Murder, She Wrote Page 4

  “It’s warmer than I thought it would be,” Maureen said, rolling up the sleeves of her shirt and fanning her face with her hat.

  “Maureen, did you put on your sunscreen yet?” I asked.

  “Not yet, but I will,” she said as she unzipped her convertibles.

  “Don’t think you can only get a burn at midday,” I said. “The sun rises early and it’s plenty strong now.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I didn’t realize it would be this hot.”

  “Okay, ladies, see that?” Brian pointed to an area of water shaded by tall trees leaning over the bank. The water was stippled and there was a cloud of insects hovering over the surface.

  “What is it?” Maureen asked, making a sour face.

  “Caddis fly hatch. Yummy eating for trout,” he replied. He picked up Maureen’s rod and tied an artificial fly on the end of her leader. “Have you ever tried casting before?”

  “I practiced with a piece of cork on the line before I left home,” she said.

  “Good! So you already know about ‘two o’clock and ten o’clock.’” He demonstrated with her pole, tipping it behind him and casting forward, stopping when the rod made about a sixty-degree angle with the water, and slowly lowering it until the line landed gently on the surface. “Okay, now reel it in and you try.” He handed Maureen her rod and looked at me. “Mrs. Fletcher, do you need any help?”

  “I already have an elk-hair caddis fly tied on. What do you think?”

  “I think that sounds perfect. Why don’t you try it?”

  We spent the next half hour casting into the area of water where the insects had been swarming over the surface. Maureen’s line slapped the water more often than landing gently, but she concentrated on improving her casting technique, with gentle instructions from Brian.

  I knew that Mort was not aware that our fishing guide was his former prisoner, one he was still convinced had been let out of prison on a false pretext. I had purposely left out that information, trusting that when Maureen got to know Brian and saw what an upstanding citizen he’d become—and told her husband—that Mort might soften in his antipathy to the former convict. At least I hoped so.

  Fishing is a sport that requires a good deal of patience, a trait that was not one of Maureen’s strongest points. Several times she got excited when the weight of the line felt a little heavy, but her face fell when she realized that she’d hooked a weed and not a fish.

  “I think there’s a fish on my line,” I said minutes later, feeling a familiar vibration.

  “Keep reeling it in,” Brian said, watching the curve of my rod. “I believe you have something there. Now give him a little slack and pull up sharply.”

  I followed Brian’s instructions, Maureen cheering me on, until Brian took up the net and scooped it under the fish as it flopped on the surface near the boat. “That’s a pretty good-looking rainbow,” he said. “Where’s your camera?”

  “Hooray for you, Jessica! You caught the first fish,” Maureen said, bouncing up and down on her seat.

  “Hold the excitement till we get this guy measured,” Brian said, deftly extracting the trout from the hook and laying it in a measuring trough. “Sixteen inches! He looks like a good one. Where’s your derby permit, Jessica? We want to put him back in the water as soon as possible.”

  “Right here,” I said, handing it to him. “And I have my cell phone camera ready.”

  I took a picture of my rainbow trout and e-mailed it to the derby judges. Brian slid the fish back in the water and wiped off my damp permit on the knee of his pants before returning it.

  “You might have a winner right there. That guy must have been a two-year-old,” Brian said.

  “Okay! Now it’s my turn,” Maureen said, facing the pool under the trees with renewed enthusiasm.

  We fished there for another half hour and Maureen did reel in a fish, but it was a yellow perch, not a trout.

  “They’re good eating, too,” Brian declared, and dropped the fish into a bucket of lake water. “See if you can find some of his relatives and we’ll have a nice lunch.”

  All told for our morning of fishing we netted four trout (another rainbow for me and two brown trout for Maureen) and two more perch. Brian guided the boat away from shore and we headed back toward our cabin for a midday break and a light meal.

  “I can’t wait to call Mort and tell him about the fish I caught,” Maureen said, climbing onto the dock and holding out a hand for me.

  “Why don’t we leave the rods in the boat for this afternoon’s session?” Brian said, handing me up our canvas bag and the box with his daughter’s cookies. “You ladies relax and I’ll get started on a campfire and clean the perch.”

  Maureen stumbled onto the porch and collapsed into the nearest rocking chair. “I’m beat but it was wonderful.” She raised her arms in the air and swayed from side to side.

  “I told you, you’d love fishing,” I said, laughing at her seated happy dance. “I’m going inside to wash up. Would you like a cup of tea or a bottle of water?”

  “Not this second,” she said, hopping up. “I’m going to watch Brian make the fire and see how he plans to cook up our perch.” She skipped down the steps.

  I pushed open the cabin door and looked around. There was an odd smell in the air. I checked the bunk room and small bathroom. Everything seemed to be where we’d left it. I noticed some crumbs on the floor, probably from our morning scones. I’d better remind Maureen we need to be careful with our food or risk inviting wildlife inside.

  I swept up the crumbs and took them outside to spread under a tree for the birds.

  “Jessica, you have to see this,” Maureen called out, waving to me from the lake.

  I walked toward the dock where Brian was cleaning the fish.

  “What is it?”

  “Footprints. I mean paw prints. Brian found bear prints in the mud next to the lake.”

  “Really?”

  “It looks like a mama and her cub stopped by for a drink,” Brian said, coming over to where we stood admiring the prints. “Don’t go near them if they come back. A mama bear can be real trouble if she thinks someone is threatening her cub.”

  “I’m going to take a picture of the paw prints to show Mort before we cover them all up with our own.” She pulled out her cell phone and stepped around the prints already on the beach to get the best angle for the ones made by a bear and her cub.

  I frowned down at the prints and looked back up at the cabin. We’d been careful with our garbage last night, wrapping it up in a bearproof container, but had this ursine pair smelled good things to eat here anyway? Was that strange odor I detected eau de bear? I decided that the next time we left, we’d lock that cabin door just to be sure we didn’t get any unwanted visitors.

  Chapter Five

  Sitting on logs around the campfire, eating a leisurely lunch including sliced peaches and Emma’s chocolate chip cookies for dessert, Maureen and Brian and I spent a comfortable hour discussing fishing, the Boston Red Sox, and the relative merits of cornmeal versus flour when cooking pan-fried perch.

  “I use both,” Brian declared. “You mix them together, a cup of flour for every half cup of cornmeal. Dip the fillets in buttermilk, maybe add a little garlic powder and fresh ground pepper, and fry ’em up. Delicious, don’t you think? Works for the pike, too, but with pike you gotta be careful of the bones.”

  “Do you ever cook the perch with the skin on?” Maureen asked.

  “I don’t. I think you get a more delicate flavor with the fillets. If I’m home, I might soak the fish in the buttermilk for a while.”

  “Plain yogurt works, too, if you don’t have buttermilk,” I put in. “But after a couple of hours on the water, who wants to wait that long to eat?”

  “I’m going to try this when I get home,” Maureen said. “I bet it’ll work with oth
er fish as well.”

  “Of course any fillet will taste delicious if it’s served in a restaurant as beautiful as this,” Brian said, waving a hand at the lake and the trees.

  “True,” Maureen said. “You can’t beat the atmosphere.”

  After lunch, as Maureen and I watched him, Brian cleaned out our campfire, making sure the fire was smothered by pouring a coffee can of lake water over the embers. He stirred the ashes with a stick, adding handfuls of dirt and plucking out bits of aluminum foil left by previous campers and depositing them in the can to dispose of later.

  “What are you doing?” Maureen asked as he pulled out some stones and reset them.

  “Checking under the stones to make sure there are no embers left, and that the stones are set correctly,” Brian responded.

  “I never knew they could be set incorrectly. I thought you just make a ring of stones and put on a grate and that’s all you need.”

  Brian smiled. “Not quite all,” he said. “A fire pit has to be set up where there won’t be any danger of a forest fire. On public lands, the Maine Conservation Corps checks to make sure they’re in the right place. But on private properties, we usually just site them correctly for our clients.”

  “Fishing guides do that?”

  “The ones I work with do. You can tell people how it’s supposed to be done, but most of the time it’s easier doing it yourself.”

  “How did you get to be a fishing guide, Brian?”

  Brian shot me a look. I shrugged as if to say, “It’s your decision.”

  “As a kid, I was always interested in the wilderness,” he said, carefully patting the mud-pie concoction he’d made out of the fire. “I knew all the woods around Cabot Cove. Used to hide from my old man in them when he was on a bender. Me and my friends would pretend to be Indians and see if we could live off the land. We would go fishing and hunting until the game wardens chased us away for not having a license. Those were good times.”

  “Did you work at anything else before you became a fishing guide?” Maureen said.

  Brian snorted. “I got a little experience in the upholstery trade, thanks to the government.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Maureen, I think maybe we should let Brian finish up,” I said.

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Fletcher. She’s going to find out sometime.”

  Maureen looked from Brian to me. “I’ll find out what?”

  “I was a prisoner over in the state pen in Warren.”

  “Oh.”

  He stirred the muddy water without saying anything more.

  “Brian, you can’t just leave it there,” I said.

  Brian stood. “You tell it, then,” he said, gathering up our plates and walking down to the shore.

  “I shouldn’t have been asking so many questions,” Maureen said, watching him sadly. “Mort always says I’m as bad as you in asking questions. Oh, I didn’t mean that the way it came out. Mort has such respect for you. You know that, right?”

  I smiled. “Yes. And I respect him as well.”

  “What did Brian want you to tell me?”

  “Brian was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and went to prison.”

  “Oh, how awful. Didn’t he try to get Mort to help him?”

  “Mort was the arresting officer, Maureen.”

  “That was before Mort and I met,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about it. Mort never said anything.”

  “Mort doesn’t know which guide I hired.”

  “How come you didn’t tell him?”

  “You wanted to fish with me in the derby.”

  “Do you think he wouldn’t have let me come if he’d known?”

  “I don’t know what his reaction would have been, but I decided it was best not to mention it.”

  Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. I had a pretty good idea that Mort would have hit the ceiling had he known Brian was our guide, and I didn’t want him to create a scene in Mara’s Luncheonette. I also thought that if Maureen got to know Brian without prejudice, she might convince her husband to give him a second chance.

  “Do you think I shouldn’t tell Mort about Brian?”

  “I would never ask you to withhold information from your husband. That would be unfair of me.”

  “But Brian got out of prison. He’s served his debt to society, right? We shouldn’t keep holding it against him.”

  I could have given her a big hug, but I didn’t want to embarrass her.

  “Thank you, Maureen. Yes, he served a debt to society, but it was one that he should not have had to serve. He had an alibi.”

  “If he had an alibi, how come he was arrested at all?”

  “He was out with his girlfriend, Alice, who is now his wife. Her father didn’t approve of him, and Brian thought that he was protecting Alice by not coming forward with the truth right away. When Alice realized he wasn’t telling the police that they’d been together at the time of the crime, she went to the authorities herself. But by then the trial was halfway over, and the prosecutor accused her of lying to protect Brian.”

  “How could she prove she wasn’t lying?”

  “She couldn’t at the time.”

  “So Brian was found guilty, but what was the evidence against him?”

  “He was friendly with the other young man who was also convicted, Darryl Jepson. And witnesses were sure they saw both of them at the scene of the crime.”

  “But they couldn’t have seen Brian if he wasn’t there.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How long was he in prison?”

  “Seven years.”

  Maureen let out a long sigh. “Boy, that’s a long time to be in prison when you didn’t do anything wrong.” She looked down at the water, where our guide squatted by the shore rinsing our tin plates.

  * * *

  I knew those years had weighed heavily on him. I had followed the trial in the local newspaper but hadn’t known both defendants before they were sent to Warren. After a frustrating year of fighting the prison system and only getting punished more for his efforts, Brian changed his approach. I was one of the first people he reached out to even though he knew me only by reputation. At the time, I couldn’t say whether his claims of innocence were true, but I advised him to become a model prisoner and to use his spare hours to make a legal case for himself. Was there any proof he’d been with Alice during the hour when the grocer was stabbed? Were there gaps in the testimony given against him? Was his lawyer competent? (I already knew the answer to that in general, but I didn’t know if the late Wes Caruthers had made egregious mistakes in Brian’s trial.)

  I also put him in touch with the Innocence Project, an organization I have great respect for and with which I have worked on occasion.

  Forensic science has made leaps and bounds over the years, especially in the area of DNA testing, a far more reliable source of evidence than eyewitness reports, which have been found to be faulty in many cases and for which there have been no best practices or standardized procedures in place to make them more trustworthy. In fact, one study found that seventy-five percent of cases later revealed to be wrongful convictions were based on eyewitness accounts. Brian’s was one of them.

  “If you ladies don’t mind, I’m going to check in at home before we go out again. I can’t get any reception on my cell phone up here.”

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked, hoping our earlier conversation hadn’t upset him.

  Brian smiled shyly. “Not at all. It’s just Alice has been having a little—what do you ladies call it?—morning sickness, except hers seems to last all day. It’s kind of tough when you have to take care of a three-year-old who doesn’t understand why Mommy can’t play. I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Of course. Please give her my best.”

>   “Will do, Mrs. Fletcher. Thanks for understanding.”

  Brian left us at the cabin promising to return by three for our afternoon session on the water.

  The sun was high as well as the temperature when Maureen and I retired to the cabin, where the air inside was only minimally cooler than outside. I hung up my long-sleeved blue shirt and fanned myself with a fishing magazine I found in a box of kindling next to the woodstove.

  “Do you mind if I take a nap?” Maureen asked. “We got up so early.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I said. “I have lots of reading material with me. Would you like me to wake you a half hour before Brian is due back?”

  “That would be great, only Jessica?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you a question? It’s about Brian.”

  “What’s your question?”

  “How did he finally prove he wasn’t at the grocery store when they said that he was?”

  “He got help from the Innocence Project.”

  “What did they do?”

  “One of their lawyers who had been corresponding with Brian sent a request to the presiding judge, asking her to reopen the case.”

  “Did he have new evidence?”

  “Yes and no. He pointed out the fact that unlike his friend, Brian wasn’t seen on the store’s security videotape. In fact, the only evidence linking him to the scene were reports from the eyewitnesses who saw two men running away.”

  “But how could they identify someone from behind?”

  “They claimed they knew who they were based on the clothing they were wearing.”

  “Why would the jury believe them?”

  “Juries can only base their decisions on what’s presented to them, Maureen. They had witnesses who identified Brian.”

  “Even if they were wrong.”

  “Yes. And they also didn’t know that the tipster who swore that Brian had been one of the robbers had once accused Brian’s father of cheating him at cards.”

  “Oh, boy. I wouldn’t believe that guy.”

  “He certainly wasn’t an unbiased source.”

  “And what about Alice?”