by Paul Doiron
“So, Ms. Evans. You understand that I am here on behalf of the State of Maine to determine the circumstances of your sister Miranda Evans’s death and to advise the attorney general’s office whether or not I believe charges should be brought against the as-yet-unidentified person who shot her.”
“They’d damn well better bring charges!”
“I am going to start by trying to establish some information about how your sister came to be on Maquoit. You’re not under oath, but I hope you’ll do your best to be candid with me. You might not understand at first how my questions are relevant—”
Her glass was already empty but she did not immediately refill it. “Mike, I told you I worked the crime beat in Chicago. I’ve probably read more police transcripts than you have. You’ve already tossed the standard framework out of the window by doing this interview without any advanced planning. I understand your objectives, etc. I’ll stipulate you’ve made a yeoman effort to establish rapport. So let’s get down to it, all right? You want to know who Miranda was?”
“Can you give me your sister’s full name?”
“Miranda Gail Evans, named after the Shakespeare character and our aunt. My parents were theater people. I always said they should have named her Ophelia.”
I felt a prickling along my scalp. “You have an aunt named Gail Evans?”
“Yeah, she’s a sculptor. Kind of kooky, but not certifiably insane like my sister was. Aunt Gail actually lives in Maine over near Lake Sebago. But she may be moving to Northern California, the last I heard. She wants to commune with the redwoods.”
People always said Maine was a small state, but I had met her aunt Gail. A year earlier, when I was still a patrol warden, I had responded to a call at her house of a dog chasing deer. The “dog” turned out to be a magnificent wolf hybrid. The people who owned the animal had called him Shadow, but he had escaped from my custody and was roaming the Boundary Mountains separating Maine from Quebec, as far as I knew. I often found myself wishing I could see him again.
“Why did you ask about Gail?” Ariel said, her curiosity piqued.
“The name sounded familiar. Let’s get back on track here.”
I asked her for Miranda’s date of birth, and Ariel gave it to me. Her sister had been thirty-five years old when she died.
“I’m two years older, in case you’re wondering.”
“I know how old you are.” I smiled. “I even now that your birthday is on Christmas. For the past twenty-four hours I’ve been operating under the mistaken belief that it was you who was shot. I spent last night reading articles you’ve written, including the piece from Esquire magazine that became your book about the neo-Nazis.”
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or creeped out by that.”
“You and Miranda grew up in Manhattan, correct?”
“On the Upper East Side. Miranda also attended the Dalton School. But while I stayed in the East and went to Columbia, she went West to Pomona College. She lasted one semester before the dean called my parents to tell them she needed to take some time to ‘reassess’ her educational goals. The truth is she’d been busted on Sunset Boulevard trying to buy coke. She came back East and gave NYU a shot. She made it through two years there. But she wanted to be a visual artist and didn’t see the point in getting a degree.”
“I’d like to backtrack a little. Your parents died when you were twenty-two, is that right? So Miranda would have been twenty?”
“They were killed in a car crash in Rome. My dad grew up in Manhattan, walking, riding the subway, and taking cabs. I don’t know why he thought he could drive a car in fucking Italy. Technically, I was her guardian for all of about a year, but I had my own troubles—my glamorous parents left us with a shitload of debt—and if Miranda wanted to drop out of NYU, I wasn’t going to stop her, especially after she nearly got me kicked out of J-school.”
“What happened?”
“She came uptown to Columbia, I have no idea why, and managed to talk her way into a reception for some Nobel Prize winner. She got drunk and started throwing herself at this young professor. When they were caught in a bathroom, she showed the campus cops my old driver’s license. I’d forgotten I’d given it to her so she could get into bars in L.A. Except for being blond and short, we didn’t look that much alike, but she knew how to do her hair and makeup to play up the resemblance. Miranda thought the whole thing was hilarious. It was the beginning of her ‘impersonations,’ as I called them.”
“So pretending to be you became a regular game of hers?”
Ariel finally refilled her wineglass. “That came later, as her manic phases grew more intense.”
“She was bipolar?”
“As the earth itself. She’d inherited the disorder from our father. Anyway, while I was off in Chicago learning my trade, she was living in a bunch of dumps downtown, hanging out with artists and musicians. I assumed that she was more interested in telling people she was a painter than actually painting. Then one day, maybe three years later, I came home from an assignment in Moscow to find a postcard in my bundle of mail. It was an announcement for a solo show of Miranda’s work at a super-trendy gallery in Dumbo.”
“Dumbo? The flying elephant?”
“It’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn! Unfortunately, I’d been away so long I’d missed the entire exhibit. I called to apologize, but she didn’t believe me. ‘You can’t handle me having any success of my own because you’re the golden girl,’ she said. We went through a period of estrangement after that. I was busy with my own career. It was probably a year later that I was talking to my aunt Gail and she told me Miranda had left New York and was living with this older artist in North Carolina, somewhere near Asheville. ‘She really loves this Galen,’ my aunt said. ‘He’s the first man in Miranda’s life who really understands and appreciates her and can cope with her mood swings.’”
Ariel paused for another sip, then continued.
“She lived with Galen for seven years. What neither my aunt nor I knew was that this guy was an emotionally abusive asshole. He disparaged her work. Then she got pregnant, and he made her get an abortion.
“The next time I saw her was after my first book hit the bestseller list. I was back in the city by then, and somehow—don’t ask me how she did it—she managed to find the building where I was living and talk her way past the guard in the lobby. She’d lost weight and cut off most of her hair. She told me what Galen had done to her. She was such a wreck, I took her in. Here I’d gotten this big advance, and now my book was all over the place, and it seemed wrong, given my good fortune, to throw her out in the cold.
“She stayed about three weeks and had a front-row seat to my big breakthrough. She went to Rockefeller Center with me the morning I was interviewed on the Today show. I started letting her answer my email because I was so overwhelmed by it all. Then one day I got a frantic call from my agent asking what the hell I was doing turning down all these requests for interviews in the most insulting manner possible. It was Miranda, of course. When I confronted her about it, she denied everything at first and stormed out of my apartment. But later she came back, drunk and totally unrepentant. I told her she had to leave. What I didn’t realize was that she’d taken the opportunity of living with me to get copies made of my license and passport, both with her photos.
“I didn’t learn that she’d stolen my identity until I started getting calls from collection agencies. She’d taken out credit cards in my name. I actually had to hire a private investigator to track her down in Playa del Carmen in Mexico. My attorney wanted me to press charges against her. Then I got a call from a mental hospital in Houston saying she’d been committed by a judge for attacking a cop.
“I flew down to see her. She was such a sad disaster. She couldn’t stop apologizing. I arranged for her to be transferred to a facility in New Mexico, near where Gail was living back then. The best thing about that place was that she started drawing and painting again. I’d get pictures of her wo
rk that would take my breath away. By then I had money from my books, and I set up a trust for Miranda. It wasn’t a lot of income, but it assuaged my guilty conscience.”
“Where did she go when she got out of the mental hospital?”
“The politically correct term is psychiatric care facility. She lived with Gail for a bit, then bumped around, staying with friends. Occasionally she would call during one of her manic phases, and I’d ask if she was taking her meds, and she’d hang up on me.”
I looked up from my note taking. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Early August. She showed up at a book event I was doing in the city. I barely recognized her. She looked great, was wearing designer clothes. Nice, but not too expensive. She said she had received a fellowship to an arts center in Provincetown for the winter. It was another lie, of course. I took her to dinner and told her about my plans to come out to Maquoit to research my next book. She asked a lot of very, very specific questions and didn’t drink at all, which should have warned me she was up to something. I told her I’d rented a house on the island for September through November but would probably be delayed since I had a magazine assignment I needed to finish. It was only the next morning that I discovered she’d found a way to swipe my license and my AmEx. I canceled the credit card. I thought I’d managed to do it in the nick of time.”
“Evidently not.”
“Evidently not.”
The wine bottle was empty. I hadn’t noticed her finishing it. Ariel went into the kitchen to open another.
22
A truck rumbled past the windows. I heard the driver slow up the way someone does who’s nearing a scenic vista. A minute later, I heard it return from the opposite direction, having turned around at the end of the road.
Yesterday the islanders had given Gull Cottage a wide berth, but the dead woman’s return from the hereafter had transformed it into Maquoit’s big tourist attraction.
Ariel reappeared with an unopened bottle of the same expensive wine and a corkscrew. “I’m afraid to look at my forehead again. Is it turning purple?”
“More like mauve.”
She uncorked the new bottle with the practiced ease of a sommelier. “I’m not going to get crocked, so you can stop looking at me that way.”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like you’re afraid I’m going to become a problem you have to deal with. I’ve always been able to hold my liquor better than most girls. It’s a stupid thing, but men respect a woman who can match them drink for drink.”
Her articulation was crisp. She didn’t sound remotely intoxicated.
“Was that a trick you used on the Nazis? Drinking them under the table?”
She smiled. “It wasn’t like I had to work hard to win their trust. An attractive, blue-eyed blonde starts showing up at their rallies eager to hear their insights about racial differences. I was basically an Aryan’s wet dream.”
“What were they like, the Nazis?”
“You should read my book!” She settled back on the couch, brought her knees up, and wrapped an arm around them. “Most of the guys ate a lot of paint chips when they were kids. The master-race masterminds, on the other hand, are smart enough to scare the shit out of you.”
I started the recording again.
“You said you were delayed arriving on Maquoit because of an assignment overseas. Is that right?”
“I’d warned Jenny Pillsbury that it might happen, but she made me pay for the whole three months anyway. She must have been puzzled when Miranda showed up pretending to be me, but I’m sure my sister found a way to bullshit her into believing whatever lies she needed to tell.”
“So aside from Jenny Pillsbury,” I asked, “did you know anyone on Maquoit prior to planning your trip?”
“Not a soul.”
“As far as you know, then, there was nobody here who might have wanted to hurt you?”
“I’ve gotten plenty of death threats since Ghost Skins came out. Are you thinking some neo-Nazi on the island murdered my sister thinking she was me? That’s would have been quite the intriguing plot twist, but I doubt it’s what happened.”
I kept my head down and marched forward. “Who knew you were coming to Maquoit?”
Ariel glanced at the ceiling as she scrolled down a mental list. “My agent and my editor. Some of my girlfriends in the city. Aunt Gail because I thought I might swing by her house on my drive up. I kept it pretty quiet. I thought I had a potentially great book in Blake Markman and didn’t want one of my fellow vultures to come along to steal it.”
My curiosity got the better of me in that moment. “Why do you find him so compelling?”
“Hermits are currently ‘hot,’ first of all. And then there’s the whole Hollywood aspect. Blake’s dad, Bartle Markman, cofounded one of the Big Eight studios of the Golden Age. His mother was a B-movie actress. He himself produced a couple of critically acclaimed films. Blake Markman was Hollywood nobility, and then one night he burns his house to the ground with his cheating wife inside—”
“How can you be sure he murdered her?”
“I have proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
Ariel must have practiced that sly expression in the mirror each morning. “You’re going to have to read the book to find out. Anyway, he pays out a big settlement to his wife’s family and uses his remaining funds to buy this godforsaken rock off the most remote island on the East Coast. He starts herding sheep—this rich Jew from Bel Air—and hides himself from the world. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t read that book!”
“If all he wanted was to stay hidden, what made you think he’d talk to you?”
“I am not lacking in self-confidence. Besides, if Miranda managed to win his trust…”
“You called her a gifted con artist.”
Ariel displayed her porcelain smile. “Maybe it runs in the family.”
“So you don’t think it’s likely that someone might have come to the island to ambush you?”
“I haven’t spent a lot of time on Maine islands, but my sense of them is that their residents tend to notice when a stranger shows up on the ferry carrying a rifle case.”
It was an excellent point. “You received no communication from your sister while she was out here?”
“If I had, you don’t think I would have—”
“What I meant was, did she send you an email or call or text where she pretended to be somewhere else?”
“I’d have to check but—” Ariel reached for the phone on the table. She ran her index finger over the screen until she found what she was looking for. Then she passed the device to me. She’d pulled up a text message, the last in a thread:
Pray for me, Ariel my angel. I’m in love with the devil. #helltopay
“Did you respond to this?” It didn’t appear she had.
“You’re not really grasping the fact that my sister was mentally ill. When she was in one of her moods and using drugs and alcohol, she sent me stuff that made ‘Jabberwocky’ read like an English composition textbook. It wasn’t the first time I got a message from my sister telling me she wanted to have some guy’s babies either. And there was the small matter of her stealing my identity again.”
In my imagination I saw Nat Pillsbury, black haired, mustached, standing on the wharf in his Grundéns rain suit, his expression carved in granite. I heard again his commanding voice as he ordered the feuding Reeds and Washburns to back off. There had seemed nothing devilish about the man, but as the son of an alcoholic father, I knew how liquor could release a legion of demons from the jail of the human heart. And as a career law enforcement officer, I had learned that some of the most fiendish beings in existence often hide behind the faces of angels.
“The word devil doesn’t strike you?” I said.
“Now it does. But it’s not like she was warning me her life was in danger. At the time it sounded like Miranda being Miranda.”
Through the window came the eng
ine noise of yet another truck. In frustration, I pulled aside the curtains. I hadn’t expected to see Andrew Radcliffe pull up in his rust-bitten Toyota.
I watched him open his passenger door. His grizzled dog, Bella, climbed gingerly to the ground and almost immediately squatted to relieve herself. The constable had to lift her hindquarters to return her to the truck cab.
“Who is it?” Ariel asked.
“The island constable.”
I managed to get to the door before Andrew could knock. He stood on the woven mat of ropes, his hair tousled, his cheeks like two pink flowers.
“Did you hit a deer?” he asked as if he hadn’t seen the dead animal in the bed of my borrowed truck.
“What’s going on, Andrew?”
“Well, the whole island is talking, and I don’t know what to tell people.”
Ariel appeared at my side, exuding the fruity smell of wine. “Tell them I was raised from the dead.”
It was the first thing she’d said that told me she was intoxicated.
“This is Ariel Evans,” I said. “The woman who was killed yesterday was her sister, Miranda.”
The constable cycled through a series of emotions: surprise, nervousness, confusion. “OK…”
“You can tell people that there was a misunderstanding that has now been cleared up,” I said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re still investigating who fired the bullet that killed Miranda Evans. You can help me by getting me that damned list you promised.”
“I’ll definitely do that.” Radcliffe’s jumpy eyes darted from Ariel back to me. “There is one other thing, Mike. I think you and I should probably talk about it in private.”
I stepped onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I set a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder and guided him away from the windows until we were positioned beside his Tacoma, past the point where Ariel could eavesdrop.
“What is it, Andrew?”
“Two things, actually. The first is, you know how islanders like to gossip? There’s a lot of hearsay on Maquoit, and yesterday I didn’t want to repeat something I’d heard without any way to back it up. But Penny reminded that I had a responsibility that outweighed—”