Harvest Gold in Spring

By

Kay Hardy Campbell

We don’t usually pick up hitchhikers. Not that you see many of them these days. Early last fall, we were coming back from our anniversary dinner in Danforth, up on the Canadian border. It was our 32 nd. There’s a resort there on East Grand Lake where they serve dinner family-style. We sat with a couple of fishermen from the Cape who talked our ears off. We’d had a great time and we were holding hands as we drove home. We were taking a shortcut on an old country road that runs diagonally through the northern Maine hills. Not much out there, just small farms and a few doublewides. It’s fun to drive that road, the way it rises and falls. If you go fast enough, it’s like riding a carousel. It was pitch black and there were no streetlights, so I half-worried we might hit a deer or a moose as we sped along.

When we pulled up to a stop sign on a dark corner, a man stepped in front of the car, and held up his hands. He was clean-cut, maybe 35. His hair was cut short, in what we used to call a ‘buzz cut’. Why young people ever reverted to that style just amazes me. If you’re young and have hair, why not show it off? He was wearing a bright orange vest and hunting hat.

“Seems like I’ve been waiting forever. Thanks for stopping,” the man said, his accent more Boston than northern Maine. “I need to get to Lincoln. My pickup died on me.”

“I got jumper cables in back,” my husband offered.

“No, thanks,” the hitchhiker said. “It’s on its last leg. A jump-start won’t fix it.”

“OK then, come on.”

We had no time to debate about taking him. It’s a Maine custom to help people in trouble, especially in the countryside. I’d once got stranded in the woods after driving my car off the road into the mud. Another time our motorboat ran out of gas on a huge lake, miles from home. Both times, people appeared out of nowhere to help us. So it felt right to take him, even if it added an extra hour to our drive home.

“Where exactly do you want to go?” my husband asked, looking at him in the rear-view mirror.

“The Lincoln Motel, next to the Irving station. In the morning I’ll get them to bring me back out to get it started.”

Jeff, it turned out, was a lawyer from Brookline. He said he was up deer hunting for a long weekend. Having had no luck, he was about to start the six-hour drive home. Then his truck wouldn’t start.

He asked where we lived, what we were doing in Maine. He could tell we weren’t locals from our accents. It never occurred to us that we shouldn’t tell him that we’d given up the rat race and retired to the Maine woods. We told him about the area around our camp, a desolate chain of lakes where you might not see or hear another person for days. We boasted about the trout we catch year-round, what good eating it is cooked over the campfire. Folks up there open up pretty quickly with strangers. So we didn’t think much of it. After dropping Jeff at the motel around 11pm, we drove home.

A few days later I stopped into Poulin’s store to get some flour. The Bangor Daily News headline grabbed my attention: Hunters Missing Near Danforth. The checkout girl knew all about it. “Yeah, it’s two guys from Boston, best friends from college. Missing up on Route 169.” That was the road where we’d met the hitchhiker.

I read the descriptions of the missing men to my husband as he stained some wood boards out in the shed. “One of them sounds like that guy we picked up. What did he say his name was?”

“Jeff,” he said.

He was actually Steven Marshall. The authorities were asking anyone with information to step forward. They were combing the woods near the camp where they’d found his pickup truck, in perfect condition, with the keys inside.

The next day, we reported our encounter in person to the Lincoln Police, who referred us to Danforth. Driving back the same route we’d taken that night, we passed a dirt road going into the woods, blocked with yellow ‘crime scene’ tape.

“That must be his place,” my husband murmured. We’d thoroughly discussed what had happened that night. How ‘Jeff’ had us completely fooled. How we hadn’t waited to see if he actually checked into the motel, how we told him everything about ourselves, but we’d learned very little about him.

“Thanks for coming in,” the sheriff said. He seemed pleasant enough. His shirt buttons were doing extra duty around his stomach. When we started telling him how we picked up “Jeff”, he called over two detectives who’d been sent up from Bangor. They were young men around Jeff’s age with the same haircut, wearing khaki pants and blue oxford shirts, rolled up to the elbows. After listening to us, they had us write out a detailed account of what happened.

After we finished, the sheriff leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his head. Apparently, his wife had sewn on his shirt buttons with steel threads since they continued to hold despite the appearance of flesh veiled in white t-shirt between each of them. “Well, I might as well tell you, we found one of them this morning. He was murdered. Shot in the back with a shotgun. It’s not the fellow that fits the description of your hitchhiker. It’s the other guy.”

“I suspect the hitchhiker Steven Marshall is long-gone by now,” he continued. “Probably crossed the border into Canada. He paid cash for a used pickup in Lincoln the day after you dropped him off, and hasn’t been seen since. The Maine turnpike cameras never spotted him either. He’s vanished.”

We couldn’t sleep that night. We laid in bed talking for hours. Had the murderer left the country? Or was he close by, looking for us? We could identify him in a line-up if he was arrested. We were witnesses to his escape, putting him near the scene of the crime. We finally dozed off an hour or so before dawn.

“Don’t you think we should get a dog?” I needled the next day. The camp was so remote and we needed advance warning. He finally agreed. We also got a shotgun, and kept it under our bed.

Weeks passed, and nothing happened. First one snowfall came, then another. Soon, the snow was so deep, the woods around us so forbidding, that we started to relax. We were glad that our new Chesapeake retriever Rufus barked at least two minutes before a car turned up our driveway. So we had an early warning system in place. At last I felt safe. The search for Steven Marshall continued. We even saw him on ‘America’s Most Wanted’.

The snow finally melted in late April. A couple of days after the first fisherman of the season motored by our camp, we were down by the water putting the dock in. The chop chop chop chop chop chop of an approaching helicopter broke the quiet.

“Medivac I bet,” my husband said, as a copter swept over the treetops. After circling around several times like a dog getting ready to lie down, it landed in the woods across the cove from our place. Gradually the rotors slowed to a halt and silence returned.

“No way it’s a medivac,” I said, “They’d have left it running if it was.” We jumped in our car and drove to the other side of the cove. We found the helicopter in a big clearing. As we pulled up, the sheriff stepped out, followed by four deputies.

He remembered us. “The Johnson’s, isn’t it? Is this your land?”

“Our camp’s across the cove.” As usual, my husband did the talking.

The sheriff paused a moment, then added, “Well, we found your hitchhiker. Why don’t you come with me?” We followed him into the woods, down a path leading toward the water. We passed an old pickup parked under a tangle of branches and brush. Unless you walked right up to it, you wouldn’t see it. “That’s his truck,” the sheriff pointed out as we walked by.

He led us to a small shack in the woods, with a campfire next to it.

“It’s an old hunting camp I guess,” the sheriff explained. “We found him in there.”

The door was open, but the deputies stood blocking our view.

“Trust me, you don’t want to see it. Pretty gruesome. Somebody shot him, wrapped him up in a blanket and left him there. Then the animals got him.”

“When did it happen?”

“Hard to say, probably early winter.”

It was just a few steps from the shack, through a thick stand of pine, to the shore of the lake. From the water’s edge we could see across the cove to our cabin. A chill ran down my spine as I realized that someone with a pair of binoculars could see into our dining room and kitchen. We’d never felt the need for curtains.

“You didn’t hear anything last winter?” the sheriff asked.

“Nothing at all. Dog didn’t bark or anything.” my husband scratched his head. “How’d you find him, anyway?”

“Pike Watson up the road. His dog got loose this morning. Started barking up a storm and made a beeline here.”

As we drove home, I remembered that during the winter there had been a lot of ravens circling above the forest and calling to each other noisily. We had agreed that a deer or moose had probably died out in the woods somewhere.

A few days later, we were working outside and Rufus let us know someone was coming. We waited in the driveway. Two police cars, including the sheriff, pulled up.

The sheriff got out of his car, but didn’t shake our hands. “Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, I’ve got a warrant to search your place.” One of the other officers stepped forward, “You are both under arrest for the murder of Steven Marshall.”

After he finished reading us our Miranda rights, the sheriff added, “It just doesn’t add up that you didn’t hear anything, seeing as you’re just across the cove.”

They put us both into the back of the sheriff’s car. As he slowly reversed down the driveway, the officers came out of our house carrying one of two harvest gold blankets that I used on the guest room twin beds. I’d bought them at the discount store in town. One had gone missing since it started snowing in November.

One of the deputies carried the blanket over to the car window and the sheriff nodded. My husband stared straight ahead.

The sheriff started barking commands into his walkie-talkie, and it squawked back with loud static. I read my husband’s lips as he whispered, “the bastard was coming for us.”

So that was it, an ugly old blanket in harvest gold. That’s why I’m here spending my days with you, Marlene.

Perfect timing. You know that bell still makes me jump. You’d think I’d be used to it by now…three two, one, and…the doors. It’s Wednesday, so we’re having those dry fish sticks again.