Read The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) for Free Online

back was to me. The seating arrangements seemed deliberate.
    The women all looked to be in their late twenties and projected that aura of vitality that people who pursue lots of outdoor activities always seem to radiate. I had the sense that they might have been college classmates, maybe members of the same ski team. I’d seen a couple of Subaru wagons with Vermont plates and kayaks strapped to the roof racks out in front of one of the cabins. The lodge was often the launching spot for kayakers beginning a camping trip through the chain of lakes north and west of Grand Lake Stream—although most people wisely waited until the end of the blackfly season.
    Their table was too far away for me to eavesdrop, but they seemed to be having a rowdy good time. Three of them were sharing bottles of wine. The fourth, who had ink-black hair and a nose ring, stuck to beer.
    “What are these green things?” Mason asked as our plates arrived.
    “Fiddleheads, silly,” said Maddie. “Haven’t you eaten them before?”
    I speared one with a fork. “They’re ostrich ferns. We consider them a Maine delicacy.”
    He bit his in half. “Tastes like spinach.”
    As promised, Mason interrogated me on my former career as a law-enforcement officer with a terrierlike persistence. I kept trying to divert the conversation to anything else—fishing, politics, their banking jobs in New York. But Mason’s curiosity would not be denied. He waited until his girlfriend got up to use the bathroom and then launched a fusillade across the table.
    “So here’s what I’m wondering.” His speech had grown a little sloppy from the wine. “How did you go to work each day knowing that someone might try to kill you?”
    “Most days, no one tried to kill me.”
    “Yeah, but you didn’t know that. There was no way of anticipating what you might encounter in the woods. Like those guys on the island. How would you have dealt with them? If you’d been all alone, I mean.”
    “I would’ve told them to get the hell off the island before I busted them for trespassing.”
    “But they were carrying guns,” Mason said.
    “That’s not unusual,” I said. “Just about everyone a warden meets in the woods is armed.” I poured whiskey from the pint bottle onto the melting cubes in my water glass. “These days, you also have to assume that anyone might be carrying a concealed weapon.”
    Mason leaned his elbows on the table, his fingers clasped, almost as if in prayer. “What if they’d threatened you?”
    “I would have done everything in my power to keep the situation from escalating before I started acting tough,” I said. “But sometimes they don’t give you a choice. People react to your overall presence, so it’s important to show them you’re the alpha dog. You do that through your posture and the tone of your voice. You try to come across as someone not to be fucked with.”
    “So what would you have done if that guy with the mustache had pulled his pistol? Would you have tried to shoot it out of his hand?”
    “That’s just something from the movies,” I said. “Cops don’t shoot to wound. You shoot to kill.”
    “How do they train you for that?”
    “Repetition. Role playing. But no matter how much you train, it doesn’t prepare you for having somebody point a gun at you in real life. You’re a human being, and you’re afraid.”
    “So you would have killed him?” Mason asked.
    “I would have done what I needed to do to protect myself.”
    Mason leaned back in his chair, nodding, as if a problem that had been puzzling him all evening finally made sense. “That must have been what happened with those two cops,” he said.
    “Which two cops?”
    “The two cops who shot that crazy vet last night. There was a thing on the radio about it before dinner.”
    The muscles in my neck and back tightened. “Where did this happen?”
    “Somewhere south of here.”
    “Did you get the names of the officers?”
    “The police spokesman