“You don’t meet many of them in Maine.”

“That woman is the biggest ballbuster I’ve met—with the exception of that bitch Betty Morse.”

I knew Marc well enough not to respond to his slurs. If I defended the woman he blamed for his downfall, he would accuse me of being oversensitive and politically correct.

He leaned his elbows on the desk, probably to show off the gold Tag Heuer on his wrist. “Why are you meeting her? Mariëtte Chamberlain?”

“Because she sent me a letter.”

“A letter! You’ve always been a soft touch, Bowditch. It’s a good thing you had the sense to call me beforehand. You were walking into an ambush. I assume you’ve read the case file.”

“Skimmed it.”

He narrowed his eyes, suspicious I knew more about the Eben Chamberlain affair than I was letting on.

“I’ll give you the short version then. The professor was seventy-seven, overweight, diabetic. He had no business being out on the river alone in December. He fell out of his boat—probably retrieving his decoys—and drowned. He wasn’t wearing personal flotation, not that it would have mattered. The shock of the water would have likely killed him in minutes. His corpse got lodged downstream, snagged in the stuff piled up underwater at the base of the Gulf Island Dam. When we found him, Professor Chamberlain was in the process of becoming fish food.”

The stool on which I was balanced was tilt-y. “You sound certain it was an accident.”

“I know you’re prone to seeing mysteries and conspiracies everywhere, Mike, but sometimes reality is the way it appears.”

I reached into the inner pocket of my parka and withdrew a pad and pen. “What evidence did you find to lead you to this conclusion?”

He regarded the notebook with disdain. “Aside from the fact that he was alone in the boat, you mean?”

He didn’t let me respond.

“First, we found his boat, washed up against one of those little islands in the river. He’d had a good morning shooting. There were four geese and maybe ten mallards in the bottom.”

“OK.”

“Second, our divers found his shotgun at the bottom of the river where the last person to see him reported his location.”

“Tell me about the witness.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk. “What was his name? I remember it was kind of funny.” He squeezed his eyelids shut. “Burch. Arlo Burch.”

“Really?”

“You doubt my memory? In my head I picture a low-hanging birch tree on which someone has carved the letter R. R low birch. Get it?”

Rivard had once regaled me with the mnemonic practices he used to remember details for his reports.

“Who is this Arlo Burch?”