Dark Tiger by William G. Tapply Page A

spray of gravel, she pulled out of the parking area and headed up the driveway.
    Calhoun watched her drive away.
    â€œI guess we better be careful and come back safe,” he said to Ralph. “I can’t hardly stand it when she won’t talk to me.”

 
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CHAPTER NINE
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    Calhoun was supposed to meet the bush pilot, Swenson, at the dock in Greenville at the foot of Moosehead Lake at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon. Greenville was a little more than two hundred miles north of Portland, and narrow, meandering secondary roads covered the last third of that distance. He figured it would take close to five hours of driving. He left at eight that morning to give himself an hour’s cushion.
    The first leg of the trip was a straight shot north on the Maine Turnpike. Ralph rode shotgun. Calhoun found a classical music station on the truck’s radio, and when it faded away, he trolled the dial until he found another one. He was trying to keep his mind from wandering to Kate and not having good luck with it. The music didn’t help. They often played the Portland classical music station on the shop radio, and the symphonies and sonatas and concertos all reminded him of her. It made his stomach feel empty and twisted.
    They were still south of Augusta when he noticed that the clouds ahead of him to the north were thickening. A few minutes later a light mist began to appear on the windshield.
    He wondered if the float plane would fly in the rain. He thought about being grounded in Greenville for a few days. The idea did not appeal to him.
    He exited the turnpike north of Waterville and stopped at a gas station to fill the truck’s tank. Now the mist had turned to a soft steady rain.
    When he went inside to pay, he bought three plain doughnuts and a big cardboard cup of black coffee. Back in the truck, he gave one of the doughnuts to Ralph and ate the other two himself between sips of coffee. When he finished eating, he took his cell phone from his pocket. He was hoping for a message from Kate, though he honestly didn’t expect one. He wasn’t surprised to see the NO SERVICE message on the phone’s window.
    They pulled into Greenville a few minutes after one o’clock. The rain had stopped, but the low clouds hung dark and foreboding overhead.
    Greenville’s main road followed the contours of the foot of Moosehead Lake, and pretty soon Calhoun came to Balsam Street. He turned onto it, and as expected, it ended up behind a row of stores in a big open area on the shore of the lake. Some vehicles, mostly pickup trucks, were parked behind the stores, and a wide wooden dock stretched into the water.
    Moosehead was the biggest lake in Maine, and today a northerly wind was chopping its surface into little whitecaps. The lake lay gray and hostile-looking under the black overcast. Good weather for trolling flies for landlocked salmon, actually, and Moosehead was one of the best salmon lakes in the world. Calhoun rolled down the truck window to get a better look. A low bank of mist hung over the water so that the far shore was a blur. It smelled like a rainy afternoon on the ocean, damp and organic and salty.
    Parked in the water and tied off on the pilings down toward the end of the dock sat a big float plane, a de Havilland Twin Otter, if Calhoun wasn’t mistaken. The Twin Otter was the workhorse of float planes. It had two turboprops and could carry ten or a dozen men and hundreds of pounds of gear. This was the plane that they used to transport lumber and generators and woodstoves when they built cabins and fishing lodges on remote Maine lakes.
    Calhoun parked his truck among the other vehicles behind the row of stores and fished his cell phone from his pants pocket. When he flipped it open, he saw that there was service here in Greenville.
    He had a voice mail message waiting. It came from a number he didn’t recognize. He called up his messages and a woman’s