The Bone Orchard: A Novel

I tried to shrug off the ghost images and nudged the canoe closer. But the bull decided he’d had enough of the paparazzi and shook his enormous head before splashing away into the forest.

Maddie turned to me in her high-backed chair. Her face was flushed. “That was awesome!”

“Thank you,” Mason said.

“My pleasure.” I scratched my chin. It was a new experience, touching my face and finding whiskers there.

Maddie had been looking at me strangely all morning. There was something about her face that seemed familiar, too. We must have been thinking the same thing.

“Mike, what did you say your last name was again?” she asked.

“Bowditch.”

“Did you go to Colby?”

“Yes.”

“I knew I’d met you before! I’m Maddie Lawson! Sarah’s friend from Choate.”

I barely remembered my ex-girlfriend’s roommate from prep school. Maddie had come to visit Sarah a couple of times in Waterville. The picture I had in my memory was of a homely brown-haired girl who had struggled unsuccessfully to keep off weight.

“You’re … blond,” I said.

“Yeah, and I have a new nose, too. I can’t believe we’ve spent the whole morning together and I didn’t even recognize you. Sarah told me you were some sort of forest ranger.”

“A game warden,” I said. “I used to be.”

“I was so sure you two were going to get married someday.”

I had thought so myself. “Sarah and I realized we were going in different directions.”

“Did you know she was back in Maine?”

The news took a while to settle in my gut. “The last I heard, she was in D.C., working for Head Start.”

“She’s living in Portland now,” Maddie said, “doing development work for a new charter school. We talked about meeting for a drink on the drive home. She’s going to be so freaked-out to hear that you were our fishing guide!”

We were drifting closer to shore than I had intended, and suddenly I heard a scraping sound under the boat and quickly pushed the paddle over the side to keep from running aground.

“You should have dinner with us at the lodge and catch up,” Mason said.

“You should!” said Maddie. “It would be our treat. Are you allowed to do that?”

“Yes, I am.” I kept my head down and back-paddled the canoe away from a looming rock. The mention of food made me check my wristwatch. “I should make you two a shore lunch before it gets any later or it starts to pour again. There’s an island up ahead with a picnic table. The guides have set up a tarp, so we can get out of the rain for a while.”

“It’s not raining now,” said Mason.

“We’ve been so lucky today,” said Maddie.

“We haven’t caught as many fish as I would have liked,” I said.

“Oh, we don’t care about that,” she said. “We’re just grateful for the experience.”

Magic words, as I said.

Mason gazed out at the blurred shoreline and breathed in the pine-sweet air. “I can’t believe you get to come out here every day and see all this beauty,” he said. “You probably hear this all the time, Mike, but I think you must have the best job in the world.”

Coming from a guy who pulled down a seven-figure salary, it seemed like a funny comment. But Mason was right that guides heard similar remarks from men who lived their lives utterly detached from the natural world. There was almost a physical shock that came from breathing air heavily scented with balsam and hearing the cries of a loon across a mirror-smooth lake. To the extent I believed in epiphanies, it was from watching people venture out to the edge of the wilderness and realize how hollow their souls were. Whether being a low-paid fishing guide was the “best job in the world” was another matter.

Now that we were no longer strangers, some of the pleasure had seeped out of the morning for me. Maddie and Mason seemed perfectly nice, among the friendliest and least demanding “sports” I had met. But I had been enjoying the anonymity that came from being just another fishing guide in a town with dozens of them.

I wasn’t sure about dinner, but it seemed rude to refuse their invitation. After I’d left the Warden Service, I’d made a resolution that I was going to put aside my regrets and direct my attention to the days ahead of me. Rehashing the past with Sarah’s friend might not be my idea of a good time, but it wasn’t like I had other plans.

* * *

Once we were clear of the shoreline boulders, I cranked the engine on the Evinrude outboard and pointed the bow in the direction of Bump Island. The canoe took off, and it felt like we were traveling along a corrugated surface. Every few seconds, the bow of the boat would hit a wave, and we would be momentarily jolted into the air before gravity pulled us back into our ladder-backed seats. I tried not to go so fast as to soak my clients or collide with one of the half-submerged trees that the winter storms had knocked into the lake.

As we approached Bump Island—an almost perfectly dome-shaped rock just large enough for a cluster of spruce trees to have taken root—I spotted a boat floating offshore. Another fisherman was using our communal picnic site.

The boat was a wedge-shaped Champion—the kind you see on Saturday-morning fishing shows. It had a flat deck for standing, a ruby red paint job that seemed to include a liberal amount of girlish glitter, and a huge black Mercury outboard. Eastern Maine has some of the best smallmouth fishing in the country, but it was unusual to see these tournament-style bass boats on our icy lakes.

“Looks like it’s occupied,” said Mason.

“I’m going to say hello, if you don’t mind,” I said.

I didn’t recognize the boat and wanted to have a look at its owner. The impulse to investigate any unusual occurrence in the woods was one aspect of the warden’s mind-set I was having trouble letting go.

As we drew nearer to the island, I saw blue smoke drifting sideways from under the spruce boughs, pressed down by the low-pressure system that had descended on the Northeast for the past week. Beside the picnic table, with its overhanging canvas tarp, stood an enormous electric-blue tent. Its owners had pitched it no more than ten yards from the NO CAMPING sign.

The campers had heard my engine, because the tent flap opened and two men crawled out. They were both middle-aged, with big bellies, and were wearing relaxed-fit jeans, sweatshirts, and sneakers ill-suited to the woods or the wet weather. One guy had a mustache and was holding a can of Coors in his hand; the clean-shaven one was eating a sandwich.

I maneuvered the Grand Laker so that it was parallel to the shore, not so close that the waves would push us aground, but near enough to have a conversation without shouting. I switched off the engine.

The two men looked at us with the silent disinterest of steers.

“Good morning,” I said.

The mustached one touched his forelock in some form of salute. The other took a bite of his sandwich.

“You guys must have missed the ‘No Camping’ sign on that tree beside the picnic table.”

“No, we saw it,” Mr. Mustache said. The accent wasn’t southern, but it wasn’t recognizably from Maine, either. “We just figured that in this crappy weather, no one was going to care if we camped here.”

“It’s still illegal, though.”

“Is this your island?”

“No.”

The sandwich eater spoke with his mouth open. “Then why is it any of your business?”

“I’m one of the fishing guides on the lake, and we maintain these picnic sites for everyone to use. If you’re camped here, it means none of us can come ashore with our sports for lunch. Basically, you’re hogging the place.”

The guy with the mustache took a swig of beer. “So go find someplace else to eat.”

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Mason and Maddie fidgeting. I’d always had a low tolerance for a*sholes, but I had the safety of my clients to consider.

“Look, guys,” I said, “there are lots of legal campsites along these lakes. You’re welcome to any of them.”

“F*ck off,” said Mr. Mustache.

I tried to keep the rising anger out of my voice. “If you don’t pack up, I’m going to have to call the game warden. He’s kind of a hard-ass. He’s going to give you a court summons. And if he’s really pissed off—which he usually is—he’s probably going to arrest you, too.”

The mustached man pulled up his shirt, revealing both an abnormally white and hairy gut and the grip of a semiautomatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his boxers.

“I said, ‘F*ck off.’”

When I was a game warden, I had traveled everywhere with a firearm. My SIG Sauer .357 was my constant companion in life. Even when I was off duty, I carried a Walther .380 in a holster hidden inside the waistband of my jeans. But when I’d resigned from the service, I’d decided that going around armed would just be a way of clinging to an identity I was desperate to shed. I’d kept my concealed carry license for future use, but at this particular place in my life, it didn’t feel right to pack a pistol everywhere I went.

The na?veté of that decision announced itself as a pain in my spleen.

The clean-shaven one pushed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and rubbed the crumbs from his hands. He smiled wide to show his teeth.