Free Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) by Paul Doiron

breasts.
    “What are you doing out here?”
    “Trying to catch a ride.”
    “Seriously?”
    She gave me a sour-lemon expression. “No.”
    “Then what?”
    “Get out of the truck, and I’ll show you.”
    I followed her down the gravel road, trying to keep my eyes trained on her shoulders. Under the heavy boughs of the hemlocks and cedars, the air felt wetter and heavier than out in the open sun. Somewhere, off to the side of the road, I heard the musical sound of water tumbling down cascades in a hidden stream. A white-throated sparrow sang in the distance: a pretty, thin whistle that sounded like Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.
    “Here,” Stacey said, pointing at a clump of fallen birch leaves.
    It took me a moment to spot the shell casing.
    I squatted down and poked at the brass with a twig. It was a .22 Magnum.
    “This was where that first moose was shot,” she said. “I followed the blood trail from the meadow on Morse’s land through a beaver flowage and back through that cedar stand.”
    “You tracked the blood through a beaver pond?” I asked in amazement.
    “Not through the water. The moose stumbled along the edge for a while. And it left some blood on the pondweed out in the middle. You could see it from a certain angle.”
    “I’m impressed.”
    She shook her head as if I was being ridiculous and then knelt down beside me. I could smell her perspiration, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Not at all.
    I smiled at her, but her face was impassive as she rolled up her pant legs above her calf. It was tan and beautifully shaped. I didn’t know why she was showing it to me. Then she reached down into the top of her Bogs boot and extracted something black, red, and wriggling. It was a leech, swollen with blood. She nonchalantly flicked it off into the bushes. “Thought I’d missed one,” she said, rolling the pants back down over the boot.
    “I need to call this in,” I said.
    “Before you do, I should show you something else.”
    She motioned me farther down the road. This time, she didn’t need to point to get my attention. Approximately ten feet from the shell casing, in a dry ditch that the road makers had carved to keep the road from washing out in the springtime, lay a crushed red-and-white piece of aluminum. It was a sixteen-ounce beer can.
    “Do you think they’re connected?” Stacey asked. “The cartridge and this can?”
    I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the Budweiser tall boy I’d seen on Billy Cronk’s picnic table three weeks earlier.

9
    My first call was to McQuarrie, alerting him to the .22 cartridge Stacey had found. He told me to hang tight while he sent another warden to “assist.”
    My second call was to Billy Cronk’s cell phone. There was no answer.
    I tried his home number and got Aimee on the fifth ring. “Oh, hello, Mike,” she said. “Is everything OK?”
    “Sure, Aimee. Everything’s fine. Why do you ask?”
    In the background a child bawled in that unconvincing way a hurt-acting child tends to do. “Billy said he was meeting you this morning, and he sounded real upset over the phone—I can always tell—and I haven’t heard from him. Now here you are calling the house. It has to do with Ms. Morse, don’t it?”
    To the unsophisticated eye of the city slicker, Aimee Cronk might have looked like a backwoods stereotype. She tended to giggle easily and blink rarely. Giving birth to four kids had given her the shape of a Mesopotamian fertility goddess. Her outfits were assembled from the aisles of Wal-Mart: white Keds sneakers, ill-fitting mom jeans, flannel shirts, and a scrunchie to hold back her hair when she cooked the kids’ Hamburger Helper. But she was a tack-sharp young lady who had the highest emotional IQ of anyone I’d ever met.
    “Yeah,” she had once told me, “my dad was a drunk. And so my brothers and me, we got real good at reading his moods wicked quick, ’cause otherwise we might get a slap across the face before we even opened our