by B. D. Smith
Wes Fuller, who Ximena had briefly dated the previous winter, and who refused to accept her rejection, had continued to harass her on and off over the past year, but the confrontation at the Bear’s Den had been a disturbing escalation of his hostility toward her and her new man. Don downplayed Fuller’s behavior, remembering him as being pretty much a loser in high school, but Ximena was definitely getting creeped out by his unhealthy fixation on her. She knew he was involved in the drug scene in the county and had been arrested several times for assault. She had thought that the protection from abuse order she had obtained would put an end to Fuller’s harassment, but clearly it hadn’t worked.
The snow was coming down more heavily, muffling sound outside the snug cabin on the Sebec River. Ximena and Don drifted off to sleep, warm now and entwined beneath the thick down comforter. Just after midnight Ximena’s Fitbit alarm woke her out of a deep slumber. She slipped out of bed and dressed slowly, trying to shake off her grogginess. Don was lying diagonally on the bed, tangled in the comforter, and snoring loudly – dead to the world. Looking out the window, Ximena was surprised by the heavy snow accumulation and worried about the trip back to her place. She took several deep breaths as she stepped outside and immediately felt better. It was hard sledding through the deepening snow on the trails back to her place, and the babysitter was pissed when Ximena finally showed up a half hour late. An extra five dollars mollified her somewhat. Checking on her son and pulling the covers he had kicked off back up to his chin, Ximena then headed off to bed, already thinking about tomorrow. Other than a scheduled meeting with a couple that were planning on putting their Sebec summer cabin on the market in the spring, her day was clear, and she had promised Don to be back at the cabin first thing in the morning.
Bright and early the next day Ximena stopped off at the Center Theatre Coffee House and picked up two lattes and several Elaine’s donuts for her Sunday morning snuggle with Don, and headed out to his Sebec River cabin. The snowstorm had cleared off and the temperature had dropped overnight, with a strong wind out of the west. The snowmobile trails had seen some use that morning and the snow was well packed. Ximena made good time. Pulling up next to Don’s snowmobile, Ximena expected him to be peaking out the cabin window. Don was a huge fan of coffee and Elaine’s donuts. But the cabin was silent. Pushing aside the foot or so of snow that had drifted up against the door, Ximena juggled the coffees and bag of donuts and opened the cabin door. Inside it was pitch dark and ice cold.
2.
Anne Quinn’s phone rang as she was getting out of her truck in the parking lot of the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Office in downtown Dover-Foxcroft. She wasn’t surprised when Ximena’s name showed on the screen – they had planned to go cross-country skiing that afternoon so Ximena could show her the basics of free skate techniques.
“Hi Ximena. Are we still on for this afternoon?”
“Anne. He’s dead. I’m at the cabin. What should I do?”
“Who’s dead? What cabin?”
“My boyfriend, Don Robertson. His cabin is out by Sebec Village.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?”
“Oh yeah, he’s dead. Like frozen dead.”
“OK Ximena. Help’s on the way. Don’t touch anything. Can I reach the cabin in my truck?”
“No way Anne. The snow’s too deep.”
“OK. Here’s what we’ll do. Go back out to the Sebec Village Reading Room and wait for me. I’ll meet you there and ride with you back to the cabin on your sled. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Anne continued walking into the courthouse complex that housed the sheriff’s office, looking for Jim Torben, the sheriff, or Jack Walker, the deputy she often worked with.
Seeing Jack at his desk she told him about Don Robertson being found dead out at Sebec Village and asked him to hitch up the trailer with the snowmobiles and a sled for the body and follow her out to the Reading Room as soon as he could. Jack looked stunned and mentioned as he got up from his desk that he had talked to Robertson just the night before.
Ximena was waiting when Anne pulled up at the Reading Room and she gratefully climbed into her truck to warm up. She was shivering from the cold and the shock of finding her lover dead, and she was crying. Ximena immediately started talking, and Anne didn’t interrupt.
“Don and I went out to the cabin last night after karaoke at the Bear’s Den. I had planned on staying the night with him but then my babysitter informed me that she had to be home by one. I left the cabin last night about midnight and then came back out here this morning.”
Ximena’s narration was broken by a deep sob, and the sound of her ragged breathing filled the cab of the truck for several minutes before she continued.
“Don was still in bed when I went into the cabin this morning and at first he seemed fine, all wrapped in the comforter with just his head out, pretty much the way I left him last night. But he was ice cold when I touched him, and he wasn’t breathing.”
Anne leaned over and hugged Ximena, reassuring her that she would be OK. Everything would be OK. It looked like more than a foot of fresh snow had fallen overnight and it began to snow hard again as they rode Ximena’s sled back to the cabin. When they arrived, Anne made a quick search of the surrounding area. With the exception of Ximena’s footprints from that morning going into and out of the cabin’s front door, the area was blanketed with a smooth unbroken expanse of snow.
The cabin door stood ajar. Anne stopped just inside and scanned the room. There was no sign of a struggle and nothing out of the ordinary jumped out at her. A kerosene heater was sitting in the fireplace, flanked by two large candles which had burned out. She touched the heater and it was cold. She shook it, confirming that it had run out of fuel. Approaching the bed, Anne was surprised by Don’s appearance. Only his head was exposed, cradled in the folds of the down comforter. She had expected his face to be drained of color, but instead his lips were cherry red and his cheeks were a healthy pink. Reaching to check for a pulse in his neck, Anne quickly pulled her hand back. He was ice cold to the touch.
Deciding to err on the side of caution, Anne retreated from the pink-faced corpse. Closing the cabin door on the way out, she called Doug Bateman, catching him at home. Bateman was a detective with the Maine State Police, out of the Major Crimes Unit-North in Bangor, but he lived just up the road from Sebec Village in the town of Bowerbank, on the north shore of Sebec Lake. He was also Anne’s lover. He picked up on the second ring.
“Hi sweet Anne. How about meeting up for breakfast at Spencer’s?”
“Doug- I’m over at a cabin on the river by Sebec Village with Ximena Lapointe. She found her boyfriend Don Robertson dead here this morning.”
“I’m on my way – what’ve we got?”
“I’d guess an accidental death – carbon monoxide maybe. Looks like he died in his sleep. You won’t be able to reach the cabin in your jeep. Jack Walker should be on his way out to Sebec Village with snowmobiles and a towing sled for the body. You can meet him there and ride back to the cabin – just follow our tracks on the road going east out of Sebec Village between the dam and the Reading Room.”
Jack and Doug reached the cabin about half an hour later. Doug took in the undisturbed snow cover, the cold kerosene heater, and Don Robertson’s surprisingly healthy-looking dead body, and agreed with Anne’s assessment. He checked the chimney, noted that the damper was open about halfway and that the chimney looked clear. Following protocol, Doug called down to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Augusta for guidance. Mike Bowman must have had Doug included in his call recognition list and answered with his standard greeting.
“Douglas Bateman – when are you bringing me some of those donuts from Elaine’s? It’s been a while you know.”
“Next time I come down. I promise. But right now I’m hoping you can help us with a body discovered up here in Sebec this morning. Looks to me like an accidental death. The victim is a man in his thirties – dead in bed. It’s an isolated cabin, deep snow, no evidence of foul play, and a kerosene heater out of fuel. Looks like it could be carbon monoxide poisoning. The puzzling thing is that the heater was in the fireplace and the damper was half open, so it looks like there was adequate ventilation in the cabin.”
“Yeah, we get those occasionally,” Bowman replied. “If the outside temperature is very low a cold air plug can form in the chimney. It can block the kerosene heater’s carbon monoxide fumes from escaping up the chimney, even if the flue is otherwise unobstructed. The CO gets trapped in the house. A clear, odorless gas, it’s a silent killer. It interferes with your body’s oxygen delivery system. You are literally starved of oxygen at the cellular level.”
Pausing for a moment to think, Bowman continued. “This would be the third case of CO poisoning this winter, I think, which is more than average. But it’s been unusually cold this year, even for Maine, beginning way back in November.”
Even though Doug had been investigating suspicious deaths and homicides for more than a decade, this was the first case like this he had encountered.
“Is there anything I can look for that might confirm he died of carbon monoxide poisoning?”
“Have you had a close look at the body? Describe it.”
“Looks like he died in his sleep, wrapped up in a comforter, just his head showing. The weird thing is his face is a nice rosy pink.”
“Bingo – a classic sign of carbon monoxide poisoning - The carboxymyoglobin content of the blood colors it pink, creating a false image of good circulation rather than being starved of oxygen. Carbon monoxide kills because it’s hundreds of times stronger than oxygen in binding to hemoglobin – that’s the protein in your red blood cells that carries oxygen from your lungs to the rest of your body. As you breathe in carbon monoxide it restricts the oxygen-carrying capacity of your blood and reduces the delivery of oxygen to tissues. I’d say this is likely an accidental death. Bag up the body and send it down. We can run a CO-oximeter analysis of a blood sample and have a quick answer for you – it only takes a few minutes.”
After they placed Robertson’s body in a body bag and carried it out to the towing sled, they retraced their path back to the Sebec Village Reading Room. There they transferred the deceased to Jack Walker’s SUV for the long trip down to Augusta and the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office. As expected, when the lab result came back the next day it showed that Don Robertson had a carboxyhemoglobin level of 61% - clear evidence that carbon monoxide poisoning had killed him. His death was officially classified as accidental, and the investigation closed.
. . .
Several months later, however, Don Robertson’s cause of death would be revisited. Spring had finally arrived in central Maine. The black fly season was well along and Dover-Foxcroft was starting to gear up to host the Whoopie Pie festival in several weeks. Anne noticed the blue tubing strung between sugar maples as she drove along Route 6 and wondered what kind of a yield Bob’s Sugarhouse in town got this year. She had read that climate change was hitting the maple sugar industry hard – narrowing the temporal window of sap flow, and pushing it back earlier in the spring.
Jack Walker had called early that morning and asked her to meet him out at Don Robertson’s cabin. There was someone she needed to talk to. Anne had initially resisted, saying she had a lot of work to catch up on, but without giving any further explanation, Jack insisted it was important. Pulling up to the cabin, she parked next to Jack’s SUV and an older pickup that had several ladders, rakes, and pole saws sticking out of the bed of the truck. Yellow crime scene tape still hung from the cabin’s door frame, waving in the light breeze.
Jack was sitting on the front porch next to an older man sporting an impressively bushy white beard. They were clearly enjoying the mid-morning sunshine. Jack introduced the older man.
“Anne, this is Gavin Anderson. He opens and closes camps for summer people on the lake, including Don’s cabin here. Don’s widow is putting the cabin up for sale and asked Gavin to get it ready for the realtor. He came out this morning to check out what might be needed to be done – any downed trees or burst pipes, or just general cleanup. He discovered a few things he thought we would be interested in.”
Anne shifted her attention to Gavin, and he picked up the story.
“A couple of things caught my eye. When I went to the storage shed the ladder wasn’t where I usually keep it – hung on the outside wall.”
Gavin led them over to a small shed behind the cabin and pointed to an area of beaten down grass along the base of the shed.
“I found it right here, lying on the ground.”
“Couldn’t it just have fallen off where it had been hung?” Anne asked.
“No, not really. I hang it on the other wall, not here,”
Gavin walked around the corner of the shed to point at the hooks where the ladder was usually stored.
“OK,” Anne responded, giving Jack Walker a puzzled glance. “Someone took it off the hooks where you store it and used it for something. So what?”
Gavin smiled, catching Anne’s bemused reaction, and pointed back toward the cabin, where a bright red fiberglass extension ladder leaned up against the chimney.
“Right,” he replied. “They used it for something.”
Smiling broadly now, he continued.
“When I got here this morning the first thing I did was pick up the ladder from where it was on the ground here by the shed and set it up so I could seal off the chimney opening. Chimney swifts can be a real problem around here if you don’t put a board or something to block them from getting down the flue and nesting, and that’s one of the things I do every spring here at Don’s. I figured a chimney full of chattering birds wouldn’t help to sell the place. When I climbed the ladder with the slab of slate I use to block the chimney I saw something weird, and called Jack. He’s been up there too. Why don’t you take a look?”
Anne climbed the ladder, looked at the top of the chimney, and called down. “What am I looking for?”
“Look closer,” Jack replied.
Turning back to the chimney, Anne looked again and noticed several fragments of dark gray fabric – likely canvas, caught on the sharp edges of the metal flue encased in the surrounding cement and stone of the chimney. Climbing back down the ladder, Anne looked over at Gavin, who said out loud what she was already thinking.
“Someone used the ladder to climb up and cover the top of the chimney with a tarpaulin. When they removed it, they didn’t notice that some of it got caught in the metal sheathing of the flue. I’ve been doing work at this camp for more than a decade and I’ve never used a tarp to cover the chimney, and those torn fragments were not there when I took the cover stone off last fall.”
Anne looked at Gavin with new appreciation.
“Mr. Anderson, thanks for calling Jack and alerting us to what you’ve found.”
Gavin smiled again.
“I’ve been watching those crime shows – you know, the CSI shows – you think I might be on to something here?”
“Maybe so Gavin. Let me make a call and see if we can follow up on this.”
Anne called Doug over at the Maine State Police barracks in Bangor and described what they had found at the cabin. He agreed it was worth looking into. The State Police Evidence Response Team down in Augusta was alerted and several crime scene technicians arrived at the cabin by mid-afternoon. They photographed the chimney and the fabric fragments before bagging them. They also dusted the extension ladder for prints – not really expecting t
o recover any, given the length of time that had passed and its exposure to the elements.
Knowing that the recovery of fabric pieces from the chimney would not be enough on its own to justify opening a suspicious death investigation, Doug and Anne assembled an informal group of several dozen volunteers the next morning and began a search in hopes of finding the chimney tarp discarded somewhere nearby. Conditions were not the best – it was black fly season and understory vegetation was thick in some places.
Working outward from the cabin and focusing on road margins and trails, the search turned up nothing of interest through the morning. In the afternoon they widened the search to include both sides of the Sebec River and the surrounding forest.
By mid-afternoon one of the volunteers – George Moser, an avid fly fisherman who knew this section of the river quite well, had worked his way downstream several hundred yards from the cabin when he saw something. He hadn’t really been looking for the tarp so much as searching for promising fishing spots when he noticed what looked like a bright red snake caught on a rock mid-stream. Looking closer, George realized it was a bungee cord attached to a large piece of gray canvas. Using a long branch he picked up from the forest floor, George snagged the canvas and pulled it to shore.
Roughly rectangular and ragged around the edges, the canvas measured about three feet on a side and was covered in paint spatters. Along with the red bungee cord, a thin cable maybe twenty feet in length was attached to the canvas. Leaving the tarpaulin on the ground, George went to report what he had found. It was bagged and driven down to the crime lab the same afternoon. Analysis soon confirmed that the fabric fragments recovered from the chimney at the cabin were a match with the tarp recovered from the river. A solid case for the death of Don Robertson being a homicide could now be made. It had been an ingenious and well-thought-out killing, and if Gavin Anderson had not been such a fan of television crime scene shows it would quite likely have gone undetected.