I release the brake and squeeze the thumb tab to give it gas. The machine practically takes off out from under me. Hardcore sledders would call this a jack-rabbit start.

There are more shots. One hits the snow flap which hangs over the track and the rear suspension. But it doesn’t seem to damage anything important.

I sneak a peek into the side mirror. Tori limps from behind the beaver den, into the approaching headlights, waving frantically. A rider slows to pick her up.

The channel ice may be smoother than the broken surface of the river, but there are still pressure ridges that lift me into the air every time I hit one.

I have to focus because I’ve reached the tip of the island and see the river ahead again, pale where it is frozen and scarred with jagged dark spaces where the water is open. I turn toward shore but can’t make out a path through the trees. There haven’t been any more shots since the first ones. It could mean they’re conserving their ammo for my firing squad.

The question returns.

Why though?

I understand why Jewett would want me dead. But why are the Dillons after me?

Meanwhile, open water looms ahead. I am almost out of ice.

28

As much as I craved caffeine, I did not drink the black coffee Tina offered me.

The music coming through the speakers was fast with lots of busy strings. Lynda kept time, tapping her fingers on the armrest. I would have wagered she played piano.

“So you’re looking into that professor’s death,” she said. “And that’s what brought you up here to our little Shangri-la-dee-da.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am! Ain’t you the charmer.” Again she dropped the r. “You know we didn’t live up here when it happened?”

“We?”

“My family and me. Tina and the twins you met and my brother, diabetes took his leg, and his boy, and his family, that girl of his is pregnant again, she’s like a cat, and, well, fuck, I don’t know how many of us there are anymore. I don’t keep count. We started moving in three years ago this past October, the twins first. The girls met Arlo and couldn’t decide which should have him. But they’ve always been good at sharing. Ain’t that right, Tina?”

The brawny woman stood by the window, smoking. From time to time she peered through the heavy drapes as if expecting a visitor. “I wouldn’t call what those three are doing ‘sharing.’”

“Tina’s always been the family prude,” said Lynda, who then cackled. “Family prude! Rhymes with Family Feud.”

In a few short hours I’d gone from the salon of a Rhodesian doyenne to a firing range housed in a nutcase’s barn to an overheated serpentarium to the chambers of a hillbilly queen.

Just another day in Mike Bowditch’s Maine.