, pointing.

Robert tugged down the bill of his cap, squinted against the glare of the water, and said, “Yes. I see them.”

About ten minutes later the three canoes pulled up alongside the dock. The guides—Ben, Peter, and Mush—climbed out and tied off the canoes. The three divers in their wet suits and swim fins hauled themselves awkwardly up onto the dock.

There were no dead bodies in any of the canoes.

“No luck, huh?” Calhoun said

“We went all the way down to the foot of the lake,” Ben said, “and through the narrows, and into Muddy. Not a sign of Curtis. No scrap of clothing, no, um, no body parts. Nothing.”

“He must've got blowed up in a million pieces,” said Mush. “No other explanation.”

“We just weren't looking in the right places,” said one of the divers, a young guy with a red beard who was sitting on the dock peeling off his wet suit. “The visibility is real good in these lakes, and they ain't that deep. Lots of rocks on the bottom, but hardly any weeds. If the man had gone down where we were looking, we'd've spotted some sign of him.”

A minute or so later the sheriff and his deputy, along with Marty Dunlap, came strolling down to the dock from the lodge. The deputy went over to talk to the divers, while the sheriff pulled Robert aside and engaged him in a private conversation.

Marty sidled up to Calhoun. “They didn't find Curtis, huh?”

Calhoun shook his head. “Nope.”

After a few minutes, the sheriff went over and spoke to the divers, who then began to load their gear back onto their float plane.

Henry, the deputy who was also the pilot, climbed into the cockpit and got the two engines started.

The sheriff came over to where Marty and Calhoun were standing and leaned close to them. “You keep in touch,” he said to Marty. He was yelling over the roar of the airplane engines. “I'll be back. Meanwhile, be sure to let me know, anything you learn, any thoughts you have.” He turned and looked at Calhoun. “You, too, Mr. Calhoun. We ain't quite done with this, I don't think.”

Calhoun nodded. “Always happy to help,” he said.

The sheriff climbed into the cockpit and took the seat beside Henry. The divers piled in through the side cargo door and slid it shut. Ben and Peter cast off the plane's lines, and then it taxied out onto the middle of the lake, pivoted, and began to accelerate with its nose into the wind. A minute later it lifted off, tilted its wings, and disappeared over the treetops heading east to Houlton.

Calhoun realized he'd been holding his breath the whole time.

 

After dinner that night, Robert Dunlap took Calhoun and Ralph around to one of the many decks that jutted off the front of the lodge, giving an excellent view of the vista that Loon Lake and the surrounding hills and forests offered, especially toward sunset.

Two men were sitting at a small round table sipping after-dinner drinks. Robert introduced them as Jack and Harry Vandercamp from Chicago.

Calhoun shook hands with both of them and sat down with them. “This here's Ralph,” he said, laying on the Maine accent. “He's a bird dog and a fish dog, and I hope you don't mind if he joins us in the canoe tomorrow.”

“We like dogs,” said Jack, who looked to be somewhere in
his forties, a lumbering bearlike man with a pleasant smile. Harry was considerably older—pushing eighty, Calhoun guessed—a wiry little guy with sharp blue eyes and wispy white hair.

“Anything special you like to eat, or don't like to eat, or are allergic to?” Calhoun said.

“We're meat and potatoes men,” said Harry.

“Not fussy,” said Jack.

Calhoun looked at them. “You're not brothers.”

“Jack's my son,” said Harry. “This is his treat. I grew up in the Midwest, spent a week in Maine when I was a boy. Stayed in a one-room log cabin on a lake with my brother and father. We fetched water from the lake, cooked on a woodstove, shat in the outhouse, and fished all day every day, and I've been dreaming about it and talking about it ever since. It's not bad when a son can make his old man's dream come true.”

Jack was looking at his father with a softness in his eyes that Calhoun couldn't quite read. There was more going on here than just a man treating his elderly father to a father-son fishing trip.

“When'd you get in?” Calhoun said.

“Yesterday,” said Jack. “Curtis Swenson flew us in from Greenville.” He shook his head. “We liked Curtis. A real character.”

“That was a terrible thing,” said Harry. “What happened this morning.”

“So who else up here flies?” said Jack. “Seems to me this place is dependent on its float planes.”

Calhoun shook his head. “I don't know. I'm sure Marty's on top of the situation.” He pushed himself to his feet. “We'll meet at the dock at eight thirty. That sound okay?”

“Sounds good,” said Jack.

“Bring your foul-weather gear. I'll have everything else.”

“Are we expecting rain?” said Harry.

“When you go fishing,” said Calhoun, “it's always best to expect rain.”

 

It was sometime in the middle of the night when Calhoun felt himself being dragged up from the depths of a black, dreamless sleep. It took him a moment to realize that Ralph was sitting on the floor beside him, growling softly in his chest. Calhoun put his hand on Ralph's head, and the dog quieted down.

He slipped out of bed just as the latch rattled and the door cracked open. Calhoun moved on silent bare feet to the wall next to the woodstove, where he lost himself in a shadow.

A moment later, somebody slipped in through the door, then shut it silently. Calhoun got just a glimpse of the figure—medium height, slender, athletic. He guessed he had many pounds and a few inches on his intruder, but he didn't know if the man had a weapon.

The shadow moved across the room to the bed.

Calhoun eased up behind him, and he was about to lever his forearm under the intruder's throat and ram his knee into the small of his back when he heard him whisper, “Stoney? Hey. It's me.”

It wasn't a man.

It was Robin.

“Jesus H. Christ, woman,” he said.

She whirled around and said, “Oh. Oh, wow. You scared the pee out of me.”

“Ditto,” said Calhoun. He reached over and switched on the light. “What the hell are you doing? I could've killed you, you know.”

“I'm sorry.” Robin looked at him and smiled. “You're pretty cute, you know that?”

Calhoun was wearing his usual bedtime attire, a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. Robin had on a man-sized T-shirt and a pair of baggy sweatpants.

“Answer my question,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here? It's the middle of the night. You should be asleep, not sneaking around in other people's cabins.”

She looked at him with damp eyes. “I was scared,” she said. “I don't know what's going on around here. I don't feel safe anymore. I tried to go to sleep, and I couldn't. I kept thinking about Elaine getting shot in her bed and Curtis getting blown up, and you, you were supposed to be on that plane, and . . . and I needed not to be alone.” She gave him a little shrug. “I wanted to be with you.”

“Feel safe with me, do you?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I surely do.”

“Some people think I'm the one causing all the problems around here.”

“Who thinks that?”

He shrugged. “Me, for one.”

“You saying you're feeling guilty about the things that have happened?”

“Not guilty, exactly,” Calhoun said, “but you've got to admit, I've been here four days, and two people have died violent deaths in that time. I'd say that defies all odds, wouldn't you?”

“Something's going on, all right,” said Robin, “but I don't see how you can say it's your fault.”

He shrugged. “It's how I feel. Look, let me walk you back to your room.”

“I don't feel safe there,” she said. “I want to stay here with you.”

“That ain't a good idea.” He remembered what June Dunlap had told him. That Robin had lost her father at sea. That she might have a crush on Calhoun. He took Robin's hand. “Come on. I'll take you back.”

“I'll behave myself,” Robin said. “I promise. I can sleep on your sofa.”

“No,” he said. “It's a bad idea.”

Robin narrowed her eyes at him. Then she nodded. “Fine. If that's how you want it. I'll go.” She turned and headed for the door.

“Wait,” said Calhoun. “I'll go with you.”

“The hell with that,” she said. “I came here all by myself. I guess I can find my way back okay.” She opened the screen door, stepped out, and let it slam shut behind her.

Calhoun went out onto his screened-in porch. Already Robin had disappeared in the darkness. He waited there for as long as he guessed it would take for her to make it back to the lodge, and when he didn't hear anything unusual, like a woman screaming, he went back inside.

 

 

 

 

After breakfast the next morning, Calhoun picked up the cooler with the lunch fixin's that he'd asked for from the kitchen, lugged it down to the boathouse, and stowed it in the Grand Lake canoe he'd be using. In the corner of the boathouse he found some of the other gear he'd need for cooking a shore lunch, and he packed that away in the canoe, too. He started up the motor to see how it sounded. It started on the first yank of the cord and burbled smoothly. He turned it off, checked the gas can, and found it full.

Then he went back to his cabin, selected three fly rods, and got them set up—two for trolling streamers and one for casting dry flies. He sorted the rest of the gear—fly boxes, spools of leader material, pliers, insect repellent, dry-fly floatant, and so forth—into a single bag and hauled all the stuff back down to the boathouse.

Ralph was tagging along at Calhoun's heels with his ears perked up and his stubby tail wagging. Ralph knew a fishing trip when he saw one, and he'd be damned if he was going to be left behind.

Calhoun got all the fishing gear stowed neatly in the canoe where he could reach anything he needed from his seat in the stern. Then he smiled at Ralph, who was sitting on the dock inside the boathouse looking intently into the canoe.

“Okay,” Calhoun said. “Let's go, then.”

Ralph leaped lightly into the middle of the canoe, moved down to the thwart directly in front of the stern seat, curled up into what he probably thought was an inconspicuous ball against a bag of fishing gear, closed his eyes, and went to sleep, on the theory, Calhoun guessed, that nobody would be so cruel as to wake up a peacefully sleeping dog and kick him out of a canoe.

Calhoun climbed into the stern seat and paddled out of the boathouse and around to the dock, where Jack and Harry Vandercamp, his clients for the day, were waiting.

“Mornin',” he said.

“Good morning,” said the Vandercamp men practically in unison.

“We got a nice soft day for it.” Calhoun looked up at the sky, which was gray and still and smelled like rain. “Hope you remembered your foul-weather gear.”

Both of them nodded.

“Well,” said Calhoun, “climb in. There's fish out there waitin' to be caught.”

Jack knelt on the dock and held the canoe while Harry, bracing himself on his son's shoulder, climbed into the bow seat. Then Jack got into the middle seat and pushed the canoe away from the dock.

Calhoun gave a couple of pulls with the paddle, then got the motor going. He steered them across the lake. The shoreline there was dark and fell off quickly into deep water. It was overhung with hemlock and alder and scattered with large boulders. He liked the looks of it. It looked fishy.

When they got there, he cut back the motor to trolling speed and handed rods to Jack and Harry. “Harry,” he said, “you let your line out on this side here,” indicating the side nearest the shoreline. “Jack, you fish the other side of the boat. You'll both be dragging your flies over the drop-off. We'll head downlake and see what might be inclined to take a bite out of those flies.”

As they chugged slowly toward the foot of the lake, a misty rain began to fall, and the water lay as flat and glossy as a black mirror. They all pulled on rain gear, and pretty soon each of Calhoun's sports caught a nice salmon.

At the foot of the lake, he shut off the motor, stood up, and poled them down through the narrows, which was little more than a curved pinching of the lake and a boulder-strewn quickening of the water where Loon emptied into Muddy.

There was a small cove on the left right there at the head of Muddy Pond, and through the mist Calhoun spotted a couple of rings on the glassy surface. He pointed with his push-pole. “Look,” he whispered, though there was no need to whisper. “See that?”

Harry and Jack shaded their eyes and looked where Calhoun was pointing at the widening rings.

“What are they?” said Harry.

“Maybe salmon,” said Calhoun, “but if I had to guess, I'd say big squaretails on the hunt for mayflies.”

“Squaretails,” said Jack. “You mean brook trout?”

“We call 'em squaretails here in Maine,” said Calhoun. “Lake trout are called togue, too, if anybody should mention it.” He picked up the spare fly rod, which he'd rigged with a bushy dry fly—an Adams, his all-round favorite—and handed it up to old Harry. “Stand up and get some line out,” he told Harry. “Let's catch one of 'em so we can tell for sure what species it is.”