Page 91 of The Instruments of Darkness

He thanked her for the advice and she moved on. Reggio waited until the rain stopped before returning to his car, but paused by the exit to ask some more questions of the woman with the rainbow flag pin, now that he was on a roll with her.

“How do the Michauds feel about those people living on the neighboring property?”

“Let’s just say the Michauds and the Hickmans are neighbors without being neighborly,” she replied, “so the Michauds probably don’t feel very good about it at all.”

“Would the Michauds be willing to talk to me?”

“You sure you’re not a reporter?”

“Cross my heart.”

“Whatever you are,” she said, “I’d leave the Michauds be. Their land is posted, and they don’t welcome visitors.”

“I can be very persuasive.”

“Nobody’s that ingratiating,” she said, “believe me.”

Reggio left the coffee shop. He’d tucked a few dollars extra under his cup because he thought she was a nice lady. His phone pinged as he got in the car: Amara, checking that he was safe. He replied with an OK, and added an X.

A screenshot of the message would be made public after his death.

CHAPTER LIX

I tried Maralou Burnham as I was driving back to Scarborough. My call went straight to voice mail, but she got back to me within minutes, and I pulled over so I could concentrate on what she had to say. It turned out that she’d just spoken to someone about the money order used by Mara Teller.

“I have good news—” she said.

I steeled myself for the worst, but was pleasantly surprised.

“—and better news,” she finished. “First, I know where the money order was purchased. It was bought at the post office in Dover-Foxcroft on April 8, paid for with cash.”

“Is that the good news or the better news?”

“That’s just the good news,” said Maralou. “The better news is that the clerk remembers who bought the money order, and it wasn’t a woman. It was purchased—and this most assuredly did not come from me—by a man named Maynard Vaughn, who lives down in Dexter. The reason the clerk remembered is that Vaughn is sort of a local character around that neck of the woods. He’s a veteran with psychological problems, but he’s harmless. He’s also not the kind of guy who usually buys money orders, or certainly not for oil and gas forums.”

“Did the clerk ask what the deal was?”

“The clerk might have made some remark, but Vaughn didn’t bite. She just chalked it up to eccentricity, Vaughn not being immune to it.”

It sounded like Maynard Vaughn might have been paid a few bucks to pick up the money order for someone who didn’t want to be caught on camera, which would be as bad as leaving a paper trail.

“Any idea if Vaughn owns a car?”

“He barely owns a second pair of shoes.”

Which raised the question of how he’d traveled the dozen miles, give or take, from Dexter to Dover-Foxcroft. There might be local bus service, but I wasn’t sure of it. I wondered if Mara Teller had driven Vaughn to the post office herself, in which case it might be worth seeking that court order to access any security footage from outside cameras. But if Teller was smart—and I was starting to think she was—she would have parked somewhere unmonitored to await Vaughn’s return.

Now it was a matter of finding Vaughn and persuading him to tell me all he knew about Teller. She hadn’t picked him at random, which would have been too risky. No, she’d chosen Vaughn because he could be trusted not to vanish with her money, or blab about what he’d been paid to do after the fact. I told Maralou that a whole case of wine was on its way to her, and if she wanted to share a bottle or two with the clerk at the Dover-Foxcroft post office, mentioning my name, I’d make up the difference next time.

I checked my watch. Angel and Louis would be in town in a couple of hours. They’d elected to drive up from New York to avoid two airports and the associated concerns about lingering COVID, particularly given Angel’s brush with cancer not so long before. By now, they’d probably stopped arguing over the choice of music for the trip and settled into companionable silence. I decided to wait until they arrived before tackling the problem of Antoine Pinette and Bobby Ocean. That was a wasps’ nest, and it made no sense to poke it alone.

I took my Maine Atlas and Gazetteer from under the passenger seat, opened it to Map 32, and rested my smartphone on the page while I did a quick Google search. As anticipated, Dexter had its own post office, but Teller had decided not to have Maynard Vaughn buy the money order there: he would have been too well-known in town, which offered a greater likelihood of the purchase being flagged. Even though Dover-Foxcroft was only a fifteen-minute car ride away, it was in the next county, so taking Vaughn north to buy the money order must have seemed a safer bet. It would have been even better to have driven him to Bangor, since no one would have batted an eyelid in the city, but Teller might have been pressed for time, or had settled on a level of caution she regarded as appropriate but not excessive. She was covering her tracks because it was better than leaving them unconcealed, but she still probably considered any pursuit unlikely.

A more-or-less straight line north could be drawn between Dexter and Dover-Foxcroft, forming the base of a triangle. Virtually equidistant from both, on the border between Penobscot County to the south and Piscataquis County to the north, stood the town of Gretton, where Sabine Drew claimed to be able to hear Henry Clark crying. Gretton represented the apex of the triangle.

Soon, I thought, I’d be paying Gretton a visit.

CHAPTER LX

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