The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) by Paul Doiron Read Free Book Online

a pillar. With the engine idling, I pulled the hood of my jacket over my ears and climbed out into the mud and mist. Wood frogs were quacking in the darkness. I bent over to turn the combination lock, shining a flashlight on the dial, then pushed open the heavy, groaning gate. There were hidden night-vision cameras on me the whole time. Only I and a handful of other people—the owner and her new security team—knew about the surveillance equipment.
    I drove down the shore of Sixth Machias Lake to the compound at the far end, passing through a stand of ancient hemlocks that the landscape architects had left standing when they built Moosehorn Lodge. The main building was an enormous log mansion constructed atop a fieldstone foundation. Motion-sensing lights snapped on as my vehicle approached, and I knew that more video cameras were recording my arrival, sending the images to a digital feed, which the security company could review at its leisure.
    Although the buildings were all new, a forsaken air hung over the place. Everything was well maintained—there was no flaking paint or loose roof shingles—and yet even a casual observer could tell that no one had lived here for a while and maybe never would again. This place would always be haunted by bad memories.
    It felt like returning to my own personal fortress of solitude. I pulled up in front of one of the guest cabins but kept the headlights focused on the door. Steam rose from the hood. I reached into the pocket of my jacket and took another pull from the whiskey bottle, warming myself before I started my nightly rounds. I turned off the ignition and listened to the engine ticking.
    My arrangement with Elizabeth “Betty” Morse was this: In exchange for free rent and a thousand dollars a month, deposited electronically into my bank account in Machias, I was to lend a human presence to her property. I wasn’t officially the caretaker, because that title would have suggested Ms. Morse cared for this collection of buildings in any meaningful sense of the word. Her plans to create an ecological preserve on the estate hadn’t worked out as she’d hoped, and sometimes I wondered if she wouldn’t have been happier walking away from her Maine holdings with a multimillion-dollar insurance check.
    The last I’d heard, she had turned her attention to a valley in northern Montana and was making a project of buying up her own private glacier. After the initial phone conversation we’d had—word had gotten to her that I had left the Warden Service, and she thought I might be right for the job—she had stopped answering my e-mails. Betty Morse was famous for her wandering attention. When you are worth nearly half a billion dollars, you can afford to follow your whims.
    My responsibilities started at occupying one of the guest cabins and stopped at letting people in the area know that a former law-enforcement officer was in residence at Moosehorn Lodge. I didn’t feel right about taking her money for living rent-free in the most luxurious cabin in the world, so I made a point of poking around the grounds with a flashlight. I was sure that Mrs. Morse would have found my unwarranted devotion to duty endearing.
    I spent fifteen minutes taking a tour of the property, which included a visit to the end of the dock, where I watched raindrops stipple the surface of the lake. There wasn’t another building on Sixth Machias. It always astonished me to gaze across such an enormous expanse of water without seeing so much as a single lighted window.
    The irony of my living situation was not lost on me. Morse’s last caretaker had been my friend Billy Cronk, the one currently doing seven years in the Maine State Prison for manslaughter. Prior to working at Moosehorn, Billy had been a hunting and fishing guide—my other newly chosen profession.
    When I’d told him over the phone that I’d accepted the job with his former employer, he’d said, “What are you, nuts?”
    “I know she